Academic freedom, 2000 and after.

What is the present condition of academic freedom? I say it's pretty vigorous, and will later explain why. Critics of "political correctness," whose voices are louder than such as mine, have for a decade shouted that academic freedom is weak: that it has been subverted by doctrinaire leftists and feminists who intimidate conservative or maverick scholars, disrupt their classes, persuade -- administrations to ( adopt repressive speech codes, and so on. (1) There are such events; the 1990s brought us books stuffed with them. But if you scan the news in an evenhanded way, you will not see such a pattern. In roughly the first six months of 2000, for example, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran about twenty stories of professors under fire. (2) Three match the stereotype of politically correct repression: a San Diego State professor denied tenure in African American Studies because, by her account, she was not "black enough" (but she won a settlement in court); vigorous protests at Princeton against Peter Singer's position on euthanasia; and the burning of an agricultural facility at Michigan State for its supposed work in foisting biotechnology on the Third World. Three others would be a stretch, for PC sleuths: a scholar at Cal State Long Beach accused of holding Jews responsible for the Holocaust; a Columbia Law professor criticized by students and then the school's Dean for using offensive examples (e.g., fetus murder) in an exam; and a faculty member at Florida Atlantic who sued over a sexual harassment charge (she lost in court).

And then, for symmetry, three stories raise questions about pressure from the right: a gay faculty member fired by a Catholic college (it claimed that was not the reason); George Mason University's conservative "Board of Visitors" (=trustees) intervening to place two traditional courses in a new curriculum; and Michael Sperber of Indiana University raking unscheduled leave because of intense heat, including death threats, from alums and others loyal to the egregious basketball coach, Bobby Knight, whom Sperber had criticized.

The remainder of the stories are about faculty members fired or suspended or denied reappointment for alleged offenses of one kind or another. The list includes two bizarre cases (one professor charged with using grant money to buy heroin for his subjects; another fired after pleading guilty to a child pornography charge--I take no position on the validity of such accusations, which are of course often vague or loaded with ideology). The other cases are humdrum, sad, and not very instructive: eccentric or rebellious professors in trouble with their bosses for. . . what? Typically the administration or department says unprofessional conduct or inadequate performance on the job; the professor says, being critical of the administration or department.

This sampling does not support the fears of the Right, as expressed for instance in the Republican platform ("At many institutions of higher learning, the ideal of academic freedom is threatened by intolerance"). In fact, the sampling doesn't clearly warrant any conclusion about academic freedom, 2000. My opening question calls nor for a snapshot but for a narrative reply: that's how it was then, this is how it is now, these are the forces that changed it. Such a narrative might be converted into a prediction: the same play of forces will take academic freedom farther along the same (dismal/hopeful) path; or those forces are changing, and with them the course of academic freedom.

Well, a number of stories in that form are now circulating. E.g., "In the late 1960s and after, leftists, feminists, and other dogmatic groups eroded academic freedom, which is fragile now and will continue to sicken." Or, "staunch defenders of academic freedom have put down the assaults that weakened it for two decades, and its prospects are now good." Or, "the Culture Wars had little effect on academic freedom, which is and will be healthy enough, unless the Right is allowed to create a new McCarthyism." Or, closest to the story I would myself tell, "1960s movements greatly expanded academic freedom, but the Right's counteroffensive has been telling, and will, along with cutbacks, probably reverse the gains of recent decades." A listener to these contending stories, and more, will suspect not just that the tellers see recent history through different political lenses, but that they mean different things by "academic freedom."

And certainly a contest has gone forward over the scope of that idea, as well as over who's trampling on whose rights and sensibilities. Daphne Patai speaks for many when she complains that

The battle cry of 'academic freedom' is still aimed at assaults from outside the academy--no longer McCarthyism, but now corporatization and privatization. Yet encroachments on academic freedom from inside--speech codes and antiharassment policies, for example--are tolerated, indeed welcomed, and that the concept of academic freedom has in this way been thoroughly debased.

