As I teach at a university that tends to attract the attention of the news media – and that has made the sort of institutional missteps in the face of the conflagration in Israel-Palestine that perhaps warrants such attention – I have been asked with some regularity over the past two months how things are going on our campus. I have generally replied, to put it plainly: not well.
Thanks for writing this, Dhananjay. It seems to me that one reason the two ideas of academic freedom (civic and professional) are so often conflated (or just jumbled?) is that both are taken to be individual rights: think of the way "faculty" is so often used as a synonym for "individual member of the faculty" rather than as a collective noun. And so your suggestion that we think in terms of spaces is both a way to restore our sense of "the faculty " as a collectivity *and* to explain why the two spaces, civic and academic, are constituted by different kinds of freedom. Very helpful, that!
Thanks for writing this, Dhananjay. It seems to me that one reason the two ideas of academic freedom (civic and professional) are so often conflated (or just jumbled?) is that both are taken to be individual rights: think of the way "faculty" is so often used as a synonym for "individual member of the faculty" rather than as a collective noun. And so your suggestion that we think in terms of spaces is both a way to restore our sense of "the faculty " as a collectivity *and* to explain why the two spaces, civic and academic, are constituted by different kinds of freedom. Very helpful, that!