While most debate on academic freedom concerns the question of what can be stated, argued, proffered and responded to – and how, such a focus has enabled a more central and insidious attack and undermining of academic freedom to occur via explicit and implicit constraints upon research.
It’s almost a year since the radical reduction, cutting and refocussing of the Marsden Fund that occurred, to our institutional shame, without any sustained or high-level public push-back, critique or challenge from the Universities. Rather, it seemed the universities waited, desperate for any reallocated government funding and ready, willing and able to do whatever was expected, demanded or imposed so as to gather as many crumbs as they could.
This occurred alongside an existing and now intensified pursuit of rankings, citations, impact factors and certain types of ‘outputs’ being privileged and rewarded over others.
This has reached new levels in response to the new draft education strategy that followed the University Advisory Group report.
We now see universities develop research strategies that in their filtering down to faculty, school and department level are expressed and focussed on implicitly demanding and explicitly expecting academics to now only write and research on certain topics and subjects, increasingly in multi-author collaboration, resulting in certain types of ‘outputs’ (articles not books monographs or chapters or other forms of traditional outputs) only to be published in certain ‘high impact’ journals (despite everyone being aware of just how corrupt and broken academic publishing, especially journal publishing, is).
In other words, this is the financialization of the university and the financialization of research as being ‘of value’ and ‘of worth’ only if it occurs within very tightly delineated, top-down approved and ordered frames, constraints and expectations. In effect, the government says ‘jump’ and universities say ‘how high…? And in doing so they abandon any pretence of undertaking their role of conscience and critic.
In many areas there is no base level research funding available, it is purely at line manager – or their outsourced research committee discretion (and so driven by their own KPIs). This means research will only be funded, and in many cases, only occur, if it is deemed ‘of metric’ – that is immediate financial – value. The flow-on occurs in decisions regarding the value of research and researchers, expressed in further funding (or funding limitations and cuts), promotions and decision regarding the ‘worth’ or ‘value’ of subject, topic and disciplines according to such ‘metrics’.
So, what’s the issue? I’d argue it is one of academic freedom and how universities are willingly and wilfully undercutting and discarding academic freedom in research.
In the Education and Training Act 2020, in the section on academic freedom, under 267 (4)(b) is stated: “The freedom of academic staff and students to engage in research.”
This, I argue, needs to be read and understood alongside the better known and more focused-upon preceding statement 267(4) (a): “the freedom of academic staff and students, within the law, to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas, and to state controversial or unpopular opinions”.
If 267(4) (a) is to be properly enforced and allowed then 267(4) (b) must also occur – and, I would argue, in line with what that first stated freedom allows.
This is why the cutting of government funding and its refocussing and reallocation only within certain areas is in impact an attack upon academic freedom. Without research funding opportunities, the government is effectively seeking to limit, constrict – and perhaps end – research of certain topics, areas of focus and outcome being undertaken. We could state that this is, by intent and outcome, the desire to limit research that undertakes “to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas, and to state controversial or unpopular opinions”.
But my real concern, as outlined above, is how the universities, in reaction to such decisions via their own ongoing subscription to a financialized metrics model and ethos, apply and reinforce such anti-academic freedom thinking within their institutions. It is one thing for government and wider society to try to limit academic freedom (that is why there is the protection of academic freedom within the Act); but we have now reached a Kafkaesque situation whereby it is universities themselves, by internal decision making, that are perhaps the greatest threat to academic freedom, even if by and large, by default.
To constrain, restrain and frame research options and outcomes (including base level equitable funding, authorship, format, and of publication and circulation) is a limitation of and attack upon academic freedom. A university should seek to be conscience and critic of itself and its own operations and decision making, as much as it has that role outside society.
As section 268 (2) (d) i and ii of the act state:
(i) that universities have all the following characteristics and other institutions have 1 or more of them:
(A) they are primarily concerned with more advanced learning, the principal aim being to develop intellectual independence:
(B) their research and teaching are closely interdependent and most of their teaching is done by people who are active in advancing knowledge:
(C) they meet international standards of research and teaching:
(D) they are a repository of knowledge and expertise:
(E) they accept a role as critic and conscience of society; and
(ii) that—
(A) a university is characterised by a wide diversity of teaching and research, especially at a higher level, that maintains, advances, disseminates, and assists the application of knowledge, develops intellectual independence, and promotes community learning.
I would argue limitations on research, by government and university decision-making in turn limit that ‘wide diversity of research’, and impact and limit the application of knowledge, undercut and often attack intellectual independence and undercut and limit community learning by pre-determining for researchers what is of value, merit and worth.
The university in New Zealand is danger of becoming a metrics-citation factory according to government demands and desires and the pursuit of rankings by universities themselves. In the process, academic freedom is being sidelined, downplayed and dismissed, especially now in research. Universities, to be a university and not a mono-versity, need to ensure academic freedom in teaching and research occurs and that includes allowing and supporting, facilitating and encouraging a diversity of research undertakings, publications, forms of authorship and outcomes.
I fully understand that certain areas, forms, outcomes and outputs will be privileged over others (I am not so naïve or idealistic as to think otherwise) – but in the name of academic freedom universities must allow, encourage, support and not limit, constrain or restrain those undertaking and publishing research ‘outside’ any current and short-term metric-focused and determined norm. For to so limit and constrain research is an attack on academic freedom and should be taken very seriously – and resisted – by the university itself.
