Free speech and the issue of academic freedom: Is the Canadian velvet totalitarian disease coming to Australian campuses?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper begins with an elaboration of the terms in the title, for which I claim accuracy, though no comfort. Academic freedom is defined for all members of the academic community (students and faculty) as the right to be evaluated only in terms of performance (merit), and not at all in terms of opinions (comfort). The current contrasting culture of comfort on Canadian campuses is a velvet totalitarian one, where, except for the severity of punishments, the following five salient features of real totalitarian regimes are present: the presence of uninterpretable laws: the presence and power of unqualified pseudo experts; status-defined ethics; freezing fear of engaging in public discussion of controversial but fundamental issues; demonization of dissidents. The final part of the paper raises the question, through a discussion of the 2006 case of Andrew Fraser's treatment by Macquarie University, of whether the Canadian velvet totalitarian administrative disease is starting to infect Australian university administrators as well as those Australian academics who think they deal with the disease by ignoring it.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it