Wolność akademicka jako zawód i powołanie

Abstract

Academic Freedom as a Profession and Vocation is an attempt to give an updated reading of Weber’s category of the vocation of science through the lens of academic freedom. This is the first such attempt; until now, the interplay between the two has not been explored in the literature. The paper begins by posing a question: how should we understand the role of academic freedom and to what extent should it be respected in scientific practice and science policy-making? We can analyse academic freedom on two different levels: (a) the methodological level relating to the principles of constructing scientific knowledge (perspectivism, conceptual constructivism, problematization); and (b) the practical level, including the postulate of academic freedom understood as a founding assumption of modern science. The dual perspective on academic freedom can also be seen in the Weberian category of science as vocation. I argue that academic freedom is the normative standard for the ideal of vocation: it is a necessary condition for the project of vocation (understood as an ethical ideal), and above all, freedom is a co-evident parameter of thinking at the level of cognitive operations and human cognitive action choices (the cognitive ideal). Moreover, I attempt to explore the extent to which Weber’s concept of academic freedom can help us understand our problems with academic freedom today. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of academic freedom for the work of academics as well as the democratic ecosystem as a whole. Weber’s notion of academic freedom has important implications for the crafting of institutional support for responsible science in the twenty-first century – implications that have yet to be fully grasped, much less implemented.