Edward J. Carvalho & David B. Downing, eds. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; 310 pp; ISBN: 978-2-23010-834-9, cloth $90 USD; ISBN: 978-0-23011-700-6, paper $28 USD.
Reviewed by Paul Handford
On the clear blue morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States destroyed or damaged iconic buildings and killed on the order of 3,000 people. Shortly thereafter the administration of George W. Bush set in motion a train of events that are still unfolding, with consequences yet to be identified and understood.
Most obvious among these U.S.-led events are the invasion and reduction of Afghanistan and Iraq, of massive lethal and ongoing consequence. Events of similar severity and possibly wider significance are policies that have led to rendition, torture and the like, and to a mushrooming fixation on what is usually called national security, leading to such as the Patriot Act, no-fly lists, process-free incarceration and assassination, including that of American citizens, and to enhanced state secrecy in general.
As in past fear-based crises, this has been accompanied by efforts to disrupt or suppress civil liberties, criticism and dissent. This is where a security focus impinges most directly on academic life, through diverse assaults on academic activities. Such actions and policies have not been restricted to the United States, of course: military and national security initiatives have attracted many traditionally open and liberal polities, such as those of the UK and Canada. Indeed, there is growing evidence of a global proliferation.
Edward Carvalho and David Downing provide an edited volume of 15 contributions that discuss such matters and consider prospects. Together these pieces aim “to intervene in the economic and political assault on higher education by making publicly accessible to a wider audience essays and interviews that reflect the depth and importance of academic freedom in a social democracy.”
The editors are concerned to make clear that these assaults come not only from the last decade’s growing security enthusiasms, but also from an ongoing financial offensive, whereby under-funding has exposed universities to privatization and to political and corporate insertion, all delivering serious threats to the integrity of the academy through negative impacts on research and teaching, thereby endangering the public trust fundamental to the proper functioning of publicly-supported universities. Given this, the book’s title is perhaps misleading: the framing context of this volume is really that of neoliberalism in general, with responses to the 9/11 events as but one part, howsoever important, of this context.
The editors situate consideration of infringements on universities in a framework provided by the historical development of academic freedom concepts in the U.S., understanding the American Association of University Professors’ articulation of ideas in its 1915 Declaration of Principles as a statement of workers’ rights: “the rights of faculty to enjoy professional autonomy in research and to inhabit a workplace free from political and juridical influence” and “the preservation of the university space (and the epistemological license it provides).”
They conclude their introductory notes with a short discussion of the recent advocacy — by such as the National Association of Scholars and the “Academic Bill of Rights” initiative — of the use of “balance” as a tool in protecting academic freedom (largely of students) in the classroom. We are reminded that “balance” usually amounts to the “internal academic disciplinary consensus (being) adjusted to reflect extradisciplinary perspectives.”
The contributions are organized into five sections. The first sets the stage with a gallery of recent cases, events and trends, along with some interpretation and analysis, including a discussion of the roles of heavily-funded right-wing think tanks and the media in shaping popular awareness and understanding of the issues surrounding academic activities, particularly the notion of left-wing bias and right-wing victimization. Authors include three scholars who have made very important analyses of the impacts of neoliberalism on campus: Henry Giroux, Cary Nelson and John K. Wilson.
The second section comprises a detailed meditation by Ward Churchill — who had goaded the lion by publishing a strongly-worded commentary on 9/11 on the day following those events — on his fate at the hands of officials of the University of Colorado, politicians, the judiciary and the media: the revocation of his tenure, his dismissal and what has followed. Churchill’s account sharply contrasts his experiences with the fine words of the university’s statement of the academic freedom principle. His troubles continue: despite a 2009 trial jury’s finding that Churchill’s political views had been a significant motivating for his dismissal, this was overturned later the same year. The decision is currently under appeal.
The next section provides two further instances of what Churchill calls the “Myth of Academic Freedom” wherein academic institutions are provoked into betraying their public principles through their treatment of members of faculty who express views on the Israel-Palestine conflict that are offensive to powerful interests. Norman Finkelstein’s essay illustrates the rhetorical use of “civility” and its close cousin “collegiality” by university authorities to justify suppression of unpopular views, while Irene Gendzier shows, in a context of Middle Eastern Studies, how legislation, together with media inattention and direct distraction, can be used to insulate U.S. foreign policy from unwanted academic scrutiny through defunding academic programs.
The fourth section, “Neoliberal Freedoms, Contingency, and Capital,” considers the consequences of importing business models (“managerialism”) into the academic world, something already much explored, for example in the first two CAUT Series volumes (Tudiver, 1999; Turk, 2000) and by Howard Woodhouse (2009). Specially emphasized here are the impacts of academic commercialization on students, not the least being their economic burdening and consequent distraction from academic activities through a need to take employment to mitigate their indebtedness. This section ends with a spirited call to arms from Sophia McClennen who describes and denounces the thrust towards commodification of higher education — whereby market values become substituted for social values — and away from its conception as a public good.
The volume closes with five items (three of them interviews) which in various ways consider routes to “reclaiming our academic and democratic rights”; how we might take back “the open marketplace for ideas; the right to research with impunity, autonomy, and without external oversight; and the civil liberties now compromised by repressive governmental and private business interests in the academy.” Along the way, Robert O’Neil wonders if things could not easily have been much worse in the post-9/11 academy than they in fact are, while Noam Chomsky wonders whether 9/11 itself in fact led to an intensification of the repression of academic liberties that was already in train.
There are now a good number of publications collecting cases, analysis and opinion about the malign impact of post-9/11 initiatives on academic life. Carvalho and Downing’s volume is an important addition to this literature, especially for the unique personal documents provided by Churchill and Finkelstein. We would do well to note that almost all of the cases considered here have their counterparts in Canada. Unfortunately, the volume’s usefulness is compromised by inadequate copy editing, which permitted a host of unhelpful text references to (n. pag).
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Paul Handford is professor emeritus at the University of Western Ontario and a member of CAUT’s Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee.