Global Perspectives on Universities’ Social Licence to Operate: The Place of Inclusion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the National Academy of Kinesiology meeting in Pittsburgh, PA (United States), in September 2025, the lead author, Doune Macdonald, presented, with input from several international scholars, the C. Lynn Vendien International Lecture around the theme Advancing (in) Kinesiology: Movement, Disability and Justice . This paper explores universities’ “social licence to operate” in our respective countries and argues how inclusive practices present avenues for enhancing the profiles and purposes of universities in what are considered, in many countries, to be turbulent times. After introducing the concept of social licence, we unpack the policies and practices related to inclusion in our universities, noting tensions and contradictions. We then argue that can showcase the legitimacy, credibility, and trust of institutions that are accorded a social licence to operate. Social theories on governance, inclusion, and power frame these tensions and opportunities.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".