In the May/June issue of Archaeology magazine the president of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), Elizabeth Bartman, made a statement that resulted in an outcry:

We at the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), along with our colleagues at the American Anthropological Association and other learned societies, have taken a stand against open access.

The story of Bartman’s opposition to the public dissemination of knowledge broke in mid-April and by the end of the month she had made a partial retraction on the AIA’s website following strong negative attention in the press. In her retraction, Bartman stated that she was “not against open access as a concept” but was “opposed to slated government legislation on the issue”. This was a direct reference to the Federal Research Public Access Act, currently working its way through US Congress. The bill would require that the results of any project funded by the US government be made open access after a fixed period of time.

In her statement against open access, Bartman quoted parts of the institute’s mission:

Believing that greater understanding of the past enhances our shared sense of humanity and enriches our existence, the AIA seeks to educate people of all ages about the significance of archaeological discovery.

So why would the AIA come out against a proposal that meets its mission statement? The institute puts it down to costs:

We fear that this legislation would prove damaging to the traditional venues in which scientific information is presented by offering, for no cost, something that has considerable costs associated with producing it. It would undermine, and ultimately dismantle, by offering for no charge, what subscribers actually support financially — a rigorous publication process that does serve the public, because it results in superior work.

Publishing can certainly be expensive and it is not always possible to rely on donations or the taxpayer to pick up the bill. The fear of publishers and societies is that if they give away their journals for free then no one will pay to be a member. Taking this fear into consideration, the stance of the AIA against open access is logical: they are scared of losing their members and being forced to close down.

However, when looking at the facts, this sympathetic reasoning starts to fall apart. The National Science Foundation, providing almost the only US government funds used for projects that appear in archaeology journals, supports roughly 50 archaeology projects a year. At best, no more than 55 projects in any given year would have to be made open access if the Federal Research Public Access Act were to be made law. The AIA only publishes one periodical publication, the American Journal of Archaeology (AJA). There are over 250 English language periodical publications that specialise in archaeology. If one were to include journals in related subjects such as anthropology, history or classics, this number jumps into the thousands. Include cross-disciplinary publications, and the possible locations for one to publish research jump to tens of thousands of options. Fifty-five publications spread out over hundreds, thousands or possibly tens of thousands of journals — and one might speculate that, at most, every year the AIA would have to make one or two of their articles open access.

The institute’s reference to the “considerable costs” involved in publishing is a questionable assertion. As pointed out by many open access advocates, the cost of starting and running a journal is quite low — some put the number at as little as $350 annually for a bare-bones operation relying on volunteers. This type of operation is not too different from how the AJA is currently run. All of the writing of the articles and research is done for free. The peer review process, which according to the AIA provides benefit to the public, is all done by volunteers. There is no reason why that should not continue. The AIA could even move to a print-on-demand system where those who want print copies can pay for them. This would significantly cut costs while allowing everyone to access the information.

Knowledge cartels

Looking at the facts, it would seem that the AIA may have overreacted. But, to return to my original question: why would the institute overreact to something that is likely to help them fulfil their mission “to educate people of all ages about the significance of archaeological discovery”? Why would the AIA, or any other scholarly or disciplinary society, come out against the idea that the public should have access to the research they paid for?

One possible explanation is that many scholarly societies, for all their rhetoric and not-for-profit status, are actually knowledge cartels — controlling the supply of information in their field and profiting from restricting access. They have neglected their original scholarly purpose of disseminating knowledge to all and now dedicate a significant proportion of their resources to publishing which also makes up the vast majority of its costs and “profits”. Its 990 tax form shows that in 2011 it spent $350,281 on its journal and $373,818 on its societies and national lecture programme. In addition to the journal, the AIA also publishes a magazine, which is available on newsstands. It was responsible for $3,803,635 of costs and $4,299,630 of revenue.

There is also great incentive for the people who manage and run these organisations to defend their cartel. For example, the American Chemical Society, a huge opponent to open access, pays many of its employees, as reported in their 990 tax return, over six figures. These salaries range from $304,528 to $1,084,417 in 2010.

Beyond salaries, these organisations provide other benefits to their employees. According to its tax return, the Phycological Society of America provided one of its employees with a mortgage worth $300,000 at an interest rate of 3.15 per cent in 2004. Even with the current record low rates, most people could not obtain such a favourable deal. While these societies are not-for-profits, their employees are heavily financially invested in their organisations bringing in the revenue
to support six-figure salaries and perks.

Open access: an attack on publishers’ business models?

