From autonomy to accountability: Academic freedom under threat in South Africa?

Invocations and defenses of academic freedom in South Africa should not necessarily be taken at face value. The threats may be all too real, and the stakes very high indeed, as the experience of universities under apartheid has shown, but on this ideological battleground the enemies of academic freedom typically do not announce themselves as such while the defenders of academic freedom may turn out to have their own ulterior motives and hidden agendas. Thus if the Extension of University Education Act 45 of 1959, which sought to proscribe the admission of black students to traditionally white universities, announced the National Party (NP) government as the prime threat to academic freedom in the eyes of the liberal or 'open universities', this did not mean that the NP government for its own part also openly admitted to the objective of doing away with academic freedom. On the contrary, their official view, as adumbrated in the Main Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Universities of 1974, popularly known as the Van Wyk de Vries Report, was that 'everyone is agreed that universities should have academic freedom', and the Report went to considerable lengths to demonstrate that separate development policies were in accordance with the 'proper' understanding of the ideal of academic freedom (Van Wyk de Vries 1974: 27). In this respect, as John Higgins (2000: 107-8) points out in a recent article, it does not differ all that much from the position taken by the post-apartheid National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) in its 1996 report, A Framework for Transformation