SNS Managing Director Anders Vredin Resigns

Today, the board of the Centre for Business and Policy Studies (SNS) announced that they have agreed with managing director Anders Vredin that he will resign his post as soon as a suitable replacement is found, and that the search for such a replacement is to start immediately. Media reports can be found here, here, here, here, here. Effectively this means that Vredin has been sacked.

Given the events of the last week or so, this development is expected. The affair, as well as my posts on the issue, started when Vredin issued a gag order for the (now former) SNS head of research, Laura Hartman when she wanted to respond to criticism of a report pointing to the weak empirical evidence for repeated claims that a long trend of privatisation of Swedish public services improves effectiveness, which led Hartman to resign. After that followed a storm of criticism of Vredin, further resignations and threats of such from all parts of the SNS leadership and scientific advisors. Vredin did a weak attempt to roll over publicly, but instead exposed himself as harbouring exactly the sort of lack of support of academic freedom and research integrity that critics acused him of having acted out of. The Swedish academic community in general has also reacted strongly against Vredin's actions. My posts on this process can be found here, here and here.

The decision of the board today was simply the only one they could make, lest SNS would very quickly have been history. It remains to be seen, however, if trust and confidence in SNS research can be rebuilt. At least for me, it will take quite a while of unquestionable behaviour before I can start to feel reasonably certain about results and reports coming out of SNS not being screened, edited and censored on other grounds than purely scientific ones. One thing one would like to see in that process is that SNS research is more systematically being exposed to critical scrutiny of the international scientific community, thus not primarily publishing reports in Swedish only, but base these on peer reviewed articles in established research journals.

The Philosophy of Hate Crime Symposium

On Monday and Tuesday the coming week, I and my colleague David Brax, will be hosting the 2nd European hate crime symposium, arranged within the EU project When Law and Hate Collide, on the theme The Philosophy of Hate Crime. The program of the symposium can be viewed here (click pic to enlarge):

During the two days of the symposium, a hand-picked collection of international scholars and experts on the underlying philosophical and ethical issues actualised by the phenomenon of hate crimes and the challenges of designing hate crime policy will present their views. They will, furthermore, discuss with us in the project basic such issues related to the challenge of designing an overarching European hate crime policy with regard to criminal law, monitoring, prevention and public awareness. The symposium will be documented by the University of Gothenburg TV and audiovisual department, for eventual broadcasting through Swedish TV and the internet.

During the symposium, you can follow the action on twitter, using the tag #H8Crime

While waiting for that, it may be of some interest to watch some of the footage done at our first symposium, held in Strasbourg this spring. Below, you find some of the presentations plus a part of the roundtable discussions we had with interested members of the European Parliament (this video has some image damage at the end, but the sound is clear all way through).

1. Anthony Mark Cutter & Keiran M Bellis: Introduction and overview of the European hate crime situation

2. Paul Iganski on what is bad about hate crime

3. Paul Gianassi on the UK law enforcement approach to hate crime

4. Alke Get on German hate crime policy

5. Nathan Hall on what hate crime is and may be

6. Sylvia Lancaster on the Sophie Lancaster hate crime case, and the issue of the scope of hate crime policy

7. Excerpt from roundtable discussion of hate crime, policy concerns and research needs with members of European Parliament

Seven Members of the SNS Board of Trustees Demand the Resignation of Managing Director, Anders Vredin

The sad circus of the inability of the leadership and management of the Centre for Business and Policy Studies (SNS) to stand up for elementary standards of scientific freedom and integrity against vested interests continues. My former posts on this affair are here and here.

Today, seven members of the SNS Board of Trustees – attached, among other things, to ensure that not even the proverbial wife of Caesar is suspected of things like the ones revealed in this affair – publish an article in my country's leading daily. They recount in astute terms the core of what this business is about, the faults committed, what is at stake for SNS and conclude by, in so many words, demanding the more or less immediate resignation of managing director Anders Vredin. Yesterday, Vredin made a sad attempt to put the toothpaste back into the tube, but as I described in my post on that, when reading what he actually says in that statement, it rather conveys the impression of a person that, albeit flagging academic credentials, a long time ago lost his moral compass when it comes to basic values of the research and scientific community.

The SNS board of trustees, it may be added, is no light collection of people. It hosts leading and very well-respected scholars and researchers in the academic fields often figuring in the projects of SNS, such as political economy and history of ideas – several of which are held in high regard, not least for their demonstrated high standards of integrity in relation to business and political interests.