When students spoke up for academic freedom

Academic freedom is dead. Long live academic freedom.

That was the theme of a mock funeral held this month in Lubbock, where black-clad mourners marched alongside a horse-drawn carriage. It bore an urn carrying the symbolic remains of academic freedom at Texas Tech, which has closed academic programs centered on gender identity and has even prohibited some student research about it.

Another mock funeral is planned for Wednesday at the University of Texas in Austin, where the board of regents has restricted discussion of “controversial topics” in the classroom. That should alarm anyone who cares about higher education. Put simply, professors can’t do their jobs if they’re not allowed to speak their minds.

That’s what University of Texas president Homer Price Rainey said in 1944, when the board of regents fired him for defending academic freedom. And students raised their voices in protest, staging — yes — a mock funeral in his honor.

Rainey moved on, but academic freedom remained. His story reminds us that freedom of speech and thought are always under threat. But it also demonstrates that students can help protect it, if they speak out.

Homer Rainey wore many different hats in a long and distinguished career. He was a minor-league baseball player, an ordained Baptist minister, and a trained tenor. At 31, he became the nation’s youngest college president when he took the reins at Franklin College in Indiana. He then served as president of Bucknell University before coming to the University of Texas, where he assumed the presidency in 1939.

He was also an unapologetic advocate for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which put him on the wrong........

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