Conclusion

Abstract

Academic freedom has been called the “glue that holds the university together,” “a fundamental value for a university in a free society,” “the raison d’être for the professorate,” and the “basis for the high moral ground from which the university community speaks.”¹ In the 1957 Sweezy v. New Hampshire decision, United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that without it, “our civilization will stagnate and die.”² Yet, despite the widespread acknowledgment that faculty freedoms to teach, research, and pursue the full rights of citizenship are core aspects of American higher education and fundamental to the creation, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge, such was not always the case. It was in the decades leading up to World War II that American academics established modern understandings of academic freedom and the procedures that would come to protect it. Academic freedom went from being widely panned as a claim for special privilege to a recognized, if not always secure, feature of academic life. Tenure transformed from an informal understanding for a select few to formal policies endorsed for many; the existence of a perpetual staff of instructors and assistants was renounced by both the professoriate and institutional leaders. It was through the activities of individual educators such as John Dewey and Arthur Lovejoy—and, more importantly, the associations that they led and served—that these understandings developed, were refined, were negotiated, and were ultimately endorsed.