This article presents the address delivered by Roger Bowen, American Association of University Professors' (AAUP) general secretary, last fall to the Coalition of Faculty Associations of Western New York. The AAUP's history could be rendered in a series of biographies about academic dissenters who dared to speak truth to power. His address centers on a recent dissenter--Neil Rappaport of Bennington College--whose case illuminates especially well the relationship between academic freedom and academic governance. Rappaport, a photography professor, courageously defended faculty rights in 1994 when his institution's president, Elizabeth Coleman, embarked on a trustee-supported slash-and-burn plan to rid the college of nearly 40 percent of its entire faculty. "Financial exigency" had been declared by the Bennington administration but had not been demonstrated to its faculty, nor was it proven to the AAUP investigation team that later recommended placing Bennington on the list of censured administrations. Because Rappaport dared to challenge the president and trustees, he was terminated two years later, primarily on grounds of failing to be "collegial," a criterion for contract renewal at Bennington that had been unhappily foisted on the faculty by its administration.