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Despite having one of the largest and fastest-growing post-secondary sectors in the world, there has been increasing protest against the lack of academic freedom within HEIs in India in the past decade. This research study carries out a comparative analysis of academic freedom within HEIs in India and the U.S., with a specific focus on how the notion is formulated within key policy documents and the provisions to safeguard it. Preliminary data from the systematic review revealed that while policy documents within both the countries frame the notion along similar lines, various sections within the Indian Penal Code are used to criminalize useful dissent and freedom of expression within HEIs. The study recommends that in order to safeguard academic freedom in India, certain specific sections within the Indian Penal Code (Section 124A, Section-153A, Section-292, Section-295A) should be either repealed or reformulated so that they are not amenable to misuse by the government.

This paper was invited as a commentary on the keynote paper for this special issue by Simon Marginson and Lili Yang. The paper begins by noting the importance of a fully balanced approach to comparison in higher education, that gives equal value and weight to Sinic and Anglo-American views by adopting a transpositional approach and also recognising the linguistic challenges involved. It then considers strengths of the Sinic approach and of the contrasting Anglo-American approach and their outcomes over history, using a frame drawn from recent work by Francis Fukuyama. Finally it turns to weaknesses on both sides, and ways in which learning from the other could make a difference. [For Marginson and Yang's, "Individual and Collective Outcomes of Higher Education: A Comparison of Anglo-American and Chinese Approaches," see EJ1323341.]

The purpose of this paper is to identify the special features of the governance structures of research universities in four western countries: the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and France. Conceptual framework was laid out as groundwork of the paper. Scholarly work of known authors in higher education governance was reviewed with major features of the governance of the research universities of these countries identified and discussed with reflection of the conceptual framework. It was found in common that major research universities have (1) governance structure with responsibilities of components specifically defined; (2) distinct separation of business affairs and academic work; (3) good collaboration among the entities of their governance structure; and (4) great respect for academic freedom and independence.

This paper presents perceptions of China's Confucius Institute project held by different stakeholders in China and the USA. A number of studies have been published in each place since the first establishment of Confucius Institutes in 2004, but there has not been a comparative study to date. The study, which draws on media reports related to significant milestones in the development of Confucius Institutes, shows that, in the USA, the institutes are viewed with a considerable degree of ambivalence. They are attractive for universities seeking engagement with China, but also seen as a threat to academic freedom. Domestically, Confucius Institutes are perceived as a way to soften China's international image and to promote the Chinese language and culture, although some concerns have been raised about the cost and transparency of the initiative. The paper highlights the controversial aspects of the institutes and outlines some of the challenges facing China in making the strategy effective.

The US global leadership in science and technology has greatly benefitted from immigrants from other countries, most notably from China in the recent decades. However, feeling the pressure of potential federal investigations since the 2018 launch of the China Initiative, scientists of Chinese descent in the United States now face higher incentives to leave the United States and lower incentives to apply for federal grants. Analyzing data pertaining to institutional affiliations of more than 200 million scientific papers, we find a steady increase in the return migration of scientists of Chinese descent from the United States to China. We also conducted a survey of scientists of Chinese descent employed by US universities in tenured or tenure- track positions (n = 1,304), with results revealing general feelings of fear and anxiety that lead them to consider leaving the United States and/or stop applying for federal grants. If the situation is not corrected, American science will likely suffer the loss of scientific talent to China and other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we theorize the intersectional gendered impacts of COVID‐19 on faculty labor, with a particular focus on how institutions of higher education in the United States evaluate faculty labor amidst the COVID‐19 transition and beyond. The pandemic has disrupted faculty research, teaching, and service in differential ways, having larger impacts on women faculty, faculty of color, and caregiving faculty in ways that further reflect the intersections of these groups. Universities have had to reconsider how evaluation occurs, given the impact of these disruptions on faculty careers. Through a case study of university pandemic responses in the United States, we summarize key components of how colleges and universities shifted evaluations of faculty labor in response to COVID‐19, including suspending teaching evaluations, implementing tenure delays, and allowing for impact statements in faculty reviews. While most institutional responses recenter neoliberal principles of the ideal academic worker that is both gendered and racialized, a few universities have taken more innovative approaches to better attend to equity concerns. We conclude by suggesting a recalibration of the faculty evaluation system – one that maintains systematic faculty reviews and allows for academic freedom, but requires universities to take a more contextualized approach to evaluation in ways that center equity and inclusion for women faculty and faculty of color for the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics of school choice claim support for educational options was an outgrowth of racist, segregationist views following the U.S. Supreme Court's Ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. In this paper, I examine these claims by analyzing the development of the public school system in the United States and the historical records from Citizens for Educational Freedom. Founded in 1959 in St. Louis, Missouri by Martin and Mae Duggan, CEF was a grassroots school choice organization. The records contain newsletters, text from speeches and national conventions, and personal correspondence, among other relevant materials. The records help us understand the motives and mind-set of the early school choice movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the response of University of Florida president J. Wayne Reitz and University of South Florida (USF) president John Allen to what are identified as attacks against the privacy and academic freedom of university professors thought to be subversive, due in part to their alleged homosexuality or promotion of homosexuality, by the group the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (FLIC) and Florida state senator Charley Johns between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s.

