Academic freedom is the glue that holds the university together, the principle that protects its educational mission. It is the principle that guarantees faculty members the right to speak and write as they please without interference from the university, the state, or the public. It is the principle that gives both students and faculty in the classroom the right to say whatever they believe is pertinent to the subject at hand. It is the principle that affirms there are no limits to what subjects and issues educational institutions may study, investigate, debate, and discuss. As Louis Menand writes in The Future of Academic Freedom, it "is not simply a kind of bonus enjoyed by workers within the system, a philosophical luxury universities could function just as effectively without. It is the key legitimating concept of the entire enterprise" (5).
From the outset academic freedom was vested simultaneously in individuals and in institutions. It was designed at once to protect the independence of disciplinary inquiry and to protect individuals from the exercise of political and economic power, including the power of those who pay professors' salaries. The first American efforts to define academic freedom at the turn of the century, as in John Dewey's 1902 essay "Academic Freedom," came at a time when academics
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All faculty members lose their academic freedom in a dictatorship, as faculty members did in Nazi Germany. The guarantees academic freedom offered were also widely abandoned in the United States during the 1950s, in the long postwar inquisition that culminated in the McCarthy period. As Ellen Schrecker demonstrates in No Ivory Tower, many progressive faculty members lost their jobs during this period and none were able to speak freely without fear of punishment. Academic freedom must thus be relearned and defended