Gaza and the Unsettling Equality of Academic Freedom Open Access

Abstract

In June 2024, the University of Minnesota withdrew its offer of appointment to Professor Raz Segal to head the university's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Drawing on the Segal case, this essay offers a conceptual and philosophical history of academic freedom especially in US universities. What makes the principle of academic freedom so charged is that it is not only the institutional manifestation of the very principle of the modern university but also the intimation of an equality very different from the equality involved in free speech. Attending especially to these two aspects of the principle of academic freedom, the essay traces the differences and relations between four discourses around it: the liberal-professional, which emphasizes the role of the university as a public space separate from action; the neoliberal, which denies the publicness of the university and makes education a private activity; the neoconservative, which cannot allow for education, even as a private activity if it conflicts with the neoconservative vision of society; and the egalitarian-minor, which works with a more expansive notion of the public and insists that the university also has a responsibility to those marginalized both within the university and within society.

On June 14, 2024, the interim president of the University of Minnesota (UMN), Jeff Ettinger, announced in a statement to the university's board of regents that the hire of Professor Raz Segal to head the university's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) had been canceled. It was the culmination of a dramatic series of events. Less than two weeks earlier, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Ann Waltner, had decided to offer Segal the position of the director of the center. He was also offered a position in the history department, where I teach.

Waltner's decision to hire Segal was an extraordinarily principled and courageous one. In October 2023 Segal, a scholar of the Holocaust and himself an Israeli descendant of Holocaust survivors, had in an interview on Democracy Now and in an article in Jewish Currents said that the Israeli response to “Hamas's mass murder of Israeli civilians—a war crime under international law that rightly provoked horror and shock in Israel and around the world,” was a “textbook case of genocide.”¹ His statement deeply upset some scholars at UMN, who started a campaign to torpedo his candidature. But Segal clearly emerged as the strongest candidate in the search, and Waltner's decision endorsed that faculty consensus.

What followed, the reversal of Segal's hire, was unprecedented. As J. B. Shank and Michael Gallope, the chair and vice chair, respectively, of the General Assembly of the College of Liberal Arts (CLA), wrote in a letter calling for a special meeting of the assembly, the university central administration acted

Following its meeting, the CLA General Assembly passed by an overwhelming majority a vote of no confidence in the president. A few days later, the university-level faculty senate followed suit with a vote of no confidence against both the president and the provost. None of that seems to have made any difference. President Ettinger and Provost Rachel Croson refused to reconsider their decision, and in early July, as the new president, Rebecca Cunningham, took over, the university's board of trustees effectively limited her options by endorsing Ettinger and Croson's action. This limiting may not have been necessary: in September this year, Cunningham authorized Croson to “create a faculty-led committee to review hiring and academic freedom policies”—this despite Croson being the most senior professional academic among those in the Segal episode who “violated the University's hiring and academic freedom policies” (Ettinger is not an academic) and despite her receiving “80% of the ‘no-confidence’ vote from the CLA Assembly and 53% from the Faculty Senate.”³

The opposition to hiring Segal seems to have emerged entirely from a conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism. In a letter to Waltner, one of the two members who resigned from the CHGS board argued, citing Segal's article and interview, that “Professor Segal, by justifying Hamas’ atrocities five days after they occurred (via a perverse allegation that Israel was committing a genocide), cannot fulfill the mission of the center.”⁴ The other resigning member alleged that Segal had taken “extremist positions” and that the university should not have hired “someone who blames Israel for the rape and murder of 1,200 civilians, and kidnapping of hundreds more.”⁵ Both claims involve elementary factual and logical errors: Segal, as noted above, explicitly condemns Hamas's “mass murder of Israeli civilians” as a “war crime,” and his assertion that Israel is conducting a genocide, quite apart from being very reasonable, is, logically speaking, surely not a justification of Hamas's violence.

At the CLA General Assembly meeting, most scholars supporting Ettinger and opposing Segal were as intellectually, morally, or logically muddled in their arguments. One defended Ettinger's action by asking attendees to imagine a situation, such as the appointment of a candidate who would deny the Holocaust, in which a president's intervention might be justified, seemingly unaware of the irony of denying the Gaza genocide through his position. Another raised procedural questions about whether the position had been advertised widely enough (it had), and so on; she seemed to forget—or else repress the knowledge—that the issue at hand was Ettinger's action, in explaining which he himself had not cited any procedural irregularities.

The reason I mention the opposition to Segal's hire from some faculty, even if on intellectually and logically untenable grounds, is that the ongoing systematic and well-documented suppression in US universities of criticism of Israel is, and has historically been, somewhat different from the Republican-led crackdown on academic freedom. Florida's Stop WOKE Act or takeover of New College, for instance, were initiated from outside the university, and most scholars within US universities were united in vocally deeming Governor DeSantis's interventions an attack on academic freedom, while senior university administrators have been quietly disapproving.

By contrast, in the case of the Gaza genocide, senior university administrators across the United States led the crackdown on faculty and student dissent (under pressure on occasion, true, from external forces such as the JCRC in the UMN case, or the US Senate and House elsewhere, but showing their own enthusiasm too). And more than on previous occasions, sections of the faculty have aligned with administrators or even pushed them to crack down on any criticism of the Gaza genocide. At UMN, what makes all this especially fascinating is that some of the same faculty have in other instances advocated for academic freedom. In 2011, for example, when one of the two members who resigned from the CHGS board over Segal's appointment was himself leading the CHGS, it found itself embroiled in a controversy when it published “a list of what it deemed untrustworthy sources” on the Armenian genocide, including a website that promoted “the Turkish government's denialist position.” Turkish community organizations engaged in Armenian genocide denialism protested, and one of them sued. But “the university and the center stood up for the value of academic freedom against community pressure”; finally, the lawsuit was dismissed, with the judge noting that the CHGS stance was “within the purview of the University's academic freedom to comment on and critique academic views held and expressed by others.”⁶

Drawing on the Segal case as an occasional litmus test, this essay offers a conceptual and philosophical history of academic freedom in US universities. Of course, it may be tempting to explain any particular case of hostility to criticism of the Gaza genocide nonconceptually—simply by invoking hypocrisy or lack of principles. But this is never enough. Even what seems like hypocrisy or lack of principle manifests, on closer consideration, a conceptual world. Besides, in the votes of no confidence at the CLA and university level, there were quite a few nays and abstentions. It seems safe to presume that not all those who voted nay or abstained were being hypocritical or simply seeking to suppress criticism of Israel and the Gaza genocide, and that a significant portion of the nays and abstentions would likely also have affirmed the principle of academic freedom. So we need to also ask: What are the competing and often overlapping ways in which those who adopt diametrically opposed positions—opposing or standing by Ettinger in this case, and more broadly opposing or supporting student protests or movements such as Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)—conceive academic freedom?

This question matters all the more because academic freedom is not just a concept. It is a principle: a concept or set of ideas that demands an existential commitment—a promise—from its adherents, and a promise moreover that puts the promisor in a relation of universality with the world. Additionally, academic freedom is a very charged principle: it is the institutional manifestation of the very principle of the modern university, and arguably a principle more broadly of education as an autonomous institutional activity in modern societies. From its modern inception, the university has been institutionalized as the site for the search of knowledge that might challenge established authority, whether that of the state, society, or disciplinary guardians within the university itself. And such a search requires, as its very foundation, the freedom that we call academic.

The semantic power of academic freedom is all the more intense because it is inseparable from another even more charged principle: equality. It might seem something of an oxymoron, of course, to speak of equality and the university in the same breath. Even the US university system, the most democratic of the three national university systems of which I have been part, is not just unequal but profoundly hierarchical (by which here I mean an inequality so stable as to acquire an existential dimension): one need only recall the institutionalized inequalities between tenured and tenure-track or adjunct faculty, between faculty and staff, between faculty and graduate students, between faculty and undergraduates, or the exploding inequality between faculty and senior administration.

And yet the very principle of academic freedom also intimates something else. To exercise academic freedom, after all, is also to be equal at least to those others who exercise it. Because the modern university must be organized around the principle of academic freedom, the tremor of its equality is everywhere. (To be clear, while equality here or elsewhere is incompatible with hierarchy, it is entirely compatible with the authority that we might extend to somebody whom we think more insightful or informed on a matter than we are.) True, this tremor works in roundabout and paradoxical ways. Students and faculty from historically excluded backgrounds often face the modern university with dread, and their accounts of their university experiences are replete with instances of conscious and unconscious discrimination. Nevertheless, they are animated at least in part by the equality implicit in the principle of the university—an equality, to be clear, that has not always been available but has been activated in specific struggles and counterstruggles: notably from the 1960s in the United States and from the 1980s in India, for example.

Equality is always unsettling, of course: while unequal relations can be sedimented into routines, to be equal is to perform a relation especially contingent on and responsive to the other. Even where this unsettling is regulated by the institutionalization of equal rights, as it must be where possible, its everyday performance continues to be unsettling. But the unsettling works very differently depending on the equality and inequality at stake. So to abide by the principle of academic freedom is also to constantly be asking ourselves: What inequality is being questioned, what equality is being claimed, or how and what does this principle unsettle?

Yet one might also ask: Can we talk of a principle of academic freedom without making it a transhistorical referent, without invoking some “transcendent idea of academic freedom”?⁷ Given the disagreements such as those over the Segal hire or over BDS, and given the transformations in the concept since the nineteenth century, when it was explicitly formulated, should we not talk instead of multiple principles of academic freedom? Well, in a colloquial sense, maybe. But it might be more conceptually and politically generative to activate instead the distinction and relation between principles and ideologies. Every principle is a thin promise: it presents the commitment and universality it entails in abstract terms. (In his Annihilation of Caste, B. R. Ambedkar, drawing on John Dewey, underscores this abstraction in order to distinguish between principles and rules, which are marked precisely by the incapacity to abstract.) The thin promise of the principle can be articulated only within the thick field of ideology. Ideology provides the principle with its habitus—its historical and political context, its subconscious and unconscious commitments, its embodiments in everyday activities. And the same principle can be articulated by and embedded in very different ideologies—as happens, for example, with the principles of equality, democracy, liberty, and secularism. Precisely because they can be claimed by several ideologies, principles in their fictional abstraction become the site for the most intense questions, solidarities, divisions, borrowings, transpositions, and switches.⁸

If we are to flesh out the lines along which various ideologies take up the principle of academic freedom, two clusters of questions seem especially pertinent. When members of the university disagree about issues such as the Segal hire or the more contentious issue of academic boycotts of Israeli academic institutions, even if they do so illogically or irrationally, this is almost always because they consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously have very different answers to these two clusters of questions, and so articulate very divergent ideologies around that same principle, academic freedom.⁹

The first cluster is from the locus of the university. What is this freedom we call academic, and why should those in the university need it? What does it mean for some within the university to have the power to confer this freedom? How do different ideologies of academic freedom conceive the responsibility of academics to themselves and to the society outside the university? How does the freedom of speech and of action manifest itself within the space of the university? So the principle of academic freedom is the moment also of the especially intense flashing of the question: What do those of us who abide or have abided by the university think the university is for?

The second cluster is from outside the locus of the university. For while the university may be an autonomous space, its autonomy is nevertheless authorized and sustained by the society of which it is part. What does academic freedom reveal about the freedom or unfreedom in the societies that the universities are part of? What is its relation to freedom of speech and action in the wider society of which it is part? What about itself does a society affirm when it grants the university—and its scholars—this freedom? How and when does this freedom manifest itself outside the university?

If we work with these two clusters of questions, it seems possible to distinguish conceptually and historically between four ideologies or discourses or traditions (for my limited purposes here I shall be using these three terms interchangeably, though I recognize of course that they have often been deployed in overlapping and even antithetical ways), each of which takes up differently the unsettling tremor of academic freedom: liberal-professional, egalitarian-minor, neoliberal, and neoconservative, though the last rejects any significant notion of academic freedom itself. Of course, the distinctions between these ideologies can be made only palimpsestically: they overlap in many ways, and I worry that distinguishing between them leaves us with too typological a vision of matters. All the same, it also seems to me that distinguishing between these four ideologies clarifies the stakes of academic freedom for our times.

