academic freedom means different things in different places https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Criminalization-of/243501
As a person with a degree in Socialist Sciences, err I mean Social Sciences, I can speak from experience when I say that yes, they very much are the same. If only I knew then what I knew now, I would have chosen just about any other major available to me. I wasn't smart enough, until it was too late, for me to realize how much I was being preached to as opposed to being educated. In any case, academic freedom is a corollary to free speech. Free speech is, globally, unpopular. Even in the developed world, there are countries where historical revisionism or off-color humor can lead to criminal charges. Sweeden and Canada are well on their way to making it illegal to classify less than infinitely many genders. We now have millions of people, l-i-t-e-r-a-l-l-y crying out in the streets that there should be less free speech, and doing so under the tutelage of their highly politically motivated college professors, among others. Academics are (f-i-g-u-r-a-t-i-v-e-l-y ) digging their own graves, jumping in and pulling dirt on top of themselves.
I'm a big fan of American brand of free speech. Having say that, historical revisionism sometimes is being used to justify bloody foreign invasions and recruit brainwashed mooks, and the sort of history often being revised is... I can't imagine it being done in good faith. OTOH, we see allies like Poland and Ukraine complicating dialogue on difficult history by passing mutual anti-revisionist statutes: unhelpful. (Naturally, I'm not on Poland's side in this, but our guys do fair bit of whitewashing of horrible wartime stuff on our side, and we need space for dialogue).
I think that the phrase "academic freedom" means different things to different people. To university professors, 'academic freedom' means professors' freedom to do as they like and to teach anything they want. To people like myself (and hopefully to most of the intelligent public out here in the real world) 'academic freedom' means an academy where free inquiry prevails, an academia that is open to a wide diversity of views and viewpoints, where opposing ideas are heard, discussed, considered and when appropriate critiqued. An academic world where particular orthodoxies, whether ecclesiastical or political, aren't enforced. What we are seeing today is those two definitions colliding and contradicting each other. So we have the paradoxical situation of university faculties displaying an increasingly monolithic uniformity of opinion on political and cultural matters, enforced by the faculties' own hiring and tenure decisions about who they allow to join them (and even who they allow to earn a PhD) and where professors are paradoxically convinced that academic freedom prevails because that's what they and the other members of the established professoriate want to do... despite disagreement not being welcome or even tolerated. Yet when education is presented as a public good to the people in the wider community who are supposed to support higher education and pay for it with their taxes, then everything is defended in terms of the importance to history and civilization of free and open inquiry.
Yes, sure - let's fight for the world where professors are told what to do and what to teach, and at the same time academia is open to a wide diversity of views and viewpoints. I'm SURE it is easy to do! I know... QUOTAS! Let's expand diversity of views by making a portion of professors teach AIDS denialism and flat earth theory. Academic freedom is not about diversity of views, it's about freedom to follow research wherever it leads. At any given time, hope is that more researchers would flock around what is TRUE; dissidents are to be protected for those situations where the herd is wrong. Not everyone "shunned by the academic establishment" is a misunderstood Galilei; most are just cranks.