("Speak Freely, Professor--Within the Speech Code, "The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 99, 2000, B8-B9).

Critics of higher education from well to the right of Patai have for a decade seen violations of academic freedom nor just in speech codes and harassment policies, which are formally adopted by the university, but in attacks by students on the incorrect views of their instructors, and in occasional disruptions of classes. From another political quarter, many students and faculty members have argued that academic freedom does not protect a right to demean or insult any group, certainly not one represented among an instructors students, whose right to speak and learn freely is impaired by racism, homophobia, and other hostilities emanating from from behind the lectern.

The battles of the last ten years have centered on policies and practices such as those just mentioned. It is worth noting that none of them (not even McCarthyism, except when enforced by university administrations and trustees) was among the threats against which the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) sought to guard academic freedom in its "1940 Statement of Principles," the document that, along with various commentaries and supplements, has guided case law in this area for sixty years. The "1940 Statement" postulated that "Institutions of higher learning are conducted for the common good," which "depends upon the free search for truth and its free expression." It went on to enumerate with elegant simplicity the activities of professors that were to be protected in this high cause: "full freedom in research and in the publication of the results," "freedom in the classroom," and freedom "from institutional censorship or discipline" when instructors "speak or write as citizens." All three fr eedoms are, like that last one, couched in terms making it plain against what danger the drafters meant to protect freedom: "censorship or discipline" by the university that employed the instructor. The second part of this document, "Academic Tenure," is devoted to procedural safeguards of academic freedom before and during personnel decisions. In short, the explicit working idea of academic freedom for many years concerned a faculty member's right to do research, to write, to teach, and to speak out as a citizen without being fired as punishment for unorthodox or irritating views. The AAUP proposed, advocated for, and, with what weapons it had, enforced this principle. The overwhelming majority of colleges and universities accepted it as a guide to routine practice, and still do.

So what stretched the idea of academic freedom to cover fights having little to do with the arbitrary dismissal by universities of intellectually and politically wayward faculty members? This is no place for a history, but consider just a few moments of conflict and adjustment. Calls for help from professors targeted by McCarthyism forced universities and the AAUP to think whether they meant academic freedom to protect not just the speech and writing of citizen-professors, but their membership in a party widely held to be both treasonous and a destroyer of free speech. (Could a Communist possibly be doing research in "full freedom" or practicing "freedom in the classroom," while following the Party line?) There were also battles in the 1950s over a faculty member's right not to speak at all, when under subpoena or the threat of it--i.e., to commit principled civil disobedience, or maybe just save his or her own skin. Faced with this expansion of the work that the idea of "academic freedom" was asked to perfor m by those under anticommunist assault, and with considerably higher stakes, few universities acted bravely on behalf of free speech and free silence. The AAUP itself failed to meet the challenge, hiding its head in the sand for several critical years (see Ellen Schrecker's No Ivory Tower for the best account.)

It and the academic profession partially recovered from this humiliating encounter, helped by a boom and a labor shortage that made colleges ask fewer questions about the politics of qualified faculty members. Then, in the late 1960s, academic freedom came under new and far more complex pressures, toward which I cannot do more than gesture. Professors joined antiwar protests and sometimes disruptions, attacked the policies ("cooptation" and "complicity" were favorite terms) of their universities, agitated for new programs in black studies, and in many other ways gave offense to their employers. Some colleges and universities took disciplinary measures against such dissidents. Did academic freedom protect teachers who obstructed oncampus recruiters for the Navy or Dow Chemical? Who committed crimes in the course of civil disobedience off campus? The "1940 Statement" did not say, and the profession wrestled with such questions.

