In Brief
- The Pozen Center is launching a series of original, long-form articles on timely conversations among human rights scholars and practitioners.
- The first report in the series tackles academic freedom, a topic of growing focus in human rights circles.
- It features interviews with multiple United Nations Special Rapporteurs and other experts.
Today, the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights launches Pozen Center Reports, a series of original, long-form articles designed to draw attention to forward-thinking conversations among human rights scholars and practitioners, highlighting their relevance to pressing issues of our time.
The first report in this series (downloadable as a PDF) focuses on the widely cited but poorly understood concept of academic freedom.
In recent years, human rights scholars and practitioners have increasingly asked whether existing approaches to academic freedom – including the standard one used in the United States – are adequate in the face of mounting threats faced by schools and educators worldwide. These specialists have worked toward a new approach, one grounded in the international human rights tradition.
This report, “What Kind of Freedom is Academic Freedom? Emerging Human Rights Perspectives,” is built around scholarship and United Nations thematic reports that reflect this emerging discourse, plus extended interviews with key participants, including:
- Balakrishnan Rajagopal, United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Right to Housing
- David Kaye, former United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression
- Joan Wallach Scott, a major contributor to American debates about academic freedom.
Prepared by the Pozen Center’s Peter Baker, the report describes the standard United States approach to academic freedom, traces the emergence of a complementary but more expansive human rights approach, and explores its potential implications for the defense of educational spaces.
You can read "What Kind of Freedom is Academic Freedom?" using the above flipbook or by downloading the PDF directly.