More Information about the Academic Freedom Alliance

On March 8, the Academic Freedom Alliance launched publicly. I have the pleasure of chairing the organization, a nonprofit aimed at advancing and defending academic freedom and professorial free speech at American universities. The founding members of the AFA are a diverse group that runs across the ideological spectrum, and the AFA is committed to defending professorial speech rights regardless of the content of the speech or the ideas being expressed. Professors can quite appropriately be criticized for bad ideas or poor judgment, but when they are acting within their established contractual or constitutional rights they cannot be sanctioned by their employers for their speech.

Over the past several days, I have elaborated on the commitments of the group and the principles of the AFA. You can see more at an interview with the alumni group, Princetonians for Free Speech, and with the AAUP's Academe Blog. I wrote about the group at National Review Online. My conversation about academic freedom and campus free speech with the Shaping Opinion podcast will drop on Monday. We are grateful for coverage of the launch by such outlets as the FIRE, Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, the New York Post, Inside Higher Ed, Forbes, and Voice of America.