freedomtogripe

> Academic freedom of teachers teaching a 2nd or 3rd grader how to read? Or of teachers of 6th graders learning geography.

I share your concerns, but I'll take the difficult position here.

Before CRT bogeyman there was the Common Core bogeyman. Tucker Carlson has Strong Opinions on how to teach math. I shit you not.

Every time I flew through MCI I had someone in the terminal or on the lane strike up conversation (midwest is like that) and learn that I'm in a math-heavy field. They would then say some inane shit about math education. I would ask the last math course they took. The highest answer I ever got was Calc or Linear Algebra, and 90% of the answers were "I don't remember" or "algebra in high school".

So, yeah. Third grade teachers need cover. Because even http://www.corestandards.org/Math was politicized by cable news talking heads. Go read it, not knowing what it is, and explain to me why someone who hasn't thought about math in 20 years would reasonably have any sort of opinion that's not motivated by a cable news talking head telling you that the reason you don't understand fifth grade probability theory is not that you were woefully failed by the American education system and your kid is already outstripping you, but because Obama Socialist Math makes no sense.

We need more scientists who have a small bucket of money to work on what they think is important, without answering to a funding agency every year. More CAREER awards and endowed professorships. THAT is what I always thought was meant by academic freedom! At least the type of freedom I would want to see more of & think society would benefit from. The freedom to do scholarship and talk about their area of expertise as they see fit.

I think 80+% of professors who decry the need for more academic freedom would use that freedom to talk about the most inane and stupid things on Twitter. Or complain in committee meetings and trigger 20 year olds in intro classes. instead of, y'know, doing their job and taking big research risks that are supposed to be enabled by academic freedom.

The political type of academic freedom doesn't seem particularly socially valuable and I can't really bring myself to care about professors having more political speech protections than anyone else. Why are physics or math professors so much more important than Bob from Accounting on culture war BS?

An old mathematician saying women aren't good at math isn't a particularly interesting use of a mathematician's academic freedom. Or whatever word policing is in vogue these days from the other end of the spectrum. Like, how the fuck is that "academic freedom" at all, other than that the complainer is an academic and wants more freedom to say whatever they want? It has nothing to do with their research field. It's not academic freedom. It's just bizarro entitlement.

Anecdotally? It's usually the folks who actually do have tons of real academic freedom to do whatever they want with their research time who find themselves complaining that they can't collect a salary to wage stochastic culture wars in Calc 101 classrooms and committee meetings about course schedules or whatever.

Academic freedom should be about academics -- research and teaching. That doesn't include going on bizarre unrelated culture war rants in math/science classes or saying stupid shit about a politician on twitter.

Yes, they absolutely do, and the threat of either state or political violence keeps most people in line.

> that's far too expensive to be total and widespread.

That's true for all criminal acts, everywhere. The US doesn't even clear the majority of its violent crime. Law enforcement of all types and in all cases works via deterrence rather than perfect enforcement.

For those blissfully unaware: Amherst has a $3.8B endowment and 1745 students, or $2,177,650 per student (endowment income: $87K/student/year at a 4% withdraw). In addition to that $2M/student from the endowment, they also charge $61K/year in tuition. Amherst is a undergraduate-only teaching college, so unlike R1 these funds aren't e.g. funding a giant amount of R1 research labs or anything like that. They really do just have $90K/student per year in safe endowment withdrawal and then also charge $61K/yr in tuition.

Academia has a lot of exhaustingly bullshit inter-personal stuff in general, but I have no idea how I would sit through the faculty meetings described in this post without exercising an excessive amount of academic freedom... UMass next door does infinitely more for all of these stated goals by just... not being a finishing school for the wealthy elite.

(I don't have anything against Amherst per se. It's just a bit insufferable how few faculty at places like this understand that they are running finishing schools for the economic elite.)