Published with license by Koninklijke Brill bv | doi:10.1163/25903276-bja10071 © Victor Coutinho Lage, 2025 | ISSN: 2590-3284 (print) 2590-3276 (online) A Haunting Cultivation of Academic Freedom and Equality Victor Coutinho Lage | ORCID: 0000-0002-0998-3619 Institute of Humanities, Arts, and Sciences (ihac), Federal University of Bahia (ufba), Salvador, Brazil victorclage@gmail.com Received 22 April 2025 | Accepted 23 April 2025 | Published online 15 July 2025 Abstract In this short text, I claim that it is important that debates on academic freedom do not leave aside what does it mean to speak about and with(out) academic freedom in face of such globally-produced conditions of deliberate maiming and scholasticide. I also point out that universities (and their hierarchies) have been governed and managed through, and not only in opposition to, the cultivation of certain freedoms. Moreover, I highlight that entangled with academic freedom is academic equality, and that the understanding of this entanglement requires, among other things, staying with the trouble of thinking universities as also (even if not exclusively) a place of reparations. A final remark stresses the intimate relation between critique and complicity. Keywords freedom – equality – scholasticide – reparations – critique – complicity eardrums in time to burst under the sound of the siren that reddens the Palestinian sky, the teacher claims not to have enough elements to give a statement on the most recent monster-massacre Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences 6 (2025) 17–23