Beschreibung:
In these seventeen essays, distinguished senior scholars discuss the conceptual issues surrounding the idea of freedom of inquiry and scrutinize a variety of obstacles to such inquiry that they have encountered in their personal and professional experience. Their discussion of threats to freedom traverses a wide disciplinary and institutional, political and economic range covering specific restrictions linked to speech codes, the interests of donors, institutional review board licensing, political pressure groups, and government policy, as well as phenomena of high generality, such as intellectual orthodoxy, in which coercion is barely visible and often self-imposed.As the editors say in their introduction: "No freedom can be taken for granted, even in the most well-functioning of formal democracies. Exposing the tendencies that undermine freedom of inquiry and their hidden sources and widespread implications is in itself an exercise in and for democracy.
Miriam E. David:This impressive collection of 17 essays, with its broad range of social, scientific, legal and philosophical analyses, will be vitally important to democratic and political dialogue. Anthony Appiah, author of The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen and Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity:The phrase 'academic freedom' is often used carelessly: here is a work that will allow a more careful conversation about those many crucial issues facing the academy, in which a well-worked out understanding of conceptions of academic freedom is, as its authors show, an essential tool. Michael Wood, author of Literature and the Taste of Knowledge and Yeats and Violence:Academic freedom, the editors of this lively and challenging volume tell us, is a value because 'it enables the pursuit of other values.' It can even be at odds with some of those values, and this is why the topic needs the careful and varied attention it receives in these essays. Is academic freedom a subset of the freedom of speech, and if not, what is it? Who sets the rules for freedom of this or any kind? Who changes the rules when they don't seem to be working? And what does 'working' mean in this context? There are no easy answers in this book, but there are ideas and counter-ideas in abundance, and it handsomely illustrates and defends (and shows it is not afraid of) the value it names in its title. Cogent essays about a topic crucial to the university and to all discourse in a democracy. Michael Crow, president, Arizona State University:Who's Afraid of Academic Freedom? is a fantastic c