On May 2, the CAUT celebrated Don Savage’s twenty-seven years of service as Executive Director with a remarkable series of talks and discussions on academic freedom, political thought and action and their implications for the future of the university.

The four major speakers at the May 2 International Conference discussed CAUT’s history of commitment to academic freedom, and its political work in ensuring academic freedom will continue to flourish here and abroad.

Canada’s foremost historian of academic freedom, Professor Michiel Horn (York University) began by showing in an opening address to 140 delegates, not only how Canadian universities became committed to academic freedom — but also how recently.

There was, said Professor Horn, no "golden age" in the history of academic freedom in Canada, and academic freedom remains under threat. Retrograde administrators and interventionist politicians continue to put pressure on critically minded academics, just as they did between and before the Wars. But there are new pressures, a new self-censorship; a certain willingness to restrict academic inquiry to narrow and apparently harmless research, and a tendency to stay out of public argument and dispute on the great questions of the day.

Paul Zeleza (University of Illinois, and longtime colleague of Don Savage in African studies) and Mary Burgan (General Secretary, American Association of University Professors) showed that attacks on academic freedom in North American and in Africa have surprisingly similar roots.

In Africa, close bureaucratic ties between the state and the academy are a constant menace to academic freedom. In the name of combatting neo colonialism, too many African states suppress free inquiry and teaching, and limit the conversation between the professoriate and the people.

In the United States, the politicization of boards of governors has led many of them to become highly interventionist, thus allowing either new and risky openings for the direct involvement of the "religious right," or for the imposition of "business think" on teaching and research.

Professor Daniel Soberman, emeritus professor of law at Queen’s University and recipient of CAUT’s Milner Award, helped synthesize the work of the entire conference, showing how the recent development of academic freedom could be understood in the perspective of the common academic and social goals of the professoriate — everywhere.

Don Savage closed the conference with a talk looking back over recent decades and even centuries of the history of academic freedom and looking forward to a time when politics and due process combine to make academic freedom a reality in the Canadian university.

The conference provided for intensive discussion groups, and the proceedings are to appear in the coming year in a Festschrift for Don Savage.

Every Council is "special," but President Bill Bruneau suggested "we had special reason here to celebrate the work of Don Savage. We now draw on that work in preparing for the coming decades of change."