Journal Considers Practices of Academic Freedom as “Flowers of Liberation”

BY RACHEL IDA BUFF AND S. ANI MUKHERJI

Design by Favianna Rodriguez using artwork by various artists from Reproduce

Poster design by Favianna Rodriguez using artwork by various artists from Reproduce and Revolt, 2006.

We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 12 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. As coeditors, we agreed on the theme for the volume, “Practices of Academic Freedom in Times of Austerity,” late last summer—a time of cascading loss and despair, but also of inspiring protests and bold acts of public grieving. Over a year later, the need to protest and grieve has hardly disappeared.

Our call for papers asked potential contributors to consider the relation of academic freedom struggles to broader movements and to envision the university in the larger context of the world and its historical processes. We focused on concrete practices, gathering examples as material for reflection and encouragements for further experiments in transformative change—change that we have come to imagine as “flowers of liberation.”

The resulting volume’s twelve articles, divided into four sections, invite readers to engage with academic freedom as a dynamic framework for individual and collective practices rather than as a static ideal or entitlement. Follow the links in the table of contents below or access the complete volume at https://www.aaup.org/JAF12.

—Rachel Ida Buff and S. Ani Mukherji, Faculty Coeditors

Table of Contents

Editors’ Introduction: Practices of Academic Freedom and Flowers of Liberation
By Rachel Ida Buff and S. Ani Mukherji

INVOCATIONS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Against the Common Sense: Academic Freedom as a Collective Right
By Eva Cherniavsky

Queered Outrage: Reclaiming Anger amid Facile Calls for Campus Civility
By Cathryn Bailey and Susan K. Freeman

Educating from the Margins: Academic Librarians and Academic Freedom
By Alexis Logsdon and Danya Leebaw

HISTORIES OF STRUGGLE

Confession and Mirage: Professor Mas`uda and the Ashkenazim-for-Palestine in Israel’s Academe
By Smadar Lavie

A Mosquito on an Elephant’s Behind: The Third World News Review and Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson’s Community Media
By Joshua Myers

AUSTERITY AND ORGANIZING

Class Politics, Crisis, and Opportunity: A Call for Solidarity
By Douglas Alberto Medina and Anya Yankovich Spector

Making the Invisible Visible: Organizing against the Instructionally Harmful, Antidemocratic Effects of Institutional Debt
By Eleni Schirmer, Jason Wozniak, Dana Morrison, Joanna Gonsalves, and Rich Levy

Toward Abolitionist Unionism: Resisting Pandemics, Police, and Academic Austerity at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
By Chelsea Birchmier, Austin Hoffman, Logan Middleton, A. Naomi Paik, and Angela Ting

Public Higher Education in Puerto Rico: Disaster, Austerity and Resistance
By Rima Brusi and Isar Godreau

THE MATERIAL MEANS OF MENTAL PRODUCTION

Forbidden Words: Academic Freedom, Censorship, and University Presses
By Marc Dollinger

The Palestinian Exception in the Age of Zoom: A Bellwether for Academic Freedom
By Bill V. Mullen

Class, Politics, and Higher Education: Universities and the Capitalist State Thirty Years On
By Clyde W. Barrow, Isaac Kamola, and Heather Steffen

The journal’s new coeditors, Michael Dreiling and Pedro García-Caro, will be sharing the call for papers for next year’s volume of the journal in October.

The Journal of Academic Freedom is supported by funding from the AAUP Foundation.