Many of you know that I am very interested in the current state of higher education. Lately, I’ve been reading books about academic freedom. Most of my reading focuses on academic freedom in Christian colleges and universities. Today, however, I want to share my review of a book that sheds light on the present state of secular higher education:

Julia Schleck, Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism, University of Nebraska Press, 2022.

In this book, Julia Schleck attempts to defend the traditional practice of granting university faculty the special privileges of academic freedom and tenure, which employees in other lines of work do not enjoy. As her book title hints, she describes the challenges that the rise of the “neoliberal” model of the university poses to academic freedom. Her proposal for dealing with these challenges centers on the concept of “dirty knowledge.”

The Challenge

The term “neoliberalism” refers to a late 20^th century political philosophy that argues that “a society’s political and economic institutions should be robustly liberal and capitalist, but supplemented by a constitutionally limited democracy and a modest welfare state” (See “Neoliberalism,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). According to Schleck, neoliberalism subordinates social/moral goods to economic goods and reduces group rights to individual rights. Applied to the university, neoliberalism measures the worth of knowledge production and student learning by their direct and immediate economic impact on society in producing qualified workers, new technology, and goods for the market. The public, politicians, governing boards, and administrators increasingly view the university as a business that should produce a near-term return on investments made by donors, students, granting agencies, and tax payers. University boards and administrators act as CEOs and managers of this knowledge business.

As a result of the university’s assimilation to neoliberalism, academic freedom is no longer understood as a privilege necessary for practicing the profession of professor. It is reconceived, rather, as a right of the individual citizen-professor almost totally assimilated to the constitutional right to free speech. In Schleck’s estimation, the focus on the individual professor weakens the idea of the professorate as a self-governing community of experts. Instead, professors become employees with employee and citizen rights. The turn to individual rights disperses the collective power the professorate traditionally used to protect the professorial vocation against violations of academic freedom. Not only so, in this new environment academic disciplines experience greater difficulty defending competent colleagues from censorship and disciplining incompetent or rogue professors.

Moreover, according to Schleck, one of the greatest threats to academic freedom in the neoliberal university is the division of professors into the tenured elite and the mass of contingent faculty. In theory, the contingent faculty (nearly 70% of all university teachers!) have “academic freedom” conceived along the lines of freedom of speech. But they have limited contracts that expire at designated dates. Hence not only are they underpaid and overworked; they are vulnerable to contract nonrenewal without recourse to the juridical procedures afforded to tenured professors. This practice allows boards and administrators to work around academic freedom rules in these cases. Increasingly, then, academic freedom is reserved for an elite few, not for all who engage in the profession. And sometimes, the elite tenured professors are the greatest threats to the academic freedom of the untenured and contingent faculty.

Two Proposed Solutions

What can be done to protect academic freedom today? Some urge a return to the original 1915 AAUP rationale for giving professors special privileges (academic freedom and tenure) not given to other employees, that is, society needs a professorate devoted to the public good. To devote themselves to the public good wholeheartedly, professors need to be free from the narrow interests of donors and board members and the fear of losing their livelihoods. Schleck warns, however, against getting too nostalgic about the good ole days. First, the idea of the “public good” will most likely be assimilated to neoliberal culture with its focus on productivity and economic value. Second, the “public good” as understood in 1915 was neither public nor good; it left out women, the poor, people of color, and other “invisible” groups.

A second proposal urges unionizing the faculty and engaging in hard-hitting collective bargaining. Schleck admits that unions can negotiate better pay, benefits and working conditions for professors. But unions still work within the neoliberal framework, treating professors as “labor” and the administration and board as “management.” The unionized professorate falls short of a self-governing profession that can justify its traditional privileges, that is academic freedom and tenure.

Schleck’s “Dirty Knowledge” Solution

Schleck proposes a model of academic freedom fitted to the university as it exists today. According to Schleck, the university of today is thoroughly postmodern. The university does not recognize any viewpoint as “true” or “good” or any one method of creating knowledge as superior to others. Hence academic freedom can no longer be defended with the rhetoric of the disinterested pursuit of truth or service to the highest good. These qualities no longer (if they ever did) describe the work of the professorate. The professors and disciplines of the postmodern university are overtly political, combative, and activist. They are warriors fighting for power to advance their causes.

Hence Schleck proposes that we reconceive academic freedom as “agonistic academic freedom,” that is, freedom to fight for your truth, your good and your knowledge, that is, for whatever helps your cause to achieve power. The university must not be expected to serve any one vision of “the public good.” It is only out of the refereed clash of ideas that society will be shaped and moved into the future. She states succinctly her vision of the postmodern university in her last paragraph:

“The knowledge produced and disseminated at universities has always been and will always be dirty, shot through with the politics and material inequities that characterize our society at large. Providing a special space for those contentions and an especially strong set of contenders is what the university offers to our democracy, and it is why it should continue to be funded by our communities. Like a wild profusion of plants, professors compete for the resources they need to generate the intellectual seeds specific to their form of life, seeds that universities will continue to store in the expectation that someday we as a society will need them to maintain and improve our quality of life, or even to perpetuate our species on earth. Universities should be sure to foster with a deliberate distribution of material resources the strangest, least useful, and most contrarian of these plants to ensure that we have the diversity we need to survive the coming storms. This new grounding for academic freedom gives us a better rationale for the renewal of the special employment protections under which previous generations of faculty have flourished. Such a renewal will enable us once again to reach for the heavens in our pursuit of knowledge, without forgetting that we are firmly rooted in the dirt” (pp. 116-117).

