asian american studies

Pedagogies of Dissent Kandice Chuh

American Quarterly, Volume 70, Number 2, June 2018, pp. 155-172 (Article)

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2018 The American Studies Association

Pedagogies of Dissent

Kandice Chuh

T hat academic freedom is under attack is something of a commonplace observation, and understandably so. There is ample evidence to be drawn from across the world and more locally in support of such a

claim. The Scholars at Risk Network’s recent publication, Free to Think 2017, covers 257 reported attacks on higher education communities in thirty-five countries in just the past year.1 These include the violent suppression of orga- nized student protests by state authorities in Venezuela, South Africa, Niger, Cameroon, Turkey, and India, as well as repression through travel restrictions in such countries as China, Turkey, Israel, Uganda, Thailand, and the United States. The report also includes legislative activities that threaten the autonomy and viability of higher education institutions, a phenomenon clearly notable in the United States. The consequences of all this, Scholars at Risk finds, run the gamut from killings and disappearances to restrictions on the content of teaching and research, and to fines, dismissal, and imprisonment. Other organizations and studies report similar repressive and suppressive activities, and importantly take note of the growing influence of private interests—cor- porations and overtly ideological organizations—on restrictions to academic freedom.2 In brief, there is no shortage of evidence that academic freedom is insecure, fragile, vulnerable.

In the United States, we know such vulnerability across all levels of educa- tion is produced through a wide range of state and state-authorized activities including the Arizona anti-ethnic studies movement and legislation; the enactment in ten states and the pending status of legislation in several others of “campus carry” laws providing for the possession of concealed weapons in public universities and colleges;3 the intensive defunding of public schools again at all levels;4 “bathroom bills” that regulate access to public facilities; the promised defunding of science and especially climate research; and the repeated attempts at both state and federal levels to enact laws that would refuse public funding or otherwise penalize individuals and institutions who criticize Israel in any way. Indeed, people who have mounted criticisms of Israel, or who have spoken out against racism or sexualized violence, have found themselves

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targets of administrative censure and have faced aggressive harassment through online campaigns.5 The autonomy of both educational institutions and educa- tors on which the principle of academic freedom is grounded, arguably always fictional, is these days aggressively challenged both by state activities and by unfettered incursions of the interests of capital, as well as by private, ideologi- cally driven groups.

All this contributes to the sense that we are under siege, that public educa- tion in particular and especially higher education is in crisis, and that it and both its current and aspirational communities need defense. The question that has long been and currently resurges before us is the matter of how to respond—how to protect and defend colleges and universities from unwanted and unwarranted intrusion by nonacademic forces. It is this question I linger with in my remarks today. An enormous amount of literature already exists that details the conditions we currently face, including some that provide strategies for mobilizing against them.6 My remarks are somewhat differently skewed though similarly oriented. In this address, I take what I think of as a pedagogical approach to the question of defense, to raise some questions I believe necessary to engage in the formulation of responses to the current scene. For, it seems to me, there is work to do in sinking into the question of defense, or more precisely, to question defensiveness itself and the defensive posture that current conditions (try to) impose so strongly on us. This work is related to what we do as people committed to thinking hard together in our capacities as teachers, students, and scholars, oftentimes all at once. To my mind, while there is no question of the need to stand by and with people living the consequences of expressing dissent, there are many that arise in relation to the defense of academic freedom, a principle, or the university, an institution.7 I want to bring to bear how we fight against defensiveness—our own as well as our students’—in classroom settings, in perhaps tacit recogni- tion of how it is categorically antithetical to learning, of how defensiveness, as a self-justificatory stance, serves as a form of an ego-driven protection of one’s rightness and results in the unwillingness to entertain error in one’s own position. Such defensiveness inhibits learning, prohibits collaboration, and makes collegiality, groupness, or in other words, robust support of each other difficult if not impossible. I’m asking us to bring this awareness of the effects of defensiveness to our thinking about the vulnerability of academic freedom and what that vulnerability tells us about contemporary conditions, and to do so by working in a pedagogical mode. I’m asking us, that is, to do so by sinking into the time stretched out by the intentionally pedagogical to allow for the thickening and potential transformation of understanding. More specifically,

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by doing so, my aim is to think with and through the streams of thought that, in often overlapping forms and under the administrative rubrics of queer of color critique, women of color feminism, Native and Indigenous studies, Black studies, ethnic studies, and decolonial discourses among others, enjoin us to disidentify from the pedagogies of dissent that, however inadvertently, feed rather than defunction the systems producing the conditions that induce dissent in the first place.

Primary among such pedagogies is the nationalism that carries forward liberalism and neoliberalism in the United States, the values of which argu- ably have become dominant intellectual values through not only the histori- cal foundations upon which education has been built but also the structured embrace of academic freedom in a liberal key.8 The declaration that academic freedom is under attack accordingly acts here as an invitation to identify the conditions that give such statements traction. Who and what are being attacked and by whom, how, and why? But also, what histories are brought forward and which are occluded, what ideologies are affirmed and which discounted, by the assumed value of academic freedom accompanying declarations of its besieged state?

