Academic Freedoms and Academic Purposes

Abstract

The main purpose of this final chapter is to develop and defend the thesis that if there is to be anything special about academic freedom, as opposed to freedom without prefix or suffix, or if there is to be any separate and distinctive justification for this special sort of freedom, then the peculiarities will have to be grounded in the distinctiveness of academic duties and academic functions. But since the most recent and most widely circulated British book on Academic Freedom is to my mind full of damaging error, and since the professed concern of its sponsors seems always to be subordinate to a primary and often incompatible political commitment to a Radical collectivism, the chapter takes the form of a polemic against that book.