Abstract

Academic freedom is thus a complex ideal, and I have argued that in many respects it has a more limited application than some of its protagonists seem to believe. Many of the arguments for it, moreover, are not peculiar to academics and universities. We would therefore be well advised to take seriously Eric James' injunction “to think less of universities as having rights to additional and peculiar liberties, and to regard them more as places where the essential liberties of a civilised state find strongest champions, champions, moreover, who by reason of the intellectual strength which they possess, and the intellectual integrity which they defend, have a particular responsibility”.36 But it is beyond rational doubt that the continuation of civilised states as civilised depends on the maintenance of, among other things, academic freedom, and particularly of what I have called scholarly freedom