Many Academics Who are troubled by the growing power of administrators on their campuses believe that their jobs are protected by tenure and their campus activities by academic freedom. Hence, they believe that they, personally, have little to fear from the advent of the all-administrative university. Yet, these unworried professors might do well to fret just a bit. Tenure does not provide absolute protection, and at any rate only about 30 percent of the current professorate is tenured or even on the tenure track. The remaining 70 percent are hired on a contingent basis and can be dismissed at any time. The question of academic freedom is more complex and more dispiriting. In recent years, the federal courts have decided that deanlets, not professors, are entitled to academic freedom. This proposition may be surprising to academics, who, usually without giving the matter much thought, believe they possess a special freedom derived from the German concept of Lehrfreiheit, which they think protects their freedom to teach, to express opinions, and to engage in scholarly inquiry without interference from university administrators or government officials. It certainly seems reasonable to think that professors should possess Lehrfreiheit. Academics play an important part in the production, dissemination, and evaluation of ideas, and a free and dynamic society depends on a steady flow of new ideas in the sciences, politics, and the arts. The late Chief Justice Earl Warren once opined that American society would “stagnate and die” if scholars were not free to inquire, study, and evaluate. Accordingly, he said, academic freedom “is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned.” Despite Chief Justice Warren’s endorsement, professors’ ideas and utterances do not have any special constitutional status. Like other Americans, professors have free speech rights under the First Amendment. In a number of cases decided during the 1950s and 1960s, the Supreme Court made it clear that the First Amendment offered professors considerable protection from the efforts of federal, state, and local governments to intrude on their freedom of speech and association.
