How far does the idea of academic freedom extend to professors in an era of racial reckoning?

The protests of summer 2020, which were ignited by the murder of George Floyd, led to long-overdue reassessments of the legacy of racism and white supremacy in both American academe and cultural life more generally. But while universities have been willing to rename some buildings and schools or grapple with their role in the slave trade, no one has yet asked the most uncomfortable question: Does academic freedom extend to racist professors?

It's Not Free Speech considers the ideal of academic freedom in the wake of the activism inspired by outrageous police brutality, white supremacy, and the #MeToo movement. Arguing that academic freedom must be rigorously distinguished from freedom of speech, Michael Berube and Jennifer Ruth take aim at explicit defenses of colonialism and theories of white supremacy-theories that have no intellectual legitimacy whatsoever. Approaching this question from two angles-one, the question of when a professor's intramural or extramural speech calls into question his or her fitness to serve, and two, the question of how to manage the simmering tension between the academic freedom of faculty and the antidiscrimination initiatives of campus offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion-they argue that the democracy-destroying potential of social media makes it very difficult to uphold the traditional liberal view that the best remedy for hate speech is more speech.

In recent years, those with traditional liberal ideals have had very limited effectiveness in responding to the resurgence of white supremacism in American life. It is time, Berube and Ruth write, to ask whether that resurgence requires us to rethink the parameters and practices of academic freedom. Touching as well on contingent faculty, whose speech is often inadequately protected, It's Not Free Speech insists that we reimagine shared governance to augment both academic freedom and antidiscrimination initiatives on campuses. Faculty across the nation can develop protocols that account for both the new realities-from the rise of social media to the decline of tenure-and the old realities of long-standing inequities and abuses that the classic liberal conception of academic freedom did nothing to address. This book will resonate for anyone who has followed debates over #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, and "cancel culture"; more specifically, it should have a major impact on many facets of academic life, from the classroom to faculty senates to the office of the general counsel.

How far does the idea of academic freedom extend to professors in an era of racial reckoning?

About the Author

Michael Berube is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University. Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film at Portland State University. Together, they are the coauthors of The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments.

Reviews
Michael Berube and Jennifer Ruth's 'It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy and the Future of Academic Freedom' addresses the question of what academic freedom does and should protect-and what it does not and should not protect. Drawing careful distinctions between free speech and academic freedom, they contend that an 'excessively libertarian' understanding of academic freedom, often confused with an absolutist position on free speech, needs to be rethought and replaced with less traditionally liberal policies....A provocative read, with practical suggestions for how to put faculty back in charge of defending academic freedom as well as preventing its abuses.
-Forbes



Book Information
ISBN 9781421443874
Author Michael Berube
Format Hardback
Page Count 304
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 567g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 26mm