BY HANK REICHMAN

Be forewarned!  This post is an act of shameless self-promotion.  That’s because it announces that today, April 2, is the official publication date of my new book The Future of Academic Freedom.  Consisting of ten interlinked essays–the publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, calls them “audacious”–the book “aims to bring to discussions of academic freedom some of the practical lessons I have learned working for the AAUP.”

Several of the essays use material from posts on this blog, others are based on articles originally published in Academe magazine and the Journal of Academic Freedom, but all are significantly expanded and updated.  Each essay may stand on its own, but taken as a whole they “convey a unified basic argument: that academic freedom is threatened today from multiple directions and that challenges to it are central to the present crisis in higher education. More specifically, I argue, among other things, that academic freedom is closely related but not identical to freedom of speech; that new social media pose unique challenges to academic freedom; that the influence of market-oriented business practices and of outside donors may also endanger academic freedom; that the expressive rights of students must be upheld as part of the defense of academic freedom; and that recent controversies over outside speakers on campus have been exaggerated and pose less of a challenge to academic freedom than do more ominous developments like the decades-long expansion of contingent faculty employment, legislative and trustee intrusion into academic affairs, and the targeted harassment of individual faculty members.”

I am grateful to my fellow Committee A member Joan Wallach Scott, who contributed the book’s foreword.  There, she writes,

Reichman’s answer to the question his title implies is not exactly yes; instead, it’s an urgent call to stop the destruction. Academic freedom is never guaranteed, he reminds us; it is “an imperiled gain that must repeatedly be won anew.” Without concerted action on the part of a too-often complacent, apathetic, or overworked faculty, “powerful forces in our society today . . . would not only restrict the faculty’s academic freedom but also . . . transform our institutions of higher education into engines of profit instead of sources of enlightenment.” Reichman’s book is a call for action. If there is to be a future for academic freedom, indeed for higher education as we’ve known and practiced it, a robust and outspoken defense is called for. . . .  If reading this book doesn’t rally the forces, I don’t know what will.

Here, for those interested, is the Table of Contents: