Aside from what others said, ‘academic freedom’ is the freedom to research what a scientist finds to be important, rather than what their funding agency thinks is important. There are some reasonable restrictions on academic freedom - you cannot, for example, study ‘the effects of cyanide on humans’ - but in general academic freedom is a good thing. Unfortunately, the US government is now in the hands of oil companies and various other lobbies, so they will not fund research that is necessary but inconvenient to those interests.
Aside from what others said, ‘academic freedom’ is the freedom to research what a scientist finds to be important, rather than what their funding agency thinks is important. There are some reasonable restrictions on academic freedom - you cannot, for example, study ‘the effects of cyanide on humans’ - but in general academic freedom is a good thing. Unfortunately, the US government is now in the hands of oil companies and various other lobbies, so they will not fund research that is necessary but inconvenient to those interests.