Academic Freedom in the Post-9/11 Era

by Carvalho, Edward J.; Downing, David B.

• ISBN13: 9780230108349
• ISBN10: 0230108342
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-11-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Since 9/11 there have been many startling instances where the rhetoric of national security and terror, corporate interests, and privatization have cast a pall over the terrain of academic freedom. In the post-9/11 university, professors face job loss or tenure denial for speaking against state power, while their students pay more tuition and fall deeper in debt. This timely collection features an impressive assembly of the nationrs"s leading intellectuals, addressing some of the most urgent issues facing higher education in the United States today. Spanning a wide array of disciplinary fields, Academic Freedom in the Post-9/11 Era seeks to intervene on the economic and political crises that are compromising the future of our educational institutions.

Author Biography

Edward J. Carvalho is Instructor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is an MFA recipient (Goddard College 2006), and ABD in the Literature and Criticism program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He the author of solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short (Fine Tooth, 2007) and the poetry audiobook Chants from the Seven Cities (Guerrilla Ignition, 2009). His poems have been twice-nominated for the Pushcart Prize (2004-05) and appear along with his essays, reviews, and interviews in numerous journals throughout the country. He is also the founding editor of The Acknowledged Legislator and guest editor for David B. Downing’s Works and Days journal on Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11 University (2008-09), which was the subject of considerable national press in three of Stanley Fish’s New York Times “Think Again” Blogs (March and April 2009). In 2010, he offered a week-long series of poetry workshops for the National Endowment of the Arts Big Read program sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, followed by a presentation on teaching post-9/11 literature at the NeMLA in Montreal, Canada. He is the recipient of Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Twentieth and Twenty-First Annual IUP Doctoral Fellowships (2006, 2008) and IUP Professional Development Grant (2010).

David B. Downing is Professor of English and Director of the Graduate Programs in Literature and Criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace (2005), and he is the editor or coeditor of four other books including Beyond English, Inc.: Curricular Reform in a Global Economy (2002). Since 1984 he has edited the scholarly journal Works and Days, which publishes biannually. He is the author of more than sixty scholarly articles, book chapters, and review essays in various literary and cultural journals on topics such as the history of the university, institutional critique, cultural studies, literary theory, and pedagogy. He has also received numerous awards including a Fulbright to Rio de Janiero; three NEH fellowships; two “Excellence in Teaching” awards; first IUP recipient of the “Innovative Excellence” award from the International Conference on College Teaching, Learning, and Technology; and a fellowship to the School of Criticism and Theory. He received his PhD in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1980; his MA from San Francisco State University in Creative Writing in 1974; and his BA in Philosophy from Beloit College in 1970.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Reframing Academic Freedom: An Introduction	p. 1
State of the Union
Academic Unfreedom in America: Rethinking the University as a Democratic Public Sphere	p. 19
Barefoot in New Zealand: The Politics of Campus Conflict	p. 41
Marketing McCarthyism: The Media's Role in the War on Academic Freedom	p. 51
Churchill v. University of Colorado
The Myth of Academic Freedom: Experiencing the Application of Liberal Principle in a Neoconservative Era	p. 65
The Image and Reality of Teaching the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Civility and Academic Life	p. 117
The Risk of Knowing	p. 133
Neoliberal Freedoms, Contingency, and Capital
Caught in the Crunch	p. 151
Academic Bondage	p. 169
Take Your Ritalin and Shut Up	p. 185
Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Intellectual Engagement	p. 203
Reflections and "Tightrope Hopes"
Generation Kill: Nietzschean Meditations on the University, War, Youth, and Guns	p. 217
The Post-9/11 University: It Could Have Been Much Worse	p. 239
Lessons from History (Interview with Noam Chomsky)	p. 247
"Taking Back the Street Corner" (Interview with Martín Espada)	p. 257
Preserving the Democratic Experiment: Moral Courage and the Role of Intellectual Activism (Interview with Cornel West)	p. 267
Contributors	p. 285
Index	p. 289
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