Schleck 2022
Schleck, Julia. Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism. University of Nebraska Press, 2022.
Prologue
…the clamor raised during such incidents has helped to obscure a true crisis in protected speech on university campuses—the profound loss of the protections designated by the term academic freedom, protections which were designed to defend the integrity of the knowledge produced and transmitted by university professors. This crisis is linked not to individual political rights but to a profound shift in the economic value system being embraced by institutions of higher education in the twenty-first century: neoliberalism. Under the neoliberal regime, the mission of the university in society and the role of faculty in carrying out that mission have been dramatically altered. The result has been the near-complete destruction of academic freedom as it was conceived and widely adopted in America at the beginning of the last century. In its place the neoliberal regime proposes a collapse of the professional, collective rights of academic freedom into an individual’s right to free speech, thus radically overhauling the premises and practices of aca- demic freedom in higher education.
The question under such furious public debate is not who has the right to speak, since universal free speech rights are loudly trumpeted on all sides, but who, if anyone, will be pun- ished for their speech. From the perspective of the academy, several limitations have recently been put in place that make the professoriate more vulnerable to dismissal for controversial speech, particularly when it takes place outside of a clear research or teaching context. They may have the right to speak, but if their speech is deemed to have infringed upon another’s right to speak, the decision of whose right is greater is adjudicated through sheer political force, as Karl Marx shrewdly noted in Capital.
For Marx, the battle over the “rights” he identifies—those of the capitalists and those of the workers—is ultimately a struggle over the working conditions of the employee.15 I argue that the battle over free speech rights on college campuses should rightly be read in the same way when they involve faculty: as part of a larger struggle over the working conditions of the pro- fessoriate, with profound ramifications for the faculty’s ability to publish and speak freely, an ability critical to the mission of the university in our society.
What might be construed as a moral obligation for our society to provide its citizens with a college education that will not force them into bankruptcy or burden them with loans that will take decades to repay, is executed by the government through a careful counting process of a series of institutional metrics, accompanied by the vague threat of punishment for those who fail to perform well in such bookkeeping.
…how many of the hundreds of lecturer and other nontenure-line faculty teaching at unl and across the country are likely to teach or research against political and moneyed interests when their employment conditions are just as precarious as Lawton’s or even more so? How many will mute their desire to lead or simply participate in a public protest, even against an organization that, like t P u S a, actively advocates for the defunding of higher education?
The real threat to academic freedom is not the interference of morally outraged conservative politicians insisting on an unequal assertion of free speech rights on campus. The real threat to academic freedom is contractual, economic, and woven into the very structure of contemporary American higher edu- cation. It is the insinuation of neoliberal market values into almost every aspect of university life, into faculty contracts and into the faculty’s behavior and mindset.
A Public Freedom
The version of academic freedom cited and codified on Amer- ican university campuses today is based on the educational reforms of the early twentieth century, which were part of the broader changes wrought to American society during the Pro- gressive Era. Central to this process was the formation of the American Association of University Professors (aau P), which sought to represent and advocate for all college and university faculty in an effort to raise the status of the professoriate in the United States.
The concept of academic freedom and the role of the univer- sity in society laid out in these documents has been described by scholars as the “common good” or the “public good” model.3
In short, uni- versity professors advocated for professional self-regulation: they would be responsible for the quality of their work only to their peers. This privilege was justified because the good produced by the work of university professors benefited all of society.
If the ideas themselves were unacceptable to ruling elite, the faculty who propounded them were forced to conform upon threat of dismissal, or were simply dismissed as a warning to others who might contemplate doing the same.
This was accomplished in large part through the adminis- trative structure of American universities, which differed from
American universities adopted a structure similar to that of corporations, in which a govern- ing board and chief administrative officer exercised complete control over the employees and policy of the institution.
