Bérubé and Ruth, It's not Free Speech
Bérubé, Michael, and Jennifer Ruth. 2022. It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
This is an interesting, but frankly inconsistent and at times confused prescription for revising Academic Freedom for the contemporary era.
The main confusion, I think, comes from the fact that it is not really about Academic Freedom per se. It is about Academic Freedom in the service of Anti-racism and democracy. That is to say it is really about how Academic Freedom can/should be used for a specific purpose, rather than about how it can be developed, maintained, etc., as an infrastructure for the pursuit of academic work.
Ironically, this makes the book quite similar in many ways to William F. Buckely Jr.‘s (much more sophomoric) God and Man at Yale, the subtitle of which is “the superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’.” In that book, in essence, Buckley argues that the purpose of a university (or at least an originally religious university like Yale) is to uphold Christianity and Democracy (by which Buckley means explicitly capitalism), and that attempts to use Academic Freedom to argue that Faculty should be allowed to do something else should be suppressed — ideally, in Buckley’s view, by a committee of Alumni who are committed to the idea of the university as a school from the promotion of Christian, capitalist ideals.
Bérubé and Ruth, for their part, argue that the purpose of the University is in essence anti-racism (and explicitly name it as “bettering humanity” or “furthering democracy”), and, especially, undoing the structural white privilege uncovered by Critical Race Theory. And, as a result, they believe that Academic Freedom cases should therefore be adjudicated by Senate Committees, pointing particularly to the proposal at Princeton for an Anti-racism committee.
An academic freedom committee is not the same thing as an anti-racism committee, of course, and Bérubé and Ruth do distinguish between the two at a certain point; but their chapter on the academic freedom committee begins with a long and elaborate defence of the Princeton Anti-racism committee as being, in essence, the same thing as an academic freedom committee.
This is typical of the confusion throughout the book, which is probably the most explicit example I’ve ever read of people working out their ideas by writing. And so they defend broad protections for extra-mural academic freedom, including for speech in one’s area of expertise, by arguing that Salaita (who had a job rescinded for pro-intifada tweets), but not for Amy Wax (who works on right wing politics) and her ilk. They argue that it is important that Academic Freedom not be restricted to measured, evidence-based speech, but also praise those who say that speech protected by Academic Freedom should be both Free and academic (i.e. evidence-based). Running throughout is a very strong sense of white and privilege guilt, which makes the authors (both of whom are white and tenured academics) very hesitant — not so much as to propose solutions, as to think them through to their logical conclusions.
In the end, by feeling is that this is a book that hasn’t made up its mind on a very difficult question. It can see the problem: how do we deal with weaponised academic freedom used in bad faith to promote racism and similarly anti-democratic ideals? But it can’t see how to deal with this consistently: it’s proposals are primarily for how we can regulate the academic freedom of those we disagree with, rather than find structures that we can use to stop bad-faith arguments of all kinds.
