Referencing a UCLA professor fired because he blew the whistle on fraud in environmental research, Professor Glenn Reynolds writes:
A cynic might suggest, of course, that notions of academic freedom were developed in the first half of the 20th century largely in order to protect communists from being fired, and that since Enstrom isn’t a communist, academic freedom shouldn’t apply . . .
The “superstition of academic freedom” was a primary subject of William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1951 book God and Man at Yale and, indeed, the biggest fights over academic freedom at that time involved the protection of communists.
Nowadays, American universities are run almost entirely by communists, so the meaning of “academic freedom” has necessarily changed.