Freedom

Okay, so that's the Paul McCartney song that's playing on my 'Simon & Garfunkel' station at pandora.com. (The website's pretty cool. You can put in your favorite song or artist and the website radio station will play other songs that are similar in style to your favorites. They call it the 'Music Genome Project.' And best of all, it's free!)

But anyway, I took a newspaper article to class today that deals with personal freedom and academic freedom. (My students were writing in-class essays today, so I took the article as a writing prompt.) The article has been circulating around the department during the last few days and evoking quite a few responses. While I expected the professors and instructors to have strong reactions to the article, I hadn't really expected my students to react in much the same ways. (I haven't read all of their essays yet, but we did talk about the article just a bit before they started writing.) Isn't academic freedom what prompts people to teach at the college level instead of teach high school? If you take away academic freedom, then what's left? Merely another bureaucracy-dominated institution....