Academic Freedom in Iran's Higher Education System

Academic freedom is one of the fundamental principles governing higher education systems, which has a long background in universities of the world. Scientific freedom is a relative concept. Whenever it comes to speaking of relativism, the meaning of the concepts should be examined in social structures and context. For this reason, a permanent and universal method is not used, but rather it should be investigated in the setting of the needs and requirements of time and place. The idea of using a universal project in this field has faded away and should be replaced by cultural and local ideas. The concept of scientific freedom is highly influenced by the cultural beliefs of societies. Therefore the general purpose of this paper is to study the scientific freedom of higher education in Iran. The statistical population included faculty members of universities and institutes of higher education as well as scientific experts of this field, 13 of them were purposefully selected for deep interviews. The method of adjusting participants and reviewing colleagues was used for validity of the tools. Open and axial coding has been used for data analysis. The findings of the research included five dimensions of scientific freedom (challenges, strategies, prerequisites, requirements, and extents of academic freedom), 17 main categories and 148 conceptual propositions (sub field) whose relationships between them were also drawn in the research model.