On the process by which decisions are taken in the University, Intersecting Sets has this quote from Cornford’s sardonic Microcosmographia Academica (html | pdf):

No one can tell the difference between a Liberal Conservative Caucus and a Conservative Liberal one. There is nothing in the world more innocent than either. The most dare-devil action they ever take is to move for the appointment of a Syndicate ‘to consider what means, if any, can be discovered to prevent the Public Washing of Linen, and to report, if they can see straight, to the Non-placets.’ The result is the formation of an invertebrate body, which sits for two years, with growing discomfort, on the clothes-basket containing the linen. When the Syndicate is so stupefied that it has quite forgotten what it is sitting on, it issues three minority reports, of enormous bulk, on some different subject. The reports are referred by the Council to the Non-placets, and by the Non-placets to the wastepaper basket. This is called ‘reforming the University from within.’ (pp 6-7)

In a similar vein:

The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent is that you should not now do an admittedly right action for fear you, or your equally timid successors, should not have the courage to do right in some future case, which, ex hypothesi, is essentially different, but superficially resembles the present one. Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time. (pp 14-15)

That being the case, I wonder how Associate Degree’s 25 Predictions for the University of the Future are ever going to happen?

On Cobh’s misappropriation of Australia Day, if you can’t forget Skippy, then you can’t forget Lassie either. From Strange Brew via the Language Log:

Language Log adds a further joke – I wonder if Simon Fodden would call this a lapdog?

In today’s Irish Times obituary of Robert Novak (pictured left, on the cover of his autobiography), there is an excellent summary of the Judith Miller affair. From the obituary (with added links):

Conservative US columnist revealed identity of CIA officer

… Six years ago, he crowned his long record of controversial disclosures by revealing the name and position of Valerie Plame, a clandestine CIA officer involved with intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. Her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former US diplomat, had enraged the Bush administration by publicly questioning the White House’s misuse of such intelligence to justify its invasion of Iraq.

Publishing Plame’s name broke federal law and there was a ferocious hunt for Novak’s source, which he stoutly refused to name. This witch-hunt eventually brought prison sentences for a New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, and for Lewis Libby, the chief of staff of former US vice-president Dick Cheney.

Under continuing pressure, Novak told all to a federal grand jury, naming the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, and US president George W Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove as his sources. He justified his action on the basis that both officials had already identified themselves. No one else was prosecuted, but it was not Novak’s finest hour. …

There are also excellent obits in the Economist, New York Times (also here), Time, Wall Street Journal and on the BBC website. Thus ends another chapter in a fascinating case study on journalist source privilege: both Miller and Novak published stories with Libby as the main source, but there the similarities end: although Miller declined to name her source until after she had served 85 days in jail and Libby had given her permission to do, Novak did eventually name Libby without going to jail and without his permission. It graphically illustrates the difference between conceiving of the privilege as attaching to the journalist (as Miller did in her assertion of the privilege even after Libby had outed himself and given her permission to name him) and conceiving of it as attaching to the source (as Novak did by claiming that he was no longer bound by it after Libby had outed himself). Despite what the Supreme Court said in Mahon Tribunal v Keena [2009] IESC 64 (31 July 2009) (also here (pdf)) therefore an important distinction which can make a great deal of difference on the facts of any given case, and the sooner the law recognises both species of the privilege, the better.

In his column in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post, Vincent Browne (to coin a phrase, the éminence terrible of Irish journalism, pictured left) gives a guarded welcome to the Defamation Act, 2009, and pours cold water on the recent Supreme Court decision about journalist source privilege. But that’s all en passant to the main event, in which he recants his youthful enthusiasm for press freedom:

Media caught in headlights of official orthodoxy

Twenty-three years ago, I was an enthusiast for press freedom. … But, in the meantime, perversely, I have become a good deal less ardent about press freedom, and I have dropped the conceit about the press being the defenders of the weak against corporate, political and other centres of power.

I have come to believe that the media is the problem – or a large part of it – and not the solution. The media is a centre of corporate power, and it is inextricably tied into the other centres of corporate power. … press freedom … essentially … is freedom for the owners and/or controllers of the media and freedom to propagate an ideology that, basically, is destructive of the ordinary person, or at least their chances of being equal members of society, aside from a formal legalistic sense.

