A Governance Dimension of Academic Freedom

Theme: Knowledge, Epistemes, Universities

Published: 17 October 2025

Summary
In this episode of SCAS Talks, Linda Wedlin, Professor of Business Studies at Uppsala University, discusses how individual freedom and university independence are linked, and how different ways of running a university affect this. She elaborates on current challenges to academic freedom, especially the growing distrust in knowledge. At the same time she stresses how important it is to find a balance between trusting knowledge and questioning it. Linda Wedlin also mentions the "A Week on Academic Freedom" event coming up on 20-23 October 2025, a joint initiative by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, the research program Democracy and Higher Education and Higher Education and Research as Objects of Study. To round off with she shares her thoughts on the benefits of being a short term researcher at SCAS, where she got to connect with international scholars from many different disciplines.

Keywords
Academic freedom, democratic society, individual and institutional autonomy, knowledge, organizational dynamics

Suggested Link/s
SCAS Page: Linda Wedlin

Transcript of the Episode

Linda Wedlin 00:00
So we tried to show there that the collegiate steering principles and the collegiate model for organizing is needed in order to have a link and assure that individual freedom and institutional freedoms both support a full academic freedom. So it means that the institution of the university has to organize in order for individual freedom to actually be realized. But it's also so that the individual has obligations to serve the collective, to serve the university in order to also protect both the institutional and individual freedoms.

Natalie von der Lehr 00:51
Welcome to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. My name is Natalie von der Lehr, and in this episode I talk to Linda Wedlin, Professor of Business Studies at Uppsala University and program director for the multidisciplinary research program Democracy and Higher Education at Uppsala University. She was a short term researcher in residence at SCAS during spring 2025. Her research focuses on regulation, governance and organizing of higher education and research, as well as on issues of global governance and social change, and we're going to talk about some of that today. This is the second episode on our theme "Knowledge, Epistemes, Universities".

Natalie von der Lehr 01:35
So welcome to SCAS Talks and the studio, Linda.

Linda Wedlin 01:38
Thank you so much. Great to be here.

Natalie von der Lehr 01:40
Would you like to say a few more words about yourself?

Linda Wedlin 01:43
I think you summarized it well. I'm a Professor of Business Studies. I'm an organizational scholar, so I'm interested in organizations and organizational dynamics and organization theory and leadership. I have worked on different kinds of organizations, but most of my work, empirical work has been focused on universities and other type of knowledge organizations. So business schools also, and I'm part of a research group in the Business Studies Department working on public sector management. So in that sense, and in Sweden, higher education is part of the public sector. So, but we also have research on schools and hospitals and other, other forms of public organizations.

Natalie von der Lehr 02:25
You are the program director for the research program Democracy and Higher Education at Uppsala University. Can you tell us a little bit more about this program?

Linda Wedlin 02:33
It's a multidisciplinary research program. It was initiated by the domain of Humanities and Social Sciences at Uppsala University. So it was a strategic initiative where they saw that we had, within the domain, lots of research on democracy and democratic development, and lots of research on higher education, and also the benefits of combining them with the challenges to democracy we were facing, and also the challenges to the universities and the university systems. So it's a 10-year program where we get funding from the domain to promote and to initiate and to fund research that in different ways try to explore this relationship between democracy, democratic development, democratic values on the one hand, and universities, knowledge development and higher education on the other. So trying to explore the links there between higher education and the role that higher education can play and does play or does not play in democracy and democratic development.

Natalie von der Lehr 03:40
In the end of October, your research program, together with SCAS, is hosting "A Week on Academic Freedom". What happens during that week?

Linda Wedlin 03:49
Lots of things will happen during that week. So one of the things that we do in the program is to organize both academic events and public events, and this is a sort of a little bit of a combination of those together with then our partners, guests, and the research center HERO. So we have a program, a public program, for three full days where we will discuss different topics related to academic freedom. This year, we have an international theme for the week, so we explore academic freedom and questions related to academic freedom in different contexts. So we have one session on Africa, the challenges to academic freedom in Africa. We have the US, of course, we cannot talk about academic freedom today without talking about what's going on in the United States. We have Europe and what is going on in Europe, both in in singular countries in Europe, we have examples of worrying cases also close by, but also talking a little bit about what the EU and the European Union overall is doing on these issues. And then we also have a day where we bring in scholars from around the world to give more personal accounts or stories of how this can play out in academic life in various contexts. So the overall theme is sort of explore the international variations of questions related to academic freedom. We will also have a panel with Swedish, some of the Swedish vice chancellors, discussing and trying to put all these into also Swedish in the local context, thinking about what we need to think about and what, what the questions they are wrestling with at the moment.