Commercialization and corporatization (C&C) arguably contribute to the strain in the academic roles of professors in research, teaching, and service, and in their political roles asorganic, professional, and critical intellectuals, both in the United States and greater China. Although they may manifest themselves in different shapes and forms, these global trends have been going strong and areadverselyaffecting professors’ role playing, and in essence, their academic freedom, at different degrees in different places. The paper is informed by theoretical perspectives of the sociology of higher education, and its argument is supported by both quantitative and qualitative data. Higher education is not only an important engine of the economy, but also an important driver of social and political change. How well professors can play their roles will directly influence where a society is heading; hence, the importance of this topic and what this paper may contribute to the understanding and solution of the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The decline of interest among sociologists in the works of Talcott Parsons over the last several decades has been driven in substantial respects by a belief that he was personally conservative in his political views and that his theoretical formulations were rigidly tied to a conservative view of social order. The present paper reviews Parsons' major political involvements through the course of his career from his student days through the last decade of his life. The review demonstrates that Parsons was a typical academic liberal of his time and that his liberalism was expressed especially in several major applied essays. In the 1930s, he was an early and active opponent of Nazism. During World War II, he taught professionals to administer occupied territories and nations effectively. After the war, he advocated for government support of the social sciences, citing the important contributions they had made to the war effort. In the 1950s, he wrote a famous critical analysis of the Joseph McCarthy movement in American politics. In the 1960s, he contributed supportive essays to the Civil Rights movement. Later in the decade and in the 1970s, he contributed to the protection of academic freedoms while also proposing accommodations to the demands of the student movement for more "relevant" teaching and greater participation in university governance. Throughout his career, he taught and worked closely with students of various political views and sought to protect their rights of freedom of political expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US higher education accreditation agencies provide external quality evaluation for institutions and programmes to deliver quality control and assurance. Although there is ample discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of the accreditation process, this article reviews the academic literature to consider the impact that accreditation might have on the academic freedom of the teaching staff. Specifically, this article centres on how standardisation, assessments and the fundamental elements of accreditation affect academic freedom in higher education and how these might dilute academic freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, academic freedom and shared governance have stood as cornerstones of higher education in the United States, but these principles face unprecedented challenges. Recent developments point to a disturbing decline in these critical values, stirring debates on the future viability of the higher education system. This study delves into the problematic trajectory of modern higher education, spotlighting the rise of corporate practices within academic institutions, the swelling ranks of university administration, and the disproportionate weight given to student evaluations in assessing faculty. These factors have converged to push academia into an unstable transition, a liminal phase fueled by external and internal forces. This study examines the evolving landscape of academic freedom within the corporatized university model. Utilizing the concept of liminality, it explores the transitional challenges faced by academia in balancing traditional scholarly values with emerging market-driven paradigms, arguing that the corporatization of universities represents a liminal phase, wherein the identity and purpose of academic institutions are in flux, significantly impacting the notion of academic freedom. The shift toward a consumer-oriented ethos endangers the foundational principles of higher education, risking substituting educational substance with the mere transaction of educational services. The study concludes by issuing a call to action for all stakeholders in higher education to acknowledge and confront these detrimental trends, thereby safeguarding the principles of academic freedom, shared governance, and the educational system's overall integrity and dynamism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse around school choice often is divisive. Less understood is the effect polarization has within advocate groups. