Dr Dylan Evans has been given leave to apply for a full judicial review into the finding which followed an investigation by University College Cork, where he lectures in behavioural science.

In a hearing on Thursday, the scientist also won an injunction to stop UCC from taking any further disciplinary action against him.

The university has accused him of leaking confidential details of the sexual harassment investigation and bringing the college into disrepute. The investigation followed a complaint made by Italian-born Dr Rossana Salerno-Kennedy last November. She has since left the university. She claimed she was sexually harassed after Dr Evans showed her a recent study which proved – for the first time – that flat-nosed fruit bats engaged in fellatio. She also made a string of other allegations against him, which were subsequently dismissed.

Indeed, the panel that investigated Dr Evans concluded that while it did not believe he intended to sexually harass her, simply handing her the paper constituted sexual harassment.

Neither Dr Evans or Dr Kennedy – who is also known to have accused a female colleague of bullying her – were available for comment last night.

Another hearing was set for the end of June, in which both sides have to argue why there should or should not be a judicial review of UCC’s initial decision.

Counsel for UCC yesterday asked Mr Justice John Hedigan to adjourn the matter because opposition papers had only just been filed. The judge agreed to adjourn the case to July 16.

It has made a laughing stock of the university, with more than 5,000 websites around the world carrying details of the investigation against Dr Evans.

More than 3,000 academics signed an online petition calling for a reversal of the decision.

If Dr Evans wins his case, he intends to apply for costs and damages which could be substantial.

The Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT) said the unanimous view of its executive was that the clarifications, drawn up by the Labour Relations Commission, did not “provide any basis to revise our earlier strong recommendation for a rejection of the Croke Park proposals”.

Union general secretary Mike Jennings said in a bulletin issued to members yesterday that no clarification of any nature was provided directly to his union in response to its specific concerns.

“The specific aspects of the ‘Croke Park proposals’ which we have highlighted was the threat posed to job contracts by the unlimited, open-ended commitment demanded of us that we put these on the table for negotiations – negotiations from which we could not withdraw as they would be ‘final’.

“The ‘clarification’ document which was issued to the public sector unions generally last week confirms that there is no change to the present wording regarding ‘dispute resolution’. In other words, we must assume that a ‘final’ outcome must mean ‘final and binding’. We simply cannot accept such a high risk that we could see fundamental changes being imposed to our employment contracts by ‘final’ arbitration.”

Mr Jennings said last week the chief executive of the Higher Education Authority had made a speech calling for fundamental changes to contracts in the higher education sector.

He said at the weekend the Sunday Business Post had revealed a secret Department of Education memo calling for the closing of departments, while a separate strategy group was also reported to be considering the provision of new employment contracts, the ending of a number of programmes and courses, and more effective monitoring of staff.

“In view of all of the above, I once again repeat that we are urging all members to vote to reject the Croke Park proposals,” he said.

The union has said that it will not be bound by a majority decision on the Croke Park deal when it is considered formally by the public services committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) when it meets following the completion of individual union ballots.

So far, the executive committees of eight public service unions have recommended that their members should reject the pay and reform deal.

However, the unions with the largest number of public service members, Impact and Siptu, are backing the agreement.

If this is the essence of ‘new managerialism’, then what this tells us is that the legitimacy of university strategy as a concept has not been accepted everywhere in the academy. This reminds me of an experience I had in the earlier years of my term of office. I was present at a meeting of university heads at which one president told us that he could talk about a ‘strategy’ for his university without some staff telling him that no university should claim to have a strategy: this should be a matter solely for departments or maybe even only individual academics. In that setting any attempt to use management structures of whatever kind to supervise a strategy formulation and implementation meets resentment among staff.

Clearly here is a distinction between criticism of managerialism as a claimed excess or even abuse of power, and management as a tool of organisational oversight. But in some people’s eyes the gap between the two is not large.

Universities are much more complex organisations than they used to be, and frankly I doubt that many could now operate successfully as loose coalitions of academics. On the other hand, there are contradictions between the desire to keep the overall control of the institutions in academic hands, and the need to professionalise key functions such as finance and human resources and ensure that they are run in accordance with best practice.

Academic institutions have not worked out properly how they should be run, how within a necessary management structure the integrity of scholarship and learning can be assured, and how they can build up institutional success through focused strategies. And because there is no consensus around this, universities are dogged by suspicion and tensions within.

I think it is time to stop using what are in essence terms of abuse such as ‘managerialism’ that suggest that all management is illegitimate, no matter how it is exercised. It is also time to ensure that management in universities secures consent and cooperation and recognises the special ethos of the academy. All of which is probably more easily said than done.

Ferdinand von Prondzynski, President of Dublin City University

Now, it needs to be emphasised that universities are not uniquely plagued by this problem. Managerialism started in the private sector. It flourished in a society that had reduced thinking and management – particularly management – to a basket of easily learned and often repeated pieties. It then infected the public sector via business consultants. It is characterised by extraordinary salaries, new and extraordinary job titles, unnecessary work in the creation of new information flows and jargon. It will be hard to eradicate because considerable numbers are now employed in a layer of waste and because their best defence is that they express themselves in the language of efficiency, innovation and management, while being destructive of all three.

Colm McCaffrey

http://colummccaffery.wordpress.com/

IN INDEPENDENT Ireland, in times of tranquillity, intellectuals were commonly dispensed with. The views of economists, novelists, playwrights, sociologists, historians, and independent writers were ignored. Calamity had people fleeing to the arms of Mother Church rather than seeking the advice of lay intellectuals.

It was not until the 1950s that political crisis actually got acceptance for the advice of established intellectuals. This was, of course, the group around the economist and public servant TK Whitaker and industry and commerce minister, and later taoiseach, Seán Lemass. Years of reliance on oracular knowledge from bishops and ideologues were suddenly replaced by Mother Erin asking a fortune teller in Dublin Opinion of September 1957: “Get to work! They’re saying I have no future!”

Tuairim, a youth movement of intellectuals, flourished in the late 1950s and 60s, to considerable impact, but faded with the coming of television. Intellectuals of the liberal variety are only valued in this country when things have become unstuck.

We can see the same thing happening today, provoked again by economic crisis, driven by an appalling mixture of greed, imprudence and disregard for ordinary social intelligence. Over the past few years, we have seen an increasingly desperate political leadership break away from the usual pattern of appointing people to key posts in connection with economic policy.

Patrick Honohan, a distinguished economist, now suddenly heads up the Central Bank. Again, Colm McCarthy, unusual among Irish economists in being something of an insider in government, has become the moving force behind “An Bord Snip Nua”, while John FitzGerald of the Economic and Social Research Institute is listened to respectfully when he comments on the irresponsibility of Irish government, particularly the vote-hunting programme of decentralisation of civil servants, which has served to mainly wreck the social services.

Nothing new under the sun; the fate of the Irish intellectual and, in particular, the creative writer after independence was pretty horrendous. As Frank O’Connor put it eloquently in 1962, the Irish book censorship system managed to produce a situation by which a generation of young people had no knowledge of the literature of their own country. Education in independent Ireland was strangled by vested interests, and by 1955 scientific education in Ireland lagged far behind such education in 1910.

Things improved considerably in the 1960s, with the coming of mass education with an emphasis on vocational education. However, this shift was accomplished at the expense of the humanist curriculum, which the better clerical-run high schools had supplied. Levels of literacy in the English language suffered; grammar and spelling teaching were abolished as being anti-creative. This anti-intellectual nonsense resulted in the sometimes illiterate student scripts that passed across my desk for years at University College Dublin. The value of education, as distinct from practical training, has never been really grasped in independent Ireland.

Rhetoric, creative writing, foreign languages and history are commonly, if covertly, regarded as unnecessary or pretentious. A grey philistinism has established itself in our universities, under leaders who imagine that books are obsolete, and presumably possess none themselves.

Debating societies are going into eclipse, partly because of a lack of official sympathy for them; in UCD all public listings of auditors of student societies are now six or seven years out of date, having stopped in the early 2000s.

In five years’ time a whole free-thinking student tradition will have been lost, much as medieval studies and classical studies have been smothered. Furthermore, no one will be aware of what has been lost.

A central problem in modern universities, certainly in much of the English-speaking world, is a recent commerce-driven loss of respect for what is termed “blue-sky research” or, more cheekily, idle curiosity.

One of the human race’s greatest inventions is the university. It has at its core the free exercise of trained curiosity by independent-minded and well-educated people.

Since the recent takeover of many universities by State authorities and commercially minded presidents with narrow intellectual outlooks, the pressure to engage in applied, intellectually derivative but profitable research at the expense of blue-sky inquiry has intensified. Intellectual derivativeness is a symptom of provincialism.

