Free space in the academy

Abstract

“Academic freedom” does not mean the same thing to everyone. There are, to be sure, a few who argue against it. Sandra Korn, in the Harvard Crimson last year, argued that we should abandon academic freedom in favor of academic justice. She argues that we have reached a consensus on issues such as racism, classism and sexism, and so to promote racist or classist or sexist views under the guise of “academic freedom” is to ignore a higher standard and more importantly to ignore the fact that academic freedom is always couched in political realities, and is never the dispassionate exercise of reason and the pursuit of knowledge. It always serves an agenda, and so if that is the case, it should serve the agenda of justice, particularly justice for disadvantaged and marginalized people. Her online article, when I last looked, had almost 1300 comments, and had inspired commentary from a number of other publications. You can imagine the range of these comments and reactions: everything from “this is long overdue” to the newest favorite insult circulating the internet, “she’s just another Social Justice Warrior (SJW).