Theorising Academic Freedom in a Plural World

The global academic landscape is changing: non-Western systems are becoming increasingly influential in global knowledge production. This raises questions about the applicability of concepts developed primarily within European and North American intellectual traditions beyond these contexts. Academic freedom is one such concept.

Given these rapid and profound changes, this paper examines whether, and on what basis, academic freedom can be applied in a way that is sensitive to context while preserving the conditions necessary for meaningful dialogue and public reasoning. Through this argument, I speak to a broader debate central to the field of comparative and international education concerning cultural relativism, particularism, and the limits of cross-contextual normative claims. I argue that the strongly prescriptive forms of cultural relativism that have become increasingly influential within the field have important limitations, which are illustrated through the example of academic freedom.

Drawing on the thought of Sen, Benhabib and Said, the central argument is that any attempt to reduce academic freedom to siloed, culturally specific understandings is unsustainable because cultures are internally diverse, contested, complex, constantly changing, and not hermetically sealed. Any account of academic freedom that takes cultural difference seriously must therefore create space for competing interpretations and intellectual traditions within societies to be expressed and negotiated, rather than treating dominant political, cultural or intellectual currents as representative of a culture as a whole. This in turn requires an understanding of academic freedom that centres the minimum conditions necessary for public reasoning. This means that, rather than treating positive and negative freedom as separate and broadly compensatory dimensions, the two must be understood as interdependent: academic freedom requires both protection from coercion and the resources necessary to exercise their freedom meaningfully. However, because dissent is a prerequisite for public reasoning, and because a restriction on negative freedom is necessarily also restriction on positive freedom, negative freedom occupies a foundational position within any workable account of academic freedom.