In a closely related development, academic participants in sixties movements intensely rethought race, power, war, U.S. foreign policy, a bit later gender and sexuality--and the work of the supposedly neutral disciplines and the university in all these areas. This revaluation led to research that sharply challenged dominant views and methods and that opened new fields of inquiry (black studies and women's studies were the boldest projects, but there were many others). Radicals carried the same questions and ideas into their classrooms, taught about previously excluded groups, read forgotten texts, introduced students to critiques of power both in and out of the academy. Most of these rebels were graduate students and junior faculty members. In time, many failed to achieve reappointment or tenure. Had their employers dismissed them for courageously exercising "full freedom" in the pursuit of truth, or for falling short of established intellectual standards? Since the radicals often regarded those very standar ds as major obstacles to the pursuit of truth the answer could be, "both." Accepted procedures for awarding and denying tenure seemed inadequate in such cases, especially when a candidate's chief opponents were not deans, presidents, or trustees, but senior members of his or her own department and distinguished outside referees in the discipline.

As that last point suggests, political conflicts in this period created or deepened rifts among faculty members themselves, both within and across fields. (For instance, leftists in the humanities and the less mathematical social sciences were highly critical of main-stream economics and political science for ignoring class gender, and race, and for close links between important practitioners and power elites.) There was a good deal of energetic debate and some name calling, over such questions as opening the university to previously excluded groups, and especially between opponents and supporters of the Vietnam War. Although the latter held more real-world power, the former became numerous and outspoken within the university, so that many conservatives and not a few liberals felt silenced or intimidated by colleagues. When they cried "foul," invoking academic freedom, they sought to appropriate that ideal in still another way unanticipated by the "1940 Statement." And of course, that document had nothing to say about how students' anger and student rebellions might deter faculty members from freely expressing their beliefs in class, or even from pursuing certain lines of research. Was it to be extrapolated in such a way? If so, who was responsible for punishing and silencing rude students in the name of academic freedom?

The AAUP recognized some of these difficulties at the time, and in a 1970 statement, "Freedom and Responsibility" (approved by the Council, not the whole membership) wondered whether the "customary procedures" it had long endorsed for promoting and dismissing faculty members "are sufficient in the present context." Not quite, the Council thought. It recommend some precautions against campus disorder, and, more interestingly for my purpose, laid down a new framework and rationale for academic freedom:

Membership in the academic community imposes on students, faculty members, administrators, and trustees an obligation to respect the dignity of others, to acknowledge their right to express differing opinions, and to foster and defend intellectual honesty, freedom of inquiry and instruction, and free expression on and off the campus.

What had in 1940 been chiefly a relationship between employer and employee was now expanded into a set of mutual obligations among groups in disparate contractual relations to the university, but imagined as sharing "membership" in a "community." The authors of the 1970 statement were explicit about the reasons for this rather vague and confusing change: to wit, the "tactics of intimidation and harassment," "harsh responses and counter-responses," and generally repressive atmosphere" that had come to campuses in this time of protest and rebellion. Clear, too, were the intent and primary audience of the change: it urged upon faculty members more respectful treatment of one another, of students, and of university officials, whereas the "1940 Statement" had sought to regulate the conduct of administrators and trustees.

One might interpret and explain this shift variously, depending on one's politics and memories. I note merely that the official guardians of academic freedom responded to some of the pressures mentioned above, by amending the concept in a way that favored some professors and implicitly censured others (including yours truly, in case anyone was wondering). The change in emphasis also made the sanctioned idea of academic freedom more available than it would have been in its 1940 version to the culture warriors (from the right) against "political correctness" in the late 1980s and after. For although some of the conduct cited as outrageous by Dinesh D'Souza, Roger Kimball, David Horowitz, and the rest has provoked administrative investigation or discipline of faculty members, it has rarely if ever led to dismissal or denial of tenure. Many of the conflicts have been about alleged misbehavior of colleagues toward colleagues, including severe criticism of supposedly retrograde attitudes and ideas about such topics as affirmative action and sexual harassment, sometimes via epithets such as "racist" and "fascist." And most of the juicier incidents cycled and recycled through the media have had to do with students intimidating faculty members or other students. Thus, the 1970 recasting of academic freedom as a relation of respect for disagreement and unfashionable ideas among campus constituencies not only answered to the concerns at that time of those who thought antiracist and antiwar protest had become too unruly; it met ideological and strategic needs of the conservative restoration two decades later.

