It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom

The concept of academic freedom in the era of racial reckoning is explored in "It's Not Free Speech," which argues that academic freedom must be distinguished from freedom of speech and that the democracy-destroying potential of social media makes it difficult to uphold the traditional liberal view that the best remedy for hate speech is more speech. The book suggests that faculty across the nation should develop protocols that account for both the new realities of social media and the old realities of long-standing inequities and abuses.

Format: Hardback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 21 June 2022
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

The protests of summer 2020, which were ignited by the murder of George Floyd, led to long-overdue reassessments of the legacy of racism and white supremacy in both American academia and cultural life more generally. However, while universities have been willing to rename some buildings and schools or grapple with their role in the slave trade, no one has yet asked the most uncomfortable question: Does academic freedom extend to racist professors?

It's Not Free Speech considers the ideal of academic freedom in the wake of the activism inspired by outrageous police brutality, white supremacy, and the #MeToo movement. Arguing that academic freedom must be rigorously distinguished from freedom of speech, Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth take aim at explicit defenses of colonialism and theories of white supremacy—theories that have no intellectual legitimacy whatsoever. Approaching this question from two angles—one, the question of when a professor's intramural or extramural speech calls into question his or her fitness to serve, and two, the question of how to manage the simmering tension between the academic freedom of faculty and the antidiscrimination initiatives of campus offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion—they argue that the democracy-destroying potential of social media makes it very difficult to uphold the traditional liberal view that the best remedy for hate speech is more speech.

In recent years, those with traditional liberal ideals have had very limited effectiveness in responding to the resurgence of white supremacism in American life. It is time, Bérubé and Ruth write, to ask whether that resurgence requires us to rethink the parameters and practices of ac.

Weight: 568g
Dimension: 161 x 239 x 32 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781421443874