Academic Freedom

In yesterday's Guardian Boris Johnson quoted with approval a definition of academic freedom which feels more like a definition of academic dictatorship: "the freedom to decide on academic grounds who should teach, what they should teach, how it should be taught and whom to admit." In Johnson's academic freedom the only person to be free is a single figure at the top of the hierarchy.
The resolution passed at the end of the Berlin IDEC (International Democratic Education Conference) included this sentence: "Young people have the right to decide individually how, when, what, where and with whom they learn." Remove the word "young" and replace the word "learn" with "study" and you find the essence of real academic freedom, not just in schools but in the world in general.