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."

Table of contents:

Introduction: Who Is Afraid of Academic Freedom?, by Akeel Bilgrami and Jonathan R. Cole
1. A Brief History of Academic Freedom, by Geoffrey R. Stone
2. Truth, Balance, and Freedom, by Akeel Bilgrami
3. Academic Freedom and Its Opponents, by David Bromwich
4. Academic Freedom Under Fire, by Jonathan R. Cole
5. Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom, by Joan W. Scott
6. Obscurantism and Academic Freedom, by Jon Elster
7. What`s So Special About Academic Freedom?, by Michele Moody-Adams
8. Academic Freedom and the Constitution, by Robert Post
9. IRB Licensing, by Philip Hamburger
10. To Follow the Argument Where It Leads: An Antiquarian View of the Aim of Academic Freedom at the University of Chicago, by Richard A. Shweder
11. What Is Academic Freedom For?, by Robert J. Zimmer
12. Academic Freedom: Some Considerations, by Matthew Goldstein and Frederick Schaffer
13. Academic Freedom and the Boycott of Israeli Universities, by Stanley Fish
14. Exercising Rights: Academic Freedom and Boycott Politics, by Judith Butler
15. Israel and Islamic Freedom, by John Mearsheimer
16. Academic Freedom and the Subservience to Power, by Noam Chomsky
17. Academic Freedom: A Pilot Study of Faculty Views, by Jonathan R. Cole, Stephen Cole, and Christian C. Weiss
List of Contributors
Index

Authors:

Akeel Bilgrami is the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy and a professor on the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. His books include Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment; Self-Knowledge and Resentment; and Belief and Meaning.

Jonathan R. Cole is the John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University at Columbia University. For fourteen years, he served as provost and dean of faculties at Columbia. His latest book is The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected.