Within the tradition of academic freedom, exactly as within ecclesiastical practice, there exists an unwritten law of abstention. It restrains professors and administrators alike, though at different points. Not all professors or all administrators, of course, but the great mass of them. Self-restriction expresses itself in solicitude for “the standing of the institution”; in the professor’s choice of his field for research and publication; in acute tenderness for the immature judgment of students (most of them either in possession of the ballot or about to reach their majority); in the censorship of student publications that criticize the social and educational _status quo_; in decisions as to what speakers may be heard upon the campus; in the use of the term “good judgment” or its opposite when variant professors are attacked; in the selection and promotion of members of the staff; in the budget; in consciousness of the legislature at state institutions, and in consciousness of the donor at others; finally, in the development of the present dominant type of college and university administration. If we compare state institutions with privately endowed ones in these matters, we do not discover any great difference. The same scale, from overt repression, through tacit abstention, to courageous championship of real freedom, is found filled up by both, and institutions representing the religious motive have no distinctive place of their own upon this scale. Fear to use academic freedom is not a mark of either religious or secular institutions; it is merely academic! In short, real freedom for the mind is as much a problem in our day as in that of Galileo. It is the subject-matter that has changed. Not that hypocrisy is in the academic saddle. No; our trouble is the confusion that arises from sincerely believing in freedom but also sincerely fearing it. This is why technicalities of procedure play so large a rôle; this is the reason why so much depends upon judicious silence. It is because we are not quite at one with ourselves in our own souls that what might be the lusty exercise of our powers of variation becomes merely the absence of certain external restraints. Fear puts us on the defensive; whereupon, quietly reducing the points of possible attack appears to be a dictate of practical wisdom. The handling of freedom in our legal system is not a whit more daring than in our ecclesiastical and educational institutions. It is not customary to construe particular laws in the spirit of an expanding liberty; nor do courts, as a rule, endeavor to get at the core of justice, ethically considered. The technical theory of their function is that they are umpires between litigants, responsible merely for seeing that contests are conducted according to prescribed rules.