Academic Freedom: A Prologue (original) (raw)

Academic Freedom as a Defensive Right

Hague Journal on The Rule of Law, 2023

Ensuring the proper implementation of academic freedom can be difficult both for policymakers and university authorities. Hence, great emphasis should be given to the defensive function of academic freedom. In this paper, we analyse the legal regulations and the jurisprudence of the constitutional courts of Germany, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, and Spain. We identify who is the holder of academic freedom, how the defensive function of academic freedom works and what academic activities are being protected. The study shows that individual countries emphasise slightly different aspects of the defensive function of academic freedom but remain unanimous on the essence of this function. As academic freedom is not defined unequivocally in most constitutions and legal frameworks, constitutional courts play a significant role in shaping its defensive function.

Individual Academic Freedom and Aprofessional Acts

Educational Theory, 2009

Does so-called "extramural" speech deserve protection from academic sanctions under the principle of academic freedom? I discuss two alternative views of the matter, spell out and examine some of the arguments advanced by the proponents of the "restrictive" theory against the broader, traditional view. I suggest that the choice between the two definitions of academic freedom is a question of sound policy in specific institutional contexts, rather than a matter of conceptual consistency.

Academic Freedom as a Fundamental Right

in Domènech J., Lloret J., Vincent Vela M.C., Zuriaga Agustí E. (editors), 1st International Conference on Higher Education Advances, HEAd’15, Universitat Politècnica de València, València, 2015, pp. 552-558

The paper aims at defining in particular the concept of academic freedom within the context of the European legal sources. Even though the idea of a special corporative status for professors was born during the Middle Ages, it was only during the second half of the twentieth century that the Constitutions recognised academic freedom as an individual’s legal right. Such an individual right is regulated within the category of the freedom of expression, even if it is characterised by particular aspects. Like any individual right that is recognised at the constitutional level, the freedoms of teaching and research are subject to limitations that protect other fundamental rights. Furthermore, today the academic freedom has lost its traditional sense as a defence against public powers and is now granted to play a social function, protecting not only the corporative interests of teachers. It can then be concluded that only through the developing ofthe social role of education and research, by the principles of quality, transparency and accountability, ensures the individual and institutional rights of the teachersand researchers, strengthening and upgrading the role that universities are playing in the last 900 years.

Slippery Beasts: Why Academic Freedom and Media Freedom Are so Difficult to Protect

The Australian Universities' review, 2021

Periodically, the academy, and its friends and critics, pause to consider the idea of academic freedom. This is often connected with events outside the academy, as in the 1950s when 'loyalty oaths' were sometimes imposed on academics in the United States, or after 9/11, when security concerns were leveraged to permit oversight of 'sensitive' scholarly and scientific enquiries. Thirty years ago, from the very place where we write, a series of 'managerial' changes to the governance of Australian universities (the so-called 'Dawkins Reforms') prompted the Bulletin of the Australian Society of Legal Philosophy to devote a special issue to discussing 'Academic Freedom Today' (Moens, 1991). So-called political correctness (in the form of things like 'de-platforming' , 'speech codes' , 'cancel culture' , and 'safe spaces') has recently provoked heated debate, while the Commonwealth government was so concerned about these matters that in 2018 the Minister for Education commissioned former High Court Chief Justice Robert French AC to set up an inquiry. (And a subsequent 2020 inquiry into the results of the inquiry, led by Professor Sally Walker AM.) Justice French's findings yielded, among other things, a model code for universities, some of which have adopted it, with or without modifications. On this topic we believe something already asserted by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), which said in its submission to a 2008 Parliamentary review, 'The dialogue about protecting academic freedom needs to move beyond old debates about political correctness [already old thirteen years ago!] to the real threats that incursions on academic freedom can have for our universities and for our society more broadly' (2008, p. 8). We aim to show how to move the debate beyond these hackneyed questions, though not, perhaps, in the direction that the NTEU had in mind in that earlier intervention. Public airing of this topic frequently suggests that there is nothing more to the concept of academic freedom than the idea of freedom of speech (within a particular community), where this is read as a negative liberty, in the sense that Isaiah Berlin (1969) first proposed in 1958. Berlin thought of 'negative liberty' as an absence of enforced institutional constraints such as laws and regulations that explicitly limit certain behaviours. In this case it refers to the ability for people to say what they please, within broadly described legal limits. However, some notable discussants have been careful to distinguish academic freedom from such a libertarian conception of freedom of speech. Professor Carolyn Evans,

The question of academic freedom: Universal right or relative term

2014

In this essay, we interrogate the role of academic freedom in the 21st century by describing its historical genesis in the modern university, its association with the concept of tenure, and how it is reinterpreted by different cultural and social contexts. Afterwards, we examine traditional infringements by national governments upon academic freedom, as well as new infringements brought on by the forces of globalization and commercialization. Since academic freedom not only protects scholarly inquiry, but the health and safety of academics across the world, we argue that academic freedom is a “transcendent value” that should be respected by political and institutional forces and carefully defended by engaged scholars.