Examining academic freedom within WB and UNESCO discourses on higher education: A Foucauldian discourse analysis

Academic freedom constitutes an integral part of traditional university values that ensure the proper functioning of universities in pursuing truth and inculcating civic values. In a globalized world where Higher Education (HE) policy is the result of the interaction of local, national, and international levels, the positions of international organizations on questions of academic freedoms deem significant. Within global discourses on HE, literature contrasts the World Bank’s human capitalist to UNESCO’s humanistic approach. Through Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of both organizations’ documents, the paper presented a genealogical analysis of academic freedom that challenged the existence of static, opposite, and binary positions. Transformations, ruptures, juxtapositions as well as gaps, limits, and exclusions were detected within and across International Organizations’ discourses. Juxtaposition of economic and humanistic rationales as well as academic freedom protection and neoliberal policy interventions have muted discursive conflicts and inherent contradictions. The failure of UNESCO to address contemporary threats to academic freedom emerged from the appearance of neoliberal transnational governmentality as an inevitable social regularity that delimits what can be said and cannot be said about academic freedom. Through coercive funding schemes and technologies of differentiation, surveillance, and monitoring, the WB created the space for such transnational governmentality, and placed faculty members under its gaze resulting in undermining academic freedoms and de-professionalization of academics.