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Humanities
Michiel Horn.
University of Toronto Press. xvi, 446. $39.95
This is a very fine book. Given the topic's propensity to mobilize controversy among professors, academic administrators, politicians, business people, and the general public, it is, notably, also a patient book, scrupulous in its assessment of the historical material and in its allowance to the parties of bygone controversies one more opportunity to air their sides of old grievances. One suspects Horn's many years of service on CAUT's Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee provided valuable experience in the patient listening that has served him so well in his survey of academic freedom in this country.
Of the 'two main meanings to academic freedom' - 'the freedom of universities from external control, and the freedom of teachers and researchers to do their work' - it is the latter with which Horn is concerned. Inevitably, however, the struggle to provide academic freedom a secure home in Canadian universities had to contend with the view that too much such freedom poses a threat to the freedom of universities. Since the middle...