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) approach offers a systematic approach to understanding how political actors use narratives to affect policy debates. Because NPF assumes bounded relativity, the approach requires a theory of political ideology that can explain why narratives stick within certain ideological boundaries. Because Kling's three-axes model provides non-mutually exclusive character identification, it can help illuminate in-group overlap and conflict. This essay uses NPF and Kling to examine how narratives are used by various subgroups within the school choice advocacy coalition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study examined how early career faculty of color in higher education departments of educational leadership and administration across the United States were able to manage the cultural taxation associated with faculty service and achieve promotion and tenure. In the U.S., receiving academic tenure promises faculty both academic freedom and job security. This study utilizes cultural taxation as a theoretical framework to explore how faculty of color navigated service demands at their institutions. Three commonalities were found among participants: (1) being strategic about commitments to students and promotion and tenure efforts; (2) making connections between faculty workloads and motivation for pursuing promotion and tenure; and (3) believing relationships with students were a benefit during the promotion and tenure process. The results of this study indicated that successfully navigating cultural taxation helped faculty in their pursuit of promotion and tenure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US colleges and universities have operated on the belief that academics need the freedom to question received wisdom, test new pedagogical methods, and produce knowledge that can be transparently shared for the public good. However, the same institutions are increasingly engaged in competition for resources through externally imposed accountability measures, such as performance funding. This article draws upon qualitative data from a year-long ethnographic study of institutional reforms to critically interrogate the impact of performance funding in US higher education. Data depict three ways in which performance funding—and the resulting competitive pressures—negatively impact faculty's ability to impart their expertise for the benefit of their institutions: (1) a diminishment of control over the content of coursework and the curriculum; (2) a decline in shared governance; (3) and a chilling effect on scholarly inquiry and innovation. In turn, the central argument of this article is that institutional competition has the potential to undermine academic freedom and the intrinsic motivation of professors currently working in performance funding environments. This article also contends that similar policies that purport to catalyze positive learning outcomes could actually hinder the open exchange of ideas that foster a productive teaching and learning environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early years of the Cold War, as universities expelled scholars with ties to the Communist Party, it became an article of faith among conservatives that the only targets of an ideological purge were people like themselves. William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, the most important exponent of this view, argued that "academic freedom" was a "superstition" designed to promote liberal indoctrination. Buckley's work tweaked, and mainstreamed, claims that a subversive conspiracy had overtaken the nation's schools and colleges. The correspondence the book generated demonstrates how attacks on academic freedom, and claims of victimhood, mobilized the postwar right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic societies tolerate intolerance, but that obligation finds its limit when the security of its citizens is jeopardized or its institutions of liberty are imperiled. Similarly, universities tolerate intolerance, but that obligation finds its limit when threatened by weaponized intolerance advocates who disenfranchise and denigrate community members and imperil academic norms and professional standards of conduct. Then, just as democratic societies must protect their threatened citizens and safeguard their imperiled institutions of liberty, so universities must protect their threatened community members and safeguard their imperiled norms and standards. I argue for these conclusions by establishing a conflict between what the First Amendment legally permits university community members to express and what the norms of the university and the professional standards that structure academic freedom require from university community members. I argue that given the First Amendment, universities are legally obliged to tolerate even weaponized intolerance in campus public forums even if not in the classroom. I then recommend three responses to weaponized intolerance on campus that are consistent with the First Amendment: denunciation and protest, provision of safe space, and affirmation of academic values, norms, and standards. I reject three frequently encountered responses to weaponized intolerance as inconsistent with the First Amendment: heckler's vetoes, student speech codes, and speaker bans. And I argue that one response—disruptive protest that falls short of a heckler's veto—is legally permissible for students and faculty members but is ruled out for faculty members by academic norms and professional standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of contingent employees in higher education institutions. According to the author the lack of focus on contingent labor in communication studies needs to change. Issues faced by contingent employees including job security, working conditions, and wages is also discussed. Topics include college policy on academic freedom, and statistics on the number of adjunct faculty members in U.S. colleges and universities.

