current issue

LISA ANDERSON

FROM PURSUING TRUTH TO MANAGING STRESS: THE COSTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE THERAPEUTIC TURN IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES

The desire to simultaneously encourage and contain transformative research and to both nurture and control critical thinking has been a tension since the very creation of the university. In recent years, efforts to manage these conflicting impulses have been assigned to individual psychic expressions of “cognitive dissonance” rather than structural disparities or social contradictions. In a diversionary fusing of the individualism of neoliberalism and the collectivities of identity politics, university leaders tried to reconcile the contradictory mandates by attributing failures to resolve the paradox to psychological distress. In the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, they issued declarations of personal “devastation” and recommendations that individual anguish be taken up by “mental health resources”—exemplifying a therapeutic turn designed to evade the deeply political role and responsibility of universities in their societies, as well as the purposes of academic freedom.

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ALBENA AZMANOVA

FREE SPEECH OR SAFE SPEECH: NEOLIBERAL UNIVERSITY’S FALSE DILEMMA

The war between free speech and safe speech in universities has unleashed competition for victimhood among antagonistic groups whose battles empower administrators. Freedom versus safety is a false dilemma. Understanding its falsity and social origins can help us detect the forces deploying it for political control by fostering demands for patronage. In the “cancel culture” era, we should remember that the original purpose of the struggles for free speech was to empower the weak, not to shelter them. Universities should not become unfit-for-purpose social welfare agencies trying in vain to counter the ubiquitous insecurity neoliberal policies generate. The 2024 university campus protests against the Israeli atrocities in Gaza indicate a way out of the false dilemma.

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AHMED BAWA

SOUTH AFRICA’S UNIVERSITIES: A CRISIS OF IDENTITY

South Africa’s public universities have trodden a long and winding path over the last century shaped by vastly different political environments. In the last 30 years they have experienced continuous instability and what can be considered the loss of social ownership. Being global and local in scale, they must contend with forces that are particular to the national context and that influence higher education and science more generally. These forces contribute to shaping the universities’ relationship with society and, in particular, to their social value. This essay discusses what can be done to reignite a national conversation about their purpose and their relationship with society.

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JUDITH BUTLER

ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN A TIME OF DESTRUCTION: RECONSIDERING EXTRAMURAL SPEECH

The protection of extramural speech is a part of academic freedom that has not been as extensively explored as other key components. Although extramural speech is not different in kind from constitutionally protected speech, it entails specific protections from retaliation by administrators, including censorship, suspension, and termination. It also contains some theoretical connections between the university and democratic life. Violations of extramural protections have escalated recently in light of university actions against protesters of Israeli state violence. The protection of extramural speech is crucial for understanding the relationship of democracy to higher education, and the centrality of the right to education in protecting democratic freedoms. The “wall” distinguishing intra- and extramural speech calls to be rethought, given that, especially under scholasticide, the infrastructural conditions that make education possible also make sense of academic freedom.

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SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI

THE UNIVERSITY IN NEW INDIA: A STATE OF SIEGE

Universities in India, projected by ambitious policy pronouncements as poised for unprecedented growth, are actually under attack from multiple quarters, with restrictions placed upon academic freedom and research, compounded by funding reductions, faculty shortages, decaying infrastructure, course obsolescence, and increased social and financial precarity among both staff and students, within a general climate of political repression. The current regime’s investment in a new India projects the nation itself as a university—or at least as a teacher. This is very far from the reality that obtains on the ground, with academic freedom and intellectual values severely compromised.

 

 

NICHOLAS B. DIRKS

AMONG THE RUINS OF THE UNIVERSITY

In this essay I evaluate the current state of the university in relation to the escalating crises of the past 10 years. I survey critiques that have been made by both the right and the left. Pointing to how the late works of Max Weber and Bruno Latour can be helpful in adjudicating these critiques, I suggest the need to limit the political demands made on the university, while working to orient the humanities toward the myriad of current human challenges and developing new modes of critique and engagement. Only then might we reassert the centrality of the liberal arts as fundamental to the idea of the university in the twenty-first century.

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LEN GUTKIN

INSTITUTIONALIZED INCIVILITY

The last decade of academic life has been witness to a peculiar species of moralizing whereby fierce political condemnations (“ritual anathematizations”) of disciplines by their practitioners and of scholars by one another are deployed to authorize a comprehensive politicization of knowledge work. As a form of professional maneuvering, these bids for political relevance can be quite effective, but in the long term they degrade the epistemic standards of the fields they afflict, primarily by dogmatically imposing the appearance of expert consensus where none in fact exists. Among other things, disciplinary politicization is a compensatory strategy meant to ward off fears of irrelevance and anxiety about declining prestige.

 

 

DAVID A. HOLLINGER

THE EVANGELICAL CAPTURE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR ACADEMIA

For the first time in American history, a major political party has a vested interest in keeping the electorate’s education level relatively low. This is largely the result of the Republican Party’s capture by one of its clients: the White evangelical Protestant population with anti-intellectual tendencies. In this political environment, academics must resist the understandable temptation to go beyond the traditional missions of truth-seeking and truth-telling. Surrounded by a deeply unjust society, we must not make the mistake of trying to pick up the social pieces left on the national floor by the failure of other institutions. Telling the truth is enough, if we do it well.

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JONATHAN VEITCH

THE BURNED-OVER DISTRICT: THE HORSES OF INSTRUCTION AND THE TYGERS OF WRATH

This essay explores how, if at all, colleges and universities should intervene in contemporary student protests; the limitations and potential of deliberative democracy in structuring those debates; and whether or not such attempts—however well-intentioned, as Stanley Fish puts it—“erode the constitutive distinctiveness” of the university’s mission.