Beyond Academic Freedom

In the mid-2010s, concerns began to surface in Australia about possible risks to academic freedom arising from a rapidly corporatizing Australian university sector linking up with counterparts in an increasingly authoritarian China. ¹ At the time, those concerns were not widely shared by university executives, many of whom had been dealing with China without difficulty for decades. Nevertheless, continuing media revelations and occasional faculty confirmations alerted university executives to the importance of defending academic freedom for the maintenance of their universities’ social license to operate. They were compelled to respond once the national conversation around threats to academic freedom broadened to embrace domestic sources in addition to foreign ones, including populist antiscience sentiment, domestic government intervention, demands from philanthropic donors, and the managerial practices of universities themselves. ²