I want to remember how the pedagogical refuses the reactive temporalities of the language and production of crisis, temporalities that are fundamentally anti-intellectual in their inhibition of thoughtful consideration. Certainly, the rapidity with which highly objectionable, dissent-inducing events and actions are these days pressed on us, in an important sense, demands reactive imme- diacy. It is breathtaking—literally for some—to experience and apprehend the manifold ways the US state in its partnership with capitalism innovates to diminish life. The need for immediate redress is clear in the face of the state’s aggressive abandonment of people, its refusal to provide basic relief to the people of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of hurricanes and in disavowal of the responsibility the United States bears for the crumbling infrastructure of the island, for example, and by its moves to eliminate the already very minimal affordance that DACA offers to undocumented students, as well as by its ef- forts to restrict travel and entry, its plans to defund health care, to divert public monies to corporations and away from student loan programs—the list goes on.

This cascading cruelty has given rise to what I have elsewhere called “protest nationalism” to refer to expressions of dissent aligned with and framed by the rationalities of the US nation-state.9 Protest nationalism remains faithful to the idea of the fundamental goodness of US liberal democracy and identifies its retrievability from the hands of a spastic executive anomalous to the nation’s otherwise laudable if imperfect past as source of political hope and objective. It

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is in this way a form of consent in the cloak of dissent. Of protest nationalism we might say, simply, metonymically and empirically speaking, we are not all immigrants, nor do we aspire to be, for a variety of reasons including the settler colonialism that originates the possibility of immigration. The availability and traction of “We Are All Immigrants” as a response to US nationalism attest to the continuing potency of the liberal nation-state as the framework that governs dominant understandings and imaginations of both US history and its possible futures.

Stretch time around academic freedom and in ways mindful of these nor- mative, nationalist pedagogies of dissent, and it becomes sharply clear that contestations over academic freedom bespeak what Edward Said describes as the “nationalization of intellectual activity” through formal education. Like Said, here, “I want to raise the question of how the central importance and authority given [to] national identity impinges on and greatly influences, surreptitiously and often unquestioningly . . . what transpires in the name of academic freedom.”10 The project that emerges, and in some important respects has long been ongoing, is not one of “decentering” the nation or “transnational- izing” our paradigms; rather, it may be understood as the delegitimation of the authority of the US nation-state and the bourgeois liberalism that secures it, by the elaboration and activation of frameworks and sensibilities fundamentally incommensurate to it.

All this is to remember that dissent is in itself not an end but is instead a point of departure. The question is, where will we go, and how will we get there?

A Brief History of Professionalization, or The Ruse of Academic Freedom

Many of you will recognize that I’m riffing Lisa Lowe in using this phrase, “the ruse of academic freedom.” In Intimacies of Four Continents, Lowe resoundingly details how freedom, as given to us by liberalism, is a ruse that covers over the ongoingness of unfreedoms organized by the entangled procedures and effects of colonialism and settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and empire.11 Freedom as narrated under and by liberalism denies slavery and its afterlife, and disavows the dispossession of the land and lives of indigenous peoples. Liberalism in this way develops freedom for a narrow portion of humanity under the sign of Western Man while subjugating all others as not-yet and perhaps never to be capable of its possession. Liberal freedom in this regard must be understood to belie its materiality, its uses against people and the worlds we inhabit in the name of humanity, and its evocation must cause pause.

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It is in that pause that I situate academic freedom. In and from that space, it is unmistakable how, as developed in the US context, academic freedom delimits its affordances to a select few, as it not only occludes the labor condi- tions that characterize the academy but also affirms the onto-epistemologies of liberalism that continue to rationalize and thereby legitimate the ravages of capitalism and colonialism.

As may be familiar to you, in the United States, academic freedom is gener- ally understood in the ways elaborated by the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure from the American Association of University Professors, to which in 1970, the AAUP offered “interpretive comments.”12 Most US universities and colleges have adopted its principles in the formula- tion of their employment procedures and institutional aims. They are in this sense embedded in the very architecture of contemporary higher education.

The AAUP’s introduction of the statement reads as follows:

The purpose of this statement is to promote public understanding and support of academic freedom and tenure and agreement upon procedures to ensure them in colleges and uni- versities. Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition. Academic freedom is essential to these purposes and applies to both teaching and research. Freedom in research is fundamental to the advancement of truth. Academic freedom in its teaching aspect is fundamental for the protection of the rights of the teacher in teaching and of the student to freedom in learning. It carries with it duties correlative with rights.

Tenure is a means to certain ends; specifically: (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2), a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profes- sion attractive to men and women of ability. Freedom and economic security, hence, tenure, are indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society.

Academic freedom, the statement continues, is constituted by three features:

1. Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties; but research for pecuniary return should be based upon an understanding with the authorities of the institution.

2. Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.

3. College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free

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from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.

