The Mail’s attack on universities is typical of a campaign denigrating those who dare to question BrexitAcademic freedom is the soil in which knowledge flourishes. The freedom to research,to follow where evidence leads, to argue, or to be challenged,to exchange ideas freely and to disseminate the results lie at the heart of academic life. Immanuel Kant captured the spirit that animates universities when he said that knowledge was a process in which human beings dared to know.
The distinguished advances in science and medicine over the past 250 years, along with the breakthrough understandings offered by social sciences and the humanities, and would have been impossible without this Enlightenment mindset. It is these freedoms,entrenched because of universities’ constitutional autonomy, that have allowed our civilisation to achieve what it has.
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Source: guardian.co.uk