The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent ed. by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira (review)

In The Imperial University, Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira provide an invaluable collection of scholarship on the transformation of the University into an apparatus of empire and the U.S. War on Terror. The central argument of the collection is that in the context of decades-long public disinvestment in higher education, the University has sought to replace public spending with corporate dollars. This requires the University to orient its activities towards the interests of corporate culture with the consequence that programs in humanities and social sciences that do not sufficiently promote corporate interests are viewed as economically inefficient burdens. Moreover, as the neoconservative decades of the 1970s onward have entailed a massive disinvestment in the social wage coupled with an increasing dedication to militarism, universities have become places not only to produce the knowledge required for ascendant militarism, but they also increasingly seek out military relationships in order to substitute for declining public investment. As a result of this transformation universities have been places of repression where challenges to war and empire are disciplined and contained.

And yet, argue Chatterjee and Maira, the imperial university is not only an institution reflecting hegemony, but is also a space of contest and challenge. Chatterjee and Maira are particularly interested in what sorts of challenges are possible within the imperial university. Many of the volume’s contributors discuss their personal history of being cast out of the University due to their political critique of militarism. Nick De Geneva discusses his dismissal from Columbia University following his critique of the Iraq War following 9/11. Thomas Abowd discusses his experience of being accused of anti-Semitism at Wayne State University due to his support for Palestine solidarity politics. And in perhaps the most prophetic and ominous essay of the collection, Steven Salaita—writing as a tenured faculty member at Virginia Tech University—discusses his university’s discomfort with his scholarship, which is critical of Israeli policies and supportive of Palestinian decolonization. At the time of this writing Salaita could not have predicted the tumultuous road ahead due to his firing at the University of Illinois, but even at the of time of this chapter’s writing he expresses the risks of scholarship that is political and that engages with communities resisting colonialism and imperialism. Salaita’s scholarship was framed as polemical and “political” in ways that led some to question his scholarly rigor and excellence.

In addition to showing how the imperial university attacks scholars critical of imperialism and U.S. geopolitical interests, the collection also demonstrates several related challenges within higher education in the these times. Laura Pulido argues that the increasing corporatization of the University has led to a precipitous decline in shared governance and an increase in tenure-denials at the University of Southern California, particularly for faculty of color. Roberto González demonstrates the desires of working-class universities, especially those that are minority-serving, to replace state-funded budgets with support from the Department of Defense and from related intelligence agencies. He shows that in an effort to recruit intelligence experts who look like the brown people they will target in the War on Terror, the intelligence community has offered scholarship and program support to national security studies programs at minority-serving public institutions.

The collection also documents several ways that universities can serve as oppositional spaces, where knowledge critical of imperial culture is possible. This insight suggests something of the conundrum of the imperial university; it is both an institution for empire making while also serving as one space to contest imperialism. Chatterjee and Maira advocate a critical rethinking of academic freedom as a panacea, arguing that academic freedom is often merely a liberal right that obscures deeper and other freedoms. In order to make the University an insurgent space, Chatterjee and Maira argue that more than an assertion of academic freedom is required; as they and several authors in...