I want to draw our attention to how the statement links academic freedom and tenure—that is, by means of constellating special privileges (that come with being a professional), with obligations (to behave appropriately), and job security. This three-part constellation, the AAUP makes clear, is necessary to avoid embarrassing the profession, which is itself justified as necessary for the common good. Academic freedom, in other words, comes to us as a facet of and bound by professionalization.

Part of the significance of the professional boundedness of academic freedom lies in helping us understand how the structures that give academic freedom meaning bolster the neoliberalization of the academy we are experiencing now—for example, the exponential growth of contingent labor, and here I return to the AAUP’s history to explain.

The association was founded in 1915 by a group of professors from such private, exclusive research universities as Johns Hopkins and Columbia, who were concerned with limiting the power of governing boards in curricular and thus personnel matters. College and university governing boards were at that time formed by businesspeople and others with vested interests in the kinds of education offered, and exercised substantial control over basic operations. In the nineteenth century, US tertiary education had undergone considerable challenge in the face of the establishment of Darwinism, which undermined the explanatory power of religious orthodoxies that had defined the curricula of colleges to date, and the establishment of public research universities in the Humboldtian model drawn from Germany. The social status and authority of faculty as well as universities and colleges were in flux. By 1915, the founders of AAUP were also responding to the dismissal or refusal to hire faculty on the basis of economic viewpoints (specifically socialist) at odds with those on gov- erning boards.13 In short, AAUP’s founders had many reasons to be concerned about the prospects of teaching and research without external constraints on content given the governance structures of higher education of the era.

That they decided on professionalization as the route necessary to giving faculty the kind of authority to self-government enjoyed by professions like medicine and law is suggestive of the strength and contours of the bourgeois imaginary in play at the time. And it is in this context and with these aims that

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the principles in the 1915 articulation were formulated and expressed in 1940. As Timothy Cain persuasively documents, the elaboration of academic freedom in the 1940 statement was consequent to sometimes contestatory interactions among several different organizations in the interwar years, including the AAUP, the Association of American Colleges (now the AACU), the American Civil Liberties Union, and the American Federation of Teachers.14 Cain notes among these interactions the different orientations of the AFT and the AAUP, differences that can be understood as between the interests of labor and the aims of establishing an elite professional class, as the AAUP sought to do.15 In other words, the stratification of education between K-12 educators, at the core of the AFT’s mission, and college and university professors, underwrites the crystallization of academic freedom.

The elitism of the AAUP of these early days was expressed in part by its insistence on the expertise of faculty and their unique ability to judge the merits of each other’s work. At the time, what was understandably construed as the overreach of college and university governing boards in making hiring and firing decisions underwrote this insistence on expert knowledge. In short, this early iteration of the AAUP understood and rationalized professionaliza- tion by means of insistence on the distinctive judgments of disciplinary peers as necessary to securing freedom from external forces.

It is in the context of McCarthyism that academic freedom as elaborated in the 1940 statement is legalized, specifically by the US Supreme Court’s recognition of a constitutional interest in it, and in ways that sediment an understanding of expert or disciplinary knowledge as necessary to the national interest. In providing universities with cover of academic freedom, the Court concretized disciplinarity insofar as the test of academic freedom defers to professional scholarly standards.16

In Sweezy v. New Hampshire, a 1957 case involving University of New Hampshire professor Paul Sweezy, the Court found that the state’s attorney general had unconstitutionally invaded Sweezy’s guaranteed rights of expres- sion and due process.17 Sweezy had refused to answer questions about his suspected affiliations with the Communist Party. In its decision, the Court found Sweezy’s academic freedom as it pertains to the “intellectual life of a university” more compelling than it did the government’s interest. The Court in 1967, in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, more specifically identified academic freedom “as a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom. . . . Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not just the teachers involved.”18

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The Court’s interest in academic freedom may be understood, as Robert Post suggests, in terms of the furtherance of “democratic competence,” the “cognitive empowerment of persons within public discourse, which in part depends on their access to disciplinary knowledge.”19 This is knowledge, Post explains, that is understood to be necessary for self-governance and democratic legitimation. That is, the Supreme Court affirmed the importance of disinterested expert knowledge by positing society’s reliance on it as it invested universities with distinct constitutional—which is to say, national—value.20

It takes no special insight to recognize that the legacies of the professional elitism through which academic freedom crystallizes are part of the very terrain against which we contemporarily struggle.21 While the AAUP certainly was not solely responsible for the concretization of disciplinarity and elitist forms of expert knowledge, that these aims and logics grounded the articulation of the principles that would come to be elaborated in the 1940 statement deepens our understanding of the difficulty of delegitimizing disciplinarity, the purview of expert knowledge, and the competencies necessary to gauge each other’s work. The absence of the language of labor in the articulation of academic freedom also helps explain why unionization has come generally late and haltingly if at all to the professoriat.22