Instead of giving professors and students the freedom that they possessed in European institutions, Amer- ican corporatized administrations molded their faculty and students by “prescribing for each officer and for each student his specific duty, and . . . bringing to bear upon him the power of the organization if he fails to carry out the implied contract under which he is employed or the implied conditions under which he is admitted.”10 As Pritchett sums up the differences in the two structural philosophies: at American universities, “the watchword is no longer freedom, but accountability to the administration.”11 Freedom, Pritchett argued, required reformed educational structures that would allow faculty freedom from the close management and occasional direct interference of administrators in faculty work, and make them responsible only to their professional peers.
Academic freedom, as it was conceived by the early twentieth-century reformers, would institutionalize faculty job security through a series of regulations designed to place employment decisions in the hands, or at least subject to the review, of faculty peers rather than continue to allow boards and their presidents to hire and fire at will. It was clear that many donors and governing boards felt that the faculty within these institutions worked for them, and should deliver a product they deemed acceptable. This was in some cases explicit, as in the founding of the Wharton School, where industrialist Joseph Wharton made clear to the initial board of trustees that he would not tolerate the teaching of free trade, and threatened to retract the donated funds should that ever take place. The academic freedom advanced by university reformers like those in aau P tackled that assumption head on by blocking the institutional mechanisms through which such normalizing power could be wielded by elites.
The changes in institutional regulations advocated by aau P and other reformers represented a shift in power from the elites who endowed and governed universities to the professoriate. However, they were discussed less in terms of the empower- ment of the faculty and more in terms of the protection of the public interest, through the vocabulary of service to society.
The risk of students being exposed to, or reaching of their accord, socially unacceptable conclusions or outright errors was well worth it, as the necessity for developing independence of mind in university students was paramount.
…o stimulate thinking of any kind.”17 The aau P and other advocates of academic freedom thus sought to replace a conformity of content with a conformity of method. The well-educated man would think in a particular way, rather than think particular thoughts.
Similarly, the public itself, although the beneficiary of university work, also must not be allowed to influence its direction. Thus the public good would only be achieved, paradoxically, without the influence of the public, either directly or through its elected representatives.
Although there are many differences in the two situations, this defense against outside intervention into the work and employment conditions of the professoriate shares many characteristics with labor organizing in other fields. It insists upon some measure of worker control over the material conditions of the institution—in the case of professors, absolute control over curriculum, review of hir- ing and firing, and participation in other internal governance decisions—and seeks to give greater power to those whose labor produces the product rather than the men whose capital founds the factory or school. Given the specialized nature of their work, professors were able to make a strong case against being alienated from their labor and for greater control over the conditions of production.
In a move that would be viewed with some incredulity in today’s job market, professors would sometimes resign en masse as a means of protesting a board or president’s actions in dismissing one of their colleagues. In a labor market that was less glutted with qualified faculty, it was possible for academic labor to exert a power akin to striking in withholding their labor from objectionable institutions and bestowing it instead on those that conformed to faculty expectations of academic freedom.
The psychological security offered through tenure was a guarantor of the quality of the knowledge produced and disseminated by the faculty. Without such publicly certifiable conditions of production, the word of the professor remained questionable and confidence in his product was shaky, nullifying his status as an expert on the complex problems that might be addressed through legislation.
The educational reforms of the early twentieth century ulti- mately succeeded in shifting power from wealthy elites who oversaw the operations of American institutions of higher education through boards of trustees or regents to the profes- soriate itself. These powerful elites were divested of the power to shape the content of what was investigated and taught in universities, in a philosophical realignment that brought new and profound restrictions on the ability of such men to fire or otherwise severely discipline faculty whose work or speech wandered too far from approved norms. That responsibility was taken up by the faculty themselves, as they organized into academic disciplines that stretched across the country.
Thus academic freedom rested upon economic guarantees within university employment.
…while faculty reformers employed the tools of the nascent workers’ unions to pressure employers into concessions involving greater power on campus, increased job security, and higher pay, the arguments for such changes were made in the register of politics and morality. Academic freedom may have been enacted through changes in the economic and regula- tory conditions of academic employment, but it was justified in the language of liberal democracy and service to the pub- lic.
Put in the vocabulary of politics, universities adopted a workplace governance structure similar to a constitutional republic like that of the United States.
