Academic freedom and its impact on scholarship are considered in this University of Toledo's Honors Day address. As introduction, some significant points of the University's history that portray its commitment to academic freedom are cited, along with trends affecting academic freedom in the United States as a whole. It is suggested that academic freedom protects the right to explore controversial issues honestly, in the classroom and the laboratory. Two decades ago concern was mainly with loyalty oaths and speaker bans, measures adopted by the state legislatures in the 1950s to allay public apprehension about subversive activities on U.S. campuses. After the Kent State students were killed, one threat to academic freedom was legislation calling for dismissal of state university professors who were convicted of offenses on or off campus. Threats to academic freedom today are of a different type: (1) those involving restrictions imposed by the federal government; (2) those of private groups who from one side of the political spectrum challenge the right to teach freely in the classroom; and (3) those who on the other side challenge the right to speak freely on university campuses. (SW)