Bérubé pontificates on Academic Freedom
Read it.
I don't want to tell you how much time was wasted chasing down the false allegation of the the "bio instructor who showed a Michael Moore movie in class" last year, this issue is not just one of principle for academia, it is a matter of pragmatism, these idiots can smother a university for months by a single lie.
A colleague of mine likes to calculate the opportunity cost of administrative task; if you figure a mean cost of ~ $50 per faculty per hour then a committee of 8 people meeting for two hours four times in a semester is an effective cost to the institution of $3200 just in the time lost.
That is one way to spend our students' tuition.