Mgr Przemysław Rybiński
University of Wrocław
English abstract: There is no agreement as to whether academic freedom is a variation (perhaps a subset) of freedom of speech – which is individual in its character and which governs a person’s relations with other persons and with the state – or a cluster of rules unlike freedom of speech, which has a different origin and which is enjoyed by the academic community as a whole. Irrespective of which of these claims is true, some concepts that originated in US case law on the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States may well be imported to the discourse on the scope of academic freedom held within the civil law tradition. In light of both the functionalist and natural law positions on the nature of freedom of speech, this article argues three points about the normative environment of academia: first, academic freedom (freedom of research, freedom of teaching) is rooted in natural human curiosity and urge to communicate; second, the error-correcting features of the scientific method are consistent with self-correcting features observed in static normative systems such as systems of professional ethics in professions of public trust; third, any normative environment of the academia must conform with the notions of content neutrality and a marketplace of ideas. These points suggest that academic freedom cannot be subject to limitations, whether external (relating to law, scoring systems or funding) or internal (relating to non-merit based themes of discourse).
Key words: freedom of speech, academic freedom, content neutrality, marketplace of ideas, ethics
Language: polish
Published: Number 4(2025), pp. 112–124.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2025.4.112
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