ABSTRACT

This chapter reviews the historical record regarding freedom of academic inquiry and speech in American higher education since the emergence of the modem university 125 years ago. Essentially waves of zealotry from outside the walls of the university and principally from the far right were the source of three separate waves of suppression within the university over forty years. There is a wide spectrum of academic opinion on the degree to which the use of such tactics currently is similar to the use of such tactics during McCarthyism. Extreme proponents of the ideology of anticommunism during the late 1940s and early 1950s and fundamentalism from the radical academic left today have employed similar tactics of public accusations of moral turpitude, ostracism, investigations or the threat of investigation, tribunals. Student activism of the 1960s and the fundamentalism share an ideological kinship.