ABSTRACT
In 1969, the Board of Regents of the University of California fired Angela Davis for her membership in the Communist Party. After the courts ruled that a university could not fire a professor merely for being a communist, the Regents managed to fire her again, this time for speaking in public like a communist. In her speeches, Davis defined academic freedom as the right to engage in political struggles on campus. She also held that those who do not engage in progressive struggles do not have academic freedom. The legal system protected her First Amendment right to associate with the Party but did not protect her against the Regents’ judgment that her statements about academic freedom made her unfit to be a professor. The Davis case is saturated with competing conceptions of academic freedom and can serve as a textbook for understanding the structure of debate about this topic.