Ireland has this problem in an intense form. Researchers are being required by bureaucrats to specify what they are going to discover before the money to do the research is made available. Picasso’s comment is appropriate: “If I knew what I was going to do, what would be the point of doing it?”

The idea that knowledge is an end in itself has become alien. There are powerful people who dislike free research and see it as pointless. The real cost of this has been immense, because the result is a loss of wisdom and imagination. Naturally, some people never possessed it, but the idea that the appetite for knowledge is a good in itself has always existed in Ireland. It is, however, under attack.

We are treated to the spectacle of veterans in modern languages, medieval studies, economic history, engineering, economics, Celtic studies, geography or political science being told how to do their teaching, research and publication by means which are wildly inappropriate to the nature of their subjects. These undereducated people bossing many of the best brains in the country also despise undergraduate teaching.

Interestingly, the best undergraduates spotted this immediately. Many of the administrators dislike academics because they have the horrible habit of answering back intelligently. UCD has abolished the teaching of foreign languages by language laboratory. It costs too much, and the money is better diverted to bioscience and the salaries of vice-presidents. During the current economic downturn, the first move toward economy was a freeze on the purchase of books for the library, the heart of any good university.

On October 16th, 2009, in the middle of the fiscal crisis, a glossy magazine extolling UCD’s glories was given out with The Irish Times . It was modelled on Hello! magazine. It cost enough to keep 10 graduate students for a year. Hello! epitomises accurately the mentality of those in power in Irish universities. UCD’s vice-president for research has declared in my hearing and that of colleagues that books are obsolete, and that in future historical research will be carried out by teams, just like the study of the basking shark. This is a stupid view of the nature of the humanities and the social sciences, but it is one which is being enforced as policy in some Irish universities.

Imposing a research model derived from the physical sciences stultifies academic research in languages, history, literary criticism, political science, sociology and the policy sciences. This includes economics, the subject which our Government pathetically hopes will get us out of the trouble which anti-intellectualism got us into.

A sum of €10 million has been spent on plans for a mad “Gateway” project at Belfield, involving a hotel, a multiple-storey car park, a string of lakes and God knows what other non-academic irrelevancies; it is of course, a very, very expensive fantasy.

The ideal put forward by these new barbarians is the Chinese university system, a system created by one of the most hideous regimes running a major country. Chinese universities are best-known for plagiarism and hatred of free speech. In UCD there is a thing called the Confucius Institute, which is an agency of the Chinese tyranny. The Irish taxpayer should know that he’ll pick up the tab for this dissemination of post-communist rubbish.

UCD, an historically respected Irish university, increasingly resembles an English provincial college, run on authoritarian top-down lines, profligate financially, and anti-intellectual. What is referred to with surrealist humour as “intellectual leadership” in UCD is in the hands of medics masquerading as businessmen (they’re nearly all men; welcome to 1961) and practitioners of non-subjects such as “management” and “teaching and learning”.

It should be dawning on us that one of the nation’s most valuable assets, third-level education, has been taken over by non-academic forces by means of a gigantic and very expensive hoax. The universities are our collective brains, and hatred of them is silly and unpatriotic.

The people who are “running” Irish universities claim, falsely, to be businessmen running enterprises which will bring greater economic growth. These people are truant academics, running universities while having no idea what universities are for. Anti-intellectualism automatically leads to the glorification of ignorance, and this country is well on the way from the former to the latter.

It’s going to cost us.

Tom Garvin is professor emeritus of politics, University College Dublin. A version of this essay was delivered at a conference on “Public Intellectuals in Times of Crisis: What Do They Have to Offer?” Royal Irish Academy, November 28th, 2009

However, the Dublin Education Committee of SIPTU has endorsed a rejection of the proposed agreement.

Public Service Draft Proposals 2010-2014
This proposed deal will ask union members, who have already taken two pay cuts, not only to give up any attempt to restore their salaries but also to agree to extra productivity.
That is, MORE work for LESS pay.
While billions are made available for the banks, yet again public sector workers are asked to sacrifice.

THE GENERAL TERMS

Job Cuts: The proposals endorse the government’s policy of reducing the deficit in public finances to less than 3% of GDP by 2014, principally by reducing public sector numbers. In this context it makes reference to the McCarthy Commission which set as its target getting rid of 17,358 public sector jobs. These job cuts include:
6,930 jobs in Education 6,168 jobs in Health

Paragraph 3 states ‘This Agreement will enable public service numbers to reduce substantially over the coming years in accordance with a new Public Service numbers policy, which will facilitate a progressive reduction in staff numbers across the Public Service by end 2012’
However, cutting 17,000 public sector jobs will help to deepen the recession. It will remove the hopes of many people of obtaining a job – and so encourage emigration.
Destruction of Union Conditions: In order to cover this massive job haemorrhage, public sector workers will be expected to give up long standing rights won by unions in the past.
New Contracts. The draft states that ‘the Parties have agreed to review and revise contractual or other arrangements or practices which generate inflexibility or restrict mobility.’
This is one of the most sinister of the suggestions. If you think about it, it could mean that no-one will be permanent, let alone tenured. It is so vague it could mean any kind of change, and you can be certain that it will be interpreted in a way most disadvantageous to us.
Re-deployment anywhere. The agreement states that ‘barriers to a unified public service labour market will be dismantled’ and that ‘cross sectoral redeployment may take place, within a geographical area if possible’.
Management can first ask for volunteers, but if none are available can compel staff to move to a new workplace that maybe as much as 45 kilometres from their current workplace or home address.
This gives management huge power to intimidate those who do not conform by threatening them with re-deployment.
Management by stress: The draft means that all increments will now be linked to your performance. The relevant clause states ‘’There will be significantly improved performance across all public Sector areas, with promotion and incremental progression linked in all cases to performance’ You will not get an automatic increment for years of service as is the custom until now but increments will be conditional on the judgement of your line manager or on a Performance Management Development System.
New Pensions Scheme: The pensions of public sector workers were normally based on the final year of their salary. Under the government’s new plan, the pension will be based on the average mid point of your salary for new entrants.
And, make no mistake, once they have introduced this for new entrants, it will spread to the rest of the workforce when they discover another crisis in public finances.
Outsourcing: The agreement provides new opportunities to outsource work from the public sector. It allows the government to close down separate units of administration and to lump them under ‘shared services’ which can then be outsourced. This could lead to the loss of thousands of public sector jobs.
No Commitments on Pay
. The proposed draft makes it clear that there will be no general pay rises from THREE years, until 2014. This is despite the fact that inflation is set up rise due to rising interest rates and rising fuel prices. Instead there is a vague commitment to review public sector pay – but this was already contained in the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest Acts of 2009.

The only additional clause is that ‘the review will take account of sustainable savings generated from the implementation of this agreement’ And that: ‘in the events of sufficient savings being identified in the Spring 2011, priority will be given to public servants with pay rates of €35,000 or less in the review of pay’

These clauses are barely worthy the paper they are written on because:

1.       There is no commitment to restore pay cuts even though public servants launched a campaign for this express purpose.

2.        There are no specific figures given about how much workers MIGHT get or WHEN they might get it.

3.        The government has a huge get-out clause to override even this vague commitment. This clause states that ‘the implementation of this Agreement is subject to no currently unforeseen budgetary deterioration.’

4.        There has been an ‘unforeseen budgetary deterioration’ for the past 18 months – and  everyone knows that it is set to continue!
HIGHER EDUCATION: MORE GIVE BACKS
In addition to the general ‘give backs’ there are four additional ones that are required of all staff in universities and higher education institutes. Every staff member will have to work an extra hour a week ‘at the discretion’ of management ‘to facilitate teaching, research and learning. That covers everyone in higher education. Co-operate with academic workloads, full economic costing and compilation of associated data. This is a recipe for more paper work – so beloved of managerialist bureaucrats. Rationalisation arising from a review of Higher Education Strategy. This is a catch-all clause that will be used widely in future years. A comprehensive review and revision of employment contracts to remove any impediments to the development of optimum teaching, learning and research environment. This is a very open clause that will allow for extensive revision of our contract. It could be used to destroy academic tenure. It can be used to force staff to teach in the evening for no extra pay (another hidden pay cut), to stop us going on sabbatical leave, and to force us to work a ‘third semester’.
CONCLUSION: This draft deal contains no firm promises that we can welcome. On the contrary, it contains many dangerous clauses that will lead to a rapid deterioration in our working conditions.
Not only that, but we will be able to do nothing about them since it also takes away our right to strike or to take industrial action. That is, we will be agreeing to our own complete disarmament in any future fight.
By voting NO you will signal that the fight against pay cuts is not over – and that there will need to be a major internal debate within the unions to change structures, leadership and strategy. 
Within such a context, it will be possible to develop alternatives which amount to a serious campaign of resistance to this government.

