Academic freedom ‘compromised’ when institutions choose content

New Zealand universities risk violating academic freedom by peppering science courses with “non-scientific content”, according to the elder statesman heading reviews of the country’s higher education and science systems.

Sir Peter Gluckman told a conference that universities were overstepping their roles by conflating cultural and religious issues with core scientific content.

“No one of any ideological persuasion should object to all science graduates knowing the context in which they operate – ethically, historically, philosophically, culturally,” Sir Peter told the Tertiary Education Union’s Academic Freedom Conference. “I would argue all scientists need a course in the civics of science including…[its] relationship [with] other knowledge systems.

“Doing that is a very different matter from affecting disciplinary teaching. Are we now seeing approaches which are compromising academic freedom and smell of a potential ideological or political agenda?”

New Zealand educators have come under pressure to teach traditional Māori knowledge as part of science courses. Sir Peter said universities were responsible for determining the courses offered and ensuring their quality “but the actual content within that framing should be largely a matter for the individual academic”.

“It is logical in a course of seismology to teach about tectonic plates, subduction zones and so forth, but it would not be logical to expect the lecturer…to teach about non-scientific theories of earthquakes as if [they were] science. Does the institution have the right to override what academic leaders in that discipline believe…should be taught?”

Sir Peter said the answer to that question was not completely clear. New Zealand’s Education and Training Act includes “the freedom of the institution and its staff to regulate the subject matter of courses taught at the institution” in its definition of academic freedom. But the act, he said, “does not clarify the boundaries between the institution and the staff member…in determining subject matter”.

Sir Peter, a former chief science adviser to the prime minister, is chairing concurrent reviews of universities and the science system. He said the university advisory group was considering how academic freedom was affected by dealings between governing councils and academic boards, but was reluctant to delve into academic practices at the faculty level.

The government considers institutional autonomy to be “sacrosanct”, he said. “How the crown…makes rules around this, without getting too far into institutional operations, is quite a sensitive matter.”

But he said the relationship between academic governance and university executives had “got out of balance”, with academic boards sometimes treated as “rubber stamping” bodies.

“Academic freedom and institutional autonomy exist because of an implied social contract between societies and universities to give them these special rights,” he said. “The social contract depends on strong academic governance.”

Sir Peter warned that universities also risked the social contract by allowing themselves to become “tools of a specific ideology or politics”. The “consensus” that universities should not take ideological positions was “not universally accepted”, he said.

“There [are] scholars of higher education who argue that universities can…and should shape the direction of a community by being ideologically positioned. I suspect that’s a slippery slope which would ultimately harm democracy.

“Given the greater polarisation around the developed world, politicians – rightly or wrongly – are looking hard at universities and whether they’re respecting the social contract.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com