Academic freedom is the byword for modern creationism. In Dover and other areas Intelligent Design was incorporated into school curricula with the justification that they were "teaching both sides" of a controversy. The forthcoming movie Expelled makes the charge that "design proponents" are being expunged unfairly from academic institutions and that academic freedom is suffering as a result. And most importantly, bills have been introduced in the legislatures of Alabama and Florida that would give students and teachers the right to discuss the "full range of views" on controversial scientific theories, and protect students from being penalized from expressing dissenting opinions, even on tests and assignments.

Yet how can I protest? How can I argue against freedom? Certainly students and teachers should be free to pursue the truth in whatever manner they choose. Certainly a teacher should be allowed to teach about the treatment of Japanese Americans in World War II internment camps, even if it is unpopular or glossed over in textbooks because America wasn't the Good Guy in those circumstances. Why, then, shouldn't a teacher expose students to Intelligent Design or Creation Science, even if those beliefs are not accepted by the scientific mainstream? I may disagree with the creationist perspective—and certainly we should discuss the reasons for that disagreement—but if in the end my instructor and I have different interpretations of the facts, who am I to say mine is better than his? Or hers?

So, I suppose I agree with the IDers and creationists that we should have academic freedom. However, there is something missing from the discussion that I think ought to be addressed: academic responsibility.

It is a necessary corollary that with freedom comes responsibility. Responsibility to exercise that freedom well: to avoid carelessly endangering others or ourselves, to ensure that we do not impinge upon others' freedoms, and to be just and honest in the use of our liberty. Certainly academics, the discipline of passing on and acquiring knowledge, entails great responsibility.

In academics, the first responsibility we have is to truth. While no human possesses perfect knowledge of the truth, we must never waver in seeking it. For knowledge of the truth allows us to operate in the field of the world: it widens the sphere of possibilities, allowing us to exercise the vital powers that define us as living beings. Accurate knowledge, and the ability to pursue such wisdom, is the foundation of liberty. To be lax in pursuing truth is to deny us our full range of expression, and to miseducate others in the belief it would make them behave better is to be doubly dishonest. For, as Kant would say, misinformation would deprive them of their autonomy, as well as their own freedom of inquiry. It is impossible to have academic freedom without academic responsibility.

As such, it is essential in education to exercise reliable methods of discovering truth: observation, logic, analysis, and experiment. Anything presented as truth must be knowledge derived using these methods of reasoning. Speculation should be marked as speculation, and opinion as opinion. And not all opinions, it should be apparent, are created equal. There are opinions which are informed, logical, consider the evidence and offer means with which to test themselves—and then there are opinions that are the wildest conjecture, sometime stimulating but other times driven by wistful thinking and fancy.

If, in forming one's opinions, one succumbs to such wishful thinking, one is rendered incapable of competently pursuing the truth. For academic freedom is first and foremost the freedom to pursue the truth without compromise, following the facts wherever they lead, with unfaltering honesty. In such a pursuit we must be ready to be disabused of our preconceived notions, our biases, our superstitions, and even some of our hopes. To sacrifice honesty for comfort is to deny ourselves the boons that the pursuit of genuine knowledge provides.

And so in the classroom the instructor must not only exercise reason himself, and draw his curriculum from sources that are transparent in their reasoning, but he must inculcate those very tendencies into his own students. Just as an instructor who expresses an unfounded opinion ought to be questioned, students who do not exercise logic or analysis and ignore facts should be called out and challenged. To fail in this task is to betray the very purpose of education.

This is where "academic freedom," as peddled by modern creationists, fails. Instead of producing superior education, it protects students and instructors from the consequences of their faulty reasoning. The bills introduced in Florida and elsewhere, in making those of dissenting views immune to "punishment," make students immune to education. Any view must be able to stand on its merits, and dissenting views should not be singled out for special protection. Students must learn what merit is when it comes to opinions, and this is not learned by being left alone and allowed to say anything they wish without challenge. If a belief can withstand questioning, then it has earned a degree of merit.

And this brings us back to my examples at the beginning of this essay, of World War II internment camps and creationism as unpopular subjects. By now it should be apparent that there is a great difference between the two. We know that over 120,000 Japanese-Americans were locked away in camps during World War II because of records and the testimony of numerous survivors and witnesses. It stands up to scrutiny. Creationism, on the other hand, does not.

Creationists like to wax nostalgic on how, in the early days of science, Christian scriptures were taken far more seriously by scientists, until the ominous Atheist Takeover. Indeed, in the 1800's the Holy Grail of geology and archaeology was to find evidence and records of the worldwide Deluge. They fully expected to see at every step a world created about ten thousand years ago by a bearded yet inscrutable Supreme Being. But then they began digging. And digging. And digging. Then they discovered extensive layers of rock formations that took tens or hundreds of millennia to form. When radiometric dating came along, they found that the world was not thousands, but billions of years old. And in those layers that had been laid down over those billions of years, they saw fossils documenting vast changes in the shape of life of the course of history. Species did not stay more or less the same, as their religion had taught, but had changed in size, morphology and habitat over time, and thus the notion of evolution was born.

Biology did not diverge from biblical teaching because atheists invaded the discipline. Many of the people who contributed to modern biology and evolutionary theory, from Linnaeus to Darwin, were religious at first, and believed in the veracity of the Bible. But at heart they were scientists, and they lived in an age that was increasingly valuing questioning, reasoning and scientific investigation. Ironically, it was this academic freedom that allowed these scientists to pursue the facts to wherever they led, and come not to the conclusions to which they wanted to come, but the ones that they had to come to. It is this freedom, and this responsibility, which we should impart to the next generation. Not the ersatz freedom of living in a velvet world of whimsy, but the true freedom of feeling the wind on your face and knowing from whence it comes.