Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom

Joan Wallach Scott

Published by Columbia University Press 2019

Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom

Joan Wallach Scott

In the series The Wellek Library Lectures

https://doi.org/10.7312/scot19046

Overview
Contents

About this book

This book presents a series of essays by the renowned historian Joan Wallach Scott that explore the history and theory of academic freedom and the value of critical inquiry today. Scott gives a nuanced reflection on the tensions within one of academia’s cherished concepts.

Author / Editor information

Scott Joan Wallach :

Joan Wallach Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her books include Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996); The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011); Sex and Secularism (2017), and Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia, anniversary edition, 2017).Joan Wallach Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Her books include Sex and Secularism (2017) and Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia, thirtieth anniversary edition, 2018). She is a long-standing member of the American Association of University Professors Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

Reviews

Adam Sitze, author of The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission:
For anyone who cares about the survival of academic freedom in the twenty-first century, this is required reading. Scott deftly outlines the tensions, ambiguities, and paradoxes of academic freedom and proves that it is the oxygen of any healthy democracy. Readers will come away convinced that the crises of our own historical moment call for its reinvention and revitalization.

Carolyn M. Rouse, coauthor of Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment:
Joan Scott’s incisive account of the numerous assaults on academic freedom is a timely intervention in the so-called free speech debates. Scott reminds us that the search for truth requires freedom on the part of experts to challenge prior knowledge and established theories. The forces arrayed against academic freedom, she reminds us, would love to do away with public education altogether,which in any functioning democracy is simply unacceptable.

Hank Reichman, chair of the American Association of University Professors Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure:
For decades, Joan Scott has been a passionate and thoughtful advocate for academic freedom. In these penetrating essays, she explores the often subtle tensions between free inquiry and disciplinary authority, critique and orthodoxy, disruption and civility, as well as the distinctions and interplay between academic freedom and freedom of speech, which underpin academic freedom as an ethical practice essential to the academy's future.

Michael Bérubé, author of author of What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education:
Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom is brilliant and written with admirable clarity and style. This book could not be more timely or important.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Introduction: On the Future of Academic Freedom Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Academic Freedom as an Ethical Practice Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	15
2. Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	39
3. Civility, Affect, and Academic Freedom Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
4. Academic Freedom and the State Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	95
5. On Free Speech and Academic Freedom Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
Epilogue: In the Age of Trump, a Chilling Atmosphere - An Interview with Joan Wallach Scott Bill Moyers Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	125
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	163

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;General/trade;

eBook

Published: January 14, 2019
ISBN: 9780231548939