Academic Freedom

The concept of academic freedom, based on First Amendment freedom of speech, applies generally to all levels of education. As the Fifth Circuit wrote in Edwards v. Aguillard (1985), a case that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court on the issue of creation science, academic freedom is “the principle that individual instructors are at liberty to teach that which they deem to be appropriate in the exercise of their professional judgment (p. 1257).”

Disputes over classroom content and methodology typically pit a teacher's claim of academic freedom against an educational institution's clearly established, though not absolute, authority to prescribe the curriculum in its schools. Such struggles to determine what will be taught, and in what manner it will be presented, turn school districts, colleges, and universities into battlegrounds between competing viewpoints and agendas.

Educators imagine that academic freedom provides greater protection of their classroom actions than case law supports. Courts consistently, but not unanimously, side with school boards, colleges, and universities when educators refuse to follow curriculum and reasonable administrative commands, teach with unapproved or administratively rejected materials, and in public schools use or allow objectionable language in the classroom, as discussed in this entry. Particularly in light of the ongoing attempts by individual educators and various interest groups to use educational institutions as forums to promote their ideological positions, one can anticipate claims of academic freedom will continue as educators and their schools battle over the right to determine school curriculum.