The Supreme Court first affirmed the importance of academic freedom in 1957. Yet in subsequent cases, First Amendment precedent has displaced the concept of academic freedom to resolve disputes among competing interests on public campuses, primarily in favor of institutions. This paper draws on the concepts of path dependence and policy space to…

The Depression and the New Deal brought together a variety of conditions and social forces that set up a formative clash over the institution of professional journalism. At the heart of that fight was the rise of the American Newspaper Guild and its battle for control over the trusteeship of the freedom of the press. The experience in the news…

The classical conception of academic freedom associated with Wilhelm von Humboldt and the rise of the modern university has a quite specific cultural foundation that centres on the controversial mental faculty of "judgement". This article traces the roots of "judgement" back to the Protestant Reformation, through its heyday as the signature…

When people gathered last May for the commencement ceremony at the University of California at Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, they were greeted by chanting activists from the National Lawyers Guild and other left-wing groups. The university, protesters shouted, should fire John C. Yoo, a tenured professor who has taught at the law school…

When threatened with censorship, educators can call upon the National Coalition against Censorship (NCAC), a nonpartisan, nonprofit corporation uniting a broad range of professional, educational, artistic, labor, civil rights, and religious groups in their common conviction that freedom of thought, inquiry, and expression must be defended. NCAC…

In this paper, we focus on the relationship between studying university mathematics and the "thinking styles" of both undergraduate and postgraduate mathematics students. A cross-sectional quantitative study (N = 238) was conducted in a large Greek university, identifying the thinking styles of second, third and fourth year…

Education in a free society requires that students are provided with a provocative and thoughtful curriculum and learning materials that will prepare them to function as productive adult citizens in a diverse and changing world. Textbooks and curricular materials that engage the rising generation in the study of social ideas, problems, and issues…

This study explores the implementation of a Holocaust curriculum, designed for Latvian schools through the method of curriculum deliberation, five years after its enactment. By exploring the complexity of implementation, the study provides a generative knowledge base for curriculum proposals, symposia, and other initiatives that seek to disrupt…

This September, public universities in Texas will be required to post on their Web sites detailed syllabi for all undergraduate courses, a curriculum vitae for each regular instructor, a departmental budget report for each course offered, and reports of student course evaluations. According to a new state law, all of this must be "accessible…

The paradigmatic values underlying British and German higher education emphasise personal growth, the wholeness of the individual, intellectual freedom and the pursuit of knowledge, which cumulatively can be viewed as a form of academic essentialism. However, these concepts were generated within a particular cultural and historical context which…

In this article, the author discusses the issues surrounding contingent faculty. Contingent faculty members are central to academe's future because prevailing logics of the market can confuse accountability with accession to any and all "customer" demands; faculty organizations can instead take the opportunity to hold academic managers and…

In another twist in the decades-long battle over evolution's status in public school science classrooms, state legislators are arguing that teachers have a right to raise doubts about that essential scientific theory as a matter of free speech. Similarly worded bills that attempt to protect the right of educators and students to present critiques…

In this article, the authors offer a more humanistic vision of educational community, one that is substantive in content yet flexible in its application to the diverse contexts in which American schooling occurs. In doing so, the authors turn specifically to the nonviolent philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and consider what a school…

The historic institution of tenure is rapidly becoming history. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has for almost a century advocated for tenure as the chief guarantor of a faculty member's academic freedom. But today tenure and academic freedom are viewed less and less as crucially intertwined. Academic freedom has widely…

Encouraging greater access to higher education for deserving students, regardless of their socio-economic status, and ensuring that curricula reflect the diversity of human experience have been longstanding priorities for higher education and thus for the Ford Foundation. However, in the wake of 9/11, the war in Iraq, and the war on terror, a…