Hello, good day. You know, you may have noticed that every time there's a political controversy of some kind on an American campus, someone will appeal to the principles of free speech and academic freedom. Sometimes in the same breath as if they're the same thing. Well, they're not. And that's what I'm here to tell（ 告诉） you today. Free speech, we mostly understand.
It covers pretty much everything except fraud, defamation, child pornography and threats of imminent（即将来临的） violence. Courts have generally decided that the violence has to be really imminent. It's basically a neo-Nazi running at you with the tiki torch right now. That matters. But academic freedom is not free speech. And so Jennifer Ruth of Portland State University and I wrote an entire book to say so because we'd noticed over the past ten years or so that people were beginning to confuse and even sometimes conflate（合并） these two concepts, free speech and academic freedom, sometimes mistakenly, sometimes deliberately.
I think there are two reasons for this. One is that a lot of these controversies involve invited speakers. And a lot of all these invited speakers are really matters of academic freedom. Some, like this one, involves alt-right trolls whose only purpose is to weaponize free speech, generate outrage（暴行） and own the libs and make a pile of money doing it. But there's nothing academic about an event like that. It serves no legitimate（合法的） intellectual purpose, right?
So, yeah. There's another reason as well, though. It's a little more complicated. The Supreme Court decided in 1967 that academic freedom is a special concern of the First Amendment（改善）. It's not clear what that means. So, I like to draw on a metaphor.
Aha! There's even a horizon（地平线） so appropriate for today. Free speech is an ocean. It's huge. It's deep. It's fast.
Academic freedom is a ship on the ocean. It won't work without the ocean. But it is distinct from it. Okay. Well, who exactly is on this ship? That's a crucial question and the courts are all over the place on answering it.
There's no coherence. It could be the university itself, like Penn State, which should be autonomous from external political control, right? Or it could be individual professors themselves in their research or teaching their classes. Or it could be a collective（集体的） right of professors as a whole, which is a more nebulous concept. So, let us go to the American Association of University Professors, an organization that actually defined the concept and continues to defend it and refine it today. Academic freedom has three components.
The first is not terribly controversial. We are entitled（给…权利(或资格)） to full freedom in research and the publication of the results. I can only think of a couple of instances in which that causes trouble. One is when a corporation sponsors research and then doesn't like the results and tries to suppress（抑制） it. The other involves, I would say, researchers in climate change. Michael Mann taught here for many years and he was subject to constant political harassment（骚扰） and now he's at U Penn and he's been fighting back.
So, there, you know, his right to publish his research and do his research has been challenged for quite some time. But usually this is not the case. What usually comes up more often is number two. Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom and discussing their subject. But they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. This sometimes happens.
And sometimes people read this as if it's trying to suppress controversy. So, the AUP in 1970, interesting time, what had just happened, the '60s, interesting time for campuses. So, the AUP went back and did a gloss（光泽的表面） on this and here's the interpretive comment. The intent（意图） of the statement is not to discourage what is controversial. Controversy is at the heart of the academic inquiry but the entire statement is designed to foster（培养）. The passage serves to underscore（强调） the need for teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.
Okay. For me, the key word there is persistently. Because if a professor makes a one-off comment about the events of the day or a tsunami or something, no harm, no foul, but persistent（固执的） intrusion of irrelevant（不相干的） material, not covered by academic freedom. It's not carte blanche. The third thing involves college and university professors speaking as citizens. I'll get back to this one.
It's tricky and this is actually where most of the controversies occur. Thank you medium formerly known as Twitter. But it happens whenever we speak not as professors but as citizens. That is called extramural speech outside the walls of the academy（学院）. Okay. So let me gloss this.
By way of Yale（耶鲁） law professor Robert Post who distinguishes between academic freedom and free speech like so. Free speech, he says, is a matter of democratic legitimation. Meaning that no democratic government is legitimate if it suppresses public criticism of it by its citizens. So all citizens must have free speech even if they're criticizing the government by claiming that the government is actually controlled by alien（外国的） lizard（蜥蜴） people. A distressingly large number of people believes things like this. Just Google David Ecke will find the author and creator（创造者） of alien lizard（蜥蜴） people theory.