This history of professionalization also makes obvious that because academic freedom is reserved for permanent faculty members, the split between tenure track and contract instructors in higher education acts as a built-in leverage against the ability to teach and research freely in the contemporary context, when the vast and growing majority of teachers at the college level are contin- gent workers. Simply, the fewer tenured faculty there are, the less academic freedom there is or can be. In other words, even staying within the given parameters of academic freedom and its relationship to the common good as instated by the 1940 statement, we can recognize its limitations as a defense against the kinds of incursions by external forces—specifically, here, incursions by the forces constituting the reigning political economy—that it was designed to forestall. Indeed, a perhaps paranoid but nonetheless plausible take on the phenomenal growth of contingent labor is its advantage to those who benefit from the minimization of academic freedom, that is, those who benefit from the anti-intellectualism that so robustly accompanies the convergence of the interests of the state and of capital characterizing the current conjuncture.

But neither can we be satisfied with this framing of academic freedom, or by the invocation of the version of the common good it posits. For, we know that the prevailing conception of the common good—prevailing today as it was in 1915 and 1940, if in different iterations—is that which obscures its

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own historicity, including especially how it secures itself in modern nationalist terms through rationalization of the dispossession of native peoples and through logics that buttress the dichotomies between good and bad subjects—that is, the public versus the criminal, the immigrant versus the alien, the citizen versus the terrorist, and so on—in brief, the dichotomies that are a key technology of racialization.

Understanding that professionalization, academic freedom, and US na- tionalism are intimately linked projects vis-à-vis this posited “common good” also reminds us how academic freedom “here” is implicated in the US nation’s contribution to producing the social and political unrest characterizing those places identified in the Scholars at Risk Network’s report—Venezuela, South Africa, Niger, Cameroon, Turkey, and India—where violence on campuses has erupted, whether through its economic policies or military incursion, as recently exemplified in Niger. US academic freedom may be understood in this way to be linked to the suppression of academic freedom elsewhere.

We can also recall how academic freedom was used to criticize the curricular transformations wrought by the social movements and students and teachers of the 1960s and 1970s—how “political correctness” emerged as a term of the culture wars to criticize what was cast as the politicization of the academy against its true nature.23 Such criticisms and deployments of academic freedom eluci- date the specifically nationalist character of education. That academic freedom can be used by both those arguing for inclusion and exclusion is symptomatic of its cathection to nationalism and liberalism in the United States.

As Frances Julia Riemer explains of the “discursive packaging” of Arizona legislation regarding Mexican American studies and guns on campus, “the stars and stripes of liberalism” are used to justify both advocacy for and opposition to them: “Liberalism . . . affords the vocabulary to both establish and contest political authority.”24 According to her convincing account, state officials took the position that Mexican American studies advances “ethnic chauvinism” and is thus antithetical to the sacrosanct liberal value of equality, while teachers and students countered by invoking civil rights history and idioms, to argue that Mexican American studies advanced the liberal democratic project. Meanwhile, advocates for campus carry relied on individual rights arguments while “even those who advocate for increased gun control pay their respects [to the Second Amendment] before they offer their rebuttals.” As Riemer rightly notes, “This rights-based discourse obscures the economic interests behind gun initiatives,” that is, the interests of the $4 billion gun industry. Riemer concludes: “In 21st century Arizona, liberalism is our system of representation. . . . Both sides of the political continuum, assimilationists and pluralists, pro-gun and anti-gun

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activists, we all wrap ourselves in the flag.”25 Until and unless we can defunc- tion this epistemology, academic freedom will remain precisely that, that is, a construct the usefulness of which is delimited to the defense of liberal ideology as it rationalizes US nationalism.

Extramural Speech, or The Problem of the Individual

In 1960 Leo Koch, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, wrote a letter in response to an article published in the Daily Illini, the student newspaper, which he signed with his institutional title. As John Wilson reports, Koch was responding to a multiauthored forum titled “Sex Ritualized,” which, in Wilson’s words, “lamented how unfortunate it was that men were obliged to be ‘smooching’ with women in a sorority ‘until the one o’clock ‘dong’ relieves [them] from their chivalrous duty.”26 The authors complained in this forum that “‘male-female relations on campus’ have ‘stul- tified into a predetermined ritual.’”27 In essence, they were complaining that they were unable to do anything more than “smooch.” Koch’s response, which was published a few days later, chided the paper for failing to acknowledge the moral and social norms that sustained everything from outdated Victorian codes of behavior to reigning double standards for the sexual lives of men and women. Koch concluded: “‘With modern contraceptives and medical advice readily available at the nearest drugstore, or at least a family physician, there is no valid reason why sexual intercourse should not be condoned among those sufficiently mature to engage in it without social consequences and without violating their own codes of morality and ethics.’”28

