Ben Stein v. Darwin, Courts v. academic freedom?

• In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: See Ben Stein’s Movie:

........Intelligent design — the idea that the “irreducible complexity” of living things can’t be explained without some notion of a creator — continues to fuel struggles on the local level to control K-12 school boards. Now proponents of the controversial idea — dismissed as pseudoscience by a wide consensus of scientists — have graduated to college, and they wield a powerful new weapon: Ben Stein.
.....The author, actor and lawyer, a former speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Ford, perfected his monotone delivery in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” when he memorably induced a state of catatonia by lecturing his students about voodoo economics. ("Anyone? ... Anyone?") He used the deadpan style to similar effect in the quiz show “Win Ben Stein’s Money,” which pitted contestants against the host for a portion of his own paycheck. Now the conservative commentator is more interested in waking America up, with a documentary that seeks to challenge the “progressive orthodoxy of government-issued science in its winter of discontent.”
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.....“Expelled” begins, according to a preview on the documentary’s Web site, with a montage sequence that introduces Stein’s quest to investigate scientists who have lost tenure bids or their jobs for supporting intelligent design or questioning evolution’s ability to fully explain the origins of human life. As a lone professor repeatedly scrawls “Do Not Question Darwinism” on a classroom blackboard, Stein pits the victims of evolutionary dogma against Dawkins and other atheists. As Martin Luther King Jr. addresses a crowd on screen, Stein suggests that suppressing intelligent design contradicts America’s ideals of free expression. Flashes of Nazi death camps accompany the assertion of evolution’s “dangerous” implications….

• Not So Free Speech in Campus Governance:

.....When the U.S. Supreme Court two years ago limited the First Amendment protections available to public employees, faculty groups thought that they had dodged a bullet. While the decision didn’t go the way professors hoped, it specifically indicated that additional issues might limit its application in cases involving public college professors.
.....Now, however, a federal court has applied just the principle that faculty groups thought shouldn’t be applied in higher education — that bosses can punish employees for speech deemed inappropriate — to a case involving a university. As a result, the American Association of University Professors and the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression are asking a federal appeals court to affirm that the Supreme Court decision does not apply to public higher education. The two groups warn that failure to reverse the lower court’s decision could make it impossible for professors to freely debate hiring choices or campus policies….