Academic freedom, to be sure, exists here at Minnesota as at other equally “ideal” universities. Our president has publicly announced that fact. Our faculty and the student body enthusiastically applauded that announcement. This academic freedom, however, is of so peculiar a nature that no one member of the faculty is free publicly to discuss it. The president may speak of it with an engaging boldness; the students may speak of it (and do) with a fine ironic scorn; but members of the faculty, those to whom is intrusted our instruction in “all forms of knowledge,” those even whom we address as “Professor” and “Dean,” they dare not utter their true opinion concerning it; their mouths are effectually sealed. This the students know. They have seen the flush of shame and anger rise to the cheeks of embarrassed teachers who could reply to audacious undergraduate taunts of insincerity and dishonesty only with mortified silence. They have seen, at that moment when vigorous applause gave generous approval to our president’s insistence on academic freedom, at that very moment when enthusiasm for truth was at its highest, at that very moment they saw instructors wink at their colleagues, and deans look meaningly at some understanding friend. Students, both inside and outside the class room, are particularly observant of the actions of their instructors. They know when deans applaud because they have to; when professors say things they do not mean. They know that even while they listen to talk of academic freedom they see men annually relieved of their academic burdens for having dared to utter what they deemed to be the truth. These students know the colleges from which such instructors were dismissed. They know the names of these instructors. They know the cause for which they were dismissed. They know, also, that such is the state of academic freedom at our university that, even as we go to press, at least one professor in the academic college—a professor, too, whose discreet devotion to facts, and whose cautious refusal to permit the slightest classroom interpretation thereof, make his potentially excellent subject an inexpressible bore—that at least this one professor is trembling with fear and anger because of official intimation that he had entertained opinions for which his institution did not stand.