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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I think you're wrong on two counts: one practical, one theoretical.

The practical one is that state schools are arms of the state. Given that their governor sits on the Board of Regents, I'm not sure they're effectively distinguishable in the way you suggest.

The theoretical one is that universities are not like "every job". The whole point of universities is to encourage bold intellectual inquiry. Academic freedom is at the heart of what universities do. Whether or not they can legally get away with trying to treat professors like serfs seems less important to me.

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I always thought that your right to free speech was as a citizen, not as an employee. For example if you work for the President and you badmouth him, he can have you fired. The distinction is that once you don't work for him anymore, you're now free to say whatever you want.

I'm not a lawyer so I don't know. If my mental model for how free speech works is wrong I'd love to find out. Especially if you can give me case law to look at.

that's right. 'freedom of speech' is about the right not to be thrown in jail for your speech, not about your entitlement to a sum of money, or a position with a title.

Practicing free speech is a duty for an academic - there is this idea of "public intellectual". It's also the duty of the employer not to restrict it in the name of political expediency.

"Free speech" and "the First Amendment" are not synonymous. The First Amendment makes no guarantee of employment, of course. But if you fire people based on speech, you are making the speech of your employees less free. This is what the debate is about. The First Amendment is a red herring in this context.

Ken White has a post titled "Ninth Circuit Clarifies First Amendment Rights of Public University Professors" [0] which goes in to some detail about the various legal issues at the nexus of free speech rights and professorship.

[0] - http://www.popehat.com/2013/09/05/ninth-circuit-clarifies-fi...

Thanks for the link.

> The theoretical one is that universities are not like "every job". The whole point of universities is to encourage bold intellectual inquiry. Academic freedom is at the heart of what universities do. Whether or not they can legally get away with trying to treat professors like serfs seems less important to me.

Then maybe universities shouldn't be funded by the state. A CIA operative, military officer, cabinet member, etc. doesn't have a broad freedom of speech, because they are paid by the state to do a job. If you want to be free, don't take the 'dirty money'.

That's an idealistic view. The US has seen immense success in the past 100 years or so by funding universities for research and at the same time still providing a "reasonable" amount of academic freedom for professors. It attracted the brightest minds of the world and gave them the resource to study what they wanted to do. And you propose throwing that away for an absolutist principle?

wrong. The federal government has only been broadly funding academic research for the past 50 years or so. While there was scattered early research (such as the Michelson-Morley experiments done at the USNA), and the land-grant acts. Big guided research operations such as NIH and NCI were largely internal, small research operations from the 30s through the 50s. NIH first issued grants in 1967.

Oh, please. Universities are a fine example of something that the state should fund. Knowledge is a public good. An educated populace is important societal infrastructure, especially in a democracy. Education is such a long-cycle thing that purely private funding of it is deeply problematic.

I grant that people working under the rules of wartime discipline have reasonable speech restrictions. And people whose job is to publicly represent the organization also have some limitations on their public speech. But there's no general reason that employers should be able to control employee speech except when they are directly working.

false dichotomy. Just because there is no profit motive doesn't mean that it can't be private. For example, the chemiosmotic effect is something that was discovered by a private nonprofit scientific effort.

You could also argue that education is such a long-cycle think that state control is deeply problematic. Knowledge is a public good so it shouldn't be sullied by grubby hands of politicians seeking to control the populace and gain more political power for the sake of their narcissism.

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