Driven in large part by a figure described as “‘a right-wing anti-communist former missionary to China, whose daughter was a student at the university,” a campaign to fire Koch was organized in the state legislature and among par- ents.29 A pamphlet denouncing Koch was circulated, which described his letter as “‘an audacious attempt to subvert the religious and moral foundations of America.’”30 University of Illinois administrators, a mere ten days after Koch’s response was published, and without consulting his faculty peers as the prin- ciples of academic freedom warranted, determined his letter to be irresponsible and voted to fire him. The university president at that time, David Dodds Henry, “declared that Koch’s views were ‘offensive, repugnant and contrary to commonly accepted standards of morality and [that] his espousal of these views could be interpreted as an encouragement of immoral behavior . . . for these reasons he should be relieved of his University duties.’”31

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This case turned out to be formative in the shaping of the AAUP’s stance on extramural utterances. Until then, as established in the 1940 statement, extramural utterances had to meet professional standards insofar as faculty were enjoined to “exercise appropriate restraint, . . . show respect for the opinions of others, and . . . make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.” At issue in 1960 for the AAUP was whether a standard of “responsibility,” conceptualized in terms of a “gentleman scientist model,” should be retained. While the organization censured the university for failing to follow due process by not consulting with faculty before dismissal, as well as for what it judged to be the disproportionate punishment for Koch’s behavior, the politics of professional respectability loomed large over its consideration of this case. It is bitingly ironic given the University of Illinois’s recent flagrant demonstration of its unwillingness to heed its expert faculty in matters of personnel and curriculum when those faculty are in American Indian studies, that the school responded to censure following its treatment of Koch by trans- forming its processes and articulating strongly worded policies on academic freedom and tenure. Such irony, of course, attests to the ongoingness of settler colonialism and its multifaceted minimization of indigeneity.

The problem the AAUP faced was how to isolate speech as a citizen from that of speech as a professional. The 1915 principles and the 1940 statement had made the distinction based on the relationship of such speech to areas of expertise: if a professor spoke on a topic within his realm of expertise, that speech was to be held up to the normative standards of the profession; if that speech was unrelated to his expertise and removed from the spaces where professional obligations hold—the classroom, for one—then it should be protected under the umbrella of academic freedom as a matter of the rights of a citizen to engage freely in public discourse. Moreover, the manner of speech matters insofar as it ought to take into account the unique social position of professional scholars and thus be presented in an appropriately dignified way. While the AAUP undertook renovation to its understanding of extramural speech following the Koch case, and in part as a result of both McCarthyism and the social and intellectual movements of the 1950s and 1960s—renova- tion resulting in a statement that more actively affirms the professor’s right to extramural speech—its current position retains a relationship between grounds for dismissal and extramural speech as an indicator of professional competence. More important, beyond the AAUP’s debates on these matters, we can observe across the landscape of education at all levels an energetic and proliferating reliance on codes insisting on civility.32

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We can readily acknowledge the historic and ongoing usefulness of the mandate to civility in the service of dispossession, subjugation, and devasta- tion of people and planet. The civilizing and Christianizing mission of early higher education in the United States resonates strongly today. Perhaps espe- cially in the aftermath of 9/11, with the unapologetic resurgence of the kinds of efforts to subordinate and censor intellectual activity to the interests of the US nation-state associated with McCarthyism—remember the PATRIOT Act—and the corollary ways that the state has redoubled its efforts to secure Christianity as the US nation’s religious and moral foundation by regulating the nation’s borders, that both the content and manner of expression continues to be at issue is patently clear. As the dismissal of and/or refusal to hire people expressing support for Palestinians or criticism of Israel in ways that challenge the gentlemanly model of speech attests, as well as the suspension of others for public remarks made in response to anti-Black racism and white supremacy indicates, the judgment of incivility still operates as part of the machinery of suppression of illiberal dissent.33

We may refuse the liberal framework of academic freedom and the dictates of professionalism that ask us to consider the civility of speech, to ask instead, who gets to express themselves with incivility—through state-sanctioned violence and/or racist, sexually violent, and white supremacist discourse and activities, say—and for whom is incivil speech impermissible?34 In fact, we know that it is speech emergent outside the powerfully structured domain of civility that is a practice of freedom—of the freedom that is before and beyond the academy, civic society, or broadly, the liberal order. It is the freedom that is not given or even taken but is already and has always been ours, the freedom that inheres in existence. This freedom punctures perhaps the biggest ruse of liberal freedom, namely, the idea that freedom is something to be given or earned.

Stretch time around the case of Koch’s academic freedom and the centrality of the regulation of desires and behaviors to which we give the name gender and sexuality, and the political uses of “sex panics” come to the fore as key facets of the world liberal freedom attempts to secure;35 stretch time and the histories of orientalism, US imperialism, and the rationalities of racial capitalism that give rise to the figure of the “right-wing anti-communist party former missionary to China” may be brought to bear. Stretch time and the voracious logics and effects of settler colonialism come to the fore, that is, the dispossession of the indigenous people who lived on the lands on which the University of Illinois is built emerges with great clarity—through the Morrill Act of 1862 that gave rise to land grant universities by territorial acquisition advanced by such US legislation as the 1887 Dawes Act, the 1862 Homestead Act, the Indian

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Removal Act of 1830, and, by the establishment of Illinois as a state in 1818, each of which is a marker in a long history of compulsory cession and warfare, and involving ongoing incursions in the territory referred to as Illinois, and resulting in the university’s location on lands seized from the peoples of the Kaskaskia, Miami, Shawnee, Sauk, Fox, Chippewa, Ottawa, Chickasaw, and Potawatomi tribes. Those gender and social codes to which Koch’s case refers us are, we remember, facets of the settler colonial regime realized in the university.

