ACADEMI CADEMIC FREEDOM has become one of the central issues of our time. It has been our aim in this volume to write an account of the problem of academic freedom in American colleges and universities from the founding of the first college to the recent past. While we have tried to provide historical perspective on the current struggle over intellectual freedom in higher education, we have tried also to avoid the pitfall of interpreting the past solely from the standpoint of present issues and current anxieties. Ours is an analytical history, not a full-throated polemic for academic freedom. We have no desire to conceal an ineluctable prejudice on behalf of freedom of thought, and we hope and expect that this inquiry will be a history, not an autopsy. Our commitment to freedom has no doubt affected in many ways our treatment of the problem, but our foremost intention has been to shed new light on the history of the academic man and the complex circumstances under which he has done his work, in the faith that an enlargement of understanding will in the end be an enlargement of freedom.

One of our earliest decisions in planning this work was to make it more than a running account of" cases." To write only about the outstanding violations of freedom would be to treat the story of academic freedom as though it were nothing but the story of academic suppression. The cases are, in a sense, the pathology of the problem. The distortions that would arise from dealing with them alone are comparable to those that would be found in a history of the labor movement telling only of strikes, a history of science telling only of the encroachments of theology, or a history of political democracy devoted only to its defeats. It is, of course, an important part of our concern to learn what forces in society have ranged themselves against the freedom of teaching and research and what successes they have scored; but we have also been interested to know what freedom has meant to successive generations of academic men, to what extent they have achieved it, and what factors in academic life itself, as well as in American culture at large, have created and sustained it.