Ever the controversialist, since the views he espoused twenty-seven years ago are on the way to becoming more orthodox, the restless Browne now feels the need to move on. But, characteristically, he overstates his case. It is ironic that he is taking advantage of the very freedom he denounces to make his point. Indeed, I agree that he has a point about the corporate power of the big media outlets. However, proper – and actively enforced – regulation about cross-ownership and pluralism would go a long way to meeting his objections, without having to recant his youthful enthusiasm for an important democratic right – after all, for all its structural flaws, if the media cannot seek to hold the powerful to account to to make the kinds of points Browne himself does on a regular basis, who will?

Or not, if you’re five:

A little while I ago, I blogged about the deservedly-popular site Typography for Lawyers; now a story by Joel Alas in the Financial Times (hat tip: The Faculty Lounge) brings news of lawyers for typography, or more to the point, potential litigation about the most (in)famous font type in the world – Times New Roman. First, some background: on Typography for Lawyers, Matthew explains that the Times New Roman font

has been with us since 1932, when the Times of London (the newspaper) hired font designer Stanley Morison to create a new text font, which was based on historical Dutch designs. Because the font was being used in a prominent daily paper, it quickly became very popular when it was released for general commercial use the following year.

Despite the success of the font, legal wrangling was not far behind (is it ever?) …

The FT story now brings news of more potential legal wrangling – Mike Parker, one of the world’s leading experts on type, claims that in 1904 William Starling Burgess created the font we now know as Times New Roman. Parker’s evidence is twofold. First, he has a series of 1904 drawings for font Number 54 signed by Burgess, prepared by him for the Lanston Monotype company to be used for company documents at the Burgess shipyard in Marblehead, Massachusetts. The order was later abandoned, but the font must have intrigued Lanston, since there seem to be subsequent real world examples of it, giving rise to Parker’s second piece of evidence: the brass pattern plate (above left) bearing a large capital letter B. This technology was not used after 1915 (long before the 1932 release of Morrison’s font), and Parker claims that the plate is of a Times New Roman capital B. As he tells the story, the font was subsequently rediscovered by Frank Hinman Pierpont who passed it on to Stanley Morison; he, in turn, relied on it to meet the difficult challenge of redesigning the font for the Times; and the final version was drawn for him and under his direction by Victor Lardent, a designer and draftsman at the Times. The rest, as they say, is history … Interestingly, according to the FT piece,

Morison never took credit for designing the font himself, but claims only to have “excogitated” it. Years after its release, he wrote of the only font that he is credited with designing: “It has the merit of not looking as if it had been designed by somebody in particular.”

Parker first made his claims about the role possibly played by William Starling Burgess in the history of the Times New Roman font in 1994, and the FT has picked up the story now because Parker has just released Starling, a new Times-like font, based on what he sees as the superior 1904 Burgess sketches. Moreover, according to the FT piece,

along with the Starling roman font, Parker has released a matching italic series. He says that in 1904 Burgess drew just five letters of an italic to accompany Number 54 before abandoning typography for aviation. Parker has taken it upon himself to finish the job and has spent the past few years carefully drawing the graceful slanted figures of a rich italic.

“Morison’s was a dog of an italic,” he says of the existing Times New Roman version, which he accepts was a Morison-Lardent creation. “It didn’t match the roman at all. It was a standard Monotype italic.” Now Parker has set out to rectify this by giving the world’s most popular font – no matter its name or creator – a deserving italic. Aside from the five inspirational characters, this is wholly Parker’s own work and, remarkably, it is his maiden typographic creation. Throughout his decades in the industry, Parker remained a creative administrator and researcher but was never himself a typographer.

And this, perhaps, is the real force behind Parker’s enthusiasm for the William Starling Burgess story: it has given him, for the first time, the chance to create a font of his own.

All of this raises the question, of course, not merely of whether there is going to be any litigation about this, but whether we can use the new Starling font, or whether it is so similar to Times that it comes within Matthew’s advice on Typography for Lawyers to avoid Times when-ever and where-ever possible?

By way of update to my post on Legal Citation, I note that Geoff McLay on 15 Lambton Quay (the Faculty Blog for the Victoria University of Wellington Faculty of Law) writes:

The proposed uniform legal style guide for New Zealand

A group of academics, editors and publishers led by myself and Justice Chambers has been developing a uniform New Zealand legal style guide. We hope that the guide will adopted by all New Zealand publishers, law schools and courts. We have released a consultation version. Any comments would be gratefully received and may be sent to Geoff McLay. The project has been supported by the New Zealand Law Foundation.

