‘Professors are the enemy’? Two faces of academic freedom
In this special guest lecture, Professor Pippa Norris will discuss the growing concern about risks to academic freedom in the UK, the US, and worldwide.
Professor Norris will examine the relationship between external governmental restrictions on independent scholarship and internal cultural processes within the academy that limit viewpoint diversity. She will argue that universities need to resist these pressures if they are to fulfil their classic mission of advancing human knowledge.
Admission is free, but booking is essential.
Professor Norris is a comparative political scientist who has taught at Harvard for three decades. She is the Paul F McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Founding Director of the Electoral Integrity Project, Director of the Global Party Survey, Co-Director of the TrustGov Project, Co-Principal Investigator for Trust in European Democracies (TrueDem), and Vice-President of the World Values Survey. Her research compares public opinion and elections, political institutions and cultures, gender politics, and political communications in many countries worldwide. She is ranked the 2nd most cited political scientist worldwide, according to Google scholar, and the 3rd political scientist ranked worldwide, according to Research.com. Major career honours include, amongst others, the Johan Skytte prize, IPSA’s Karl Deutsch award, fellowship of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, APSA’s Charles Merriam award, Warren E Miller award, Samuel Eldersfeld award, and George H Hallet award, EPOP’s Sir David Butler award, and the PSA’s Sir Isaiah Berlin award, as well as several book awards and honorary doctorates. Recent books include Electoral Integrity in America, Cultural Backlash and In Praise of Skepticism: Trust but Verify. Her latest book forthcoming with Oxford University Press is The Cultural Roots of Democratic Backsliding.
