The new challenge to academic freedom

Academics have developed principles and policies of academic freedom during the last century in order to protect intellectual inquiry from ideological and political interference. One recent academic freedom case is compared to several earlier in the century in order to illustrate how threats to academic freedom have changed in recent decades. Most importantly, threats now come primarily from within rather than outside academe. Even the best academic freedom policies provide scant protection when an institution fails to enforce them and when the professorate fails to insist that they be enforced. Threatened individuals must then turn to external parties for protection. However, such appeals for outside assistance invite the very political interference that academic freedom policies were originally developed to deter. Academics thus risk losing what they collectively fail to protect.Based on a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Chattanooga, Tennessee, April 3, 1993.Co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society.