Academic freedom in New Zealand isn’t healthy
Curia was commissioned by the Free Speech Union to conduct a survey of academics at the eight NZ universities on how well academic freedom is working for them. Academic freedom is a legislative right in the Education and Training Act, and something all of society should be concerned with protecting.
The results are here.
A key table is this:
| Measure | 0 – 2.5 | 2.6 – 5.0 | 5.1 – 7.5 | 7.6 – 10 |
| Free to engaged in research of choice | 9% | 12% | 21% | 59% |
| Free to criticize the Government | 14% | 14% | 15% | 57% |
| Free to regulate subject matter | 12% | 20% | 23% | 46% |
| Free to teach and assess | 13% | 21% | 3% | 43% |
| Free to question and test received wisdom | 21% | 24% | 17% | 38% |
| Free to raise differing perspectives | 22% | 25% | 16% | 38% |
| Free to debate or discuss gender and sex issues | 27% | 20% | 3% | 40% |
| Free to debate or discuss Treaty issues | 30% | 20% | 14% | 36% |
| Average score | 8% | 25% | 32% | 35% |
For an academic to score their level of academic freedom a 2.5 or lower, means they must feel severely restricted or unfree. I would have thought you might have 5% or so rating so lowly, but for some measure it was between 20% and 30%.
The proportion of respondents who rated their freedom as a 5 or lower out of 10 on each measure was:
- Free to engaged in research of choice 21%
- Free to criticize the Government 28%
- Free to regulate subject matter 32%
- Free to teach and assess 34%
- Free to question and test received wisdom 45%
- Free to raise differing perspectives 47%
- Free to debate or discuss gender and sex issues 47%
- Free to debate or discuss Treaty issues 50%
What is also of interest is a huge gap between those who think academic freedom is working well for them, and those who don’t. I commented:
It is clear the distribution is not a normal bell curve with most responses around the middle. For the freedom to question and test received wisdom you have 21% saying it is very low and 38% very high. Different academics perceive their level of academic freedom dramatically different from their peers.
If I was the Minister of Education I would want to know who so many academics do not feel they have academic freedom, despite the legislation.
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