Academic freedom is a core value at Gila Community College, where the free exchange of ideas and the exploration of topics and issues on campus and in the global context is fully endorsed. Academic freedom is vital to the college community’s shared goal of the pursuit of knowledge, is fundamental to the exploration of new ideas, and is essential as we learn from one another. Academic freedom shall be understood to include, but not be limited to, the following:
- Academic freedom protects faculty from any and all arbitrary interferences with their ability to fulfill their responsibilities in research, creative activities, teaching, service and outreach.
- Academic freedom is essential to the fundamental mission of discovering and advancing knowledge and disseminating it to students and society at large.
- Academic freedom enables faculty members to foster in their students a mature independence of mind, and this purpose cannot be achieved unless students and faculty are free within the laboratory, classroom, and elsewhere to express the widest range of viewpoints in accord with standards of scholarly inquiry.
- Academic freedom extends to expressing opinions concerning matters of shared governance, leadership, or the functioning of the College and its internal departments.
- Academic freedom includes the right of faculty members to be free from any adverse action resulting in whole or in part from the exercise of freedom of speech, belief, or conscience in any venue, to the maximum extent consistent with the fulfillment of clearly defined teaching, creative activity, research, service, or clinical obligations.
- Academic freedom includes the right to due process sufficient to minimize the risk that adverse actions are taken, even in part, as a result of the faculty member’s exercise of academic freedom.
- Academic freedom includes the right to criticize existing institutions (including leadership, professions, paradigms, and orthodoxies).
Academic freedom does not protect student speech or activity that is prohibited by law. The College reserves the right to limit student expression not protected by the first amendment of the United States Constitution, including:
- A violation of state or federal law.
- An expression that a court has deemed unprotected defamation.
- Harassment. For the purposes of this policy, "harassment" means only that expression that is so severe, pervasive, and subjectively and objectively offensive that it unreasonably interferes with an individual's access to educational opportunities or benefits provided by the College.
- A true threat. For the purposes of this policy, "true threat" means a statement that is meant by the speaker to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence against a particular person or a group of persons.
- An unjustifiable invasion of privacy or confidentiality that does not involve a matter of public concern.
- An action that unlawfully disrupts the function of the College.