Academic Freedom

Powerline and the Volokh Conspiracy have been heavily covering the Lawrence Summers debacle, fallout, and consquent ponderings. Powerline is all about defending Summers's right to speak his mind, his "academic freedom" if you will. The Conspiracy, unsurprisingly, takes the same position. But two things struck me when I read this Powerline post, not long after reading this one:

1) One of the reasons it's the faculty now, and not just the students, is because the people who were students a decade and a half ago are now working their way up through the faculty and academia. So if this kind of thing was prevelent when they were students, then of course it will remain so as they gather more and more power and influence to themselves as professors. And thus it becomes an endless cycle.

2) Why advocate dumping Churchill but defend Summers? Firing Churchill for the "fraud" issue, as a  reader suggested, is just a subterfuge for firing him for his views. The degree to which we defend free speech should not be dependent upon the degree to which we agree with the message.

Professor Volokh said it more correctly, I think:

Naturally, we like to think that our views are much more sensible and well-defended than those of the Ward Churchills of the world. But we suspect that some of our colleagues may disagree. If it weren't for academic freedom, we might face serious retaliation for speech — even outside-the-classroom, on-blog speech — that our colleagues claims creates a "hostile learning environment" for students, supposedly constitutes "hate speech" (a vague and broad category), supposedly discredits the institution in the eyes of this or that group, and so on.

I know that's true, just from the sentiments I've faced here from my own classmates and from the statements professors are willing to make in class. It's a two-way street, and making decisions regarding who should be protected and who shouldn't, based on what values they advocate, is dangerous territory. The end result will, of course, be that idiots like Ward Churchill will get hired and retain a job sometimes long past the point of embarassment. Re-thinking the tenure system is a good idea, but only if it isn't redone into something that can be used as a weapon to get rid of "undesirables." There are few enough conservatives in academia that such a dangerous notion will likely backfire and be used to pick off any of those who don't fit into the prevailing system of thought. And it's already hard enough to make a place for oneself in academia if you're not PC enough. Let's not make it any harder, please. (At least until I have tenure!)