ABSTRACT
My first dilemma when it came to writing up this chapter for publication was how to punctuate the title. I first settled on ‘Academic freedom: academic obligation’, with the colon doing the work of an explanation, making the point that it is an academic obligation to ensure academic freedom. But can we take it as a given that academic freedom is an obligation? This seems to assume too much too quickly, and it whistles past further challenging questions: if academic freedom is an obligation, whose obligation would it be? What form would it take? Who is obliged, and to whom would the obligation be owed? Would it be legally binding? I decided against the colon, as the complexity of the issue didn’t seem to fit neatly with the explanatory logic that the colon promises. Next I considered a colon and a question mark: ‘Academic freedom: academic obligation?’ But despite its rather busy punctuation, this title seems to reduce the problem to just one question: is academic freedom an academic obligation? My chapter seeks to address a broader field of enquiry and is not focused on this question alone. I decided against the combination of colon and question mark and considered the slash: ‘Academic freedom/academic obligation’. On the authority of the grammarians, the slash transmits impressively heterogeneous semantic valencies: it can mean ‘per’ as in, ‘50 km/h’; it can mean ‘and’ as in ‘the language/literature major’; it can mean ‘either/or,’ as in ‘each student must present his/her identity card’; and it can also be used to represent, as the online Punctuation Guide rather ambiguously tells us, ‘a conflict or connection between two things’, as in ‘the nature/nurture debate’. 1 With its meanings of ‘either/or’, ‘and’ and ‘conflict or connection’, the slash seems to capture nicely the complexities of the relationship between academic freedom and academic obligation. But in the end I decided against the slash too, because (linguistic expertise set aside) for the ordinary reader the default understanding of the slash in ‘Academic freedom/academic obligation’ is ‘either/or’. The risk with this punctuation is that the reader may not pause long enough to register the further intricacies of the relationship between the two phrases, and it is the hesitation in thought that I am after, right up front. In the end, I decided not to punctuate the title at all: ‘Academic freedom academic obligation’. This makes 252the reader wonder: is something missing? What, if any, is the connection between academic freedom and academic obligation? What do these two terms refer to in the first place? These are my leading lines of enquiry.
