Predictably, the AAUP is declaring that Aliza Shvarts was expressing her academic freedom when she inseminated herself and then induced menstruation (and possible miscarriage) all for the purposes of a naive, self-absorbed, intensely warped "art" project.

Here is Cary Nelson, newly re-elected AAUP president: "Academic freedom for faculty and intellectual freedom for students give them the right to speech that shocks and challenges."

Amid all the verbiage, Nelson appears to have lost track of the fact that Shvarts was doing a hell of a lot more than engaging in shocking and challenging "speech." She was performing acts on herself--and, potentially, on her unborn children--that I strongly suspect ought to have been run by Yale's Institutional Review Board, a body that decides whether faculty and student projects involving research on human subjects should be allowed to proceed. I also strongly suspect that the IRB would not have approved Shvarts' venture.

IRBs exist for good reason--they work to ensure that academic undertakings involving people (especially involving their bodies) are ethically sound. Yale quite properly requires students and faculty across the university to get prior approval for any project that could be construed as research conducted on a human subject. Did Shvarts do that? It sure doesn't sound like it.

Nelson ought to know all about IRBs, and he ought also to understand that IRBs are compatible with academic freedom. The AAUP has said as much, after all. And while the AAUP argues that IRBs have gotten a bit overly intrusive about the kinds of projects they want to oversee (sometimes, for example, extending their prerogatives to cover innocuous surveys and the like), the AAUP does not argue with the foundational goal of the IRB, which is to ensure that research projects involving human subjects do not put those subjects at unreasonable risk.

Academic freedom does not cover reckless, unethical, unsupervised experimentation on one's own body for the purposes of completing coursework and getting a good grade. Nor, I would imagine, does it cover the creation of embryos for the purpose of destroying and then displaying them.