The Future of Academic Freedom - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226520048 ISBN 13: 9780226520049

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1996

Synopsis

At the bottom of every controversy embroiling the university today—from debates over hate-speech codes to the reorganization of the academy as a multicultural institution—is the concept of academic freedom. But academic freedom is almost never mentioned in these debates. Now nine leading academics, including Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Edward Said, Richard Rorty, and Joan W. Scott, consider the problems confronting the American University in terms of their effect on the future of academic freedom.

"Louis Menand has assembled The Future of Academic Freedom to better define and delineate what should and should not happen within our colleges and universities. . . . The whole extremely learned yet accessible debate exploits the freedoms it extols, tackling sensitive subjects such as ethnicity and ethics head-on."—Publishers Weekly

"The essays are not only sharp, elegant and lucid, but extremely well-informed about the history of American battles over academic freedom."—Alan Ryan, Times Higher Education Supplement

"[A] superb inquiry into some of the most vexing and significant issues in higher education today."—Zachary Karabell, Boston Book Review

About this title

About the Author

Louis Menand is a staff writer at the New Yorker as well as the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including the Pulitzer-Prize winning The Metaphysical Club.

From the Back Cover

At the bottom of every controversy embroiling the university today - from debates over hate-speech codes to the reorganization of the academy as a multicultural institution - is the concept of academic freedom. But academic freedom is almost never mentioned in these debates. Now nine leading academics consider the problems confronting the American university in terms of their effect on the future of academic freedom. Whom and what does academic freedom protect? Are restrictions on hate speech compatible with the academic freedom of inquiry? Must academic freedom have epistemological foundations, or should it be reconceived as an ethical practice? If the American university is now undergoing a radical reorganization, both intellectual and economic, what are the threats to the freedoms of inquiry and expression that professors and students have traditionally taken for granted? The essays respond to critics of the university, but they also respond to one another: Rorty and Haskell argue about the epistemological foundations of academic freedom; Gates and Sunstein discuss the legal and educational logic of speech codes. But in the end the volume achieves an unexpected consensus about the need to reconceive the concept of academic freedom in order to meet the threats and risks of the future.

Reviews

One of the main contenders for New York's "public intellectual" throne, which was left vacant by the likes of Lionel Trilling, City University of New York professor and contributing editor of the New York Review of Books Louis Menand has assembled The Future of Academic Freedom to better define and delineate what should and should not happen within our colleges and universities. Internal debates erupt among the nine essayists: Richard Rorty and Thomas Haskell argue about philosophy; Cass Sunstein and Harvard's Henry Louis Gates Jr. take the debate back to the campus, to what actually gets said inside and outside the classroom. Essays by Edward Said and Menand himself take differing but complementary stands on curriculum. The whole extremely learned yet accessible debate exploits the freedoms it extols, tackling sensitive subjects such as ethnicity and ethics head-on. (Univ. of Chicago, $24.95, 240p ISBN
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226520048
• ISBN 13: 9780226520049
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 250
• Editor: Menand Louis