From NZSkeptics: New Zealand’s Education Act 1989 states that academic freedom means freedom ‘within the law to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas and to state controversial or unpopular opinions’. In theory one is protected but in practice there is no protection from ad hominem, scurrilous and unwarranted attacks on one’s integrity and professionalism, as I have recently discovered.
Linda Bryder is a professor of history at the University of Auckland. As well as the author of ‘A History of the “Unfortunate Experiment” at National Women’s Hospital’she has written ‘Below the Magic Mountain: The Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-Century Britain’ and ‘A Healthy Country: Essays on the Social History of Medicine in New Zealand’. She is on the editorial board of a number of international health and history journals including Hygeia Internationalis and is a council member of the New Zealand Historical Association.
[audio:https://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/wp-content/upload/2010/08/Linda-Bryder.mp3]