Commentary by Dr. Kieran Allen, President of the Dublin Education Sector, SIPTU

There is an online retailer in the UK that sells T-shirts marketed specifically at academics. Most of them feature geek jokes and nerd humour (one sports the slogan “Chillin’ with my genomes”, another a Rubik’s Cube image), but one carries an amended version of the popular short poem First they came. The original by Pastor Martin Niemoller was a rebuke to the intellectuals who stood by while the Nazis purged group after group of “undesirables” (“First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a communist;”). The T-shirt makes changes to detail the lack of voices defending black people, gay people and “bleeding-heart liberals”, but it leaves the final line intact: “Then they came for me and there was no one to speak up for me.”

Although it may seem odd to some, the sentiment speaks to many inside Britain’s academy who feel they are in danger of losing a core feature of scholarly life: academic freedom. Barely a week goes by when Times Higher Education does not carry a complaint or a warning from an academic about threats to their cherished right to speak out. And it is not just high-profile people – there is a real sense of unease among rank-and-file academics that their right to speak truth to power, to set their own research and teaching agendas and to voice their opinions about the management of their institutions is being stripped away.

Despite the UK’s generally liberal atmosphere, there have been many instances where officials have come down hard on scholars attempting to exercise their freedom.

Aubrey Blumsohn lost his job as a researcher at the University of Sheffield in 2006 after he blew the whistle over his difficulty accessing research data on a drug from his funder, Procter & Gamble. After 30 years at the Dartington College of Arts, Sam Richards, a lecturer, was sacked in 2007 because his apology for publicly criticising his principal was judged to be insufficiently sincere. And last year, outrage greeted the decision by the University of Nottingham to vet the reading lists of politics lecturers after it was discovered that a student had downloaded an al-Qaeda training manual.

Last year also saw the sacking of David Nutt, the independent scientific adviser on drugs, after he “campaigned” against the Government’s policies – a case that underscored the broad threat to scholarly values, even if it was arguably more a crisis of scientific advice than of academic freedom (as there was no university reprimand).

Other notorious and unpleasant cases test the limits of academic freedom. Chris Brand was fired by the University of Edinburgh for gross misconduct in 1997 after questioning paedophilia charges against Nobel prizewinner Daniel Gajdusek on the grounds that his own research suggested that paedophilia with a consenting partner over the age of 12 with above-average IQ was not harmful. Frank Ellis, an expert in Russian and Slavonic studies at the University of Leeds, sparked intense debate about scholarly liberty in 2006 after he was suspended for expressing support in a student newspaper for a theory that whites were generally more intelligent than non-whites.

There are, nonetheless, academics who are rather more sanguine about the state of their personal freedoms.

Steve Fuller is not a biologist, but that does not stop him arguing publicly that intelligent design should be accorded equal status with evolution and other scientific theories. In fact, he believes it is his right to speak out as he does. According to the controversial University of Warwick sociologist and author of The Sociology of Intellectual Life (2009): “Academic freedom isn’t simply the right to speak within your expertise: it is the right to speak about anything – but in a way that involves an appeal to reason, argument and evidence.”

He regards his participation in the debate about evolution as living proof that academic freedom is alive and well in the UK. “There are people who hate my guts, but they have not been able to shut me down.”

Another scholar unafraid to speak his mind is David Colquhoun, professor of pharmacology at University College London. Best known as an outspoken campaigner against pseudoscience, he is also an inveterate critic of the objectionable changes he sees at universities, including his own. On hearing that his department would be restructured, he launched a blog to chart its journey to “death”. “People say it is brave when you challenge your institution, but if you think things are not being done right at a place you are very attached to, you should say so.”

Which examples give the true picture of the state of liberty in the UK academy in 2010? Are scholars being cowed? Is the UK academy suffering a catastrophic loss of liberty? What dangers are looming, what lines are being drawn and how is freedom being protected and defended?

A year of reckoning

“2010 looks like being the year when academic freedom needs to be defended everywhere,” claims Dennis Hayes. The professor of education at the University of Derby is also leader of Academics For Academic Freedom (AFAF), a campaign group set up in 2006 to put freedom at the top of the agenda of everyone in the academy. Controversially, it also argues that a wider definition of academic freedom must include a right to no-holds-barred free speech.

“I don’t think people live in fear, but academic freedom has been lost and a lot of critical people now are moving out of universities.”

His concern is echoed by a transatlantic observer, Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). “It is under threat in a fairly similar way in every country that has made a major shift towards employing people without any long-term job security,” he says, making clear that that includes the UK. In his book No University is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (2009), Nelson lists 16 threats to scholarly freedom, which range from the ethos that sees higher education as little more than job training, to the claims that institutions and their managers must be afforded a free hand amid financial crisis.

A great many UK academics consider the biggest threats to academic freedom to be increasing commercialism and managerialism. Teaching has been reduced to “box-ticking” and “learning outcomes”, they complain, while research must increasingly be configured around the agendas of others. But they also identify a raft of specific threats including institutional changes to governance arrangements, the Government’s research impact agenda and its approach to tackling extremism (see box page 33).

Terry Hoad, lecturer in English at the University of Oxford, is vice-president of the University and College Union. He believes that a “creeping culture” that is “mostly insidious” is encroaching on academic freedom. “All these things conspire, and whether it is to do with extremism or government priorities or threats to livelihoods, the pressures are such that they make people look over their shoulders more.”

“Academic freedom has always been under threat,” notes Blumsohn, who is now a hospital researcher, campaigner for openness in research conduct and co-chair of the Council for Academic Freedom and Academic Standards (Cafas), an organisation seeking to provide support to individuals whose academic freedom is infringed, which it does largely through letter-writing targeted at vice-chancellors.

“I don’t know if it is fair to say that it is more under threat than it has been in the past – we have never been able to do all these wonderful things we imagine we should – but I do think that the types of threats have changed a lot over the past decade. A lot of things that are threatening now were not really big issues on the agenda 10 or 15 years ago,” he says.

Others, too, see this as a crucial time. “I think it is going to be a crunch year for academic freedom,” notes Tim Horder, senior research fellow in medicine at Oxford and co-editor of Oxford Magazine, which recently dedicated an issue to academic freedom. “The impact agenda and libel laws are firmly poised to impinge on it,” he says.

Like Hoad, Eric Barendt, a professor of media law at University College London and a member of Cafas, thinks freedom is slowly withering. His book titled Academic Freedom and the Law is due out later this year. “In many respects academic freedom hasn’t gone, but there is a gradual decline in academic freedom in practice. Although in the traditional older universities it is still in its main substance honoured, the anecdotal evidence from newer universities is that many more academics tread on eggshells to avoid trouble.”

Enemy within?

Such wariness leads some to argue that academics have been complicit in the restriction of freedom by not standing up in its defence.

“The real threat to academic freedom today is the failure (of the academy) to see it as something that needs defending,” says Hayes.

A similar point is made by Roy Harris, emeritus professor of general linguistics at Oxford: “Academics are the chief enemies of academic freedom.” Harris, who was also instrumental in establishing AFAF, accuses many in the academy of being “plodders” who just want a quiet scholarly life and who do not see it as their duty to speak up on vital issues.

Others continue the enemy-within argument. “Nobody bats an eyelid when they are told: ‘This is what you are going to do research on.’ It is just accepted that people will roll over,” notes Frank Furedi of the University of Kent, also an AFAF supporter. He is another controversial sociologist who has written books including Politics of Fear (2005) and Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? (2006).

Colquhoun, too, has noticed a timorousness in some colleagues. He laments the “self-censorship” that he sees – the people who “daren’t speak for themselves” – and he lays the blame at the feet of an intimidatory “cult of managerialism”. “Whether (academic freedom) is actually reduced is hard to say. But I think the perception that it is worse is real, and the perception is quite enough to effectively gag people,” he notes.

What worries him most is academics’ timidity about “everyday” matters: people won’t stand up even at departmental meetings to express their opinions, he says. “While it is easier for older academics to speak out, the younger either don’t want to speak or heavily self-censor. They are worried by the fear that it will harm their careers – that they won’t get a promotion or they will be seen as ‘troublemakers rocking the boat’.”

It’s difficult to say just how widespread is the intimidation and restriction of academics. Blumsohn says many institutions use gagging agreements to ensure the silence of academics they get rid of. “In the end, (some staff) get so beleaguered that they just sign and leave.” The agreements prevent campaigners and colleagues from finding out just how universities deal with staff who raise unpopular matters, he says.

Perhaps most pessimistic for the future is Terence Karran, a senior academic in the Centre for Educational Research and Development at the University of Lincoln and scholar of academic freedom. In his regular surveys of legal provisions governing academic freedom in European Union member states, the UK repeatedly comes “bottom of the pack”.

