In ACTA’s last post here at the Brandeis Center Blog, we noted several examples of how professors abuse and violate the principles of academic freedom. How has the landscape of academic freedom changed over the years and who is best positioned to stand up and fight for it today? The first “Key Document” in ACTA’s Free to Teach, Free to Learn guide is the 1915 “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure.” This declaration set forth the guiding principles of the American understanding of academic freedom. One hundred years ago, the declaration’s authors saw the greatest threat to free inquiry coming from outside the professoriate. As former Harvard president Lawrence Summers writes in Free to Teach, Free to Learn “ideas about academic freedom have their roots in concerns about trustees or funders using their leverage to dictate what students are taught or what idea professors propound.” The great fear at the time was that those outside of academia would, despite their lack of qualifications and expertise, seek to control, in light of their own biases, what was taught and what research was conducted at institutions of higher education. Given such an environment, the declaration states that “university teachers must be prepared to police themselves.” Vigilant professors were to be the safeguard of freedom of thought and research on campus. Over the years, however, the nature and sources of threats to academic freedom have changed dramatically. Indeed, the professors who were to be the primary guardians of such freedom have often become a threat to it. As former Yale president and first-amendment scholar Benno Schmidt writes in his preface to Free to Teach, Free to Learn: [P]rofessors have been known to invoke academic freedom in ways that can only be described as self-serving. The principle has been claimed to defend … research misconduct … ; sexual involvement with students; faked credentials; political harangues in the classroom; and the blocking of curricular review.” In other words, too many within academia have forgotten the words of the American Association of University Professors’ “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure” that academic freedom “carries with it duties correlative with rights.” Whether they are abusing Jewish students in the classroom, violating Christian students’ freedom of conscience or engaging in gross research misconduct (all documented cases described in Free to Teach, Free to Learn), too many professors and university administrations are using academic freedom as a shield to hide from accountability for their actions. So who is left to stand up for academic freedom today? Ironically, just as some professors and administrators are now threats to, rather than defenders of, such freedom, so too are those who were once considered threats to free inquiry—university trustees—often the ones best-suited to defend academic freedom on campus. Though the popular perception of trustees is that their authority is merely symbolic, boards of trustees exercise final legal authority over universities, and they are often well-positioned to be independent arbiters who can balance competing institutional demands with public interests in mind. At the end of Free to Teach, Free to Learn, ACTA offers over a dozen ways that trustees can take responsibility for protecting academic freedom at their institutions. They can take a stand against campus speech codes that repress freedom of expression; they can make an active effort to stay informed about courses and course content at their schools; they can make sure that controversial speakers aren’t disinvited due to a heckler’s veto, and they can review, and if necessary, amend policies on academic ethics and integrity. In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Benno Schmidt highlights the following words from the 1915 declaration mentioned above: If [academia] should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of the incompetent and unworthy, or to prevent the freedom which it claims . . . from being used as a shelter for inefficiency, for superficiality, or for uncritical and intemperate partisanship, it is certain that the task will be performed by others. This is why trustees must play an important role in protecting academic freedom. If universities become places where ideology is prized over free inquiry and where brainwashing is more common that teaching, then those outside the university will attempt to impose discipline from without. If professors and administrators are derelict in this regard, then trustees must step up to the plate.