EVEN if late enrolment still goes on in some schools, things will have normalized by now. The late registrants and stragglers will just have to double time so they can keep pace.
Fired with idealism and characteristic of their age, young college students will expectedly be testing the waters of the new sea. And especially if they come from cloistered schools, it’s expected that they easily sway from shrinking violets to testy protesters.
In the classrooms, articulate and fired-up teens and tweens will test the limits of academic freedom, or even snidely remark that the teaching practices have turned the phrase academic freedom into an oxymoron.
Or in this age of the US leader saying climate change is a hoax, it’s no surprise that congressmen are at loggerheads with the academe over researches on climate change.
Such is the case in the University of Delaware, which contends that because of academic freedom, it cannot reveal to a congressman the identity of the agency funding a research on climate change conducted by a skeptic of climate change.
Academic freedom or secrecy?, the congressman asks. Indeed, Delaware’s refusal gnaws at the line between preserving research integrity and protecting free inquiry. Unfortunately for Delaware, not all agree that academic freedom includes keeping secret the funding sources.
All these are simply about men and their puny prides, quite shallow when seen beside the experiences of academics living under ISIS.
Matthew Reisz writes of how, through testimonies submitted to the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA), faculty members in Iraq described their fears, humiliations and violence.
Here were professors afraid to voice their opinions about IS because in their classrooms sat students involved with IS. Some lecturers were beaten up by students, and it became risky to give low grades.
The University of Anbar located in Ramadi, capital of the country’s largest province, Al-Anbar, received the IS wrath. Books and research papers were burned, and academics houses, laboratories, laptops and cars were taken over. All research projects were stopped.
At the University of Mosul, the second largest in Iraq, teaching has stopped, except medicine and education. But the Iraqi government and the higher education ministry do not recognized universities operating under IS rule.
Escape is always on one’s mind, but this is costly and dangerous.Taxi fare for the three-day travel costs more than $ 1,000.
Then there’s the high risk because several times, the international coalition aircraft bombed cars leaving Mosul and killed civilians instead, including university professors and their families.
The only remaining hope is the Baghdad government’s plan to relocate the University of Mosul, but the partnerships are still hazy. For now, the teachers are caught in the terrible dilemma of being shunned by Baghdad, or facing the loss of everything if they try to escape.
Viewed from their hard life, quibbling elsewhere over academic freedom or secrecy is petty.