Karran – whose surveys are theoretical and do not take account of the cultural protections not explicitly stated in the law – makes the point that two bulwarks of academic freedom are largely absent from the UK. Tenure (which basically ensured that an academic could not be sacked) was abolished in 1988, and the right of academics to engage in the governance of their institutions is all but non-existent (Oxford and the University of Cambridge are exceptions – see box page 32).

The list includes a third element – institutional autonomy – according to Gill Evans, professor of medieval history at Cambridge and a veteran who has long fought for academic freedom, including many years with Cafas. She argues that without institutional autonomy, which faces many threats, academics would be at the mercy of the state’s control. Although the UCU agrees, it also notes that there are plenty of powerful university groups defending autonomy, which simply isn’t the case for academic freedom.

Generational change may explain some of the reason academics could be losing their hold on this aspect of academic life, Evans explains. She says the UK is in “new territory” in the sense that in the past ten years the older scholars who retained academic tenure after it was abolished have begun to retire and leave the academy. “(Now) the vast majority of academics do not have tenure and so we are in a more precarious position,” she notes.

Karran advocates a return to a system of tenure with caveats such as a probation period and some get-out clauses for universities.

As to the necessity of academic freedom to the academy, Evans does not mince her words. “Weaken it and you are in very dangerous territory for the future of civilisation. It is the best way of ensuring that knowledge moves on without being distorted by factors irrelevant to the nature of the truth.”

AFAF’s Hayes agrees: “Lose academic freedom and you have not just lost a freedom, you have lost the university.”

What are we fighting for?

But exactly what is it that campaigners seek to defend? There are almost as many different interpretations of academic freedom as there are academics, and the line between where it stops and where other rights such as freedom of speech start is as blurry as it is controversial.

In 1954, at the height of the McCarthy hearings in the US, Albert Einstein offered as a definition of academic freedom the “right to search for truth and to publish and teach what one holds to be true”. This right also implied a duty, he asserted: “One must not conceal any part of what one has recognised to be true.”

But how much practical value is a statement of principles?

For those in the UK, the law offers some solid support. The right to academic freedom is enshrined in legislation, as part of the Thatcher Government’s Education Reform Act 1988 (which is duplicated in the devolved administrations). However, notes Hayes, few academics are even aware of this protection.

The Act’s main aim was to scrap tenure but, at the 11th hour and after wrangling in the House of Lords, a section securing academic freedom was inserted to offer academics some compensation for their loss.

It provides special employment protection for academics by placing a duty on institutions to ensure that academic staff have “freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom, and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or privileges they may have at their institutions”. Strictly speaking, it applies only to pre-1992 institutions, but most post-1992 institutions have included it in their statutes or instruments of governance (except a few Christian universities).

The provision gives academics a “much greater freedom” than any other profession to determine how they work and to criticise the administration of their university, notes Barendt. Yet although it may be a particular and specific freedom that does not apply to non-academic jobs, its precise meaning and extent is unclear. The simple fact is that it has never been tested in the courts.

At a minimum, most would regard it as the right of academics to, within laws such as those governing freedom of speech, undertake their own teaching and research without interference and according to professional standards. It allows, say, a university economist to issue an evidence-based paper highly critical of the Treasury or an English lecturer to impart a certain textual reading to students without fear of reprimand. It protects the activities at the core of academia and intellectual life, for which disciplining an academic would be both completely absurd and unacceptable.

Yet it is also commonly considered to extend to giving academics licence to participate in and to publicly criticise their university’s governance. “Academic freedom (includes) the right to express one’s opinion publicly about the institution or the education system in which one works,” says the UCU’s 2009 statement on academic freedom. Academics have the right to “take part in the governing bodies and to criticise the functioning of higher education institutions, including their own,” states the 1997 Unesco “Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel”, to which the UK is a signatory.

Understandably perhaps, universities see things somewhat differently. Prefacing his views with the proviso that he is “speaking as a lawyer more than as a head of an institution”, Malcolm Grant, the provost of University College London, says: “Certainly academics may criticise their own institutions publicly, and that is a not uncommon habit. But it is not an entitlement to act with impunity. The legislation protects freedom of speech within the law. So it obviously doesn’t protect speech that is defamatory, incitement to racial or religious hatred, harassment, malicious falsehood and so on. The extent to which it is conditioned by the contract of employment remains – so far as I am aware – untested in the courts, and in particular whether it would yield to a contractual obligation to their employer not to publicly criticise the institution in ways that would bring it into disrepute.”

Barendt’s interpretation is that academics “probably” do have the right to be critical of their institution. “It is clear that academic staff, by convention, have a broad freedom to put forward their own ideas as to how the university is run and to criticise the governance of the university without running the risk of losing their jobs … The Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life said that it was a very valuable check on bad governance, incompetence and corruption in universities for academics to speak freely about how the university is run.”

The ‘business’ of academics

In considering academics’ rights, the UCU’s Hoad notes that universities are not commercial organisations and that they and their staff have special missions. The “whole business” of academics is to question and to challenge ideas; the “consequence” of that is that academics “have to be allowed” to publicly question the running of their own institutions.

Evans notes that it was only after the 1988 Act came into effect that academics began to ask if academic freedom meant they could criticise the management. “It seems to me that it has to,” she says, “but it has never been subsequently tested in the courts.”

The area of “extramural utterance” is equally tricky and just as open to interpretation. Does academic freedom grant special protection to academics who speak outside their own subject and express controversial views outside lecture halls?

AFAF says there is no question about it – such speech should be protected under academic freedom. “The most creative aspect of academic life is often the ability to comment on areas that are not narrowly part of your ‘contracted’ area of expertise,” says Hayes.

For his part, Fuller argues that it is the scholarly “mode of expression” – relying on reason, argument and evidence – that deserves special protection, irrespective of the subject.

Others counter that while it is completely acceptable for academics to speak outside their expertise, for example, stating beliefs on religion or politics, it does not – and should not – merit any special rights of protection. “It is up to academics if they speak outside their subject areas,” says Karran. “But if they do so, they can speak only in the capacity as citizens. They can’t claim academic freedom.”

The obvious problem is just where to draw the line. Is a sociologist speaking about evolution protected by academic freedom?

Exactly where academic freedom ends and limits on freedom of speech and expression kick in is also hotly debated. Many believe that academic staff should not be exempt from general laws governing freedom of speech and expression. But the UCU statement argues for less freedom than the law allows, stressing that academic freedom bears a responsibility to “respect the democratic rights and freedoms of others” and noting that it expects members to refrain from “all forms of harassment, prejudice and unfair discrimination”. It gives a long list of grounds on which members should take care to ensure that this does not occur.

But AFAF and its supporters object. They argue that the UCU caveats and any “narrow view” of academic freedom amount to “politically correct censorship”. While remaining civil, academics (and everyone else) should, they contend, have “unrestricted liberty” to be offensive to others without fear of sanction – indeed, such liberty is necessary for academics to do their jobs. AFAF would like to see the law changed to enshrine complete and absolute freedom of speech for academics. It is a provocative position that offers support for notorious cases from Frank Ellis to Chris Brand. Such individuals may be wrong-headed and voice unpalatable thoughts, but the right to say such things should be sacrosanct, the absolutists argue.

“People say I mix up free speech and academic freedom, but I just see it as a continuum,” Hayes explains. “It is freedom of speech that is the core of academic freedom … and academic freedom is the uninhibited and unrestricted right to be critical and the freedom of people to listen and make up their own minds.”

Furedi takes up the intellectual argument. By engaging honestly and openly with people who have very different views, however noxious, scholars sharpen their views and make intellectual leaps, he maintains; suppress the conversations and the quality of ideas and discourse diminishes. “Good arguments about race and racism don’t drop out of the heavens,” he says. “They come about by arguing with racists – not by being offended by what they are saying but by taking their arguments apart.”

Hayes paints a bleak scenario of the “subversive classroom”. In it, lecturers are happy to criticise anything and everything within the confines of a classroom but never dream of raising a whisper in public. “You can still have the illusion of criticism … (but) it is intellectual masturbation,” he chides.

He detects a strain of this in the “tragedy” of a distinct lack of support for AFAF’s ideals among scholars who busy themselves with the “academic study” of academic freedom but do nothing to defend it. Not one higher education professor has signed a 1,000-strong AFAF petition supporting the ideals, he notes.

“I just don’t think we should have carte blanche to be offensive or insulting, let alone to defame,” explains Barendt, summing up why he and others disagree with the AFAF view.

Karran thinks the UK must come up with an “agreed definition” of academic freedom that sets out its limits before it can move forward at all.

A little less conversation

However, more talk and discussion is the last thing a pragmatist like Blumsohn wants. He says there is a “huge gap” between the theorising and pontificating about the many and varied aspects of academic freedom, and the messy front line where individuals encounter problems. More action on the ground is what is needed most, he believes.