Critical Comments and Questions

Schleck’s book deserves thorough analysis and critique. But I will limit myself to a few observations.

(1) Her analysis of the challenges to academic freedom and the goals of higher education deserves thoughtful consideration: the commodification and monetization of the university’s contribution to society; the use of contingent employees for 70% of the faculty, and the assimilation of profession-based academic freedom to individual freedom of speech.

(2) I agree that unionization may be needed to secure better treatment for faculty and graduate student teaching assistants, and I agree that unionization falls short of the ideal of a self-governing profession. For it fails to ground its claim to the special privileges of academic freedom and tenure in publicly acknowledge values.

(3) Schleck is correct that there is no social consensus about the public good—at least not a very detailed consensus.

(4) But I am not clear how her proposal differentiates the university space from the public square where everyone is free to say whatever they wish. In her summary paragraph quoted above in full, she urges,

Providing a special space for those contentions and an especially strong set of contenders is what the university offers to our democracy, and it is why it should continue to be funded by our communities.

She attempts here to justify funding a “special place” for a “strong set of contenders” to engage in the clash of interests and ideas and the struggle for power. By what standards are the combatants (professors) deemed “strong,” that is competent? And who decides? Why can’t these functions be carried out in other places and by other people? Why pay and give people job security to do what every citizen is free to do?

Notice that she offers a public-good like rationale for granting a privileged space to the university. In the quote above, she hinted that the university offers something “to our democracy.” Apparently, then, promoting “democracy” is a foundational value she presupposes. And the traditional privileges granted to the professorate is valuable because it supports democracy. I am not sure how this works, because “democracy” itself is a contested concept in the postmodern university.

Using an ecological metaphor in which genetic diversity is of survival value, she outlines the postmodern university’s contributions in greater detail a bit later in these words:

Like a wild profusion of plants, professors compete for the resources they need to generate the intellectual seeds specific to their form of life, seeds that universities will continue to store in the expectation that someday we as a society will need them to maintain and improve our quality of life, or even to perpetuate our species on earth.

Society should support the contentious and seemingly useless discussions in the postmodern university because of their potential utility in the future. Again, Schleck appeals to a vague notion of public good. She urges society to tolerate what may seem to most people useless, ideological, destructive, godless, profane, extreme, angry, and racist discussions in view of the possibility that some of the ideas thus formulated will contribute to our future “quality of life.” One might ask about the scale on which a “quality of life” is measured.

Scheck seems particularly worried that the neoliberal university may not see the social value of such disciplines as her own. She is Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, specializing in Woman’s and Gender Studies. She says,

Universities should be sure to foster with a deliberate distribution of material resources the strangest, least useful, and most contrarian of these plants to ensure that we have the diversity we need to survive the coming storms. This new grounding for academic freedom gives us a better rationale for the renewal of the special employment protections under which previous generations of faculty have flourished.

Perhaps Scheck stretches the ecological metaphor beyond its applicability. For it makes sense to assume that nature never produces the useless, redundant and wrong, but human beings often produce nonsense and evil. She here urges toleration and even fostering of strange, useless, and contrarian studies in the postmodern university. I don’t think she thinks these studies are truly strange, useless, and contrary to all that is good and true. She speaks, rather, of the public’s untrained perceptions. But we must ask her this question: might not some ideas, theories, and fields of study generated by the postmodern university be truly strange, useless and contrary to all that is good and true? Should the university tolerate anything and everything? If she answers “Yes,” I return to my previous question about what distinguishes the university from the public square. If she answers “No,” I’d like to know how we judge between the tolerable and the intolerable.

Must the public blindly trust the community of scholars in a specialized area to judge between bad and good academic projects? Can we rule out the possibility that whole disciplines, subdisciplines and communities of scholars may be engaged in that which is truly “strange, useless, and contrary to all that is good and true”? Might not some disciplines simply be manifestations of mass kookiness? I don’t see in Schleck any rules for what counts as sound academic teaching, learning, and research and what does not. She seems to be saying to the public something like this: “Trust us with your children and your money. Give us unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment. But don’t expect us to answer to you or explain why your investments are sound.”

What, then, is the purpose of a university that no longer believes in knowledge, truth, or virtue? Julia Schleck tries valiantly to answer this question. She fails. And I am not convinced that anyone else could do a better job. Because, a “university” that no longer believes in knowledge, truth, or virtue no longer believes in itself. As far as I can tell, its driving purpose is maintenance of a system that provides faculty unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment in exchange for expressing their private opinions in esoteric vocabularies.