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    1.

    THE POLITICS of professors has been an issue in higher education since the end of the nineteenth century. And why shouldn’t it be? Professors enjoy social authority, they virtually monopolize the business of knowledge production in many areas, and they have intimate and largely unsupervised access to developing minds. Their political views are important. At the same time, it is a custom in the modern university to segregate those views from the professional identities of professors—that is, to treat views extraneous to the subject matter of teaching and scholarship as somehow “out of bounds” to the evaluation of job performance. We don’t approve when the chemistry professor gives anti-war speeches (or pro-war speeches, for that matter) in chemistry class, and we may intervene, because we feel that the professor has impermissibly mixed her politics and her job. But we choose to not make it a problem when she gives such speeches out in the quad or on the street.
    Professors have the protection of this firewall as part of a deal more or less tacitly worked out at the time of the establishment of the American Association of University Professors in 1915. 1 The AAUP was founded to articulate and defend the principle of academic freedom in the wake of several notorious cases in which professors were fired for expressing political views that trustees or administrators considered obnoxious. The principle of academic freedom was designed to allow professors to pursue inquiry wherever it leads, without fear of damaging their careers if they reach results other people find offensive. It is, in effect, a pact with the rest of society: the results of academic inquiry will be worthwhile if professors are held immune from sanctions for the political implications of their work and for their personal political views. But another reason for the principle of academic freedom is that it helped to define academic inquiry as, by its nature, a value-neutral enterprise. Protecting professors’ political and religious views was a way underscoring their irrelevance to research and teaching. The modern university was about knowledge, not ideology. It was about facts, not values. It should have been obvious that patrolling this distinction was going to be a never-ending task.
    It did not seem so at first, at least to John Dewey, the Columbia philosopher who (with Arthur Lovejoy) was the founder of the AAUP and who became its first president. When he took office, Dewey said that he imagined that within a few years, cases involving violations of professors’ academic freedom would be rare—a comment that gives an idea of the irenic nature of Dewey’s mind. Characteristically, he was too optimistic, and by the end of the year, he had to admit that he had been mistaken. 2 Professors’ politics are usually a low-level issue in higher education. They become a high-level, and sometimes inflammatory, issue during times of public anxiety: during turn-of-the-century debates over immigration, for example, or when the United States entered the First World War. The politics of professors was an issue during the McCarthy period in the early Cold War, and at the time of the protests against the war in Vietnam. They became an issue in the so-called culture wars in the late 1980s, and again after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
    Almost all professors subscribe to the principle of academic freedom under a fairly non-restrictive interpretation, and they are right to do so. Faculty members are by nature contentious and inefficient self-governors, but faculties must govern themselves. Simply as a practical matter, experience shows that you cannot dictate to tenured professors, or put their feet to the fire of public opinion, with much hope of success. Administrators come and go, but tenure is forever. But the importance of the principle goes beyond that. Academic freedom is not just a nice job perk. It is the philosophical key to the whole