Some see these developments as a perversion of academic freedom; some, like Daphne Patai, think them necessary in order to complete a weak and limited practice of academic freedom. I want to make a different kind of point: the working idea of academic freedom at any moment is the temporary, unstable outcome of competing historical projects and differential powers of agency. Before 1915, when the AAUP organized, there was no universal idea of academic freedom in the United States, only aspirations unevenly granted from college to college. Skirmishes continued after that, leading to the "1940 Statement" and (more important) its gradual acceptance at almost all universities and colleges--so that, for instance, most administrations accused of violating the AAUP principles try hard to justify their conduct; if found guilty, most correct their procedures to lift censure; and over the years only a few dozen have gotten in that kind of trouble--even though AAUP censure entails no penalty beyond the ill opinion of pr ofessors and of others who respect that opinion.

Academic freedom kept changing after that time, in response to events and political pressures. I have focused on just one amendment. Many are recorded in successive AAUP documents and in university practice. Academic freedom won't sit still. As Louis Menand writes, in his introduction to a useful collection of essays on the subject, freedoms, including this one, "are in effect manufactured by civil societies in order to further some conception of the good life...." (3) This jibes with Stanley Fish's notorious and perfectly sensible argument that "abstract concepts like free speech do not have any 'natural' content but are filled with whatever content and direction one can manage to put into them." (4) Transcendence of politics is impossible. Individuals and groups claiming the shelter of academic freedom win or lose because they can or cannot "manage" to persuade others that the idea suits their case.

How they manage is complicated: neither just by mobilizing the best arguments nor--at the other end of an explanatory spectrum--just by having the most clout. We can best imagine this complexity, I think, through the idea of an hegemonic process, layered with multiple forces and agents. Thus, when corporate capitalists came to dominate U.S. society a hundred years ago, they held control less by direct force than had the robber barons that preceded them, and more through the work of other social groups that found ways to advance their own interests while also advancing the project of industrial capital. Those groups included retailers, advertising agents, publishers and other founders of the modern culture industry, scientists, engineers, city planners, and all those who were organizing the professions as we now know them--including of course professors themselves, whose authority both supported and was sustained by the new research universities that were making a place for themselves in the corporate order. ( 5) The knowledge work of some professors (e.g., scientists) had great economic value to capital, and the work of others to reproduce, justify, and sometimes help repair the social order had great political value. For these reasons professors were able to win some benefits and privileges, including a measure of autonomy from big capital itself--including even the right to be critical of big capital and the social arrangements over which it presided, without automatically getting sacked by employers who had close ties to it. As Thomas L. Haskell nicely shows (see his essay in Menand's collection), the founding document of the AAUP, its 1915 Report on Academic Freedom, was precisely an argument for such autonomy, to be justified by the social benefits of free inquiry within "communities of the competent" (Haskell, p. 57). In short, professors gained assent to the idea and practices of academic freedom (not without many battles and setbacks) just as the hegemonic arrangements of the 20th century were settling int o place. An important one of those arrangements was the university's subservience to--but partial independence from--capital's project of development.

A helpful narrative of academic freedom up to now must begin that long ago, and be understood as a subplot in the story of professionalization, (6) which itself is a subplot in the story of corporate domination and crisis. Fights over academic freedom participate in both those larger narratives. Let me suggest how, by revisiting briefly the moments of contestation mentioned earlier. When the academic profession struggled, not that boldly, to keep McCarthy and his allies from shredding the 1940 principles, the timid defense succeeded partly because McCarthy was distasteful even to mainstream capitalists and politicians, but chiefly because capital and its Cold War champions needed to enlist the university in developing technologies for economic expansion, economic and social control, and possible war against the Soviet Union. Sometimes, as in the late 1950s and early 1960s, professionalization sings in harmony with capitalist development.

