Aren't we entitled to a better simile Inger?

Hi,

Great thoughts as usual Inger.

Having worked for the Commonwealth Public Service their rules are far more restrictive and they are years behind the real world in terms of communication and they certainly don't let you have your own opinion on anything.

Universities are no worse than any other big organisation.

However I think academics should be able to have their own opinions and differ from their employer.

Dale.

I think it is important universities to have public comment policies for their academic staff and research students, as these can set clear guidelines and boundaries for understanding where the demarcation and overlap are between public and private comments. Such policies should not limit freedom of speech any more than it is already limited by rules relating to things such as defamation, vilification, harassment and the like. As long as these policies are clear and reasonably applied they are helpful. Certainly, there must be some
scope for discretion and good judgement. For example, in The Conversation academics from a range of universities and with a range of expertise are likely to comment on many different stories. With a forum such as The Conversation we should be able to reasonably assume that readers are sufficiently intelligent to distinguish qualified experts from people who are talking outside of their area. We should also be able to assume that people can judge the merits of the arguments put in these comments independently of who is saying them.

Fantastic piece of work, thanks Inger for illuminating an area of much uncertainty for academics. Unfortunately, being an academic is not what it used to be - your university does not see you as an academic first, but as an employee. Managerialism has well and truly colonised the academe, and a tenure means absolutely nothing nowadays. Heck, if a student evaluation survey can get you fired, or if writing a poem gets you kicked from an adjunct position, then what chance one has if, as a last resort, they take their Head of School to task in the media? I rather think that we may need to revisit the statement, "Likewise not using your real name should be no defence against such behaviour; hiding behind anonymity is the refuge of cowards". Since there is no longer freedom for academics in the traditional sense, what can an academic with a mortgage over their head, unable to move to another university (after all, Armidale is a one-uni town) do when they have something to contribute, but which they know their employer won't like? Methinks anonymity is prudence, not cowardice - and scholars will use it increasingly, as a means to resist the kind of suffocating conditions imposed on them by the new age universities.

I agree with Guy Curtis

All that is needed is for universities to update their public comment policies.

Thanks for your piece, Inger. In my opinion, the best approach for managing reputations online is pretty much the same as for managing reputations in everyday life. Simply sticking to the facts - and correcting any mistakes online as elsewhere once they become apparent - is the key to maintaining reputations as competent academics/researchers/analysts/commentators.

One way for reputational problems to develop is for simple but serious errors to drive spectacularly false conclusions published in a "peer reviewed" pay-as-you-publish online science journal, for the debate on critical public-health matters to be seriously misled, and for false information not to be corrected even after unreasonable delay: http://www.australianparadox.com/pdf/8-QUESTIONS-FOR-AWB-&-JBM-BANNED.pdf

Reputational problems can intensify when a University mounts a disingenuous defence in support of its underperforming but overconfident scientists: http://www.australianparadox.com/pdf/Sept2012-Conversations.pdf

I'm not an academic or a scientist. I'm an economist. I'm mostly a simple guy with uncomplicated views. My starting point is knowing the difference between up and down, valid and invalid, and right and wrong. I was/am amazed that - after stumbling onto it in a newspaper (Slide 6 in the next link) and simply subjecting it to basic factual scrutiny - I was able to shred the credibility of the highest-profile paper published by the University of Sydney's highest-profile scientists: Slides 8-10, 17 and 36-44 in http://www.australianparadox.com/pdf/AUSTRALIAN-PARADOX-101-SLIDESHOW.pdf

In my interactions with the scientists, the journal, the University and on this Conversation website over recent months - see the LHS of www.australianparadox.com - I've been similarly amazed by how little support I've received for the simple proposition that high-profile academics who mislead important public debates with false information should correct the public record.

Back on the topic of academic reputation, in my opinion the thing potentially most damaging for academics', scientists' and Universities' reputations - online and otherwise - is the refusal to correct errors once they have become obvious to everyone with an interest (Slides 9 and 10). By refusing to correct obvious errors, academics, scientists and Universities transform questions about competence into questions about integrity (Slides 28 and 38-44). I've gone to ridiculous lengths to convince the University of Sydney that in this matter it has a serious problem it needs to fix (Slides 3, 29 and 36-52).

My bottom line is that it is not okay for publicly funded academics and other scientists to publish as fact - in peer-reviewed journals, newspapers or anywhere else - things that, in fact, are factually incorrect, leaving the public misinformed. It is about academic and scientific integrity, and public trust. It is bad for the reputations of academics, scientists and universities, because everyday people think the scientific record is supposed to be populated by factually correct information, via the oversight of a competent peer-review process.

Critically, the public debate - including the current debate on the causes of obesity, diabetes and related maladies, the biggest public-health issue of our time - needs to be based on facts. It is absolutely unacceptable for two of Australia's highest-profile scientists to poison this important public debate with false facts. The false facts need to be corrected and the public debate allowed to proceed without roadblocks put up by publicly funded scientists from the prestigious University of Sydney.

I'm surprised - actually disappointed - that I've struggled to find others online who are comfortable agreeing with those sentiments.

Perhaps because of the increasing amount of rubbish published these days as scientific fact, a global debate is heating up on the increased use of corrections and retractions to lift the reputation of journals in which academics and scientists publish formal papers: http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/if-a-papers-major-conclusions-are-shown-to-be-wrong-we-will-retract-the-paper-plos/

To conclude, I again encourage co-authors Dr Alan Barclay and Professor Jennie Brand-Miller to come online and defend their deeply flawed paper: http://www.australianparadox.com/pdf/8-QUESTIONS-FOR-AWB-&-JBM-BANNED.pdf

Again, I predict with confidence that they will no do so. For their deeply flawed Australian Paradox paper, there is no good defence. In my opinion, the paper has become an academic disgrace (Slides 9, 10 and 17) and a menace to public health (Slide 46) that should be corrected or retracted without further unreasonable delay.

Readers, please criticise me severely in comments below if you think my version of the facts expressed above is unreasonable.