Privilege, platforms, and power: uses and abuses of academic freedom

Academic freedom is critical to knowledge production, yet like other forms of freedom of speech, it must be limited where it infringes on other rights or causes serious harm. In this chapter I describe the limits of academic freedom, taking as a case study Steven Salaita’s firing over tweets about Israeli state violence. In Salaita’s case and others, the concept of “civility” was deployed to limit academic freedom, yet was not defined or defended, leaving university administrators able to wield the concept to impose limitations which serve other interests. I describe how a rigorously-defined version of civility might be helpful in understanding the objectives and limitations of academic speech.