And sometimes not. The peace of 1955-65 began to collapse when large numbers of faculty members and graduate students joined undergraduates in critique of and rebellion against domestic inequalities and imperial ventures that seemed at first aberrations, then earmarks of "the system." Dissidents not only researched and wrote and spoke up as freely inquiring individuals--that was the sort of thing the "1940 Statement meant to protect. They formed caucuses and alliances and parties, held teach-ins and sitins, protested the war and the university's involvement, agitated for admission of minority students and hiring of minority faculty, challenged the authority of academic disciplines and their leaders, started programs in African-American and women's studies, demanded more say in university governance, and so on and on. In short, these faculty members were active in movements (optimistically felt for a brief time to be a single, revolutionary movement). They went well beyond academic critique of power, and they attacked administrators and colleagues as well as generals and senators. It was not clear how or if the 1940 principles were to shelter such activities. Yet on the whole they did (better than for Communists 15 years earlier). Of the thousands of faculty members who defied their employers or broke local and federal laws, few were punitively fired from even non-tenured jobs, and hardly any lost tenure. I think the main reason that academic freedom in the 1940 sense held up well through the late sixties is clear. Universities were still growing, supported by the last wave of the postwar boom. Faculty jobs were plentiful, and professors had the power that comes, m such a market, to claim benefits and guard professional privilege.

But soon after 1970 the two narratives fell our of step. On the one hand, professional solidarity weakened because of the political rifts mentioned earlier, and because sixties movements were changing the university. Activists got Ph.D.s, faculty jobs, often tenure. They found natural allies in previously excluded groups of students brought in by open admission and affirmative action, and in new movements of women, gays, and lesbians. They democratized and opened up the curriculum, as well as the political culture of the campus. And many of them staged a critique of professional conventions and privilege. (7) Faculty members (often liberals) who felt cornered by leftists and feminists sought to regain the academic preeminence they had enjoyed in the good old white male days. One of their tactics was to charge colleagues (and of course students) with violating academic freedom by bullying the "incorrect," and administrations by instituting speech codes and the like.

While these rifts weakened professional cohesion, a more organized movement was pressing for a similar revision of academic freedom. This was the newly awakened Right, which undertook to reclaim the university from the barbarians who, in its view, had taken control there. Working through conservative think tanks and foundations, the Right generated an ideological offensive, portraying universities (the humanities in particular) as traitors to western civilization and democratic principles, and attacking the diverse groups it corralled together as "the left" for intolerance and intimidation. This well-funded movement nor only sponsored right wing campus newspapers and groups such as the National Association of Scholars, but also influenced federal policy on education, most notably at the National Endowment for the Humanities during the Bennett and Cheney years. These rightists made common cause with disgruntled professors in the battles over multiculturalism and political correctness, from the late 1 980s on. And it was this unprecedented interaction of intramural, professional politics and capitalism's ideological counteroffensive against sixties movements that brought forward the new and rather bizarre appeals to academic freedom I mentioned earlier. Professionalizing academics had for decades shaped it as a bulwark against the rich and powerful. Now, it was being deployed by academics and some strange allies as a bulwark against the power of women, queers, workers, people of color, reds, and deconstructionists-and was invoked in the Republican platform to protect not just conservative professors, but editors of right wing student newspapers and of conservative students protesting against fees that would support someone else's "political agenda."

