Ask HN: Does peer review often take away a professor's academic freedom?
In what sense do professors have academic freedom if they can't publish and/or get grants on research they find interesting but that peer review does not?
Tenured professors are not owed a voice on a third party publication to say anything they like. Just as individuals are not owed a voice on social media to say anything they like.
What professors are owed (any within narrow limits) is the ability to voice some opinions without fear that the institution will dismiss them. In the same way people in the US are free to say and voice opinions (within very wide limits) without fear that the government will jail them.
Nothing stops a professor from publishing in a paper or publishing individually their own findings without peer review. I understand that the respected journals in the community do require this and they have their own barriers to entry to get published. If the community wanted to change or if in a professor wanted to change they could simply publish outside of those journals. Asking for some external Force that's not part of the community to break the community standards seems a bit unrealistic. The community should change its community standards if that's what it desires or you should have rogue professors that do this and perhaps eventually the community would change if it's deemed worthy.
As for grants there's nothing that stops a professor from getting independent grants from independently wealthy individuals. I don't see a need that just because you're a professor that you can arbitrarily take money from the citizens of your country or state to do your pet project. I understand that wealth redistribution to whatever class of people that you want seems to be the theme of the day but ultimately you are forcing someone to give up their earned money for another purpose. The government does issue grants for things that are deemed of government or public interest. Private wealthy individuals can also provide grants for things that they deem of their interest. I have achieved professorship therefore give me money because I want to research laying on the beach for the next 25 years seems a bit strange.
Freedom is the idea of doing what you want but what you seem to propose is at least monetarily taking from others to provide freedom to another with zero oversight. If you're taking money from other people those other people should definitely have oversight and input into what that money is used for that is only a reasonable proposition. Taxation voting and government grants provides that oversight. A wealthy benefactor which requires a research toward a specific topic for continued grant money again provides that oversight.
I too wish I had ultimate freedom to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted but that is not the case in any kind of ordered society. Freedom is freedom of opportunity not freedom of achieving arbitrary outcomes. It seems to me that professors do have these freedoms to pursue opportunities but if no one else is interested they should not be able to force interest in it.
It reminds me of somebody who said she wanted to be a film director, got a decent camcorder and editing rig, but always had excuses why she wasn’t performing. My friends and I helped her film a music festival for instance and she had a whole year to edit it to make a disc to sell at the next year’s festival and she put it off and was still duplicating the discs when the next year’s festival was ongoing so we sold very few and didn’t have her leadership for doing shoots.
Her work inhibition had something to do with a fantasy that she had some idea inside of her that was so dangerous that she’d be killed if she tried to express it. Well she wound up nearly killing herself by getting addicted to heroin, thank God she got clean and is still with us.
I think today there are people who have very similar feelings. They think what they have to say is important, dangerous or whatever but really it just crap like ‘You should take dog pills to cure COVID-19’ or ‘I want to paint a Z on my car to show I am a free thinker’
There are some serious delusions of grandeur going on.
These sorts of folk are mad that somebody got the ads turned off on their pro-Russia YouTube channel and never stop to think that in Russia you really could be arrested, poisoned, killed for a ‘crime’ like calling a war for war or running for public office.
Something can be uncommon, but still be a big problem for the individual impacted. In higher education, there has been a legitimate trend in professors getting terminated, and it’s discussed in places like the chronicle of higher education, and written about by very middle of the road progressives like Stephen Pinker. I don’t think it’s the only problem our universities must solve, and defenestration isn’t a new thing, but it matters by degrees (no pun).
There are also a lot of scandals of tenure track people who don’t get tenure for reasons like: we can’t afford to have another tenured prof when adjuncts can teach the course, this prof was in an area that was fashionable 5 years ago but now it is not, etc.
I’d point to Jordan Peterson, who quit his tenured prof job, as a special example. That guy has had so much success with the message he is pushing today that him teaching a class at a uni would be like the boss of Walt Disney World hand squeezing oranges at a roadside stand. He was not driven out but instead found much greener pasture.
As for Pinker I’d leave out anybody who was such a shameless enabler of Jeff Epstein (e.g. Bill Clinton rode on the Lolita Express but didn’t publically discredit himself the way Pinker did defending Epstein.)