Academic Freedom

The author explores the concept of academic freedom in American educational institutions, focusing on legal applications from 1915 (when the first formal definition was established) to the present. Topics addressed in this paper include the concept's inherent tensions among the competing interests of institutions, educators, students, and government overseers in controlling classroom instructional content. A review of case law and the current literature reveals that for students and teachers, the concept of academic freedom is restrained by administrative and political decisions on the part of educational and governmental institutions.

In Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234 (1957), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter described the four essential freedoms of a university as the right to determine who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study. Justice Frankfurter made it clear that these were the university's freedomsùnot those of students or professors. Here I will review the literature on academic freedom and show how the exercising of institutional rights often overrides or restricts the academic freedoms of faculty

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eneral were much more evenly divided between the two major parties during the same period. The reporters suggested that since professors have more power than students to set the intellectual tone in their classrooms, the law schools in the study lacked a "critical mass" of conservatives to balance the reigning liberal orthodoxy ("Conservatives," 2003). Their belief that college professors, as a class, are more liberal than the general public is held by most Americans: The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that a majority of voters they surveyed believe that college professors hold more liberal beliefs than their own (Weidner, 2003). In response to the argument that liberal bias found in American college classrooms is harmful to students because they are not exposed to alternative viewpoints, republican state legislators in California, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Utah introduced various forms of what they call "academic bills of rights" for college campuses ("Academic Freedom's Thin Line," 2004, p. 34). Based on a model developed by David Horowitz, the conservative founder of Students for Academic Freedom, these bills primarily encourage colleges and universities to increase their political
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Approximate Word count = 6451
Approximate Pages = 26 (250 words per page)