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Eve Darian-Smith has written a book for our times. Policing Higher Education provides a primer on our driving issues today: free expression and academic freedom, the grounds of knowledge making, and the demands of critical social engagement in a world of interactively spiraling authoritarianism and repression. A probing analysis to think with.
Policing Higher Education brings an international perspective to contemporary debates about academic freedom. In response to attacks on both scholarship and constitutional democracy, Darian-Smith urges us to define and defend academic freedom as an ethical practice founded on social responsibility. This ambitious work will be essential reading for anyone concerned about the future of higher education in the US and around the world.
Policing Higher Education moves beyond the limitations of domestically focused analyses to place academic freedom in a global context. Connecting the dots between pressures on academic freedom, antidemocracy movements, and global economic powers, it gives readers indispensable tools for expanded understanding and action across disciplinary borders, institutions, and nation-states.
In a time of severe ideological attacks on academic freedom and on higher education in general, books such as Policing Higher Education are even more necessary. Eve Darian-Smith's volume needs to be widely read and discussed by anyone who cares about what is happening to higher education today.
Both a passionate manifesto and fact-based academic account, Policing Higher Education places the attacks on academic freedom and autonomy in the US in a global perspective and relates them to the importance of social responsibility for higher education.
Surveying the growing challenges in the US, including the corporate capture of universities, increased policing activities on university grounds, and the banning of so-called controversial topics, Darian-Smith makes a compelling case for society to defend the public mission of universities. This book shows a way forward.
Scholars deeply desire the freedoms to learn, teach, investigate, and publish and to cooperate with each other in doing so. Unless they can practice truth and the common good in the public sphere, and unless governments everywhere respect their rights and listen to what they say, we cannot meet the climate-nature emergency and the other great challenges we face.
Policing Higher Education gives us hope for why we should care about what is happening in our universities and for how we can build resilience and momentum for justice through difficult conversations and coalitions. A must-read for all those engaged with higher education and for those who care about the state of the world.
Eve Darian-Smith has produced a book of seminal importance. She offers a brilliant defense of the humanities, academic freedom, and scholars as critically engaged intellectuals. In addition, she integrates history, criticism, and a discourse of resistance and hope into essential reading for anyone concerned about the relationship between education and democracy. This book could not have appeared at a more crucial time.
It is tempting to see Ron DeSantis's ransacking of New College, Christopher Rufo's attack on critical race theory, and Texas's defunding of offices for diversity, equity, and inclusion as exceptional acts of right-wing overreach. Darian-Smith, however, provides the much-needed tools to situate these attacks as local iterations of the creeping authoritarianism and societal fascisms spreading around the world. Defenders of democracy and academic freedom must enter the existential fight ahead with the clear analysis that Darian-Smith provides.
Eve Darian-Smith has produced a fresh work of vital importance for those who care about American and global democracy. This is a must-read book not only for new and seasoned scholars alike but for anyone concerned about backsliding democracies. What's especially original is the manner in which Darian-Smith foregrounds the link between rising antidemocracy and recent declines in academic freedom. The best part is that she provides a road map for fighting back!
About
Book Details
Release Date
Publication Date
Status
Preorder
Trim Size
5
x 8
Pages
336
ISBN
9781421451312
Illustration Description
13 b&w photos, 4 b&w illus.
Series
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Introduction
1. Intersecting Global Trends: Rising Antidemocracy, Declining Academic Freedom
2. The Politics of Knowledge Production
3. Classrooms as Global Battlegrounds
4. Higher
List of Figures
Preface
Introduction
1. Intersecting Global Trends: Rising Antidemocracy, Declining Academic Freedom
2. The Politics of Knowledge Production
3. Classrooms as Global Battlegrounds
4. Higher Education and Democratic Dreams
5. Weaponizing Universities in the 21st Century
6. Fighting Back: Revisioning Higher Education
Acknowledgements
Appendix A: PEN America—Principles on Campus Free Speech
References
Index