In the late eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant articulated the intellectual foundations of the modern university, and in the process foreshadowed not only what was to later become the concept of academic freedom but also its aporias. Around the turn of the century, John Dewey, whose dissertation was on the psychology of Kant, provided one of the first systematic modern accounts of academic freedom. He was also the founding president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which in 1915 produced a report that defined, arguably for the first time so systematically, the modern concept of academic freedom, departing from Kant not least in the notion of the public it articulated. Between them, Kant, Dewey, and the 1915 AAUP statement exemplify the spectrum of the liberal-professional discourse of academic freedom.

There has also been a more skeptical and restrictive discourse of academic freedom incipient right from the mid-twentieth century at least. Since the 1980s this tradition—call it neoliberal—has, however, become increasingly influential, and I shall touch briefly on how it has been articulated especially forcefully by Stanley Fish and how, moreover, it has been extended even further by the neoconservative tradition.

Finally, there is a fourth discourse of academic freedom, which may be called the egalitarian-minor. In the United States, this tradition gained strength with the Vietnam protests and then with the movement to divest from South Africa and to boycott South African universities. In the decades since, it has encountered massive pushback both from the liberal-professional tradition (the Kalven report, for example) and from an increasingly aggressive neoliberal tradition. However, it has held on tenuously, helped in part by the political mobilizations around minoritized identities; a symptom of its persistence is the recent endorsement of academic boycotts by the AAUP. I conceptually frame this fourth ideology of academic freedom primarily by thinking with B. R. Ambedkar, arguably one of the world's most powerful thinkers of the egalitarian-minor. Though Ambedkar, to my knowledge, never wrote in any systematic way about academic freedom, there are very direct and personal links between him and the Columbia members of the AAUP Committee—Dewey, Edward Seligman, and Franklin Giddings—during the very year, 1915, when they produced the report that first systematically articulated the modern concept of academic freedom.¹⁰ I explore this egalitarian-minor ideology concretely with reference to the questions of what it entails for practices in the university around academic boycotts or teaching controversial issues.

Considering these four discourses around academic freedom will also help us get a clearer sense of what may be at work more structurally—more slowly, if you will—in events like the rescinding of the offer to Segal or the increasing criminalization of student protest by university administrations, or, in a countervailing spirit, in the increasing acceptance of the moral rightness of academic boycotts and divestment.

1. Kant and the Public Use of Reason

Arguably some of the most important contours of the principle of academic freedom are laid out, long before the term itself gains any traction, in Kant's essays. In “What Is Enlightenment?,” he famously writes:

We know why generations have been drawn to this vision of the public use of reason. It is one of the inaugural moments of the modern figure of the intellectual—the figure who speaks of the universal in the name of reason, who even seeks to embody this universal. It is also—and this is related—one of the inaugural moments in the assertion of a community centered on the equality of rational beings. This equality of rational beings offers one modern way of conceiving a democratic world. Most evidently, it entails the categorical imperative, where people who accept the moral law treat each other as ends in themselves. As crucial, or more so, is Kant's vision of how to institute a public use of reason among those who do not accept the moral law: with a proper constitution, as he notes in the first addendum to “Perpetual Peace,” even a “nation of devils” following only their self-interest can be brought to regard each other as ends in themselves, “if only they have understanding.”¹²

But we cannot gloss over the exclusions involved in the “public use of reason.” It is only the scholar and the reading public—even smaller in Kant's time than in later centuries—who here exercise reason; all the rest are putatively deemed not to be engaged in the public use of reason. Two of these exclusions matter especially to us. On the one hand, there is the sovereign, in this case Emperor Frederick William II, the ruler whom Kant recognizes as so enlightened as to allow for the public use of reason, even if his own sphere of reason is private or governmental. On the other hand, unmentioned in this text, because they are completely excluded, is the community of those who do not exercise reason—the nonscholars, the nonreaders; perhaps sometimes even scholars who forget to reason are debased into this community.

Both these excluded groups force themselves into view in The Conflict of the Faculties. It is the sovereign, after all, who must decide whether the public use of reason is staying within its bounds. Emperor Frederick decides that Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone has exceeded these bounds, that he has distorted and disparaged Christianity and its scriptures, and sends him a very displeased letter. In the preface to The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant reproduces Frederick's letter, his own reply to it at the time, and his further reflection. In his reply, he distinguishes between his roles as “a teacher of youth” and as a “teacher of the people.”

As a teacher of youth, he says, he has stayed away from the Bible because he does not believe in mixing one science with another. Students in the classroom, in other words, may be readers of books, but they are not quite part of the world of the “public use of reason”—they are still being trained for it, and maybe they will never make the cut. On his role as a teacher of the people, the caveats are stronger still. He has done no harm to the “public religion of the land” (a different publicness from the public use of reason), which should be

So the equality and freedom that Kant envisages is for a small community of faculty who moreover accept the responsibility of making sure that the texts in which it is articulated do not reach “the people,” and really not even the “youth”; equality within the university is organized here around some constitutive inequalities with those outside the university.

We might think that we have moved far from Kant's world. But are we sure of this? From the very moment of the birth of the US university, it was quite at ease, after all, with owning slaves and later with the exclusions of Jim Crow America, quite at ease also until very lately with the exclusion of Jews or women. Even in the current context of the Segal controversy, the same university administration that flatly opposed having Segal direct a “public-facing” organization such as the CHGS is apparently willing, and likely was willing right from around the time it rescinded his offer, to have Segal serve as a faculty member of the history department. Perhaps this maneuver is merely the practicality of minimizing liability in a lawsuit. But practicality also always smuggles in ideology.

And here the university administration, to the extent that it claims to stand by academic freedom in this action, is arguably smuggling in a particularly troubling version of the Kantian defense of academic freedom. Kant seeks to defend academic freedom by insisting that scholars would not address the people, his assumption being, of course, that “the people” were not capable of moral reasoning. Analogously, in their communications, Ettinger and the senior administration also made it clear that their opposition was to hiring Segal as the CHGS director, a public-facing position; were he to be hired for a conventional faculty position, they indicated, they would be willing to accept it. So, whether they intended it or not, by reserving “academic freedom” strictly for conversations between faculty, the senior members of the university administration and those faculty who support them are implicitly assuming something similar to what Kant did about “the people”: they are assuming that the Jewish community (after all, for the administration the JCRC stands in for the entire community) is incapable of the moral reasoning that academics are capable of. Such reasoning by these administrators surely reproduces one of the most troubling antisemitic tropes.

Of course, there can be a more democratic reworking of Kant—one that dismantles his distinction between the public and the people and includes “the people,” too, in the public. This is a maneuver many of us resort to routinely. But when we do so, we are also implicitly introducing other notions of the public. These are initiated by Dewey and the AAUP's reframing of academic freedom and can be radicalized by an Ambedkar-inspired egalitarian-minor framing.

2. . . . And the Private Use of Reason

More on these two democratic reworkings below. First, let's spend some time with the way Kant separates the world of scholars from the world of action. In The Conflict of the Faculties, he distinguishes between the higher faculties (theology, law, and medicine) and the lower faculty (philosophy). The distinction rests on their usefulness to the “government,” or what we would today call the state: “A faculty is considered higher only if its teachings—both as to their content and the way they are expounded to the public—interest the government itself, while the faculty whose function is only to look after the interests of science is called lower because it may hold whatever propositions about science it finds good.” The “government reserves the right itself to sanction the teachings of the higher faculties, but those of the lower faculty it leaves up to the scholars’ reason.” And the lower faculty, having no commands to give, “concerns itself with the interests of the sciences, that is, with truth: one in which reason is authorized to speak out publicly.”¹⁴

A Kantian perspective thus works through the doubling of the public use of reason—on the one hand, the discretionary public use of reason by the state to maintain and extend its power, and the pure public use of reason in the university, which stays away from power. The university—well, the most philosophical parts of the philosophy faculty, at least, which in Kant's time included much that we would today class in different disciplines such as history and anthropology—becomes in the Kantian rendering the purest manifestation of pure reason and, as such, also the purest manifestation of the public sphere.

But with this comes a massive trade-off. Where the public reason of the state speaks and acts, the public reason of the scholar must only speak. Of course, speech is also inevitably an act, both in itself and in the action it might cause, and so it becomes incumbent on scholars, to the extent that they are audible outside the university, to speak in a way that converges with the reason of the state. This compulsion Kant acknowledges in his letter to Emperor Frederick.

Here we see a distinctive feature of the Kantian principle of the independence of the university. Kant is acutely aware that the capacity to not just speak but also act—both individually and in concert with others—is at the heart of political freedom. And it is precisely this heart that he relinquishes in the distinction he shores up between speaking and acting, as he creates a free space for reason for the philosophy faculty within the university. His anticipation of academic freedom, in other words, can be sustained only by turning away from political freedom even within the university.

3. Speech, Not Action

Again, it would be hasty to assume that these Kantian assumptions are safely sequestered in the eighteenth century. In mutated forms, they also grip our present more firmly than the Platonic tradition to which we sometimes trace the genealogy of our concept of academic freedom. True, the hierarchy between two sorts of faculty has been undone, as we shall see. True also that few would assert that the state is dominated by the public use of reason: since Kant's time, the state's public reason has increasingly been dominated by the twofold private reason involved in capital both as a distinct form of instrumental reason and as a machine for cultivating desire. But have not both these changes in certain ways only perpetuated more strongly some aspects of the Kantian framing of the university and the state?

Consider the state to begin with. However it determines its ends (reasonably or unreasonably), the task of its functionaries—those working with it directly or within the bounds of its laws—remains that of resorting to the private use of reason and hypothetical imperatives (imperatives that reason through “if X, then Y” logic) so as to realize these ends. To give a contemporary example, if the state has decided that trans patients must receive the medical care they require, a conservative doctor must simply use their private reason to deliver this care, rather than resort to the public use of reason to deny this care. But equally, if a state bans abortions, a doctor who disagrees must use their reason privately to follow that rule, rather than resort to the public use of reason to disobey it.

As for the modern university, the very fact that the state's claim to the public use of reason is even more tenuous makes the university's aspiration to be the rational public sphere all the more conspicuous (even if few would today describe this rationality in terms of pure reason, theoretical or practical). Indeed, the collapse of the distinction between two sorts of faculty has effectively meant that the university as a whole now claims to be the space of reason; in fact, it is often implicitly on the basis of an untheorized version of the claim to the public use of reason that academic freedom is then claimed for the university.

Along with this, have we not institutionalized also the Kantian insistence that the university should be a realm primarily of scholars speaking between themselves? In a sense, it might seem we could answer that, no, an entire new category called “public scholarship” has become visible in academia. For example, at the University of Minnesota, as in most other US universities today, it is part of public relations to put those outside the university in touch with faculty “experts” who can “provide insights on timely news and research.”¹⁵ But what university administrations encourage under this rubric is scholarship that dovetails with the public reason of the state, or the private reason of capital. The “public scholarship” beyond this is mostly the doing of faculty dissatisfied with the Kantian framing, and this dissatisfaction will be discussed later. One clear inference that vulnerable or timid faculty members will surely draw from the withdrawal of the offer to Segal is that such public scholarship may have unpleasant consequences.

