“We ought to complicate academic freedom even as we vigorously defend it.”
My review of Steven Salaita’s Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom (Haymarket Books) was published in Electronic Intifada.
Excerpt:
Uncivil Rites is a necessary book about a watershed moment that reveals the cracks in the foundation of the neoliberal university. Salaita eschews the easier strategy of locating all this in academic freedom and takes pains, in a text filled with wit and sarcastic asides, to document the implications of Palestine and Israel and the sheer brutality of Zionism not only on the beaches of Gaza but in the corridors of academic and political power.