Academic freedom for whom?

Earlier this year Kim Carr expressed a commitment to the preservation of academic freedom. He suggested the development of charters between the government and research institutions, to protect intellectual freedom (The Australian, HES, February 20, 2008). Such charters should be pursued.

But ultimately the freedom of intellectuals to conduct enquiry and report their results in a climate of freedom and candour rests little on the text of a document or charter, and much on the place intellectual enquiry holds in the general community.

Intellectual enquiry needs to be (re-)valued as a public good. Intellectuals need to be given recognition as professionals whose job it is to ask academic questions, and to analyse the possible answers to those questions that have been posed in scholarly literature and public life.

A parliamentary inquiry will not assist the pursuit of these goals, and the current government’s concession to the idea that such an inquiry is needed demonstrates its own lack of understanding of what academic freedom really means.