Most of the societies that opposed or were critical of open access in the White House’s consultation receive a good portion of their funding from publishing; for some it’s over 80 per cent of their revenue. Some of these societies are in essence publishers with an individual subscription option
attached to their publications, called a membership.

Open access is a direct attack on the business models of these societies. While mandated open access may not directly hurt societies, by forcing them to make some of their articles freely available it will become a competitor and one that they will be hard pressed to beat. It will have all the benefits of their own publications, peer review, volunteer work, but people will be able to access it for free.

Whether it is right or wrong for scholarly societies to operate as knowledge cartels may be a matter of moral opinion. Some might say that they are not following their mission statements and should be stripped of their not-for-profit/charity status. Others would argue that while they may not benefit society as a whole, they do provide a service to their members. What is clear is that there is a vested interest in controlling the flow of information.

Doug Rocks-Macqueen is a graduate student in archaeology at the University of Edinburgh

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©Doug Rocks-Macqueen. This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. View a copy of this licence here

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Academic freedom is in danger. Thomas Docherty explains how cuts are damaging universities across the UK

One morning in June 1946, Hannah Arendt received a package at her home in New York. As a Jew, Arendt had not been permitted to teach in German universities; and, like many German-Jewish intellectuals, she found refuge in America. The package she received that morning contained a book, The Idea of the University, written by her former academic supervisor, Karl Jaspers. It was a new edition of a book Jaspers had initially published in 1923; in its 1946 revision, it became a contribution to the de-Nazification of the German university system and German society. Arendt read it avidly, immediately exploring the possibility of having it translated for a wide audience. The book was amongst the first to formulate a post-war credo of academic freedom. Jaspers saw its importance for the renewed health of a university system and of a society that had been corrupted by authoritarian restrictions on freedom of thought, speech and action under Nazism. Academic freedom permits the scholar to follow fearlessly whatever lines of inquiry are demanded by the disinterested pursuit of truth and knowledge in any field; and the actual and material realisation of this freedom lies in the dissemination of such knowledge through teaching. To teach is to enact those very freedoms of thought that academic research strives to imagine. Substantial funding cuts in the UK are severely undermining Jasper’s tenets. Since Lord Browne’s higher education review two years ago recommended slashing the university teaching budget by 80 per cent, the pace has accelerated. In a climate of public sector austerity there now even appears to be a logic to the cuts, but the impact on academic freedom is profound. Why does it matter? The licence to engage with ideas that are critical of social norms and existing values depends on that freedom. Its curtailment encourages the establishment of orthodoxy and promotes authoritarian forms of governance that stifle freely spoken critique.

Academic freedom — crucial to a thriving democracy

The 1946 context makes clear what is at stake: the university, built onacademic freedom, is an institution that seeks to realise the freedoms that will give an emergent democratic society its various identities, arguments and openness to future possibilities. Such openness of spirit had been precluded while the university sector was the instrument of an ideologically determined political programme. Nazism permitted only those academic activities that were consistent with its aims. All else was illegitimate. For Jaspers, as for Arendt, academic freedom is more than merely academic.

In the UK, we have two constitutional post-war definitions of academic freedom. For the 1963 Robbins report, it is the freedom to publish, to teach according to a teacher’s own concept of fact and truth, and “to pursue what personal studies and researches are congenial”. For Robbins, academic tenure guarantees such freedoms. When the 1988 Education Reform Act abolished tenure, it redefined academic freedom. Section 202 of the Act gave academics “freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom,  and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions, without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or privileges that they may have at their institutions”.

No one seriously is suggesting the abandonment of such principles. However, thanks to the economic logic of cuts to public expenditure, we have drifted insidiously and gradually towards that dangerous state of affairs where the spectres of “official knowledge” and “official teaching” are increasingly visible and material. If Jaspers and Arendt are right, then our predicament may be all the worse for the fact that we fail to see our democratic liberty being threatened by a quiet ruination and decay of academic freedom. Arendt, writing back to Jaspers after reading his book, considered what should be the proper relation between state and university: “Because somebody has to pay for the whole show, the state clearly remains the best donor of money.” She continued: “It would be good … if the professors would not, despite this, see themselves as civil servants.” Some arrangement was needed — and eventually found in the German constitution — to protect academic freedom; but, in the UK in recent times, the arrangements are different.

