The vice-chancellor of Auckland University in New Zealand recently sent an e-mail warning academic staff that he would ”summarily fire” anyone making critical comments. ”We all work for the same company,” he wrote, implying that that meant toeing a party line. A New Zealand university teachers’ union took the matter up with some vigour and the New Zealand Herald ran an article headlined: ”University gags academics with sacking threat.”
In Britain the infamous 1988 Further and Higher Education Act took away the tenure that used to protect academic staff from dismissal for having their say. After some debate in Parliament a clause (Section 202) was inserted to try to prevent this sort of thing. It protects academic staff who ”question and test received wisdom” and express unpopular opinions from being put in jeopardy of losing their jobs or ”privileges” at their institution.
It has not, to my knowledge, really been tested yet. It was partly overtaken by the Public Interest Disclosure Act of 1998. That has the advantage that it protects not only academics but everyone in higher education who is an employee (though not the students). But it is not all plain sailing. It covers only a set list of ”protected disclosures” designed for the general workforce.
Academic freedom is the freedom to tell the truth responsibly about anything without fear of professional punishment. (I say ”responsibly” because academics are not, of course, freer than anyone else under their special protection to defame people or to incite racial hatred. And there are some worrying questions over whether academic boycotts should be called for where there are politically sensitive rather than purely academic reasons.)
Since 1988 a great deal has changed in the culture of the university world. Academic culture has less than it used to do with books and ideas and the sophisticated use of language, fundamental science and pure mathematics, the things universities exist to preserve and advance. (I hope that is all being stored away in cardboard boxes until government fashion changes.)
The change of culture I mean has involved management style. It has led to pressure on academics to lead lives of craven compliance with the wishes of heads of department. No yes-man, no promotion. No scratching of his back, no scratching of yours. Power increasingly resides with the administrative classes in universities. It is not unknown for headships of academic departments to be given to administrators who are not, and never have been, academics at all.
Those who trade in the small-beer power of academe are short on the long vision. They tend to deal in today’s advantage. So to object to the impoverishing of the content of a course or the massaging of examination results can get you systematically excluded, frozen out, even sacked, for lack of the loyalty so valued in Auckland.
Across the world on the research front, intellectual property deals are done. Research students and their seniors find they cannot publish their work freely or discuss it at conferences until the sponsor says they may.
David Healy found the offer of a post at the University of Toronto withdrawn following his frank comments about Prozac. The United Kingdom government’s current control-freakery is visible in the way it has lost sight of Section 202. The House of Lords recently made a bid to stop a move in the Excise Control Bill that would have restricted the freedom of academics to exchange ideas across borders, but no one thinks the Commons will let that amendment through.
Gillian Evans lectures in medieval theology and intellectual history at Cambridge University, and is a member of the Campaign for Academic Freedom and Standards.