Academic freedom: Universities threaten authoritarianism

The proliferation of new threats against academic and intellectual freedoms across Africa has emanated mainly from the deepening of neoliberal cultures in society and in higher education institutions, driven, in part, by a worsening economic crisis.

Against this backdrop, there is an urgent need for a renewed drive to safeguard these freedoms across Africa, according to the concept note that framed the international conference, ‘Academic Freedom in Africa: Revisiting the Kampala Declaration’, organised by the Senegal-based Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA).

A total of 48 presentations were posted on the conference website as part of the event that was hosted by the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from 29 April to 2 May.

David Mills, the director of Oxford University’s Centre for Global Higher Education, United Kingdom, told University World News: “This major CODESRIA conference – happening as American universities face existential threats to their funding and autonomy – is a vital reminder that academic freedom has to be constantly practised, struggled for and defended.”

He said that, 35 years after the 1990 Kampala Declaration on intellectual freedom, there were many new threats facing African scholars, made worse by the straitened financial circumstances of many public universities.

“Four days of dialogue highlighted shared experiences of political overreach and financial conditionality, as well as impressive acts of faculty resistance and organising. A new annex to the declaration calls for African intellectuals to work with a wide range of publics and communities to protect knowledge as a common good,” said Mills.

University World News spoke to some of the higher education experts who participated in the conference about the new threats undermining academic freedom in Africa and how academic and intellectual freedom on the continent can be strengthened.

Threats unique to the African context

Professor Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atua, based at the University of Ghana’s school of law and the regional director of the Africa Coalition for Academic Freedom, said new threats to academic freedom that manifest themselves across the African continent are, in general, threats that are “unique to the continent”.

These include threats by foreign actors such as international financial institutions which have neo-liberal economic policy reform agendas that are largely responsible for engendering managerialism, marketisation and commodification of knowledge in many African universities.

Appiagyei-Atua told University World News what factors and which actors were responsible for violating institutional autonomy and academic freedom of academics and students.

For instance, the engagement of universities from the Global North (and from some in the Global South itself, such as India, China, South Africa, Egypt) in internationalisation … seeks to compel less financially endowed universities to engage in ‘academic colonialism’ – consumption of knowledge and services produced from or by comparatively richer institutions at a cost, which result in a brain drain.

Another problem is corporate bodies that provide funding for controlled research projects which have outcomes that are predetermined.

He also noted the tying of funding from grants and partnerships promoted ‘helicopter science’ and did not duly recognise the collaborative research efforts of scholars from the Global South.

“We are also seeing a trend where university managements are becoming increasingly authoritarian as they are coopted to do the bidding of their governments to suppress the academic freedom of academics and students,” Appiagyei-Atua said.

“This is, of course, in addition to the ‘traditional’ violations of academic freedom, such as arrests, threats, demotion, suppression of freedom of research, [as well as the] infliction of violence on academics and students,” he added.

To deal with the threats to academic freedom in Africa, Appiagyei-Atua said African governments needed to manage state resources well and control corruption and frivolous spending to put their economies on a sound footing that will reduce their reliance on such financial institutions.

He said universities in the Global South should seek to promote responsible and smart internationalisation, especially among themselves.

Governments should increase research, innovation and development budgets for universities and think tanks and recognise the self-determination of academics to control the research agenda.

“Academics should respect and protect the academic freedom of students and forge alliances with them to resist oppression by university management,” Appiagyei-Atua advised.

Politicisation of the university

Professor Cissé Chikouna at Félix Houphouet-Boigny University in Ivory Coast told University World News: “A definite threat to academic freedom is the excessive politicisation of the university, which singles out those who think against the dominant political power.

“This is a very common phenomenon in post-colonial African universities.

“There is no other way out for the African epistemic community than to resist collectively, to build what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls an intellectual collective to confront these predators of academic freedom.

“This requires universities to free themselves from partisan political considerations when an academic is the victim of political repression in the exercise of their academic functions,” Chikouna urged.

Echoing Chikouna’s views, Dr Robert Kakuru, the general secretary of the Forum for Academic Staff of Public Universities in Uganda, told University World News threats to academic freedom were, in the past, largely external to the university and faculty but, at present, they are largely internal.

“The university systems and structures are being used to threaten and undermine academic freedom, with no response at all by the faculty to proportionally respond to these attacks,” Kakuru said.

“To address this, all faculty must be intentional and stand in solidarity and unity at institutional, national, regional and international levels (depending on the gravity of the matter) to reject any attacks of this freedom. All faculty must participate in this. Such actions should be inclusive and non-discriminatory,” Kakuru said.

He added that faculty associations must progressively develop, nurture and inculcate empowering interventions such as awareness creation so that the faculty can always defend themselves.

He added that faculty must be aware of the use of the law and policies as instruments for undermining academic freedom and must, at all times, monitor this, proactively pursuing changes to create an environment for progressive academic freedom.

Expanding further, Dr Pedro Mzileni, a senior lecturer at the University of Zululand in South Africa, told University World News that postcolonial higher education in Africa puts a very high premium on academic discourse that “does not disrupt Eurocentrism, coloniality, whiteness, and the legacy of land dispossession”.

“Today, the African higher education system, which is increasingly replacing public funding with foreign and philanthropic private aid, is becoming comfortable with promoting, rewarding and incentivising polite scholarship that does not call the enduring legacy of settler white racism by its name,” Mzileni said.

