ABSTRACT
What constitutes indoctrination in the classroom? Does a professor have a free-speech right to turn a college course into a forum for political activism? If there is such a free-speech right, is it limited by the professional duties implicit in the concept of academic freedom? This chapter, and the next one, map out debates over these questions, from the founding of the American Association of University Professors in 1915 to the present. The founders of the AAUP warned against classroom indoctrination and created what I call an “anti-political orthodoxy.” This chapter includes an account of the formation of Black Studies departments and other developments in higher education that created cracks in this orthodoxy.
