Who is Afraid of Academic Freedom?

In recent years, there has been concern over the curtailment of freedom of speech in US and English-speaking universities. This review essay compares two books dealing with academic freedom and censorship. James R. Flynn’s A Book Too Risky to Publish argues that the central mission of the university is to promote the pursuit of truth and the liberation of the human mind, and that today’s US universities fail almost entirely in this regard. Burton Porter’s Forbidden Knowledge deals with various cases in which knowledge was deemed too dangerous, and was suppressed for political or ideological reasons. The review essay also attempts to see how both books’ insights may be combined in order to reach general conclusions about the origin and the nature of academic censorship.