A Private Freedom
In short, faculty reformers argued for a sort of academic laissez-faire, insisting that the university’s administrators could not fully understand the proper functioning of knowledge production and that their interference would only result in damage to the…
As the American economy shifted from a Fordist to a neoliberal mode of capitalist produc- tion in the late twentieth century, the liberal political discourse
of freedom within the university would remain in place but the economic analogy would change dramatically to match the larger economic system in society. Academic freedom as a faculty “right” persists, but the employment conditions that guaranteed it are being systematically destroyed as the university integrates itself into the neoliberal economy.
The university still maintains its independence from government interference through a discourse of freedoms and a set of campus judicial structures, but it is now itself subject to the values of the market, with a major target being the employment conditions—hiring and firing—that once guaranteed the quality of i…
As Peter Gratton notes, the result is not so much a disciplinary regime of “‘power/knowledge,’ that is, how power implicates a thinking of what is considered as true and hence a form of knowledge. Our universities today are more and more built on ‘profit/knowledge’—one must be ever convertible into the other. Knowledge must be convertible into profits, and making a profit is the only proper form of knowledge.”
The primary danger in terms of knowledge production within the university is no longer that political and economic elites will demand conformity to their own beliefs, but that they will insist that whatever knowledge “product” the university generates must be justifiable on economic grounds.
The Fordist insistence on normalization has given way to a new regime in which content difference is not only tolerated but intensified as a means of distinction and niche marketing. Efforts at mold- ing the professoriate, even in terms of teaching, the activity previously described as molding young minds or characters, has relaxed into a curriculum that is increasingly driven by student desire, in which students “shop” for classes through online enrollment systems rather than submit themselves to a particular preconceived discipline of study.
Departments that insist for pedagogical or intellectual reasons upon offering courses or programs of study that are perceived by students as obscure, difficult, or not obviously leading to a degree that will increase postgraduate earnings accordingly attract fewer students, receive fewer institutional resources, and become increasingly anemic and powerless. Through a series of modifications of the institutional environment, faculty are being conditioned to act in line with neoliberal market values.
As in the corporate sector, universities have sought to develop a “flexible” workforce, one that managers consider necessary to be able to maximize reve- nues. Flexibility in academia, as elsewhere, involves developing a large bank of employees who can be hired at the last minute on short-term contracts to execute a limited number of tasks and then fired or not rehired when it is no longer advantageous to the institution.
If nearly three quarters of the professoriate in America is working off the tenure track, and the number of tenure-line faculty continues to shrink, one must ask whether academic freedom is not dead, or at the very least dying out in U.S. higher education. As American society more broadly loses the idea of the demos and the very conception of a public good, universities are evolving to serve a different role within it, and it appears that academic freedom as previously understood does not serve any necessary function in that new vision for higher education. As a result, the changes in academic labor that are destroying academic freedom in its traditional conception meet with relatively little structural resistance from the neoliberal university and even less protest from society more broadly.
Both Butler and Joan Wallach Scott call attention to this function of “disciplines” as a problem for the traditional conception of academic freedom under a public-good knowledge regime.23 Those arguing for a simple return to that regime thus must grapple with its dark side, which insisted upon an exclusionary conformity that reflected its Fordist-era origins.
The result has been a profound shift from the conception of university-generated knowledge as directly benefiting a pub- lic that supports its production through taxes, to knowledge produced through a combination of university and corporate facilities and financial resources. This knowledge is then pri- vately owned by the university and corporation(s), and reaches the public only indirectly, primarily through the introduction of new products to the market.
Universities are still state-sponsored in a variety of ways, for example through state revenues, federal grants, federally guaranteed student loans, and tax-exempt status, but this no longer translates into a generally recognized public ownership of the knowledge produced. The public is often charged three times over in this system, wherein citizens pay taxes that support higher education, then pay tuition for their children to attend these institutions, then pay again for the products developed through university research. In such an environment, the increasing discourse around university “accountability” is hardly surpris…
In a world where the lines between the university and the corporate sector are blurred, the university is no longer a space apart, generating a unique kind of reliably pure knowledge from which others can generate profit. The university itself is seeking to generate its own profits from the knowledge it pro- duces, and thereby values information insofar as it translates directly to the market. The more directly, the better.
