The dawning of the third millennium finds many Christian colleges and universities in a search for identity. Coming to grips with the confused, often maligned topic of academic freedom is an essential part of this search. In this volume an unabashed defender of academic freedom offers well-founded advice to an academy that has seemingly lost its way. Drawing on forty years in higher education, including twenty years as president of Calvin College, Anthony Diekema reflects on the extensive scholarly literature on academic freedom against the backdrop of personal experience. He develops the larger philosophical framework necessary for thinking about academic freedom but also offers pointed advice gleaned from specific events and challenges to academic freedom that he has personally confronted. This balanced approach provides a seasoned perspective for those struggling with the subject of academic freedom in their own institutions. In the course of the book Diekema develops a sound working definition of the concept of academic freedom, assesses the threats it faces, acknowledges the significance of worldview in its implementation, and explores the policy implications for its protection and promotion in Christian colleges.

The Christian College and the Meaning of Academic Freedom is a study of the past record and current practice of the Protestant colleges in America in the quest to achieve intellectual honesty within academic community. William C. Ringenberg lays out the history of academic freedom in higher education in America, including its European antecedents, from the perspective of modern Christian higher education. He discusses the Christian values that provide context for the idea of academic freedom and how they have been applied to the nation's Christian colleges and universities. The book also dissects a series of recent case studies on the major controversial intellectual issues within and in, in some cases, about the Christian college community. Ringenberg ably analyzes the ways in which these academic institutions have evolved over time, outlining their efforts to evolve and remain relevant while maintaining their core values and historic identities.

In the twenty-first century, religious faith has reemerged from the margins of modernism and moved back to the center of contemporary scholarly conversations. "When Jacques Derrida died," Stanley Fish recently wrote, "I was called by a reporter who wanted to know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion." A group of evaluators of the Lilly Endowment's Initiative on Religion and Higher Education recently agreed. "There is today more discussion about the role of religion in the academy than at any time in the past 40 years and more commitment to the project of Christian higher education than there was just ten years ago." In recognition of these developments, this particular monograph offers an overview of the various ways conversations about religion and religiously informed scholarship are increasing in the academy. Although a growing number of faith traditions are finding their place in this conversation, the Christian tradition in its various forms is still the dominant voice. This monograph addresses the history of secularization in American higher education and scholarship; the historical and resistance by dominant religious traditions to that secularization; the contemporary ways that individual scholars, networks, and institutions approach the question of religious faith and scholarship; the concerns such a question raises for academic freedom; and the relationship between religious faith and scholarship.

Kenneth Garcia presents an edited collection of papers from the 2015 conference on academic freedom at religiously affiliated universities, held at the University of Notre Dame. These essays reexamine the secular principle of academic freedom and discuss how a theological understanding might build on and further develop it. The year 2015 marked the 100th anniversary of the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the leading advocate of academic freedom in America. In October 2015, the University of Notre Dame convened a group of prominent scholars to consider how the concept and practice of academic freedom might evolve. The premise behind the conference was that the current conventional understandings of academic freedom are primarily secular and, therefore, not yet complete. The goal was to consider alternative understandings in light of theological insight. Theological insight, in this context, refers to an awareness that there is a surplus of knowledge and meaning to reality that transcends what can be known through ordinary disciplinary methods of inquiry, especially those that are quantitative or empirical. Essays in this volume discuss how, in light of the fact that findings in many fields hint at connections to a greater whole, scholars in any academic field should be free to pursue those connections. Moreover, there are religious traditions that can help inform those connections.

This book offers a Christian engagement with the realities of academic life and work. Examining this topic from intellectual, institutional and spiritual perspectives, the author explores how the two identities – as a Christian and an academic – can both coexist and complement one another. The author provides a ‘road map’ for academics demonstrating the interaction between religious faith and the responsibilities, challenges and opportunities of university scholarship and teaching. Addressing questions such as the contentious nature of religious faith in the university environment, the expression of faith within the role of professor, and the consequences of consecrating oneself to learning, this pioneering and practical volume will be relevant to Christian scholars in any academic discipline.

There are currently no books on Catholic higher education that offer a theological foundation for academic freedom. This book presents a theologically grounded understanding of academic freedom that builds on, extends, and completes the prevailing secular understanding for Catholic higher education.

In these seventeen essays, distinguished senior scholars discuss the conceptual issues surrounding the idea of freedom of inquiry and scrutinize a variety of obstacles to such inquiry that they have encountered in their personal and professional experience. Their discussion of threats to freedom traverses a wide disciplinary and institutional, political and economic range covering specific restrictions linked to speech codes, the interests of donors, institutional review board licensing, political pressure groups, and government policy, as well as phenomena of high generality, such as intellectual orthodoxy, in which coercion is barely visible and often self-imposed. As the editors say in their introduction: "No freedom can be taken for granted, even in the most well-functioning of formal democracies. Exposing the tendencies that undermine freedom of inquiry and their hidden sources and widespread implications is in itself an exercise in and for democracy."