I'm familiar with the general notion of Academic Freedom.
But I just ran across the phrase "given his/her academic freedom", which is a concept I've never run across before. It seems related to students writing solo papers, and etiquette around a student publishing without their advisor.
In general, are there aspects of academic freedom that don't exist until they are be bestowed on people? Tenure is about the only thing that may fit that bill, but that seems typically framed in terms of job guarantees. Do students pass any similar hurdles?
Update: The reference is from Wikipedia: Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski - Wikipedia
As a sophomore, Pasterski worked on the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.[8] She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in high energy physics under the supervision of Andrew Strominger[16] from whom she was given her academic freedom in the Spring of 2015[17] based upon Pasterski et al's 2014 discovery of the "spin memory effect" which may be used to detect/verify the net effects of gravitational waves.[18] After being granted that academic freedom, she would complete the Pasterski-Strominger-Zhiboedov Triangle for electromagnetic memory in a 2015 solo paper[19] that Stephen Hawking cited in early 2016.[20]