Academics’ mental health has been undermined by the “cognitive dissonance” experienced when researchers dedicated to open inquiry find themselves working for closed institutions, Australian scholars have argued.
A new article blames academia’s rising mental health toll on universities’ refusal to allow staff to apply principles of academic inquiry to their own institutions.
“Values that an academic might seek…to uphold in one’s work – such as a commitment to reason, objectivity, public responsibility and the pursuit of knowledge – are routinely compromised, thwarted, trivialised or dismissed,” says the paper in the journal Social Alternatives.
