Academic Freedom, Analysis, and the Code of Professional Conduct

Despite nursing’s move into higher education, academic freedom has received little attention within the literature. After discussing the concept of academic freedom, this paper argues that there is a potential tension between academic freedom and the requirement to educate student nurses who are fit for practice. One way in which this tension might be revealed is in the marking of student assignments. We ask the question – how should nurse educators mark an essay which is sufficiently analytical but reaches moral conclusions that lie outside the Code of Professional Conduct? We argue that despite an understandable temptation to penalise such an essay, invoking the Code of Professional Conduct to do so, no penalty should be applied, and academic freedom for students within higher education should be encouraged. This is because first, academic freedom is a good in itself especially as it allows unconventional and unpalatable conclusions to be discussed and rebutted, and second, applying a penalty on these grounds is necessarily inconsistent.