Besides, is it not two Kantian presumptions—the presumption that faculty and even student speech represents public reason and that, moreover, this speech should not only be segregated from action but so segregated as to not be construed even as provocation to action—that explains the often incandescent anger of mainstream Democrats, and the discomfiture of quite a few liberal faculty too, over the protests in universities? Part of the conceit of such Democrats, even more so as Republicans have become acolytes of Trump, is that they disdain the Trumpian publicness of rhetoric and unreason and stand instead for public reason. Precisely this conceit is challenged by the slogans and arguments from students and faculty insisting that Gazans, too, are humans and have human rights, that what is happening in Gaza is by the criteria of public reason a genocide that the United States is actively participating in through the arms it supplies as well as the policy support and cover that it provides to the Israeli regime; that US universities are hardly innocent on this count, providing as they do expertise in technology, law, and other fields pertinent to the occupation and genocide. In other words, the protests and critical speech are especially unsettling to mainstream Democrats and some liberal faculty because they rip away their self-image; they imply that those who would prefer to look away are perhaps no more capable of moral reasoning than the Trumpian Republicans.

Here we encounter the need to go beyond what is enabled by Kantian presumptions, as well as the need to rework Arendt's dichotomous conceptualization of banal evil, for only so can we understand the distinctive violence embraced by mainstream Democrats today.¹⁶ Arendt articulates that concept, of course, in the context of the Eichmann trial—startled into high alert at the trial, we must not forget, by Eichmann's self-satisfied claim that he is following the Kantian categorical imperative. Her contrast is with the Kantian idea of radical evil. Kant himself develops that concept as a substitute for diabolical evil, or an evil inherent in human beings. In his account, radical evil occurs when humans choose, often rationally, their self-interest or inclinations over what the moral law might prefer.

Arendt argues that evil is not radical but banal, driven above all by a thoughtlessness that thinks of itself as embodying moral reason; she seeks also to limit banal evil to extreme cases such as Eichmann's. On both these counts, perhaps it is difficult today to entirely follow Arendt. First, there is no need to assume that banal evil entirely displaces radical evil. The latter can morph into banal evil, yes, but radical evil continues its own independent existence, too—perhaps most evidently in the private reason of capital or the public reason of nation-states. Second, now that we recognize so many more genocides, including those of the Native Americans and the slave trade, which Arendt but dimly perceives and which underpinned the American Revolution that she treasured (I write this, by uncanny coincidence, on July 4), surely it is untenable to stick to the contrast that made totalitarian and Nazi genocides seem unique; surely we must recognize that the (neo)liberal democracies we inhabit and hope to suscitate are themselves founded on and sustained by banal evil. So perhaps one very schematic but no less compelling way of describing the difference between the party of Trump and the party of Harris, especially in the context of Gaza, is that the former is driven by radical evil and the latter by a banal evil.

All this is directly relevant, of course, to the rescinding of the offer made to Segal. Ettinger, a Democrat, was appointed as an interim president by the board of regents during the term of Democratic then-governor (and, later, vice presidential candidate) Tim Walz. Ettinger is a person, moreover, from entirely outside academia: he was the president previously of Hormel Foods, best known as the producer of the original Spam, from which we have derived the now more ubiquitous meaning of the word. It would not be surprising if, even as he believed in the doubling of public reason, he believes in the primacy of the reason of the state. Could the squashing of Segal's appointment have been, then, a manifestation also of the outrage experienced by those who exemplify this statist public reason when the pure public use of reason demands that they face up to this state's—which is to say their—genocidal tendencies? Is the rescinding of the offer part of the way banal evil sustains itself in its banality?¹⁷

4. The Reclassification of the Faculties

Despite these continuities, Kant's conception of the university—and the concept of academic freedom that may be inferred from it—needs to be leavened with some other elements if we are to understand the distinctiveness of the ideology of academic freedom as it coalesces from around the turn of the twentieth century. In 1902, John Dewey publishes “Academic Freedom,” one of the early significant essays devoted to that specific phrase. That essay reflects the new centrality of the concept: in it, Dewey declares that “any restriction of academic freedom is directed against the university itself.”¹⁸ For him, this is because “the university function is the truth function”—that of both discovering truth and transmitting it.

Dewey, like a raft of other scholars in the early twentieth century, continues that modern process of emphasizing truth procedures (in Kant's case, the idea of reason) over truths. Where truth names an end or a goal, a truth procedure is concerned with the path or the means—protocols and methods—used to investigate a question. Focusing on truth procedures in this way allows the issue of truth to be put under erasure, even permanently deferred. That emphasis Dewey systematizes even further, and it has continued down to our time: disciplines today increasingly coalesce not, as formerly, around an object (“the past” for history, “culture” for anthropology) but around their commitment to shared truth procedures (arguably the question of how to contextualize for history, or of how to represent the embodied other for anthropology).

But there is also by the early twentieth century a profound break from the Kantian framing of the university. One striking symptom of this transformation is the very different placement of the faculties in Dewey's classification; another, discussed from the next section, is the distinct inflection that academic freedom receives in the statements of the AAUP. Dewey observes that “some of the studies taught in the university are inherently in a more scientific condition than others,” and their scientific status is also more widely recognized. This is the case with mathematics, astronomy, physics, or chemistry. The biological sciences are in a “transitional state,” with “many of the smaller colleges” likely to be “shaken to their foundations by anything that seemed like a public avowal” of evolution. But even in these disciplines, at least in the larger universities, academic freedom seems secure. These have acquired “their independence thru a certain abstractness, a certain remoteness from matters of social concern.”¹⁹

And then there are the “social and psychological disciplines” for which the term science could be used “only in a tentative and somewhat prophetic sense—the aspirations, the tendencies, the movement are scientific.” This “backwardness,” combined with the “failure of the general public to recognize even the amount of advance actually made,” is what leads to “the concrete problems of academic freedom.” Precisely because of this, “the right and duty of academic freedom are even greater here than elsewhere.” But even as he says this, Dewey also admits in the very next sentence that “per contra, it may be pointed out that, in so far as these subjects have not reached a scientific status, an expression of opinion on the part of a university instructor remains after all nothing but an expression of opinion, and hardly entitled to any more weight than that of any other reasonably intelligent person.”²⁰

Still, Dewey's reorganization is symptomatic of the way modern disciplinary knowledge parts ways with Kant. Very schematically, the truth procedures Kant had classed under theoretical reason have by this time found their own independent disciplinary location in what we would today call the sciences. And those that he classed under practical reason are disintegrating—in part incorporated into the “social and psychological disciplines” with their new object, society, which has its own rhythms that need to be elicited, and in part incorporated into more aestheticized humanities. The modern university, which had already come into being by the early twentieth century, is in this sense fundamentally different from the university Kant writes about. In the new university, especially though not only in the United States, the task he assigned to the faculty of philosophy no longer exists, and the rationale he gave for the autonomy of the lower faculty no longer prevails.

Symptomatically, while for Dewey too the “social and psychological disciplines” especially need academic freedom, he cannot make this claim any longer on the grounds that they best exemplify the idea of reason. To the contrary, they may even be the furthest from reason. He defends academic freedom for them primarily on pragmatic grounds: they at least seek to be scientific in fields where controversy is inevitable.

But this period, when the Kantian argument for academic freedom is in disarray, is also the time when the demands for that freedom gain strength, and a version of that freedom is to some degree institutionalized. So the reasons for the twentieth-century rise of academic freedom cannot be found in the Kantian idea of the university. They must be located rather in a new framing of the university.

5. The Public Good

We have sometimes described this framing in terms of the rise of the Humboldtian university centered around “culture.”²¹ This way of discussing the transformation may be misleading, or at least very partial. To accord primacy to “culture” misses out on the way that reason—the institutions around truth procedures, to be precise—is transformed during this period. Indeed, it may be more appropriate, at least in the context of the United States, and perhaps elsewhere too, to talk of the rise from around the early twentieth century of the professional university—a university centered around the reframing of reason in terms of professionalism. More than the Humboldtian vision of academic freedom articulated in the nineteenth century, it is this shared emphasis on a distinctive professionalism that allows us to understand the specificity of our contemporary principle of academic freedom and allows us also to understand how the universality of the university could accommodate the plurality of “national” cultures.

Dewey's 1902 essay is an early and transitional moment in this new framing. Though he defends academic freedom vigorously, at the time he still understands it in the terms noted above, as primarily “the right to express opinion” (though he offers some prescient arguments about it as the freedom to work).²² Thirteen or so years later, however, he plays a leading role in articulating a vision of the university in terms of professionalism.

At the very beginning of 1915, a new organization is founded with Dewey as president: the AAUP. Among its very first initiatives is the creation of a committee, led by Seligman (another member was Guy Stanton Ford from the history department at UMN, Segal's potential tenure home), “to take up the problem of academic freedom in general.” Symptomatically, the committee's “1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure” kneads, perhaps inadvertently, the older framing of the autonomy of the faculty of philosophy into a newer professional discourse of “academic freedom.”

One nodal point where this transformation occurs is the term public. Though nine of the committee's fifteen members are from private universities, its report emphasizes the public nature of the university as an institution. It explicitly insists that “even our privately endowed institutions” “are public trusts.” This is why they have “no moral right to bind the reason or the conscience of any professor.” But why are they public trusts and what makes the university a public space? On this, given the increasing unavailability of the older answer that the university is the quintessential site of public reason, the answer seems at first pass empirical: private universities “cannot be permitted to assume the proprietary attitude and privilege, if they are appealing to the general public for support.”²³

But the figure of the public picks up conceptual heft in the later sections of the 1915 statement. When the report turns from the nature of the institution to the “nature of the academic calling” as well as the “function of the academic institution,” we can discern three registers on which the public is invoked in defense of academic freedom: the publicness of intellection and the public good, the publicness of the professional and expert, and the “public itself” or the publicness of citizens as a community. What makes the 1915 AAUP statement so remarkable, capable of resonating into the present despite the obvious datedness of much of its language, is the way it activates these three senses of the public, each of which presumes a distinctive equality and each of which also bleeds into the others.

The first theme is very pronounced in the 1915 report. The hum of the older Kantian emphasis on the public use of reason can be heard here already in the word calling, indicating something more than a job. The report declares that the university “should be an intellectual experiment station, where new ideas may germinate and where their fruit, though still distasteful to the community as a whole, may be allowed to ripen until finally, perchance, it may become a part of the accepted intellectual food of the nation or of the world.”²⁴

In the very way this is formulated, we can sense how the Kantian spirit has been transformed. The scholar does still conceive what is beyond the capacity of the rest of society not just intellectually but even morally. But Kant's reason and equality, recall, rested on the emphatic exclusion of “the people.” By the time of the AAUP, however, the people were at the heart of the public, although still only a certain people, very much understood through categories that were the product of the Enlightenment. Surely this is part of the remaking of the vanguardism of the figure of the intellectual over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the Kantian intellectual claimed a relation with the universal, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual claimed a relation in addition with a concrete whole: the people. Moreover, this intellectual was no longer necessarily defined by reason in the Kantian sense but by something more nebulous—a quest for the relay between the universal and the whole.

A more democratic understanding displaces this vanguardism by the time of the 1940 statement. That statement asserts: “Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.”²⁵ Common good: no longer are the scholar-intellectual and the university the epitome and midwife of reason. Rather, they serve the common good. And common good is a capacious way of conceiving democracy, not least because of a question Judith Butler asks in the context of a discussion of the university: “Is it right to separate the public or common good from the field of politics? This seems right only if politics is reduced to partisan affiliation or viewpoint. Politics is the sphere of the public good; it is the activity by which a people come together to debate their values and set a common course for their future.”²⁶

With the invocation of the common good, it becomes difficult to separate academic freedom from politics—the politics, to be precise, of the common good. But what form would politics take in the university, and in the university's relation with the world outside it, if it tried scrupulously to stick to the form of the common good? This question we shall return to later.

6. The Professionalism of Expertise

The 1915 declaration is also conceptually a pivotal moment in the inauguration of a new public: the scholarly public. Differences over how to understand this public are at the heart of the divergences among the various ideologies of academic freedom. Depending on how we conceive this scholarly public, our framing of the raison d’être of the university will change, and our notion of academic freedom will also differ. Furthermore, every ideology of academic freedom also articulates a vision of the reason for being of a university. This is therefore not just about ideologies of academic freedom; it is also about ideologies of the university, and of society.

