Towards a Genealogy of Academic Freedom in Canadian Universities

Abstract

In this dissertation, I take a genealogical approach (Foucault, 1977/1995, 1988-1990, 1971/1984a) to the study of the intellectually “free” subject through the analysis of selected academic freedom statement-events. Assuming academic freedom to be an institutionalized discourse-practice operating in the field of contemporary post-secondary education in Canada, I conduct a specific kind of cross-disciplinary, historico-theoretical research that pays particular attention to the productive nature and effects of power-knowledge. The intent is to disrupt academic freedom as commonsensical “good” and universal “right,” instead focussing on how it is that the academic subject emerges as free/unfree to think--and therefore free/unfree to be--through particular, effective, and effecting regimes of truth and strategies of objectification and subjectification. The study suggests how it is that academic freedom operates as a set of systemically agonistic practices and an autodestructive social programme (Foucault, 1977/1995; Gordon, 1980) that might only realize a different economy of discourse through the contingent nature of the very social power that produces it.