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The advent and dominance of social media in our daily lives is not a matter of discussion, and very few minimalistic individuals have tried to decrease this technological dependency, which can become toxic and noxious for the development of an autonomous personality and free thinking. Academic faculties claim a depauperation in terms of their freedom but are also not free from duties, responsibilities, and obligations. Here, duties, responsibilities, obligations, and freedom are addressed in historical terms as the university as an institution developed over the centuries after its founding in the 11th century is currently under attack. We premonish that these concepts must still be reiterated and divulgated to students and fellows in academia. Galilei's "Eppur si muove" ("and yet it moves") are the words pronounced by the Italian mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Galileo Galilei that should resonate in censorship bodies now and in the future.

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We identify points of conflict and consensus regarding (a) controversial empirical claims and (b) normative preferences for how controversial scholarship-and scholars-should be treated. In 2021, we conducted qualitative interviews (n = 41) to generate a quantitative survey (N = 470) of U.S. psychology professors' beliefs and values. Professors strongly disagreed on the truth status of 10 candidate taboo conclusions: For each conclusion, some professors reported 100% certainty in its veracity and others 100% certainty in its falsehood. Professors more confident in the truth of the taboo conclusions reported more self-censorship, a pattern that could bias perceived scientific consensus regarding the inaccuracy of controversial conclusions. Almost all professors worried about social sanctions if they were to express their own empirical beliefs. Tenured professors reported as much self-censorship and as much fear of consequences as untenured professors, including fear of getting fired. Most professors opposed suppressing scholarship and punishing peers on the basis of moral concerns about research conclusions and reported contempt for peers who petition to retract papers on moral grounds. Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship. These results do not resolve empirical or normative disagreements among psychology professors, but they may provide an empirical context for their discussion.

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Intellectuals tend to cherish heroes who embody their ideal way of life. The fact that the personas of the unworldly Greek philosophers Diogenes and Crates were so popular in the late Middle Ages proves that Max Weber's Idealtypus of the "authentic man of science" (as termed by Steven Shapin) has been problematic for centuries. This finding gives cause to modify Max Weber's and Shapin's viewpoints about the loss of the "authentic man of science" due to professionalization. The development of the university as an educational institution in the High Middle Ages chained the academic once and for all to a formal training that costs time and money: investments that were expected to have reward. Soon, university-trained experts were highly appreciated by local and national authorities. By combining Frank Rexroth's and Marcel Bubert's ideas on the coming into being of an "amor sciendi" in the twelfth century Arts faculties, with David Kaldewey's and Klaas van Berkel's appeals for academic autonomy, my article argues that academics have always struggled to protect the pursuit of truth, even while they recognized its vital importance from the beginning.

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Since 2010, the number of life science doctoral graduates opting into academic postdoctoral employment has steadily declined. In recent years, this decline has made routine headlines in academic news cycles, and faculty members, universities, and funding bodies alike have begun to take notice. In November 2022, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) convened a special interest group to address the problems in postdoctoral recruitment and retention. In response, the American Physiological Society Science Policy Committee highlighted several key issues in postdoctoral training and working conditions and offered the NIH solutions to consider. There are known issues that affect postdoctoral recruitment and retention efforts: low wages relative to other employment sectors, a heavy workload, and poor job prospects to name a few. Unfortunately, these concerns are frequently dismissed as "the price of doing business in academia," and postdoctoral scholars are promised that if they overcome the trials and tribulations of this training period, the reward at the end, a career with academic freedom to pursue your own interests, justifies the means. However, academic freedom cannot and should not be used as the band-aid in a system where most of us will never actually experience academic freedom. Instead, we should systematically embrace solutions that improve the personal and professional health of early career researchers in all levels of training and independence if the goal is to truly shore up the academic workforce.

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Science is among humanity's greatest achievements, yet scientific censorship is rarely studied empirically. We explore the social, psychological, and institutional causes and consequences of scientific censorship (defined as actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality). Popular narratives suggest that scientific censorship is driven by authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance. Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups. This perspective helps explain both recent findings on scientific censorship and recent changes to scientific institutions, such as the use of harm-based criteria to evaluate research. We discuss unknowns surrounding the consequences of censorship and provide recommendations for improving transparency and accountability in scientific decision-making to enable the exploration of these unknowns. The benefits of censorship may sometimes outweigh costs. However, until costs and benefits are examined empirically, scholars on opposing sides of ongoing debates are left to quarrel based on competing values, assumptions, and intuitions.

