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 […]
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.
All the arguments for a critique of the new authoritarian, hierarchical, business-minded corporate universities are in place, says Daniel Nehring. The ways to insert these arguments into public life still need to be found.
”Here’s the message I want to give you today: We’re all very close to research. When we gather information to understand this world that we’re in, we are gathering both numbers and statistics, and the stories of people. The research methods I do put those two together.”
Were a psychologist to win federal funding for an experiment that involved offering 3-year-olds marshmallows, it’s likely that grant would eventually be cited on the floor of the House of Representatives as yet another example of silly and wasteful spending on social science.
New research in ‘Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences’ finds that being left out and ignored causes more pain and emotional damage than any overt forms of abuse.
Social psychology has seen more than its fair share of all of ethical lapses, argues Jonathan Borwein, who notes it’s been described as a ‘train wreck.’ What are the deeper causes and implications of this most recent case of fraud in the social sciences?
The values of a university education are many and generally agreed upon. But is holding a degree the same thing?
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.