Academic freedom has been a principle that undergirds the university since 1915. Beyond this, it also protects a spirit of free inquiry essential to a democratic society. But in the post-9/11 present, the basic principles of academic freedom have been deeply challenged. There have been many startling instances where the rhetoric of national security and terror, corporate interests, and privatization have cast a pall over the terrain of academic freedom. In the post-9/11 university, professors face job loss or tenure denial for speaking against state power, while their students pay more tuition and fall deeper in debt. This timely collection features an impressive assembly of the nation's leading intellectuals, addressing some of the most urgent issues facing higher education in the United States today. Spanning a wide array of disciplinary fields, "Academic Freedom in the Post-9/11 Era" seeks to intervene on the economic and political crises that are compromising the future of educational institutions. This book begins with "Reframing Academic Freedom" by Edward J. Carvalho and David B. Downing. Part I, State of the Union, contains: (1) Academic Unfreedom in America: Rethinking the University as a Democratic Public Sphere (Henry A. Giroux); (2) Barefoot in New Zealand: The Politics of Campus Conflict (Cary Nelson); and (3) Marketing McCarthyism: The Media's Role in the War on Academic Freedom (John K. Wilson). Part II, Churchill V. University of Colorado, contains: (4) The Myth of Academic Freedom: Experiencing the Application of Liberal Principle in a Neoconservative Era (Ward Churchill). Part III, The Image and Reality of Teaching the Israel-Palestine Conflict, contains: (5) Civility and Academic Life (Norman G. Finkelstein); and (6) The Risk of Knowing (Irene Gendzier). Part IV, Neoliberal Freedoms, Contingency, and Capital, contains: (7) Caught in the Crunch (Ellen Messer-Davidow); (8) Academic Bondage (Jeffrey J. Williams); (9) Take Your Ritalin and Shut Up (Marc Bousquet); and (10) Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Intellectual Engagement (Sophia A. McClennen). Part V, Reflections and "Tightrope Hopes," contains: (11) Generation Kill: Nietzschean Meditations on the University, War, Youth, and Guns (Susan Searls Giroux); (12) The Post-9/11 University: It Could Have Been Much Worse (Robert M.O'Neil); (13) Lessons from History: Interview with Noam Chomsky (Edward J. Carvalho); (14) "Taking Back the Street Corner": Interview with Martin Espada (Edward J. Carvalho); and (15) Preserving the Democratic Experiment: Interview with Cornel West (Edward J. Carvalho).