Academic freedom

Dennis Baron, in one of his rather too revelatory* (and rather too rambling) essays for the CoHE, does wander across an important issue: are there limits on academic freedom? But neither of the cited examples really opens up any serious path into such a discussion. If anything, they suggest that "academic freedom" has become a buzzword for "I can do whatever I darn well please." In the first case, an instructor claims "academic freedom" when he seminars instead of surveys. Baron's point, reasonably enough, is that one thing is not like the other: a course advertised as a survey really ought to be a survey. (Signifier, meet signified.) That eo ipso, however, is not an "academic freedom" question, although it might possibly be a professorial literacy question. Had Baron forbidden our pseudonymous professor from teaching his "pet project," he would have crossed the line; telling O.P.P. that he cannot teach said pet project as Brit Lit II or American Lit I or whatever sounds like a perfectly appropriate exercise of authority. It's as though I proposed spending all of Brit Lit II on Felicia Hemans (something I'm not likely to do, seeing as how I don't teach Hemans in Brit Lit II in the first place, but never mind). Nowhere in the AAUP's statement on academic freedom is "refusing to teach the course assigned to you" listed as a core component of one's understood intellectual privileges. Similarly, in the second case, we have several instructors arguing that classroom observations violate their "academic freedom." In that case, I can't help wondering if having students in class violates academic freedom. More seriously, such observations would undermine academic freedom only if they were used to police faculty opinions--penalizing all those who preferred Hamlet to King Lear, or, more seriously, all those who argued that Marx was wrong or Adam Smith was wrong or whatever other sacred cow was wrong. Suggestions like "use the blackboard more often" would seem to fall under the heading of useful (if trivial) advice rather than the decline and fall of academic life as we know it.

*--An Anonymous UIUC Source has confirmed for me that all of these people are immediately recognizable.