By Andy Ho, Senior Writer

SOME university faculty have called to talk about what they say is an assault on academic freedom. Professor Thio Li-ann recently declined a visiting teaching post at New York University (NYU) after her appointment evoked hostile reactions from students and faculty who charged she held discriminatory views against homosexuals.

The National University of Singapore law professor had in a 2007 parliamentary speech vigorously opposed the decriminalisation of homosexual sodomy, likening anal sex to 'shoving a straw up your nose to drink'. This led to hate mail and threats against her life when she was a Nominated Member of Parliament.

Her NYU appointment was based not on her parliamentary speeches but her published academic writing - which has never addressed homosexual issues apart from some tangential asides in relation to the definition of human rights.

The firestorm of protest against her appointment made her fear for her safety again. Moreover, the enrolment in the two courses she had planned to offer in the fall semester at NYU was quite low. Did her decision to withdraw reflect an abridgement of her academic freedom?

This is not the first time an academic has been attacked for expressing unpopular views outside of his academic work. In 2005, the University of Colorado investigated a professor who had written disparagingly about the victims of the Sept 11 attacks on the United States.

In his 2001 essay, Some People Push Back, Mr Ward Churchill said those who had perished at the World Trade Center in New York City in those attacks were not innocent victims. Rather, they were 'little Eichmanns', members of 'a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire - the 'mighty engine of profit' to which the military dimension of US policy has always been enslaved'.

In 2005, at another college that had invited Mr Churchill to speak, an outraged professor started a media campaign against him. This eventually led the University of Colorado to investigate him and, finding fraud in his academic work, dismiss him. In April this year, a court awarded Mr Churchill US$1 for wrongful dismissal. Had he been denied academic freedom too?

Both Prof Thio's speech and Mr Churchill's essay had nothing to do with their individual areas of expertise. They were both assailed for their extramural expressions of opinion. Their individual academic records, which had nothing to do with their extramural views, were subsequently impugned in one way or another.

Such incidents may have a chilling effect on the speech of academics. Unpopular or unorthodox viewpoints may not get aired as a result. This would cause public debate to be less than robust as academics are among those most likely to engage in such debate.

For this reason, some experts argue that protecting academics from being discriminated against for their political viewpoints should be seen as the third component of academic freedom. The first is the liberty to teach what and how one wants to; and the second is the freedom to choose one's research agenda. Some experts would also include academic self-governance in questions of faculty hiring and promotion as part of academic freedom.

Yet we also expect no employee of any organisation to be punished for expressing his political views. Academics, in this respect, don't have more free speech rights than others in the public arena.

Indeed, when speaking as citizens outside their academic institutional settings, they may in fact have less protected speech than other citizens. Most citizens won't lose their jobs if they expressed unorthodox views. But a professor who does so may be sanctioned.

The reason is that professing unorthodox views may lead the academic community to doubt his scholarly competence or ability to work with others of different race or creed, and so on. Academic freedom does not confer on academics special speech rights beyond their work.

What academic freedom does undoubtedly confer is freedom from reprisals that disable academics from doing their jobs as academics per se. An academic has the right to allow his data and arguments to lead where they might, regardless of official views.

In practice, this broad theoretical right translates mainly into the right of professors to choose what content to teach and how to teach it in courses they propose or are assigned. Generally, no supervisor can tell a professor, even a freshly minted one, what the content of his course should be or how to teach it. So also with their research agendas. By contrast, almost all other types of employees can be told what they must do and how it must be done.

Yet a professor cannot teach course content that does not resemble what the course title suggests. A law professor, for instance, cannot be reprimanded for teaching in his class that criminalising sodomy is good law. But he may be sanctioned for teaching theology in a course on human rights.

Moreover, a professor who argues inside or outside academe that paederasty is a good thing would probably not be hired or given tenure if already hired or be dismissed if already tenured. Thus some discrimination based on political viewpoint does already exist in academe.

An academic may also be disciplined for regularly making irrational scholarly arguments, if he is consistently incomprehensible in the classroom and if his research is incoherent. Thus, even the rights that individual professors have against being told how to actually do their work seem limited.

In the US, the notion of academic freedom has been litigated up to its highest court several times. Yet there are still no consistent guidelines as to what its limits may be or if it even applies more to institutions than individuals, experts say.

But one thing seems obvious: The individual professor's academic freedom is much narrower than widely imagined.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.