Meanwhile, beginning also around 1970, the narrative of capital took another turn of great moment. American business ran into an economic crisis more threatening than the political and social movements of die time, and certainly far more threatening than their partisans on campus. Japan and Europe challenged U.S. dominance of the First World economy, profits fell, debt of all sorts rose, the balance of trade went sour, the U.S. dollar softened--and in in sum, the postwar party came to an abrupt end. American capital tried a number of strategies against tough rivals and tough times; the overarching one was to take away what labor had gained through the boom times: high pay, benefits, job security, some control over the workplace and labor process (see William Greider's popular book of 1997, One World, Ready or Not, or Robert Brenner's more technical and densely argued The Economics of Global Turbulence', which takes up the whole May/June 1998 issue of New Left Review, among hundreds of recent sources) This, c orporations have accomplished by downsizing and decentralizing, shifting production to where labor is cheap and docile, subcontracting and outsourcing, getting rid of the old core labor force wherever possible and replacing them by casual workers. This offensive went forward against knowledge workers, too, including those in universities. There, too, downsizing and subcontracting became standard practice, along with bottom-line rethinking of the university's operations and an effort to market its resources and products. The PC wars, by trivializing liberal arts education, made cuts in public funding seem justified as well as necessary. Finally, a host of companies jumped into the education market with everything from online courses to entire, fir-profit universities.

This development is reversing the hundred-year-old process of professionalization, and will surely reconstitute academic freedom as well. On the first point I need say little, to likely readers of this essay. You are painfully familiar with the bad job market for Ph.D.s (but may not know it dates back precisely to 1970); the proliferation of low-paid, part-time, insecure jobs; the loss of control over curriculum and in some fields of the research agenda; the shrinkage of departmental power and of departments themselves; and the near-helplessness of professional associations. The academic profession is not alone in its post-1970 decline (even medicine and law have taken serious hits), but it has perhaps led the way.

Whither academic freedom, in such a time? It should be clear by now that the question cannot be drained of politics, or separated from one or another group's values and wishes. I tie the following conjectures to the differing and conflicting wishes of three groups identified in the exposition so far.

1. To those (neoliberals, apolitical centrists, conservatives) who felt silenced or intimidated by members and inheritors of sixties movements, and who with some success have redesigned academic freedom to define a polite university "community," privatization will bring a blessedly quieter and less overtly political arena of debate in most colleges and universities--and also a narrower one.

As business calibrates higher education more precisely to its needs, students will be pushed along highly pragmatic trajectories: get the knowledge that will translate into job credentials, and forget about changing the world. But of course this trend is not determined, either by corporate wishes or by the dialectic. Seattle could portend something else.

2. For those liberals and leftists and unionists who still think of the administration and trustees as academic freedom's chief enemies, and adhere to the ideals of 1940, the privatizing of education and the commodifying of knowledge will bring a reduction in politically driven firings yet at the same time a contraction of the safe area in which tenure protects fearless, disinterested inquiry. That contraction will happen partly through economically driven firings. These often become AAUP cases, and turn up in the pages of Academe. In the last ten years, one institution after another has terminated faculty members, sometimes in bargain lots, for reasons of "financial exigency" or institutional need" (an allowable cause, by AAUP rules, if it can be substantiated and if there is a semblance of due process). Thus the MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine set out to fire thirteen professors while in bankruptcy court. Clarkson College (Nebraska) retrenched by firing six. The University of Bridgeport, plagued by debt an d declining enrollment, tried to "restructure" by firing fifty, mostly tenured, professors. In like circumstances, Bennington College eliminated tenure in 1995 and has since declined to renew contracts for what some take to be retributive reasons. The Savannah College of Art and Design, Benedict College, Alaska Pacific University, Lawrence Technical University, St. Bonaventure University, and others have in the last ten years fired individuals or closed down programs and departments, claiming financial exigency. San Diego State University terminated 111 in a 1991-92 budgetary crisis, and the University of the District of Columbia set the record, so far, by firing 125. Several of these wholesale retrenchments were successfully opposed, locally and with AAUP help, but they strongly suggest that AAUP battles in future will pit traditional academic freedom against administrations claiming to make politically neutral, bottom-line decisions--fighting the next war with the last war's weapon? (Interestingly, sex and gender "offenses" account for most other cases in which the AAUP intervened this past decade. Does my admittedly cursory overview suggest that rebellion or perceived weirdness in this area of conduct and expression is today's equivalent of belonging to the Communist Party?)

