For large swaths of graduate students, adjuncts, tenure track faculty, and even some tenured faculty, the notion of academic freedom has always been suspect anyway.
This week, academics across the country are stepping up their efforts to agitate for or against Steven Salaita, whose case has become a flashpoint in a series of controversies about the discussion of Palestine in academia.
Both Corey Robin and The Electronic Intifada have been detailing all the twists and turns in this matter, so I recommend you follow them for ongoing news and analyses.
Salaita is hardly the first academic to feel the consequences of expressing pro-Palestine views. At DePaul, Norman Finkelstein was rejected for tenure, and Terri Ginsberg experienced similar issues at North Carolina State University. Efforts to silence critics of Israel have also extended to commentators and activists who write on the topic. Most recently, Ali Abunimah had a scheduled talk at the Evanston Public Library cancelled, then reinstated after a public outcry.
I hope it’s obvious that I’m fully behind Salaita and his supporters, and I agree with the general thrust of the arguments that this is an awful moment.
The Salaita affair is being widely discussed as a case of the dismantling of free speech in academia. The concept of academic free speech is neither widely understood nor uncontroversial. One of the biggest problems in discussing this issue is that the average American is fundamentally clueless about how academic institutions function. For that matter, as this recent and unintentionally hilarious commentary indicates, it’s likely that few are aware of the distinctions between American Indians and Indian Americans. Salaita is a Palestinian-American hired by the American Indian Studies program, and this apparently unthinkable combination of racial and ethnic categories appears to have caused some consternation and confusion, in a world still ruled by monolithic ideas about what can and should constitute properly regulated difference.
As I write this, academics on the left, among whom I have trusted friends and colleagues, are emphasising the matter of free speech and academic freedom. I recognise that this is both a sincerely felt politics and a political strategy. When Liza Featherstone interviewed Vivian Gornick about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the latter pointed out that, as Featherstone put it to me in an email, “every disenfranchised group in American history has appealed to the idea of ‘American democracy’, and the outrage that they aren’t included in it.” I agree with Featherstone that “even though it’s always bullshit in one way or another, the ideal of [American democracy] has helped” and that “academic freedom is a similar kind of notion.” (you can read more in Featherstone’s book, Selling Women Short).
Based on the conversation so far, the general public might be persuaded that academia has been a bastion of freedom of expression, and that academics’ right to think and write are in general unfettered by political and cultural constraints. Whether people agree or disagree with Chancellor Wise’s (erroneous and perhaps soon to be ill-fated) decision on Salaita, they come to their conclusion based on the idea that academic free speech exists as a given; whether or not they agree it should be such is a different matter altogether.
But who really has freedom in academia?
For large swaths of graduate students, adjuncts, tenure track faculty, and even some tenured faculty, the notion of academic freedom has always been suspect anyway.
The concept of free speech is an abstraction worth defending, certainly. But what does free speech mean when nearly everyone who has actually gained any kind of a degree understands fully that the freedom to academic expression is contingent upon any number of factors, including race, class origins, gender, and ethnicity, to name just a few? Or that the very nature of intellectual production in the academy is contingent upon factors that academics are loath to discuss out loud, such as money, which includes the funding of everything from departmental picnics to scholarly journals?
Ask any graduate student of colour in the average American university system what it’s like to try to write a dissertation on a topic that’s deemed unsuitable for him or her, simply because it doesn’t involve a special race or ethnicity issue (my friend and comrade Aruna D’Souza has a piece on that here). Ask any female graduate student what it means to approach a topic on something that’s deemed masculine, and to have professors and fellow graduate students browbeat her into something more docile, more domestic. Of course, when white academics write about matters pertaining to race or ethnicity, it’s considered bold and innovative. When, to a lesser degree, men write about supposedly female topics, it’s considered similarly a form of emancipation. You might think that the popularity of “diversity hires” would have ensured that such petty requirements would disappear but in fact the trick of diversity expansion in academia has never been to encourage more “minorities” to engage in a wide range of topics, but to ensure, even demand, that they continually affirm their status as such.
Theee is also the stickier issue of the kind of censorship that occurs before someone is hired. We hear a lot about cases like Salaita after the fact of their hire and/or tenure; what we don’t hear about are the cases of those whose work, whether on Palestine or race or economics or gender or anything all never even makes it past the eyes of a hiring committee. I have plenty of colleagues whose work is considered too incendiary, too volatile, too beyond the pale to ensure their hiring. There are, in academia, unspoken rules about what gets legitimacy, and while it’s widely held that academic work is always bold and innovative (and it can, often, be, which is why I still seek out academics for interviews on their work), a good chunk of it also simply repeats what has gone before.
These are not the only ways in which academia stifles free speech or expression in its ranks. Academic publishing is rife with rules, often arcane ones, about what counts as intellectual work. In recent years, as the number of tenure-track positions slides downwards, it has become more common for those who consider themselves academics to write for publications conventionally considered off bounds and not scholarly enough, such as blogs and online publications. Such work rarely if ever counts towards tenure. I actually like and respect academic writing, and I don’t think that there needs to be a wholesale revamping of its shape and form such that a blog post is weighted the same as, say, a research-driven journal article which can take months, sometimes years, to produce. That being said, there’s a great deal of original thought being produced (and that has always been produced) outside the formal walls of academic publishing, but scholars who might like to cite the same will often face editors who ruthlessly excise such references.*
Anyone who has made it through the grind of the academic world, whether or not they survived, can (but might not) tell you that it’s always imperative to not simply express themselves but to learn how and when to be silent, whether on matters pertaining to students and disciplinary actions, the question of Palestine, or the silently ominous ways in which departmental and programmatic rituals and appointments are decided upon.
While I wholeheartedly support the campaign around Salaita, I’m concerned about the ways in which this papers over some pressing, systemic issues in academia. The larger perception is that this is somehow a definitive moment in the crystalisation of academic life, and in some ways it is. Put it this way: to not do anything about Salaita would be disastrous, and it’s imperative that the campaign get as much support as possible.
But I hope that those marching and signing petitions on his behalf also consider the implicit and explicit forms of silencing, the ways in which academia continues to silence its own ranks in often brutal and invisible ways that are never acknowledged. I trust that they will remember the underpaid and overworked graduate students and adjuncts whose ever more fewer and increasingly unstable jobs make it less possible to exercise freedom of speech and who feel compelled to turn out work that is less thoughtful and provocative in the hopes of gaining permanent employment. I hope they remember that this instance—a very remarkable one—of so many banding together to send a clear message to a top-heavy, bloated university structure has to be linked to a more systemic critique of how academia functions as a silencing mechanism.
*A forthcoming piece of mine, “The Politics of Citation,” looks at this in greater depth
For more on my views on higher education, see also my article, “Who Loves Teaching? Free Speech and the Myth of the Academy as a Place to Love and Be the Left,” in Arab Studies Quarterly, volume 33, number 3-4, 2011. Contact me if you can’t access it.
With many thanks to Karma Chavez, Ryan Conrad, Liza Featherstone, Richard Hoffman Reinhardt, and Eric Stanley.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. I make a point of citing people and publications all the time: it’s not that hard to mention me in your work, and to refuse to do so and simply assimilate my work is plagiarism. You don’t have to agree with me to cite me properly; be an ethical grownup, and don’t make excuses for your plagiarism. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
