In a 4-2 decision, the Supreme Court did not defer to the recommendations of a Marquette University advisory committee and held that Marquette breached its contract with a professor, John McAdams, by implementing disciplinary action for activities protected under academic freedom.

 McAdams had written a blog post criticizing another instructor at the university, who then filed a complaint against McAdams. The complaint went through the disciplinary hearing process laid out in Marquette’s handbook. An advisory committee reviewed the incident and presented a report with disciplinary recommendations to the university president. The president then decided to suspend McAdams without pay but with benefits through the fall semester and required he write a letter acknowledging wrongdoing and expressing regret for his comments against the other instructor. McAdams refused to write the letter and filed a complaint in circuit court against Marquette for breach of his tenure contract with the university. McAdams argued that the contract protects him from disciplinary actions for activities considered as academic freedom.

The court held that McAdams’s contract with the university does guarantee freedom from disciplinary actions for activity protected as academic freedom or free speech, and McAdams’s blog post falls under the definition of academic freedom. The court ordered Marquette to reinstate McAdams.

The court chose not to defer to the Marquette advisory committee’s recommendations to suspend McAdams for three reasons:

1. The contract did not prohibit litigation outside Marquette’s disciplinary process.
2. The disciplinary process was biased and did not represent a true arbitration process.
3. The court recently ended the practice of agency deference in Tetra Tech v. Department of Revenue.

In a concurring opinion, Justice R. Bradley engaged in a philosophical analysis of academic freedom and free speech on college campuses.

In dissent, Justice Walsh Bradley (joined by Justice Abrahamson), citing the “shared governance” procedures of allowing faculty to participate in decisions affecting the university, argued that the court should have deferred to Marquette’s advisory committee, which is better suited to solve its own disputes. The dissent said the court should have preserved the university’s institutional academic freedom to determine who may teach there.