With contributions from six leading scientific countries of the Global North and from the general European Higher Education Area, this book questions the predominant view on academic freedom and pleads for a holistic approach. While academic freedom has been a top agenda point for the global scientific community in recent years, the public and academic discourse has often been marked by a negative interpretation of the term understood merely as exemption from state intervention and censorship. The contributions in this edited volume demonstrate, however, that this is not where the story ends: the ability to exercise academic freedom not only involves the freedom of expression in its abstract sense but should involve the capability to determine research agendas and curricula independently from market pressures or threats of career sabotage, and to resist workplace misconduct without fear of losing future career chances. Providing a differentiated picture of contemporary structural limits to academic freedom in advanced democracies, this volume will be of great interest for not only scholars of higher education, but for the entire academic community.

Recent years have seen an alarming rise in antiintellectual outbursts by politicians, documented threats against radical scholars across continents, and serious blows to the fundamental right of scientific freedom. Scientific Freedom under Attack is an edited volume that ties together proceedings of the international conference on "The Problems of Scientific Freedoms in Modern and Contemporary History", which was held at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, on in November 2018. Covering a broad geographic and temporal span, stretching from the early nineteenth century through the Cold War and on to the neoliberal era, from Eurasia to China and to the United States, it presents an illuminating and important panorama of the political and structural challenges that scientific production and critical thinking continue to face. As these forces continue to attack scientific freedom, this volume offers necessary and critical analysis of their emergence.