Education and “value for money”

The first major cuts to UK university funding took place in the 1980s, as part of a project of privatisation that diminished the state’s commitments to the public sphere. The demand for accountability in the public sector, for “value for money”, was crucial to the ideological acceptance of this process. Universities adopted a business-like efficiency, encapsulated in the mantra of “doing more with less”. Success in making economies then provided the rationale for further cuts, for we were now “doing more” than was previously thought necessary, and so could accommodate additional cutting of resources; and if we failed, we deserved to be cut entirely, for we had failed in doing what was necessary. This argument led to a rationale for what happened finally in 2010, when the UK government formally withdrew all funding for the teaching of arts, humanities and social sciences, and cut the general budget by 80 per cent following the Browne Review. The effects of the cuts have been gradual and insidious, but substantive:we now no longer research as we wish, teach as we wish, or pursue those congenial studies that Robbins wanted to protect. Arendt’s fear — that academics would become servants of their governments — was well founded. In 1992, the UK University Grants Committee (UGC) was replaced by the Higher Education Funding Councils (HEFCE) and the change of title brought into law a change of practice. Where the UGC had acted as a buffer between academy and government, to stop us becoming civil servants, HEFCE’s management statement virtually required that we make our academic freedoms subservient to the state. Paragraph 3.4.2 of that statement requires that “The Chairman [of HEFCE] is responsible to the Secretary of State. The Chairman shall aim to ensure that the HEFCE’s policies and actions support the wider strategic policies of the Secretary of State.” HEFCE became an arm of government; and, without debate, the dominos fell. Vice-chancellors became agents of HEFCE, and academics — no longer “authorities” — became human resources in the advancement of government strategy. The university — without legislation — was now tacitly politicised, and our research and teaching legally constrained and restricted. It is important to state that things are not always as crude as this on the ground. Academics continue to maintain their integrity and independence in their research and teaching, but this is despite the prevailing norms, and their chances of official recognition are therefore much diminished. Yet the perception of academics as accountable to the requirements of the government of the day, rather than the demands of intellectual inquiry, has become entrenched: our main priority is to serve business and to do whatever government decides is necessary for the economy. Charles Clarke, as Secretary of State for Education, argued in 2003 that “We have to make better progress in harnessing knowledge to wealth creation.” Consequently, the 2003 Lambert Review identified “a need for the government to support university departments which are doing work that industry values”; and it went on to claim that “Public funding for basic research … is intended to benefit the economy.” Later, the 2011 Wilson Review stated that “Universities form the supply chain for business.” These views are now so commonplace that they provoke no debate.

Malleable public opinion — a threat to free expression

Jonathan Mitchell | Demotix

In this now quasi-official view of the university, research and teaching that do not serve business or wealth creation are seen as luxuries; and it is equally assumed that luxuries should not be funded from the public purse. The academic who works in medieval theology or French experimental fiction is in an invidious position: the classroom work must highlight not academic issues but rather skills that are transferable to business or wealth creation. The “luxury” of serious critical thinking on matters of theological politics or of relations between art and society — a luxury that might provoke new thought and new freedoms beyond the academy — is now less legitimate. Academic and other freedoms are being diminished, and education itself drastically impoverished. As a result, dissident thought is sacrificed to a tacit demand for conformity. We are expected essentially to validate whatever it is that public opinion decides is the genuine or proper existing states of affairs, and thus to confirm our cultural identity. Yet as Christopher Hitchens once put it, the greatest threat to freedom of expression today is not government but a malleable public opinion. If the public is genuinely to extend our freedoms and possibilities, then such opinion needs to be subjected to critique — sometimes by the exercise of academic freedom. The loss of our freedom to critique such constructions means that our identities — and thus our possibilities in life — are essentially in the hands of others. The point of research is not to rehearse what we know, but to explore and extend the boundaries of our ignorance and, by thus disturbing our idea of ourselves, to prise open those human possibilities that were previously undreamt of.  Such ideals sit uneasily alongside the now normative corporatist ideas of accountable efficiency.

