Daniel Gordon. What Is Academic Freedom? A Century of Debate, 1915–Present. London: Routledge, 2022

Abstract

In What Is Academic Freedom? Daniel Gordon discusses the history of free debate culture since 1915. Gordon’s research interests include the history of European and American social and political thought, comparative law, and the history of higher education. The current book follows his recent work on Alexis de Tocqueville and his key ideas in Democracy in America and on Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (Gordon 2017, 2019), as well as analysis of the published diary of the French-Tunisian writer and philosopher Albert Memmi titled Tunisie, an I, 1955–1956 (Gordon 2018). The core question of his latest monograph, which focuses on modern research universities in the United States during the twentieth century, is when and how freedom of speech can be distinguished from academic freedom. Based on a broad selection of sources, such as written philosophical debates, political speeches, court transcripts, university regulations, statements of principles, university bulletins, surveys, newspaper articles, television and radio programs, or blog posts, the author shows how the university debate culture has developed over the past 100 years, alongside the transformation of media technologies.

Text in English