And start talking about “civil liberties.” I read George’s account of the “debate” between Peter Wood and Carey Nelson and was struck by the following paragraph:

Nelson began with an effort at establishing common ground, noting that AAUP is opposed to speech codes and the proliferation of “identity politics” on college campuses. (When asked in the Q and A session what, exactly, the AAUP had ever done in opposition to those things, he could only say that his organization “moves slowly.”) But after that, his carefully prepared talk scarcely got into the three questions pertaining to academic freedom. He did say that academic freedom isn’t an “absolute” right, but offered no guidance as to where the lines should be drawn — except that students don’t have academic freedom rights.

The AAUP has been peddling this tired line about students for a long, long time — so long, in fact, that I fear that the message itself is responsible for a host of abuses. Regardless of the AAUP’s stance on the definition of “academic freedom,” the fact remains that students on public universities enjoy the full range of First Amendment rights, and these rights can dramatically limit faculty and institutional control over student speech and conduct — even in the classroom.

It is true that these rights are bound by context — chiefly the time, place, and manner of the speech (launching a protest in the middle of class is not advisable, but at the same time professors do not have unfettered discretion either), yet the AAUP does its members and universities a disservice by falsely denigrating student rights. Because students are private citizens studying at public institutions, they arguably enjoy a greater range of First Amendment rights than their public-employee professors. (Of course, at private institutions, the civil liberties generally belong to the institution, and the rights of professors and students are defined by contract.)

At the end of the day — and particularly for public-university students and professors — the AAUP’s manufactured definition of “academic freedom” is almost entirely useless. In some ways, it is worse than useless because it wrongly diminishes the vast reach of student expressive rights. To maintain clarity (debates over academic freedom invariably turn into debates over what ought to be rather than what is), I like to think of “academic freedom” as simply those civil liberties that are exercised in an academic environment. Beyond civil liberties lies the land of contracts, where “rights” end and privileges begin.