This chapter explains why academic freedom is of great ethical, social and political importance, with repercussions that extend well beyond the walls of the academy. It argues that academic freedom is, in fact, fundamental to democratic freedoms within a polity. However, it is also precisely because academic freedom is so politically important and consequential that it is under threat in our times, and the chapter also explores these threats. The freedoms that it promises present a real, present and pressing danger to existing political and economic privilege, quite simply because the full exercise of academic freedom always offers the possibility of change in the material conditions of life. This is most obvious in the domain of the sciences, which concern themselves directly with the material world. But it also applies to other academic disciplines, such as philosophy, the social sciences, history, arts and humanities. There, the exercise of full academic freedom enables the citizen to understand the world more clearly and, in judging that, also to become sceptical about the operations of justice. These disciplines equip us to understand if our regular judgments in all aspects of daily personal, social and political life are based on sound principles. In all fields, the proper exercise of academic freedom threatens existing social relations with change – and it thus poses a potential danger to the standing of those who currently enjoy a privileged status, be that in social or in economic terms.

From post-truth politics to "no-platforming" on university campuses, the English language has been both a potent weapon and a crucial battlefield for our divided politics. In this important and wide-ranging intervention, Thomas Docherty explores the politics of the English language, its implication in the dynamics of political power and the spaces it offers for dissent and resistance. From the authorised English of the King James Bible to the colonial project of University English Studies, this book develops a powerful history for contemporary debates about propaganda, free speech and truth-telling in our politics. Taking examples from the US, UK and beyond - from debates about the Second Amendment and free-speech on campus, to the Iraq War and the Grenfell Tower fire - this book is a powerful and polemical return to Orwell's observation that a degraded political language is intimately connected to an equally degraded political culture.

In his article, “Remnants of Dissent,” Thomas Docherty explores the relation of dissent to guilty complicity in post-war Europe. The article opens with a consideration of the position of Karl Jaspers in 1945 and examines how Jaspers worked through the various modes of guilt that flowed from diverse modes of living under Nazism. Of particular interest is the status of silence in the face of tyrannical Nazi oppression and murders. The essay explores how the workings of language, and its manipulations by the Nazis, helps to normalize such tyranny and to make resistance to it both dangerous and difficult. The detailed examination finds, via individuals such as Wilhelm Furtwängler and Václav Havel, that there is a vital distinction to be made between dissent and dissidence and that this distinction depends upon the ways in which political discourse is regulated.

The rise of the managerial class has effected a fundamental reversal of priorities in the university sector, such that faculty now exist primarily in order to serve the demands of management as such. With managerial jargon in the ascendancy, political argument about the nature of the sector falls into cliché; and cliché precludes the yielding of any knowledge that is based in thinking, because it reduces thought to prejudicial clichéd banalities. Inn this state of affairs, there can be little legitimacy for a critical position that might challenge the supposed primacy of economic rationalisation of all aspects of university life and of knowledge. The result is that the privatisation of knowledge and the attendant commercialisation of information assumes a normative force. The university is complicit with a general political trajectory that leads to the corruption of politics and of intellectual work through the improper insertion of financial rationales for all decision-making. The chapter explores the pre-history of this in Thatcherism and Reaganomics; and it demonstrates that the logic of university privatization is essentially a state-sponsored subsidy for the wealthy, and for the ongoing protection of existing privileges.

The contemporary institution fails to understand the real meaning of ‘mass higher education’. A mass higher education should address the concerns of those masses of ‘ordinary people’ who, for whatever reasons, do not attend a University. Instead, the contemporary sector simply admits more individuals from lower social and economic classes. Behind this is a deep suspicion of the intellectual whose knowledge marks them out as intrinsically elitist and not ‘of the people’. An intellectual concerned about everyday life is now seen as suspicious, given the normative belief that a University education is about individual competitive self-advancement. This intellectual is now an enemy of ‘the people’, and incipiently one who might even be regarded as criminal in dissenting from conformity with social norms of neoliberalism. There is a history to this, dating from 1945, and it sets up a contest between two version of the University; one sees it as a centre of humane and liberal values, the other as the site for the production of individuals who conform to and individually benefit from neoliberal greed. The genuine exception is the intellectual who dissents; but dissent itself is now seen as potentially criminal.

The ‘social mobility’ agenda permits a society to circumvent the failings that are consequent on its hierarchical class structure. It exists to protect existing unearned privilege and authority, while permitting occasional individuals to be ‘admitted’ to those class privileges. The entire agenda should be scrapped, and the University should dedicate itself instead to a concern for ‘social justice’....

