ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the evolution of professional academic freedom over the last seventy-five years. The progress of knowledge as a community of checkers with specialized training, information, and skills, professors had to have special employment protection from their employer's interference for their right to offend in the pursuit of knowledge. For several hundred years after the founding of institutions of higher education in the United States, scholars laboured under employment law doctrine holding that private and public employees had no right to object to conditions placed upon the terms of employment, including restrictions on free expression. Unique tradition has been incorporated into employment contracts with individual professors. Employer interference with professional speech at the turn of the century led academics in 1915 to organize a professional association, the American Association of University Professors. The 1915 statement imposes higher correlative obligations on extramural utterances.
