Press release, 3 February 2021
Foundation of the Network for Academic Freedom
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.