The AAUP statement lays out a liberal-professional raison d’être for academic freedom and, by implicit extension, for the university, but its ambiguities leave it open to reconfiguration to support either a neoliberal or an egalitarian-minor discourse. The statement specifies that the “social function of the professional scholar” is “to deal at first hand, after prolonged and specialized technical training, with the sources of knowledge; and to impart the results of their own and of their fellow-specialists’ investigations and reflection, both to students and to the general public, without fear or favor.”

The professional scholar—here the scholar is apparently assimilated to the professions, that new category of publicness that emerges from the late nineteenth century, which subsumes within it various groups, such as doctors and lawyers; “professional” as a category is a secularization of older notions of calling or vocation. One of the fundamental characteristics of professionals is their claim to be committed above all to their profession—more so than to their employer or client or any other group. This means also that the professions should regulate themselves, even if under the aegis of the state. (These assumptions, after all, are what suffuse the phrase “professional ethics” with special resonance.) The professions also defined themselves in terms of a hierarchical opposition. As Burton Bledstein notes, the

Aligning the scholar with this new category, the statement declares, “The scholar must be absolutely free not only to pursue his investigations but to declare the results of his researches, no matter where they may lead him or to what extent they may come into conflict with accepted opinion.”

Why absolutely free? No other profession considers it their right that they should be only minimally regulated by the organizations that employ them. What, then, makes university faculty so different from these other professions with which, after all, the statement has just claimed affinity? And what is it that university faculty share across their very different disciplinary locations that makes them all require academic freedom? What vision of society underpins a vision of the university where faculty because of their profession require academic freedom? The AAUP statement does not really answer these questions. But in its very insistence on academic freedom, it is enacting—likely inadvertently—a certain answer to these questions, a vision that reworks Kant for the twentieth century.

To situate the AAUP's conception of the professional public, I would like, over this and the next two sections, to distinguish between three ways of framing the activity of knowledge that the university is home to: expertise, humanist reason, and thinking. Each of these involves a distinctive ideology of academic freedom, the university, and society. The AAUP's professionalism is driven most evidently by a conception of knowledge as knowing an object and so requiring a particular kind of subject—the expert. But it also has as its undertow another conception of knowing that we might call reflection, which itself divides into two forms: humanist reason, which is centered on the subject, and thinking, which steps back from the subject-object distinction. (Though she does not frame the matter in terms of professionalism, and it will soon become clear why, the distinctions I am drawing here depend on and somewhat modify those that Hannah Arendt ventures when, in The Life of the Mind, she turns to Kant to distinguish between answerable and unanswerable questions.)

Already the 1915 statement draws on the figure of the expert. Scholars should not be “subject to any motive other than their own scientific conscience and a desire for the respect of their fellow experts.” One of the tasks of the university is “to develop experts for the use of the community.” In a democracy, the statement asserts, experts are necessary to deal with the “inherent complexities of economic, social, and political life,” and the training of experts is part of the work of universities. And this has continued down to the present (with transformations I shall not go into here): in 2019 the AAUP issued a statement defending “knowledge and higher education” in the name of expertise.²⁸

Expertise, we might say, is the form of professionalism concerned with questions that are answerable in principle even if the answer is not known right now. What this means can be explicated by repurposing a well-known remark by Donald Rumsfeld: experts are concerned primarily with known knowns and known unknowns.

Furthermore, expertise outside the university is quite different from expertise inside it, though the difference between them is one of degrees of intensity. The former is concerned primarily with activating known knowns, and with investigating known unknowns usually within a horizon of instrumental reason—that is to say, within a horizon that usually seeks to instrumentalize investigations in terms of monetizable returns. The latter is concerned with teaching known knowns, and investigating known unknowns without as much of a constraint imposed by questions of instrumentality, whether posed in terms of monetizable returns or even in terms of immediate answers.²⁹

When the AAUP asserts academic freedom for experts, could it be doing so because it is responding to the inchoate intimation that only this freedom will allow expertise in the university to resist the blandishments of subsumption to instrumental reason? And further: What becomes of answerable questions (after all, by their very nature, answerable questions are means to an end) when they are freed from instrumentality? When the questions that are asked become answerable in principle, but unanswerable in practice because they are interminable, as is often the case in the sciences and social sciences, how are they different from unanswerable questions? Does the answerable question itself here transform into something else?

7. The Professionalism of Humanist Reason

In the overhang of these questions, let's turn to reflection, the term I shall reserve for the other form of professionalism.³⁰ The 1915 AAUP statement does not explicitly recognize this other form, and later iterations have not done much better, including one released as recently as 2009. Yet even from within their conception of expertise there emerges the intimation of this other kind of knowing. Expertise as an activity taking place in the university, I just argued, is distinct from expertise elsewhere precisely because its questions are unanswerable in practice. In other words, though the AAUP statements have not thematized it, the emphasis on unanswerability has always been an undertow of their arguments for academic freedom, and it is through reflection, I would suggest, that we address and approach unanswerability.

Unlike expertise, reflection is concerned with questions that are unanswerable in principle, even if these questions can always be broken down into myriad answerable questions. Here Rumsfeld's residual category—unknown unknowns—is of no use: it conveys no more than his flailing when faced with unanswerable questions and his desire to quickly convert them into known knowns and known unknowns.

We could start elsewhere: by recalling, for example, that Rumsfeld glosses over—or perhaps represses—a category that should logically have been evident to him right away: what Slavoj Žižek has called unknown knowns, or those matters we do not know we know. The founding unknown known of this language of answerable questions is its presumption of a reason and relatedly a conception of the political conceived as constitutively European. (It is profoundly ironic that even as he attacks the cruelty, genocide, or banal evil that are the unknown known of liberal regimes, Žižek, too, represses the knowledge that this founding unknown known constitutes also the category Europe. Hence his arguments for a “leftist appropriation of the European political legacy,” forgetting that unless this appropriation reworks the figure of Europe itself otherwise, it continues the tradition of an imperial leftism.)³¹

And then we could move on to that phrase “unknown unknowns.” Even though it flounders, it compels attention because it is the inchoate manifestation of a crucial question: How are we to engage with questions of meaning? Such questions are all around us, and they take various forms—historical, aesthetic, moral, or epistemological, for example. What distinguishes questions of meaning is that they are not so much about what we and others are as about who we and others are—individually and collectively. This question of who we are can, of course, be answered immediately with positive content—made into a “what” question—if we are proceeding too quickly. But we cannot repress such questions, and they emerge everywhere. Is the death penalty justifiable? Can we demand a right to abortion or gender-affirming care, and if so, how and why? What about the culling of invasive species that we humans have introduced in order to protect the species that were around previously and are now threatened? Or take the example of gun violence. Should we respond to it with increased policing? With legislation restricting the possession of guns? To answer any of these questions is also to answer the question of who we are, which is inseparable always from the question of who others are.

To call these questions of meaning unanswerable does not mean that we do not ask or answer them. On the contrary, we are always asking and answering them, both through our explicit choices and our comportments. Nor does calling them unanswerable mean that we do not have answers to them—I certainly would want to give very strong answers about the death penalty or abortion or gender-affirming care, for example. We call them unanswerable because these questions are not means to an end. Rather, answering them involves reflecting on the question of “who.” And because of this emphasis on “who,” the unanswerable question also has, as Butler observes, a living character: “The open question is also bound up with the living character of the one who poses the question. We have to live long enough to keep pursuing the question, and questioning is itself one way to live, one way of responding to others, what is new, or what remains unknown.”³²

A caveat: I am not for a moment suggesting that the unanswerable questions are superior to answerable ones, or the other way around. Neither one can exist without the other; each one proceeds through the other. This is evident enough in the case of unanswerable questions: the question of who we are must always be answered first factually and empirically, even if we cannot stop there. And on further consideration it is evident even in the case of answerable questions. For example, when we prefer or push for allocating resources to one set of answerable questions rather than another, we are inevitably responding to the undertow of the question of who we are. When we think we are dealing with purely answerable questions, then we have perhaps already answered—without our conscious recognition of it, and perhaps even repressing our recognition of it—the underlying unanswerable questions.

Toward the beginning of this essay, I described academic freedom as the institutional manifestation of the principle of the university. I resorted to that locution, “institutional manifestation,” because the principle of the university is more properly described as the unanswerable question, and its infinitesimally close cousin the answerable question with an infinite horizon (what Hegel, in too quick a dismissal, called a false infinity). Once the unanswerable question and its close cousin are banished or obscured, there is no conceptual way to describe the modern university; all we have are empirical accounts of disparate congeries of professionalisms each coalesced around a different empirical object and truth procedure, which just happen to inhabit the same institutional space. (I do not doubt that this account has a significant empirical truth to it. I only want to stress that without the aspirational dimension of the unanswerable question, the university as a concept is not possible.) But the unanswerable question cannot be institutionalized. Only the means to it, academic freedom, can be. This is why it must be the institutional manifestation of the principle of the university.

With reflection, the unsettling dimension of equality also gathers force. The equality of expertise does already bring about some unsettling: experts do displace the older and far more hierarchical order of craftsmanship, and experts are—despite the inequality of authority—also broadly equal to each other. But expertise remains a credentialed and policed equality (in academia, for example, the PhD is usually the ticket of entry), which often has a hierarchical relation with what it excludes. By contrast, the unanswerable question brings about a more forceful unsettling, though how forceful depends on the mode of reflection.

To return, after this detour, to the unanswerable question: What does it mean for a question to not be a means to an end? Here it seems necessary to develop a distinction that Arendt does not really make, at least not explicitly, and suggest that unanswerable questions can be addressed through two modes of reflection—those of humanist reason and thinking (though the two are not strictly speaking separable: the first always bears the possibility of the second even if it often represses this fact, and the second can collapse into the first where we do not keep a vigil).

So, first, if we were answering this question in a Kantian spirit, we might say: the unanswerable question calls forth a humanist reason, where questions—and the questioning subjects who ask these questions—are ends in themselves. The affinity here with the categorical imperative is unmissable. After all, to enact the categorical imperative is minimally to constitute ourselves as beings who ask unanswerable questions. These unanswerable questions are what give us our equality with each other. For if I am engaged in answering such a question, then I am equal to every other person who is engaged in that quest. Even if some of these persons may have greater authority than me, they are not hierarchically superior to me. It is this way of constituting the unanswerable question that is the crux of the liberal-democratic ideology of academic freedom, which asserts the sovereignty not just of citizens but of citizens as rational beings. For Kant himself, of course, this sovereignty takes the form of practical reason and “understanding” (as in the famous declaration: “Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment”) but the sovereignty of reason in engaging with unanswerable questions has since been conceived in so many ways that perhaps we can reserve for all of them together the phrase humanist reason.³³

Where reason can be thus sovereign, we might add, the unanswerable question assumes some of the flavor of the question that is answerable in principle. For even if we cannot agree on the answer for now, we already agree on the subject of this reason: the rational human being. Such a being may, of course, study fields that are not necessarily rational, such as the arts or the humanities. But the very appreciation of these presumes a certain kind of human—equal because equally rational. We must not forget that this equality—equal simply by being human—is in its way unsettling. Outside the university, there have been revolutionary mobilizations in its name—of women, the enslaved, or Dalits, for example. And within the university, organized as it is under the sign of reason, this humanism has arguably blossomed even more vigorously.

Still, neither can we forget that this unsettling equality is also a new settlement: its rational subject presumes an invidious civilizational logic that is continuous with the logic that underwrites racism and settler colonialism. Even more troublingly, humanist reason celebrates academic freedom and the unanswerable question through a hierarchical exclusion. (I stress the adjective hierarchical because every conceptual category and institution is necessarily marked by exclusion. What matters is not exclusion as such but how that exclusion is carried out—with what responsibility to and relation of power with the excluded.) Here the claim to be able to be addressed by the unanswerable question itself becomes a claim to superiority over others—a claim of superiority over nonhumans, most evidently, but also one legitimizing a civilizational hierarchy of human societies according to the degree to which they can produce works presumed to be addressed by unanswerable questions. This civilizational logic produces at its most obviously violent phenomena such as colonialism, but its more subtle violence organizes also traditions that distinguish between classical and nonclassical literature, music, or art, or that produced the claims, so widespread in the universities till just a few decades back, that some societies had no history, art, culture, or literature.

