South Atlantic Quarterly current issue

Why Academic Freedom Doesn't Matter

Donoghue, F. — 2009-09-23

This essay questions the historical yoking together of the concepts of academic freedom and tenure, arguing that both concepts have been poorly and inconsistently defined since the AAUP's inaugural document, the "Declaration of Principles on Academic Tenure," was published in 1915. The essay charts the critique of the "Declaration" by the Association of American Colleges (AAC). The AAC, an organization of administrators rather than faculty, laid the groundwork for the tenure system as it exists today. It outlined the seven-year probationary period that would precede tenure, and it fought to restrict academic freedom to the professor's area of academic expertise. In doing so, it joined together the two otherwise unrelated concepts. The second half of the essay examines how the legal system has tried, largely without success, to sort out the relationship between academic freedom and tenure. The essay concludes by noting that the research model in the humanities—in which assistant professors are expected to produce scholarly publications in order to earn tenure—has now been grafted to the probationary period, thus compounding the problems of linking academic freedom to tenure.

Take Your Ritalin and Shut Up

Bousquet, M. — 2009-09-23

While David Horowitz's Student Bill of Rights is a false solution, is there a sense in which it grasps a real problem? While all the data shows that student intellectual freedoms aren't foreclosed from the Left, undergraduate curricular choice may be foreclosed in advance by the forces served by the political Right, in a kind of economic conscription that frames student choice within the scaffold of the business curriculum.

If faculty and student intellectual freedoms are interrelated in key ways, it is simply difficult to imagine that undergraduate intellectual freedom could be perfectly secure when the faculty's is not. As administrations struggle to supplant traditional faculty values and practices with "market-smart" and entrepreneurial arrangements, we should be exploring the senses in which the intellectual freedom of the undergraduate may be under similar attacks by similar forces.

With the active involvement of corporate partners, administrations are striving to commercialize, vocationalize, and militarize both curriculum and student culture itself. Furthermore, the role of higher education in sharply intensified exploitation means that we have to ask the same question of most students that we ask of faculty and graduate students: to what extent does the structured precariousness of their existence affect the very possibility of their exercising academic freedom irrespective of any formal guarantees?

Academic Freedom and the Composition Program

Brodkey, L., Bauer, H. — 2009-09-23

Composition programs in American colleges and universities do not enjoy the rights and privileges of other fields and disciplines. The problems have to do with the status of an academic field beset by commonsense criticism of both its curriculum and pedagogy. Subject to frequent institutional reviews, writing programs are often expected to defend their academic practices from the advice of reviewers whose commonsense understanding of writing eschews process and practice in favor of product. Drawing on several reviews of the program in which they teach, the authors argue that the propensity to allow professors from a range of departments to decide what constitutes good writing and the best ways to teach it violates the intentions on which academic freedom at their university resides. They provide examples of reviews of their program that fail to take into account the pedagogical goals of the writing program. Such reviews rely on external criteria such as commonsense understandings of grammar and style instead of considering the program's stated pedagogical goals and learning outcomes. The essay concludes that institutional reviews of writing programs should acknowledge the review guidelines set by professional organizations in writing program administration and, further, that they be conducted by peers familiar with research and scholarship in the field of composition.

Murderabilia Inc.: Where the First Amendment Fails Academic Freedom

Nelson, S. P., Prendergast, C. — 2009-09-23

The commonplace justification of academic freedom, described in terms of professional norms and practices of the professoriate, often cites advancing the public interest in knowledge creation as a key basis for academic freedom. Yet the public's role remains underspecified, its interests loosely defined, and it is increasingly imagined as opposite the professoriate in this justification. Using the example of the U.S. government's effort to control and ultimately destroy the archived papers of convicted murderer and former professor Theodore Kaczynski through a "murderabilia" auction, we explore the relationship between the public's freedom of inquiry and access to information, on the one hand, and academic freedom of the professoriate, on the other. We argue that the public's broad, yet poorly recognized freedom of inquiry under the First Amendment is in some ways analogous to the academic freedom of faculty described by application of professional norms. While we seek to clarify the boundary between these freedoms, we argue that they can be mutually reinforcing to the benefit of both academics and the broader public. We conclude that more is to be gained by such rethinking of the relationship of the public to academic freedom than by the current attempts to refine the professoriate's position in the corporate hierarchy of the university.

The Fate of Academic Freedom

Nelson, C. — 2009-09-23

Following a concise definition of academic freedom and a rejoinder to current conservative efforts to limit it by David Horowitz, the National Association of Scholars, and Stanley Fish, "The Fate of Academic Freedom" describes sixteen specific conditions emerging as major threats to the concept and the practice: (1) instrumentalization, (2) contingency, (3) authoritarian administration, (4) abuses of the national security state, (5) administration restrictions on the use of communication technology, (6) unwarranted research oversight, (7) neoliberal assaults on academic disciplines, (8) managerial ideology, (9) circumvention of shared governance, (10) globalization, (11) opposition to human rights, (12) inadequate grievance procedures, (13) religious intolerance, (14) political intolerance, (15) legal threats, and (16) claims of financial crisis. Definitions and examples of each of these trends are provided and their consequences explored. Readers are encouraged to test the list of emerging threats against their experience at their own institution(s). The essay concludes by mapping out strategies for resisting these trends.

