“Academics are guilty of collective hypocrisy because they ‘bleat’ about the erosion of academic freedom while devising new ‘instruments of intellectual tyranny’, a seminar has heard. Roy Harris, emeritus professor of general linguistics at the University of Oxford, said that although individual academics wanted freedom of inquiry, the profession as a whole was structured in a way that prevented it. Speaking at a seminar marking International Academic Freedom Day, Professor Harris argued that the current challenges to academic freedom were threats in which the academic community was complicit. Academics protect their work from external criticism, he said, and specialisation is used as a barrier behind which academics and their colleagues can hide …” (more)
[Rebecca Attwood, Times Higher Education, 28 May]