Colleges and universities are still thought of as educating students, but now instead of creating informed citizens or building character, we build future earning capacity.
In such a system, acquired knowledge serves not a public good but an individual one, and the good offered that individual is an economic not a civic one.
In such an academic capitalist knowledge regime, academic freedom as a guarantor of the integrity of the information gener- ated and presented to the public is perceived to have increasingly little social function. Consequently, there has been little resis- tance to the system-wide massive violation of academic freedom that is contingent hiring.
The idea that academic freedom is akin to First Amendment rights, wherein every individual who does academic work at the university is covered by academic freedom by virtue of its embeddedness in the constitutional mission (and often the bylaws) of the uni- versity, lends credence to the idea that contingent faculty, like tenure-line faculty, are understood to enjoy academic freedom simply by virtue of carrying out their pedagogical responsibili- ties. This belief would appear to be grounded in the idea that the right adheres to the work, rather than the employment contract that precedes and codifies the work and thus the conditions in which it will be undertaken.
An Individual Freedom
Controversies involving extramural speech are most likely to be framed as issues of free speech rights, in part because such speech is furthest from the realm of activities recognized as academic such as research and teaching. Yet the overwhelming response to the brief episode between the two women as one of individual rights, combined with loud calls for Lawton to be fired from her teaching position, are symptomatic of a deep confusion over the nature of academic freedom within and without the academy.
Under an academic capitalism regime, academic freedom is being gradually reconceptualized as an individual right akin to constitutionally protected speech rights. Such a formulation aligns more productively with the goals and structures of the neoliberal university and is an integral part of the shift from a public good to an academic capitalist model of higher education in America.
Both the scientific method and the more loosely conceived “critical thinking” of the humanities require the scholar to practice and the student to learn how to separate good ideas from flawed or unconvincing ones. Within the academy, all ideas are not equal. All ideas may be equally expressed, but they will be subjected to rigorous scrutiny, and only those deemed worthy by professionals with long years of training in the standards of their field will survive, gaining a place in the published literature or in the university lecture hall.
If academic freedom were reconceived as akin to individual speech rights, this equality of status would flatten all distinctions of expertise, rendering all statements on academic subjects equally valid, whether made by novices or by masters in the field, by students or by teachers.
In other words, it would cast aside the self-gover guaranteed to faculty by virtue of the belief that such peer review is necessary for the production of quality knowledge that can function effectively as a public good.
As the necessity for professional self-regulation and the peer equality that effective self-governance structures required went unattended, it allowed the rise of contingent labor in the acad- emy, which itself undermined academic freedom on campuses.
…ion.10 The rigorous and meaningful peer review that comes with the tenure system is what enables the formation of a community of peers capable of performing the self-regulation that was the quality control on the knowledge produced and disseminated in the academy. The generation and teaching of this socially beneficial knowledge is what justified the freedoms given to academics in the first place, so with…
self-regulation of a community of peers, the entire public-good model of higher education fails.
As Gerber argues, the faculty’s claim to a role in university governance is not based on the idea that all members of the university are guaranteed representation in governance, as in a democratic republic.13 Instead, it is the fact of having earned membership in a professional body (i.e., earned tenure) that guarantees one the right to participate in governance in the areas of faculty experience, such as curriculum and the hiring, assessment, and tenuring of academic personnel. The work done and the respect earned by having achieved such a place creates the equality among peers necessary for open debate.
It is critical, therefore, not to stop an analysis of the prob- lems posed to governance by contingent hiring with the idea of professionalism. The role of financial security must also be examined. Were all faculty in a department tenured at their current salary levels, extreme differentials in workload and com- pensation (which can easily reach $100,000 or more), could still hamper the equality required for effective professional gover- nance.
It is both of these factors—the ability to fire at will, and low labor cost—that the neoliberal university values and for the sake of which it pursues this type of hiring with ever-increasing vigor.
