Although thousands of excellent pages have been written about it, it seems to me that the practice of academic freedom can be boiled downed to two principles and a procedure.
The first principle is something like: Each professor has as much freedom to do his or her scholarly work without interference as is consistent with the institution's freedom to foster its distinctive identity and integrity.
The second principle is virtually the opposite: Each institution has as much freedom to foster its distinctive identity and integrity as is consistent with the freedom of its professors to do their scholarly work without interference. The procedure would be along these lines: Otherwise irreconcilable disputes about how these two principles ought to interact in a specific situation will be settled on a case-by-case by a representative committee that is constituted for this purpose.
Although it appeals to me, my reason for making this abbreviated proposal is not to make a contribution to the vast amount of sophisticated literature about academic freedom. It is to highlight something more general about the moral life as such that we all know but do not discuss enough. This is that it is rarely a process of relating a single norm to specific cases. Much more often it is about doing as much justice as possible to an irreducible number of competing obligations.
It has been my experience that those who doggedly relate their one norm to every case rarely come up with solutions that are as helpful as are those that are proposed by people who first try to identify all the relevant and rivaling obligations and then attempt to formulate a solution that meets as many of them as well as possible in the particular case at hand. If this is "situation ethics" it is not what frequently is offered with that label.
Liberty or Justice? Both! Sanctity of Life or Quality of Life? Both! Maternal Freedom or Fetal Rights? Both! Exercise or Rest? Both! Beauty or Utility? Both! Prayer or Protest? Both!
The irreducible pluralism of the moral life is not exhausted in an endless list of couplets such as these. I present them only to illustrate some ethical basics. One of these is that almost always there is more than one ethical obligation. Another is that it is not possible to arrange them conceptually in some single and permanent hierarchy of priority. A third is that it is not possible to eliminate the tension among them by either subsuming some under or deriving some from others. A fourth is that a fair amount of frank intuition informs every instance of relating these various considerations in different specific cases. A fifth is that interacting with others--checking and double-checking to see if our intuitions overlap with theirs--is an important part of ethical deliberation. Sixth, although this process can rarely establish the one right thing we should do, it often can identify many things we shouldn’t.