Abstract
This is a symposium to celebrate the academic freedom we all enjoy but so often take for granted. 1 The university serving its mission of seeking, discovering and disseminating knowledge is one of humankind's most remarkable achievements. The principle of free inquiry and speech is critical to this mission. The rights and correlative duties of academic freedom are the core values of the university. The focus of this symposium is what happens to these core values when the winds of zealotry blow in our society. We have had, and we will continue to have, periods of zealotry that threaten academic freedom. I agree with columnist Nat Hentoff that censorship of opposing views is one of the strongest drives in human nature. Throughout history, Hentoff observes, one group or another has been labeled too dangerous to be heard. 2 The lust to interfere with the wrong thoughts of others can come from any direction, from religion, from the Right, from the Left, from patriots, from capitalists, from excessive ethnicity. Often the lust to interfere with the wrong thoughts of others arises out of good motives. A puritan, for example, is simply someone who exaggerates a virtue until it becomes a vice. In the United States, lust is often camouflaged by an unbounded hypocrisy concerning free speech. 3 The censor extols the virtues of free speech while carving out an exception in the name of a higher morality. Academics occupy a salient particularly exposed to the lust to censor ...