What is the nature of academic freedom?

This may not be a coherent post but I am looking for some feedback on a few questions.

What should the term "Academic freedom" include?
What is the relation of academic freedom and partisan interests?
How is indoctrination different from persuasion or propaganda?
How should we discuss the “left” or the “right” or “liberal” and “conservative”? Treat them as a coherent whole or divide them into belief systems?

Recently, there have been a few national stories that challenge the sense of academic freedom:

Erwin Chemerinsky was offered a position to become the Dean of UC Irvine's new law school. Subsequently, the offer was rescinded by one of the school chancellors, Michael V. Drake. Chemerinsky is a prominent constitutional scholar, who has argued before the Supreme Court (The Texas Ten Commandment cases). Also, He is outspoken politically, as he has written editorials against the death penalty.

It appears that when Drake rescinded the offer, he failed to offer good reasons for this, leading many people to believe that the push to remove the offer developed from “Conservatives” within Orange County, California. Even one of the state’s more conservative Supreme Court Justices spoke out against the hire.

Last week, the school reoffered the position to Chemerinsky. You can read about this from the The L.A. Times

Second, former Harvard President Larry Summers was asked to deliver a keynote speech for a dinner at UC Sacramento. Some of the “liberal” professors objected to this because of Summers’ view on gender. The offer was rescinded and he did not speak.

Third, professors at Stanford protested the appointment of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institute. As far as I know, the protests have not succeeded and Rumsfeld will still be a fellow at Stanford.

Fourth, Steve Bitterman,
a professor at Southwestern Community College was fired after offended students appealed to the school’s administration over Bitterman’s comments that the biblical story of Adam and Eve should not be read literally but rather figuratively. Bitterman told the class that "it was an extremely meaningful story, but you had to see it in a poetic, metaphoric or symbolic sense, that if you took it literally, that you were going to miss a whole lot of meaning there." After he was fired, Bitterman (a fitting name) said: I'm just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master’s degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job, I'm just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master’s degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job.”

How should we understand these four examples in heir relation to partisan interests and education?