In these seventeen essays, distinguished senior scholars discuss the conceptual issues surrounding the idea of freedom of inquiry and scrutinize a variety of obstacles to such inquiry that they have encountered in their personal and professional experience. Their discussion of threats to freedom traverses a wide disciplinary and institutional, political and economic range covering specific restrictions linked to speech codes, the interests of donors, institutional review board licensing, political pressure groups, and government policy, as well as phenomena of high generality, (...) such as intellectual orthodoxy, in which coercion is barely visible and often self-imposed. As the editors say in their introduction: "No freedom can be taken for granted, even in the most well-functioning of formal democracies. Exposing the tendencies that undermine freedom of inquiry and their hidden sources and widespread implications is in itself an exercise in and for democracy.". (shrink)

This paper focuses our attention on a few principles that guide great universities. I want to suggest that the United States has not distinguished itself particularly well in preventing episodes of repression and attempts to silence dissent at universities, nor has it produced an extraordinary number of courageous leaders over the past seventy-five years who have come forward to defend the principles of academic freedom. While the US has never reached the level of repression that Germany felt in the 1930s, (...) nor that which was felt by Soviet geneticists at roughly the same time during the Lysenko years, we have nonetheless done significant damage to our system of higher learning because we have failed to understand fully the role that academic freedom and free inquiry play in creating the knowledge that societies depend on for their social and economic, as well as humanistic, progress. (shrink)

From roughly 1965 to 1995, Columbia University's Department of Sociology was a leading center for social study of science, both nationally and internationally. It was often referred to as the Merton School or Columbia School, and four scholars paved its way : Robert K. Merton, Harriet Zuckerman, Stephen Cole, and Jonathan Cole. The goal of the Columbia School was to create and legitimate a new sociological specialty focusing on the scientific community and the growth of scientific knowledge and they did (...) this by exploring the norms, values, and structure of science. The core values of the scientific and university system and the norms attached to them consisted of deeply held beliefs as well as principles that determined how individuals would act. They were organizing principles designed to support the institution in meeting its goals and mission. They influenced the types of social structures that developed to carry out the activities of scientists. Edited by Jonathan R. Cole, this collection of individually and co-authored papers and essays by Cole represents some of the work produced by Cole and his close collaborators over the past 50 years. the essays are contextualized with an introduction by Cole. The pieces in this volume represent the major concerns on the Columbia School, whose focus of attention was not on the production of individual pieces of knowledge, but on the social systems that made that production possible. (shrink)