The latest efforts to restrict the freedom of bloggers come not from authoritarian governments or oversensitive lobby groups, but university administrators. Increasing numbers of academics are being disciplined for criticising their bosses, or other colleagues, on blogs like Bullying of Academics in Higher Education, other online forums or even in emails. As Dennis Hayes of Academics for Academic Freedom tells this week's Times Higher Education Supplement, 'Despite continually promoting the supposed benefits of new technology, in reality universities fear it. Blogs, simple emails or discussion groups and podcasts are new forms in which academics and students can explore ideas freely without permission from any authority. [University managements] view academic freedom of speech as something that happens in the classroom and not something that is to be tolerated elsewhere.' In truth, academic freedom cannot be limited to classrooms, but depends on the more general freedom to speak freely in a variety of contexts, blogs included.
Dolan Cummings
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Academic freedom is really one of those things that is rapidly becoming "dead dogma", as J.S. Mill warned principles would become if simply invoked reflexively and not experienced and lived as necessary truth. You only need to look at my institution, the University of Oxford, to see that. It regularly uses the idea of academic freedom to defend its staff from criticism - e.g., in the recent David Coleman controversy, or against the animal rights lobby's attacks on medical researchers. Simultaneously, they deny the right of free expression to their enemies by using injunctions to silence the animal rights protestors and have them removed from the city; and undermine their staff's own academic freedom by seeking to bring in new university governance rules that would allow faculty to be disciplined and fired for not producing work that meets some mysterious set of standards. As I've also written on this blog before, at least one tutor has also been effectively dismissed for having so-called "communist" tendencies.
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