By Robert Carpino
The SCCE’s 2016 Higher Education Conference in Baltimore kicks off with a bang! Delving deep into corruption and scandal aka “the New Jersey way of doing things” as John Hughes JD refers to in his riveting session on finding the balance between government ethics and academic freedom at Rutgers University, I’m very much reminded why I enjoy these conferences so much. With humor and candor in a “you just can’t make this stuff up” narrative setting, we as compliance professionals share our “war stories” integrating legal precedent, regulatory requirements, remedial response and actual experience from a lessons learned perspective.
So, and getting back to our session at hand, does academic freedom actually exist? From a compliance perspective, yes but only to the extent the compliance officer is able to keep the university and the professor off the front page of the newspaper. As they say there’s more truth in jest than not but some considerations include -is the university subject to state laws; academic freedom is not entrenched in the law; state statutes can dramatically affect academic freedom at State colleges and universities, is the professor tenured? The bottom line is that one size fits all solutions do not work for academia and there must be some flexibility.
On a side note, the venue is terrific with a waterfront view of the Baltimore inner harbor. Thanks for a terrific session and am enthusiastically looking forward to the rest of the conference!