Lectures: Full list
| Year | Speaker | Subject |
| 1959 | A van de Sandt Centlivres | Thomas Benjamin Davie |
| 1960 | C de Kiewiet | Academic freedom |
| 1961 | Z K Matthews | African awakening and the universities |
| 1962 | H F Oppenheimer | The conditions for progress in Africa |
| 1963 | Sir Robert Tredgold | Ideas, ideologies & idolatries |
| 1964 | R H Thouless | Rationality & prejudice |
| 1965 | Sir Robert Birley | The shaking off of burdens |
| 1966 | A van Selms Nisibis | The oldest university |
| 1968 | E H Erikson | Insight and freedom |
| 1969 | Barbara Ward, Lady Jackson | A new history |
| 1971 | W A Visser T'Hooft | A responsible university in a responsible society |
| 1972 | Alpheus H Zulu | The dilemma of a black South African |
| 1972 | John, Lord Redcliffe Maud | National progress and the university |
| 1973 | Rene Dumont | University autonomy and rural development in Africa |
| 1974 | R Coles | Children and political authority |
| 1975 | Juliet Mitchell | Women and equality |
| 1976 | A H Halsey | Academic freedom & the idea of a university |
| 1977 | Lord Goodman | The University's special role |
| 1978 | G M Budlender | Looking forward |
| 1979 | Martin Legassick | Academic Struggle and The Workers Struggle (published not delivered) |
| 1980 | Ivan Illich | Shadow work, industrial division of toil (published not delivered) |
| 1981 | Terrence Ranger | Toward a radical practice of academic freedom: the experience |
| 1982 | Howard Zinn | Academic freedom: collaboration & resistance |
| 1982 | Julius Tomin | Academic freedom in a repressive society |
| 1983 | Helen Joseph | The doors of learning & culture shall be open |
| 1984 | Raymond Suttner | The freedom charter - the people's charter in the nineteeneighties |
| 1986 | Albert Nolan | Academic freedom: a service to the people |
| 1986 | H M Coovadia | From ivory tower to a people's university |
| 1990 | E R Wolf | Freedom and freedoms: An anthropological perspective |
| 1990 | Walter Sisulu | The road to liberation |
| 1991 | E W Said | Identity, authority & freedom: the potentate & the traveller |
| 1992 | G C Spivak | Thinking academic freedom in gendered post-coloniality |
| 1993 | C H Long | The gift of speech and the travail of language |
| 1994 | E Foner | The story of American freedom |
| 1996 | O Patterson | The paradoxes of freedom in America |
| 1997 | Noam Chomsky | Market democracy in a neoliberal order: Doctrines and reality |
| 1999 |
Alan Ryan Wole Soyinka |
Academic freedom: Human right or professorial privilege? Arms and the arts: a continent's unequal dialogue |
| 2002 | Kader Asmal | Breaking with the past, planning for the future |
| 2003 | F van Zyl Slabbert | Is academic freedom still an issue in the new South Africa? |
| 2004 | Jonathan Jansen | Accounting for Autonomy: How Higher Education lost its Innocence |
| 2006 | A C Kors | The Essential Relationship of Academic Freedom to Human Liberty |
| 2007 | A Mbembe | Race and Freedom in Black Thought |
| 2009 | N Chetty | Universities in a Time of Change |
| 2010 | Robin Briggs | The Knowledge Economy and Academic Freedom |
| 2011 | Nadine Strossen | Some Reflections on the British and French Cases: Post -9/11 Threats to Academic Freedom |