It doesn't mean anything goes. It doesn't mean professors can do whatever they want in the classroom. It's not a system of absolute rights, and it doesn't mean that colleges and universities aren't accountable to their students or to the public. What it does mean is that institutions of higher education should be free to figure out for themselves how to fulfill their missions, and how to solve their problems. Of course, when they refuse to do that--when they make problems, or won't acknowledge that problems exist, then trouble arises. You get things like the ABOR, and all the fallout, anger, incomprehension and bad faith that attended all sides of that enterprise.

But the ideals of self-governance and institutional autonomy--which lie at the heart of academic freedom--speak directly to the manner in which the educational enterprise and the scholarly pursuit of truth require freedom from meddlesome external interference, even as they also require colleges and universities to be transparently responsible to the public they serve. That recognition seemed to be at the forefront of yesterday's roundtable discussion of rising tuition costs and bloated endowments:

Two dozen college presidents and policy experts defended the rising costs of tuition on Monday and argued against forcing colleges to spend more of their endowments.

But Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, who convened a round-table discussion on the subject, indicated that they would continue their effort to push universities to justify their tax exemptions by spending more of their endowment money.

"Tuition has risen at twice the rate of per capita income," Mr. Welch said, "and this year it will cost just under $50,000 to attend the average private college. If the cost of milk had risen as fast as the cost of college since 1980, a gallon would be $15."

Mr. Grassley said it was only fair to ask whether universities were doing enough for society, given that the value of their tax exemption, in the 2007 fiscal year, was more than $17 billion. He cited a survey finding that in that year, universities earned an average return of 17.2 percent on their assets but spent only 4.6 percent.

The two richest universities, Harvard and Yale, together have about $60 billion in endowments.

"If an institution could educate all of its undergraduate students, regardless of need, free of charge, with a payout of just 1 percent of its assets, is its endowment an unreasonable accumulation of taxpayer-subsidized funds?" Mr. Grassley asked.

Although Mr. Grassley has repeatedly suggested that he would like to mandate that the richest universities spend 5 percent of their endowments each year, as private foundations must, there was no hint on Monday that any specific legislation was on the horizon.

In fact, Mr. Grassley's closing remarks gave some comfort to university leaders, who oppose such legislation. He described his earlier experience looking into problems with nonprofits, saying his initial assessment was that it would take "a massive amount of legislation" to correct the problems. But after discussions with nonprofit groups, he told the educators, "a lot of the things that needed to be corrected were self-corrected," He added, "We'd like to encourage you folks to look inward and correct what can be corrected."

At the very least, we are getting a good airing of the issues, a necessary discussion is being launched, and colleges and universities are feeling the constructive pressure of a public that has gone just about as far as it can go with hypertrophic tuition bills. Now if only we all had the economics knowledge needed to actually conduct this discussion at an appropriately informed level.

Have I mentioned here that among all the many distribution requirements colleges and universities typically maintain--foreign language, math, science, composition, maybe some literature or history or social science--economics never seems to be among them? That's something ACTA pointed out in their 2004 study of the "hollow" core curriculum, and it's an observation whose poignance deepens with time.