No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (review)

Initially, the most striking thing about No University Is an Island is how mainstream—almost conservative—its author's definitions of many of the key terms are. Not all U.S. academics will place quite as much emphasis as Cary Nelson does on the need for higher education to cultivate critical citizenship among students. But the great majority will approve of his definition of academic freedom: an institutionalized guarantee for academic professionals to pursue research and teaching according to their interests, their proven expertise, and the standards of their disciplines. Academic freedom, Nelson further offers, covers freedom of expression in a range of possible venues, extramurally as well as intramurally. Only slightly more debatable is Nelson's contention that shared governance and tenure constitute, along with academic freedom, the "three-legged stool" upholding the academic profession (31). For academic freedom to be genuine and for it to be maintained, he asserts, faculty need to have job security and to exercise real power in decision-making at their institutions. In short, Nelson defends academia as a professional guild, with its own self-generated, self-correcting, and semi-autonomous disciplines, professional protocols, and standards of value. And the only thing that seems surprising in all this is that these middle-of-the-road concepts are articulated by the same scholar who penned Manifesto of a Tenured Radical and has relentlessly challenged received knowledge about modern American poetry.

More novel are Nelson's analysis of the threats besetting intellectual freedom and the remedies he advocates to counteract them. One of Nelson's core contentions is the interconnectedness of every institution and every class of academic. Every time that a president or board of trustees revokes a faculty member's tenure or denies tenure outside of established procedures and peer review—as has recently happened to Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado and Norman Finkelstein at DePaul University—precedents are established that might be appealed to by other administrators. And just in case less-outspoken tenured faculty imagine Churchill and Finkelstein to be outliers, Nelson points out that Hurricane Katrina provided presidents at the University of New Orleans, Tulane, and Loyola with emergency powers that enabled them to cut whole programs and departments, firing tenured as well as untenured faculty in spite of university-handbook guarantees of tenure, due process, and shared governance.

More pervasive than the threat of natural disasters and outside political forces are economic pressures both inside and outside academia. Under the guise of fostering "translational" research (70), programs and individuals that generate cash-flow for the university are prioritized ahead of those who engage in cultural critique. Under the banner of globalization, administrators have instituted programs with teachers neither held to the same standards nor protected by the same rules as regular faculty. The common denominator connecting many of these threats to academic freedom, Nelson persuasively argues, is neoliberalism, which takes the marketplace to be the ultimate test of any program, idea, or individual. The natural and often all-too-effective ally of these threats is a culture of complacency among faculty, founded upon the illusion that academic freedom and tenure remain sacrosanct. For complacent faculty, Nelson has news. Over the past thirty years, tenure has become increasingly rare. The trend is probably captured best by Nelson's straightforward citation of government statistics: in 1975, U.S. faculty who were tenured or on the tenure track constituted 56.8 percent of all faculty; by 2007, the percentage had been nearly halved, to 31.2 percent (88).

To counteract these developments, Nelson recommends as one step that all academic professionals join the American Association of University Professors. Writing as the current president of the AAUP, Nelson explains in detail the organization's history of publishing policy statements and defending professors against violations of academic freedom. The AAUP defends any academic who can present credible evidence that their academic freedom has been violated—regardless of whether they are Association...