Academic Autonomy and Freedom under Pressure: Severely Limited, or Alive and Kicking?

Joel D. Aberbach () and Tom Christensen ()
Additional contact information
Joel D. Aberbach: UCLA
Tom Christensen: University of Oslo

Public Organization Review, 2018, vol. 18, issue 4, No 4, 487-506

Abstract: Abstract Academic freedom and the autonomy of academic institutions (their freedom from outside interference) are core values in contemporary academic life. This article outlines changes that have taken place in the last few decades that impact academic freedom and autonomy to at least some degree. These include the increasing catering by universities to stake-holders in the environment, increasing professionalization of university administrations, an evolving pattern of broadening authority over internal university decision-making, and an increasing attention to student (i.e. customer) needs. Two case studies -- one of recent decisions in the University of California system and the other at the University of Oslo -- illustrate the theoretical points in the article and point to the need to know a lot more about academic autonomy and academic freedom, especially in an environment of changing management practices and scarce resource bases for many institutions. The cases were selected because of the authors’ familiarity with them and are examples meant to illuminate some of the challenges and complexities inherent in the phenomena and to inspire further research on academic freedom and autonomy utilizing the instrumental and institutional perspectives from organization theory that are the core of our theoretical analysis.

Keywords: Academic freedom; Institutional and individual autonomy; Universities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11115-017-0394-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:porgrv:v:18:y:2018:i:4:d:10.1007_s11115-017-0394-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11115/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11115-017-0394-2

Access Statistics for this article

Public Organization Review is currently edited by Ali Farazmand

More articles in Public Organization Review from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().