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Academic Freedom

Brief Supports Academic Freedom in Research

The American Association of University Professors filed an amicus brief on October 26 with the Arizona Court of Appeals arguing that academic freedom to conduct research is essential to a vital university system and warrants protecting certain research records from disclosure. The case involves a lawsuit filed by the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, a “free market” legal foundation which is using public records requests in a campaign against climate science. 

Does Academic Freedom Have a Future?

Prognostications about the future of academic freedom will be informed best by the lessons of its past. And if there is any lesson to be learned from the AAUP’s first century, it is that academic freedom can never be taken for granted. While academic freedom is one of the foundations of greatness in the American higher education system, it has always been—and always will be—contested and vulnerable. Academic freedom must be fought for repeatedly, and there will be no final victory in the struggle.

The AAUP in the Digital Universe(ity)

The universe of the Internet is changing both the AAUP and the university—and it will continue to do so. The AAUP, an organization that once could focus primarily on matters of particular concern to the faculty, now finds that it must react to a much wider range of issues and address a wider population. Universities that once were able to solve many of their problems out of public sight now find that almost everything they do is subject to comment. The privilege of privacy has disappeared—for all of us.

The Changing Media and Academic Freedom

The media have been both enemies and allies of faculty in the fight for academic freedom during the past century.

The AAUP's 1915 Declaration of Principles: Conservative and Radical, Visionary and Myopic

Understanding the 1915 Declaration helps illuminate some of the current debates about academic freedom (such as the question of whether statements related to academic work are protected as extramural utterances).

Debating Academic Freedom in India

The authors of this article put forward what academic freedom is not and then argue how academic freedom gets defined in the context of twenty-first-century India.

A Review of Academic Freedom in African Universities through the Prism of the 1997 ILO/UNESCO Recommendation

This essay assesses the compliance of African universities with the ILO/UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel, based on its four indicators: institutional autonomy, individual rights and freedoms, institutional self-governance, and tenure.

Lost in Post-Cold War Transitions: The Limits of Freedom in Scholarship

Relying on a key conceptual distinction between “activism in scholarship” and “activism with scholarship,” this essay proposes a way to think about justifiable limits to freedom in scholarship, using as its example the field of “transitional justice” studies.

Free Space in the Academy

This essay advances the idea that freedom is the production of Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the “virtuality,” using several examples from South Africa and elsewhere.

Championing Academic Freedom at Rutgers: The Genovese Affair and the Teach-In of April 1965

This essay discusses Rutgers University's defense of the academic freedom of history professor Eugene D. Genovese, who made controversial remarks at a teach-in on the Vietnam War. 

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