“We need to look at multiple individual cases and why things have gone wrong and get involved in commenting and challenging and calling universities to account … But the (theorists) don’t seem to care.”

Put simply, he thinks there are not enough places for academics who feel their rights have been breached to take their cases and find support. “In the US there are lots, but there are very few places where beleaguered people can go in the UK and it is a real problem.

“The whole atmosphere of dissent and challenge of universities needs to be upgraded. There are no effective organisations out there with sufficient gravitas and energy to call universities to account in these cases.”

He says academics suffer because the UCU is more interested in defending salaries and working conditions than in pursuing universities that infringe academic freedom and because professional bodies that should engage just don’t. AFAF raises important principles of free speech, but is not very vocal in the public defence of besieged individuals, Blumsohn says. The situation leaves Cafas as just about the only organisation taking an interest, he says, and it isn’t particularly vocal either. It consists of a small group of academic volunteers who get involved in limited casework in a limited way.

OXBRIDGE – WHERE ACADEMICS RULE OK

Academics at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge enjoy far more freedom to participate in – and criticise – their governance than academics at most other UK institutions.

It is a model of self-governance that some such as Terence Karran, who studies issues of academic freedom, would like to see adopted more widely.

Given that Harvard University has a similar model, perhaps it is actually part of the fabric of what makes a world-beating institution, he contends.

As established by their own 1923 Act of Parliament, the universities’ supreme governing bodies are their Congregation (Oxford) and Regent House (Cambridge). Each consists of all of their 4,000 or so permanent academic staff. And each acts almost like a mini-parliament, giving scholars both the capacity to speak truth to power and to democratically stop their administrations dead in their tracks if they don’t like what they are doing.

Of course, the bodies are not involved in the day-to-day administration – mostly their approvals are just a rubber-stamp process. But if they desire, academics can speak their minds and flex their muscles.

Imagine standing up in public to your deputy vice-chancellor as a matter of routine and without an ounce of fear and saying the following, as Andrew Aitchinson, a young computer officer in the department of pure mathematics and mathematical statistics at the University of Cambridge, did in November last year. His comments were part of a four-hour debate on proposed changes to weaken disciplinary, dismissal and grievance procedures (so-called Statute U) and which Cambridge’s administration and its Regent House are currently locked in battle over.

“Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor,” he began, after stating his name and his department. “I can’t tell you what I really feel about the report, since I am unwilling to use what Westminster calls ‘unparliamentary language’. (But) I believe that this proposal, if enacted, will make the university a less good employer, put an unproductive division between academic and academic-related staff, and dilute our academic freedom, so I wanted to be able to stand here and tell you how to make the proposal work better for the interests of the university. I struggled for ages; in the end the best improvement came to me: drop the proposal and stick with what we already have.”

Terry Hoad is vice-president of the University and College Union and an Oxford academic. “Ultimately we do have this power, which is very precious to us. We are not the worst off (when it comes to academic freedom in UK institutions), but we are not immune from the creeping threat either.”

UNDER SIEGE

While there are many insidious threats to academic freedom, some are overt. Those currently worrying the academy most include:

Institutional changes to statutes or instruments of governance

Some universities are making changes with a view to being able to remove such entitlements as academic peer involvement in dismissal or grievance cases and the right to an independent appeal against dismissal.

What is being amended is how academic freedom is protected and who oversees that, says Jane Thompson of the University and College Union.

“We are concerned that removing (current provisions) could affect academic freedom,” she says.

On the positive side, she notes that the union has successfully worked with some universities to revise governance rules without damaging the principle of academic freedom.

The Government’s research impact agenda

This promises to skew research funding to reward those academics whose work delivers the biggest economic, social and public policy pay-offs.

Such a change could restrict the freedom academics have to undertake research into any area that interests them or that they feel is important. The notion that research must be “useful” reduces their discretion.

“I don’t think it could be legally challenged and academic freedom is not a positive right to funding, but impact does seem to be something of an undesirable limit on what it is we choose to work on,” notes Eric Barendt, a University College London academic who is writing a book on the subject.

Academics acknowledge that research has never been immune to the sway of fashion or patronage in the past – the academy has always had to do some sort of research to get funding (think of the research assessment exercise). But combined with increased priority-setting by research councils and more pressure to secure highly directed industry funding, the threat to researchers’ blue-skies ambitions is more significant than ever.

The use of new powers under the Terrorism Acts of 2000 and 2006

The most obvious threat posed by these laws is to those academics involved in security and terrorism studies. But the Acts have also led to worries that in the future universities may be forced into monitoring extremism on campus, which would threaten the student-teacher relationship.

Could academics be investigated and even prosecuted for discussing an al-Qaeda training manual or extremist propaganda in their seminars or publications? Quite possibly, says Barendt, given the broadness of the law.

A Universities UK working group is exploring the balance between academic freedom and the need to prevent violent extremism.

English libel law

“It is almost fascist-style legal intimidation, and people are becoming too scared to raise things because they are worried about litigation.”

That is how Aubrey Blumsohn, co-chair of the Council for Academic Freedom and Academic Standards (Cafas), describes the potential of English libel law to curtail academic freedom.

Other scholars believe that its insidious use and chilling effect could grow even further as academics work increasingly with private-sector companies.

A campaign to change the libel laws is gathering support, and the Government has a working group considering the issue.

Other specific threats

Other specific threats to academic freedom identified by scholars include:

- an “increasing obsession” with intellectual property rights on the part of universities

- the restrictive terms that companies increasingly insert into contracts with academics that prevent them from publishing or require them to share preliminary findings

- pressure from senior colleagues to control publication so as to gain a competitive edge

- the move among funders to require research to be done by teams.

IT’S NOT JUST FOR LECTURERS

Steve Fuller believes that the academic freedom of students also needs to be protected in the UK.

Students in Germany have traditionally shared some of the rights that academics enjoy in setting the direction of their learning.

That is not the case in the UK or the US, where the consequences of neglecting this issue are being played out across campuses. The right-leaning group Students for Academic Freedom was founded by writer and activist David Horowitz, who believes that some lecturers try to indoctrinate their students in leftist thought. (His book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006) attacks individuals for their conduct.)

Active on many campuses, the group campaigns against professors whom its members regard as steamrollering students with their political biases. It is also pushing a “Student Bill of Rights”.

Fuller believes it is unlikely this situation would be replicated in the UK, which has more checks on teaching (such as external examiners). However, he still notes the “tendency” for UK academics to think they are the only ones in the university who have academic freedom.

“(It) is not just the freedom to teach and research, but also the freedom to learn … Academics have to provide intellectual space for students to question them.”

LAND WHERE FREEDOM IS TESTED AND DEFENDED

“I don’t think in practice that our academic freedom is less well protected and respected than it is in the US, but I do think in America there is a much greater consciousness of academic freedom on the part of the academy.”

This is how Eric Barendt, a professor of media law at University College London, describes what he sees as the differences between the UK and the other side of the Atlantic when it comes to academic freedom. He is writing a book on the subject of academic freedom that includes an analysis of the comparable law in the UK, the US and Germany, where the idea of academic freedom was first conceived in the middle of the 19th century.

He puts the “greater consciousness” partly down to the longstanding attention given to protecting and defending it by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

The bedrock of academic freedom in the UK is the definition of academic freedom under the Education Reform Act 1988, which is woven into university governance. In the US, it is the AAUP’s 1940 “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure” that is enshrined in statutes and faculty handbooks.

The AAUP’s statement, in essence, protects freedom of speech in teaching, research and extramural statements. Unlike the UK definition, it has been much tested in the courts, in combination with the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment of the American Constitution.

The resulting court rulings have put limits on employee free speech, making the US position less pro-academic than it used to be.

“The courts have been moving in the direction of saying your governance speech (comments by a faculty member about university governance) is not protected from reprisal,” notes Cary Nelson, president of the AAUP.

“They have gone in a really weird direction, saying that the more you are responsible for commenting on university affairs or the more you have demonstrable expertise to do so, the less protected you are!”

As to statements made outside one’s field of expertise, academic freedom in the US holds scholars “harmless for any extramural speech except that which suggests they are incompetent in their area of expertise”, Nelson explains.

“The distinction would be if an engineer goes to the public square and says the Holocaust did not happen, it doesn’t matter because it does not impinge on his ability to do engineering and do engineering research. But if a modern historian does the same, then his knowledge base and competence is really in question.”

RESIGNED TO LOSS

German academics fear for their right to determine how and what to teach. But, Christoph Bode writes, they are leaving the fight to others.

In January 2009, Marius Reiser resigned from his position as professor at the University of Mainz – it was, he explained in Germany’s leading conservative daily, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a helpless protest against increasing infringement of academic freedom in Germany. At 54 and as a professor of Catholic theology, Reiser not only risked unemployment, he also lost a great part of his pension.

