UKLFI Charitable Trust held a webinar on Challenges to Academic Freedom with Professor Raphael Cohen Almagor, chaired by Natasha Hausdorff on 14 January 2025.
There has been a marked decline in academic freedom in the world, especially in the United Kingdom. In this lecture, Professor Cohen Almagor explains what academic freedom is and how it differs from freedom of expression. He will also discuss what is academic freedom, what kinds of pressures do academics face and to what extent do current trends regarding the commercialisation of research undermine fundamental academic principles such as academic freedom, integrity in research, openness, and serving the public interest?
To Watch on YouTube press HERE
More about the speakers:
Professor Raphael Cohen-Almagor is Chair in Politics, Founding Director of the Middle East Study Centre (MESC), University of Hull; Fellow at The Institute for Advanced Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Global Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS), Washington DC, and President of The Association for Israel Studies (AIS).
Raphael was the Yitzhak Rabin-Fulbright Visiting Professor at UCLA School of Law and Department of Communication; Visiting Professor at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University; Fellow at WWICS (twice); Distinguished Visiting Professor to the Faculty of Laws, University College London, and the 2023 Olof Palme Visiting Professor, Lund University, Sweden.
Raphael is the author of twenty books, most recently The Republic, Secularism and Security: France versus the Burqa and the Niqab (2022, Springer) and Resolving the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict: A Critical Study of Peace Mediation, Facilitation and Negotiations between Israel and the PLO (forthcoming CUP)
Natasha Hausdorff is a barrister at 6 Pump Court Chambers and a frequent speaker on International Law. She has a law degree from Oxford University, qualified as a solicitor at Skadden, and subsequently gained an LLM from Tel Aviv University, focussing on public international law and the law of armed conflict.
She clerked for Miriam Naor, President of Israel’s Supreme Court, and was a Fellow at Columbia Law School’s National Security Program. Natasha is legal director of UKLFI Charitable Trust.