Defending the Ivory Tower: A Twenty-First Century Approach to the Pickering-Connick Doctrine and Public Higher Education Faculty after Garcetti

Abstract:     
Due in part to various recent socio-political trends, constitutional academic freedom doctrine has proven inadequate in recent decades as applied to public university faculty scholarship. Unlike the prevailing analytical framework, which lumps scholarship with unrelated speech forms, this article’s framework conceptualizes scholarship as a special form of speech that is neither pure employee speech, nor traditional public-concern speech, but which contributes uniquely to the marketplace of ideas. Accordingly, the introduced approach expands the Pickering-Connick doctrine’s limited definition of “matters of public concern,” thus enhancing protection of scholarly expression.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 48

Keywords: First Amendment, academic freedom, freedom of speech, free speech, higher education, scholarship

Accepted Paper Series