The article discusses how to preserve academic freedom amidst the abusive requests of research records of university professors under open records laws in the U.S. Topics include the importance of academic freedom to academia, the effects of open records laws on the country's public colleges, and the need to adopt a clear academic freedom exemption for the laws to allow professors to conduct research, teach, and debate without outside interference and censorship.

I review arguments favoring bans on problematic speech (e.g., hate speech) on campus. Contrasting such calls for top-down regulation, I explore the potential for a “bottom-up approach” to campus speech governance to address vexing concerns pertaining to campus speech without violating free speech and academic freedom principles. I examine the political economy and epistemological dynamics inherent within the two forms of governance. I argue that, relative to a centralized top-down approach, a decentralized bottom-up approach to speech governance avoids political dynamics that bend toward the inappropriate use of power. Further, I argue that a bottom-up approach leaves the discursive space contestable, and therefore more open to new discovery and correction. Recognizing that a bottom up approach is no panacea, I also consider open questions and concerns that warrant further inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article connects the sociology of science to discussions of academic freedom and scientific autonomy, asking how social science is shaped by politics and extrascientific forces and how this understanding of the social determination of social science should inform social research and political critique. The focus is present-day American academic social science, particularly sociology. The first section reconstructs the relations between social science and political power in theoretical terms and argues that relative autonomy is a necessary condition for scientific knowledge and responsible political interventions by academic intellectuals. The second section constructs the space of scientists’ views of the proper relations between political power and social scientific work. The third section turns to the American university, focusing on actors and organizations that shape social research. The goal is to identify these major actors and organizations and to provide a framework for identifying past and present threats to scientific autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research reported in this Article represents a pioneering attempt to study public records lawsuits involving a public university system over an extended period. An analysis of all public records lawsuits involving the University of Wisconsin System over a four-decade period suggests that much of the received wisdom about public records disputes involving higher education is incorrect. Most public records litigation is not about administrative searches or issues that implicate traditional notions of academic freedom. Rather, most lawsuits in Wisconsin sought information about alleged misconduct or suspected ethical lapses by university employees. News organizations initiated the majority of the lawsuits, always prevailing. Advocacy groups were also very successful in litigation. In contrast, students or employees who sued to obtain information for purely personal reasons rarely gained access to the information they sought. The results show the usefulness of public records laws as a means of public accountability. In addition, the Article demonstrates the merits of a research strategy that focuses on data from trial-court cases that are not available via Lexis, Westlaw, or other online services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information related to academic freedom in higher education in the U.S. It mentions the implementation of the two-year college writing program in the country as well as faculty views of academic freedom such as from experienced contingent faculty and tenured faculty with programmatic responsibilities.

The article offers information related to academic freedom and the concept of a writing program in the U.S. It discusses tensions in power relations as well as issues about academic freedom that often exist in writing programs at two-year colleges in the country and academic freedom's core principle of the autonomy of faculty.

The article offers information about academic freedom in higher education in the U.S. It discusses results from a multisite case study of dual enrollment instructors as well as administrators in high school–college partnerships which aims to identify key challenges to teachers’ academic freedom and examines the possibilities presented by their liminal institutional positionality.

The article offers information about academic freedom in the U.S. It discusses a principled and critical orientation towards educational reform initiatives based on the experiences of two instructors as well as presents interviews with two-year college instructors across the country and the solid research for developmental education.

The article offers information related to academic freedom and employment in higher education in the U.S., highlighting the different kinds of freedom. It discusses a call for two-year college English teachers to defend open admissions institutions as well as the ideals of social justice they embody.

