Understanding academic freedom: The views of social scientists

The current debate about academic freedom has been marked by a lack of clarity and consistency as to what academic freedom actually means. Sometimes it is described solely in terms of individual freedoms; at others in terms of an interplay between individual, collegial and institutional freedoms. Sometimes it is presented as a set of rights; at others, as a pairing of rights and responsibilities. This paper presents an empirical investigation of the range of understandings of academic freedom experienced amongst social scientists in Australian universities. The investigation was undertaken from a phenomenographic perspective and five different ways of understanding academic freedom were constituted, based on two primary dimensions of variation in views: the types of constraints regarded as an appropriate part of academic freedom; and the role of self and other (i.e., peers, institution, society) in creating academic freedom. The structural relationships found between different ways of viewing academic freedom in this study provides a broader framework within which to interpret the range of views found in the literature and public debate.