How the academy works

Left wing blogger and UCLA professor Mark Kleiman denounces the Pope’s views on academic freedom, paraphrasing them as:

“You’e perfectly free to think anything you like, as long as you wind up agreeing with me.”
Funny thing, that. It would be exactly Mark Kleiman’s views on academic freedom, as applied to John Yoo.
After a while, you get used to university life working that way.

UPDATE: In the comments, Mark Kleiman is unhappy, to put it mildly, and says I have misrepresented his views. This, I think, is the relevant extract from his original post:

So that raises question #3: in the absence of a criminal conviction, does Yoos conduct warrant removal of tenure? I don’t think so.
It wasn’t committed in connection with his university duties. The act of giving advice to the President, even bad advice, isn’t obviously inconsistent with competent academic performance. For a law faculty to set itself up as the judge of whether the advice Yoo gave fell so far below professional standards as to raise questions about his scholarly credentials, and to do so in a politically-charged atmosphere, strikes me both a terrible idea on its own merits and a precedent I’d hate to see established.

So, strange as it seems, I’m inclined to think that John Yoo belongs in prison (along with his client) but not to think that in the absence of a conviction he ought to be stripped of tenure.

Of course, that’s not to say that Yoo’s colleagues at Boalt have any obligation to give him collegial assistance in his scholarly work, have lunch with him, or even acknowledge his presence. I think the appropriate treatment is called “being sent to Coventry.”

Some observations:
My post was snarky, which is okay, but I should have spelled out my point more specifically: Kleiman says the Pope praised academic freedom, but does not really believe in it, and my point was that Kleiman says he believes in academic freedom but does not seem to believe in it.
Kleiman”s post defends not academic freedom, but tenure. The charges against Yoo are political, and nothing, and I emphasize nothing, in Kleiman’s post would offer any protection of Yoo’s academic freedom if Yoo were untenured.
Kleiman’s supposed defense of academic freedom consists of saying that Yoo should not be fired, he should be “sent to Coventry”, that is, isolated and ignored. Is he serious? The point of academic freedom is to keep ideas from being suppressed, not job protection for people with advanced degrees. Kleiman calls for suppressing ideas, and thinks this serves academic freedom? Sorry, but this makes him as uncommitted to academic freedom as says the pope is.
I have seen this “sent to Coventry” game played lots of times, and it is pure thuggery. An example: when I taught at Northern Illinois University in the 1980s, a tenured sociologist did something deeply wicked: he admitted he was sufficiently unhappy with Michael Dukakis that he was thinking of breaking from being a lifelong Democrat to voting for Bush. Being isolated was the good part. On one occasion, he was carrying a pile of books down the hallway, and another member of the department elbowed him to knock the books down. Hothead that I am, I said he should he file a police complaint. He did not do so, because his field was the then fashionable field of gerontology, and he had lined up another (better paying) job. He did not want that job offer messed up by publicity, and he told me that in his next job, he would keep his voting plans to himself. Nothing like open discussion. (And that, frankly, is one of the less noxious cases of being sent to Coventry that I have encountered.)
I will be more general here: an important function of the tenure system is to ensure that only right thinking people get tenure and therefore get any sort of protection, so that they can deny academic freedom to the untenured. I will add a point I think I have made before. Hatred of the untenured by the tenured is common, and is partly driven by politics, as in “I think that bastard is a Republican”, but is much more commonly driven by “that bastard already has three good papers, and I haven’t done a lick of work in ten years, so he is getting the graduate students that I am entitled to”. Nasty left wing politics have helped make universities rotten places, but vanity, entitlement, thuggery, and envy are much more consequential, and some of the finest defenders of academic freedom and energetic opponents of wretched academic thuggery I have known have been hard core leftists.
LAST UPDATE: The comments on belief in the update are misleading, because it distracts from the issue by focusing on what people really think, . So let me put it more simply. Kleiman criticized the Pope for offering a defense of academic freedom which he says actually undercuts it. I was amused, because Kleiman had just offered a defense of academic freedom which I though pretty clearly actually undercut it. Universities are like that: there are lots of opponents of academic freedom, and even its supporters frequently do it damage.