The liberty of contract formation is a form of speech, and thus it is a right guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This Article examines how the First Amendment secures the liberty of contract formation and analyzes how that liberty is supported by the U.S. Supreme Court's commercial speech jurisprudence and by both originalist and traditionalist theories of Constitutional interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key pointsU.S. university OA policies are far less mandatory than those in the U.K.The waiver clauses in U.S. university policies make it easy for authors to decline making their articles OA.The relative autonomy – and competitiveness – of U.S. universities may be the reason for weaker OA policies.OA in the U.S. is likely to be driven by government funding agency policies rather than by academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study describes how a group of teachers in a US public school developed and used permission-seeking moves as strategic and agentic tools to change their school curriculum and challenge norms of teaching. Although the notion of asking permission is typically considered disempowering in educational contexts, this study demonstrates that certain forms of permission-seeking (and giving) can foster collaboration and teacher agency across multiple constituent groups in a school community. This 2-year ethnographic study occurred within a context of a test-driven teaching environment with shifting student racial and economic demographics. Our research offers a reconceptualized theory of permission within a teacher agency framework and new possibilities for practitioners to engage in transgressive teaching with diverse learners in hyper-standardized teaching contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many arguments support mandating American National Government for undergraduates. South Carolina is one of the few states with such a legal mandate, but the law is badly flawed. We briefly review the history of a failed 1994 effort by the SC Political Science Association to improve the law and encourage implementation. We examine the impact of an “American Political Institutions” general education requirement implemented at our school in 2001 on knowledge and political attitudes. Our data come from two studies. The first study looks at short-term impacts of the course and includes over 3,100 students as they enter and exit the course over 13 years. We find a variety of positive impacts for students completing the course. The second study, performed in 2011 on over 500 students, looks at medium-term impacts of having taken American Government and/or American History at some point in their college career. We find a variety of significant positive impacts from taking either course, and we find even greater impacts from taking both courses, although the impact on political trust seems conditioned by government performance. We have some misgivings about state-mandated requirements with respect to faculty governance and academic freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the state of academic freedom in the U.S. during the 21st-century. Topics discussed include the centennial celebration of the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure by the American Association of University Professor (AAUP), the structure and logic of academic freedom in the country, and at risk freedom of teaching, as well as freedom of extracurricular utterance.

Charles A. Beard resigned from Columbia University on October 8, 1917 at a time when modern universities were emerging as significant institutions in the economic and political development of the United States. Thus, Beard's highly publicized resignation came at a time when universities were under exceptional scrutiny by economic and political elites, who increasingly viewed higher education institutions as either private corporations which they owned or as extensions of the modern state apparatus. Moreover, Beard's resignation came after a long string of dismissals, resignations, and censures at American universities that progressive historians have ironically chronicled as a history of the development of academic freedom in the United States. In fact, the early “academic freedom” cases were successful acts of academic repression and, in this context, Charles A. Beard's resignation opened a window onto therealpolitikof American universities, which have never been ivory towers, but have always been fundamentally political institutions, where groups and individuals engage in contests for power, authority, and resources within the framework of even larger social conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay is about Ernst Kantorowicz's stance on the anti-communist Loyalty Oath controversy at the University of California in the early years of the Cold War. Kantorowicz, who just had escaped Nazi Germany, found himself caught up in a fight between a group of so-called non-signers and the Regents of the University who tried to enforce a political oath on all faculty. In his pamphlet about the controversy Kantorowicz turned this moment of university politics into a meditation on the "fundamental issues" of academic freedom, the very character of the public office of the university professor, and the character of the university as legal corporation, which resembled his notion of a Secret Germany and anticipated aspects of his The King's Two Bodies. After a close-reading of Kantorowicz' pamphlet in which I analyze his understanding of the university as an idealized Arcadia of scholarship and a mythistorical reiteration of the medieval universitas magistrorum et scholarium, I finally turn to the afterlife of the Loyalty Oath controversy and its implications for our understanding of academic freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how the principles of academic freedom apply to extramural expression in the U.S. Topics covered include the distinction between academic freedom and freedom of expression, the role of universities in ensuring that the rights of academic freedom and extramural political expression are exercised, and the unstable relation between disciplinary expertise and academic freedom.