The perennial debate about academic freedom engages with assessing the extent to which academic freedom has been exercised by academics by using some normative and quantitative approaches. Often studies on academic freedom deal with the extent to which institutions comply with norms in terms of the rights of the academics on some international standards. This article takes its departure by making an empirical investigation of how academics understand academic freedom by employing a qualitative approach. It presents an empirical investigation of the different conceptions of academic freedom among instructors of social sciences in Addis Ababa University. The study was undertaken from a phenomenographic point of view and four qualitatively different ways of understanding academic freedom, based on the distance between the self and the perceived threats to academic freedom, were identified. The relationship between the different ways of viewing academic freedom reminds one that more pragmatic provisions for academic freedom and policy debates need to begin which must be accommodative of academics' views on the subject before making any meaningful point.