Academic freedom in teaching in higher education in Europe and the Asia Pacific rim

This study and thesis are based on a research project conducted within the framework of the Marie Curie Initial Training Network UNIKE (Universities in Knowledge Economies). This thesis is concerned with the issue of academic freedom and teaching in higher education. Academic freedom – the right of the individual scholar to follow truth without fear of punishment (Berdahl 2010) – is along with university autonomy – the freedom of the individual university to run its own affairs without outside interference (Anderson and Johnson 1998) – one of the two key academic values in universities. Even if these academic values seem to be well elaborated in the relevant literature and research, there is still one widely neglected aspect: academic freedom in higher education teaching. Despite the fact that teaching is and always has been a key role of universities (Ridder-Symoens 2002; Zonta 2002) it is less promoted and valued in comparison with research in contemporary universities (Boden and Epstein 2011; Houston, Meyer and Shelley 2006; Altbach 2002; Kerr 1995). Therefore, this work attempts to connect these two neglected and under-researched issues of academic freedom and teaching in higher education. It provides an updated account of academic freedom in university teaching in Europe and the Asia Pacific Rim as the two regions of concern in the UNIKE project. A qualitative research design based on interpretative comparison (Custers et al. 2015; 2016) frames this study. In this respect, two case studies (one with the University of Bologna and one with the National University of Singapore) were conducted. The data collection includes policy and document analysis as well as semi-structured in-depth interviews with academics from different disciplines and at different career stages – 11 from the University of Bologna and 7 from the National University of Singapore. Thematic analysis is used as a data analysis method (Braun and Clark 2006). The overall aims of the project are to analyse the recent situation of academic freedom and teaching in higher education, to gather diverse individual experiences of higher education teachers and to provide a detailed account of academic freedom in higher education teaching by contextualising the individual experience within each cultural, regional, national and institutional context. This thesis concludes by pointing out that the policy context between Italy and Singapore concerning academic freedom is very different. Whereas academic freedom is visible and adopted in regional and national policies in the case of Italy, there is almost no mention of academic freedom within the Singaporean case. The situation is similar at the institutional level. Despite the very different policy context, the core meaning of academic freedom from the interviewees’ perspective differs more between individuals based on their (disciplinary) background than between the different cultural contexts. Nevertheless, the degree of academic freedom that academics experience is dependent not only on the individual situation but also on regional, national, and institutional policies. Next to these influence factors, the immediate academic community, the career stage and the point of reference seem to be essential for the experience of academic freedom. Overall, academic freedom in teaching is perceived as important by almost all interviewees regardless of which university they are from. The reasoning behind this perception is that without academic freedom it is almost impossible to encourage critical thinking and to introduce diverse and sometimes controversial ideas on a certain topic in class.