Oh, academic freedom, where art thou?

Dahlia Lithwick gives a lesson in Free Speech 101, which does not speak well of how colleges, those bastions of higher learning, deal with "free speech":

These firings and suspensions were not initiated by the government, and consequently they don’t implicate the First Amendment. They threaten a broader democratic ideal of free speech: the long-cherished belief that words don’t hurt but censorship does. Call it patriotism or call it “academic sensitivity,” but censorship is still censorship, even when it’s invoked to shore up some gauzy dream that universities are a Technicolor rainbow of love and tolerance.

And they complain about Bush....