This book addresses the condition of the university today. There has been a fundamental betrayal of the institution by the political class, perverting it from its proper social and cultural functions. The betrayal has narrowed the scope of the university, through the commercial financialisation of knowledge as such. In short, the sector has been politicized, and now works explicitly to advance and serve a market-fundamentalist ideology. When all human values are measured by money, then wealth is mistaken for ‘the good’. Social, cultural and political corruption follow. The University’s leadership has become complicit in a yet more fundamental betrayal of society, as an ever-widening wedge is driven between the lives of ordinary citizens and the self-interest of the privileged and wealthy. It is no wonder that ‘experts’ are in the dock today. In 1927, the philosopher Julien Benda accused intellectuals of treason. His argument was that their thinking had been politicized, polluted by a nationalism that could only culminate in war. In 1939, Nazism explicitly corrupted the University and the intellectuals, demanding ideological allegiance instead of thought. We continue to live through the aftermath of this, only worse: by endorsing an entire ideology of ‘competition’, intellectuals have established a neo-Hobbesian war of all against all as the new cornerstone of societies. This now threatens human ecological survival. In light of this, the intellectual and the University have a duty to extend democracy and social justice. This book calls upon the intellectual to assist in the survival of the species.

Education involves the search for good judgment, and thus also institutes the principles of criticism. It does this in the interests of extending the range of human possibilities and in extending and distributing those possibilities democratically. In this, it is structurally opposed to the logic of privatization as such. This chapter explores how it is that existing social and class privilege has tried to prevent the university from doing this, in the interests of protecting those very privileges. The Browne Review was central to this project. In a peculiar self-contradiction, Browne fundamentally reconstructs the University as an ivory tower institution, one that legitimised privilege by radically reducing the scope and ambit of the university’s roles and social responsibilities. After Browne, the university seeks to entrench the very ideology of privilege, by translating the demands for justice or good judgment into a logic of self-advancement via competition. It institutes the culture of acquisitive individualism or greed over the extension of democracy and freedoms.

The prevailing cult and culture of managerial audit and measurement systemically translates qualities into quantities. Further, it requires that those measurements be inserted into a form of warfare that we normalise as ‘league-table competitiveness’. The system as a whole then operates in a neo-Hobbesian state of war of all against all, which serves the interests of none and which damages the world’s intellectual and natural ecologies. Ecology is subsumed under economics. This chapter considers what must be done to construct a new model of the institution that will help not only to shape the good society but, even more fundamentally, will help to preserve and sustain the society itself in a time of ecological disaster. What should be the university’s proper relation to the state of nature? The chapter argues that the contemporary institution must reject all forms of political fundamentalism – including especially the dominant prevailing modes of market fundamentalism – if it is to work against any and all forms of political terror. The chapter situates the question of the survival of the university within the abiding question of the survival of the species and of our social existence.

This introductory piece situates Sartre's What is Literature? in a historical and theoretical context. Historically, it points out that it is shaped by issues of collaboration during the Occupation of France in World War II; and, consequently, when writers such as Robert Brasillach are executed for collaboration, it sees literature as a matter of life and death. Theoretically, it addresses the idea of commitment in both writing and painting; and it addresses Sartre's argument in terms advanced by Adorno's criticism of Sartrean ideas of commitment and existentialist choice. Sartre distinguishes prose literature from other arts, including especially painting, and claims that prose, in describing the world, reveals fundamental truths about persons; and, once those truths are revealed, they pose a question to the reader of whether she wishes to change the facts of the world. For Sartre, 'parler, c'est agir'. This is his 'commitment', and it devolves into a choice between capitalism and communism. Adorno shows that Sartre is interested in choice in merely abstract terms, and not in material and empirical choices that are made. The piece examines the relation between 'parler' and 'agir' specifically in terms of the actions made by and on paintings, to argue that what is really at stake in any contemporary political choice is the radical potential not of prosaic content but of aesthetic form.

This review article considers the work of John Higgins on academic freedom. It reveals that Higgins offers an account that eschews any fundamental relation between academic freedom and the market. Rather, he offers a more nuanced view that takes academic freedom out of the academy and into a wider political and social domain, while simultaneously avoiding the trap of offering a transcendent or metaphysical ‘idea’ of academic freedom. This depends upon what Higgins calls ‘critical literacy’, which requires that we develop an understanding of specific issues textually, theoretically, and historically. In this way, Higgins attends to historically specific occasions when social freedom is under threat, and demonstrates how our freedoms within the academy can intervene to redeem that social freedom and extend it. The piece argues that academic freedom is more than merely academic, but social and political.

Across the world academic institutions are being questioned by their stakeholders and pressured to change. Answering these questions requires that academics and professional managers in universities think about their work, its value and organisation. The book highlights the need for space and stimulus to reflect on the responsibilities, roles and expectations that they identify for themselves, and that others place upon them – then, they might be better able to understand and to act. Similarly, policymakers and higher education commentators need the space and stimulus to reflect on the role of universities. This book will provide this space and an invaluable contribution to the stimulus.

British grant-makers unwisely conspire with the British government to tell researchers what to do.