The biggest threats to?academic freedom are neither corporate muzzling nor mob?censorship but ¡°managerialist¡± overreach from risk-averse administrators, according to a?scholar-turned-entrepreneur.

Mike Zyphur, a?part-time professor of?quantitative methods at?the University of Queensland, said the sector¡¯s instinctive method of?ensuring quality was to?place limits on?academics.

¡°There¡¯s this managerialist culture in many ¨C not all, but many ¨C universities that leads them to see everything that people do as something that needs managing,¡± he said. ¡°The minute a university starts caring about something, it usually gums it up with red tape, committees [and] oversight.

¡°In particular, teaching ends up being quite heavily managed. You have to conform with¡­guidelines and rules. That is actually quite antithetical to academic freedom.¡±

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What can universities do to protect academic freedom?

Professor Zyphur is founding director of the Institute for Statistical and Data Science (Instats), which describes itself as ¡°an open platform for research training and community building¡±. It enables academics to bring insights from their disciplines ¨C often in the form of material developed for their PhD students ¨C to a much broader audience, either gratis or commercially.

He said he had developed the platform around academics¡¯ needs, and had quit a tenured position in Melbourne to do so. Building the company would not have been possible from within the ¡°bureaucracy and hierarchical control¡± of a university.

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Professional associations are now the only organisations that allow academics to fully harness their expertise, he said.

Professor Zyphur likened universities¡¯ treatment of academics to a restaurant requiring its star chef to ¡°standardise the ingredients¡± and submit ideas for new dishes to a committee. ¡°What do you think the net result is going to be? The more you try to control something like some of the coursework that academics are offering, the worse it¡¯s going to get.¡±

He said that instead of trying to ¡°de-risk everything¡± with rules that rarely stopped things going wrong anyway, universities should ¡°trust people until they screw?up¡±. If that happened, ¡°you try to figure out the cause and how to fix it. You don¡¯t impose restrictions on an entire community and ruin the process for everyone when problems are usually quite localised.¡±

He conceded that rules imposed on academics often originated from governments, but said university administrators needed to make a ¡°mindset shift¡± from managing to representing their people.

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¡°The general approach should always be [to] protect the academics. Shield them from as much administration and bureaucracy as you possibly can.¡±

He said academics¡¯ view of the ¡°problem of universities¡± differed from the wider ¡°narrative¡± about institutions failing to meet business¡¯ needs. ¡°The real problem for us, who are in them, is that universities aren¡¯t allowing us to do our work and be more relevant.¡±

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com