Natalie von der Lehr 05:31
You had a similar week two years ago, 2023 and we actually have a podcast episode on that for our listeners who are interested. But now looking back two years ago, what has happened since then? What are the big changes?

Linda Wedlin 05:46
Well, a lot of things, I would say, have happened in these two years. I think again, coming back to the United States, which is perhaps the most obvious example, where we've seen a lot of developments over these two past two years, not the least a new president. So I would say that in only two years, I think most of us today think quite differently about academic freedom and what issues are at stake with academic freedom now than we did two years ago.

Natalie von der Lehr 06:16
I get the sense that there is more urgency to the topic.

Linda Wedlin 06:19
Yes, definitely more urgency. One of the things I think we have seen in the US is that when things start to move, it moves fast. And things can really be destroyed quickly. And also things that we have taken for granted, I think, for a long time, and that we see the vulnerability of even Harvard and other elite universities that we have felt they're somewhat untouched, but they're not, and I think that has framed a lot more people's thinking today. And that we need to actively think more about how we can protect that and try to prevent that from happening elsewhere. And also, of course, what to, how to help with what is already happening.

Natalie von der Lehr 07:08
The event "A Week on Academic Freedom" is a joint initiative by the research program Democracy and Higher Education, Higher Education and Research as Objects of Study and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. All events take place in Uppsala between the 20th and 23rd of October 2025, and the program can be found on the website of Uppsala University and SCAS. You can also listen to the SCAS Talks Spotlight podcast episode "Academic Freedom", which was published in December 2023, and which highlights some of the discussions from the previous event.

Natalie von der Lehr 07:42
This is an episode now, that we are recording today within the theme "Knowledge Epistemes, Universities". So what role does academia, or maybe knowledge and universities, if we want to stick to the theme, play in a democratic society?

Linda Wedlin 08:01
I think they play multiple roles. I think the one that we most often see in the debate, I saw a debate article just the other day in "Dagens Industri" calling for, you know, we need to rebuild Swedish higher education to be able to contribute to knowledge and innovation. And innovation is a commonly used word in the policy documents, and that universities contribute to society by being a provider of knowledge and creating innovation, helping to create innovation. And that's, of course, true, but I think it's only a small part of what academia and universities do for democratic societies. I think one of our more fundamental, perhaps, role is, we provide the means and the methods to assess what knowledge is trustworthy, what knowledge we can rely on, and what knowledge is, in a sense, useful for us. So we provide principles and mechanisms and also procedures to construct knowledge, but also to understand and evaluate science and knowledge and knowledge claims, not the least, to help form, you know, the idea in society, what knowledge can we actually trust? And I think the importance of this, of course, this goes back to the scientific methods, the methodologies that we, that we stand for, but it also goes back to the universities, the openness and our fundamental practices and principles to discuss, to test ideas and to try ideas, but also to criticize each other constructively, of course. But the kind of continuous assessment and scrutiny of knowledge that the universities also provide, I think, is fundamental. And this is vital, of course, for decision making in a democratic society. We rely on having sort of a shared knowledge, reasonably shared knowledge that we agree on for our decisions. We have professional organizations. We have public bodies that develop and take care of this knowledge and help develop this into policy and into decision making, which is an important part of a democratic society. But what we also do in the university is to educate our citizens, and we educate democratic citizens, in a sense. In a society, we also need to have people who can take care of that knowledge that is produced. So our students go into jobs in public and private sector and in all kinds of areas of life. And as such, they, of course, they continue to provide knowledge, but also continuously assess and consume knowledge. And as such, they also need to be able to evaluate what knowledge claims are trustworthy and how to sort in that. So fundamentally, it's about trust in knowledge, I think, and we provide that on both sides, so to speak, both through the citizens that we educate and through the decision making procedures. I think we also, in some sense, have a fundamental role to play in shaping the democratic conversation, if you wish, or keeping to the academic ideals of having the argument in focus, and knowing how to construct arguments, what knowledge to build on, how to put that together into new facts, into new arguments, to keep a kind of a fact based debate, I think it's also one of our important roles. And I think that role is actually increasingly important with what we see today with fake news and all kinds of contestations of facts and knowledge, and also with the developing AI technologies. We need even more to stick to and develop our principles for how do we assess what is true and what is not true and what knowledge to build on.

