559 INDIVIDUAL ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND APROFESSIONAL ACTS Liviu Andreescu Department of English Spiru Haret University Abstract. In this essay, Liviu Andreescu examines the question of whether a certain category of aprofessional acts by academics (in particular, political speech) deserves protection against academic sanctions under the principle of academic freedom. Andreescu discusses two alternative views of academic freedom (the extensive and the restrictive) providing different answers to the question. He then examines some of the arguments advanced by the proponents of the more recent, restrictive theory of academic freedom against the broader, traditional theory, which in recent times has been on the defensive. Andreescu ultimately suggests that the choice between the two definitions of academic freedom is a question of sound policy in specific institutional contexts, rather than a matter of conceptual consistency. Introduction The days are long gone when Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California and victim of excessive government meddling in the business of his institution, could nonchalantly equate Lehrfreiheit — literally, ‘‘freedom to teach,’’ or ‘‘academic freedom’’ in plain rendition — with ‘‘the freedom of the professor to do as he pleases.’’ 1 What makes such phrases sound quaint today is not the fact that this putative definition of academic freedom is nonoperational, for its author almost certainly never intended it as such. Rather, it is the implicit but manifest optimism about the extent to which the professoriate should be shielded by the safeguards of academic freedom that appears out of place. And not because of today’s additional, or additionally intrusive, outside interference with the business of academics and their universities. As Kerr’s own career abundantly demonstrates, this was at least as much the case at the time his The Uses of the University was first published in 1972 as it is nowadays. More precisely, and somewhat ironically, the new conception of a university that Kerr’s ‘‘multiversity’’ heralded sits uncomfortably with the traditional understanding of academic freedom, which in the 1960s and 1970s was arguably in its heyday in the United States. After all, the Supreme Court had just placed it, albeit problematically, under the generous umbrella of the First Amendment. The advent of the entrepreneurial university and the more or less subtle changes of academic ethos it engendered have gradually eroded the symbolic prestige of academic freedom. 2 The notion itself is rarely attacked head on these days. Only very infrequently does a contemporary William Buckley dare dismiss 1. Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 44. 2. Burton Clark’s Creating Entrepreneurial Universities (Oxford: Pergamon, 1998) and Sustaining Change in Universities (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004) are two standard works among the many that could be cited to illustrate this point. EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 59 Number 5 2009  2009 Board of Trustees University of Illinois