Freedom-from or freedom-for?

academic freedom, responsibility, and the revival of the liberal arts

Michele Averchi

Emanuele Colombo

pp. 133-152

in: Kenneth García (ed), Reexamining academic freedom in religiously affiliated universities, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

The debate on "academic freedom" is usually built around the idea of freedom from, namely the absence of constraints, boundaries, and limitations to the free expression of one's own epistemological position in scholarship and teaching. In particular, in the last decades, a supposedly neutral atheistic view has been imposing its view on the academy, even in many religiously affiliated institutions, both in the USA and in Europe. However, there is a second aspect of academic freedom, namely the academics' freedom to show the intrinsic connections between their field (whatever it is) and a broader metaphysical view (whatever it is), and this second aspect needs much more attention.