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Schools of public health are often situated within universities but not infrequently also function as public health advocacy organizations. Viewpoint diversity on many issues is often limited within schools of public health and does not reflect the diversity one finds in society more generally. It is argued that welcoming, and even seeking out, viewpoint diversity within public health would contribute to understanding and knowledge, to the training public health leaders and academics who can serve the whole of society, and to working together across ideological lines to better contribute to population health.

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The US global leadership in science and technology has greatly benefitted from immigrants from other countries, most notably from China in the recent decades. However, feeling the pressure of potential federal investigations since the 2018 launch of the China Initiative, scientists of Chinese descent in the United States now face higher incentives to leave the United States and lower incentives to apply for federal grants. Analyzing data pertaining to institutional affiliations of more than 200 million scientific papers, we find a steady increase in the return migration of scientists of Chinese descent from the United States to China. We also conducted a survey of scientists of Chinese descent employed by US universities in tenured or tenure-track positions (n = 1,304), with results revealing general feelings of fear and anxiety that lead them to consider leaving the United States and/or stop applying for federal grants. If the situation is not corrected, American science will likely suffer the loss of scientific talent to China and other countries.

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Since 2021, some state legislators have passed laws that limit what public institutions can teach about discrimination. The number of these laws, also called gag orders, is increasing despite a national outcry against racism, homophobia and transphobia, and other forms of discrimination. Many nursing and other professional healthcare organizations have recognized and published statements decrying racism in healthcare and calling for an increased focus on health disparities and advancing health equity. Similarly, national research institutions and private grant funders are funding health disparities research. Nursing and other faculty in higher education, however, are being gagged by laws and executive orders which prevent them from teaching and conducting research about historic and contemporary health disparities. This commentary seeks to highlight the immediate and long-term impact of academic gag orders and to encourage action in opposition of such legislation. Supported by professional codes of ethics and discipline-specific education, we present concrete activities readers can use to address gag order legislation and in doing so, protect patient and community health outcomes.

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Much debate centers on the conditions of free speech and academic freedom within higher education. Underlying these debates are what appears to be increasing occurrences of ideologically based censorship battles within academia. This paper examines one aspect of those battles-e.g., how cancel culture has intruded into the academic environment of higher education. In particular, this paper explores how an ideologically based retraction practice may be infringing on academic freedom. The paper also discusses how an overly politicized academia may itself undermine the necessary conditions for academic freedom.

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Faculty get bullied for their work by multiple audiences. Faculty bullying is thus workplace bullying. As employers of faculty, universities must ensure faculty workspaces are safe by taking actions to secure these spaces and to support and defend faculty, specifically, and academic freedom and knowledge creation and promotion, generally. Suggestions for responding and preventing hostile work environments are provided.

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The spread of "cancel culture" related to sex and gender controversies in North America is examined as part of a larger movement to politicize sex research findings and certain sex and gender narratives as "correct" and "incorrect" from a so-called social justice standpoint. This binary is then used by academic administrators and empowered individuals or self-interest groups to reward or punish scholars for their viewpoints. The cases described by Meyer-Bahlburg, Lowrey, and Hooven are concrete examples of a growing "sexual McCarthyism" where empirical results are challenged by offended social justice "warriors" and embellished on social media into ad hominem attacks, to the point that it can damage-or even cancel-the careers of productive sexual scientists. This occurs largely out of fear on the part of academic administrators and lawyers charged with protecting the university from "brand damage" that might occur if the offending scholar is not dealt with. Sexual scientists are being vilified for research on sex differences, sex/gender assignment and subsequent causes for transitioning and/or de-transitioning, research that shows few or no untoward social or psychological effects of viewing pornography, research that debunks the notion of porn or sex "addiction," research showing the efficacy of medications to treat sexual desire disorders in women, research on "minor attracted persons" and even animal research that dares to show homologies to human sexual behavior. The silencing of empirical evidence and alternative viewpoints is contrary to the intellectual mission of universities and destructive to academic and political freedoms.

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I teach in and co-direct the undergraduate program in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. During the promotion of my recent book on testosterone and sex differences, I appeared on "Fox and Friends," a Fox News program, and explained that sex is binary and biological. In response, the director of my department's Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging task force (a graduate student) accused me on Twitter of transphobia and harming undergraduates, and I responded. The tweets went viral, receiving international news coverage. The public attack by the task force director runs contrary to Harvard's stated academic freedom principles, yet no disciplinary action was taken, nor did any university administrators publicly support my right to express my views in an environment free of harassment. Unfortunately, what happened to me is not unusual, and an increasing number of scholars face restrictions imposed by formal sanctions or the creation of hostile work environments. In this article, I describe what happened to me, discuss why clear talk about the science of sex and gender is increasingly met with hostility on college campuses, why administrators are largely failing in their responsibilities to protect scholars and their rights to express their views, and what we can do to remedy the situation.