8. The Quasi-professionalism of Thinking

But, second, the question—both in the sense of how the question can avoid being a means to an end, and of the question itself as a comportment—need not be attuned only to the spirit of humanist reason. Reflection can also take the form, so to speak, of thinking, inflecting that term now with a meaning that is in its way faithful to Arendt, even if not thematized by her. Thinking is not humanist reason, but it is not without reason. It emerges from the encounter, in friendship, of reasoning with the other and others it minoritizes or places at its margins. These others we unavoidably bear with us, and perhaps they could be said to collectively bear the troubling, troubled, and yet inescapable name love—inescapable because it intimates, on the one hand, the opening to a world that we do not rationally or agentially inhabit and, on the other hand, the caring inclination of the self toward the other. So thinking is a particular way of being taken into the unanswerable question: it is the supplementing of humanist reason, the moment when this reason transforms itself at a granular level by abiding with those whom it had minoritized in the process of constituting itself, when reason relinquishes its sovereignty over itself and what it surveys.

Thinking, then, is the comportment the unanswerable question finds itself assuming when and where it is attuned to or abides by the minor. Even if not thematized as such, this comportment has been increasingly pervasive since at least the mid-1960s, and a symptom of this is the emergence of many new disciplines: women's studies, gender and sexuality studies, Native American studies, African American studies, postcolonial studies, decolonial studies, and critical caste studies among them. What is striking about each of these “disciplines” is that they emerge from or in conversation with movements and mobilizations of those who are marginalized and minoritized both within and outside the university. This is precisely why it is appropriate to talk of their quasi-professionalism and quasi-disciplinarity. For if they remain faithful to their founding spirit, these fields cannot be professionalized into disciplines; rather, they work the seam between disciplinarity and its exclusions.

Now, unlike the professionalisms of expertise or humanist reason, for both of which we can easily find authority in the 1915 statement, it is difficult to argue that there is a sustained or explicit commitment to thinking in either the AAUP statement or other documents we have dealt with so far. And yet there is the curious case of Ambedkar, that consummate exponent of thinking. He claims to have read everything that Dewey wrote; he “would boast that he could reproduce every lecture of John Dewey's verbatim”; he says, “I owe all my intellectual life to him”;³⁴ and his wife Savita Ambedkar notes that he “would imitate Dewey's lecturing style and voice intonations for her.”³⁵

What do we make of this admiration for Dewey? It is a hallmark of Ambedkar's interventions that though he operates with terms that are very much part of the liberal-democratic mainstream, he radicalizes them, displaces their dominant meanings, and brings to the fore that which is invoked and yet marginalized in these meanings. Thus his repeated invocation of the French revolutionary slogan “Liberty, equality, fraternity,” or his proposal that the newly independent state of India be called the United States of India, only to articulate something significantly different. So it is with his intellectual and political relation with his mentor: it would be shoehorning Ambedkar to describe him as a Deweyean or pragmatist. (Indeed, given his originality and eclecticism, it would be misleading to place him within any one tradition.) Even as he draws on Dewey, most of all on the latter's conception of a democratic society centered on social justice, he foregrounds what is at best recessive in the latter.³⁶ His admiration for Dewey, it seems to me, is the way that thinking takes the relay from, and away from, humanist reason.

At its broadest, the difference appears in the way the two conceive social justice and injustice. A key theme of Ethics, the book Dewey coauthored with James Tufts in 1908, is “the idea of social justice.” Contrasting it with the idea of charity by exceptional individuals, the book notes, “Our own time has seen a generous quickening of the idea of social justice. . . . The change illustrates, on a wide scale, the transformation of the conception of justice so that it joins hands with love and sympathy.”³⁷ Such justice “would make formal freedom, formal ‘equality’ before the law, less an empty mockery.”³⁸ However, who this justice is for, who might want it and who might not—all these questions receive little attention in their text. Perhaps a symptom of this is the very ease with which love, which we saw is the intimation of thinking, is assimilated here into social justice, a term whose contours themselves remain abstract.

Where justice, whether social or political, is conceived thus in terms of abstract egalitarianism, it remains amenable to being folded into the profoundly supremacist vision that always underpins the abstract concept of the human. (We see an especially alarming contemporary example of this slippage—which is also a slippage into banal evil—in the writings of Michael Walzer, onetime editor of the progressive magazine Dissent, who describes the ongoing Gaza genocide as a “just war” even if Israel has made a “moral mistake” or two.)³⁹ When justice is displaced by an abstract love, this supremacist violence becomes even more marked. This is why it is so appropriate to describe the horror of what is happening in Gaza as Michael Marder does: as a “compassionate genocide.”⁴⁰

Dewey, of course, even if his endorsement of social justice remains abstract, was perhaps too involved in the concrete struggles of the minoritized (he participated in the suffragette movement, engaging in a suffragette march while Ambedkar is a student, and was a cofounder of the NAACP, among other things) for this kind of slippage to occur. Still, as Eddie Glaude notes, building on Cornel West's observation, Dewey fails to take seriously enough the “night side” of American democracy—how deeply racism undercuts it.⁴¹

Unlike Dewey, who starts from abstract egalitarianism and derives from it the injustices he focuses on, Ambedkar starts from a singular injustice or wrong: caste. I deliberately say “singular” rather than “specific.” To start from a specific justice would be to start from an injustice defined in terms of a what—to give a classical example, the injustice suffered by labor. It is precisely this focus on an abstract egalitarianism that disturbs and sometimes infuriates Ambedkar so much about the Marxist trade unionists working in Bombay—he feels they focus on class in a way that forgets that the experience of class is also shaped by caste. Injustice for Ambedkar must be addressed not only in terms of what the dispossessed are positionally, not only through an abstract egalitarianism, but also in terms of the singularity of who they are, of how they have been minoritized. In this sense, we might say that Ambedkar emphasizes an inclination toward the egalitarian-minor in their singularity—surely this too is one way to describe the task of thinking.

In part because of this double difference, specific and also singular, Ambedkar's thinking of social justice inclines away from Dewey's explicit framings. Yet, because Ambedkar gives him the slip at a very granular level (so granular and interstitial, in fact, that we do not know whether Ambedkar himself is aware of his departure from Dewey; certainly he never writes about it), it would require a separate essay to trace this shift.

Still, as one example, consider their divergences on education, all the more striking since Ambedkar's copy of Dewey's Democracy and Education is profusely annotated.⁴² In Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar writes, “Social war has been raging between the strong and the weak far more violently in Europe than it has ever been in India. Yet the weak in Europe has had in his freedom of military service, his physical weapon; in suffering, his political weapon; and in education, his moral weapon. . . . All these weapons were, however, denied to the masses in India by the caste system.”⁴³ There is no equivalent in Dewey to this conscription of education into a “social war” between the strong and the weak—a war, that is to say, internal to a society that is profoundly divided, and divided, moreover, by a wrong. And such an emphasis on social war (an emphasis that also reframes the concept of civil war, which has sometimes too simplistically been associated with Ambedkar) is central to the entire anticaste movement, which can be distinguished from the caste-reform movement precisely by this reframing.

There is, additionally, the distinctive work that education does in this social war: it is a moral weapon of the weak. Education need not be a weapon of the weak, of course. Very often, it can be consciously or unconsciously part of the way the status quo is maintained. And even when it becomes a weapon of the weak, it can be more of a political, social, and economic weapon than a moral one. This is the case, for example, when education is rationally used for advancing the socioeconomic and political position of the weak. Ambedkar is attuned to this use and elsewhere stresses that “the backward classes have come to realise that after all education is the greatest material benefit for which they can fight.”⁴⁴ It can also be the case when the primary work of education is to spread awareness of an oppression and exploitation cast primarily in external terms.

What happens, then, when education becomes a moral weapon of the weak? Two things most of all: a rearrangement of the speech-action distinction, and a reframing of the relation between justice and love. Spivak notes that the ethical, a term she deploys in a manner analogous to Ambedkar's “moral,” is

If it were not too much of a diversion, we could have reworked Spivak's formulation so as to distance it from the surely unintended implication here that the ethical is outside the epistemological. But for now, put in relation to what I have been saying here, the world of the epistemological is constituted by humanist reason (as an epistemologically grounded morality) and expertise, and the world of the ethical or the moral is constituted by thinking. Seeing as she does the crux of education in the opening to the ethical, Spivak describes education as a “an uncoercive rearrangement of desires”⁴⁶ that seeks to cultivate the capacity to “listen to the other”⁴⁷ (as distinct from the attempt to “merely know the other”).⁴⁸ Ambedkar's remark about education shares a matrix with Spivak's, but he starts from further outside the academy, and from the position of the weak.

So here, what must be uncoercively rearranged, for a start, is one's own desire. This uncoercive rearrangement is what Ambedkar describes with terms such as dignity (manuski) and self-respect.⁴⁹ And because exercising dignity is, given the oppression that Dalits face, inseparable from challenging the social relations that oppress them, the struggle for dignity is not merely internal but social. Perhaps this is the stake of the Fabian slogan “Educate, Agitate, Organize” that Ambedkar repurposes, as Aakash Rathore notes, when in 1926 he founds the Bahishkrut Hitakarini Sabha (BHS) or the “Association for the Benefit of the Excluded”⁵⁰ Here, educating, agitating, and organizing are not necessarily sequential activities, with one preceding the other. Rather, education is itself also an education in dignity, and so in the activity of agitating and organizing.

A refusal of the mind-body, speech-action, or theory-practice distinctions (all related because the first says at the individual level what the other two say at the social level, to put it quickly for now) is central, then, to Ambedkar's conception of education. This remains the case in later years: in the posthumously published The Buddha and His Dhamma, the exhortation to thinking is inseparable from the compulsion to also carry his message to others. In all of this, it is difficult not to think of another consummate practitioner of thinking, Frantz Fanon, who in Black Skin, White Masks famously prays, “O my body make me one who questions.”⁵¹

But, of course, it is not only one's own desires that are to be rearranged: “educate, agitate, organize” is also about striving for a noncoercive rearrangement of the desires of the oppressors. We find some clues to Ambedkar's agenda for the latter in a letter he wrote in 1932, some years before Annihilation of Caste, to Amritlal Thakkar, head of the Gandhian organizations Anti-Untouchability League and Harijan Sevak Sangh.

In the letter, Ambedkar tries to educate Thakkar on what anticaste work would involve. The League, Ambedkar says, should undertake a “campaign all over India to secure to the Depressed Classes the enjoyment of their civic rights such as taking water from the village wells, entry in village schools, admission to village chawdi, use of public conveyance, etc.” Only this social revolution centered around “direct action” will enable the “Depressed Classes” to achieve “equal social status.”⁵²

Such a campaign, he acknowledges, is more likely to produce crisis for the “the Caste Hindu,” but “the crisis will compel him to think and once he begins to think he will be more ready to change than he is otherwise likely to be. The great defect in the policy of least resistance and silent infiltration of rational ideas lies in this that they do not compel thought, for they do not produce crisis.”⁵³

It again turns out, then, that thinking is not an activity of the reasoning mind alone: it emerges from crisis and from the unfamiliarity that crisis causes. The socially weak always already inhabit this crisis structurally because of their weakness, and perhaps that is why some of the most powerful thinking has come from the weak, or those who have sought to abide by or even assume the comportment of the weak. True, whether for the weak or the strong, crisis need not automatically lead to thinking; Ambedkar worries, in fact, that caste Hindus would not go as far in fighting other caste Hindus as the “Whites of the North” had against the “Whites of the South” in seeking the “emancipation of the Negro.” And if the rise of Hindutva in the decades since his death is any indicator, crisis could well lead also to a headlong flight from thinking. But without crisis, there is no thinking, whether for the oppressed or the oppressors.