But universities can eliminate positions or programs without attracting the attention of AAUP investigators, and the last war's weapons and tactics will be less than useless against the quiet shifting of resources to areas of high student demand, the elimination of full-time positions as their occupants retire, the substitution of part-timers, the staffing of basic courses with full-time instructors off the tenure track, the turn to distance learning programs that exploit the "courseware" of a few tenured professors and recruit adjunct or piecework help (not even physically at the university) to "interface" with students, and so on. Less than useless, because while the tenured professoriate shrinks and loses ever more control of higher education, academic freedom of the 1940 sort will win enough victories to seem inviolate.

3. For people like me, who identify with the left in general and the academic inheritors of 1 960s movements in particular, the post-1970 transformation of capital heightens the contradiction just explored: academic freedom has never been so robust/academic freedom has its back against the wall. I approach this contradiction through Menand's and Fish's point that the content of academic freedom is what people manage to put into it, and mine that the putting-in and taking-out are phases of an hegemonic process.

What I think we want to put into it--in addition to the familiar safeguards of competent and open inquiry--is full freedom for a critique of power, for the thought and perception and feeling of those excluded from power, and for imagining how to make the world peaceful, equal, and able to sustain decent life. As for hegemony: we do fight with one another, and also with regents and trustees and presidents, over the legitimacy of ideas, as groups 1 and 2 insist. Clearly, such contests also play out in job searches and tenure decisions, in admissions to graduate programs and the award of fellowships, in departments and curriculum commit tees, in caucuses and elections within scholarly organizations, in the channeling of money to right wing foundations and campus newspapers, in the media spasms they are sometimes able to provoke (as with PC), in battles over public funding that are sometimes influenced by such publicity, in decisions at journals and presses on what will see print, in the whole apparatus of judgi ng merit and allocating celebrity--and in many other, fields of contestation. In such venues, the overlapping movements against war and imperialism and the "military-industrial complex," for racial equality, women's rights, gay liberation, and ecological sanity have fought for recognition, legitimacy, and sometimes power.

They do not run or terrorize the university, as the Right would have it. Yet in the arts, humanities, and social sciences they have established a counter-hegemonic presence of some weight. Think of it in terms of programs and courses and faculty positions, of journals and university press series, of lectures and seminars and research centers, unimaginable in, say, 1962. We can study and write and teach now about Jewett, Chopin, Chesnutt, Yezierska, and many other terrific, forgotten writers--to mention just a handful from the period about which I most recently taught. We can debate the sexuality of "Boston marriages" and the historical construction of race. The non-European world turns out to have cultures worth the attention of more than anthropologists, and worth theorizing (as posrcolonial, subaltern, Third World....). Historians can work "from below." Scholars from many fields can think from many angles about commercial culture and commodities. Science now has a social and institutional history, not ent irely separate from domination. In fact, power, once a well-kept secret, is now discernable and subject to critique in all areas of public and personal life. And so on-not to mention that traditional academic topics and problems look entirely different now than they did in 1962, largely because of perspectives and urgencies brought to the university by those democratic movements. This paragraph could be expanded to a book. Indeed, the Right has produced many books on the subject, lamenting such developments as intellectual foolishness or a new, tyrannical orthodoxy. I say: academic freedom has in forty years grown beyond all expectation, and as a result, we understand the world better.

