More on Freeze Peach

This is a topic I address from time to time, but it seems a new post is needed now because of various nonsense that's going on. First, let me make one thing perfectly clear, as a man we would all like to forget used to say: free speech and academic freedom are not the same. Legally, the only meaning of Free Speech™ is the First Amendment, as interpreted by the courts. Originally it applied only to the federal government, but the 14th Amendment extended the protections of the Bill of Rights to the States, so it now applies to all government entities within the United States, and that includes your small town Board of Selectmen and yes, public colleges and universities. (However, the courts have ruled that the free speech rights of public elementary and high school students are restricted.)

The First Amendment does not apply to any non-governmental entity, including private employers, newspaper publishers and broadcast news producers, or private universities.  There may be specific laws limiting how employers can restrict speech in the workplace -- for example, you can complain about sexual or racial harassment and it's illegal for the employer to retaliate, not that they don't do it anyway. But if you call your boss a poopyhead, he can prove you right by firing you. 

However, the government can indeed make laws restricting freedom of speech, and there are a lot of them, because there are a whole lot of crimes which are implemented by means of talking and writing. Even though your just talking, you can be convicted of fraud, terroristic threats, blackmail, extortion, conspiracy and harassment, among other crimes. That would include trying to bully an election official into rigging an election for you. 

Now, we come to academic freedom. That is not a legal requirement anywhere, although state legislators and boards of regents may try to promulgate policies for their public universities. But, The university’s mission to discover truth requires it, for example, reject the claim that the earth is 6,000 years old or that hydroxychloroquine cures Covid-19, because these claims are unequivocally inconsistent with the scientific inquiry the university exists to foster. Maybe it gets a bit more fraught with the claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and that Donald Trump was the legitimate winner, but the Political Science department cannot countenance this and students who write that on their poli sci exam should get an F. Similarly with anthropogenic climate change, the historical facts about racism in America, and a whole lot more. Reality has a well-known liberal bias, and the university is constrained by it. That means that professors do not have academic freedom to teach, or require their students to write on exams, that which is objectively false. 

There are generally accepted methods for testing assertions against observable reality. That’s called science. We have ways of deciding what is true, what might be true but may be assignable some degree of high or low likelihood, and what is almost certainly false. There are also categories of assertions — moral values and personal preferences — that aren’t really subject to such tests, although we can require that people make them explicit when they construct an argument. These are by the way the “Three Worlds” as defined by Jurgen Habermas and other philosophers. I think that it is fair to consider living within these parameters to constitute academic freedom. A problem that ought to be acknowledged, however, is that religious beliefs that fall within the First World are for the most part almost certainly false. People can assert them in private, but not in the classroom, where they can be subjects of sociological observation but not claimed to be truths.

Liberty University, for example, requires faculty and students to adhere to false beliefs in the first category, and to specified beliefs in the second and perhaps the third. That is obviously not what would be considered academic freedom at most universities. Conservatives who claim to support academic freedom, however, would assert that it requires accepting the legitimacy of Liberty University. That’s not my definition, and I don’t accept it.