The Court has also ordered Marquette to reinstate the professor with back pay and other damages. This is a significant victory for academic freedom, especially since Marquette is a private university, so there were no constitutional claims, only contractual claims. (Earlier coverage of the McAdams case here. This post in particular is a useful reminder of the misplaced rhetoric of "vunlerability": it took McAdams three years and litigation that, if he had had to pay for it, would have no doubt cost at least a half million dollars, to have his contractual rights upheld and get his job back.))
(Thanks to Alan White for the pointer.)
ADDENDUM: You can read the Court's opinion here. Much of it is given over to the question whether the court should defer to the university's determinations; the opinion analyzes the university statutes quite thoroughly in concluding it should not. The argument of this part is summarized at paragraph 57 and the majority responds (correctly, in my view) to the dissent in paragraph 58. (The dissent, alas, is typical of how deferential courts are to private universities in many of these cases.) On the merits, the court has a sensible discussion of whether 'academic freedom' encompasses McAdams's blog post, and correctly concludes that it does: the core argument is paragraphs 69 to 77. It's consistent with what I had argued all along, and makes mincemeat of some of the nonsense repeated by others in philosophy cyberspace.
UPDATE: The concurrence by Judge Bradley (beginning at paragraph 97) is quite good on academic freedom, and makes a good contrast with the dissent, which, bizarrely, suggests that the value of "shared governance" trumps the core contractual protection for extramural speech.
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