There is a certain, almost instinctive satisfaction in seeing politically patronised academic appointments swept away in one go. For years, university offices were filled not through scholarly distinction but through networks of proximity, patronage and money. Framed as an attempt to disrupt that pattern, the recent ordinance brought by the government after uniquely proroguing the Parliament whose session was already called, enabled the simultaneous removal of vice-chancellors, registrars and even deans, in addition to members of academic committees, across federally chartered universities. But when reform takes the form of a sweeping, executive-led reset of university leadership, effected simultaneously yet unevenly across institutions and levels, it ceases to be merely corrective. It raises concerns about institutional autonomy, security and, ultimately, academic freedom.

Academic freedom is often described, somewhat reductively, as an individual liberty—the freedom of scholars to teach, research and speak without interference. But this framing obscures a more structural reality. International standards, including UNESCO’s 1997 Recommendation concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel, recognise institutional autonomy as a necessary precondition for the exercise of academic freedom. Where those structures are weakened, the freedom they sustain becomes fragile, contingent and increasingly difficult to exercise without incurring a cost.

Universities, in this sense, are not administrative extensions of the state, even where they are publicly funded or statutorily created. They are sites of independent knowledge production where claims are tested, policies interrogated and orthodoxies, governmental or otherwise, subjected to scrutiny. Their legitimacy derives not from alignment with executive priorities, but from their capacity to question them rigorously and, when necessary, uncomfortably. Treating university leadership as if it were interchangeable with administrative office within the executive branch collapses this distinction and risks transforming institutions of critique into those of compliance.

Universities operate through non-singular authority, depending on layered academic and administrative governance. The removal of these layers in one stroke risks creating institutional vacuums in which decision-making is delayed and diluted. The absence of properly constituted bodies inevitably affects routine functioning—from academic approvals to administrative continuity. And the firing drive hasn’t yet considered the consequences of such disruptions and their adverse effects on academic freedom. Furthermore, the unevenness in the removals is intriguing. Deans from select universities have been fired, unlike the vice-chancellors, rectors and registrars, who have all been sacked evenly.

The justification of ‘urgency’ offered for the removal of officials sits uneasily with the idea of reform. In constitutional design, ordinance powers exist to address situations where delay would produce immediate harm, not to facilitate a structural overhaul that is, by its nature, deliberative and time-sensitive. Moreover, where parliamentary processes have already been initiated or could reasonably be engaged, the invocation of urgency risks appearing less as a necessity and more as a convenience. One needs no elaborate constitutional theory to appreciate this tension. Even a cursory recall of positions taken by members of the current ruling dispensation, when previously in opposition, reveals a similar scepticism towards rule-by-decree styles adopted by previous governments.

Yet the more significant concern lies not in the immediate disruption, but in what this moment signals about the nature of academic office itself. It may be argued that much will depend on who is appointed next, and that the current damage may be cauterised if the new ones are competent, independent and committed to academic values. However, that logic ignores that academic freedom depends not just on the virtue or competence of officeholders, but also on the security and autonomy of the offices they assume. When leadership across universities can be reset in a single, contestable executive overreach, tenure begins to appear contingent rather than institutional. Under such conditions, independence need not be explicitly curtailed to be weakened, as officeholders become implicitly aware (or apprehensive) that their continuation in office may depend on executive satisfaction rather than institutional process. This results in them recalibrating their decisions accordingly, avoiding positions that could be perceived as confrontational, moderating critique or deferring to external expectations.

Universities are not oppositional in a partisan sense. Rather, they are inherently critical institutions, as they ought to produce knowledge that can affirm, refine or challenge historical myths and present public policy, via methods independent of political authority. Whether through formal intervention or through the more diffuse awareness that institutional positions are precarious, the rising cost of critique renders that function harder to sustain. In such contexts, academic freedom erodes through anticipatory compliance and the gradual internalisation of limits that are never formally articulated but widely understood.

The present intervention may be driven by a genuine desire to dismantle entrenched patronage and restore credibility to university governance. It is equally possible that subsequent measures may seek to enhance institutional autonomy by insulating appointments from political office, by strengthening internal selection processes, or by otherwise recalibrating the relationship between the state and academic institutions. But even on that charitable reading, the method adopted here raises above-outlined difficulties that cannot be addressed simply by improving subsequent appointments or by promising future reforms. Even a future framework that formally enhances autonomy may carry within it the imprint of this moment; the ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’ lies not in the character of those appointed, but in the precedent that governs their tenure.

Independence exercised under the shadow of potential removal is qualitatively different from independence grounded in institutional security. Furthermore, the prime minister who fired academic officeholders has not fired himself as the chancellor of most of these universities, which further undermines the reform narrative.

The question, then, is not whether universities require reform, nor even whether the individuals removed were, in any case, products of a flawed system. It is whether reform undertaken in this manner preserves the conditions necessary for universities to function as independent institutions of inquiry. Reform, if it is to endure, must respect the logic of the institutions it seeks to improve. Otherwise, it risks weakening them in the very act of attempting to repair them. Such reforms are more sustainable if carried out independently, one university (and its constituting charter) at a time, in a scientific, democratic and deliberative process—none of which sit easily with the urgency invoked here.

Much like democratic backsliding, academic freedom rarely disappears in a single moment. It recedes when institutions begin to internalise that their autonomy is contingent and conditioned, that independence must be exercised carefully, and that the boundaries of acceptable critique are shaped not only by law but by the perceived stability of the structures within which they operate. The uneasy question that remains is whether, after this intervention, those structures can sustain the independence that universities are meant to embody.