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Call for Papers: Academic Freedom and the Contemporary Academy, Journal of Historical Sociology
In 2015 it will be thirty years since Philip Corrigan and I published The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Blackwell, 1985), a book that did much to popularize the concept of moral regulation as a category of political analysis. The birth of the Journal of Historical Sociology, which Philip and I co-founded, was bound up with the political project of that book. It seems appropriate to mark this anniversary by attending to present-day forms of moral regulation that gravely threaten everything an open interdisciplinary scholarly journal like the JHS stands for.
In December 2013 the Kansas Board of Regents empowered universities to dismiss faculty whose “improper use” of social media was “contrary to the best interests of the university.” Months later Steven Salaita was “de-hired” before he could take up a position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign because of tweets criticizing Israel for its actions in Gaza. Meantime the University of Saskatchewan in Canada dismissed Robert Buckingham, dean of its School of Health Sciences, because his public challenge to the budget-setting process constituted “egregious conduct and insubordination” that “damaged the reputation of the university.” On the other side of the Atlantic Thomas Docherty, a prominent critic of UK higher education, has been suspended from his position at Warwick University since January 2014 charged with “undermining the authority of his head of department” and allegedly banned from any contact with his colleagues or students—a Kafkan state of affairs whose acceptance within the sector might be taken as a mark of how abject contemporary British academia has become.
We believe these well-publicized recent cases are symptoms of a much wider crisis of regulation in universities, in which neoliberal university managers concerned to advance the institutional “brand” run up against assumptions of academic freedom that were the bedrock of the liberal university. Attempts to regulate communication in a world in which communication is potentially freer than ever before, however, are merely the tip of a very large iceberg. What lies beneath the surface is less visible but no less dangerous: an arsenal of regulatory routines whose cumulative effect is to reduce the academic profession to a docile workforce that can be relied upon to police itself. The progressive “adjunctification” of university teaching on both sides of the Atlantic and the increasing “management” of research through regimes like Britain’s REF are important aspects of this process and no less corrosive of academic freedom.
The Journal of Historical Sociology is planning a special double issue on
Please direct all inquiries and contributions to Derek Sayer ([log in to unmask]) or Yoke-Sum Wong ([log in to unmask]).