Will there be lots of full stops? Given that the dominant US style is the Blue Book, perhaps we should call any New Zealand style guide the All Black Book?

Bonus link: Gary Slapper has an entertaining Summer Quiz in today’s Times.

As universities grapple with reducing budgets, their autonomy from government comes increasingly under scrutiny, and traditional academic values such as academic freedom come under threat. As a consequence, a recent story in Times Higher Education concerning a recent attempt to define academic freedom in detail, makes for fascinating reading (with added links):

What is freedom? Choosing your v-c

By Rebecca Attwood

Proposal is key part of plan for European ‘Magna Charta’ on scholars’ rights.

Academics would be given the right to appoint their own vice-chancellors under plans for a Europe-wide definition of academic freedom. The proposals have been tabled by Terence Karran, a senior academic in the Centre for Educational Research and Development at the University of Lincoln …

One of the cornerstones of the proposals is the need for academic self-governance. Setting out his plans in the journal Higher Education Policy, Dr Karran says: “To guarantee academic freedom, academic staff must … be able to determine who shall serve as rector. … Where possible, the rector should be appointed from within the university by a democratic process with the support of the majority of academic staff. … Where the appointment is external … academic staff should have the major role in determining (it).”

So far as I know, very few universities in fact choose their Rector (President, Provost, Vice Chancellor, head honcho, great leader) in this way; I think that the only one in Ireland that does is TCD, where I work. The Irish Times recently reported that discussions on “whether the college has the traditional election among academics or whether there will be a more modern search and selection process” are “already concentrating minds at Trinity”. Against that backdrop, I find it interesting that something very like TCD’s “traditional” process is being seen as part of a radical modern proposal to safeguard academic freedom.

It is an important proposal, but there is more to Karran’s piece than this; rather, it is a comprehensive vision of academic freedom. In Ireland, it is secured by section 14 of the Universities Act, 1997 (also here); the Magna Charta Universitatum was founded by the University of Bologna and the European University Association (EUA) and opened for signature by universities in 1988 on the occasion of the 900th anniversary of the University of Bologna; and section 4 of Recommendation 1762 (2006) concerning Academic freedom and university autonomy (reaffirmed last month) the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe provides:

4. In accordance with the Magna Charta Universitatum, the Assembly reaffirms the right to academic freedom and university autonomy which comprises the following principles:

4.1. academic freedom in research and in training should guarantee freedom of expression and of action, freedom to disseminate information and freedom to conduct research and distribute knowledge and truth without restriction;

4.2. the institutional autonomy of universities should be a manifestation of an independent commitment to the traditional and still essential cultural and social mission of the university, in terms of intellectually beneficial policy, good governance and efficient management;

4.3. history has proven that violations of academic freedom and university autonomy have always resulted in intellectual relapse, and consequently in social and economic stagnation;

4.4. high costs and losses, however, could also ensue if universities moved towards the isolation of an “ivory tower” and did not react to the changing needs of societies that they should serve and help educate and develop; universities need to be close enough to society to be able to contribute to solving fundamental problems, yet sufficiently detached to maintain a critical distance and to take a longer-term view.

Building on earlier work, Karran now proposes a working definition of academic freedom for the European Union states which could form the basis for a European Magna Charta Libertatis Academicae; his proposals cover not only the protections for teaching, research and tenure, but also extend to academic self-governance, and are drafted in such detail as to determine boundaries and accompanying duties. He concludes:

… the European Union already has a Magna Charta Universitatum, [and] establishing a Magna Charta Libertatis Academicae would constitute a desirable next step. Such a document would protect the professional rights of staff, and raise vocational standards, while providing enhanced protection for students from abuses of academic freedom. … More important than this, however, is the recognition by academics that the protection of academic freedom is something in which they should become actively involved. There is a tendency, given both the ever-growing pressures to teach more students and write more articles, for university staff to ignore the process whereby, via legislation or legerdemain, academic freedom is being slowly but irrevocably eroded. Academic freedom brings rights and responsibilities — a major one of which is to ensure that such rights are there to be used and enjoyed by future generations of scholars. Society at large will only sanction the granting of particular freedoms to a specific professional group if it is persuaded that these freedoms produce net benefits. Hence it is incumbent on today’s academics to voice, with passion and persuasion, the reasons for the continuance of academic freedom. Neglecting such a responsibility will surely impoverish academics, academia and the free society in which they operate.