When a student challenges you in class, you encourage his intellectual curiosity. When he continues to present alternate views, you humor him and try to be patient while pressing through your syllabus. When he calls you a liar and peppers you with alternate economic theories, when other students begin to complain, when your email box fills up with links to Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell, you take steps to control your classroom.

When Dan Lomba, who teaches microeconomics at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, was faced with this situation, he went through each of these steps, then told the combative student he'd like him to drop the class.

According to documents made available through the chair of Lomba's economics department, the request that the student drop came after a harangue that caused other students to squirm and complain to the professor about this student's behavior. In response to an email, Lomba wrote. "I want you to drop my class. If you don't, I will refer you to the dean. Do not harass me!"

What to do? Well, the student, Ben Tansey, ran to the College Republicans to complain about discrimination. The Republicans contacted Daniel Georgianna, the chair of Lomba's department, who requested and received (a month later) a written account of the incident from Tansey. Georgianna also met with Tansey and two representatives of the Republican club, then investigated further by meeting with the rest of the class. The other students overwhelmingly viewed Tansey as disruptive and rude, and supported Lomba, who was described as "accommodating" in the face of Tansey's outbursts. In one of the most succinct descriptions of this kind of situation, Georgianna noted that the students said they were "not bothered by [Tansey's] beliefs but by his behavior." They also noted that other conservative students remained in class and were even encouraged to speak out.

Georgianna concluded his involvement with a letter to Tansey defending Lomba as having acted within his rights, and suggesting that, had Tansey contacted him earlier, he might have helped him balance his own freedom of speech with other students' rights to an education, free from disruption.

Students who use academic freedom as a foil for rude diatribes against professors with whom they disagree politically are committing the very sin of which Students for Academic Freedom accuses the professoriate -- using the classroom as a soapbox. What worries me is that the soapbox extends beyond the classroom. In this case, Tansey's complaint was mounted on the SAF web site and subsequently used as evidence at the SAF spring conference, bandied about (in a one-sided presentation) by state representative Jeff Perry.

The entire incident, which appears at this point to have been dropped along with the class, is another instance of SAF trumpeting unsubstantiated accusations as gospel truth.