Description
Book SynopsisHow far does the idea of academic freedom extend to professors in an era of racial reckoning?The protests of summer 2020, which were ignited by the murder of George Floyd, led to long-overdue reassessments of the legacy of racism and white supremacy in both American academe and cultural life more generally. But while universities have been willing to rename some buildings and schools or grapple with their role in the slave trade, no one has yet asked the most uncomfortable question: Does academic freedom extend to racist professors?It's Not Free Speech considers the ideal of academic freedom in the wake of the activism inspired by outrageous police brutality, white supremacy, and the #MeToo movement. Arguing that academic freedom must be rigorously distinguished from freedom of speech, Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth take aim at explicit defenses of colonialism and theories of white supremacytheories that have no intellectual legitimacy whatsoever. Approaching this question from two a
Trade ReviewMichael Berube and Jennifer Ruth's 'It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy and the Future of Academic Freedom' addresses the question of what academic freedom does and should protect—and what it does not and should not protect. Drawing careful distinctions between free speech and academic freedom, they contend that an 'excessively libertarian' understanding of academic freedom, often confused with an absolutist position on free speech, needs to be rethought and replaced with less traditionally liberal policies....A provocative read, with practical suggestions for how to put faculty back in charge of defending academic freedom as well as preventing its abuses.
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ForbesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. Context Culture, or, a Few Cautionary Words Concerning the Politics of Interpretation
2. Talking out of School: Academic Freedom and Extramural Speech
3. What Is a Firing Offense?
4. Who's Afraid of Critical Race Theory Today?
5. The Limits of Academic Freedom
6. The Future of Academic Freedom
Works Cited
Index
