Academic Freedom in Development

In delivering his 1916 annual report, American Association of University Professors (AAUP) president and Northwestern University Law School dean John H. Wigmore noted of academic freedom: “This is a world-old theme. …[It] is not a problem to be solved in a year or in ten years by this Association or by any other.” 1 Wigmore knew well that the AAUP’s recent claim for academic freedom, though an important step, was part of a much longer struggle that had played itself out in the battles over sectarian control of colleges, debates about slavery and abolition, divides over economics and politics, and disagreements about disinterested research and political advocacy. The founding of Wigmore’s association and the concurrent beginnings of other educational and voluntary associations marked a new and vital era in the understandings and experience of faculty work, but the longer history of conflict over faculty rights and responsibilities set the stage for these modern conditions while highlighting their contested nature. With no unifying themes and few published statements on issues that would later be thought of as involving academic freedom—itself a term that did not appear until the late nineteenth century—much of this early development can be understood in terms of key and illustrative cases that cumulatively affected nascent ideas of academic freedom but also reveal complex understandings and perspectives. 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.