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United States First Amendment see-saw If American academics were looking for the perfect representative around which to construct a case for academic freedom, Ward Churchill probably wasn’t it. The University of Colorado professor of ethnic studies was found to have plagiarised, falsified and fabricated some of his research, according to a two-year university investigation. Even his claim of American Indian ancestry is in doubt. The university fired him in July for academic misconduct. But the unapologetic professor is also a lightning rod because of his political opinions. He blamed American foreign policy for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and called the victims “little Eichmanns”, a reference to the Nazi bureaucrats who managed mass deportations and extermination camps. Some of his supporters have, if grudgingly, agreed with Prof. Churchill that he is himself a victim, sacked primarily because of his controversial comments. No matter how egregious, they say, the remarks were protected by the First Amendment — the free-speech provision of the US Constitution — and by the principle of academic freedom. It is a principle to which academics have resorted more and more often in the polarised and partisan time since 2001. And Prof. Churchill has become its unlikely symbol. “Firing Prof. Churchill in these circumstances does not send a message about academic rigour and standards of professional integrity,” says Aaron Barlow, a blogger and a faculty member at the New York City College of Technology. “It sends a warning to the academic community that politically unpopular dissenters speak out at their peril.” But if more and more academics have drawn angry public condemnation because of comments considered unpatriotic or inappropriate since September 11, the intensifying spotlight on the issue has also made universities more wary of firing them. Caught between warring constituencies of opposite political stripes, university presidents have been quick to criticise unruly faculty, but — until Prof. Churchill — have otherwise seldom done anything more than reprimand them. When a University of New Mexico history professor joked on the afternoon of September 11 itself that anyone who blew up the Pentagon would get his vote, he was reprimanded but not fired. And at Northwestern University, the president routinely condemns the views of a Holocaust denier on the faculty but defends his right to hold those views. Students who prefer not to enroll in the professor’s classes are given the option of being taught by someone else. Speakers on American campuses have been given more leeway recently. Over the past few decades, the courts have tended to side with universities that fired or suspended faculty or staff for doing such things as over emphasising sex in a health course, using profane language in a classroom, protesting against the Vietnam War and discussing religious beliefs in a physiology class. The courts have ruled that a university’s interest as an employer outweighs a teacher’s free-speech interest. Serbia Degree sale scandal Emilija Stankovic, the deputy minister of higher education and a senior member of the faculty of law at the University of…