ABSTRACT
Academic freedom encompasses the liberty to decide curricular content, determine instructional strategies, as well as select instructors and students alike. This chapter presents a case study of of East Carolina University (ECU) which is about a program in which administrators of the College of Education and the larger doctoral program in educational leadership enjoyed these liberties whereas faculty in the higher education concentration did not. The purpose of this case study is to explore the usefulness of higher education curricular guidelines in a setting where higher education faculty were numerical minorities and also minoritized in terms of the power in an organizational unit and subunit. The Council for the Advancement of Higher Education Programs (CAHEP) master’s core content guidelines helped faculty make the argument to a new department chair and other college administrators that the research on educational leadership programs with a K–12 focus was not applicable to the higher education concentration.
