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A clear and present danger
Many scholars feel that their freedom to question is in danger of being eroded or even lost. Zoe Corbyn examines the threat in the UK, while Christoph Bode and David Gunkel consider the state of affairs in Europe and America
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.
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