Links for 11/3/10

Joan DelFattore

Professors in public colleges and universities have long cherished the belief that the First Amendment protects our academic freedom…

In reality, faculty academic freedom has always been more firmly rooted in professional norms than in legal decisions. This is readily apparent in private colleges and universities, to which the First Amendment does not apply…

Moreover, the function of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from abridging the free speech of individuals. Its protection does not depend on whether that speech is original, well reasoned, or well informed. By contrast, academic freedom as a professional norm upholds the authority of the faculty as a whole to establish and maintain academic standards and to share in institutional governance. It poses no obstacle to penalizing individual faculty members for scholarly speech that is judged to be professionally incompetent, even if the First Amendment would protect the expression of those same ideas by a citizen on the street. The applications are different because the fundamental purposes are different…

Michael Smith

Reconstructing Thoreau’s cabin…

Unable to see how irrelevant modern building codes were for this project, the director of code enforcement immediately declared our plans as drawn were a menace to public health and safety. The entire thing was transformed from frustration to farce when he insisted that the cabin would need ... a sprinkler system…

Even if the project becomes another one of those good ideas that run afoul of the sclerotic bureaucracies that too often hamper creativity, however, those of us most closely involved have learned, as Thoreau had, that we often forge our own chains. Our experience has confirmed the essential truth that we are almost all conformists, bound by rules and conventions we seldom question and even more rarely challenge…

submissiveness in the face of injustice — or, in our case in the face of intractable bureaucracy — begins with the habits of mind we cultivate in our day-to-day activities…

Yikes. I could only get about 3 of these correct. Some of them I barely even recognize the word.