Academic freedom and the university: Fifty years of debate

Contemporary debates about academic freedom and institutional autonomy in South Africa’s “liberal” universities began in the 1950s, stimulated by the policies and legislation for racial segregation. At the University of Cape Town (UCT), these debates were shaped by the influential T B Davie, and since 1959, UCT has offered a (usually) annual T B Davie Memorial Lecture at which the symbolic torch of academic freedom (extinguished during the apartheid years, and re-ignited after 1994) is carried in procession. But despite this ceremonial and its endurance there is not, and has not been since the mid 1980s, a university-wide consensus on the nature of academic freedom and its relationship with institutional autonomy