The essential point is to recognize the centrality to the university’s neoliberal economic system of the hiring structures that destroy the professional community through which the self-regulation of the faculty is supposed to take place. Moreover, we must see this as the further destruction of knowledge production as understood in the public-good regime, which allows faculty the privilege of academic freedom in exchange for the production of socially valuable knowl…
If academic freedom does not require the special employment relationship of tenure but is instead inherent in the mere fact of being hired as a teacher or researcher at an academic institution that states in its bylaws that all faculty possess such freedoms, then the university as an employer has free rein to configure the nature of the employment in whatever way best suits the interests of the institution as conceived by its administration and board.
…the academic capitalist system does include a provision for choice, for superior or inferior areas of study, but it is dominated by selection criteria that are different than those employed by scholars who assessed ideas solely or primarily under the auspices of the public-good model. The environment of American higher education has been altered to ensure that market values are the dominant criteria in academic and institutional decision-making as the university moves to integrate itself into the twenty-first-century…
A theory of academic freedom that rests not on a particu- lar employment relationship, but upon an individual right—a political right rather than an economic protection—is thus important to reconfiguring the university on an academic cap- italist model. Respect for academic freedom is still considered important to the reputation of a university, and is particularly strongly held within the professoriate. Even faculty who lack a strong understanding of academic freedom’s history and the way it once grounded the university’s place in society will assert its centrality to higher education. Therefore, instead of fading away with the advent of the academic capitalist regime, the concept is instead being transformed into something that will not undermine the neoliberal university’s ever-incr…
casualization of academic labor, the idea of academic freedom as an individual right.
These faculty are assured that their academic freedom will be respected and protected, a promise that can be made only if academic freedom is under- stood as an individual right that all faculty hired at an institution possess by virtue of its statement in a governance document. This is neoliberalism’s substitute for a freedom protected by an employment contract that guaranteed faculty independence through tenure and self-governance.
The idea behind tenure was to remove the fear of losing one’s employment from professors’ minds so that they might prosecute their academic work with independence and cred- ibility. Tenured professors can be fired, but only for adequate cause, which must be proven to their peers in a campus judi- cial hearing. The burden of proving this cause lies with the administration. In contrast, contingent faculty are at a mas- sive disadvantage in judicial proceedings alleging an academic freedom violation if they have been fired. Sometimes there is no requirement that the administration prove cause in the case of contingent faculty, even if they are fired in the middle of a contract, which means the faculty members themselves would have to grieve their firing and bear the burden of proof in showing that their firing was not done for cause and was in fact a violation of their academic freedom, as per the pro- cedures described above.
The casualization of the academic labor force coincided with the opening of the academy to women and racial minorities, shunting larger percentages of these incoming professors into contingent positions than in previous generations of university faculty, which were whiter and more masculine.
What these many parallels should make clear is that the min- imal protections offered by the university’s judicial system are clearly inadequate to guarantee the freedom of mind that is the end goal of academic freedom. The basic accessibility of the peer review offered by these courts is questionable and the deck is stacked against those with less institutional knowledge and clout, and fewer financial resources.
A New Freedom
To forge a new freedom that will carry us through the neoliberal age, we need to abandon the language of neutral expertise and of work undertaken in service of some vaguely defined public good. Instead, we must proudly proclaim that the university is a profoundly politicized arena in which what exactly might constitute the good and who gets to define it are vigorously argued across and within fields of knowledge, in the domains of both research and teaching. The university’s social function is not as a place apart from our society’s battles over resources and priorities but as one of its most important forums for debating such questions. In this, it is similar in kind to the fourth estate—the public press—but only the university provides a place where detailed, long-form arguments can be articulated over time by those who have dedicated their lives to debating such questions. The knowledge produced by uni- versity faculty and discussed in their classrooms is in no way pure or neutral. It is, and always was, dirty, shot through with the interests, passions, and needs that drive democratic debate, and whether it contributes to a generalized public good or not depends entirely on the eye of the beholder. The university embodies democratic debate, in all its messiness, and we should celebrate both the process and the products of these dynamic and vital arguments.
Our libraries of academic knowledge function as seed banks to our society as it confronts new challenges and dangers.
