ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with Arthur O. Lovejoy's encounters with the early challenges to academic freedom because they reflect the various dilemmas that the academic profession has confronted about its self-governance. Academic freedom is, on a world-wide basis, a fragile commodity, one which stabilizes with the relative distance between the pursuit of intellectual and scientific life and any form of government oversight. Distinguishing the role of self-governance in matters of academic freedom from state diplomacy reveals different stakes at work when considering how universities across the world can and should work with one another. The level of cooperation just below the diplomatic is economic, with an emerging global sensibility that the expansion of markets of production and consumption will enable all nations to flourish if government control is limited. These two forces, the diplomatic and the economic, have led to the process of globalization, in certain respects, universities have begun to enter into new arrangements that have diplomatic and economic elements.
