Thursday, May 10, 2007
I hate freedom!
Yay! Only UCSF voted against academic freedom in terms of tobacco money.
Lawrence Pitts, a professor of neurological surgery and otolaryngology at UCSF, said he started out on the side of academic freedom in the debate but changed his mind.
"I believe the tobacco industry, maybe singularly, has been successful in suppressing academic freedom around their own research," Pitts said. "If they only choose to fund research that will support their contentions, they are not supporting a broad range of issues ... so without us being aware, our academic freedom is being suppressed by the methods that have been used by the tobacco industry." How can an organization unitlaterally suppress academic freedom when other people are doing research? You don't "suppress academic freedom around your own research." That doesn't even make sense. The idea of academic freedom is that you can do the research you want to do, not that everyone is doing every single kind of research from every angle.
Regent John Moores, a key proponent of the ban, expressed disappointment in the faculty decision Wednesday.
"This issue remains a profound mystery to me," he said. "Perhaps one of the deep thinkers in the UC senate can explain to me why the university should help an industry that will be responsible for 1 billion deaths in this century." I don't think you need a deep thinker for that one. I'll handle it: Academic freedom means that we don't think of "the university" as doing the research, we think of the faculty at the university doing research, and they can help whatever industry they want to help. The university does not tell the faculty what they can and cannot research, so it has no power to help or hurt an industry.
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