Abstract
The persecution of dissenting academics by authoritarian regimes in the Global South has gained renewed focus. On unceded First Nations lands, Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and Māori academics continue to speak out against attempts to suppress their voices on freedom of speech and related rights (Watego, 2021). First Nations intellectuals repeatedly remind us that civility in white liberal contexts cannot be unlinked from projects to dispossess and displace Indigenous peoples to the benefit of economic markets. The marketplace of ideas remains profoundly inequitable.
The university is far from free or democratic and from the perspectives of historically excluded groups it never has been (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014). However, surveillance appears to have become an expected role in the neoliberal settler university. In addition to the relentless collection of performance data to improve transnational rankings, this vigilance takes the form of discourses of civility accompanied by words such as respect, acceptability, and accountability. It is disproportionately directed toward the policing/disciplining of dissenting academics who will not be deterred or deflected by performance-based accountabilities of the managerial academy.
As this powerful collection edited by Ballerstadt-Dutt and Bhattacharya demonstrates, the meaning of civility in liberal universities is defined entirely from the standpoint of academic elites—those who dominate and reproduce university power structures. This discourse denies power dynamics and assumes equivalence amongst ethical and political viewpoints. Therefore it can be wielded disproportionately against women and racialized faculty.
Contributors to this collection write from diverse racialized and gendered locations in post-9/11 United States. They analyze different forms of retaliation and retribution experienced after raising critiques of harmful social structures/practices including anti-black racism in the USA, the U.S. War on Terror and Trump's Muslim ban, and settler colonialism in Palestine. These testimonials highlight the extreme degrees to which university managers are ruled by wealthy donors (alumni and corporate philanthropists) and threats of defamation lawsuits (including from students). They also reveal sophisticated academic surveillance infrastructures maintained by White Supremacist, Zionist, and Hindu nationalist right-wing groups that penetrate deep into universities. As a whole, this surveillance infrastructure remains hyper-alert to any perceived attacks on the privileges and power of historically socially powerful groups in academic institutions and beyond. The level of care and concern experienced by members of these groups is rarely experienced by Othered academics.
In Part I (Black Bodies: Weaponizing the Personal), academics testify to the emotional, physical, and intellectual costs of existing in campus communities as bodies that continue to be constructed as incompetent, dangerous, and undesirable. Part II (Civility Repression and Academic Freedom) underlines what epistemic justice looks like in meaning and practice by deconstructing Eurocentric, liberal notions of civility, incivility, and democratic debate. The book ends with chapters deploying absurd and ironic humor to frame insightful questions about how voices speaking from places marked by difference are labeled as uncivil and disciplined (Part III Politics of Permissibility and Absurdity). Epistemic injustice is a theme cutting across every chapter regarding injustices experienced by academics from marginalized groups relative to academics from historically authoritative groups. The former continue to experience credibility deficits (their knowledge and expertise are always suspect and bounded and must be proven repeatedly) while the latter can always count on credibility surpluses (their knowledge is automatically considered legitimate and unlimited).
Whether this is new or familiar terrain for adult education scholars and wherever one might be located in settler academies, readers will find situated insights into debates about academic freedom as played out in spaces ranging from academic social media; the hosting of controversial nonacademic speakers on university campuses; academic freedom in classrooms; and resistance or counter speech.
After reading these essays, one might be momentarily overwhelmed by the impact of corporate and conservative power on academic freedom and racialized, gendered, and classed labor precarities in the capitalist colonial university. However, the authors remind us that repression in the academy is often met with solidarity and organizing against attempts to silence and punish. The enduring feeling of the text is that of celebration of dissent and relatedly the social justice mandate of universities. We cannot forget this question raised by Choudry and Vally (2020)—what are the responsibilities of universities today in the context of the global ecological crises, structural racism, sexual violence and other deep inequalities, and state violence and repression?
