University – humanities and social sciences – the state

Abstract

With the Great Charter of Universities as a point of departure, the author discusses the four tasks of the university: (1) search for the truth (2) education which supplies students them with the latest scientific knowledge and the skills that knowledge justifies (3) student formation in the spirit of tolerance, pluralism and openness to dialogue, (4) popularizing scientific knowledge. For their accomplishment to be unconstrained (by ideological, religious, xenophobic or economic limitations), as well as effective and ethical, the university must be free and autonomous. Nowadays humanities and social sciences are particularly exposed to factors that damage or hinder this autonomy and freedom, which is regrettably the case especially in countries that declare attachment to democratic values, yet trample them at the same time.

The author is very critical of the state’s policy of evaluating scholarly activities of universities based on converting scientific output into points. According to the author, this produces a greatly simplified and distorted picture of their achievements. What is more, it also encourages certain academics (for whom „survival” at a given institute or department is at stake) to engage in unethical behaviour: plagiarism of other people’s works, falsification of empirical research results, fabrication of findings, guest authorship, ghost authorship. One of the major solutions aimed to counter such unethical practices is to depart from bibliometric evaluation (via IF, H index) in favour of peer review. It is also necessary to implement new publishing practices, which would require replication of empirical studies, access to raw results provided by authors, as well as preregistration assessment of research projects so as to take works in which positive results were not obtained (thus failing to bear out the initial hypothesis) into consideration as well.