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 Sc

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.