A matter of conformity

Virtually all research funding in the UK is now competitive: we bid to research councils for it, or we win it through competing in the Research Excellence Framework (REF, formerly Research Assessment Exercise). This exercise aims to concentrate research in ever decreasing numbers of institutions (thus rationalising cuts everywhere else). A good REF performance “earns” us our future research funds; and, cast in positive terms like this, the process obscures the fact that competition is reducing the state’s commitment to the total research capacity of the nation and its academies. Governments will not inflict the cuts; instead, peer review ensures that we do the government’s work and cut ourselves in a form of self-harm. We are like Kafka’s Joseph K, watching his executioners with their knife and realising that he is expected to wrench it from them and “plunge it into his own breast”. Much research is published in scholarly journals. These now also have rankings, with some having higher “impact factors” than others. Academics are effectively required to seek publication in those highly ranked places, as the journals themselves become proxies for measuring the value of research. A piece in Physics Letters  is ranked excellent by the REF, axiomatically; recognition of excellence is harder to secure in the new upstart journals. However, all journals have their own scholarly priorities and preferences, sometimes even ideological preferences in the humanities and social sciences. To be regarded as excellent, my research must be recognised by my peers; but, if good research is by definition marked by dissidence, then such evaluations can pose awkward difficulties. The likelihood will be for research to be considered excellent precisely to the extent that it confirms the basic principles of my peers and conforms to their priorities. So, farewell freedom, as I skew my work to get it into Physics Letters ; and thus the REF restricts the thinking behind our increasingly sclerotic research base. Crucially, universities increasingly require that academics make sure that their research conforms to that narrowed base, in order to secure more funding — more funding that will, in turn, eviscerate the now anorexic research base further, and decrease the freedom to research as we would wish. If you want the funding that comes with prestige, make sure your work fits in. Academic freedom becomes subservient to academic orthodoxy.

“The Big Society” and “Connected Communities”

The process can be politicised too, as we saw in June 2010, when the coalition government’s Big Society agenda became explicitly a funding priority for the research councils. At the centre of this was a political hijacking of an interdisciplinary project called “Connected Communities”, led by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). When the AHRC held its first summit on the programme, Shearer West, the AHRC’s director of research, gave a presentation which set the scene for the research programme and its funding explicitly in terms of the Big Society framework. The only other presentation archived on the AHRC website from that summit was given by Bert Provan of the Department of Communities and Local Government. His title: “Connected Communities; or, ‘Building the Big Society””. If you want funding to carry out research, make sure you centre it on serving the political agenda. Similar strictures afflict teaching. We no longer teach as we wish, but according to the logic of cuts and its attendant economics. Teaching, like research, is inherently unpredictable; but such unpredictability cannot be permitted in a system grounded in efficient accountability. In teaching, especially with very high tuition fees, quality must be assured by our Quality Assurance Agency (QAA). Now that all degrees are modular, thought is compartmentalised; knowledge becomes reduced to information; and learning becomes simply the managing or manipulation of that information. The economics here understands knowledge as a commodity, and not a dynamic process that might involve the changing of minds and thus also of identities. Commodities are never critical of anything, but simply available for purchase; and that purchase is intended simply to assure the consumer of his identity, to “enrich” an already existing and settled identity. It’s just that the freedom of that identity is now reduced and narrowed to matters of consumer choice between modules. This is all the more pressing when the UK deals with the 80 to 100 per cent cut in state funding of teaching by effecting a massive tuition-fee hike whose effect is to monetise teaching and learning. Teachers are required by QAA to predict outcomes of their teaching, so that the student knows what it is that she is “buying”. Now, all students need to be the same as well; their futures safely predicted, managed, controlled. There is no academic freedom left in teaching — unless we ignore these strictures and carry out our work essentially in clandestine and unofficial fashion. Accountability, though seen most vividly as part of the logic of cuts, can have further unexpected repercussions. When a former University College London (UCL) student, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was found to be involved in a plot to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, Universities UK (UUK, the vice-chancellors’ association) drew up a report on freedom of speech on campus. It was interesting that they felt implicated simply because Abdulmutallab had attended UCL. No doubt, he also frequented coffee shops, but there was no similarly anxious report from Starbucks. UCL, however, chose to identify freedom of speech in academia as a subject for policing, as if the university were a site of terror by association, and therefore responsible for terrorist acts. In the UUK report, the 1988 Reform Act statement is rehearsed: academic freedom is sacrosanct “within the law”. It is in that phrase, “within the law” that the report finds the absolute limit of academic freedom. On one hand, this sounds eminently reasonable: the university should not encourage criminality. However, in principle, it changes the accountability of the academic again. Where Jaspers thought that the academic’s accountability was to the intellectual process itself, and where REF and QAA see accountability as being political and consumerist, UUK’s report makes the academic into an official, policing “the law of the land”. But which land? In an age of globalisation especially, intellectual work knows no such borders. Further, what if the law itself is a bad law or a law that lacks legitimacy? Is it not actually incumbent on the academic to point this out and speak out about it? UUK appears to take the view that the results of our research and teaching must be in conformity with the law of the land; but the text of the 1988 Act might properly be read as saying that our academic freedoms are themselves protected within or by the law. That is to say: the law protects us, even if what we discover calls the law into question. In what has by now become a classic procedure, UUK has imported the logic of accountability into academia. The result is the Quisling attitude of our vice-chancellors. On one hand, some fear speaking out lest it endangers either their own self-advancement or the competitive advancement of their institution; and on the other, there are some who do not even see the dangers inherent in their quiescent compliance. Both have fully internalised the economic logic that endangers our freedoms. Academic freedom is at the core of the democratic intellect and a free culture. It must be fought for.
Thomas Docherty is professor of English and of Comparative Literature in the University of Warwick and the author of many books

