"Even the AAUP concedes that we do have the rights of citizens, but we should remind ourselves that institutions will often be judged by our known associations." WILLIAM VAN ALSTYNE Professor of law photo: Les Todd

Such creeping ambiguity is a departure from a longstanding executive-branch policy. A Reagan administration national-security directive stated that "No restrictions may be placed upon the conduct or reporting of federally funded research that has not received national-security classification." That policy was reaffirmed just a year ago by Condoleeza Rice, the current national security adviser. But government agencies are becoming more insistent about reviewing findings--even from unclassified research--for sensitive information.

In the competition for research contracts, universities, too, are reckoning anew with the definition of prudent--or appropriate--policies. James Siedow, vice provost for research, says there's pressure to rethink the classified-research prohibition at Duke. A research policy committee he chairs will be scrutinizing the ban.

" In the post-September 11 world, there's clearly going to be a lot of federal funding that may come with strings attached. There are components of the university, particularly engineering, which may be locked out of large pools of federal monies if we're caught in this dilemma," he says. But it's more than a money matter. "We have an engineering school with lofty ambitions. And being an engineering school, they're going to see those more practical things as being very much part of what they do. At the moment, they can't do that. So we just have to recognize that if we're going to play in the big leagues, we need basically to give the school the wherewithal to compete without having one hand tied behind its back."

There's plenty of precedent for hand-holding between the university sector and the federal government. After all, as MIT's Technology Review magazine puts it, the World War II Office of Scientific Research and Development generated civilian research "from fighting malaria to radar to the atomic bomb." And MIT presents an interesting model on matters of science and secrecy: MIT bans classified research on campus but allows it at secure, off-campus facilities, notably its Lincoln Laboratory.

"The issue of whether we will accept a restriction on publication is one that comes up frequently. We always fight it." JUDITH DILLON Director, Office of Research Support photo: Les Todd

Historically, though, government's embrace of the academy hasn't been a stranglehold. In their survey The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States, Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger note that academic freedom is a modern term for an ancient idea. It probably dates at least as far back as Socrates' defense against the charge of corrupting the youth of Athens. But the university itself--including disputation as an academic form--has medieval roots. "In internal matters the universities had the prerogative of self-government," according to Hofstadter and Metzger. "They were autonomous corporations, conceived in the spirit of the gilds; their members elected their own officials and set the rules for the teaching craft."

At various times and in various ways, the concept of academic freedom has been articulated by the American Association of University Professors and allied groups. In a 1915 statement, the AAUP supported "freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the university or college; and freedom of extra-mural utterance and action." An updated 1940 AAUP statement said "the teacher is entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing his subject, but he should be careful not to introduce into his teaching controversial matter which has no relation to his subject." When a faculty member speaks or writes as a citizen, according to the statement, "he should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but his special position in the community imposes special obligations."

Academic-freedom purity hasn't always been the position of the courts. Duke law professor William Van Alstyne, a noted First Amendment scholar, says academic freedom can be seen as extending either to the institution or to the individual faculty member or student--a triad that can sometimes be in conflict within itself. It was only after World War II, he says, that the Supreme Court adopted a strong First Amendment stance and elaborated on academic freedom within the special protection of the First Amendment. "Roughly from 1965 on, the First Amendment has grown more and more robust and, correspondingly, academic-freedom claims based on the First Amendment have tended increasingly to win. It was not always so."

In the past few decades, the Supreme Court and lower courts have acknowledged universities' freedom to maneuver, whether to set a standard curriculum, emphasize certain schools of thought in their programs, or, as in the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, establish affirmative-action guidelines as an educational imperative. (In the latter case, decided in 1978, Justice Lewis Powell wrote an opinion that granted the medical school at Cal-Davis an exception to what the Equal Protection Clause would otherwise demand, namely, strict color-blindness in admissions.)

Most of the academic-freedom cases, though, have focused on the professional prerogatives of the scholar against the restrictions of the state or the institution. Loyalty oaths in the academy were largely upheld in the Fifties. But in Baggett v. Bullitt, decided in 1964, the Supreme Court turned aside the requirement of professors (and others) at the University of Washington that they swear not to have "subversive" intentions. There, the Court hinged its ruling on student academic freedom--that is, the view that learning requires a faculty whose critical skills aren't arbitrarily reined in. Three years later, in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, the Court struck down a similar New York loyalty oath, with a strong nod to the First Amendment. As Justice William Brennan saw it, "[A]cademic freedom...is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom."

It's a special concern to the academy when the First Amendment Center, a think tank on free-expression issues, reports--as it did this summer--that "for the first time in the annual State of the First Amendment survey, almost half of those surveyed said the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees." The survey saw a jump by ten percentage points from 2001. More than four in ten said they would limit the academic freedom of professors and bar criticism of government military policy. For many Americans, academic freedom and other fundamental freedoms are "possible obstacles in the war on terrorism," center officials said in a statement.

Academic-freedom controversies loomed large over the summer for Duke's neighbor, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The furor came from a reading assignment for freshmen, Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations, by Michael A. Sells. The book is a translation of thirty-five early suras, or chapters, of the Koran, accompanied by commentary and a glossary of Islamic terms.

A conservative Christian group charged that the assignment represented "forced Islamic indoctrination," and took the university to court. At the same time, the North Carolina House passed a bill that would deny funding to Carolina's summer reading program if it did not give equal time in the classroom to "all known religions." The university's board of governors, whose thirty-two voting members oversee the flagship Chapel Hill campus along with the system's other components, was a slow-to-arrive ally of the school. It failed to produce the needed two-thirds majority vote for a resolution proclaiming the importance of academic freedom. Some objected on procedural grounds; others, reportedly, were reluctant to offend members of the legislature.

But UNC President Molly Broad asked the governing board to reconsider its vote. She voiced concerns about accreditation problems that could arise from a perceived lack of support for academic freedom, and raised the possibility of a reprimand from the American Association of University Professors. Eventually, the board bought into academic freedom. That action followed on the heels of Carolina's own Faculty Council executive committee, which had voted unanimously to uphold "academic freedom and the fair exchange of ideas," as well as a commitment to "understanding cultures and conflicting values of all lands."

In the midst of the controversy, Duke President Nannerl O. Keohane sent a strongly supportive letter to the chairwoman of the Faculty Council at UNC-Chapel Hill. Keohane noted, "At a time when our nation is focused on challenges that directly threaten the freedoms that make our country a model for the world, it is useful to remember that those who have attacked us would move quickly to prohibit free discussion. It is all the more important, therefore, that we stand firm, as you and your colleagues have done, in defending core values which throughout history have characterized the very best institutions of higher education."

Challenges to academic freedom are hardly new. In his 1989 book Stalking the Academic Communist, David R. Holmes documents some of the effects of McCarthyism. "Because so many of the firings were done quietly (especially the nonrenewal of contracts for untenured faculty), done ostensibly for other reasons, or were not reported to the AAUP," he writes, "we may never know the actual numbers of faculty dismissed during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is probable, however, that the total number of faculty dismissed for political reasons during the McCarthy era surpassed one hundred. This estimate does not include the many faculty who, under threat, resigned or chose to take early retirement."

Higher-education institutions were all too ready to join the campaign to root out Communists. In a 1953 statement, the Association of American Universities, which represented the administrations of the nation's leading research universities, declared: "Above all, a scholar must have integrity and independence. This renders impossible adherence to such a regime as that of Russia and its satellites. No person who accepts or advocates such principles and methods has any place in a university."

As a historian of America, Duke's William Chafe, dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences, looks back on that era and sees some unpleasant echoes in our own time. "There were some serious breaches, even at those schools we would identify as part of the fortress of academic freedom. It's scary, the number of people who were willing to compromise the intellectual freedom of some of their faculty colleagues and to be complicit in the hurting of their careers." Today, he says, campuses are "more institutionally conscious of the need to preserve their independence than was true in the 1950s or even the teens, when faculty were fired for being opposed to World War I."

In their book, Hofstadter and Metzger refer to the nationwide "cult of loyalty" in World War I. At the University of Virginia, the head of the journalism school was charged with disloyalty--and eventually dismissed--for a speech in which he declared that "we can win the war only by freeing the spirit of democracy in the Germans by goodwill," that "war does not remove the menace of autocracy [or] make the world safe for democracy," and that Russia would be the spiritual leader of the next generation. Columbia's president formally withdrew the privilege of academic freedom for the duration of the war. "What had been tolerated before becomes intolerable now," he said. "What had been wrongheadedness was now sedition. What had been folly was now treason."

Chafe says today, he worries about "a willingness to make judgments about people who criticize the government or who raise questions about our policy on terrorism. They are being subjected to highly generalized denunciations, not from within the university but from outside the university."

Some of the strongest denunciations have targeted Sami Al-Arian, a tenured computer science professor at the University of South Florida. In August, the university accused Al-Arian of links to terrorism. It then asked a Florida court to rule on whether firing him would violate his constitutional rights. As The Chronicle of Higher Education noted, "The idea that a professor who had not yet been fired would have to defend himself in court frightened some faculty members at South Florida and elsewhere."