Academic Freedom & the Politics of the University - Joan Wallach Scott

Academic Freedom & the Politics of the University Academic Freedom & the Politics of the University Joan Wallach Scott In this essay, I explore the relationship between the politics of the production of knowledge and partisan attempts to interfere with it. [...] He must give the student the best of what he has and what he is.11 Of course, the founders noted, the freedom to express oneself in the classroom came with a responsibility to the disciplined search for truth and the manner of its presentation. [...] Johnson’s administration (the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Executive Order on Affirmative Action of 1965, the Immigration Act of 1965); the doubling of the num- ber of colleges and universities and their recruitment of increasing numbers of students and faculty from more diverse domestic and international backgrounds; decolonization and co. [...] Along with the Supreme Court decision declaring unconstitutional the use of race as a criterion for admission at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the end of DEI will spell the end of affirmative action and a return, if not entirely to the more homogeneous faculty and student bodies of the pre-1960s era, to a re-imposition of a “classical” conservative curriculum (without all those tro. [...] My paradoxically pessimistic hope for the future of academic freedom rests on the fact that–despite media hype and right-wing politicians’ claims to the contrary–there are still spaces within the “ruins” of the university where the crit- 153 (3) Summer 2024 161 Academic Freedom & the Politics of the University ical practice of academic free inquiry continues, the free inquiry that the Progres- siv.