The Corporate University, Academic Freedom, and American Exceptionalism

Cheyfitz, E. — 2009-09-23

In the first part of this essay, I sketch some of the material conditions that comprise the contemporary corporate university: a job market dominated by contingent labor (non-tenure-track positions) and increasingly by part-time labor; the cooptation of links between scholarship and activism (particularly noticeable in ethnic studies and Native American studies programs) by the traditional scholarly agenda of "disinterested" individualized research; and the force of this agenda coupled with the changing labor market to stymie collaborative progressive action within the university. I then suggest the way these conditions have operated in two cases with which I have been centrally involved: faculty governance at Cornell University, and the firing of Ward Churchill by the University of Colorado at Boulder. In the second part of the essay, in addition to the Churchill case, I survey the cases of some scholars who have found themselves under attack by their own universities either for their activism, their scholarship, or a combination of both. By looking closely at the cases of Churchill, Norman Finkelstein, and Nadia Abu El Haj, I conclude that what these cases have in common is that all these scholars have mounted critiques of Israeli and American exceptionalism. I define exceptionalism as a mode of producing history outside of history, as a way of reading history ahistorically in order to create a coherent narrative—one that appears to be without contradiction—that we call the Nation. In particular, the exceptionalist mode functions to deny the violent displacement of indigenous peoples by settler colonialism.

Civility and Academic Life

Finkelstein, N. G. — 2009-09-23

The essay focuses on whether academic freedom is compatible with prescribing a code of conduct outside the classroom. I first look at the Bertrand Russell case. Russell was denied a teaching post at City College of New York because of his expressed opinions on morality and religion. Russell maintained that insofar as he was appointed to a teaching post in logic and mathematics, his opinions on morality and religion had no relevance in assessing his academic competence. Dissenting from Russell's absolutist position, the essay argues that it is unrealistic to expect a university to hire faculty regardless of their opinions, however outrageous, on topics of general, public interest. I then scrutinize cases of allegedly outrageous political opinions. I conclude that most of the criticism directed at such opinions is hypocritical and disingenuous.

Deadwood: Academic Freedom and Smart People

Robbins, B. — 2009-09-23

"Deadwood: Academic Freedom and Smart People" offers a reading of the 2008 film Smart People as an allegory of what the humanities "do" as understood by the general public: the remembering of beloved but now distant or inaccessible things, such as the dead wife for whom the protagonist is in mourning, and using that remembrance to judge or refuse the present. The film suggests that the standpoint of the present must finally prevail, and yet that there is also a value in the characteristically crotchety (that is, critical) attitude toward the present that stems logically from this reverential attitude toward a neglected past. The question of how much value there is in the humanities' posture of perpetual critique—a posture embodied in the paradox of the "deadwood" professor who is successful precisely because of his failure—is crucial to the defense of academic freedom, the essay argues, given that academic freedom is not a constitutional right, but on the contrary depends on the public's goodwill, a goodwill that is perpetually at stake in struggles over common sense such as the struggle staged in Smart People. In other words, academics who want to defend their academic freedom need to extend their fight outside the walls of the academy, into the public sphere, and to take on the particular issues where academic opinion diverges most dramatically from ordinary opinion—for example, secularism and internationalism.

The Economics of Academic Freedom, or Plato's P & T Committee

Nealon, J. T. — 2009-09-23

Within contemporary debates about the present and future of the university, academic freedom often functions in a Neoplatonic manner—which is to say, it functions as that eternal and unfettered form that guides the mundane material practices of academic life (most obviously, tenure and its lifetime job security). Without the Platonic cover of academic freedom, the exorbitant job guarantees of tenure would, it seems, have precious little reason to exist. However, in the Platonic spirit of academic freedom, I want to propose that we jettison the entire notion of academic freedom as the primary theoretical cover for tenure and examine—dare I say affirm?—tenure as a practice in its own right, as a business practice in a particular labor situation. While most recent analysis suggests no future for tenure precisely because of its economic costs, I argue that tenure is in fact "rational and maximizing" in the present cultural-capital economy of university administration, teaching, and research. In short, this essay argues that it's the practice of tenure, rather than the idea of academic freedom, that needs to be expanded, affirmed, or saved in the context of the corporate university.

Away from Home: The Case of University Employees Overseas

Ross, A. — 2009-09-23

As Anglophone universities expand overseas, what are some of the problems facing the protection of faculty rights? The essay describes the spectrum of potential threats to academic freedom at overseas sites and describes various measures undertaken by the AAUP and others to combat them. Protection needs to take account of commercially induced self-censorship, which is less visible than the overt efforts on the part of government authorities to quash politically inconvenient speech. Offshore branches of universities may prove to be the most cost-effective way of servicing the needs of multinational knowledge capital as it roams around the globe in search of the cheapest locations and highest returns. How we think about academic freedom also needs to take account of the increasing crossover between universities and knowledge corporations as they mutate into species more adaptable to the land, sea, and air of the new geography of knowledge capitalism.

Academic Freedom/Academic Market

Watkins, E. — 2009-09-23

The principles of academic freedom as articulated in centrally influential documents such as the 1940 AAUP "Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure" assume the concept of merit as basic. The protections and the responsibilities of academic freedom and tenure are granted to faculty members who over time have demonstrated meritorious work in their specific fields of expertise. The proliferation of post-tenure reviews, however, suggests another model at work: academic freedom as grounded in free market principles rather than on long-term merit. The changes marked by the transition from merit to market models affect a considerable range of people, not only faculty, but also students and the general public, whose support is crucial to higher education. I argue that the economic costs of sustaining an academic freedom market are enormous, a burden borne primarily by groups marked as exogenous to the proper operation of the market who receive little or no benefit from its operations. Combinations of merit and market models usually offer the worst of both worlds, where the exclusionary force so often a part of the history of merit practices thereby becomes available to rationalize the exclusions imposed by an academic freedom market. Thus rather than attempt a return to merit-based principles of academic freedom, I argue in conclusion that it's worth exploring the possibility of building alternative collective forms of markets that can be responsive to the needs of all citizens who have a stake in the ideals of academic freedom.

Notes on Contributors

2009-09-23