SUPPORTING FREE SCIENCE
//[This is an older piece of news, but striking]
A mother-of-two law student who was investigated by university chiefs after saying ‘women have vaginas’ has today been cleared of misconduct.
//James Murray is a higher education and employment lawyer at Taylor Vinters, a law firm specialising in research and innovation. He has written a number of articles dealing with academic freedom and free speech on campus.
//My name is Jo Phoenix. I am Professor of Criminology at the Open University.
I am bringing an employment tribunal claim to hold the OU to account for the public campaign of harassment that has made my working life unbearable, and I really need your support.
My hope is that this case will force universities to protect female academics from the vicious bullying perpetrated by those who disagree with our beliefs on sex and gender; bullying that is designed to silence us and our research.
Continue reading -> here
//A professor accused of transphobia for her views on gender identity is quitting her post at the University of Sussex.
Philosophy professor Kathleen Stock, who rejects the claim, said she would be leaving after “a horrible time” and “difficult few years”.
Earlier this month an anonymous group launched a campaign to get her sacked.
Continue reading here at the BBC
//A new journal article finds that the introduction of so-called gender mainstreaming at Swedish universities led to multiple violations of academic freedom. In addition, it may have increased an already existing bias against men’s research merits when hiring for the rank of professor, the study concludes.
//Press release, 3 February 2021
70 academics from German-speaking countries and various academic disciplines have joined forces in the Network for Academic Freedom. They are making their appeal for academic freedom public for the first time today.
They are concerned about the increasing narrowing of questions, topics and arguments in academic research. In many places, a climate has developed at universities in which dissenting positions and opinions are marginalised and morally sanctioned. These restrictions on academic freedom often follow an ideological or political agenda. They hinder a rational and open-ended search for knowledge, which is at the core of the freedom of science in the tradition of the Enlightenment. Cancel Culture and Political Correctness have caused the free and controversial debate even of outsider positions to disappear in many places at universities.
With their appeal and the founding of the network, the academics want to defend and strengthen the prerequisites of free research and teaching. They advocate a culture of debate characterised by factual arguments and mutual respect. Intellectual freedom, curiosity and intellectual diversity are indispensable for this.
//Controversies in recent years and months in the academic world (most recently involving Prof. Strumia at CERN) relating to gender issues have shown that there is much disagreement on what constitutes best practice with regard to gender equality. There seems even to be considerable disagreement between scientists of different disciplines as to fundamental aspects of gender identity.
We believe that the resolution of these disputes is not best promoted by discrediting and even discriminating against one side or the other.
For this reason we have asked a number of specialists if they would contribute to any future event debating STEM and gender (Prof. Amanda Diekmann, Prof. Alice Eagly, Prof. David C. Geary, Prof. Lee Jussim, inter alia), in order to facilitate an intellectually honest discussion.
We invite everyone (on both sides of the gender debate) to sign our petition and encourage the administration at CERN to invite these academics to their second Workshop on High Energy Theory and Gender.
Together, we can ensure neutrality, nuance and balance at CERN and in the whole scientific community.
Petition website: https://stemgender.com/
Lead authors
@ForStrumia; Anonymous author of Justice for Strumia, a rebuttal to the Particles for Justice letter.
Liberté Académique; @AcadFreedom
Tom Todd; Primary author of this petition to re-instate Professor Strumia.
Yi-Zen Chu; Associate Professor, Department of Physics, National Central University, Taiwan.
//Free speech is under threat in universities but there is growing opposition to bans and censorship. This opposition is led by students, student groups and academics. The Speakers’ Corner Trust, Liberate the Debate (LtD) and Academics For Academic Freedom (AFAF) began to form a loose alliance of supporters of free speech in universities at the Battle of Ideas Festival in October.
Read the full article here.
//by Alessandro Strumia
(Source: Quillette – a few days before Cathy Young’s article)
Six months ago CERN hosted a workshop on “High Energy Theory and Gender.” Nearly all the contributors to this and previous workshops on the same topic endorsed the view that gender imbalances in physics, particularly in the higher echelons, are predominantly due to sexual discrimination. (…) One attendee claimed that only the military has a higher rate of sexual harassment, although she didn’t say which country’s armed forces she was thinking of.
Read the full article here
//(Source: academicrightswatch.com)
Academic Rights Watch marvels at a recent expert opinion from The University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm where male applicants for a professorship in Visual Communication are marginalized as a group because their art is considered masculine. We caution that the requirements of norm criticism and norm creativity on the part of the holder of the professorship in practice discriminate against men.