They display “agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life,” which I use here as a way to describe the deep investments faculty in different fields have to their notion of the way the world works and how one should appropriately engage with it. These forms of life can point us in new directions as a society and serve as fountains for a continuing flow of ideas within particular strains of knowledge.
The forms of life represented by university disciplines produce both the dirty knowledge of today and store in their dark cool depths the varied seeds that will be necessary to feed the world in the future.
In short, it collapses the “academic” in academic freedom into the identity of the individual—speech rights for those who are academics or participating in academic endeavors—rather than embedding it in the philosophy of higher education’s function in American society as in its original …
…omy and academic governance against entrepreneurial managerialism within an established bureaucratic framework.”3 In short, unions can mitigate the worst ravages of the academic capitalist system on the working conditions of the faculty, buttress grievance
structures, invigorate shared governance, and curb the speed at which the faculty is converted from tenured to contingent lines. What unionizing does not do is address the larger question of the university’s role in society.
…st the encroachments of academic capitalism.4 Academic unionization is thus a necessity, but it fails to provide the broader vision of the university in society that is ultimately needed to justify the special employment protections for which unions fight.
We need to stop relying on the rhetoric of the public good, as it is not working, either inside the university or outside its walls, and it is quite frankly becoming counterproductive.
That noneconomic, nonquantifiable good the university previously claimed to provide to the public is difficult to assess by any standard metric by which an institution can be held accountable by those providing funds for its accomplishment. In short, as a rhetorical point it fails to engage in the practices and values of neoliberal capitalism and so is now rarely deployed when making the case for state funding for the simple reason that it has no traction in our late-capitalist society.
Academic research has often been charged with irrelevance, but the public’s faith that such work ultimately benefits our collective society in some way has diminished to the point that the worth of such obscure projects is no longer taken on faith, and most academics spend little time thinking through or articulating that good to anyone outside their own fields.
Christopher Newfield’s work, which focuses on the “unmaking of the public university,” highlights the ways in which such institutions were originally conceived as forces for greater social equality, helping to create a strong American middle class in the same decades where tenure was instituted as a protection for academic freedom and as a lure for strong candidates to enter academia. The transformation of public universities in particular into increasingly privatized, high- cost institutions that saddle lower- and middle-class students with decades of staggering student loan payments consequently inverts their economic function in our society, causing greater economic insecurity for the middle class and contributing to its erosion under late capitalism.
There is a vicious circle at play with the loss of public support for higher education causing universities to seek funding from the corporate world, which pushes research (and thus teaching) priorities away from the public to the private sectors, which contributes to a greater loss of faith that universities exist for the public good, which justifies further state defunding.
…postmodern critiques of universal values and knowledge have exploded any appearance of a consensus in society, both inside and outside the academy. In laying bare the operation of power in knowledge creation and its repression of the voices of so many in society (women, people of color, the indigenous, the poor, lgbtqia2+ individuals, and so on), postmodern scholarship and activism has destroyed the notion of an unproblematic set of universal values or ideas along with the desirability of ever returning to such a state. The battles over resources in the academy, broadly construed (students, funding, faculty lines, syllabi, space in the curriculum), readily show that there is no consensus even within the university as to what good we might be pursuing through our work and thus how to prioritize our labor and resources.
The change of voices within the academy and the public square that not coincidentally came with postmodernism did more than shatter a shared sense of content: it also broke the consensus on facts and methods, that is, on a rationality through which agreement could be reached. The philosophical and demographic opening of the university has destroyed the consensus about what constitutes a well-educated individual capable of participating thoughtfully in public debate as much or more than the simplistic market rationality of neoliberalism.
At a time when a university education is once again
pulling out of the economic reach of many young citizens, to argue that participation in our democracy is dependent on such an expenditure is antidemocratic.
It is not the “uneducated masses” who have driven the imposition of academic capitalism or the saturation of neoliberal market values in American society. College graduates are the ones who have implemented neoliberalism, as politicians, technocrats, and busi- ness elites who learned these ideas and values partly in college. It is in fact popular movements not tied to academia that have provided the most vehement pushback against neoliberalism,…
A university education has not only not been a bulwark against the spread of neoliberal market ideology in the demos, it has been one of the principal vehicles for its spread. This undeniable fact is one of the reasons for the deep skepticism in both right- and left-wing popular movements of the knowledge produced and taught at universities.
…the idea of universities as providing a widely recognized public good is neither accurately descriptive of the role played by higher education in American society right now nor persuasive to the public to whose good we are supposedly contributing with our labor. It is time to articulate a new vision for the role the university plays in society and a new justification for the protection of faculty work.
Nealon proposes we stop fighting the idea that the university is becoming indis- tinguishable from a corporation and instead acknowledge what the work of Slaughter and Rhoades, among others, indicates: the university is already a business, and as such it is following the corporate trends of the neoliberal moment. And if we acknowl- edge this, the question shifts from how to keep the university from becoming more like a business to “How is it going to be run in the future? For what reasons? For the substantial benefit of what populations inside and outside the university commu- nity? And according to what labor protocols?”
The public cannot agree on what con- stitutes its own good right now, on a very fundamental level, making the public good a massively contested arena. Indeed, if the American public is taken in its entirety, and not just as those authorized to speak, when was it ever in agreement over what constituted the public good?
…make the case for reconceiving the university not as a site apart from society, producing neutral knowledge, but as an arena for debate that openly and vigorously involves itself in our society’s fierce struggles over what might constitute the good. Out of it emerges a vast bank of knowledge, all of it dirty, all of it per- meated by the operations of the power that produces it, and all of it absolutely critical to preserve for the sake of our society’s future needs and very survival…
We enfeeble these forms of life at our peril. The new academic freedom is a freedom to fight from a position of strength in a thoroughly politicized battle whose process and whose products are necessary to our collective future.
Claiming that the university produces or might produce politically neutral expertise requires that we deny both our own embeddedness in the debates of our times and the university’s de facto openness to outside influence. It also disadvantages certain projects and intellectual positions, ironically often the ones that faculty deploying such arguments hope to protect or forward.
Perhaps it is not currently possible to fund all research through a general fund or general operational budget for the university. Perhaps we should be working toward that goal. If so, it would require a reversal of the current direction of academic capitalism, which privileges research that attracts and wins such outside funding.
The current insistence that university knowledge is neutral and undertaken for the public good, provided faculty are free to follow their best professional judgment, serves to obscure the reasons for the success or failure of certain schools of thought or lines of inquiry in the academy today.
The neutral playing field supposed by a liberal discourse of equally free academics disadvantages those who operate with fewer material resources.
Academic capitalism’s valuation of the rich and the privi- leging of the interests and desires of the rich when pursuing and disseminating knowledge is dramatically narrowing the scope of the types of knowledge the university produces. Who funds the faculty and projects that reflect the interests and desires of the poor man (or the Black man, or the woman)?
Universities are knowledge seed banks. We generate and house an extraordinary biodiversity of ideas. Within our walls we house the ancient and the futuristic, the bizarre and the mundane, the immediately useful and the seemingly pointless, the dangerous and the exciting. We create all these ideas and more, and we are continually generating new ones and storing them away for potential future use. The rampant intellectual diversity we house will provide the ideas necessary to survive coming droughts, floods, diseases, and other world-altering events, both literal and metaphorical. If the university con- tributes to a public good at all, it is in the sense that this seed bank is a public good as defined in economics: a resource that, like public infrastructure, benefits all without direct cost to the individual and without being diminished by its use by any par- ticular individual. The university’s bank of ideas is collectively built and not exhausted through individua…
Dirty knowledge may currently be considered good or not, depending on one’s viewpoint, and may be embedded in economic structures that prevent its functioning as a public good in the economic sense or even in the general sense of pro- viding widespread benefits throughout our society. But in the realm of the potential, a bank of knowledge is always a public good in the economic definition of the phrase. Its consistent value in the present lies in its potential for future public use.
