How do universities balance their rights to institutional autonomy and academic freedom and still retain public accountability?
How do universities balance their rights to institutional autonomy and academic freedom and still retain public accountability?
According to the newly-appointed vice chancellor of Pretoria University, Dr Cheryl de la Rey, as public funding in universities increases, so does the threat of government interference.
Speaking at the DCS Oosthuizen academic memorial lecture at Rhodes University recently, De la Rey said the values of academic freedom and institutional autonomy were regarded as distinctive features of many countries’ higher education systems.
According to de la Rey, academic freedom and institutional autonomy are enshrined in our Constitution and are core principles of the 1997 White Paper on higher education, which sets the framework for transformation in higher education in South Africa.
Despite this, she says these values are continually contested, primarily due to the fact that there is little agreement as to what academic freedom and institutional autonomy mean and involve. However, she says there is some consensus on the distinction between the two concepts. She argues that the right to institutional autonomy applies to a recognised community of scholars within a university, whereas the right to academic freedom applies to individual academics.
De la Rey examined what she believes is a commonly held perception that academic freedom and institutional autonomy are used by professors and universities to resist doing what they don’t want to do and that they are values that are “claimed and defended only in the face of disagreement”.
The only way to change this perception, she feels, is by defining the concepts and discussing how to give them operational effect, adding that the research on academic freedom and institutional autonomy is limited and that they have meant different things within different contexts.
A further problem is that as society evolves, the reasons why governments fund universities are also likely to change. But as this relationship with government changes, so too does the public’s perception of the role and purpose of universities in society.
As public funding in universities increases, there’s a greater demand from the government and the public to see results. It is important therefore, to not only explain and agree on the purpose of higher education in society and why and how it should be funded, but it is also important to establish how universities should demonstrate public accountability.
De la Rey thinks an accountability framework based on key national policy objectives should be introduced and developed. In countries where such a framework has been introduced, agreements are made between government and universities and those agreements are made public, as are the periodic performance evaluations. This would give operational effect to government’s expectations in a transparent way but at the same time, universities would retain their autonomy.
With regard to academic freedom, de la Rey believes that in the same way we need to clarify why higher education and institutional autonomy are important, we need to clarify why academic freedom is important. She says there is little understanding about this in society and that if we agree on a set of guiding principles and reduce ambiguities, we will begin to “facilitate the resolution of conflicts that we see around us”.
"We need freedom of enquiry as a necessary condition for innovative, creative, and quality teaching and research for the short term, medium term and the long term," de la Rey concluded. "And this is, in fact, in the public good."