Well, that's an answer to the question that launched these reflections. It's an answer that completes my own narrative, in this way: "1 960s movements greatly expanded academic freedom; their academic inheritors withstood an ideological counteroffensive from the right, but were eventually exiled from the curriculum by strategies capital had adopted around 1970 to beat down industrial labor, and then extended to the production and circulation of knowledge, the professions, and the university." Strong energies drive the story in this direction, but something is wrong with it, aside from its unpleasant ending. For one thing, it reifies academic freedom in just the way I have opposed doing: why should academic freedom c. 2000 be preserved in amber, any more than academic freedom c. 1940? People will be fighting over the content of the idea until it ceases to be worth fighting over.

Now, the Right, sensibly worried that students will be taught a better understanding of the world than is conveyed by the media or the old liberal arts curriculum, has gone to battle against these advances, in many familiar ways, but hasn't put the genie back in the bottle, and wont. The main threat to the genie comes from the post-1970 dynamic of relentless privatization. As knowledge is increasingly made and organized to sell in tidy packages, where will the market be for feminist or queer or marxist critique? These are not among the intellectual properties that the university's venture capital team will see as the foundation of a spinoff enterprise. Nor will it find corporations ready to "partner" with it in developing and selling the ideas of Joan Scott or Judith Butler. Nor will corporations themselves look to the university as a subcontractor that can efficiently supply their needs for Gramscian or Foucauldlian critique. Students will still want bell hooks and Noam Chomsky at least as celebrity speakers. But how many students will jeopardize their economic futures by majoring in the fields where post-sixties critique is the center of intellectual excitement? The likely answer is: quite a few at elite campuses, where having been admitted in the first place is a ticket into the professional managerial class; not many at major public universities; a handful at the branch universities and st ate colleges; very few at community colleges; and none at the strictly-for-credentials University of Phoenix and its drive-through clones. There will doubtless be a niche market online for "Revolutionary Thought" as an elective, but it is hard to imagine most students who pursue their degrees by distance learning -- students short on capital and with adult responsibilities -- straying far or for long from the subjects that promise (however falsely) to pay off in lifelong earning power. In the dystopia toward which this paragraph squints, academic freedom is a mighty fortress, quite empty because no one can afford to live in it.

A related flaw is my story's assumption that the present lineup and balance of contending forces will remain unaltered. True, globalizing capital has momentum. The academic left is weak in spite of its freedom to say critical things about capital, and even if strong would be to capital as a mouse to a lion. But globalizing capital's dominance will not last forever. Opposition is out there. Resistance happens now; it will become smarter and more organized. Many will join it because many are harmed by globalization. They are potential allies of academic progressives, especially as labor is casualized and the profession undermined. What will save academic freedom from obsolescence will be actual alliances of teachers with other workers in the university and with knowledge workers of all kinds, here and abroad. Such alliances, if and when they form, will also change, once again, the idea of academic freedom and the terrain defended in its name.

NOTES

(1.) An ample survey from this point of view is Zealotry and Academic Freedom; A Legal and Historical Perspective, by Neil Hamilton (New Brunswick Transaction, 1995). Hamilton's appendices include some of the most important AAUP statements, including the ones from which I quote in this essay.

(2.) The Chronicle, like any paper, has unstated principles of selectivity importance. I use it for convenience, and because it is ideologically centrist--i.e., about equidistant from me and Herb London.

(3.) The Future of Academic Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). The AAUP sponsored this useful book as an intervention in the PC controversy.

(4.) There's No Such Thing As Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too (New York Oxford University Press, 1994), 102. He applies the argument to academic freedom in a Chronicle essay of Nov. 26, 1999.

(5.) See my Selling Culture; Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996), for much more on this subject.

(6.) That is, every group of workers with professional recognition has achieved at least partial control of and independence in its practices of research and communication. This achievement was more difficult for professionals working for salaries than for those, like physicians, who worked mainly for themselves.

(7.) I joined the effort: see my English in America: A Radical Critique of the Profession, (New York Oxford University Press, 1976).

Richard Ohman has been on the board of Radical Teacher since the last great vowel shift. He taught at Wesleyan University until retirement, and is now a member of the school committee for the Mowhawk Trail Regional School District in Massachusetts.