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 […]
If the public institution is committed to public interest, then privatization of research and teaching cannot be allowed. Work done should be seen, heard and critiqued. Innovation in knowledge can come when people take away ideas from us, just as we did. Research should be made public, accountable and responsible. The data commons in public interest cannot be sacrificed at the altar of intellectual autonomy.
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.
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.
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.
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.