Academic Freedom Between Neoliberal, Liberal, and Islamic Imaginaries of University

• In Event: Just Academia? Higher Education Organizations as Social Spaces for Equitable Transformation

Abstract

Academic freedoms constitute an integral part of values of the western/liberal/ public university. They enable universities to fulfil their roles in pursuing truth, promoting scientific accumulation, and inculcating civic values. The position of academic freedoms, however, has been undermined with the hegemony of the neoliberal model of higher education reforms (Brown, 2016; Gburi, 2016; Giroux et al., 2016). Under neoliberalism, universities have turned into businesses that are run by managerial rather than collegial and democratic modes of governance (Olssen & Peters, 2005; Ward, 2012). Within corporate universities, the increase of casualized employment and professors’ loss of job security have imposed restrictions on academic freedoms where temporary faculty members exercise self-censorship and avoid critical scholarship (Seth, 2004; Gerber, 2010; Gburi, 2016).
The neoliberal university is no longer peculiar to developed/ western countries with international organizations calling for neoliberal reforms in developing countries. In Egypt, higher education reforms were guided by international receipts where privatization, quality assurance, and institutional reforms were constructed as the solution for higher education crisis (Kohstall, 2012). Academic freedoms, institutional autonomy and socio-political dimensions were excluded from policy discourses and internationally funded projects such as the World Bank sponsored Higher Education Enhancement Project (HEEP). In exploring the relationship between discursive constructions of the “university” and positioning of “academic freedom”, the paper employs Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) in analyzing the government's strategy to develop Higher Education in Egypt 2015-2030. FDA is utilized to examine how governmental policy discourses form specific constructions of universities and attribute particular subject-positions to students and faculty members. Exploring the implications of such discursive constructions for academic freedoms, it is meant to show how the prevalence of the neoliberal imaginary of the university marginalizes academic freedoms.
According to Foucault, discourses are contingent and situated within particular social systems practices which open windows for resistance and transformation (Foucault, 1972). Attempts to defend academic freedoms, resist neoliberal reforms and propose alternative discourses of university have always been proposed by western scholars and called for a return to values of the western/liberal/public university. In tackling the Egyptian case, this paper, however, seeks to go beyond liberal and neoliberal discourses on academic freedom through searching for own cultural, historical and Islamic traditions of the university. The paper presents alternative Islamic streams of discursive (re-) positionings including a) the thoughts of the persian doctor, natural scientist, Aristotelian-new-platonian philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna born 980 - 1037). Makdisi (1981), discusses b) the rise of “Madrasah” in medieval Islam as a form of higher education institutions, enjoying institutional autonomy. c) Contemporary Islamic imaginaries proposing the ‘islamization and de-westernization of knowledge’ (Wan Daud, 2013), which intend to remove secular elements from knowledge and to leave the ‘westernized’ individualized subject behind. Discussing those imaginaries of the university, different discursive positionings and notions of academic freedom are shown.

Author

• Israa Medhat Esmat, Cairo University