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Academics worldwide face economic and political attacks that restrict their freedom to challenge convention, says Jo Glanville

This piece was originally published on Times Higher Education

More than 30 years ago, the Index on Censorship published a special issue on academic freedom titled “Scholarship and its enemies”. It included a report on the persecution of scientists in the Soviet Union, an article about the harassment of scholars in Czechoslovakia, a feature detailing how Bantu education in South Africa politicised black students and an account of university education in Libya under the rule of Mu’ammer Gaddafi. Since those once monolithic regimes have now fallen, it is ironic that the article that has dated the least and is even prophetic in its vision of the future is a portrait of the threat to universities in the UK written back in 1981. Anthony Arblaster and Steven Lukes warned that academia, and the freedom of scholars, “is under constant and growing pressure from its paymasters, the local education authorities and, above all, central government. The general tendency of these pressures is towards a crude and debased utilitarianism which sees education as an industry, or a production line whose purpose is to ‘turn out’ persons equipped with the various kinds of skills which the economy and current employment opportunities require”.

A generation on, in the 40th anniversary year of the Index, we have returned to the subject of academic freedom in a special issue, “Censors on campus“. This includes an essay by Thomas Docherty that gives a stark outline of the consequences of the past 30 years on universities in the UK since the first significant cuts to higher education funding took place. It is a sobering sequel to Arblaster and Lukes’ analysis: “the perception of academics as accountable to the requirements of the government of the day rather than the demands of intellectual inquiry has become entrenched: our main priority is to serve business and to do whatever government decides is necessary for the economy”.

All three writers recognise the importance of universities for fostering ideas that dissent from the mainstream and the dangers for democracy as a whole when that space is threatened. For Arblaster and Lukes, that freedom depends on the principle that all decisions and judgements are made on academic or educational grounds; for Docherty, it is a licence that is essential for an open society.

As the international cases published in the special issue illustrate, around the world academics are often at the forefront of challenging authoritarianism and orthodoxy both in their research and in direct political activism. Their protection – and the threats that they face – should receive as much attention as attacks on the press.

Yet although there are many organisations and international bodies standing up for journalists, the defence of academic freedom trails behind. The classification of our various freedoms into special interest groups – whether press or academia – is perhaps part of the problem. It is time to recognise that the protection of academic freedom is as fundamental for democracy as the safeguarding of the press – it is, after all, freedom of expression for the whole of society that is at stake.

Turkey is a particularly strong example of the vital role played by academics and how vulnerable they remain to intimidation. As the distinguished author and translator Maureen Freely demonstrates in her report for Index, the pressure on universities, students and scholars is growing. Academics who dare to explore taboo topics that challenge the nationalist mythology, topics that may range from the Armenian genocide to Atatürk, may damage their careers or even face prosecution. One notorious current case is that of the academic Büşra Ersanlı, who is facing prosecution over links to an “illegal organisation”. She is believed to have been targeted because of her association with the BDP, the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, which has seats in the national assembly. As Freely reports, new networks and campaign groups are now emerging to defend students as well as their teachers.

In Thailand, academics are challenging one of the most notorious chills on free speech: the lese-majesty law that criminalises insult to the king. It carries a minimum jail sentence of three years. A group of young law academics at Thammasat University is courageously leading a campaign to reform the law: they have been banned from holding meetings at their own university, and their spokesman, the celebrated lawyer Worachet Pakeerut, was assaulted on campus earlier this year.

These are scholars whose work takes them into the heart of public life, daring to raise questions that challenge the national identity of their culture.

Although the risks facing scholars at home may be less extreme, the same principle is at stake: the space and the licence to challenge convention. Any government that reduces that freedom, whether on economic or political grounds, shrinks the possibilities for a truly open society.

Jo Glanville is outgoing editor of Index on Censorship.

