For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom—A book by Robert Post '77 and Matthew Finkin '73 LL.M.

Motivated by a desire to ground current controversies about the meaning of academic freedom in an understanding of its history and structure, Dean Robert Post ’77 and co-author Matthew W. Finkin '73 M.S.L. have authored For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom.
 
“In our view,” Post and Finkin write in the book’s introduction, “American principles of academic freedom have become a victim of their own success. At the end of the nineteenth century, academic freedom was a fighting cause for the American professoriat.” Today, they argue, the idea of academic freedom has “slipped from consciousness and…For too many members of the American scholarly community, academic freedom has become a hortatory ideal without conceptual clarity or precision.”
 
For the Common Good tracks the origins of American academic freedom in the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure drafted by the American Association of University Professors. Post and Finkin explore the four primary dimensions of academic freedom—research and publication, teaching, intramural speech, and extramural speech. They distinguish academic freedom from individual rights of freedom of expression that are protected by the First Amendment.