Academic freedom: What it is, what it isn’t and why there’s confusion | Robert Quinn

Academic freedom is an often misunderstood and often contested concept. But at its essence, it's the freedom of research professionals, educators to seek the truth, to follow their research, their teaching, their ideas, and to share them in order to pursue that truth however it leads, assuming they're doing it according to professional and ethical standards. It's contested because sometimes asking questions can be sensitive or can be threatening to people who don't want to have their worldview changed or depend on a certain understanding of a certain topic or a certain question.

And I think it's misunderstood because academic freedom isn't free expression, but it's connected to that. Academic expression isn't political by nature, but it connects to issues that are political. And because of those two, there's a lot of confusion about it. But at the end of the day, this space matters so much because the world is getting smaller. The issues that are affecting all of us are complex, and we really need to have an engine that can look at complex problems and try to solve them together.

And that is what the university is and that's what academic freedom gives us. I work with the Scholars at Risk network, which is a global network of universities and administrators and staff and faculty and students who say we share this vision of a university that serves the public good, that uses that freedom responsibly to engage with truth and difficult questions to try to help society. And our efforts at Scholars at Risk are to protect the space in which that can happen.

And I mean the physical space, the bodies of scholars who suffer violence or coercion or prosecution or threats, as well as student leaders and so forth. But we also frankly mean the conceptual space. The space in all of our minds to think freely and not worry that when we try to ask questions or we share ideas that we're going to be harassed or targeted or lose our jobs or somehow threatened not because of the quality of our ideas but for the audacity of having them and sharing them.

Different disciplines get attacked for different reasons sometimes. There's an— I think— very false and dangerous perception that there are safe disciplines and there are troublemaking disciplines, and I think this goes to a misperception about the definition and boundaries of academic freedom. Every discipline requires the ability to travel and engage and share ideas across borders.

So, we had a marine biologist from Ukraine. He studied plankton, the tiny little stuff that some whales eat, and he was thrown in prison for it. Why was he thrown in prison for studying plankton? Because the data that he used to study plankton, he realized— and this was just after the Cold War— that the sonar beacons that were all over the ocean, the U.S. and the Russians had all over the oceans to track submarines, he realized they were so sensitive that he could use them to track plankton flows.

So this data was all publicly available. It was on the internet, but because the old mechanisms of the regime said anything from that is secret, even though it's on the internet, they prosecuted him for using that data. So marine biology was not safe in that sense. At our founding conference, people said, "Well, let's only focus on people who are targeted because of their work, because of what they actually work on."

And we said, "Okay, that makes sense and that would make our mission narrower," but we realized it would define away the problem because everybody knew that historically one of the largest groups of persecuted scholars was physicists. They were never targeted for their physics. They were targeted because they had the standing to stand up and say we need to travel to conferences. We need to talk to each other. And then they became public dissidents.

So it's all disciplines, it's all countries. Anybody can get in trouble if the question that they happen to want to ask crosses with whatever authority isn't comfortable with. So I would say recent development politically both in the U.S. and abroad have in we...