Bill Ayers, the petition, the University of Nebraska, and academic freedom come together this morning in Naomi Schaeffer Riley's Wall Street Journal column:

Late last week, the University of Nebraska rescinded an invitation to William Ayers to speak on its campus after the election. Mr. Ayers, the co-founder of the Weather Underground and the man responsible for bombing a number of federal buildings in the 1960s, has been the subject of much media attention recently, thanks to his associations with Barack Obama. When Nebraska politicians learned of Mr. Ayers's forthcoming visit to the university, they were outraged. Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson said: "His past involvement in a violent protest group and incendiary comments are not consistent with the agenda of unity that we need in America."

The university cited "security concerns" as the reason for its action (certainly ironic, given Mr. Ayers's own background), but it was seen, in certain quarters, as mere censorship. "It's a major infringement on academic freedom," David Moshman, an educational psychology professor told the Lincoln, Neb., Journal Star. Mr. Moshman called the decision "a dangerous precedent." The one upside to the publicity surrounding this controversy, he said, was that the university "may also get a major lesson in academic freedom."

Lately, it seems, Mr. Ayers, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has become something of a poster child for "academic freedom." An online petition signed by more than 3,000 educators explained: "The attacks on and the character assassination of Ayers threaten the university as a space of open inquiry and debate, and threaten schools as places of compassion, imagination, curiosity, and free thought."

Compassion and free thought? We should remember that Mr. Ayers was a domestic terrorist. He has never expressed the slightest regret for his violent actions; indeed, he pointedly said, in 2001, that he and his collaborators "didn't do enough." And he has continued his radical project in the classroom. As Stanley Kurtz recently explained in these pages: Mr. Ayers favors "individual schools built around specific political themes," which "push students to 'confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.' He believes teacher education programs should serve as 'sites of resistance' to an oppressive system." Surely someone whose has devoted his life to attacking the system -- one way or another -- is not exempt from attacks on his own character or ideas. But champions of Mr. Ayers's "academic freedom" seem to want exactly this sort of exemption. After all, no one is talking about taking away his professorship -- just his good name.

But Riley is ultimately less interested in Ayers than she is in Stanley Fish--and in parsing the "do as I say, not as I do" approach to academic freedom that he lays out in his alternately commonsensical and nonsensical new book, Save the World on Your Own Time:

A new book out by one of the academy's more esteemed fellows offers some useful reflections on the subject of academic freedom. "Save the World on Your Own Time," a short treatise by Stanley Fish, suggests a return to an earlier and more limited definition of the idea. Citing a 1915 statement by the American Association of University Professors, Mr. Fish writes: "Academic freedom can be asserted only by 'those who carry on their work in the temper of the scientific inquirer' and never by those who would use it for 'uncritical intemperate partisanship.' "

Mr. Fish's idea of academic freedom -- what he calls the "freedom to do the job" -- follows from a more narrow idea of a college education. He writes: "Pick up the mission statement of almost any college or university, and you will find claims and ambitions that will lead you to think that it is the job of an institution of higher learning to cure every ill the world has ever known: not only illiteracy and cultural ignorance, which are at least in the ball-park, but poverty, war, racism, gender bias . . . and the hegemony of Wal-Mart." Mr. Fish is merciless in mocking the overreach of the modern university, concluding: "I want an academy inflected by no one's politics, but by the nitty-gritty obligations of teaching and research."

By such a measure, Mr. Ayers is an activist professor out to save the world by way of the classroom, and he should cut it out. Just as important, there is nothing wrong with criticizing his efforts to save the world outside the classroom because, to go by Mr. Fish's comments, such criticism in no way affects academic freedom. And yet, in an essay on his New York Times blog this spring, Mr. Fish defended, you guessed it, Mr. Ayers, accusing Sen. Obama's critics of "McCarthyism" for bringing Mr. Ayers into the discussion. And Mr. Fish confessed to trying to persuade Mr. Ayers to stay at the University of Illinois, where Mr. Fish was a dean until recently, when Harvard was trying to lure him away. In short, Mr. Fish is a defender and admirer of Bill Ayers.

What should one make of this? I asked Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, whether Mr. Ayers's behavior in the classroom fit into Mr. Fish's model of an apolitical education. "The way a square peg fits into a round hole," he replied. "From almost every point of view, Stanley Fish reveals himself to be a colossal hypocrite."

But the problem is bigger than hypocrisy. Mr. Berkowitz went on to note that it is no longer possible to say you are going to restrict people to their discipline and expect a classroom free of politics: Disciplines themselves are politicized. Prof. Mark Bauerlein of Emory University agrees. In many cases, he says, "ideological content has drifted down to the fundamental norms of the discipline." Whether it's education studies, Mr. Ayers's specialty, or women's studies or black studies, the entire premise of the discipline is a political agenda.

Mr. Ayers doesn't spend his classes asking students to assess objectively the arguments about whether America is an oppressive regime. As Mr. Berkowitz notes, Mr. Ayers's purpose is "not to make refined minds think more sharply, but to turn teachers into preparers of young radicals." Who in turn can grow up to be college professors.

On the other hand, Fish seems to think it's enough to simply tell all these misguided academics to knock it off, to save the world on their own time. He's intensely against approaching the problem through any kind of oversight or intervention, even though his analytical starting point is the fact that academics have failed to oversee themselves. How can a professoriate that does not even grasp the concept of academic freedom reinstate it? More specifically, how can professors who have entered academe expressly in order to carry out political and social agendas through teaching and research be expected to want to change, to believe in reform, and to carry it out? Not gonna happen. And thus Fish swallows his own tail and completes the circle of the status quo.

I'll end with the usual caveats to try to prevent the predictable conniptions. Not every professor is an ideologue; many academic fields are comparatively free of proselytizing pedagogy; there are individuals, departments, and schools that do separate politics from the classroom in appropriate ways, and that do devote themselves to delivering genuinely valuable liberal education.

That said, the problem is real. Even sophists who quite like the academic status quo will admit it--though it's true, too, that many academics who should know better will not. So what is to be done? And who is to do it?