The given paradigms by which we are to understand and use academic free- dom isolate utterances and individuals to insist that the contexts that matter are professional and institutional. But if we stretch time, the potent context of modern nationalism/settler colonialism becomes strongly palpable. In other words, the pedagogical in an illiberal mode allows us to remember that the problem isn’t an individual’s decision to speak on a given subject and in a given way; the problem is the interested material power behind the very conception of the autonomous rights-bearing citizen iterated by academic freedom and that marks its liberal-nationalist grounds. This is not simply a matter of com- plicating the distinctions between professional and citizenly speech but one of understanding that the distinction itself relies on the assumption of individual autonomy in decision-making without regard for either the historicity of that understanding of autonomy or the social nature of choice.

Speech deemed uncivil is, I believe, better (illiberally) understood as speech expressed in the absence of a choice to do so: when conditions are such that speech is not willed but eruptive, when one cannot choose not to speak—to wit, in confronting racism and settler colonialism and cis-heteropatriarchy as the expressions provoking recent academic freedom cases have done. Such speech, uncivil speech, is an expression of the freedom that was/is ours before and beyond.

By Way of Closing . . . the Work of Associating

I am inspired by how this association, its constituency and our collective com- mitments to speaking truth to power, has come to take its current shape. I think of the planning and labor of people—of women of color and like-minded people—inside and outside the ASA who refused the exclusionary nature of the academy and organized in ways to remake it, who afforded the shifts to the world and this association that allow this annual meeting to be, for so many of us, a place where defensiveness is neither necessary nor useful. In one sense, what I’ve been doing in and with this address is asking us collectively, given all the conditions to which the declaration of academic freedom’s vulnerability

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refers, what will we have wanted the ASA to have been and done some decades hence? What difference can our work of associating make? Through associating, the AAUP professionalized the activities of teaching and research. Through associating, what will we do?

Here are some of the things I’m thinking. It will be necessary to continue to proliferate the unlearning of inherited

ways of knowing and being, to take flight from dissent in ways that reckon with the contradictions and entanglements of history that necessitate thinking nation, race, gender, sexuality, coloniality, indigeneity, class, and ableism all at once, which is to say, to be ever attentive to the complex ways in which power operates to dis/organize life. This kind of reckoning is difficult: it requires not merely acknowledging but living and thinking inside the cacophony, to bor- row Jodi Byrd’s term, to allow un/learning to remake us and elucidate other worlds.36 In this, what I am referring to as illiberal intellectual traditions are vital to undoing powerful ignorance and the power of ignorance, that is, of anti-intellectualism. One of the things we learn from these traditions over and over again is that it will take all of us to make sense out of cacophony, to elabo- rate the rationalities and sensibilities and structures that allow life to flourish.

Stretch time around the work of associating and part of what you will find, I believe, is, instead of defensiveness, the kind of collegiality that helps us make and hold up our worlds—of a form of relationality only possible when uninvested in professional advancement or in the defense of institutions or principles but rather inclined always toward people and the planet in their inseparability. Collegiality gives rise to the deep joy that inheres, as much as risk, in the fact of being, and being together: it lives in what Sylvia Wynter described as the unimaginability of writing an autobiography because of the imperative of the collective; it resounds in the ethos of interrelationality or- ganizing the Combahee River Collective so vital to the critique of capital and empire they advance; it is a form of the mutuality Sandy Grande emphasizes as necessary to undoing settler colonial education; it pervades the collective creative imaginaries of This Bridge Called My Back; it is an iteration of Jose Muñoz’s “being with”; it is what brings us back to the table, to this table, to this annual meeting, even when there is conflict, antagonism, difficulty, risk. The collegiality of all these people, of all of us, of all their and our work, makes us possible, continues in and through us.

What I am describing is a pedagogy of dissent, an organized approach to un/learning grounded in the world and founded in generosity and compassion, understood to be essential to social transformation. This pedagogy of dissent

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names the doing of work even, perhaps especially, when that doing might mean an undoing of belief, of job security, social standing, sometimes of self, when that doing requires courage for the sake of the collective. (I remember here that Paulo Freire opens Pedagogy of the Oppressed by emphasizing generosity and love.) These are the grounds and affordances of collegiality as a mode of refusing subjection.

Since I heard Roderick Ferguson speak brilliantly at this annual meeting about courage as a condition of possibility for intellectual activity, about the interdisciplinarity given to us through social movements as an intellectual formation that creates and proliferates new forms of courage—specifically, of the courage to be nonaligned with the powerful—I’ve been thinking about how exactly right he is and about how courage is pressed on us as much as defensiveness.37 Courage is conditioned by the fact of vulnerability and its exacerbation; it is activated not by individual choice but because circumstances make it such that there is no choice but to be courageous, nonaligned, even insurrectionary, no choice but to take up the insurrectionary work of intel- lectual activity that refuses to be disciplined, professional, civil.

Given racism in its intersectional and state-sanctioned forms, given all the ways the world’s unevenness is indexed by the bodies with which we experi- ence it, for some, the everyday act of walking on the street is courageous; for some, academic environments require bravery simply to enter; for some, courage is in these and manifold other ways a fact of daily existence. This courage learned experientially gives rise to the understanding that courage as teachers and scholars and students elicits work in the face of uncertainty, work that elaborates the genealogies of the insurrectionary forms and formations of knowledge of nonaligned pedagogies of dissent.

This is to say that we will need to remember that risk has always accompanied dissent, and that risk asks us what we will give up, not in a sacrificial model, but through the collective expression of being, of collegiality, that remakes our selves, that reveals the self to be collective, constitutively communal, relational, plural. Indeed, we will need to remember that risk inheres in the very fact of existence, that the differential distribution of risk means there is no universal safe space, and to be ever mindful of how the desire to inoculate ourselves from this vulnerability aligns all too well with the interests of the security state. More policing, more surveillance, more laws, more bureaucracy, more defensiveness have yet to produce more life or invulnerability.

We will need to continue to mobilize to address immediate needs. And through the pedagogical—not only but distinctly through the pedagogical—

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we may take the longer view necessary to organize around the conditions that induce dissent as part of a collective, collaborative, collegial effort to refuse, refute, and defunction them. The work of associating may itself be pedagogi- cal in this regard. If we will have been able to continue to create time to learn and unlearn with all that that implies as to the organizing we will have to do, the structures we’ll need to put in place, simply, the work we will need to do, we will have made a world in fact worth defending.

In the end, I am simply observing that stretching time is our collective superhero power. We must use it courageously.

Notes This address reflects insights and ideas drawn from ongoing conversations with and the luminous

work of many people. With abundant gratitude, I’m very glad to acknowledge foremost among them Jodi Byrd, Lisa Duggan, Roderick Ferguson, J. Jack Halberstam, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Gayatri Gopinath, Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Lisa Lowe, Jodi Melamed, Karen Shimakawa, Siobhan Somerville, and Alexandra T. Vazquez.

1. The period covered is September 1, 2016, to August 31, 2017. Scholars at Risk, Free to Think 2017, www.scholarsatrisk.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Free-to-Think-2017.pdf.

2. See, e.g., Philip G. Altbach, “Academic Freedom: International Realities and Challenges,” Higher Education 41.1–2 (2001): 205–19; Solomon R. Benatar, “Freedom of Speech, Academic Freedom, and Challenges to Universities in South Africa,” Society 53 (2016): 383–90; Alexis Gibbs, “Academic Freedom in International Higher Education: Right or Responsibility?,” Ethics and Education 11.2 (2016): 175–85; Lis Lange, “Thinking Academic Freedom,” Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 15.2 (2016): 177–86; and Mahmood Mamdani, “Between the Public Intellectual and the Scholar: Decolonization and Some Post-independence Initiatives in African Higher Education,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17.1 (2016): 68–83.

3. These states are Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin. For a review of the legislative actions and implementation policies regarding campus carry across the country, see Andrew Morse, Lauren Sisneros, Zeke Perez, Brian A. Sponsler, Guns on Cam- pus: The Architecture and Momentum of State Policy Action (Washington, DC: NASPA and Education Commission of the States, January 2016).

4. See Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016); Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

5. Academic freedom policies and principles have yet to attend thoroughly to social and other forms of contemporary mediation. See John K. Wilson, “The Changing Media and Academic Freedom,” Academe 102.1 (2016): 8–12; see also Kimberly W. O’Connor and Gordon B. Schmidt, “‘Facebook Fired’: Legal Standards for Social Media-Based Terminations of K-12 Public School Teachers,” Journal of Workplace Rights 5.1 (2015): 1–11; and Henry Reichman, Ashley Dawson, Martin Garnar, Chris Hoofnagle, Rana Jaleel et al., “Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications,” Academe 100.4 (2014): 18–23.

6. For a wide-ranging annotated bibliography on the literature on academic freedom, see Stephen H. Aby and James C. Kuhn IV, eds., Academic Freedom: A Guide to the Literature (Westport, CT: Greenwood).

7. In this, I am aligned with Rajini Srikanth’s reminder of the necessity of attending to the “axis of power” in discussions of academic freedom (“The Axis of Power and Academic Freedom,” Journal of Asian American Studies 19.1 [2016]: 105–10).

