Let me try and put this to rest. I believe two points are important.

First, the email that I sent to my colleagues in 2005 (which, I believe, was dredged up and sent to Tom Ricks by a disgruntled employee seeking to embarrass me) was NOT about academic freedom at the Army War College. It was about journalistic methods. Several of us had experiences with Tom where what we said was portrayed as more critical of the administration than we intended, or things written by individual War College authors were portrayed as official positions. I was attempting to draw that to the attention of my colleagues.

Was that a purely time and context specific problem? I noticed that Tom's Foreign Policy blog entry of 31 December is headlined, "The U.S. Army Speaks Up For Hamas." It was summarizing a recent publication by an Army War College professor that includes the following disclaimer on p. ii: "The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government" so everyone can decide on their own.

In Tom's blog, I see that his major source for the fact that there is an academic freedom problem at the Army War College is someone who was a guest speaker for a few days a couple of year ago. This fellow drew his conclusion from the comments of some unidentified people who came up to him during lunch.

I've been in the Professional Military Education system for nearly 23 years. I've been on the faculty at the Army War College for nearly 18 of those. In my opinion, academic freedom in PME is, by necessity, different than in a secular, civilian university, but it is robust and rigorous. I think that DoD and senior military leaders deserve great credit for allowing, even encouraging their employees to second guess and critique their decisions. I doubt few industries or even civilian universities would be equally open to that kind of free discourse.

So when it comes to academic freedom in PME, my personal opinion is that there's nothing to see here folks--let's move along and discuss issues that really need it.