Dear Colleague,
We are contacting you, in your position as a member of the teaching and
research staff in one of Hungary's higher education institutions, to
invite you to participate in a European Union funded project, by
completing an on-line survey on academic freedom. Previous attempts to
contact academic staff in Hungary were not as successful as in other EU
countries; for example, we received 485 responses from Denmark, 357 from
Ireland, but fewer than 20 from academic and research staff in Hungarian
universities. As a result, Hungary is very much under-represented in our
study. We think that it is very important to gather opinions from all the
states in the EU states, especially the smaller states which are (as a
result of their size) often overlooked in studies of this kind, which tend
to focus on large nations like France and Germany. Consequently, we
decided to choose individual staff in universities and to contact them
directly, via email. As you may realise, identifying individual academic
staff, (such as yourself), in this way is very time consuming and labour
intensive; however, we felt that devoting considerable additional
resources was justified, in order to ensure that opinions from staff in
universities in all the nations in our EU project get an equal chance to
be heard.
The survey normally takes about 15 minutes (but may take longer, depending
on your English language skills) and is designed to be as easy as possible
to complete, as most of the questions just require ticks in the relevant
boxes. The survey is completely anonymous, so that the names of both
staff who participate and the institutions in which they work cannot be
identified. The survey is designed for completion by academic staff who
rely on academic freedom in order to be able to fulfil their professional
tasks of adding to the body of knowledge, through their research, and
passing on that knowledge to their students, through their teaching.
The data gathered by the on-line survey will be analysed by means of SPSS,
with the results reported in the academic press and disseminated via other
media.
Although academic freedom affects everyone who works in a university, this
survey is designed for full or part-time member of staff employed by the
university to teach (such as Lecturers, Professors, etc.) and/or to
undertake research (such as Professors, but also Research Assistants,
Post-Doctoral Research Fellows, etc.). If you are an Emeritus Professor,
who has retired from a full time academic career, then you are eligible to
complete the survey. The survey should not be completed by visiting
academic staff, or by university support staff (administrative, managerial
and secretarial staff, librarians, laboratory technicians, etc.) or by
students on taught undergraduate and post-graduate Master's degree
courses. Students undertaking research for a PhD, but who also do some
part-time teaching are not eligible to complete the survey. We will be
looking at students' academic freedom in a subsequent project. If you are
not sure as to whether you should complete the survey, then please contact
us by return email below, and we will be happy to advise you.
It is argued that academic freedom is a universal right that all staff
working in higher education acknowledge as an essential component of
academic life, both as an individual liberty with respect to their
teaching and research, and in terms of institutional autonomy and
governance. At institutional level, the right of universities to
self-governance and autonomy, free from governmental control over
decisions about what should be taught and researched, is seen as vital for
their successful working. However, in many nations, the constitutional
and legislative protection for academic freedom is limited or poorly
defined. Consequently, institutional policies and norms, allied to
departmental culture, are often as important as legal instruments in
providing normative protection for the academic freedom of university
staff. Most research into academic freedom concentrates on legal
frameworks; as yet there has been no survey of the normative protection
for, and day-to-day staff experiences of, academic freedom and
institutional autonomy in the higher education institutions of the EU
states.
The importance of academic freedom in enabling universities to operate
effectively in the global knowledge economy has been acknowledged by the
EU, who have funded a Marie Curie Fellowship to undertake research into
the knowledge, experience and opinions of higher education academic staff
in the EU states, with respect to the policies and protocols that are
designed to protect academic freedom at departmental and institutional
levels. In order to analyse the extent, character and strength of
extra-legal informal protection for academic freedom, which operates via
institutional and departmental norms, we have devised an online survey to
gather data on the knowledge, experience and opinions of academic staff
with regards to academic freedom.
Academic freedom is a contested concept, although it is argued that
academic freedom is crucially important, not only for all those academic
staff who work in universities, but also for society at large, as academic
freedom enables university staff to provide expert criticism of the
workings of government and the corporate sector, and ensure that they are
accountable for their actions, thereby strengthening democracy. In this
sense, academic freedom, like freedom of speech, is considered to be a
right of the people, not a privilege of a few. By completing this on-line
survey, the opinions of university staff on academic freedom will find a
voice, and contribute directly to the important debate on academic freedom
within contemporary higher education. Failure to nurture the concept of
academic freedom within universities, more especially in those European
nations which first promulgated this basic right, threatens to undermine
this and other basic associated human rights, both within Europe and, by
imitation, in other nation states where they are already considerably
fragile. Such liberties, once lost, will be infinitely more difficult to
reinstate than they were to achieve.
We very much hope that you will want both your personal opinion, and that
of the Universities in Hungary, to be heard, by participating in this
study. If you know of colleagues at other universities in Hungary, who you
feel might wish to participate in this study, please feel free to forward
this email, with the url address for the survey, to them.
The survey can be accessed by going to the webpage at:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/AcademicFreedomSurvey
Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about the research
Best Wishes
Professor Terence Karran and Associate Professor Klaus Beiter
Professor Terence Karran, School of Education, University of Lincoln,
U.K.; Docent, Faculty of Education, Oulu University, Finland.
Associate Professor Dr. Klaus Beiter, Faculty of Law, North-West University
(Potchefstroom), South Africa.