Academic Freedom and Decoloniality: Reconsidering the Relationship

• In Event: Attending to the Colonial and Racial Natures of Comparative and International Education and Development

Proposal

As academic communities have become subject to increasingly destructive external political attacks affecting their day to day functioning and long term well-being, academic freedom values have been correspondingly under global assault (SAR, 2022); they have coincidentally become especially prevalent within Florida, the hosting site of the CIES 2024 Annual Meeting. Although it is crucial that we take note of the dangers that these attacks perpetuate, there has also been within the academy, a clear impetus to address the challenges of decoloniality that subsequently confront those practices that continue to reaffirm the worst effects of settler colonialism in contemporary educational settings (Mignolo, 2011; Wynter, 2003). This paper explores how to both embrace academic freedom values which highlight the importance of engaging in inquiry and knowledge production free from external interference, while also committing to principles of decoloniality. I first summarize the salient global literature that speaks to what have been generally considered to be core academic values in support of academic freedom: why teachers and scholars need support in their efforts to expand understanding and create new knowledge forms, the implications of adhering to disciplinary methodologies and peer review as mechanisms for the sharing and testing of one’s findings, the benefits of creating tenure systems to protect against undue external interference, why institutional autonomy needs to be affirmed as an additional protection against external pressure, the necessity of being able to to travel and assemble in order to conduct research, the significance of exercising the freedom to engage in extra-mural speech in support of one’s research and teaching, and the ways in which students, staff, and non-scholars are entitled to some forms of academic freedom protection (UN Working Group on Academic Freedom, 2023).
Each of these values can be critiqued from a decoloniality perspective. The embrace of individualism as a defining characteristic of rationality is a hallmark of western modernism that is implicitly affirmed in conventional academic freedom discourse given its notion of the work of the scholar/researcher. The embrace of disciplinarity as an uncontested source of authority that serves as a key to the testing of one’s research findings perpetuates western modes of thinking. It asserts a universalism precluding the valuation of alternative knowledge domains. The promotion of institutional autonomy as a key element in the service of academic protection, and peer review, which narrows those who are viewed as qualified to exercise power within the academy to the professional professoriate, further serve to reify western hegemony. There is an additional lack of conceptual clarity as to what protections should be afforded to those who contribute to the production of knowledge but may do so in less direct ways than those pursued by established scholars.

Author

• Irving Epstein, Illinois Wesleyan University