Description
Book SynopsisDirty Knowledge explores the failure of traditional conceptions of academic freedom in the age of neoliberalism. While examining and rejecting the increasing tendency to view academic freedom as a form of free speech, Julia Schleck highlights the problem of basing academic freedom on employment protections like tenure at a time when such protections are being actively eliminated through neoliberalism’s preference for gig labor. The argument traditionally made for such protections is that they help produce knowledge “for the public good” through the protected isolation of the Ivory Tower, where “pure” knowledge is sought and disseminated.
In contrast,
Dirty Knowledge insists that academic knowledge production is and has always been “dirty,” deeply involved in the debates of its time and increasingly permeated by outside interests whose financial and material support provides some research programs with significant advan
Trade Review"
Dirty Knowledge provides a valuable account of academic freedom and the importance of faculty governance in the age of academic capitalism. . . . Schleck emphasizes that academic freedom does not provide a unified public good but offers a forum for competing definitions of
public good. . . . This is crucial reading for faculty and higher education administrators."—S. R. Fitzgerald,
Choice“In
Dirty Knowledge Julia Schleck shows how the conflation of academic freedom with freedom of speech erodes the
academic nature of academic freedom and serves the atomizing purposes of neoliberalism; she also shows how the casualization of the academic workforce undermines academic freedom altogether. This is one of the very few books on academic freedom that ties the concept to the economic conditions of the profession—and one of the very few books on neoliberalism in the university that treats ‘neoliberalism’ as a coherent body of belief rather than as an all-purpose epithet. Required reading for anyone interested in the future of academic freedom and the future of the academy.”—Michael Bérubé, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Provocations
Prologue
1. A Public Freedom
2. A Private Freedom
3. An Individual Freedom?
4. A New Freedom
Notes
