Slippery beasts: why academic freedom and media freedom are so difficult to protect

It is easy to confuse academic freedom with freedom of speech, but it is illuminating to consider the responsibilities that frame academic freedom and thus distinguish it from the less constrained freedoms to speak that characterise our roles as citizens of democratic societies. In particular, scholars and scientists are subject to standards of rigour and integrity. While academics sometimes fail to live up to these standards, we consider a difficulty that arises even when they do. This is a collective action failure that arises because of the incentives that motivate choices of topics and approaches by scholars and scientists and it results in overconcentration of academic effort. Diversity within the academy is a potential antidote to this difficulty. We explore these issues from within our different professional perspectives and note some analogies between the situation of academics on the one hand and journalists on the other.