Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
In Australia, Academic Contracts Threaten Freed Speech
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®: Questioning the Lecturer Experience
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.
Archived Webinar: Librarians and the Freedom to Read
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.
Take Away Tenure, and Professors Become Sheep
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.
Archived Webinar: A Debate on Academic Freedom
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.
The Financialisation of Academic Knowledge Production
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.
Thoughts on Academic Freedom (and Our Series)
Below are some of the comments and articles that have addressed the issues of academic freedom as written about in the series appearing at Social Science Space.
The Soviet System, Neoliberalism and British Universities
Craig Brandist compares aspects of British higher education to the old Soviet Union, with a similar tendency towards stagnation and strategies that workers adopt to absorb managerial pressure.
