And someone who was teaching at any US university in those eras would have been generally preparing people for what you call a "professional" role, not to becom

And someone who was teaching at any US university in those eras would have been generally preparing people for what you call a "professional" role, not to become an ignorant peon like me working a wage labor job. Teaching people how to program (honestly, even calling it introductory "computer science" is a polite fiction) does not require inquiry at all, freedom or otherwise. It's a well-established course, much like high school algebra is well-established, and the concept of "freedom of inquiry" for the high school algebra teacher doesn't make much sense. If a university wishes to have senior faculty design such a class, that's certainly reasonable, but it doesn't fundamentally require innovation. Which gets to the heart of the problem: there isn't a meaningful sense in which any of the decisions he objected to were related to a "freedom of inquiry" about computer science or even about programming. It would be one thing if he said, I don't think we should be teaching students this programming language or this material or this approach to concepts, I think we should be teaching another way. (For instance, he could have written something like https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-javaschools-2/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java... .) I would agree with you that such decisions should be the purview of a tenure-track professor and not school administrators, and I would even agree with you that the growth of adjunct roles is an attempt to take such decisions out of the hands of professors. His objections were of a different category entirely. He objected to how he perceived universities to be coddling students, to how he doesn't recognize certain words as part of the English language, etc. It's a pretty motte-and-bailey argument to say that academic freedom also protects a professor's right to ignore any direction about teaching from university administration. Suppose a tenured professor says, I don't think students learn well in the mornings in a classroom setting, I wish to teach at 10 PM at the pub, and I don't care what time and room these managerialists have assigned me to. Students will meet me where I say they'll meet me, or they'll fail the class. Would you say that the professor (who may genuinely believe this is a better teaching environment) is protected in this decision by "freedom of inquiry"?