Ambedkar also draws in that letter on two words we saw Dewey using: love and justice. But he places them in a different configuration, connected now to thinking. The letter goes on:

And then he adds:

Two moral weapons of the weak, then: love and justice. And both work here very differently from the way they do in Dewey. Driven now by thinking, both now receive a combative dimension; they become inseparable from action. But the fields of their action diverge and are yet linked. Love is not universal but singular: the Depressed Classes are more likely to love the task of righting a wrong by securing rights. But securing rights is also a demand for justice. Thus, love for the task of righting a wrong itself leads to the demand for justice. Here, justice is singular and specific: it springs from the moment when the Depressed Classes’ love for righting a singular wrong recognizes that the dominant do not share this love, and so the Depressed Classes must also resort to abstract measures. Only justice can mediate.

Should we not connect this shuttle between justice and love to that between humanist reason and thinking? Those who are minoritized have historically responded by assuming one of three comportments: by seeking to erase their minoritized status and become part of the unmarked majority; by demanding rights as a recognizable and enumerable group minority within the majoritarian order; or by becoming minor, or stepping back from the majoritarian order and seeking relations that undo that order itself. The minoritized cannot but want the first two and have historically been more drawn to them, which belong to the tradition of justice and the sovereignty it requires—the tradition that constitutes itself within modernity as humanist reason.

But precisely because—and to the extent that—they are minoritized, they desire these first two modes from the space of the third, which belongs to the world of thinking. What is asserted in the third comportment is the originary space of love and a recognition yet of the space where the education involved in love must give way to the education involved in social justice, without ever, however, giving up on the space of love. At this moment in his formulations, Ambedkar limits love to the family. Around a decade later, in the posthumously published The Buddha and His Dhamma, the domain of love, as of the education involved in love, expands enormously and becomes the primary task. Here the unsettling spirit of equality runs riot and there is no settlement that is rational or natural: nothing can on principle be kept out of this equality intimated in thinking.

Having said all this, here's the rub: Ambedkar is not writing about thinking in relation to the university or academic freedom. The BHS is an explicitly political organization organizing hostels and other activities for the Depressed Classes. And The Buddha and His Dhamma is concerned, true, with unanswerable questions, but its modality is entirely different from that involved in the university. While Ambedkar does work at Sydenham College and establishes Siddharth College, in the interventions that he is best known for, he does not speak as a professor or an academic (though the trace of that positionality always remains—hence the pervasiveness of the salutation “Dr.” in addresses to him). There is, as far as I know, no explicit discussion of academic freedom in his writings; perhaps we would be hard-pressed to find even an implicit engagement with academic freedom. So to read Ambedkar is to arrive at this question that he himself does not engage with us but that his writings give to us to think: What is the conception of academic freedom involved in thinking? We will turn to this question in the last section.

Before moving on, there is one more matter to be underscored: Ambedkar finds the inspiration for his thinking in, among other places, Dewey's abstract egalitarianism. This is a reminder of something that we forget at our own peril: that the traditions of liberalism contain within them the seeds of an affirmative autoimmunity—call it liberality if you will—that leave them open to being both addressed and taken up by more radical traditions.

9. The Public Itself

To the raison d’être of the university implied in these three activities of knowledge we shall return. But before that, note one more sense of the public implicit in the 1915 report. It is very emphatic that “university faculties” are the “appointees” of “university boards,” but they are “not in any proper sense the employees, of the former. For, once appointed, the scholar has professional functions to perform in which the appointing authorities have neither competency nor moral right to intervene. The responsibility of the university teacher is primarily to the public itself, and to the judgment of his own profession.”⁵⁵

In that assertion, we see the third public—the “public itself.” This public is not quite new: Kant was already concerned with “the people.” Still, Kant writes at the dusk of the moment when only one equality and one public matters—the equality of reason and the rational public. And it really is the dusk of that moment. He knows this, too: he writes enthusiastically of the French Revolution, one of those turning points that was to introduce the “public itself” as an actor in the world. But he does not seek to address this public itself, not least because he was decidedly not of a revolutionary temperament, and the “public itself” was only beginning to constitute itself as an actor with a claim on speech. From his perspective, the state was to address the public itself, and the university existed only to train the “intelligentsia” and provide the higher faculty who would help the state do this. But now, with the claiming of speech by the public itself, the old Platonic division between rhetoric and philosophy recurs in a new form: as the distinction between the new public reason of the professional, on the one hand, and free speech of the citizen (in Kantian terms, a democracy centered on the equality of taste), on the other.

The AAUP statement recognizes that the professor has a knotty relation with this “public itself.” In one way, this public poses a threat to the university and to academic freedom. The report warns of the “dangers connected with the existence in a democracy of an overwhelming and concentrated public opinion. . . . In a democracy there is political freedom, but there is likely to be a tyranny of public opinion. An inviolable refuge from such tyranny should be found in the university.”⁵⁶

Here we see the foreshadowing of what was to develop over the course of the twentieth century into the contrast between opinion or free speech and academic freedom. Arguably the most insightful exploration of the difference and relation between the two comes, ironically enough, in a brilliant and absolutely indispensable essay by a former graduate student of the University of Minnesota, Adam Sitze. He notes that the citizenly right to free speech, the crux of the First Amendment, is concerned with the “unfettered exchange of opinions”: “‘Under the First Amendment,’ as one famous judgment has it, ‘there is no such thing as a false idea.’”⁵⁷

All this is quite in contrast to academic freedom, where “one voluntarily subjects one's own speech to the rules of some sort of ‘truth procedure.’”⁵⁸ So although scholars have academic freedom, this freedom is itself the acceptance of an “academic unfreedom” imposed by the embrace of these procedures. Thus, in their professional capacity at least, scientists cannot endorse creationism or a flat-earth theory, and social scientists cannot claim that Trump won the popular vote and the Electoral College vote in 2020. These self-restraints on—or, more precisely, self-discipline around—speech are not antithetical to academic knowledge but are rather the precondition for such knowledge.

But if academic freedom is in these senses “less” than free speech, it is more than free speech in another sense. Unlike those in most other professions, tenured faculty cannot be easily dismissed from their positions either for their critical speech within the university or for their extramural speech.

This double distinction between free speech and academic or reflective speech is, of course, central to our pedagogic practices. Like most other faculty I know in the humanities and social sciences, I sometimes tell my classes that while I care deeply for their opinions, I would like them to either develop rigorous and systematic arguments for these opinions or modify them; I want them, in other words, to move from “mere” free speech to reflective and self-critical speech, a speech that can either follow truth protocols or—and this works as well—point to the limits of these protocols. In my classes, moreover, as in most humanities and social sciences classes, we often deal with deeply controversial issues. This would not be possible without the protection of academic freedom.

But outside the classroom especially, the free speech–academic freedom contrast is disarrayed by this: the academic is also a citizen, or a member of the “public itself.” The 1915 statement endorses an earlier report that said that “it is neither possible nor desirable to deprive a college professor of the political rights vouchsafed to every citizen.” The professor must have “freedom of extramural utterance and action,” and they should not be debarred from speaking on controversial topics, or “limited to questions falling within their own specialties.”⁵⁹

And with the consolidation of democracy there is the transformation of the “public itself,” which in this context is defined by the right to free speech. While free speech is clearly not action, it is much less walled off from action than academic freedom. The academic as academic cannot engage in action, whereas the citizen can engage in both free speech and action. When faculty, informed by the sensibilities produced by academic freedom, become part of the public itself and act as citizens, they undermine at least implicitly the distinction between speech and action that both Kant and the professionalism of the university require.

This undoing clearly worries the AAUP. Even as it insists on the right of scholars to their “extramural utterances,” it insists on the responsibilities that accompany this.

Faculty are, moreover, “under a peculiar obligation to avoid hasty or unverified or exaggerated statements, and to refrain from intemperate or sensational modes of expression.”⁶¹ In other words, being a scholar—for the AAUP of the early twentieth century, synonymous with the sovereignty of reason—is not just a hat that can be taken off and put on at will. It entails a comportment, a mode of conducting oneself and being. And this comportment involves a certain tonality even when the academic no longer speaks as an academic but as part of the public itself (or for that matter to the public itself, the state, or students). One of the university's “most characteristic functions in a democratic society is to help make public opinion more self-critical and more circumspect, to check the more hasty and unconsidered impulses of popular feeling, to train the democracy to the habit of looking before and after.”⁶²

Both in its time and since, the firebreak that the AAUP has sought between argument and opinion does not quite work. It is not only that undergraduate students especially come into the classroom as bearers of opinion. It is also that, save in glaring exceptions such as the headlong embrace of opinion in most faculty interventions against the Segal appointment, the line between opinion and argument is often not very clear even in the university; the difference between these two forms of writing needs unpacking in every specific context, paralleling what faculty do in the classroom with students.

In the unavoidable commingling of these three senses of the public, the university as a space of academic freedom is institutionalized. What is at stake in such institutionalization?

It seems to me that to institutionalize academic freedom is to set apart an institutional space—the university—for the unanswerable question, or for the answerable question whose answer is so far in the horizon that it is practically indistinguishable from the unanswerable question. This space that is set apart is inhabited by students, faculty, and staff. Such setting apart is not a small matter. With the consolidation of the capitalist order, the pursuit on the one hand of answerable questions and on the other hand the cultivation of an unreflective and unthinking desire—that is to say, a desire produced without an equality with the self—increasingly smothers other comportments. For a society and a state to grant autonomy (and it is a grant, even if the grant has usually been clawed from society and state through vigorous efforts by those associated with the university) to the university is also for them to acknowledge, however reluctantly and partially, that not everything can be subsumed into the order of the answerable question.

Indeed, when a democratic social order founds itself by setting aside a space for academic freedom, as Jawaharlal Nehru and his compatriots do in India, that order does something very remarkable. Claude Lefort writes that the locus of power becomes an empty place in democracy—the sovereign must be replaced at regular intervals. This emptiness is because democracy as a “form of society” is “the historical society par excellence, a society which, in its very form, welcomes and preserves indeterminacy.” And the generative locus of this indeterminacy is the equality and freedom of society, or, more precisely, “the people.”⁶³

Should we not add that academic freedom in this moment—not always by any means, but after the “public itself” emerges—is another notable aspect of democracy as a form of society? It is the acknowledgment by society that even if the primary form of equality and freedom is in “the people” or the public itself, there is also another potential form, that of the unanswerable question—this one institutionalized in the university and more broadly in all those institutions, such as schools—and itself authorized by “the people,” emerging perhaps especially from the concerns of the weak among the people, and both answering and not answering to the people. And yet, having doubled freedom in this way, democracy as a form of society also finds itself addressed by the question: What is the relation between these forms of freedom and equality?

10. The Segal Case Again

As this sketch should make evident, the liberal-professional discourse of academic freedom was (unless we are willing to endorse its older racist and civilizational versions) violated by Ettinger's and Croson's intervention, as also by the faculty who demanded that Segal's appointment be rescinded. Most obviously, it is an almost textbook example of the failure to distinguish between free speech and academic freedom. By Ettinger's account, he rescinded the offer because the JCRC approached him. In doing so, he treated Waltner's scholarly recommendation as merely free speech or an opinion, and of less value than the opinion of the JCRC. (That he went by the opinion of the JCRC, rather than consulting many of the other less powerful stakeholders outside the university, is a symptom of how the principle of free speech works in practice as an ideology: when decision-makers choose between opinions, they usually go with that of dominant groups.) Even more strikingly, Ettinger proposed having a community representative on the next search committee. In doing so, he was adopting the relatively simple notion of truth involved in the idea of free speech: an opinion does not have to follow any truth protocols, save that of the claim to authenticity.

An interesting question follows from this: What is happening when those who would likely think of themselves as embracing the liberal and professional principle of academic freedom fail to abide by it? One or more of four phenomena seem likely explanations, and each is symptomatic of the kinds of threats that the liberal-professional principle of academic freedom faces from the inside, so to speak.

