GSIG’s PF&R Chair Matt Blomberg discusses a new outlook on PF&R and the importance of not only academic freedom but also responsibility.
Undoubtedly, at the start of 2021, goals for the new year began filling our to-do lists. We plan to work out more, eat healthier, spend more time with family and friends (albeit virtually), and concerning our academic profession as graduate students, write and publish more, and be the best student and instructor possible. These are worthy endeavors to pursue, yet the latter, especially, may be best served by a greater discussion of PF&R.
Professional freedom and responsibility, as outlined by AEJMC, endeavors that “free expression should be nurtured and protected at all levels, ethical behavior should be supported and promoted, media criticism and accountability should be fostered, racial, gender and cultural inclusiveness should be encouraged and recognized, public service contributions should be expected, and AEJMC programs and faculty should make every effort to ensure equal opportunity for students to enter student contests” (AEJMC, 2011). This to-do list of ethics may seem overwhelming or even unobtainable, yet, upon closer examination fits well into the two overarching categories of PF&R: freedom and responsibility.
As graduate students we should have the right and platform to speak, write and produce academic works freely, yet, as the latter post ampersand term alludes to, we are also duty-bound to a responsibility for ethical behavior, of criticism and self-examination of media, and of racial and gender inclusiveness, to name a few from the preceding list. Thus, we experience academic freedom on one side and responsibility on the other. This is
the pendulum that we will encounter daily as graduate students, a pendulum that our journalism students will also face in their professional careers.
Yet, we would be ill served to conceptualize these two as separate, mutually exclusive entities, bouncing up and down on the see-saw of our academic lives. Rather, as Wilkins (2011) writes, “Far from being dichotomous, these ideals should be viewed as connected to each other” (p. 813). The question is, how do we accomplish one along with the other? How do we focus on academic freedom but also our responsibility to others and what links them together? Wilkins recommends, one having empathy for others while remembering the norms of the discipline of journalism, such as “truthfulness, dignity and non- violence” in order, he states, to successfully “honor both the freedom to act and accept the responsibility of doing so as a central component of ethical professional work” (p. 811). This, I posit, is also a good prescription for those of us who study, research, and teach areas connected to journalism, and a worthy accomplishment for us in the new year.
