Overview of Chapter 4: The Role of Academic Freedom in Campus Speech
Way back in 1896, Jane Stanford, the sole trustee, benefactor, and co-founder of Stanford University and heir to a railroad fortune, urged the University’s president to fire a professor who had supported unions and criticized railroads. She said the professor “cannot be trusted and he should go … he’s a dangerous man.”9 The university’s president ultimately fired the professor, a decision that tarnished the university’s reputation for decades.
This example illustrates that controversies over academic freedom have deep roots in our society. Yet we still do not have universal agreement on what academic freedom is or how it relates to free speech. This chapter delves into these twin topics with the goal of supplying yet another tool to help students enrich and refine judgments on how campus disputes should be resolved. What readers will see is that although some commentators treat free speech and academic freedom as interchangeable, important distinctions exist between the two. For example, while the First Amendment’s guarantee applies to all “the people,” to protect and nourish our democracy, academic freedom covers a far smaller group: faculty, and perhaps students and the university itself, in support of the academic mission of advancing knowledge. Yet academic freedom may apply in contexts where the First Amendment does not, such as in private universities.
The chapter concludes with a modern-day case controversy involving a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The dispute asks readers to reflect on the legitimacy of constraining academic speech both when the faculty member is speaking in their capacity as a professor and when they are speaking out as a citizen.
9See Melissa De Witte, “Academic Freedom’s Origin Story,” Stanford Graduate School of Education (May 1, 2023), https://ed.stanford.edu/news/academic-freedom-s-origin-story. A video of the speech described in the article is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AesygiQy0Hs.