Odds are--no disrespect--you can't. Most people in academia are in that boat. They know the term colloquially, as it floats around in casual conversation and in the occasional episode of righteous faculty outrage against the usual suspects--administrators, trustees, state legislators, watchdog groups. But being able to sling around a phrase that sounds great is not the same as knowing what it means--and it's very far from understanding how it has historically been configured and why it matters that it has been configured (and, in recent years, strategically reconfigured) as it has.

Case in point: University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer recently participated in a conference on academic freedom at Columbia University. He delivered a talk called "What Is Academic Freedom For?" And what that talk revealed is that he doesn't really know. He sort of knows some things about it--but he also either doesn't know about, or doesn't want to discuss, other parts of it.

That kind of thing is problematic when it involves a president of a major university. To see just how problematic, check out the forum at the Manhattan Institute's Minding the Campus site. Maurice Black and I contributed to it thus:

In "What Is Academic Freedom For?," University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer says some things that need to be said--but is also silent on some things that should not have been ignored. Zimmer is right that academic freedom is poorly understood. He's right that to safeguard academic freedom, the university should take no political stance. (That should not be a controversial point, but when faculties are pushing to take consequential positions on "don't ask, don't tell," the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Iraq, it becomes one.) He's right that sometimes, academics threaten academic freedom. ACTA and FIRE draw critical attention to academia's problems with speech codes, biased hiring and promotion practices, and doctrinaire teaching.

But Zimmer's explanation is incomplete.

First: the gap between Zimmer's idealized University of Chicago and the real one. Chicago has a history of principled statements defending free inquiry, but it also enjoys FIRE's "red light rating: for speech codes. In recent years, Chicago has investigated a student for posting a cartoon and has compelled another to delete a Facebook page. Just last month, Zimmer was doing campus-wide damage control after hecklers nearly prevented former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert from completing an invited speech. Zimmer talks the talk--but Chicago needs to walk the walk.

Second: Zimmer defines academic freedom as faculty members' freedom from political pressure. But that's a partial and skewed definition. Academic freedom is, in fact, a form of professionalism grounded in what the AAUP calls "duties correlative with rights." Chief among those duties is to be a self-policing profession with peer review practices that justify considerable autonomy. Behaving ethically is a prerequisite for the rights associated with academic freedom--including professors' right to be free from political pressure when pursuing the truth. Today's professoriate is not meeting its ethical obligations--a fact Zimmer ignores.

Writing about academia's "crisis of ethic proportion," University of St. Thomas professor Neil Hamilton notes that today's academics see academic freedom as a set of inalienable rights, and lack a sense of concurrent responsibility. Professorial misconduct is common; accountability is rare. Graduate education should include professional ethics, but does not. As a concept, "academic freedom" has lost the responsibilities that justify it: professional self-regulation and a commitment to serve first not oneself, not one's institution, but the public good. "The academic profession's defense of the social contract has focused on rights and job security," Hamilton observes; this "anemic defense," combined with institutions' failure to "undertake responsibility for assuring the quality of their members' work," does more harm than good.

Academic freedom cannot be justified--or sensibly defended--without two explicit recognitions: 1) academic freedom requires professors to ensure their ethical behavior; and 2) academics are not living up to that responsibility. In sidestepping these truths, Zimmer's talk might best be understood as another "anemic defense," one that misses a real opportunity to build public trust.

UPDATE: Thanks to Peter Wood for this: "O'Connor and Black spot the Big Silence in Zimmer's account of academic freedom: he says nothing about the duties that faculty members must shoulder if they assume the 'right' to academic freedom. High on that list of duties is the need for disciplines to enforce tough professional ethics. Because these days, that enforcement has withered, and academic freedom in the true sense is pretty much a dead letter---just another rationale for privileged people to do whatever the hell they want."