Academic Freedom

In 2006, I was one of the organizers of an aborted AAUP conference on academic boycotts. The point was to open a conversation about the utility—past and present—of such political actions, to understand what was actually involved in the choice of that strategy, to conduct a conversation in a setting above the fray (in this instance at the Rockefeller Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy), and to learn what we could from the various points of view we hoped to represent at the conference. Idealistically, we imagined the conference to be an exercise in academic freedom, the fulfillment of the best of AAUP principles. In fact, our experience was anything but the fulfillment of AAUP ideals.

This essay affirms that today the adjunct reality is the new norm, and that reframing conceptions of academic freedom to reflect this reality is key to any strategy to defend and expand this freedom. What we hope to offer here, however, goes beyond a litany of the fears and restrictions under which adjuncts labor, or an enumeration of the ways increasing reliance on adjuncts undermines the freedoms of the entire academy, for our contrapuntal analysis considers the various important strengths that adjuncts bring to the fight for academic freedom. In a world where contingent faculty now comprise the majority of college and university teachers, effectively defending academic freedom requires that we locate and amplify the strengths specific to this large group.

Joan Scott, with whom I worked on the AAUP policy on academic boycotts and co-edited the special issue of Academe, reports that she has changed her mind and now supports an academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions. I respect and largely share her critique of Israeli policy. Nonetheless I continue to support the AAUP recommendations against academic boycotts and, therefore, oppose the current academic boycott proposal as well as any other academic boycotts.

This response to a Journal of Academic Freedom article by Joan Scott discusses academic boycotts of Israel in the context of Chinese suppression of academic freedom.