Dutt-Ballerstadt and Bhattacharya, eds. 2021. Civility, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in Higher Education
Dutt-Ballerstadt, Reshmi, and Kakali Bhattacharya, eds. 2021. Civility, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in Higher Education: Faculty on the Margins. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
This is a very interesting and challenging collection of essays, primarily by “faculty on the margins” in the U.S., on the issue of civility in defences of Academic Freedom.
The prompt for the majority of the essays is the Steven Salaita case, a famous case from the Gaza war of 2014, in which Steven Salaita had an offer of appointment at UIUC withdrawn at the last minute in response to a series of tweets he wrote in response to Israeli bombing of the Gaza strip. Initially, the justification was said to be content-neutral — he was having his position withdrawn because his tweets were said to represent an incivility that was incompatible with the norms of his new university. Later, according to information gathered through FOI requests, it became clear that a major issue was donor pressure (given that we are facing donor pressure again in light of another Gazan war, with far higher civilian casualties, I imagine we need to reverse the normal claim that history repeats itself as farce).
Two other cases that come up frequently in the essays are those of Saida Grundy, who had her appointment at BU similarly pressured, albeit ultimately unsuccessfully, and Johnny E. Williams, a professor at Trinity, who was also attacked for tweets alleged to be incivil.
The authors are self-identified “faculty on the margins,” many of whom have been involved in similar problems with civility and academic freedom on their campuses. As such, the volume is extremely useful and interesting as an accounting of what it feels like to be “the accused”: i.e. the people who have faced institutional pressure — and in many cases consequences — to change their behaviour, be “more civil,” and change their scholarship or activity. In this regard, two essays that particularly stand out are “The ‘F’ bomb and the ‘R’ word,” by Jeong-eun Rhee and Mary Pigliacelli — a short story about a senior white faculty who throws “Freedom of Speech Bombs” — and “Chronicles exploring hegemonic civility and the evisceration of academic freedom for critical womyn of color” by Manali J. Sheth and Natasha N. Croom — which consists of “chronicles” (i.e. personal accounts) of problems experienced by both during their early tenure-track years with senior (White) faculty at “Moo university” (a lightly fictionalised University of Iowa).
Another superb chapter is “On the social epistemology of academic freedom,” by Arianne Shahvisi, which explores the meaning of “civility” in the context of Academic Freedom in an extremely grounded and thorough fashion.
The articles as a whole are more adjacent to the literature of Critical Race Theory than to that on Academic Freedom, in the sense that the bibliographies, for example, are much broader in the former area than the latter, and relatively little work is done to tie the work here to the prior literature on Academic Freedom, beyond, primarily, the AAUP statements. This is by no means a weakness in the volume, however, as these scholars experiences are a very useful corrective to an Academic Freedom literature that is perhaps even unusually White and male.
