What Are the Limits of Academic Freedom? – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Does academic freedom extend to white-supremacist professors?” That’s the opening line of Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth’s new book, It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom. The answer, they argue, should I took “should” out of italics, on the grounds that we let the good writing, not the fonts, do the work./hl be no. “Academic freedom,” the pair insists, they are saying it together, so “pair” is singular./hl “shouldn’t cover advocates of white supremacy any more than it covers flat-earthers in the geology department.”

It’s Not Free Speech is a maddening book. It raises many important questions but is so chock-full of unresolved contradictions; gross misrepresentations; and wild, unjustified claims that it ultimately makes you wonder how the manuscript made it into print. Nonetheless, it is bound to win attention because of its bold thesis: Academic freedom is “being used as a refuge for white supremacists.”

Does academic freedom extend to white-supremacist professors?” That’s the opening line of Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth’s new book, It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom. The answer, they argue, should be no. “Academic freedom,” the pair insists, “shouldn’t cover advocates of white supremacy any more than it covers flat-earthers in the geology department.”

It’s Not Free Speech is a maddening book. It raises many important questions but is so chock-full of unresolved contradictions; gross misrepresentations; and wild, unjustified claims that it ultimately makes you wonder how the manuscript made it into print. Nonetheless, it is bound to win attention because of its bold thesis: Academic freedom is “being used as a refuge for white supremacists.”

Bérubé is a professor in the English department at Pennsylvania State University. Ruth is a professor at the School of Film at Portland State University. Active members of the American Association of University Professors at the local and national level, they wrote It’s Not Free Speech, in part, “to question the views of ‘old-fashioned liberals.’” They describe being “shaken out of ” their “complacency” by the Trump years. Their “whiteness got in the way,” they say, of reconsidering “hazy, high-minded beliefs” about academic freedom.

The author