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The Academic Freedom Index is the first conceptually thorough assessment of academic freedom worldwide and a times series dataset going back to 1900. While some previous datasets exist, they are geographically limited and methodologically or conceptually insufficient to offer a comprehensive picture of the levels of academic freedom across time and space. This paper introduces the new expert-coded dataset that includes the overall Academic Freedom Index alongside several specific indicators, to which more than 2050 country experts around the world have contributed and which is freely available as part of V-Dem's time-series data releases. The paper discusses its advantages compared to other types of data on academic freedom, details the conceptualization of the new indicators, and offers a content and convergent validation of the results. The dataset provides ample opportunities for scholars to conduct in-depth research on academic freedom and its infringements, and for policymakers and advocates to monitor and analyze patterns and trends of academic freedom around the world.

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Clay feet are heavy and disabling, sadly in the decolonial scholarly battlefield which otherwise requires all-weather feet suitable for ongoing battles. Drawing on autoethnographic experiences in some African universities and drawing on Melanesian cargo cults, this paper argues that to decolonise Africa, African academics should abate cargo cult mentalities which account for pathological and uncritical intellectual dependence on theories, ideas and models from elsewhere. Similarly, drawing on Melanesian bigmanism and drawing on how some academics seek to control how students and colleagues think and write, this paper contends that those that pose as bigmen and bigwomen in African universities are a serious threat to decolonial critical, creative, innovative and original thinking. Thus, populated with some high-ranking academics who, nonetheless, lack decolonial creativity, originality, innovativeness and critical thinking, African universities are - like in Melanesian bigmen societies - marked by patron-client relations within which students and colleagues are sadly corralled into epistemic clientelism.

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ABSTRACTThe COVID-19 health crisis has so far involved enormous consequences in human pain, suffering and death. While biomedical science responded early, its response has been marked by several controversies between what appeared to be mainstream perspectives, and diverse alternative views; far from leading to productive debate, controversies often preceded polarisation and, allegedly, exclusion and even censorship of alternative views, followed by the pretense of scientific consensus. This paper describes and discusses the main controversies in the production of COVID biomedical knowledge and derived control measures, to establish if alternative positions are also legitimate from a 'normal science' perspective (rather than comparing them for superiority); explores potential non-scientific explanations of the alleged exclusion of certain views; and analyzes ethical issues implied. The operation of non-scientific factors in scientific and regulatory processes (e.g. various forms of subtle corruption) has been documented in the past; the intervention of such influences in the mishandling of controversies (i.e. on early management, non-pharmacological prevention and vaccination) cannot be ruled out and deserves further investigation. Some of these controversies, increasingly visible in the public domain, also involve ethical challenges that need urgent attention. Polarisation, censorship and dogma are foreign to true science and must be left behind.

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The development of the internet has presented special challenges for teaching and learning, especially from the viewpoint of the rights and expectations of the instructor to maintain an environment appropriate to fulfill educational objectives. Restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic have amplified these concerns as virtual teaching methods almost literally overnight had to be adopted very widely among instructors. Among the ironies have been several instances where recorded (fragments of) lectures delivered virtually were publicized on social networking sites for reasons of exposing some perceived form of objectionable content. In this paper, I focus on the policy implications of lectures being transmitted on the internet subject to their recording and distribution in ways not authorized by the instructor, especially from the viewpoint of rights formally granted in the US legal system. Various legal avenues are available to protect lectures, specifically in relation to copyright law, academic freedom, and contractual breach of trust. Although pedagogical goals and means must always remain primary in our teaching, these legal measures can be relied upon when other safeguards fail in order to maintain and promote educational integrity.

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In 1976, the Genetics Society of America (GSA) published a document entitled "Resolution of Genetics, Race, and Intelligence." This document laid out the Society's position in the IQ controversy, particularly that on scientific and ethical questions involving the genetics of intellectual differences between human populations. Since the GSA was the largest scientific society of geneticists in the world, many expected the document to be of central importance in settling the controversy. Unfortunately, the Resolution had surprisingly little influence on the discussion. In 1979, William Provine analyzed the possible factors that decreased the impact of the Resolution, among them scientists' limited understanding of the relationship between science and ethics. Through the analysis of unpublished versions of the Resolution and exchanges between GSA members, I will suggest that the limited impact of the statement likely depended on a shift in the aims of the GSA due to the controversies that surrounded the preparation of the document. Indeed, the demands of the membership made it progressively more impartial in both scientific and political terms, decreasing its potential significance for a wider audience. Notably, the troubled history of the Resolution raises the question of what can make effective or ineffective the communication between scientists and the public-a question with resonance in past and present discussions on topics of social importance.

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