The state of academic freedom has deteriorated in line with the commercialisation of universities with emphasis on the excessive milking of students for ever increasing larger fees. A process that is far from finished all done in time to bringing in the sheep. And the then subsequent lowering of student standards. As well, increased workloads through the reduction of staff and the ongoing casualisation of staff.
Then there is the accent on developing and marketing commercial courses. One example being, Aristocrat, Australia's largest poker-machine manufacturer, funds the University of Western Sydney's chair of gambling research. When this "research" or method for faster fleecing the sheep was being introduced the university had to tout around and hint that here was an easier road to a higher degree. They do not even have any shame. There is a dual process under way.
At one time academics were fairly distanced from workers, mistakenly thinking they were middle class, well those days have long gone. What constitutes a worker today? Well anyone who can be hired, fired and exploited which includes academics today.The big picture of the process well and truly under way is to wheel academics into line and toe the line. Casualisation plays a role in this do what your told and you get some work. The rightwing politics are very clear "that students and workers have no rights." That "management and big business have every right." That education will be degraded, debased, students desensitised and above all dumbed down!

I've been a fairly harsh critic of universities but keep in mind most universities have in their statutes a clause that states staff won't bring the university in to disrepute.

One of the problems that some academics have is blaming the university for issues which are way beyond the organisations control. Some academics personalise the issue and fire from the hip, rather than thinking things through.

I used to think that universities should be open and transparent places but they are, and have been for many years, commercial organisations. They should be accorded the same protection that banks and other corporate players are afforded from malicous comments.

If you criticise your employer then you had better have strong evidence to back it up. Academics are employees. If they don't like the cut and thrust (usually clumsily handled) of small time university politics, they should move on and let a casual take their place.

I’m somewhat amused by this article.

An experiment was conducted whereby the chairperson of the ethics committee of a university was contacted and sent a screenshot of a web site run by a university lecturer.That university was one of the biggest in Australia.

That web site contained extremely decadent material, and basically treated children as sex objects.

The chairperson of the ethics committee was completely aghast at the material, and would not believe that the web site had been developed by a university staff member. They thought it was a hoax, so the name of the lecturer was given, together with the URL address of the web site. The chairperson then accepted that the lecturer had developed the web site, but said that the lecturer did not accept violence against women, so the matter would not be discussed by the ethics committee, and no further action would be taken.

So it appears that as long as a lecturer says that they do not accept violence against women, then they are allowed to do whatever they like.

A second experiment was conducted whereby the vice chancellor of a university was contacted, and a complaint lodged after a university lecturer made a series of comments in the main stream media regards the sexual organs of a recently deceased person. The complaint was that it was completely inappropriate to make such comments regards a recently deceased person, particularly when the lecturer taught communication studies at the university.

The reply from the vice chancellor was that the lecturer had a right to give their opinions, and no disciplinary action was taken, and the university lecturer remained employed in that university.

So much for the general standards of our universities.

HRS/Timkins: << So much for the general standards of our universities >>

Once again, Timkins displays his remarkable ignorance not only of universities, but also of formal experimentation and evidence. Given that he's provided absolutely no references for his claimed "experiments", I think that he simply made them up.

Given Timkins' litany of comments that disparage universities and academic research, one might hypothesise that he either failed to gain entry to university, or having just scraped in did very poorly in his studies.

In his prolific posts to this forum under several different pseudonyms, he certainly hasn't displayed any evidence of having completed a tertiary degree. Quite the opposite, in fact.

On topic, there is no question that the increasing commercialisation of Australian universities has compromised the academic freedom of those unfortunate lecturers and researchers who continue to work in them.

C. J Morgan,
Do a search on “I f…. anything that moves, so don’t fidget”, and “having the right genitalia for the job” and you will find out where it came from.