Pursuing Academic Freedom: "Free and Fearless?"

Alexander D. Gregor is director of the Centre for Higher Education
Research and Development at the University of Manitoba and co-editor of
Postsecondary Education in Canada: The Cultural Agenda.

Pursuing Academic Freedom is based on the papers presented at a 1996
conference on “Academic Freedom: The History and Future of a Defining
Idea,” sponsored by the Humanities Research Unit of the University of
Saskatchewan. Some 20 contributors from across the country provide a
comprehensive and useful overview of the discussion as it exists within
the social science and humanities sector of Canadian universities.

With few exceptions, the authors are humanities professors. Their
papers run the gamut from substantial research papers to what might be
described as thought pieces. Some are very pragmatic in their focus,
looking at issues like the relationship of academic freedom to the legal
system, copyright, and data resources and sharing. Others tread the
fashionable humanist paths of postmodernism, invoking the shades of
Kant, Marx, and Derrida in consideration of such issues as Eurocentrism
and cognitive imperialism. Still others deal with the perceived
contemporary difficulties surrounding the academic-freedom fray (e.g.,
its linkage to orthodoxy and conservatism, and its implications for
curriculum and students).

The collection reflects an honest assessment of an issue that is as
important to society as it is to the academy, and it provides the basis
for formulating a better conceptualization of and response to that dual
relationship.