With Academic Freedom, Comes Academic Responsibilityâ¦Or Does It?
With freedom comes accountability and those â such as academics â who seek accountability from everyone and anyone cannot refuse to have a similar requirement placed upon them.
No faculty has the right to deny scrutiny of her or his work in the name of academic freedom. Photo: Pixabay
Education18 hours ago
There is a lot of talk about academic freedom. The index which measures this â oddly, those ardently opposed to any index or metrics cite this one merrily â is believed to demonstrate the incremental loss of academic freedom. Faculty, students, researchers are up in arms against states trying to determine what may be taught, researched and published. Reports of faculty being harassed for holding views deemed unacceptable by the ruling powers are distressing at the very least, and drive the quest for academic freedom: the freedom to think, teach and write.
University of Pretoria. Picture: Wikimediacommons
A community engagement initiative at the University of Pretoria (UP) injects more than R60 million into the economy a year.
This is part of the university’s large-scale learning project embedded into the curriculum.
Details of the initiative were revealed by UP’s community engagement manager Gernia van Niekerk at a three-day virtual summit. Organised by the university and the University Social Responsibility Network, the biennial summit allows academics, researchers and practitioners a forum to assess the progress made by partner universities on their social responsibility endeavours.
It started on Wednesday and ended on Friday and was attended by representatives from 16 network partner universities from around the world. The network was established in 2015 and UP is the only African university that is part of it.
Social responsibility MOOC for universities launched
Universities in Africa will benefit from a massive open online course (MOOC) that has been launched by the University Social Responsibility Network (USRN), which aims to promote understanding of how universities could better fulfil the societal expectations of higher education teaching and research.
Speaking during the University Social Responsibility Summit 2021, which has been organised virtually by the University of Pretoria and will take place until 5 February, Dr Fernando Palacio, a member of the organising committee and a senior lecturer at Kyoto University in Japan, said the MOOC will lay the theoretical framework of how universities globally could go about community engagements.
Universities urged to be drivers of societal solidarity
Universities have been urged to move from intense and often toxic competition for reputation and ranking to cooperation for societal solidarity and global connectedness.
The call was made by Professor Angelina Yuen-Tsang, the former vice-president responsible for student and global affairs at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, when she presented a keynote address on the second day of the University Social Responsibility Summit 2021, from 3 to 5 February, organised virtually by the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
According to Yuen-Tsang, academic excellence for centuries had been the core mission of higher education. However, in recent years, there had been calls for radical change to also meet societal expectations.
Academic responsibility: The changing mission of HE
A profound change is taking place in our understanding of the mission of higher education. Increasingly, we have realised that academic freedom must be accompanied by the exercise of academic responsibility, in the sense of making a contribution to civil society. Actively responding to societal challenges is one way of doing so – as many universities have demonstrated in the case of COVID-19.
It is by now a commonplace remark that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything, everywhere. We should all prepare for a ‘new normal’.
This is true, in particular, for residential universities, whose beautiful and comfortable campuses, in which they have invested so much care and money, were suddenly swept clean of students and professors in early 2020.