This piece is correct as it argues that academic freedom does include the study of theories and ideas that may be considered strange. Such personal study of strange, even wrong, ideas by loopy professors, however, does not mean they can be freely introduced into a classroom as part of what students should be expected to learn. Known falsehoods such as 'there was no Holocaust' or 'the U.S. government orchestrated the World Trade Center attack' clearly fall outside the definition of academic freedom and teachers promoting those ideas in a classroom have crossed over the line and should be banned.
I agree with the author that "...no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply." I also believe that patently false ideas and known lies portrayed as facts have no place in a classroom except to point out their lack of veracity.
The author sums up the piece this way:
"All you have to do is remember that academic freedom is just that: the freedom to do an academic job without external interference. It is not the freedom to do other jobs, jobs you are neither trained for nor paid to perform. While there should be no restrictions on what can be taught [known falsehoods should not be taught as fact] — no list of interdicted ideas or topics — there should be an absolute restriction on appropriating the scene of teaching for partisan political ideals. Teachers who use the classroom to indoctrinate make the enterprise of higher education vulnerable to its critics and shortchange students in the guise of showing them the true way."
I agree.
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