About
Established in 2021
SAFS Brock is a chapter of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship. It is a forum open to all members of the Brock and wider Niagara Communities. Its primary purpose is the protection and promotion of academic freedom, a mission it supports through communication with Brock administration, organization of activities, and dissemination of news relating to academic freedom and excellence. All these activities are aimed at realizing a simple goal: the restoration of the LEARNED university.
liberal
A LEARNED university is one in which individual responsibility, agency and accomplishment is fostered and encouraged. For this reason, the university’s hiring and admitting decisions are based on merit, not social location.
excellent
A LEARNED university is one in which individual responsibility, agency and accomplishment is fostered and encouraged. For this reason, the university’s hiring and admitting decisions are based on merit, not social location.
accountable
A LEARNED university is accountable to the community that works within it, to the government that oversees it, and to the general public at large. In all its actions, it respects the civil and academic rights of all who work within it. In disciplinary matters, it affords the right of due process. In fiscal matters, it spends within its means. And in academic and public disputes, it affirms the speech rights of all its researchers.
robust
A LEARNED university is robust: it constantly adds to the storehouse of political, cultural, economic and social ideas available for public use. It recognizes that such a mandate requires the encouragement of multiple and sometimes competing points of view. Without that tension, institutions cannot adapt to new challenges and opportunities, and neither can the states and societies that depend on them.
neutral
A LEARNED university is neutral. Part of the reason universities enjoy public legitimacy is because they incubate new ideas and curate old ones. At their best, they are hubs of innovation in all domains of human activity. They cannot meet that mandate, however, if they become partisan. Universities must never presume to set the values, ideas or intellectual direction of their faculty members.
ethical
A LEARNED university is ethical. It imposes a uniform standard of conduct on its members, and is neutral in its enforcement of them. It supports and defends its administrative and research staff, and never takes actions that will result in professional harm to its members. The LEARNED university does not participate in Cancel Culture.
(cognitively) diverse
A LEARNED university is cognitively diverse. It builds a culture that encourages free expression and respectful engagement with opposing points of view. Administrators and faculty in LEARNED universities make it a point to defend the right of colleagues to express opinions with which they are in vehement disagreement. No issue is or can be settled in a LEARNED university.