Something many of us have already found out: not only are professors creating skewed notions of academic freedom, but students are also far too willing to censor speech when it makes them uncomfortable.

Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed gives the run down on two recent books about academic freedom:

New books warn of expanding notions of academic freedom and checks on free speech that are hurting higher education

Professors and students are usually the biggest defenders of academic freedom and free speech on their campuses. But a pair of new books argues that students and faculty members themselves are degrading those values. Professors, one book says, are increasingly adopting notions of academic freedom that are too expansive, leaving the academy open to criticism from without. Students, meanwhile — says a second book — are increasingly trying to clip speech with which they feel uncomfortable, threatening free speech over all.

In Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution (October, University of Chicago Press), Stanley Fish, the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished Professor of Law and the Humanities at Florida International University, argues that there’s been a slow but undeniable academic freedom “creep” spanning his career. That is, where the term’s emphasis was once on “academic,” he argues, it’s now on “freedom,” promoting a kind of mythical notion of the professor as revolutionary. That creep helps explain what Fish sees as various “schools” of academic freedom, for which he creates a kind of taxonomy in Versions.

The first school, of which Fish is a member (and possibly the only member, he jokes), is called, “It’s just a job.” Fish says the book rests on a “deflationary” view of higher education, one in which higher education is a service offering “knowledge and skills to students who wish to receive them.” So being a professor in this school isn’t a “holy calling” or responsibility to advance world peace, Fish argues. Rather, it’s the responsibility to educate students and advance knowledge “by contract and by the course catalog” – no more, no less. And only work to advance those goals should he protected by academic freedom.

This definition will be familiar to followers of Fish, who in his books on academy politics and in regular commentary for The New York Times has argued that academic freedom doesn’t exist beyond one’s disciplinary expertise. It sounds limited, and it is. (Although it may be more inclusive than it first sounds: Fish said in an interview that he couldn’t “count the ways” in which the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had “botched” the retracted appointment of Steven Salaita earlier this year, including by violating his academic freedom. Since Salaita, the controversial American Indian studies scholar, was making his offensive tweets outside of class, Fish said, the university had no case for punishing him.) But Fish argues that this version of academic freedom is the strongest, in that it best preserves free inquiry.