OPINION | Academic freedom should not be fenced in

There has been a trend in the global university sector to attempt to “certify” academics as higher education teachers.
What we have seen is an increasing push by universities to get academics to enrol for courses which certify them as assessors, curriculum developers, course evaluators and student learning experts within their fields of study.
This attempt to “certify” the “teacher worthiness” of an academic is so strong that in some universities you cannot get your permanent tenure approved unless you have undergone at least one such course.
For those who work in universities, this may sound like nothing at all.
After all, aren’t academics teachers?
Well, yes and no. Academics are indeed knowledge professionals who enter into higher education to further the boundaries of knowledge through teaching and research.
In that sense, yes, they are teachers because they must convey knowledge or skills to students. But academics are also something else that is harder to define: they are members of a community that inducts its newer members into a long tradition of knowledge pursuit.
In that sense, academics are not teachers but something of an “intellectuariat” who must pursue uncharted, perhaps even unknowable terrain.
They must have the guts to walk with their students through messy, unresolved problems that humanity believes ought to be pursued.
This latter kind of academic works within is the definition that I believe is underscored by a particular notion of academic freedom – one that accepts that within universities, contestation and debate are processes that often defy categorisation.
In teaching, this means having the right to sometimes leave things unresolved, to push boundaries, to be pushed back by students and to be open to the possibility that a truth may – or may not – emerge from the complexities.
One becomes an academic because one pursues a discipline.
In my case it is history.
To teach students how to disrupt, analyse and interrogate historiography is not something that can easily be articulated and put in a “curriculum” or “assessment” box.
In fact, to teach students to think innovatively, boldly and creatively, one has to have such a strong footing in one’s discipline that letting students colour outside of the lines neither troubles nor shakes you.
In that sense, the best training to be a teacher in higher education comes from being strong and confident in one’s actual discipline – not through a mandatory certification process, usually by someone in an education faculty who knows nothing about your discipline.
There is another reality: academics teach adults.
Teaching qualified adults, who should be able to handle intellectual provocation, is not at all the same thing as teaching children of five to recognise letters or write their names.
Within a university classroom, it is perfectly acceptable in many disciplines for students to be surprised and challenged by the unfamiliar – indeed, this is what makes a university a university.
Instead, when we are forced to write down course objectives and assessment criteria, we box our own disciplines.
We are forced to use measurement language outside of the traditions and contestations of our knowledge areas.
The result is that, in formulating assessment criteria and other “objective” measures of student learning, we force debate into predefined answers and curtail the potential for knowledge to grow.
Worse, many universities in SA expect academics to produce memos – guidelines for “correct” exam answers.
Can you imagine, for the poor historian who sets the question “What were the causes of the decline of Rome?”
Or any other such question that is still debated today?
What happens when a conservative historian asks “Why is the West the best?”
Should there be an “assessment guideline” for that?
Students must have the right to deviate.
Educationalists will argue that the academic profile of our students has changed, and that we need to become better teachers.
Indeed, our students come with diverse capacities.
But certifying academics does not fix any of this because a shallow scholar merely produces shallow curricula...

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