Why this “sacrifice”, as Reiser put it? After all, Article 5.3 of the German Grundgesetz, or Constitution, guarantees academic freedom in an unequivocal and unqualified way: “Art and science, research and teaching are free.” (The original German word for science, Wissenschaft, covers both social and natural sciences and the humanities as well.) As a core right, academic freedom cannot be curtailed by any law – and technically it isn’t, with one exception: stem-cell research. Since 2002, German law has made it illegal to produce, clone or destroy human embryos (including blastocysts) for scientific purposes – although, curiously enough, the law allows these practices if such cells are imported from abroad (which is, cynics say, a bit like a vegetarian restaurant that offers steak on its menu because it comes from Argentina).

But apart from that, research is restricted only by the realities of funding – or lack thereof. The more the state withdraws from funding research, the more the disparity between the sciences and the humanities grows: there is simply much more outside funding available for sciences. The situation came to a crisis when the state announced that it intended to couple the amount of its own contribution to institutional or individual success in acquiring outside funding – which would only have increased a disparity that many felt the state should be trying to reduce. It was therefore with some relief that many academics greeted a 2004 Federal Constitutional Court ruling that success in acquiring outside funding must never be the sole criterion for allocating state money and, secondly, that, when calculating the extent of outside funding, applied research and “result-driven” research must not be counted. This ruling was absolutely in line with an earlier verdict of the same court saying that academic freedom is best guaranteed if research is unhampered by considerations of practical application, profit or narrow utilitarian motives. Science serves society best, it ruled in 1978, when it is free from such restraints.

So why Reiser’s sensational gesture of protest? It wasn’t about freedom of inquiry at all – it was about widespread infringement of the freedom to teach caused, he argued, by the Bologna Process, which radically redefines the idea of the German university, transforming it from a high-level institution of pure academic inquiry with traditionally high degrees of freedom for both teachers and students, into mere Lernfabriken, or “instruction mills” of secondary school level, in which teachers and students alike are told how much (and what) must be taught and learnt in how much time. Although there have always been some curriculum prescriptions and although the professors’ right to teach what they want and the students’ right to choose whatever courses they want has thus never been absolutely unrestricted, Reiser does have a point: the introduction of the new three-year bachelors degree has restricted, in some cases severely, the options for teachers and students alike. Departments are now legally obliged to regularly offer certain courses, and students are legally obliged to take them. If universities were not wise enough to define these “modules” very, very generally, they are now constricted by their own definitions – hoist by the petard of their own perfectionism.

In addition, there is much less time: since more and more courses are now obligatory and count towards the final grade, one cannot simply flunk a course, and the pressure on students has increased significantly – a change felt keenly in the humanities, where time for reading, for thinking and for pondering is considered essential for a student’s success. Many fear that as “input” and “output” take the place of German Bildung – the idea that higher education is more than just the imparting of knowledge, but also about character building and the formation of independent judgment – the philistines have taken over: it’s the rule of the people who, as Goethe said, know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Reiser’s fear that under such circumstances serious academic teaching becomes impossible is not totally unfounded, because time (or lack of time) now impinges greatly on what kind of work students are expected to produce. In the old days, humanities students wrote seminar term papers of 15 to 25 pages. These were expected to be fully researched and documented, with students weighing the relevant literature, arguing a case with an eye on the state of the art, and so on – in short, they were more like scholarly articles than undergraduate essays. Students could work on these papers over two to three months during their term breaks. And it was largely up to the students whether they dared to write two or three such ambitious Seminararbeiten or just one during one break. Under the new system, papers have to be written, marked and returned within two weeks. It goes without saying that this radically restricts the range of topics lecturers can set. It is, or so argues Reiser, a forced levelling-down, a deliberate destruction of university education.

A year has passed since Reiser’s resignation, and none of his colleagues has followed his example. But the students are in open rebellion and on strike. Picking up the French students’ motto “Le savoir n’est pas une marchandise”, they ask for more Bildung, for more time, for fewer restrictions and for the restoration of academic freedom, which, according to their reading, has always entailed the freedom to largely compile your own course of studies (and to face the consequences of that personal responsibility) – a significant difference between school and university education that is now being levelled out.

Given the feeling that these late reforms are a drastic infringement of academic freedom, it is not surprising that many German professors sympathise with the student protest, although many more are inwardly resigned and do not believe that these protests will have much effect. Is this another case of une trahison des clercs, of professional failure, as academics leave it to their students to fight for the idea of a university?

Christoph Bode is chair of modern English literature, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich.

STATUTES OF LIBERTY

David Gunkel outlines the foundations of academic freedom in America, pointing out that scholars are not beyond accountability

The notion of academic freedom has been around since at least the time Socrates mounted his defence in Plato’s Apology. For Socrates, uninhibited inquiry was an essential aspect of the search for truth. The idea receives its modern articulation in the Prussian Constitution of 1850, which stipulated that “science and its teaching shall be free”. And in the US, the practice is advanced in an influential document issued by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1940. This document, “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure”, was modelled on the German example, issued in response to a number of highly publicised firings of professors, and endorsed by more than 200 learned societies and faculty organisations.

As characterised by the AAUP, academic freedom consists of three elements. The first concerns “freedom in research and in the publication of the results”. The search for truth should be free of external hindrances and influence, and the AAUP justifies this as a legitimate undertaking and social benefit. This does not mean, however, that anything goes and that scholars are beyond professional accountability and responsibility. Rather, the AAUP endorses what we now call peer review – the principle that, as Immanuel Kant famously stated, “only scholars can pass judgment on scholars as such”.

There are, however, two exceptions noted in the statement: “other academic duties” and “pecuniary return”. Dismissal for the former has become the standard excuse and detour employed by a number of university administrations wishing to silence or punish outspoken members of their faculty. Ward Churchill, for instance, was not dismissed from his position at the University of Colorado for his published critique of the George W. Bush Administration’s account of the 9/11 attacks, despite calls for his resignation by the state’s governor. Churchill was, however, subsequently investigated by his peers and eventually dismissed for several forms of academic misconduct, including falsification of research findings, fabrication of facts and plagiarism.

Financial interest is the other notable exception. Today, external funding of research is not only standard operating procedure, especially in the applied sciences, but the dollar amounts of grants have become a significant statistic for university presidents and college deans. This development is both an advantage and a considerable problem. On the one hand, external funding is absolutely crucial to scientific inquiry and experimentation, which has become increasingly expensive. On the other hand, the influence of money can threaten free investigation by introducing the interests of external agencies, for example, the pharmaceutical industry, the Department of Defence or even the seemingly harmless but very powerful Dairy Council. Money can, therefore, trump free inquiry as researchers and their universities willingly contract with corporations and industry groups, agreeing to significant limitations on research practices and the publication of results.

The second element concerns freedom in instruction, or Lehrfreiheit, and is designed to protect instructors and institutions from the ancient charge of “corrupting the youth”. According to the AAUP, freedom in instruction is indispensable and non-negotiable: “Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject.” What this means in practice is something that is unique to US higher education. Unless otherwise stipulated, course content is the sole responsibility and intellectual property of the instructor. From an administrative, instructional and even legal perspective, it is the classroom teacher who is considered to be the final arbiter in all matters regarding course content, texts, classroom conduct and evaluations of student achievement.

There is, however, one important limitation. Freedom in instruction is appropriate and protected only within the boundaries of one’s disciplinary expertise and subject matter. In other words, teachers may not use classroom lectures as an occasion to offer opinions on something that is not part of the advertised curriculum. And this position has been upheld by both the political Right and the Left.

On the Right, there is a concern that university teachers be required to stick to the subject matter and not use their position of influence to offer political opinions or social commentary within the context of class meetings. Organisations such as Accuracy in Academia, for example, ask conservatively minded students to monitor their instructors’ behaviour and report any perceived bias or infraction on the organisation’s website.

On the Left, public intellectuals such as Stanley Fish have argued for such restrictions to protect higher education from these attacks launched by the Right. “It is precisely”, Fish argues, “when teachers offer themselves as moralists, therapists, political counsellors and agents of global change rather than pedagogues that those who are on the lookout for ways to discredit higher education see their chance.” In other words, the best way to avoid the charge of “corrupting the youth” is to fulfil the stipulations of the employment contract – nothing more, nothing less.

The final element has to do with freedom of expression and action in extramural situations. This is probably the most controversial aspect of the AAUP’s statement. It says, in effect, that the institution cannot terminate a faculty member’s employment as retribution for political activities, free expression outside the walls of the university or even “foolish behaviour” in public. This proviso is intended to protect the figure of the professor as “public intellectual”. At the same time, the AAUP requests that scholars execute this aspect with considerable discretion, asking that public intellectuals recognise that any statement they make will reflect on their institution and discipline.

