At a recent conference on academic freedom, university presidents criticized academics' collective failure to comprehend what academic freedom is--and what it is not:

[Former University of Chicago president Hannah] Gray spoke Friday afternoon at a panel discussion of former and current university presidents, the closing session of a three-day conference, "Free Inquiry at Risk: Universities in Dangerous Times." Covering expansive ground, the presidents began by analyzing the very terms that dominated the conference as a whole -- "free inquiry," "academic freedom," and "institutional autonomy." The terms themselves suggest that these values are distinct but interrelated, said Gray, who spoke of the misuse of the term "academic freedom" when cried as an automatic response to criticism.

"So, for example, those who say today that Bill Ayers's academic freedom is being violated because he is being attacked by opponents of Barack Obama are speaking nonsense in my view," Gray said, referring to the education professor whose history in the Weather Underground, and connections to Obama, have played a role in the presidential campaign. "He may not deserve the attacks he is receiving, but because he is an academic doesn't mean that his academic freedom is being attacked." Academic freedom, Gray continued, is "too important a value to squander, too important a value to allow the crying of wolf to make [it] meaningless in the eyes of the public--that may simply think that we are claiming a special privilege."

Speaking also of common confusion on what academic freedom is, Robert M. Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities and former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, tried to disentangle it from the concept of "free speech."

"I think frequently those two freedoms are confused. The notion that academic freedom has its roots in the First Amendment is not, I think, a very apt description of why we have academic freedom," Berdahl said, pointing out that faculty are subject to evaluation by their disciplinary colleagues (though it should be said that commitments to "disciplinary orthodoxies" and conventions were also discussed at the New School conference as potentially powerful internal constraints on free inquiry). "Faculty are not necessarily free to take any position that they choose."

"I've always thought of academic freedom as being the freedom, basically, for scholars to apply the disciplinary processes of scholarship and research to what they want to study and what they want to teach," said Charles M. Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In this context, all the misplaced uproar about Bill Ayers' and Rashid Khalidi's academic freedom operates as a distraction that enables the real problems to remain unaddressed and unresolved.