Social Responsibility over Academic freedom: Emphasizing Ethics and Codes of Conduct geared for a Scholar’s duties towards science, society and the education system in Twenty-First Century Science

This paper explores the twin issues of Academic Freedom and Social Responsibility among researchers
and scholars, and gaps in theory and praxis as well. It also discusses the current application of ethics
and objectivity in science, and discusses the need for change so as to highlight a scholar’s duties
towards science, society and the education system. It also takes vital clues from variousfields of social
sciences such as Sociology and Anthropology besides other sciences and investigates their relevance
to the tenets of this paper. It summarizes key issues in the debate between Academic Freedom and
Social Responsibility and emphasizes the need for Social Responsibility while underlining the dangers
of unbridled Academic freedom to society and the education system. We link this paper to our earlier
publications including Historiography by Objectives, Principles of Twenty-first Century Historiography,
and Anthropological Historiography, besides the sociology of science and Anthropological pedagogy,
and see how this can have a bearing on Ethics and Codes of Conduct in science in general. Such ethics
and codes of conduct are currently patchy at best, and must be consolidated and reinforced, and must
emphasize a scholar’s duty towards science, society and the education system. Thus, academic
freedom cannot override social responsibility, or be contrary to it. Such approaches are likely to raise
eyebrows and face stiff resistance from vested interests and cabals around the world but these need
to be encountered and surmounted in the interest of scholarship and science. This also becomes
necessary because most academicians hold paid positions, and definitions of social responsibilities
must be preferably driven by university mandates. Needless to say, movements emphasizing social
duties must be extended to all fields of the social sciences, besides the physical sciences, and must
become one of the important movements of the Twenty-first century.