As in so many circumstances, it is the extreme case that provides the best illustration. In January 2006, Arthur Butz, a professor of engineering at Northwestern University, publicly endorsed the controversial views of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President. The statement was not surprising given that Butz already had quite a reputation as an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier based on a book he had published previously. Despite widespread public outcry, Butz’s employment was not terminated. The president of the university, Henry Bienen, acknowledged that Butz’s “reprehensible opinions on this issue are an embarrassment” but admitted that “we cannot take action based on the content of what Butz says regarding the Holocaust – however odious it may be – without undermining the vital principle of intellectual freedom that all academic institutions serve to protect”.

To add what many considered to be insult to injury, one of Butz’s colleagues, an adjunct professor named Sheldon Epstein, did not have his annual contract renewed on the grounds that he, in a direct effort to combat Butz’s remarks, circulated Holocaust-affirming materials in his classroom. Unlike Butz, Epstein’s actions were not protected by the “principle of intellectual freedom” because Epstein had distributed the information in the context of his classroom, thus violating stipulations regarding the exercise of freedom in instruction. A more cynically minded interpretation would point out that Epstein got the axe, because he did not, like Butz, enjoy the protections of tenure … but that’s another (albeit related) story.

David J. Gunkel is presidential teaching professor, department of communication, Northern Illinois University.

While this specific incident no doubt involves complex personal issues, it nevertheless draws attention to certain pressures in academic life that rarely come to public attention. This pressure can become particularly intense in a US university. We must be careful not to import it here.

To become a university lecturer you must first serve a long and difficult apprentice- ship. In addition to your primary degree, you must also, in practice, have a PhD. It takes four years to complete the primary degree and a further four to complete the PhD (annual stipend about €16,000). You must then spend three to four years accumulating post-doctoral experience (annual salary about €40,000) before you can apply for a junior lectureship (starting salary about €40,000) with any realistic hope of success. In our system, if your application is successful, you now enter a probationary/establishment period of three years after which, if you havent seriously “blotted your copybook” in some way, you are made permanent, aged about 33. In the US system, your probationary period as a junior lecturer (called assistant professor there) is quite different. You enter a “tenure-track” that lasts for six years.

During this time, you must meet or exceed certain performance criteria and, depending on your perform- ance, you are either granted or refused tenure – tenure simply means a permanent position. If you fail to achieve tenure, you lose your job and your future prospects for an academic career are dim indeed.

One big problem with the tenure-track system is that the performance criteria are very challenging, particularly in the more prestigious universities. So, in order to have any chance of succeed- ing, you must work intensely hard for six years, and even then you may not succeed.

Success or failure is mainly judged on how many high-quality scientific papers you publish and how much research grant money you win. And remember that your six tenure-track years are additional to 12 years of immense effort from the time you entered university as an undergraduate. So, after 18 years of intensely hard slog, you could find yourself turfed out of your chosen field to face a dead-end career. This could easily break your spirit. And, in a rare case, where the mind is teetering on the edge, it may produce disastrous consequences.

But, even if you achieve tenure, the long years of arduous endeavour can take their toll. Many people marry and start families during their PhD or post-doctoral years, but it becomes very hard to devote meaningful time and attention to spouse and children if you are spending 12-14 hours a day, six days a week, in the laboratory. For many couples, the system is a conveyor belt towards divorce. The long, hard hours, year in year out, can also desiccate the spirit and produce a lifelong habit of dull workaholism. It might be argued that this grinding system produces high levels of productivity, but I doubt that it produces the highest levels of quality.

Generally, intense competition and frenetic pace are the enemies of scientific creativity, not to mention the generators of much collateral damage in wider personal fulfilment and in family contentment. Our system is gentler in that it is easier to achieve tenure. However, you will achieve no significant career advancement unless you work hard.

The promotional system is competitive and you have little or no hope of advancement unless you publish a reasonable quantity of quality papers, win significant research grant monies and do an adequate job of teaching.

I have no problem with a competitive system of promotion. Effort should be rewarded. The public perception that university lecturers glide along a genteel and friction-less path, receiving regular promotions as they pass years-of-service milestones and burdened only by having to deliver a few lectures, is merely an illusion.

But, there is a notion in Ireland in some higher academic policy circles that the US model is the ideal – the road that will lead to the nirvana of “world class” status for some of our universities. Some people would like to see the American tenure system introduced here. In my opinion, this would be a mistake. However, I feel that it will slip in gradually unless university academics guard warily against it. It is essential that everybody involved in university life keep a watchful eye in their efforts to develop and maintain a high quality and humane system.

William Reville is associate professor of biochemistry and public awareness of science officer at UCC.

The 19-year-old, who has not been named or pictured, said she posted the advert to help pay for her university fees.

The girl, from Northland, in New Zealand’s north island, is only known by her username Unigirl.

She wrote on auction site ineed.co.nz after the auction had finished at NZ$46,000: “I have accepted an offer in excess of $NZ45,000, which is way beyond what I dreamed.”

The student added that the advert had been viewed by more than 30,000 people and had received more than 1200 offers.

She wrote: “Thank you to the more than 30,000 people who viewed my ad and to the more than 1200 offers made.”

In the auction she described herself as attractive, fit and healthy and that she had never been in a sexual relationship.

She wrote: “I have never had a sexual relationship and am still a virgin.

“I am offering my virginity by tender to the highest bidder as long as all personal safety aspects are observed.

“This is my decision made with full awareness of the circumstances and possible consequences.”

She added: “I am fit, healthy and have no medical conditions of any nature.

“I am a keen athlete and have a trim physique.”

The girl has not responded to any media requests for interviews.

Ross MacKenzie, the website proprietor, confirmed it was a legitimate posting.

He also defended the auction saying it was legal and did not offend society in general.

Mr MacKenzie said: Ineed does not place moral judgments on our members, believing in the fundamental rights of the individual.

National police spokesman Jon Neilson said no law appeared to have been breached.

But “we would suggest it’s not a safe practice,” he added.

Bruce Pilbrow of the organisation Parents Inc. told the New Zealand Herald it was “horrifically sad” the woman had to sell herself to meet tuition costs, but sexologist Blair Bishop describing it as “just a novel form of sex work”.

Prostitution is legal in New Zealand in brothels and on the streets, as is offering sexual services in print ads and online.

Catherine Healy, of the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective, urged the teenager to contact her organisation for “practical information” on the realities of sex work.

Last year an American student auctioned her virginity to pay for a masters degree in Family and Marriage therapy.

Natalie Dylan, 22, claimed her offer of a one-night stand had persuaded 10,000 men to bid for sex with her.

Also last year Showgirl and Italian men’s magazine model Raffella Fico, 20, who swore she has never had sex disclosed plan to sell her virginity for €1m.

By Andrew Hough
Thursday February 04 2010

Having spent 10 years as an industrial relations lecturer at TCD from 1980 (before becoming Prof of Law at Hull University in 1991), the word is that the german-born von Prondzynski is anxious to return there to take the top job in Irish academia when Provost John Hegarty steps down in 2011. VP would certainly be the first incumbent of this post with Prussian blood, although there are numerous other characteristics that mark him apart from other senior academics here, such as his former membership of the British American Business Council (whose advisory board currently boasts the likes of James Murdoch of News Corp and Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group). VP is also a board member and shareholder of the Nasdaq-quoted Skillsoft e-learning company, last year earning him $140,000 if share options are taken into account. He also owns a large share in a castle outside Mullingar Co Westmeath – Knockdrin Castle – with the balance held by his family’s Isle of Man vehicle, Francmine Ltd.

Right now, however, what marks out von Prondzynski is the fact that he has got a drubbing from the  Supreme Court. Not many observers were surprised at the decision arrived at by Justices Susan Denham, Hugh Geoghegan and Fidelma Macken, who upheld the 2007 High Court ruling of Justice Frank Clarke in favour of dismissed Prof Paul Cahill. The guesstimate for the total legal bill associated with the challenge is pushing €1.5M (DCU availed of the not inexpensive services of Arthux Cox) and, worryingly, this comes on top of other litigation which has also cost the northside college a few bob.

The DCU president – who is an acknowledged expert in industrial relations law – played a central role in the Cahill case as it was he who dismissed the biotechnology professor. Unfortunately for von Prondzynski, the Supreme Court has now ruled that proper procedures were not followed and ‘in the absence of such fair procedures the termination was not valid’. This setback comes right in the middle of an ongoing high profile dispute with another DCU lecturer, Sean O’ Nuallain who was the subject of a Rights Commissioner ruling in 2003 that he should be reinstated to a permanent position. This matter is now before the Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) where it has been generating plenty of headlines thanks in part to the aggressive nature of O’Nuallain’s performance and the introduction of John Gormley’s name into the proceedings last week. The EAT case bears a number of similarities to the Cahill case, focusing as it does on the manner in which von Prondzynski conducted affairs although there has been a little more spice evident here, with O’Nuallain having even made unsubstantiated allegations of Nazi Party links to von Prondzynski father, Hans, who arrived here in 1961 having served in the German army in WWII.

