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Errors in Book Review
Beshara Doumani
To the Editor:
The welcome review in the January–February issue by David Rabban of my edited volume, Academic Freedom After September 11, contains two technical errors: my first name is Beshara, not Bashara, and the publisher is Zone Books, not MIT Press. The publisher reference should read: New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, Mass.:Distributed by the MIT Press, 2006.
As to substance, allow me to call attention to an issue that is not discussed in the review but that is central to my essay as well as to those of Robert Post and Kathleen Frydl, namely, the importance of recognizing that neoliberal privatization constitutes as serious a threat to academic freedom as does anti-liberal coercion. It is precisely the increasingly intimate articulation between the two in the post–September 11 era that raises difficult questions about how we understand academic freedom and what strategies we choose to defend it.
David Rabban is right to point out that the conclusions of the 2003 AAUP report on academic freedom after September 11 are not as bleak as the assessment by some of the volume’s authors, including myself. I do not underestimate the degree to which the concept of academic freedom has become part of the woodwork of higher education and sincerely hope that what we are witnessing is a passing storm, not a structural shift. But I must point out in return that the situation has worsened, not improved, since 2003. For example, the resources currently being pumped into national “take-back-the-campus” campaigns dwarf those expended prior to 2003. In any case, if the true measure is not so much who is fired, but who is hired, it will be some time before the deeper changes can be properly assessed. Until then, I take great comfort in the fact that the AAUP exists, and I salute its members who, on a daily basis, work to defend and expand academic freedom.
Beshara Doumani
(History)
University of California, Berkeley
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