The Trial: An Examination of Administrative Power, Labor Law, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in a Community College Context

Abstract

This essay offers a subjective literary exploration of personal events relevant to understanding an assault on academic freedom in a two-year college. The critically qualitative inquiry focuses on two events: (a) the questioning by faculty of dual credit policies and (b) an administratively engineered disciplinary action that functioned to have a chilling effect on free speech and to, thereby, quell academic freedom. The dual credit story comes in the form of an embedded narrative essay previously published as a Facebook note. That embedded essay presents the tale of the author and a colleague, the advisor for their community college newspaper, exercising their academic freedom to critically engage a community college administration’s violations of Illinois State dual credit laws. The embedded essay serves also to reveal an administrative response to the professors’ decision to report the violation of state law to the Higher Learning Commission and the Illinois Community College Board. Following that, the essay provides a qualitative examination of the administrative response and explains how the response served to quell academic freedom.

Citation

Leonhardy, G.R. (2020), "The Trial: An Examination of Administrative Power, Labor Law, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in a Community College Context", Sengupta, E. and Blessinger, P. (Ed.) Faculty and Student Research in Practicing Academic Freedom (Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning, Vol. 31), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 121-137. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2055-364120200000031019