Natalie von der Lehr 12:07
I also think what you said about critically being able to discuss and to assess, I think that is very important that you just don't take things for given and true.

Linda Wedlin 12:17
Yes, exactly.

Natalie von der Lehr 12:18
But then at the same time that you can trust also the knowledge that is produced at the universities.

Linda Wedlin 12:23
Yeah

Natalie von der Lehr 12:24
So it's sort of a balance of both trusting, but then also being critical and being able to discuss openly.

Linda Wedlin 12:31
Yeah, I think so. I mean, the academic system, just like the democratic system or any other system, is not a perfect system in any way, there are problems with that, but upholding that and developing those systems, I think, is very important to try to keep that balance between trust and scrutiny.

Natalie von der Lehr 12:52
Nowadays, I mean, it's a hot topic, of course, academic freedom, with everything that we see going on in the world. But let's dive a little bit into your research then. Academic freedom is one of your overarching research interests, and one aspect that you have been looking at is how individual and institutional academic freedom are interconnected. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

Linda Wedlin 13:15
So when we talk about academic freedom, we usually think that it consists of two main parts. So one part is the sort of individual academic freedom that we hear about, freedom to research the topics of your own choice with your chosen methods and to publish your results as you see fit, essentially. So the idea that individual researchers are free from interference and other considerations, essentially. So that's one part. The second part is what we usually refer to as institutional autonomy, and that is more related to aspects of the university or the organization, organizing of knowledge and their relationship between the university and other interests. In Sweden, foremost, that has been focused on the role of the state and how should universities be organized, what is the relation between the state. And that's also currently an issue for discussion, the organizational forms of the university, essentially, should they be government agencies or not, is an example of that. So these two elements, or parts of the academic freedom are discussed almost separately, and that has partly historical roots. If you look at the discussions on academic freedom in the United States, it's very much focused on the individual academic freedom, and also ties closely there to elements of free speech. In Sweden and most of Europe, on the other hand, we have mainly focused the discussion on institutional linkages and institutional autonomy and linkages to the states and the state governments. And this, of course, has historical roots, and I know you had a talk, a pod with Johan Östling that talks about these historical roots, and he is very good at explaining those roots and why it looks looks like this. But we tried to say, I work now with colleagues to try to explore, well, we also need to see how these are sort of related. And what does it mean? Can you have one and not the other? How do they sort of interplay? So we tried to say that we explore different models to organize universities, and say that, well, in order for this to work as a whole, so that you allow freedom for both the individual and the institution, it depends on how you organize and what you do internally at the university. So we explore different models here. What is the bureaucratic model? How does that allow for freedom or hinder freedom? The management model, how does that interplay with ideas of freedom, and also the collegial model that is also prominent in many university systems, not least the Swedish ones, and how does this interplay with freedom? So we tried to show there that the collegiate steering principles and the collegiate model for organizing is needed in order to have a link and assure that individual freedom and institutional freedoms both support a full academic freedom. So it means that the institution of the university has to organize in order for individual freedom to actually be realized, but it's also so that the individual has obligations to serve the collective, to serve the university, in order to also protect both the institutional and individual freedoms.

Natalie von der Lehr 16:37
Do you have an example from your studies or from your own research?

