Language-mandate compliance and academic-freedom guarantees: A difference-in-discontinuity evaluation of Kenyan university bilingual-policy reforms on faculty publication rates

Kenyan universities operate under overlapping obligations to uphold constitutionally protected academic freedom while responding to state directives promoting the parallel use of English and Kiswahili in teaching, administration and scholarly communication. It argues that language mandates work through three distinct channels of translation burden, audience reorientation and administrative audit, each of which carries different implications for what publication counts can signify. The article then formalises a difference-in-discontinuity design that combines a compliance threshold with temporal variation from reform introduction to separate mandate pressure from underlying differences across institutions. The contribution is a bounded, implementable framework that clarifies identification assumptions, measurement choices and scope conditions for future evaluation in Kenya and comparable multilingual higher-education systems.