Civility, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in Higher Education

Civility, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in Higher Education: Faculty on the Margins represents a multidisciplinary approach, deploying different theoretical, methodological, sociological, political, and creative perspectives to articulate the stakes of civility for marginalized faculty within the landscape of higher education.
How has the discourse on civility and free speech within academia become a systemic and oppressive form of silencing, suppressing, or eradicating marginal voices? What are some overt and covert ways in which institutions are using the logic of civility to control faculty uprising against the increasingly corporate-controlled landscape of higher education? This collection of essays examines the continuum between the post-9/11 and the post-Trump era backlashes. It details the organized retaliations against those in academia whose views and scholarships articulate their discontents against the U.S.-led "War on Terror." It contests the rise of White supremacy, Trump's Muslim ban, anti-immigrant and racist government policies and rhetoric, and those who support the Boycott and Divestment Sanctions movements within the corporatized universities.
All of these new and original essays shed light and further the debate on the various modes of civility that have become politicized within the U.S. academy. It will have a broad appeal to a cross section of national and international academics, activist scholars, social justice educators and researchers in the field of higher education.

Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt is Edith Green Distinguished Professor and teaches in the Department of English and Gender Studies at Linfield University in Oregon. She is the author of The Postcolonial Citizen: The Intellectual Migrant (2010) and serves as the editor for Inside Higher Ed's column "Conditionally Accepted." Kakali Bhattacharya is an award-winning professor at University of Florida housed in Research, Evaluation, and Measurement Program. She is the 2018 winner of AERA's Mid-Career Scholar of Color Award. Her co-authored text with Kent Gillen, Power, Race, and Higher Education: A Cross-Cultural Parallel Narrative has won a 2017 Outstanding Publication Award from AERA (SIG 168) and a 2018 Outstanding Book Award from the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.

Introduction; Part I. Black Bodies: Weaponizing the Personal 1. American Perversions or: The Incredibly Twisted, Horribly True Story of How I Got Educated in the Academy 2. A History of White Violence Tells Us Attacks on Black Academics are Not Ending (I Know Because it Happened to Me) 3. No Actual Bodies Needed or "Girl. what are You Looking At?": The Looking and Seeing of Time and Space in Ken Gonzales-Day's Shadowlands as a Disruption of Normalized U.S. American Institutionalized Racial Violence Against Brown and Black Bodies; Part II. Civility, Repression, and Academic Freedom: Bodies on the Line 4. Universities, Civility, and Repression in the Age of New Media: Surveillance Capital and Resistance 5. On the Social Epistemology of Academic Freedom 6. The Rhetoric of Civility as Soft Repression 7. What Did We Provoke? BIPOC/WOC Calling Out White Supremacy in the Academy; Part III. Politics of Permissibility and Absurdity: Narratives of Civility 8. Civility and the Bounds of the Permissible: Scholars of Color Embodying the Very Social-Political Dynamics at the Heart of their Critiques 9. The "F" Bomb and the "R" Word 10. Chronicles Exploring Hegemonic Civility and the Evisceration of Academic Freedom for Critical Womyn of Color 11. Civility as Absurdity: Absurdity as Civility in Higher Education; Afterword: The Civility-Incivility Paradox