It’s not just civil libertarians who worry that 9/11 has been used to justify insidious state overreach; academics have a mounting set of concerns, too. A new essay collection, Academic Freedom in the Post 9/11 Era (Macmillan), whose contributors include Cornel West, Noam Chomsky and Henry Giroux, makes the case that universities are in trouble. Its editors are Edward J. Carvalho and David B. Downing.

The book presents academe as bullied by corporate interests, saddled by the need to curb its rhetoric to match national political agendas, and pressured by the military. Its message so piqued Stanley Fish that he used its authors as characters in a short Kantian morality play on his New York Times blog, pitting them against conservative academic David Horowitz and provoking a few hundred comments.