After more six years at the helm of Canada’s Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Jean-Marc Mangin has stepped down. Christine Tausig Ford, formerly of Universities Canada,has been named interim executive director.

Higher education is a globally competitive market and institutions with a high rank can claim exceptionalism that brings in students and funding, acknowledges our Michelle Stack. But are rankings genuinely useful for students or for research?

Academics need to retain their freedom to speak on matters of interest, which intersect with their specialized knowledge, even where that intersection is tangential or not visible to others.

The never-ending audit makes a crucial point about the ways in which power structures have shifted within universities, argues our Daniel Nehring. In effect, it suggests the death of the ideal of the autonomous scholar-researcher-teacher.

As technology improves and organizations become more complex, the theory and practice of contract design will only increase in importance. As such, we owe, we owe a great debt to this year’s Nobel laureates in economics for giving us powerful tools to structure effective contracts.

“Research conducted in the social and behavioral sciences has the unique capacity to improve the human condition in a way that other sciences cannot. Social and behavioral scientists deserve to be recognized for the important impact of their work.” The SAGE-CASBS Award is an effort to do so.

Last month the webinar “Battling Bannings- Authors discuss intellectual freedom and the freedom to read” saw Index on Censorship’s Vicky Baker moderate a discussion between historian Wendy Doniger and children’s book authors Christine Baldacchino and Jessica Herthel.

Alice Dreger says shecan see clearly that universities in which the majority of the faculty feel unsafe in terms of job security become places where no one feels safe to do anything that might risk upsetting someone.

If we value contrary opinion on campus, say social psychologist Mark Brandt, it’s important to ask: Where are the conservatives?

On September 27, as part of Social Science Space’s series on academic freedom, three of the contributors to that series – Daniel Nehring, Dylan Kerrigan, and Joanna Williams – participated in an hour-long webinar to discuss some of the issues at the heart of this issue.

As part of our series on academic freedom, Dylan Kerrigan discusses the wider implications of the financialisation of academic knowledge production by considering academic book publishing. He asks if the success of academic books is best measured by economic or non-economic criteria, by its impact on the business sector or its veracity, by ideological myth-making or evidence.

A culture of bad science can evolve as a result of institutional incentives that prioritize simple quantitative metrics as measures of success, argues Paul Smaldino. But, he adds, not all is lost as new initiatives such as open data and replication are making a positive difference.