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Interrogating the politics of post-9/11 academic freedom.

Article Excerpt
Much like freedom itself, academic freedom appears to be a concept that generates a superficial consensus (is anyone opposed to it?), only to give way to sharp divergences of opinion as soon as one enters into the philosophical, ideological, legal, and institutional details, In an academic environment that remains deeply marked by the "culture wars" of the 1980s and 1990s, the dilemmas raised by the September 11 attacks and the U.S. response to them have sparked a new round of debate over the definition of academic freedom, its proper extension, and the existence of threats to its protection. Within such a context, academic freedom occupies a central place alongside a host of other important issues (e.g., workload and compensation, collective bargaining, tenure and promotion policies, discrimination and equity issues, challenges faced by contingent faculty, declining time for research) in the minds of today's college and university professors.

Anyone attempting to grapple with the complexities of academic freedom in the post-September 11 era is immediately confronted with a series of analytical challenges. The first, which might be called macropolitical, turns on the question of how to characterize the particular historical matrix within which academic work is currently taking place. On the one hand, there is the understandable need to focus critical attention on the actions carried out by the George W. Bush administration under the rubric of the "global war on terrorism" and their deleterious effects on the work of teaching, learning, and research. These actions include the infamously Orwellian USA-PATRIOT Act, but also a host of lesser-known steps designed to restrict access to information and exert control over scholarly research. On the other hand, there is a real danger that in focusing on the "trees" of these recent developments, we might find ourselves unable to see the "forest": the ongoing transformation in the political economy of higher education and intellectual work more generally, a process that predates September 11 and will undoubtedly outlive the "global war on terrorism." The best analyses of academic freedom today are those that are able to hold all of these processes in play, illuminating how twenty-first-century threats to academic freedom are embedded in a longer trajectory.

The second challenge, closely related to the first, concerns the tension between the individual and the collective. The post-9/11 period has given us a series of medium-and high-profile test cases (e.g., Nicholas de Genova, Ward Churchill, Sami al-Arian), the results of which have revealed important patterns in the kinds of protection afforded (or not afforded) to scholars who hold dissident views. At the same time, one must always be mindful of the fact that such cases can easily draw our attention away from the deeper structural factors that are shaping the ideological environment in which all intellectual work takes place. Of particular concern here are the phenomenon of self-censorship, which by definition does not present itself in readily visible form, and the growing influence of private advocacy organizations seeking to punish dissident intellectuals and shape broader curricular, research, and hiring agendas. More generally, the issue of academic freedom can never be limited to questions of individual free speech, as crucial as those questions are. Academic freedom is always a structural issue, and it can be fundamentally threatened even in a situation where free speech is fully protected.

Finally, there is an important geopolitical dilemma to be faced. For obvious reasons, U.S.-based analyses of post-9/11 academic freedom issues are likely to put the U.S. academic environment at the center. Yet here, as always, one must be wary of the danger of U.S. exceptionalism and navel-gazing. The problems confronting academics and students in American higher education, while undoubtedly deserving of critical attention and collective action, often pale in comparison with those prevailing elsewhere. Any attempt to posit trends in the U.S. academy as paradigmatic runs the risk of denying the integrity and specificity of other processes that are rooted in overlapping global, regional, and global contexts.

The scholarly literature on post-9/11 academic freedom is large and growing. The two edited volumes under review here both emerged out of conferences held...

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