Academic freedom protects faculty from any and all arbitrary interferences with their ability to carry out their missions in research, creative activities, teaching, service and outreach.

Academic freedom is essential to the fundamental mission of discovering and advancing knowledge and disseminating it to students and the society at large.

Academic freedom enables faculty members to foster in their students a mature
independence of mind, and this purpose cannot be achieved unless students and faculty are free within the laboratory, classroom, and elsewhere to express the widest range of viewpoints in accord with standards of scholarly inquiry.

Academic freedom extends to expressing opinions concerning matters of shared governance, leadership, or the functioning of the University and the units within.

An essential component of academic freedom is the right of faculty members to be free from any adverse action resulting in whole or in part from the exercise of freedom of speech, belief, or conscience in any venue, to the maximum extent consistent with the fulfillment of clearly defined teaching, creative activity, research, service or clinical obligations.

A core aspect of academic freedom is the right to due process sufficient to minimize the risk that adverse actions are taken, even in part, as a result of the faculty member’s exercise of academic freedom.

Academic freedom includes the right to criticize existing institutions (including leadership, professions, paradigms and orthodoxies).