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8. On the foundations of US universities, see Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

9. Kandice Chuh, “What Is ‘America’ in ‘The Asian Century’?,” Journal of American Studies 49.3 (2017): 299–321.

10. Edward Said, “Identity, Authority, and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveler,” in The Future of Academic Freedom, ed. Louis Menand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 214–28, 221.

11. Lisa Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 12. The AAUP provides the full text of the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure

on its website: www.aaup.org/report/1940-statement-principles-academic-freedom-and-tenure, along with a brief history of its formulation; the 1970 interpretive comments appear as footnotes to the statement.

13. Of particular note is the dismissal of Edward Ross from Stanford University at the behest, the AAUP reports, of Jane Lathrop Stanford, the university’s cofounder, whose husband had made his fortune in the railroad industry. Ross reportedly criticized railroad monopolies and the use of immigrant labor (www.aaup.org/about/history/timeline-first-100-years).

14. Timothy R. Cain, Establishing Academic Freedom: Politics, Principles, and the Development of Core Values (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

15. Ibid., chap. 2. 16. Robert Post, Democracy, Expertise, Academic Freedom: A First Amendment Jurisprudence for the Modern

State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); on the constitutional interest in academic freedom, see J. Peter Byrne, “Academic Freedom: A ‘Special Concern of the First Amendment,’” Yale Law Journal 99.2 (1989): 251–340; David M. Rabban, “A Functional Analysis of ‘Individual’ and ‘Institutional’ Academic Freedom under the First Amendment,” in “Freedom and Tenure in the Academy: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the 1940 Statement of Principles,” special issue, Law and Contemporary Problems 53.3 (1990): 227–301.

17. Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234 (1957). 18. Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589 (1967), 603. 19. Post, Democracy, Expertise, Academic Freedom, 34. 20. Ibid., 76. 21. As Judith Butler puts it, “If disciplinary innovation becomes the price we pay in order to establish a

basis on which to legitimate an argument against unwanted political intrusions, then it would seem we establish a conservative academic culture and even suppress disciplinary innovation, as well as inter- disciplinary work, in order to preserve academic freedom. Then, of course, we have to ask, for whom is academic freedom preserved and for whom is it destroyed, and with what sense of the academic are we left?” “Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity,” Critical Inquiry 35, 4 (Summer 2009), 773–795, 774.

22. It is telling that in a case involving a lecturer at Cal State Fullerton, the force of the California Faculty Association, the Cal State system’s union, was vital to their reinstatement. See neatoday.org/2017/07/24/ cal-state-lecturer-reinstated-victory-for-academic-freedom/. The AFT’s statement on academic freedom explicitly identifies labor conditions and contract terms as necessary to consider in relation to academic freedom. See www.aft.org/position/academic-freedom.

23. See the essays collected in Louis Menand, ed., The Future of Academic Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), which speak to these issues.

24. Frances Julia Riemer, “Wrapped in the Flag: Liberal Discourse, Mexican American Studies, and Guns on Campus,” Critical Education 5.8 (2014): 1–13, 2.

25. Ibid., 8. On constitutional issues related to campus carry laws, see Shaundra K. Lewis, “Crossfire on Compulsory Campus Carry Laws: When the First and Second Amendments Collide,” Iowa Law Review 102.2 (2017): 2109–44. For discussion of specific state laws, see, e.g., David Hsu and Jessica Weekley Truelove, “HB 859—Offenses against Public Order,” Georgia State University Law Review 33.1 (2016): 20–29; Aric K. Short, “Guns on Campus: A Look at the First Year of Concealed Carry at Texas Universities,” Texas Bar Journal 80.8 (2017): 516–17; Christopher M. Wolcott, “The Chilling Effect of Campus Carry: How the Kansas Campus Carry Statute Impermissibly Infringes upon the Academic Freedom of Individual Professors and Faculty Members,” Kansas Law Review 65 (2017): 875–911.

26. John K. Wilson, “Academic Freedom and Extramural Utterances: The Leo Koch and Steven Salaita Cases at the University of Illinois,” AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom 6 (2015): 2.

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27. Ibid. 28. Quoted in Wilson, “Academic Freedom,” 3. 29. Wilson, “Academic Freedom,” 3. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. On the challenges posed to academic freedom by civility codes, see Risa L. Lieberwitz, “Civility and

Academic Freedom,” Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy (April 2015), vol. 0 National Center Proceedings 2015, Article 10.

33. See Doumani for extensive discussion of academic freedom in the aftermath of 9/11. See also Evyn Lê Espiritu, “Civility, Academic Freedom, and the Project of Decolonization: A Conversation with Steven Salaita,” Qui Parle 24.1 (2015): 63–88.

34. The formulation of this question is indebted to Ruth Wilson Gilmore. 35. On the politically interested construction and uses of “sex panics,” see Lisa Duggan and Nan H.

Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, 10th anniversary ed., (New York: Routledge, 2006).

36. Jodi Byrd, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

37. Roderick Ferguson, “The Crisis of Alignment,” paper presented at American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, November 9, 2017.