Linda Wedlin 16:42
Let's take if you have a very bureaucratic organizing of a university. The bureaucratic model is based on rule following is the logic, essentially, so you have a set of rules, and your individuals in the organizations should follow those rules. And that's a very efficient and it's very good principle for certain types of decisions in a university or in other organizations. But when it comes to organizing the knowledge part of what we do, rule following doesn't really work, because we are professionals, and you can't really set rules for how to do research. I mean, there are broader rules, but not in a specific setting of what to do. So the rule following logic doesn't quite work if you think about academic decisions, then it doesn't allow freedom, in a sense, because the ideal is that you just do what you're told or follow the rules that are set. So there we need the collegial system to organize the decisions that concern the epistemic or the sort of knowledge based decisions that we have to make about what programs to give or how to give a program, or what's the content of a particular program, or how a particular research program should be run. It's very hard to do that with very bureaucratic forms of decision making.

Natalie von der Lehr 18:13
Yeah, then it's harder to go by the rule book than to sit and discuss.

Linda Wedlin 18:18
Yes. And also, if you need knowledge. I mean, the idea of the bureaucratic system is that you don't really need knowledge of the actual topic at hand in order to make decisions, because you can just follow a rule. But that doesn't - in a professional organization and in research organization - you really need knowledge of what does it mean to do research, or what is actually happening in a teaching situation in order to be able to decide what do you need particular knowledge of a subject, in order to decide what exact topics should be included in a course or in an educational program. You cannot just follow a rule. You need the knowledge of the context and the topic.

Natalie von der Lehr 19:04
How much do external factors like funding, the research bill, and all these things surrounding the university affect this kind of decisions?

Linda Wedlin 19:16
Well, of course, that has a big impact, I would say. A lot of the decisions made within the iniversity, of course funding decisions is always, that that sets the frames for what we can do. But there is also a discussion there. Some argue that it's being increasingly directed, that funding is being increasingly directed. In this year's research bill, there was a long list of specific subject areas that are to be prioritized. And of course, that has direct implications for what universities can decide about and do decide about. So it varies, I think that influences a lot the framing of what we do and some ofthe major decisions in the university, but it has very little effect on sort of the individual you know, me going into a classroom and what to teach and how to teach, that is very decoupled from those kinds of outside events. But then, of course, in our teaching and also in our research, of course, we are, as individuals, continuously engaged in discussions outside the university, or when we go out to interview people, for instance, interview managers or whoever we work with. In our empirical work, we are constantly in discussion with people outside and what issues are they interested in, to explore what is needed, where is knowledge needed, etc. So, but that's a different type then of influence, I think, because it's more grounded in our interest in finding solutions or finding questions out there in society, and what's what's going on. What are the topics people are interested in right now that we can perhaps help to solve.

Natalie von der Lehr 21:05
Exactly. That's also something I was thinking about. I mean, you have these external factors around you that somehow influence how you work. But then what is your role as a researcher in society, really?

Linda Wedlin 21:18
I think we have an important role there to play, not least for what I said before, to try to represent this knowledge based view of things, and to actually provide knowledge and facts into discussions that sometimes in the public go wild and are not necessarily anchored in what we actually know about what's going on. So there, we as researchers have an important role in society, I think, and I think many researchers do make great efforts to do that, to talk to journalists when we get questions, or even to write for public newspapers is one way to do that as well, but it's sometimes hard. And increasingly, I think we've also seen examples where the current atmosphere is harsh. It can be harsh to get into public debate on certain issues. We know of researchers who publicly went out and said, I'm not doing this research anymore because I'm being threatened and I'm not taking that. That was during the pandemic. So that is worrying, I think. And then we're back to the issue of academic freedom, right?

Natalie von der Lehr 22:27
Yeah, of course. So then circling back to the question about democracy and the bigger picture, we keep on going back to that. What is at stake when academic freedom is under attack?

Linda Wedlin 22:38
I think a lot of things are at stake. But what I tried to say before, and I think here again, the US developments illustrate quite clearly that it's not so much the, perhaps, the individual cases of threats to academic freedom, like the very public and loud struggle between Harvard and the US president, for instance. I mean that it's problematic in itself, but what I see in the US context is more, which I find more worrying, in a sense, in the long term, is the systematic erosion of trust in knowledge. And it's not just the attacks on Harvard. It's attacks more generally, or more fundamentally, on the idea of knowledge based decision making. Not only eroding or keeping funding from the elite universities, but withdrawing funding from particular topic areas, withdrawing funding from underdeveloped regions and schools and libraries that need support in order to really take a place in the societies where there is no other funding for these kinds of institutions. A systematic, more direct attack on substance, on the content of knowledge, by forbidding or red flagging certain words for research that cannot be used or taking out books from public libraries on certain topics. And I mean, all this combined is, I think, an undermining or a threat to the idea of knowledge and free access to knowledge as a democratic right in a society. And I think that systematic erosion of trust in knowledge is worrying, very worrying. It means, I think, in the long run, a subsequent, or runs the risk of subsequently spiraling this distrust in decision making and continued distrust in universities and essentially the democratic system as a whole.

