Institutional Responses to Threats and Harassment of Academics: Evidence From a Survey Among Political Scientists in Norway
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
ABSTRACT In an era marked by increasing polarization, academics face growing risks of harassment and threats, particularly when engaging in politically sensitive research or public discourse. This study investigates these challenges through a pilot survey of political scientists in Norway, focusing on harassment prevalence and institutional responses. Findings reveal that a small but significant share of surveyed political scientists reported experiencing harassment or threats over the past 5 years. Harassment frequently occurs digitally, with social media and online campaigns as common avenues. Institutional support appears inadequate, with few respondents indicating satisfaction with their institutions' guidelines for handling such issues. The study underscores significant negative impacts on academics' mental well‐being, safety perceptions, and professional engagement. It also highlights the broader chilling effect on academic freedom, where fear of harassment deters scholarly inquiry and public participation. These findings stress the urgent need for universities to enhance support frameworks and safeguard researchers' well‐being, particularly those investigating controversial topics. Future research aims to extend this analysis across different national contexts, to better understand the relationship between harassment of scholars, institutional arrangements, political discourses, and academic freedom.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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