At the turn of the twenty-first century, academic freedom is among the most widely accepted norms of American higher education while, at the same time, it is mired in controversy. Disputes abound over what it is and how to apply it. “These disputes,” Matthew Finkin and Robert Post say at the outset of For the Common Good, “call upon us to determine what academic freedom means in the twenty-first century. They require us to articulate once again the foundational principles that should guide us in explicating the content of American academic freedom” (2).

As a contribution to this restatement, Finkin and Post, two eminent legal academics with substantial involvement in academic freedom issues, have written a superb book describing “the history and structure of American academic freedom” with the hope that it will enable subsequent “debate to proceed on the basis of a common understanding” (5). Their book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand academic freedom's past or debate its future.

For the Common Good is an engaging and concise account of what I will call the “classic doctrine” of academic freedom, touching on its most basic purposes, premises, implementing doctrines, and illustrative applications. Finkin and Post define academic freedom as “the freedom to pursue the scholarly profession, inside and outside the classroom, according to the standards of that profession” (149). Their definition encompasses four distinct branches: “freedom of research and publication, freedom in the classroom, freedom of intramural speech, and freedom of extramural speech” (7). Finkin and Post thoroughly discuss each branch in separate chapters that compose the core of the book. These central chapters cover each branch's theoretical foundations, growth, and refinement and provide telling illustrations taken from actual controversies. Along with the benefits, the limits and duties that accompany each freedom are emphasized.

Although the authors clearly value the classic conception's principles and practical benefits, their analysis is forthright about many of its “conceptual difficulties” (7), “paradoxes” (54), “problematic aspect[s]” (127), and “dilemma[s] (152). With one major exception to be mentioned below, Finkin and Post present a fair portrait of America's regnant ideal of academic freedom, warts and all.

Given how established academics, as well as politicians and ordinary citizens, only vaguely understand the classic doctrine, there is a wide audience that would benefit from Finkin and Post's compact volume. I would recommend it to every new entrant to the teaching profession as an introduction to the unique privileges and responsibilities of their calling.

Historians would benefit from reading For the Common Good for additional reasons. Though mainly presentist and analytic in ambition, the authors rest their theorizing on a foundation of historical exploration. It begins with a sketch of the history of academic freedom from its origins in the seventeenth century's scientific revolution, to its establishment in Enlightenment Prussia, flowering in nineteenth-century Germany, initial appearance in America in the AAUP's 1915 “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” and authoritative restatement in the 1940 “Statement on Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure” issued jointly by the AAUP and the Association of American Universities. Throughout the book, Finkin and Post explicate the classic conception's development and refinement by drawing extensively on academic freedom controversies that went through the AAUP's extended complaint-investigation process that culminates in formal opinions issued by the AAUP's Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure (Committee A). In the Committee A complaint process, Finkin and Post have located a trove of untapped source material ripe for historical exploration.

Of course, due to the goals of their project, Finkin and Post's work should not be read as a history of academic freedom in America. What Finkin and Post have written is a fair and informed study of the past to understand, detail, and illustrate a current system of governing principles. In the course of that enterprise, they have written a book historians will find informative, reliable, and useful. It traces academic freedom's development over time, draws from little-known primary sources, and provides extensive notes that allow readers to delve deeper into every aspect of the subject. But if it is read as history, it would seem rather Whiggish.

Also, although Finkin and Post historicize their subject, more remains to be done. The authors nicely explain how differing traditions of university structure in Germany and America required development of contrasting systems of academic freedom. They also ground the early twentieth-century public's appreciation of academic freedom not only in the argument that academic freedom facilitated the production of new knowledge but also in the public's growing appreciation that new knowledge was something their industrializing, technocratic society needed. Nevertheless, more contextualization, especially as the material moves into the second half of the twentieth century, is necessary to develop a thick history that fully understands academic freedom's classic conception as a particular creation of a particular society, one motivated by a unique coincidence of self-interest, group struggle, happenstance, social needs, and societal ideals.

Perhaps the most obvious example of the need for further historicizing, and the largest gap in For the Common Good's theorizing, is Finkin and Post's reticence about the challenge of postmodern epistemology. As this book shows, academic freedom's classic conception is bottomed on a theory of knowledge peculiar to the early twentieth century. In the Progressive Era, belief in the possibility of objective knowledge was largely unchallenged, albeit the method for its acquisition had moved from sacred to scientific techniques. The early twentieth century also was a time when belief in expertise was at its apogee. Differences on questions of value were thought to be resolvable through investigation by disinterested, specially trained adepts.

Those days are gone. The reality-based community is under attack from outside and inside the academy. From postmodernism's perspective, even the title of the book, For the Common Good, is antiquated. It is a serious question whether academic freedom, as classically defined, can survive postmodernism's leveling impulse. Yet all Finkin and Post directly offer on the subject is the observation that the “premise” that “faculty are professional experts in the production of knowledge … might today be thought controversial in some circles” (27) and the assertion that “it retains its force whenever we believe that a discipline's methods produce knowledge, as, for example, we plainly do in the social sciences and humanities” (27). But do we?

Still, this book is a must-read addition to the literature on academic freedom. It skillfully explores history to describe the current ideal. Our normative conversation now can continue with a far better understanding of the subject.