The first is intangible. Recall the motto “Have courage to make use of your own understanding!”⁶⁴ Here Kant is clearly referring not so much to social courage, the courage to confront one's peers (though that, too, is necessary) as to moral courage, or the courage to question oneself. Without moral courage, neither humanist reason nor thinking can even begin, and even the more adventurous exercise of expertise, the sort concerned with known unknowns, may be difficult. It becomes unverifiable to accuse specific persons—say, those who demanded or supported the rescinding of the offer—of lacking moral courage. But analytically speaking, when those who accept the liberal-professional principle of academic freedom cannot abide by it, the absence of moral courage is very likely a factor.⁶⁵

The second explanation has to do with how an appreciation of the very principle of academic freedom might increasingly often be lacking among senior administrators, media, and even faculty. In Ettinger's case, for example, as the head of Hormel, he would likely have imbibed the corporate perspective, where controlling damage to a brand matters more than either free speech or academic freedom, and his swift action might itself have been strategically commendable. Relatedly, from that free speech perspective which in its likely normalization of racism (for can the specter of racism be banished when a regime understood as European massacres a people of color, and insists this is not genocide?) mistakes the banal evil of genocide denialism for moral clarity, it is Ettinger's decision to rescind the offer that can seem bold: indeed, one local news website noted approvingly that “the U is courageously opting to bide its time.”⁶⁶

And perhaps the case of the two faculty members who resigned from the CHGS board is symptomatic of something similar. They have both not only allowed their opinion to trump reason and thinking (hence the elementary logical fallacies); they have also insisted that the free speech of the JCRC deserves more respect than the academic speech of a committee of their colleagues. I would expect, of course, not least because I would prefer not to think poorly of my own institution, that this is only a solitary lapse of the sort that can happen to any of us and not indicative of a more fundamental inability on their part to abide by the protocols of academic speech. Regardless, it alerts us to a broader danger that academic freedom always faces: the danger that faculty become less capable of abiding by or even appreciating it, and this even as they think they endorse it. About this danger, I am not sure what to do: institutionalized protocols against it, or even collegial censures from bodies such as faculty senates, would be a cure that is far worse than the disease, severely undermining the very academic freedom they might set out to protect. Perhaps the only recourse can be to a discipline of the self that begins by making ourselves more aware of the stakes of academic freedom.

The third explanation has to do with how senior administrators must inhabit both the nonacademic world where answerable questions and free speech dominate, on the one hand, and the scholarly world where unanswerable questions and academic freedom should be privileged, on the other. They do not only deal officially with the world of answerable questions more than most faculty do. They also encounter it differently—as the dominant ideology before which academic freedom has to justify itself. This responsibility is especially unavoidable for senior administrators in public universities. In exercising that responsibility, they might have to calculate between academic freedoms, between incalculables—for example, jettisoning academic freedom in one instance so as to save it more broadly. One cannot rule out the possibility that both in the Segal case and in the crackdowns in other universities on protests over the Gaza genocide, such a calculation was at work. At the very least, senior administrators could have told themselves this, however hollow that justification might have been, for it would have allowed them to maintain their self-image as people committed to academic freedom.⁶⁷

11. The Neoliberal Turn

To focus primarily on the liberal-professional principle of academic freedom would be to ignore its reworking, especially since the 1960s, by an increasingly influential neoliberal tradition. Even though intellectually somewhat slight, it offers a fourth answer to the question posed above (What is happening when those who would likely think of themselves as embracing the liberal and professional principle of academic freedom fail to abide by it?). The neoliberal tradition arguably receives its most extended articulation, and the full glory of its slightness, in Stanley Fish's Versions of Academic Freedom. Distinguishing between five “schools” of academic freedom, he says that he belongs to the “it's just a job” school, and he even makes this the title of one of his chapters, asserting, “Rather than being a vocation or holy calling, higher education is a service that offers knowledge and skills to students who wish to receive them.” This use of the term job is somewhat muddled: by job, it turns out, he means profession:

What disappears here is the conceptual difference between professionals outside and inside the university. Indeed, the profession of academics seems to be distinguishable only because its object (“a service that offers knowledge and skills”) is empirically different from that of other professions.

Fish calls all of this a “professionalism pure and simple”—the title of his chapter. But this is surely a failure to recognize that he is endorsing a particular kind of professionalism—the Rumsfeldian professionalism of expertise, which focuses on known knowns and known unknowns. Unlike Rumsfeld, true, he would likely acknowledge the work of unknown knowns and would not seek to convert unknown unknowns into known knowns and known unknowns. For him, one might infer from his other scholarship, a humanities education is in part about learning to appreciate the pleasures of the unknown unknown. In his rendering, however, these have to do with a resolutely private pleasure, even love. Here, love has nothing to do with any of the three publics that we discerned in the AAUP statement, or for that matter with justice, which in the modern world is one of the constitutive elements of the public as a concept. So, despite his endorsement of the humanities and their unknown unknowns, his privatization of them allows his professionalism to remain resolutely Rumsfeldian. This was evident in his attacks in 2016 on the historians who put out a statement opposing Trump; they could do this in their private capacity, he insisted, but not in their professional capacity.⁶⁸

It is entirely logical that the Fish-Rumsfeld position denies any connection between academic freedom and democracy. Fish asserts that equality, so central to democracy, “is a concept foreign to the disciplines whose job it is to produce expertise.” Fish is correct, of course, that expertise of the sort he and Rumsfeld are enthusiastic about is thoroughly exclusionary; it excludes all those who are not part of the profession in question, and between members of these professions it allows only the credentialed and policed equality noted earlier. (In this sense, it is unlike both traditions of reflection: humanist reason often explicitly takes inspiration from the “public itself,” and thinking is inclined toward the weak or more precisely the weakened.) He is also correct that, as I noted earlier, the vanguardist claim that academic freedom will inculcate “democratic competence” in the public effectively grants academics the “status of cultural saviors.” But precisely because he has eviscerated any concept of the public or the “common good” beyond that of the nonuniversity professional public, he cannot recognize that the unanswerable question, and the play between publics it necessitates, also involves an unsettling tremor of equality. Indeed, it is precisely any attempt to activate this unsettling dimension of academic freedom that his positions seek to close off.

Why describe Fish's perspective as neoliberal? Neoliberalism is not just an economic ideology. Rather, as many have stressed, it is also about constricting public spaces, undoing the demos, and defining social relations in terms of private goods. In Fish's case, that constriction already starts from his description of higher education itself as “a service that offers knowledge and skills to students who wish to receive them.” Here, education is a product, and students are the consumers. From this presumption, almost all else follows—the emphasis on experts, the very disciplinary account of the academic disciplines, and, most of all, the very constrained understanding of the public good, and relatedly of politics.

This neoliberal evacuation of the public good is not as new as we might think. It begins already with the liberal pushback in the sixties. The Kalven report exemplifies this. Although on its face it affirms the University of Chicago's “commitment to the academic freedom of staff and students in the face of suppression from internal and/or external entities,” it also insists on the “institutional neutrality on political and social issues.” The insistence on institutional neutrality, adopted by many other universities, too, is hardly innocent, coming as it did in the wake of the Vietnam protests and in the face of increasing demands at the time for divestment from apartheid South Africa. It was a declaration that universities as institutions would not follow a moral compass. That very declaration, of course, smuggled in a moral compass—one that involved the administration acquiescing to and even endorsing existing injustices. (This acquiescence, of course, makes perfect sense from a neoliberal perspective: The other professions do not usually claim a public moral compass, so why should academics be any different?) And so, while the public good could be talked about in the university, it was unacceptable for the rustle of action to be heard in it, not even in the form of peaceful demonstrations. As such, the University of Chicago administration's crackdown on protesting students last academic year was not a betrayal of the Kalven report; rather, it was an underscoring of what the report's “institutional neutrality” actually involved.⁶⁹

Fish's positions also reveal the difference and relation between the neoliberal and neoconservative approaches to academic freedom. Neoliberal traditions do in their own way affirm at least one aspect of their root word, the liberal. Even if they deny the claim that the academic freedom is a public good, and so deny the liberality of liberalism, they do emphasize the other aspect of liberalism, the private. Their emphasis on the private allows them to defend at least the professionalism that scholars in the university share with other professions. This means, among other things, allowing for the distinction between academic speech and extramural speech. Thus, in the notorious case in which the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois withdrew its offer to Steven Salaita over his tweets on Israel-Palestine, Fish was acerbic and swingeing, insisting that as a “theoretical matter” there “is no necessary relationship between a teacher's partisan stances and academic performance, and, moreover, there was massive evidence that Salaita has always been an eminently fair and even-handed instructor praised by students of every political persuasion.”⁷⁰ It seems safe to assume that he would be similarly acerbic about the rescinding of the offer to Segal; certainly, the neoliberal principle of academic freedom has the resources to be critical of it.

Still, a neoliberal framing may well have informed some of the university administration's and faculty's opposition to Segal's hire, and maybe even the reluctance of some faculty senate members at the college and university level to censure Ettinger and Croson. This discourse has by different pathways become increasingly commonsensical across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In the first two domains, this has happened through the increasing focus on answerable questions, driven by the corporatization of research; all of this has made these traditions more likely to forget the unanswerable questions, to either reduce them to a technical fix or treat them as irrational.⁷¹ In the humanities, it has happened in the manner so well exemplified by Fish's own trajectory—through the privatization of the unanswerable question. And for faculty lacking Fish's nuance, it can well seem as though to insist on “professionalism” in the humanities would require abjuring any “political” positions—that is, positions beyond those they have rationalized as natural, just as racial and gender hierarchies were naturalized within the university at one time.

That said, the greater harm of the neoliberal discourse—greater than the active constriction of academic freedom as in the Segal case—is its participation in the structural and institutional pulverization of the conditions for the exercise of academic freedom. Witness the whittling away over the last three decades of protections for faculty tenure, the rapid rise of adjunct positions, and the decline of funding for the humanities, which are more explicitly devoted to unanswerable questions.

The exclusions of the neoconservative tradition work quite differently. Seeking as it does an organic whole, it cannot countenance the principle of academic freedom, which is to say that it cannot countenance a democratic society's division of itself into the two freedoms of free speech and disciplinary/quasi-disciplinary speech. Hence Vice President J. D. Vance's speech “Universities Are the Enemy” or, on a more scholarly plane, the emphasis his intellectual mentor Adrian Vermeule places on the “common good.”⁷² Such a perspective, which seeks to regulate speech within the university itself, to say nothing of extramural speech of the sort that Segal is charged with, would easily go along with the rescinding of the offer to Segal.⁷³

12. An Egalitarian-Minor Ideology

There remains a question that, as I noted in a previous section, Ambedkar himself does not himself ask, but that his writing gives to us to think: What academic freedom does an egalitarian-minor ideology entail? This question is all the more urgent because while any nonracist and nuanced version of the liberal-professional or even neoliberal ideology of academic freedom would already question the rescinding of the offer (as the previous sections argued), these two ideologies find other questions more vexing—for example: Does academic freedom cover the peaceful student encampments protesting against the Gaza genocide, the call for the boycott of Israeli universities, or the teaching of deeply political issues in our classes?

That the neoliberal principle would say no to all of these questions is obvious. Fish stresses that he is opposed to “partisan politics” in the classroom. What he means by partisan politics turns out to be very expansive; he ends up effectively arguing that academic freedom is appropriate only as long one follows the “imperative of academicizing”:

But even the liberal-professional principle would find itself out on a limb. It, too, we saw, separates study and reflection from action or even advocacy. True, it defends extramural speech and action by faculty. But it does tend to say that the university itself must stay free of both action and advocacy, and so it does not really have the intellectual resources to oppose Fish when he effectively says, “Save the world on your own time and dime.”