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This Wednesday in a Boston courthouse a crucial legal battle will be played out. It is a consequence of the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s (PSNI) contempt for academic research and the protection of confidential sources. While the “troubles” in the North of Ireland may be over for most people, the PSNI is one state agency determined to poke at the hornets’ nest that is the region’s politically violent past. In doing so it displays wanton indifference to the caution urged by amongst others Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, a former head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service and current head of the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, who warned that investigating the past “would blow apart the degree of consensus we have achieved.”

At the heart of the upcoming courtroom drama is an oral history project commissioned by Boston College between 2001 and 2006. Its aim was to enhance awareness of the long running violent political conflict in Ireland. It sought narratives from republican and loyalist activists who could offer unrivalled insight. It promised that all the material archived would be securely deposited in Boston College where it would remain inaccessible in all circumstances unless prior approval was given by the donor or the storyteller died.

The extent to which the PSNI is successful in its attempt to seize academic research will prove ruinous to public understanding of the Northern Irish conflict. It will drain the pool of knowledge that society may draw upon in order to keep itself better informed. The judicial outcome in a Boston courtroom will determine the ability of non-state actors, principally, academics, journalists and historians to collate information crucial to a more rounded public understanding. In the words of a prominent civil liberties lawyer in the US the move “could forever chill groundbreaking and important research.”

As it turned out Boston College, despite being equipped with a law school, was not on firm legal ground in issuing such promises of confidentiality, although nothing it drew up in its donor contract suggested that. Worse still, when it came to the crunch, the college — in an act of institutional deference to authority — was found to be afflicted by a fortitude deficit. In order not to offend the US Justice Department, it moved to abandon its own project, along with the researchers it commissioned and the research participants to whom it had promised the “ultimate power” of discretion over the use of their donations.

In May last year the PSNI applied through the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty to US authorities to subpoena part of the archive ostensibly as part of an investigation into the 1972 killing and disappearing of Belfast woman, Jean McConville. A killing that the Northern Irish police force in all its guises failed to investigate in almost four decades. Historian Chris Bray, writing in the Irish Times, stated that “quite literally, not so much as a local patrolman ever bothered to type up a pro-forma report on McConville’s disappearance; the filing cabinet was nearly empty.” As a result the suspicion is being aired in many places that the real motivation behind the subpoenas is one meant to embarrass or prosecute Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams who, according to the Irish Times, has been accused by some of the Boston College research participants “of giving the order to kill McConville, a charge Adams categorically denies.”

In this precarious business it has not gone unnoticed that the Police Service of Northern Ireland, under its old name the RUC, was heavily involved in a dirty war often waged in the shadows. Its Special Branch was involved in a range of activities including killings. The Northern Irish police has a long history of torture, abuse and collusion with loyalist death squads. Like the British state it served, it was a key player in the conflict. Very few police members have been brought to book. It is unlikely that they ever will. There is a professed willingness on the part of the PSNI to pursue all leads … except those leading back to the British state.

This flags up one of the murky issues at play in the case. It is the problem of law enforcement agencies being used to prise open a past when much of the problems of the past were caused by law enforcement agencies. Because no law enforcement solution to the conflict was considered possible, a political one was devised that in many senses by-passed law enforcement or relegated in significance its contribution to a solution.  The jails previously packed by law enforcement measures were emptied of conflict prisoners as the North marched into the future and away from its past. Now we have law enforcement trying advance its own agenda under the camouflage of “rule of law”, feigning a concern for victims so that it may selectively and tendentiously mine the past.

The PSNI action in seeking access to the Boston College oral history archive, so that it might plunder it for material useful to prosecutions, has serious consequences for the production of knowledge. It is now likely that a diminution in information will flow to journalists or academics for fear that the State might insist on access to what is collated for purposes of criminal investigation. The action throws a chill of censorship over the societal acquisition of vital knowledge. By seeking to colonise academic research for its own narrow objectives, law enforcement is forcing academic study off the field of play leaving our comprehension of the past in the hands of law enforcement which has at all times sought to airbrush its own invidious role out of the historical record.  Hardly a satisfactory outcome.

This assault on academic freedom  will have a deleterious impact on public understanding and will  stymie public debate. As Harvey Silverglate and Daniel R. Schwartz argued in Forbes Magazine “academics play an important role in society for the enlightenment of current and future generations; they are not mere detectives bedecked in tweed and working for governments…”

Anthony McIntyre was one of the Boston College researchers who along with colleague Ed Moloney is currently fighting to have the subpoenas quashed. McIntyre is a former Republican prisoner

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