We Need New Ways to Protect Academic Freedom
Austin Sarat | 29 January 2025 | Inside Higher Ed
Katherine Franke, formerly a law professor at Columbia University, is just the latest of many academics who have found themselves in hot water because of something they said outside the classroom. Others have been fired or resigned under pressure for what they posted online or said in other off-campus venues.
In each of those cases, the “offending party” invoked academic freedom or freedom of speech as a defense to pressures brought on them, or procedures initiated against them, by university administrators. The traditional discourse of academic freedom or free speech on campus has focused on threats from inside the academy of the kind that led Franke and others to leave their positions…