ABSTRACT
In the early twentieth century in America, the concept of academic freedom was developed and invoked to establish for university professors and students more liberty in deciding what to read, say, and write than was generally allowed in American society at the time, given the prevailing interpretation of the First Amendment to the Constitution and the traditional understanding of freedom of speech and press. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a securely protected academic freedom is thought compatible with, if not productive of, a new willingness to restrict free speech and free expression in multiple media on university campuses and through society itself. The story of this transformation is a complex one: Early academic freedom helped support the development of modern liberalism and libertarianism in social life more generally, but while libertarian liberalism made its case successfully in American law and society, it began to lose adherents in the university itself.
In this paper, I will examine the philosophical case for and against free speech, from its earliest beginnings, through its principal liberal advocates, John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, through its mid-century triumph, to the late- or post-modern critiques of Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and especially Michel Foucault, European intellectuals who have been influential on American professors. My hypothesis is that liberalism confused freedom of speech with freedom of thought, and only the recovery of the distinction between them can help us sort out and evaluate the claims of academic freedom and free speech today.
