Historicizing Academic Freedom

Andre Drainville gives a provocative and necessary intervention into discussions of academic freedom, showing its connection to the evolving social relations of knowledge and power over the last thousand years. Rather than assuming that academic freedom is an established and well-defined, if threatened, right, Drainville historicizes the concept, understanding scholarly struggles for intellectual autonomy as part of the disputed, variously situated, processes of world ordering. Tracing instances of the freedom to think through the longue duree, he sets out a materialist history of the evolving relations between economic and social orders and the conditions of knowledge production from 12th century China to contemporary US campuses.

In order to resituate debates about academic freedom within broader discussions of global forms of power and counter-power, the book draws on black existentialism, English labor history, critical political economy; French structuralist state theory; theories of global patriarchy; structural anthropology; postcolonial theory. Focussing on the little tradition of scholarly action, the book discusses two dozen moments in the development of the social relations of knowledge production that are not typically rendered as part of the (apparently) coherent and continuous dominant discourse of academic freedom. These include the restoration of the White Deer Grotto academy in Southern Song China (1179-1181), the Wartburg book burning (1817), university occupations in the 1960s, and Palestinian solidarity encampments on American campuses (2024). In four parts, More than Academic considers pre-capitalist world economies (12th and 13th centuries), the formation of modern capitalism (focusing on the 19th and early 20th centuries), the post-World War 2 world ordering, and the contemporary 'new knowledge economy'. In each case, Drainville highlights how distinct structures of world order opened up, or narrowed, possibilities for scholars to institute self-regulated relations of knowledge production and how, above and beyond circumstantial considerations, scholars have time and again struggled for autonomy and indeterminacy.

Rich in detail yet theoretically sophisticated, this book is an indispensable resource for those concerned with academic freedom and intellectual autonomy, historically and in the new knowledge economy.