Report Lists Top Threats to Campus Freedom

The “2002-2003 Report on Academic Freedom” details hundreds of incidents at colleges around the country and includes a list of the top 10 “villains and heroes” of academic freedom in the past year.

Along with “Patriotic Correctness,” the list includes: censorship of student publications; censorship of speakers on campus; zoning out free speech; silencing internal dissent; religion and bias on campus; homophobia on campus; Internet censorship; censorship of posters; and censorship of art, film and theater.

“Academic freedom in America is always under threat, and in the past year too many colleges gave in to the temptation to censor,” writes John K. Wilson, the report’s author.

“The ‘war on terror’ provides justification for many of the worst infringements of academic freedom, but beneath the veneer of ‘patriotic correctness’ a deeper assault on academic values was accelerating: the corporatization of higher education. During a time of budget cuts at campuses across the country, whether caused by state deficits or stock market woes, academic freedom sometimes is sacrificed for the bottom line,” Wilson continues.

Wilson is founder of a Web site devoted to academic freedom <www.collegefreedom.org> and a graduate student in the Department of Educational Administration and Foundations at Illinois State University, where he is writing a dissertation on the history of academic freedom.

For more information or to view the full report visit <www.collegefreedom.org>.