| This thesis addresses a problem in the conceptualizing of academic freedom: while apparently plausible on the surface, in the context of actual cases the concept has broken down and not provided clear guidance for faculty to determine whether academic freedom was indeed at stake. Books that have tried to clarify academic freedom in theoretical terms have not resolved this problem. Hence, a different approach seems warranted. This study conceives academic freedom as a cause rather than just a theory, in analogy with the Christian faith which is more than theology. Thus, academic freedom is treated as the symbol of the professoriate's vocational mission--the search for truth. As such, it represents the deepest human values of the professor's work and sanctions his claims for cultural and social authority.; In America, the idea of academic freedom and the modern academic profession grew up together with the emergence of the modern university. Section I traces that historical development, climaxed by the founding of the AAUP. In Section II, academic freedom is studied historically in the context of five celebrated cases, seeking to articulate the conflicting ways in which the professoriate understood academic freedom to be issue in each case. The cases are Scott Nearing at the University of Pennsylvania, 1915; James McKeen Cattell at Columbia, 1917; Jerome Davis at Yale, 1936; three Communist professors at the University of Washington, 1948; and H. Bruce Franklin at Stanford, 1972.; Three recurring patterns of tensions can be discerned in this history which help to explain why the idea of academic freedom has generated more heat than light in actual cases. Moreover, an erosion of several basic presuppositions that have undergirded the concept of academic freedom also helps to explain why and how academic freedom was betrayed by its own champions. Nevertheless, the cause of academic freedom--that truth-seeking is good and good for humankind--remains very much alive. That academic freedom is primarily the symbol of a moral and spiritual endeavor is confirmed, but it is a cause which, while it still compels assent, needs reformulation. |
