Dan O'Donnell - Academic Freedom, privilege, and intersectionality

Academic Freedom, privilege, and intersectionality: Revisiting a core ethical requirement of transparent and open research in the contemporary academy

Academic Freedom is a sine qua non for ethical, open, and transparent research. It is a right granted to researchers, particularly in post-secondary institutions and public labs in order to ensure that, in theory, they can follow problems and develop solutions without fear of economic or political reprisal. Although this right is often traced back to somewhat similar protections in some medieval universities, Academic Freedom in the modern sense is, like so much of the contemporary university and research worlds, a much more recent development: it begins to be formalised in the U.S. at the beginning of the twentieth century and takes on its current form in many countries during the late 1960s and 1970s.

In recent years, these forty- to fifty-year-old definitions have come under increasing pressure, both from politicians and university/research managers who wish to impose stricter controls on the work of researchers and teachers at the post-secondary level, and from researchers, teachers, and students themselves who argue whether some forms of "protected" academic speech should be defended as unconditionally as in past decades

In this session I present some preliminary research from a new project that is reexamining contemporary definitions of Academic Freedom in light of post-1960s developments in pedagogy and recent attention to issues of privilege and structural/intersectional bias. While it is too soon to have conclusion, I hope to identify some of the major trends at work in our understanding of this crucial right at this moment in history.