All this raises an intriguing question. Many faculty who have been supportive of the protests would see themselves as endorsing core elements of the liberal-professional framing of academic freedom, such as its speech-action distinction. They would usually view themselves as only affirming a capacious version of this ideology: sometimes defending the protests as acceptable intrusions of free speech in the university, sometimes making an exception for boycotts or student protests because the plight of Palestinians is so horrendous, sometimes even accepting on professional faith—as we do all the time with our colleagues, for it is through this faith that professionalism often works—that it may be possible to provide academic reasons for these actions.

But what seems like a capacious version of the liberal-professional ideology may actually be a symptom of the liberality of liberalism—its autoimmune displacement by the egalitarian-minor framing, which is already being practiced within the university, even if its distinctiveness has rarely been recognized, let alone thematized. (This porosity where various ideologies murmur within each other and seek to become hegemonic in the name of the same principle is precisely what makes terms such as academic freedom so charged.)

What, then, does the egalitarian-minor discourse of academic freedom involve? Liberal-professional traditions of academic freedom, we saw, posit the university as the site of an equality that is distinct from the equality of the “public itself.” But what this position leaves unthought, or renders at best an afterthought, is the responsibility of academic freedom—the responsibility, that is, of the university as a principle—on the one hand for the hierarchical exclusions that constitute academic freedom itself, and on the other hand to those excluded from the public itself. Said another way: within the university, liberal-professional ideology is inattentive to the institutional and structural factors affecting who actually gets to exercise academic freedom. In the United States, vulnerable adjunct faculty are effectively barred from this freedom; structurally, relatively few from historically marginalized groups enter the ranks of those who can exercise it. Outside the university, it is inattentive to its responsibility to the most marginalized groups within the societies that have institutionally authorized the university, and its responsibility, moreover, to groups beyond the society that has institutionally authorized the university (something especially relevant when universities are located in a global hegemon such as the United States).

So, simply put, the egalitarian-minor discourse recasts academic freedom as a responsibility to what the liberal-professional principle leaves unthought, and to the inequalities it perpetuates and settles in the process. This discourse has since the 1970s been in an unnoticed and quiet way pupating inside the liberal-professional ideology of academic freedom. Or maybe pupating, despite its attractive implication of exploding into beauty, is not quite the right word, since it carries the connotation of inevitability; maybe one should just say that the egalitarian-minor discourse is a radicalization, often from within, of the liberal-professional ideology.

The articulation of every new ideology is also an epistemic shift that makes new things visible, offers new explanations for old phenomena. So it is with the egalitarian-minor articulation of the principle of academic freedom too. The liberal-professional tradition, we saw, does not really have the vocabulary to defend activities that violate its founding academic unfreedom: the injunction that academic freedom, and the university itself as a space, be premised on the exclusion of action in the name of the discipline, especially where this action cannot be cast simply as expertise. The egalitarian-minor tradition undoes and redoes this distinction between speech and action. Undoes and redoes—not erases, for here too an academic unfreedom is at work, only configured differently.⁷⁵ Of course, as with the academic unfreedom that accompanies liberal-professional traditions, any mechanical attempt to institutionalize mechanisms for imposing this unfreedom, this responsibility, would severely damage academic freedom itself.

We saw this undoing and redoing even outside the university, where what happens is not so much the bringing together of speech and action in the forms they had previously as a transformation of both. Consider Fanon's prayer to make his body rather than his mind the locus of the question. To do this is to require a certain kind of action—no longer the action of a sovereign being but the action of nonsovereign beings engaged in the process of trying to rearrange their desires. Such action is what Gandhi calls satyagraha; it is what Ambedkar considers himself engaged in all his adult life—action that he has not chosen but that has been imposed on him as he thinks with his body.

But in the university? How does thinking with the body undo and redo the speech-action distinction in this space? Which is also to ask, once again, this time more concretely: What is the egalitarian-minor discourse of academic freedom, and what is the academic unfreedom that accompanies it? Let's quickly consider two examples in conclusion: advocacy in the classroom on contentious contemporary issues, and the call for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

The egalitarian-minor tradition of academic freedom would agree entirely with Fish that a political rally is very different from a classroom. To simply do or even say the same things in the classroom as in a rally would be both pedagogically negligent and intellectually negligible. But the egalitarian-minor tradition would nevertheless insist that advocacy and action must sometimes occur in the classroom; only, action must here take a different form than it does in a rally. In a rally, or in other situations where we are part of the “public itself,” we do not have to submit positions to expertise, humanist reason, or thinking. In a classroom, by contrast, there is little space for slogans, at least to the extent that that word expresses an instrumental or immediate relation with the world. Sure, slogans will sometimes occur in the classroom despite ourselves: both students and teachers are also part of the public itself, after all.

Still, we as faculty must submit (though this is a very different matter from falling back on Fish's “traditional methods”) our positions to expertise, to humanist reason and thinking, and ideally to all of these, exploring why one position may be more appropriate than the other, and what each one obscures and illuminates. In my classroom last semester, for example, we tried to discuss in this spirit the concept and historical context of genocide, the differences between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the debates around the concept of settler colonialism, the ideology of nationalism and how it often smuggles in racism, and the singular love of a place or community no longer understood in terms of sovereignty—call it patriotism for want of a better word—which remains vigilant toward the abstract love involved in nationalism and racism.

So far, so good. But does teaching this way require anything more than a capacious rendering of the liberal-professional ideology of academic freedom? In a subtle but crucial way, yes. Recall the distinction and relation that Ambedkar, perhaps drawing on his mentor, activates between justice and love. Recall also the truism that the historian seeks not to judge but to understand. This truism is symptomatic of how the liberal-professional classroom distances itself from action—by deferring justice to the space outside the university and limiting itself to understanding.⁷⁶

Need it be said that such a deferral comes more easily for the epistemologically and socially dominant, who are not existentially threatened by the social order and who find it easier to gloss over the fact that this division between justice and understanding is itself authorized by the liberal order outside the university? Need it be said that such deferral is easier where we operate with an abstract love or with a privatized notion of the public? In the egalitarian-minor classroom, action is motivated by a love for a singular community or place or concern, and this love leads to questioning in myriad concrete ways the cordon between justice and understanding. Thinking may not in the university be a moral weapon of the weak, not least because those in it are often—not always—in a privileged position, but it strives to at least abide by the weak.

Similarly, a distinctive academic unfreedom is at work in egalitarian-minor action in the university but outside the classroom. At the University of Minnesota, for example, student protests were on the whole remarkably committed to thinking—to distinguishing, for instance, between anti-Zionism and antisemitism in their actions.⁷⁷ More pertinently for faculty, we can see that the academic (un)freedom of egalitarian-minor action in universities is also at work in the call for the academic boycott of Israeli universities.

In a splendid essay in 2006 on the boycott, Butler articulates the key premise of what I am calling the egalitarian-minor tradition of academic freedom, pointing out that the “freedom whereof we speak consists in its exercise and maintains no other abstract or metaphysical status apart from the acts and practices by which it is exercised again and again.”⁷⁸ “When academic freedom becomes a question of abstract right alone,” they write, “we miss the opportunity to consider how academic freedom debates more generally—and here I would include both pro- and anti-boycott debates—deflect from the broader political problem of how to address the destruction of infrastructure, civil society, cultural and intellectual life under the conditions of the Occupation.”⁷⁹ They lay out also some of the reasons why the boycott is justified: the academic freedom of Palestinian students and faculty is “abrogated through foreclosure and pre-emption,” and “if the discourse of academic freedom cannot rise to this occasion, able to condemn widespread abrogation of rights, then to what extent is the discourse and practice of academic freedom involved in shielding such conditions, deflecting attention from them, and thus perpetuating them?”⁸⁰

Butler goes on to provide a compelling account, even more valid today when hundreds of teachers and thousands of students have been killed in the Gaza genocide, of “how the prevailing discourse on academic freedom [the discourse I have been calling liberal-professional] circumscribes itself, and what kinds of politics it ushers into public discussion and what kinds it shuts out.”⁸¹ To the extent that the liberal-professional principle cannot recognize this destruction, its invocation of academic freedom perpetuates a Kantian racism—very likely unconsciously, I recognize, but that is always how racism and sexism have worked, especially since the second half of the twentieth century: by endorsing an abstract equality while practically instituting a hierarchy.

There remains at least one urgent question: In what sense is the call for an academic boycott academic unfreedom, or why is it not simply the exercise of academic freedom? Again, the distinction and relation between love and justice, or more precisely love and understanding, illuminates the matter. Gandhi, perhaps the most sustained thinker of the concept and practice of the boycott, notes that “it can be a perfectly non-violent measure. When it is that, it becomes a duty.”⁸²

Gandhi deals at great length over several interventions with how the boycott can be nonviolent and so become a duty. Summarizing and transposing his arguments to our context, we can identify three criteria above all of a nonviolent boycott: that it enact a refusal to hate the aggressor or oppressor (a refusal that we might note is the crux of the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism and is performed again in the very delimited and specific criteria that the BDS has established for itself); that it be driven by care for the other (here a concern not only for the Palestinians who are victims of genocide but also for the humanity of the Israelis, a humanity that contemporary Zionism tries to murder while it massacres Gazans); and that it be driven by a care of the self practiced through a refusal to collude in violence (as we would by continuing to participate in Israeli institutions and universities at the current moment). Across all these three criteria, any BDS strategy will, of course, also have to be extremely sensitive in its practical implementation, as Gandhi was in the boycotts he promoted, to the challenge of not penalizing individuals for the governments they live under, usually through no choice of their own. It is precisely because the egalitarian-minor ideology must hew to this injunction to an ethics of care and love that, for this tradition, the call to boycott comes also as an unfreedom.

It is a symptom of how the egalitarian-minor tradition of academic freedom has been gaining moral acceptance among faculty that the AAUP recently endorsed academic boycotts in principle. This is all the more notable since an AAUP statement in 2006 had explicitly opposed boycotts, citing reasons very much in accord with liberal-professional traditions.⁸³ All the same, the AAUP endorsement of boycotts in principle is not antithetical to more capacious readings of liberal-professional traditions. Indeed, these traditions have been drawn on heavily by the democratic mobilizations that have since the 1960s challenged both disciplinary boundaries and the hierarchical exclusions that constitute the American university. At work in all of this is the unsettling dimension of the equality of academic freedom: that it finds itself unable to go along with the settlement—the banal evil—that requires that we not notice the violence and the genocides upon which our capacities for research and teaching are built.

Perhaps precisely because liberal-professional discourse is amenable to its emphasis on the “common good” and the public being mobilized this way, administrators especially have been abandoning this discourse in droves, and already in the weeks since the Trump administration (I am finalizing the proofs in late January) the pace is picking up, with most university administrations leading the charge to the exits. They have been drawn instead to the sort of neoliberal vision articulated by Fish (himself for a time a senior administrator), a vision that is “apolitical” in the sense that it blinds itself to its active and very political participation in naturalized exclusions and racisms and seeks a privatized public sphere. These neoliberal visions gain strength also from the rise, outside the university, of neoconservative traditions that cannot at all countenance any meaningful academic freedom. How the tension between these four ideologies of academic freedom—ideologies that are also stand-ins for the question of the reason for being of the university—will play out depends on mobilizations not only within the university but also outside it. Here, mobilization would mean exercising academic freedom in concrete situations and resisting the efforts of neoliberal administrators to defang its potential by suffocating it in the remit of top-down committees; indeed, unless academic freedom is claimed and exercised in concrete contexts, it will atrophy.

Acknowledgments

I thank Drishadwati Bargi, Judith Butler, Sharad Chari, William Jones, Andre Lambelet, Ramsey McGlazer, Julietta Majot, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Sophia Rosenfeld, Simona Sawhney, Kyra Sutton, and Shiney Varghese for their comments on earlier drafts. Conversations with and leads from Cesare Casarino, Vinay Gidwani, J. B. Shank, and participants in the “Academic Freedom Globally” panel organized in New Delhi by BML Munjal University also helped clarify the arguments here.

Notes

Works Cited