“The scholars who challenge coloniality by getting to the bottom of the truth are targeted through institutional abuse, harassment, racism and, indeed, suspensions and dismissals in the public university in Africa – as you witnessed in my case where I was investigated and suspended by the University of the Free State in 2023 for teaching and speaking about these concepts,” Mzileni said.

Neoliberal policies

Dr Peter Wekesa, a senior lecturer at Kenyatta University in Kenya, told University World News: “The neoliberal state remains one of the greatest threats to academic and intellectual freedoms across the African continent.”

According to him, policies and regulatory frameworks related to funding, governance, curriculum development, research and many others have stifled academic and intellectual freedoms.

“Most of these policies and regulatory frameworks are hugely centralised and their operationalisation clearly adopts top-down frameworks.

“We need to revisit and urgently amend the basic policies and frameworks related to higher education governance,” Wekesa urged.

He suggested several remedies.

“They include de-centralised initiatives drawn from key instruments such as the 1990 Kampala Declaration, allowing meritocracy rather than other forms of identities such as ethnic, race or religion to guide every initiative and reform,” Wekesa said.

“States should empower universities to be key and independent players in the global knowledge economy. Only free knowledge can truly be liberative,” he concluded.

Dr Felishana Cherop, a lecturer at Moi University in Kenya, told University World News that threats to academic freedom include rigid governance structures, exclusion of faculty from decision-making, weakened university unions, government controls, a lack of funding and neoliberalism policies.

Cherop said African universities must, therefore, fund academic staff to do research [with] legal and academic policy frameworks to protect academic freedom.

“We must also work on decolonising our thinking,” Cherop stressed.

Universities threaten authoritarianism

Professor Sioux McKenna from Rhodes University in South Africa told University World News that the current geopolitical situation “clearly demonstrates that we cannot take academic freedoms for granted”.

“There are good reasons why universities were actively targeted in the earliest bombings of Gaza and Ukraine – and why academic freedoms continue to be curtailed in Turkey and the United States and in many African countries,” McKenna said.

“This is because universities are a threat to authoritarianism. Universities are meant to be places of critical engagement, places that enable us to speak truth to power, places that protect the rights of people and the planet,” McKenna said.

“Academic freedom, properly enacted, is not just about the freedom to teach or research as we see fit,” McKenna pointed out.

“Article 22 of the 1990 Kampala Declaration spells out that academic freedom includes the struggle for rights and emancipation for all. It should enable a swathe of other freedoms.

“Unfortunately, the threats to academic freedom do not just come from outside the higher education sector – from the state, from powerful religious bodies, from global capital, and so on – many threats to academic freedom come from within our university walls,” McKenna said.

She pointed out that, when universities are constructed as training centres and managed accordingly, they are unlikely to be places of intellectual engagement.

“This occurs through a combination of managerialism, where every action of an academic is monitored and measured, and commodification, where the purpose of the university is to provide the product of certification to customers, the student, and the product of publications (which quite possibly nobody will read).

“Add into the mix the metrification processes whereby only things that can be counted are deemed to count, and the embrace of the rankings industry, which pits universities against each other, and we have a toxic culture that really battles to enact its academic freedoms,” she said.

“These neoliberal processes are not all done to academics by some nefarious management. Academics are, themselves, complicit. Not least because they fixate on protocols and latch onto whatever power and status their titles accord them in ways that serve to silence administrators and junior academics.

“Until we model an egalitarian society within the academy, our demands for academic freedom will be fairly empty,” McKenna said.

Imperialist powers

Professor Issa Shivji from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, said, amid the geopolitical situation, “old and new imperialist powers are landing like vultures on Africa’s natural resources”.

“In alliance with Africa’s corrupt and self-serving political classes, every power wants its slice of the booty.”

According to him, African intellectuals will raise their voices, but African states are suffocating all sites of dissent, paramount being our universities.

“This, then, is the biggest threat to intellectual freedom,” Shivji pointed out.

“In the same measure, we, the committed African intellectuals, together with our working people, must mount a formidable resistance in the fight for freedom and the protection of our resources ...” Shivji said.

Professor Georges Kobou of the University of Yaoundé II in Cameroon told University World News that Cheikh Anta Diop stressed that “ignorance of the history of one’s people is a form of servitude”.

“In my opinion, this ignorance on the part of African intellectuals is the greatest threat to academic freedom on the continent.

“To this must be added a second threat, that of the indifference and insouciance of these intellectuals in the face of social and academic problems, which they have an obligation to constantly tackle head-on and provide with adequate reflection and solutions.

“In a spirit of solidarity, we should all mobilise across the continent to vigorously defend academic freedom,” Kobou urged.

Gendered and political threats

Professor Catherine Kiprop of Moi University in Kenya said threats to academic and intellectual freedom in Africa were increasingly “gendered and political”.

“Surveillance, censorship, and the silencing of dissent disproportionately impact feminist and decolonial scholars whose work challenges patriarchal and neoliberal orthodoxies.

“This undermines, not only academic freedom, but the very possibility of transformative knowledge production,” Kiprop pointed out.

“Universities must move beyond token policies and commit to institutional cultures that actively defend dissent, protect vulnerable scholars, and validate diverse epistemologies – including African feminist and indigenous knowledges,” she said. “Academic freedom must be understood as both a collective right and a gender justice imperative.”

“Building a pan-African academic freedom agenda demands more than legal safeguards – it requires solidarity, radical imagination, and a commitment to decolonising power in knowledge institutions,” Kiprop concluded.