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 […]
An introduction to a series of short essays exploring contemporary issues of academic freedom from a range of perspectives, focusing both on British and international trends.
The right of academic freedom are often called upon, but the responsibilities of that same freedom are less often summoned. In the wake of Goffman and Hunt, Bohannan and Stapel, it’s time to rectify that imbalance.
Cathy Sandeen, chancellor of University of Wisconsin Colleges and the University of Wisconsin-Extension, argues that universities need to be more honest on how academic freedom applies to different teaching roles in an environment where tenure is no longer a given.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.