Critical to its ability to provide this good is the breadth of variety in the seed bank. It could be that we need old stock upon which to graft new ideas and that the work of the medievalists is combined with those of biologists and engineers, or that the groundbreaking work of the particle physicists when combined with the deft skills of the musicians leads to healing we seek. We cannot know in advance. So while it could be argued that the narrow range of ideas produced under academic capitalism adequately speaks to the present needs of society, what happens when a radical shift in world circumstances occurs?
While many things are needed for a society to successfully strike new ground or confront and overcome massive challenges, one of those things is ideas—ideas that often are seen as too old, too new, too bizarre, or too irrelevant to have received much attention prior to the moment they become vitally necessary. As neoliberalism steers us to tailor our research to address only the immediate interests of a certain stratum of our society and chokes off projects and fields that range widely and unprofitably across the intellectual landscape, we are creating a monocul- ture, one that will render us increasingly fragile and make our response to new challenges ever more feeble and ineffectual. The barren intellectual monoculture encouraged by academic capitalism endangers us all in ways we cannot predict. As a society, we need to be constantly generating a true diversity of
ideas that are strengthened through interbreeding, competition, and symbiosis.
The professoriate might therefore best be described as a dense network of Wittgensteinian forms of life, or ways of being in the world that groups of people practice, through actions and speech, and that characterize their conception of that world.
We might also wish to revel in the joy and pleasure that the full diversity of human ideas offers to those who seek out its riches. The healing, humor, entertainment, and beauty preserved in the seed bank and in the forms of life perambulating around university campuses have much to offer to our society through the enrichment of our lives and our humanity.
…as academic capitalism slowly chokes off some of these ways of life, we lose the biodiversity of ideas we will need to survive coming plagues. Some of these forms of life exist and are indeed dominant in the world outside the university’s walls, but many are not. They exist only in the unusually intellectually rich environment of higher education and will die out entirely if left to languish there.
I once spoke to a colleague working on a one-year contract who explained that he tried hard to eliminate himself from the intellectual life of his department, to be generally forgettable and forgotten and thereby as safe as it was possible to be. It was an extreme response to his employment situation, but an entirely rational one. People working under such conditions are not being equipped to fight successfully for their form of life: they are not free.
Nearly three quarters of faculty effectively do not have academic free- dom. Eventually, if not immediately, we will suffer from the narrowness and fragility of the intellectual monoculture we are producing.
Rather than seeking to preside over society as arbiters, we should acknowledge our place in the dirt and dust of the fight and celebrate the strength and power of our contenders. We also need to insist upon the proper support and training for all, for the joy of the current contest and also for the sake of our collective future. The faculty need the freedom to seek out ideas and to communicate them unfettered by anything but their own collective judgment. For if the university does help to
forward democracy, it is by providing this space for contending ideas to be fully investigated and carefully articulated in great detail and often at great length by people who have dedicated their lives to understanding and embodying the myriad ways in which we achieve some form of the “good” for our society. If it does contribute to a public good, it is by storing the results of those battles for future potential use. For our democracy to truly work for the good of all, it must not be a “marketplace of ideas,” where the value of an idea is set by the purchasing power of those with money. It must instead be an arena where strong champions for every conceivable form of life can make their most robust case. If we wish to hear the greatest possible diversity of ideas, the opportunity to speak cannot be condi- tioned by a price tag. It must be free.
Professors cannot be overworked, underpaid, at-will employees and do this necessary work. Academic union- ization will effectively push back on some of these conditions and should be vigorously pursued. We must also continue to make the case for tenure, or some similar mechanism for continued employment regardless of the popularity of a professor’s ideas and teaching so as to recover the intellectual freedoms tenure was designed to foster and protect.
Articulating new and potentially controversial (or potentially irrelevant) ideas is not a danger to our job; it is in fact our job.
Third, it makes explicit the material inequities under which the pro- moters of different forms of life and lines of inquiry operate so that we do not mistake material advantage for intellectual advantage.
Like a wild profusion of plants, professors compete for the resources they need to generate the intellec- tual seeds specific to their form of life, seeds that universities will continue to store in the expectation that someday we as a society will need them to maintain and improve our quality of life, or even to perpetuate our species on earth.