My son started grad school this week. He wants to be a professor. In retrospect, I probably should have scheduled a therapy session with my hairdresser.

Our midwest-raised kid has never been as mouthy as his New Yorker mother. Make no mistake, I did teach him how to be vocal. Once, when I was driving us through traffic and some idiot cut me off, he turned to me and said, “I got this.” He then proceeded to loudly curse out the other driver in a perfect imitation of my Long Island accent. He has also frequently spoken up in a more serious fashion. As a middle schooler, he criticized the local electric company’s tree-cutting policy at a public board meeting. As a high schooler, he pushed actual data on his sex ed teacher.

Fortunately, he generally takes after his Hoosier father, a man politic enough to now be a dean. Still, I find myself wondering—what’s going to happen if our son decides to speak up about something controversial as a grad student, a post-doc, or an assistant professor?

Which way is the academy going?

On the one hand, many signs are pointing in a hopeful direction. In just the last couple of weeks, Arizona State unveiled a new Center for Free Speech, Yale Law launched a new Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech, Duke announced the creation of a dorm explicitly dedicated to fomenting “big ideas and free expression,” and the University of Michigan released a mammoth, university-wide report carefully examining “Principles on Diversity of Thought & Freedom of Expression.” Bonus round: The place where our son is enrolled, the University of Chicago, just got a $100 million gift to support its Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression.

Also in the “hopeful” column, we see more and more colleges and universities adopting institutional statement neutrality—policies that, at their best, will help students and faculty feel free to pursue inquiry where it takes them. Even presidents who are holding off on institutional statement neutrality seem to think they now have to explain themselves.

Meanwhile, it’s great to see some individual faculty strongly asserting their rights. At Michigan State, for example, former Faculty Senate chair Jack Lipton is suing the Board of Trustees for alleged violations of his First Amendment rights after an investigation found board members had “attacked” Lipton, labeling him a racist following his criticisms of them. (Disclosure: Lipton is faculty in my spouse’s college and I consider him a friend.)

Lipton told the Chronicle of Higher Ed, “I think if you have [academic freedom] you should use it….I have the ability to keep my job, but that doesn’t mean I’m not hamstrung. I should be able to talk without being excoriated.” Go, Jack!

On the other hand…

In just the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen conservative tenured professor Amy Wax dubiously sanctioned by the University of Pennsylvania, tenured professor Maura Finkelstein fired without due process by Muhlenberg College for anti-Israel bias, and former University of Wisconsin-La Crosse chancellor Joe Gow fired from his tenured position because, according to Inside Higher Ed, in his free time he and his wife make “pornography and vegan cooking videos.”

One can wring one’s hands over Wax’s offensive remarks. (I sure don’t love them.) One can wince at Finkelstein’s pedagogy. (I do.) One may wonder what vegan porn even is. (I’m guessing it doesn’t involve leather or cannibalism.) But as HxA’s Director of Policy Joe Cohn has eloquently noted, free expression and academic freedom can’t only be used to protect the inoffensive.

Sure, we can look for the devil in the details of these cases of punishment and silencing. But we really ought to be leading with angels—with the strongest possible commitment to academic freedom and free expression.

If even tenured professors can so easily be punished to the point of losing their jobs, if trustees feel they can and should demolish entire programs and throw out “offensive” books, if journal publishers can retract work because they don’t like the smell, if deans can censor faculty’s work because they’re worried about their brands (that one’s my own case)—and administrations can ignore faculty’s demands to apologize for the censorship—what good will institutional positions on statement neutrality really be?

Our son’s chosen field, molecular engineering, is not the kind where one is likely to get into a political smackdown at work. But, as he tells me excitedly about what the union is doing for grad students like him, as he follows international politics closely enough to know a lot about Russian tanks and to have strong opinions on wars and justice, it is not hard to imagine a situation where he could lose his whole career to one wrong move.

His mother finds herself reminding him to be careful. More than once in the last year, I have found myself in conversation with him in my thoughts, warning him through restrained tears what it can be like to build up a scholarly life only to have it fall away because you chose to live in the danger zone.

And yet. Do I really regret that he has decided he wants a life in the academy? Not for a New York minute.

The joy in his eyes as he talks about teaming up with classmates to work on thermo p-sets. The way he hangs on to the coattails of his brilliant mentors, learning how to insert a disciplinary pun into a scientific manuscript, practicing with them the balancing beam act of deep intellectual longing and harsh funding realities. All the signs that he loves to teach, and that he’s good at it.

Let’s just say this: My work this week at HxA feels exceptionally personal. And, as it turns out, the personal is still political.