Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
Authors, Academics Join to Support Academic Freedom
Leading academics and influential authors worldwide have signaled their concern by signing a statement backing academic freedom as a special issue of ‘Index on Censorship’ examines the threats facing universities.
What’s Wrong With Academic Freedom in the UK?
Given the ferocity of the current assault on academic freedom, argues Daniel Nehring, it seems to me that we may be close to a point of no return, past which ‘tone of voice policies’ and similar control mechanisms may become a norm into which coming generations of academics will be socialized as a matter of course.
Book Review: Who’s Afraid of Academic Freedom?
Seventeen essays from distinguished scholars take on the conceptual issues surrounding the idea of freedom of inquiry and consider a variety of obstacles to such inquiry that they have encountered in their personal and professional experience. Opening a discussion on academic freedom and the place of the academy in society is a timely effort, writes Justine Seran.
A Marketplace of Ideas? Yes. A Market? No
Research and teaching have never been free from external constraints and public universities have long been expected to justify the resources society devotes to them. But universities feel threatened and increasingly incapable of fulfilling their primary functions.
Tweet Nothings? Academic Freedom and Private Rants
At what point to private (and perhaps unpalatable) opinions expressed off-campus impinge on a scholar’s employment? This abstract question has been made concrete in two recent cases.
L’affaire Salaita: Can Activism Go a Tweet Too Far?
Social media allows scholars to discuss and debate current affairs like never before, but on a very public stage. Brent E. Sasley and Mira Sucharov examine and assess one academic’s tweets on the Israel-Gaza crisis and the questions raised over his style and approach.
Sequestering Speech: Stories of the Shutdown
Thousands of scientists across the US feel cutbacks are seriously restricting their research and contributions. Gretchen Goldman asks scientists for their reaction and about impact on their work
The Day the Earth Moved: Canada’s Muzzled Researchers
Canadian scientists are being prevented by the state from discussing research findings in public, even about earthquakes in their backyard. Mark Frary reports