ROW

In 2007 von Prondzynski also found himself at the centre of an industrial row involving maths lecturer (now Professor) Jane Horgan, who claimed that she had been passed over in 2001 for the promotional post of associate professor but was discriminated on the grounds of gender. Although not centrally involved in making the decision of the promotion, VP had chaired the interview panel. An Equality Tribunal ruling in 2003 in Horgan’s favour was appealed to the Labour Court, which in 2007 found that Ms Horgan was the most qualified of the interviewees.

It is not only the decision made to hire and fire academics that has landed von Prondzynski in hot water but also the use of a college regulation governing dismissals that SIPTU claims was formally adopted by DCU in 2001 without its agreement. This issue went to the Labour Court in 2002 with SIPTU claiming that the objective of introducing the statute was to ‘reduce the influence of the Union’. The December 2002 ruling by Finbarr Flood highlighted ‘concerns in relation to the statute as written’ and recommended that the two sides enter into discussion under a facilitator. Bizarrely, seven years later there has been no progress on the matter despite the appointment of Labour lawyer Alex White as facilitator.

Such is the level of antagonism between von Prondzynski and the staff on this issue that last year SIPTU held a secret ballot which resulted in a motion of No confidence in the president being passed by 55% to 45%. Essentially SIPTU claims that the contentious statute allows the university to fire staff at minimal notice and this is an abuse of natural justice. Ironically, in his early years as an industrial relations lecturer in Trinity College in the 1980’s, VP was considered somewhere to the left of Karl Marx on trade union matters and earned himself the moniker ‘the Red Baron’.

For example, in 1985 he wrote a lengthy article for the Irish Times with Kader Asmal expressing concern at proposed changes in Irish labour law. His 1987 book, Freedom of Association and Industrial Relations, claimed labour legislation had been introduced in UK by Margaret Thatcher solely to boost business and ‘as a tool for….the weakening of trade unions and the withdrawal of the legal back-up on which unions were formerly able to rely’.

However, by 2002 VP’s views had changed radically and he was very much in favour of using industrial relations law to promote competitiveness, noting that ‘the traditional perspectives of labour law, with their focus on workers’ rights and collective organisation are in urgent need of review…this new model may need to take a more explicit and positive view of employer interests, and more particularly of the desirability of promoting business success’.

BLOG

As often is the case with such Damascene conversion, an author’s words can come back to haunt him and in the ongoing Employment Appeals case referred to above, O’ Nuallain’s barrister – Padraic Lyons – was able to quote liberally from von Prondzynski’s 1984 book Employment Law in order to undermine DCU’s own case.

These days VP’s views are often evident of his ‘President’s Blog’ which he updates twice daily, commentating on everything from academia to er, hats: ‘I grew up in a household with a lot of hats…recently have have started to creep back into the picture again. Often they are worn by rock stars such as Pete Doherty’. As Goldhawk noted recently (see Phoenix 6/11/09), VP is also an avid twitterer and no subject is deemed too irrelevant for comment from the €230,000 pa DCU president: ‘Today was the first day since – well, ever – that I was at work but had no appointment. Not one. Amazing”. Or for those more interested in his musings on hats and the like “Should we quietly drop the tie as a clothing item for men? I know some believe it makes men look neat, others wouldn’t miss it”.

Some observers wonder where the busy von Prondzynski finds the time for his social networking on Twitter, Facebook (naturally he is a huge fan) and the blogosphere. He has also started to pen a weekly column for the Irish Times, although steering clear of the controversial subjects like legal fees at DCU. Nor has he written about rumours that he fancies the job of TCD Provost.  Certainly, his exit from DCU next year looks rather well timed in this context but TCD insiders say he has no chance given that the Provost is voted in by the academics, which makes it almost impossible for an outsider. Interestingly, however, there have been suggestions that the method of election may change for the 2011 run-off and, for example, a report from the Colin Hunt chaired steering group on development of higher education sector included a recommendation that external candidates should be encouraged to apply for the post of university president and that appointments should be made by governing bodies. Something else that could count against von Prondzynski in relation to TCD is his attack on the secret nature of a research tie-up with UCD announced earlier this year. The DCU prez was highly critical, claiming that the manner in which the deal was put together “destroys trust and confidence”.

That said, with research funding and international profile such significant factors for modern universities, it seems likely that John Hegarty’s successor at TCD will be anyone other than a scientist with a serious international reputation. The main job of a university president today is to raise funds and push the institution up the world rankings table. TCD recently broke into the top 50 while UCD has also made serious headway under Hugh Brady and now stands at 89. DCU, however remains well off the pace after a decade of von Prondzynski’s presidency and the 2009 Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings placed the northside university at 326.

This pedestrian performance may be behind VP’s desire to push through a merger of DCU with NUI Maynooth and the Royal College of Surgeons, something he hopes to be seen as his legacy, although time is clearly running out.

VP can’t complain about the conditions during which he has been in situ in Glasnevin (after returning from Hull in 2000), with plenty of funding coming from the Government through the likes of Science Foundation Ireland, while DCU has also been a significant beneficiary of Chuck Feeney’s millions, albeit mostly under Danny O’ Hare’s reign (von prondzynski has proved less successful at tapping philanthropists during his decade at DCU). Progress has been slow and various schemes dreamt up by VP have failed to make a difference, notably the decision to divide the disciplines into so-called ‘themes’ with titles such as ‘Internationalisation, Interculturalism and Social Development’. Difficulties quickly emerged, especially in recruiting ‘theme leaders’ (despite funding from Chuck Fenney) and the experiment is seen to have failed.

One notable success has been von Prondzynski refusal to allow the university get into serious debt and in this context the college stands out from the likes of, in particular, UCD and UCC, which are both in the red to the tune of around €15M. However, VP will not be pleased another statistic that emerged last week from the English Centre for Education and Employment Research, which found that DCU topped the list of Irish universities for too easily dishing out top-class degrees with around 20% of graduates in 2006/2007 getting a first class degree. This compares with 14% in TCD. Moreover,  a separate statistic published recently by the Irish Times reveals that 39% of DCU students who began a science and technology degree course failed to progress to second year. This compares with 26% in UCD, despite the fact that DCU is regarded as the states ‘high tech’ university.

QUESTION MARKS

There are also some question  marks over von Prondzynski’s strategy for DCU. While the focus has previously been on science/biotech end of things (and the addition of nursing fits in here), the president recently launched a law degree course. This is despite the fact that at a symposium in TCD just three years ago, he claimed that Ireland needs “fewer law graduates and less litigation”.

So what now for VP ?  Those who know him say he absolutely believes that he could land the Trinity job in 2011 but those who know Trinity say this is a pipe dream. He has created a media persona par excellence through his online activity and the Irish Times bleatings -all of which have increased in intensity in the last few months. VP has also proved popular with the Government and was appointed to the board of the National Competitiveness Council. However, his copybook has been blotted by the industrial relations mess he is leaving behind in DCU (particularly this month’s Supreme Court judgement) and the failure of the university to do much more than tread water under his presidency.

Of course, the 55 year old VP has plenty of hobbies apart from twittering – notably photography, a passion he shares with DCU’s head of strategic planning, Gordon McConnell, who recently became von Prondzynski’s fellow director on the board of Knockdrin  Estates Ltd. This is the company that owns his Westmeath castle, purchased by Hans and Irene von Prondzynski (originally Countess Grote) when they arrived here from Germany in the early 1960s.

It is unlikely that VP is ready to retire to the country just yet but equally his plans for the next phase of his career may have come unstuck in recent months. Maybe the best thing for curious VO followers to do is keep an eye on his Facebook page or tune into his tweets.

Phoenix Magazine – Affairs of the Nation
Reply:

Dear sir,

I think when you’re in the public eye you have to accept a certain amount of shit in the media, and I don’t complain about that. But I do need to correct your comments about DCU’ s standing, as this affects other people also. DCU’s position in the global rankings in 2009 is not 326 (that was 2008), but 278. Furthermore, when I became President we weren’t in the top 500 at all, and probably nowhere near it. In 2006 we entered at 440, and as I said, by 2009we’ve got to 278.   No stagnation or languishing there. Furthermore, in the global top 300 we’re by far the newest university, no other university anywhere of our age has got that far. We have also topped the list for research income in Irish universities – for example the two largest ever research grants from Science Foundation Ireland have both gone to DCU. Not particularly my achievement, it’ s that of the whole DCU community.

Cheers,
Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski
President Dublin City University