Higher edumacation.(Scan)

I'm not an academic, but I've played one for much of the past seven years. I taught magazine journalism at Indiana University, and then nonfiction writing at two Pennsylvania liberal-arts colleges. My academic station has ranged from lowly adjunct to visiting professor to writer-in-residence. In theory, the latter two positions made me a full-fledged, albeit temporary, member of the faculty. In practice, those jobs gave me the right to watch the real academics go through their paces while I wondered why I'd been left off the e-mail distribution lists for the most important meetings.

Nonetheless, here's the takeaway from my years in the collegiate trenches: Yes, Virginia, there is academic freedom. Though it applies only to faculty--and only when willing to toe the party line (which is drawn somewhere to the port side of Marx.)

Faculty have few qualms about sociopolitical evangelism or--put another way--bullying students into submission. I met a number of professors in history, poli-sci, and the "gender" disciplines who made no bones about their inclination to grade, at least in part, based on ideology. (After all, if you oppose affirmative action or support U.S. imperialism, you can't be thinking too clearly, can you?)

As for "the spirit of unfettered intellectual inquiry" that scholars like to rhapsodize about in their elite ...