"...while at some later date, the private sector alone may have solved theseThat's absolutely correct. Academic freedom is still a value of our university, and usually a value of our current administration. As I've said before, we have a way of repairing ourselves from the inside without exterior threats from the private sector or politicians. My only concern, once people like Nass are firmly rebuked by the reasonable, is how we're going to do precisely that:
problems, it was an institution that relishes academic freedom that did the work
with a combination of private and pubic money, but most of all the dedication of
a free and independent faculty that entertained the most unpopular ideas."
There is a striking lack of conservative professors on campus. Everybody's favorite example of a conservative professor, John Sharpless, admitted to me he would be a Democrat anywhere else in the state. Liberalism is defined by the activists without any internal debate on certain items, especially foreign policy and, specifically, war. Most incoming conservative undergraduates I know are initially somewhat embarrassed about their political beliefs, before either assimilating into the liberal fold or finding a new way of intellectual expression. English classes, as I've noted, have become politicized; literature is not studied for aesthetic value, but for political importance -- reading Heart of Darkness now incorporates the question of whether we should be reading it at all. A brilliant and tenured English professor whose name I'll omit looked me sadly in the eye one day and said "I don't even recognize my own department anymore."
There are no budgetary solutions to the current state of academic freedom at UW, because it's more abstract than anybody would wish. That makes it more difficult to solve than, say, a speech code or high-profile violation. We should depend upon the Wisconsin Idea which Soglin alludes to in his post; it's gotten us through worse times than this.
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