Natalie von der Lehr 24:39
So you have been a short term researcher in residence at SCAS two times, most recently during the spring of 2025. What was your experience of the mulit- and interdisciplinary research environment here at the Collegium?

Linda Wedlin 25:03
I have only good experiences. I have to say, it's a privilege. Both times I've been here, it feels like a big privilege to come here, to be able to meet and talk to and learn from scholars around the world, first of all, it's very international. And also on topics that I would not have dreamed of to discuss had I not been here, and that I didn't necessarily think beforehand that I could add to or find an interest in. But it's fascinating to listen to the other scholars here, to talk to them and to learn about other subjects, often quite far from my own. I'm constantly surprised to find the kind of resonance that I can find in my own work, in talking to these people. So certainly inspiring. But also, I would say it has a great impact on my work too, although not necessarily as a particular line or as a particular reference, but more generally in the broader thinking of what is important and where things fit in, and how other people may approach a topic or a question or a problem that we have. So I find it even though it's very exclusive in the sense that it's small, and I know that there are a lot more applicants than there are positions, obviously, so it's exclusive in that sense, but I find it to be a truly inclusive environment once you're here.

Natalie von der Lehr 26:31
What is it like to be a short term researcher here at SCAS? Most fellows come for an academic year or a term. How was it, then, to be here for a month?

Linda Wedlin 26:42
You just float in and as part of the of the collective, I think, right from the start. So, so that's what I mean a little bit with Inclusive too, that it's very easy to come in and be part of it. Of course, I always wish that I could, could stay longer while I'm here. The benefits of the short stay, I think, is, I mean, apart from getting a temporary pause from the everyday academic hustle in terms of administration, teaching and all that other duties, I connec it a lot with, with joy time to think, which is not to be underestimated, I think, in today's academia, which tends to be quite high pace. So I think time to think is important inspiration. Generally, a lot of positive energy. It serves, at least to me, it serves the purpose of give a glimpse of, I think, what I perceive as the core of academic work, the community, and the focus on the talking and discussing and really getting into ideas, and not the perhaps sometimes very narrow minded focus on a particular method or a particular variable in a model or something like that that we may discuss in our disciplinary seminars. But here to actually try to pay attention to the broader ideas and get a chance to discuss that with, which I think is core to academia. And in that sense, these institutes provide kind of boiled down essence of that core, I think.

Natalie von der Lehr 28:13
Thank you very much for joining me here in the studio.

Linda Wedlin 28:16
Thank you for having me.

Natalie von der Lehr 28:23
And thank you for listening to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. In this episode, I have talked to Linda Wedlin, Professor of Business Studies at Uppsala University, and program director for the multidisciplinary research program Democracy and Higher Education at Uppsala University. And we have talked about academic freedom, both in a broader perspective and also about her own research on the connection of individual and institutional academic freedom. And this was the second episode in our theme "Knowledge, Epistemes, Universities". In the previous episode within this theme, we heard Johan Östling, Professor of History at Lund University, on "The University as a History of Knowledge". And this was episode number 64. SCAS Talks features a broad variety of topics, which is a reflection of the multi- and interdisciplinary research environment at the collegium. We are sure that there is something of interest for everyone. Tune in, find your favorite topic or surprise yourself with something new. And as always, we are very happy if you can recommend SCAS Talks to your colleagues and friends. Subscribe to us and you won't miss any new content. SCAS Talks is available on Podbean, Apple podcasts, Spotify and most podcast apps. I would like to thank Linda Wedlin once again for talking to me, and thanks to you for listening. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai