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> Academia is now a political race, rife with fraud to gain advantage, odd conflicts-of-interest, and extreme biases. You get tenure by sucking up so you have s

> Academia is now a political race, rife with fraud to gain advantage, odd conflicts-of-interest, and extreme biases. You get tenure by sucking up so you have strong letters. From there, the elites are extremely over-capitalized, which leads to financial fraud too (my alma mater has an endowment of around $30M per faculty member). NDAs and non-disparage agreements are used to shut people up (at least below tenured-faculty level) who step out-of-line and to cover up fraud. That all seems like an argument for academic freedom. Protect people who speak out against the system or politics. Just because academic freedom has deteriorated does not mean is should be given up on.

freedomtogripe 4y ago
My humble take here is that we need more academic freedom AND ALSO fewer academics who are obsessed with culture wars or partisan national politics. We need more scientists who have a small bucket of money to work on what they think is important, without answering to a funding agency every year. More CAREER awards and endowed professorships. THAT is what I always thought was meant by academic freedom! At least the type of freedom I would want to see more of & think society would benefit from. The freedom to do scholarship and talk about their area of expertise as they see fit. I think 80+% of professors who decry the need for more academic freedom would use that freedom to talk about the most inane and stupid things on Twitter. Or complain in committee meetings and trigger 20 year olds in intro classes. instead of, y'know, doing their job and taking big research risks that are supposed to be enabled by academic freedom. The political type of academic freedom doesn't seem particularly socially valuable and I can't really bring myself to care about professors having more political speech protections than anyone else. Why are physics or math professors so much more important than Bob from Accounting on culture war BS? An old mathematician saying women aren't good at math isn't a particularly interesting use of a mathematician's academic freedom. Or whatever word policing is in vogue these days from the other end of the spectrum. Like, how the fuck is that "academic freedom" at all, other than that the complainer is an academic and wants more freedom to say whatever they want? It has nothing to do with their research field. It's not academic freedom. It's just bizarro entitlement. Anecdotally? It's usually the folks who actually do have tons of real academic freedom to do whatever they want with their research time who find themselves complaining that they can't collect a salary to wage stochastic culture wars in Calc 101 classrooms and committee meetings about course schedules or whatever. Academic freedom should be about academics -- research and teaching. That doesn't include going on bizarre unrelated culture war rants in math/science classes or saying stupid shit about a politician on twitter.

freedomtogripe 4y ago

My humble take here is that we need more academic freedom AND ALSO fewer academics who are obsessed with culture wars or partisan national politics. We need more scientists who have a small bucket of money to work on what they think is important, without answering to a funding agency every year. More CAREER awards and endowed professorships. THAT is what I always thought was meant by academic freedom! At least the type of freedom I would want to see more of & think society would benefit from. The freedom to do scholarship and talk about their area of expertise as they see fit. I think 80+% of professors who decry the need for more academic freedom would use that freedom to talk about the most inane and stupid things on Twitter. Or complain in committee meetings and trigger 20 year olds in intro classes. instead of, y'know, doing their job and taking big research risks that are supposed to be enabled by academic freedom. The political type of academic freedom doesn't seem particularly socially valuable and I can't really bring myself to care about professors having more political speech protections than anyone else. Why are physics or math professors so much more important than Bob from Accounting on culture war BS? An old mathematician saying women aren't good at math isn't a particularly interesting use of a mathematician's academic freedom. Or whatever word policing is in vogue these days from the other end of the spectrum. Like, how the fuck is that "academic freedom" at all, other than that the complainer is an academic and wants more freedom to say whatever they want? It has nothing to do with their research field. It's not academic freedom. It's just bizarro entitlement. Anecdotally? It's usually the folks who actually do have tons of real academic freedom to do whatever they want with their research time who find themselves complaining that they can't collect a salary to wage stochastic culture wars in Calc 101 classrooms and committee meetings about course schedules or whatever. Academic freedom should be about academics -- research and teaching. That doesn't include going on bizarre unrelated culture war rants in math/science classes or saying stupid shit about a politician on twitter.