Academic freedom is of central importance to higher education and it affects all aspects of work at universities. It symbolizes academics' acceptance of the need for openness and flexibility (Balyer, 2011) and it protects the conditions leading to the creation of good teaching and learning, sound research, and scholarship (Atkinson, 2004). Since academic freedom is a defining characteristic of the health of universities (Karran, 2009), Henkel (2005) points out that it is the most frequently discussed value in higher education reform research. Despite the crucial importance of academic freedom, there remain significant problems in how to research it. This piece focuses on three issues: first, the lack of an agreed-upon definition of academic freedom; second, research on academics' versus students' academic freedom; and third, the little information available about academic freedom predictors. These three issues have generally contributed to the vagueness in conceptualizing and researching academic freedom practices at universities.