On several campuses, professors who should have been free to disagree with administration policies were instead dismissed from their positions. The president of Philander Smith College in Arkansas terminated a professor’s appointment on grounds of insubordination after the faculty member told a newspaper reporter that she could not comment on current problems at the college because a presidential directive banned faculty and staff contacts with the media and with state or accreditation agencies without prior presidential approval. The directive itself was an affront to academic freedom. Two professors at Benedict College in South Carolina were also dismissed because of alleged insubordination. They had the temerity to insist on grading students on the merits of their academic performance, without adhering to an administration-imposed policy requiring first-year and sophomore students to be graded at least as much on the basis of effort as on academic performance.

Internal policy disputes featured prominently in the dismissal of a professor at the University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky who incurred the administration’s hostility apparently because of what he had posted on his own web site about college programs and the president’s leadership of the institution. The Cumberlands administration then removed the chair of the professor’s department from the faculty because he disagreed with its action against his colleague. Two professors at Meharry Medical College in Tennessee were dismissed because of disagreements with the administration’s policies and practices they should have been free to voice.

External political pressures also took their toll on academic freedom. The administrations of California State University , San Marcos , and George Mason University in Virginia , responding to public clamor, withdrew speaking invitations to controversial filmmaker Michael Moore. The AAUP countered that the cancellation of a speaking engagement because of public displeasure with a speaker’s views is at odds with the belief that a university is place where all views--no matter how controversial--can be heard and discussed. The AAUP similarly decried death threats against Ward Churchill, who had likened victims of the attacks on September 11, 2001, to “little Eichmanns,” and the prospect of violence which led Hamilton College in New York to cancel his appearance on that campus.

At Arizona State University , controversial art was the flashpoint. The university administration insisted that several unflattering depictions of President George W. Bush be removed from a campus art exhibition scheduled to open shortly before one of the 2004 presidential debates was to be held at the university. In a second incident just prior to the November election, the ASU administration began an “administrative review” of a professor’s display of an antiwar poster, saying that it dishonored Pat Tillman, a former student at the university, who had died fighting in Afghanistan. The administration’s action in both situations, the AAUP maintained, could not be reconciled with a commitment to academic freedom.

Also disturbing to supporters of academic freedom were several steps taken by the Bush administration to curtail academic travel to and from the United States . In March 2004, the government barred scholars in this country from traveling to Cuba to participate in a conference on brain injury. In June, it announced new restrictions on educational travel to Cuba that have severely impaired academic exchange programs. In August, it revoked the work visa of Professor Tariq Ramadan, a citizen of Switzerland and well-known Muslim scholar, who had been appointed to a faculty position at the University of Notre Dame. And in September, in an unprecedented action, it denied visas to all sixty-five Cuban scholars scheduled to participate in an academic conference in Las Vegas.

In addition, political pressures on faculty rights, as well as on the independence of colleges and universities, surfaced this last year in several states that have been considering adopting versions of the so-called academic bill of rights. Common to all these bills is that they would replace academic standards with political criteria for determining whether the faculty of a college or university foster “a plurality of methodologies and perspectives.” The pressures are also clearly evident on web sites in this country and abroad and in media reports declaiming against the alleged political bias of the academic profession, and especially against certain professors of Middle East studies.

This past year’s challenges for academic freedom may have been somewhat unusual because of the intensity of the national presidential contest and its impact on the academic community. But as long as some professors, in their teachings, writings, speeches, or associations, offend those in power, those challenges will never cease. And, of course, the defense of academic freedom can never rest.

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Jonathan Knight directs the program in academic freedom and tenure for the American Association of University Professors.