Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Any conversation on academic freedom needs to be anchored in a commitment to critiquing the workings of power that constitute the strategies of silencing built into hegemonic structures. In the humanities and social sciences, academic freedom is often under threat by powerful forces of state control and private interests. Often, in situations where academic freedom is threatened, authoritarian state practices work alongside private interests to hold up the networks of power. Private donors, trustees, and funders are some of the most frequent sources of threats to academic freedom. As public universities have faced the twin forces of government control and devolution of state funding, private interests have stepped in to exert greater and greater influence. This influence is often felt in opaque ways. Calls made surreptitiously to university managers by trustees. Threats given by donors to withdraw funding. These are the typical strategies deployed by private forces to control the unive