Abstract
In preface, Dina Kiwan wrote
I have . . . reflected on whether it is the right time for me to write this book on the topic of academic freedom or whether I should wait until I retire, given the range of contentious views and controversial topics addressed throughout the interviews.
This confession tells us much about the importance of the topic of academic freedom and compels us to salute her courage of writing such book. In her Academic Freedom and the Transnational Production of Knowledge, Dina Kiwan (2023) unfolds a complex picture of stifling academic freedom beyond the divide of North/South under the effect of transnational production of knowledge, based on analysis of her interviewees’ replies mainly from four countries, the United Kingdom, the United States, Lebanon, and UAE and extensive literature review.
This book is divided into seven thematic chapters (in addition to the introduction and conclusion) which deal with the constructions of academic freedom where she shows the tension between freedom versus inclusion (Chapter 2) and this is in an ecosystem of constructions of knowledge over gatekeeping of knowledge through the disciplines and the rise of interdisciplinarity (Chapter 3). She also examines how the university as the main locus of knowledge economy does not only provide knowledge but also promotes a democratic society. Yet this is not anymore in the framework of the nation-state but in global and transitional frames (Chapter 4). She also unpacks how knowledge production has been challenged by internal and external restrictions at different levels: individual, institutional, national, and international (Chapter 5). This will generate some knowledge that will be considered ‘forbidden’ (e.g. ‘bioethics, psychology, and genetics’; ‘Palestine’; ‘gender and sexuality’; and ‘race, religion, security, and extremism’) (Chapter 6) or ‘legitimate’. She then examines the constructions of ‘legitimacy’ and particularly in relation to Fricker’s notion of ‘epistemic injustice’. (Chapter 7). Thus, academic freedom, for her, is constrained or enabled by these varying constructions of knowledge. By that, Kiwan sought to address three theoretical and interrelated challenges: ‘i) the presumed dichotomy between freedom and diversity/inclusion, ii) the relative lack of attention to the role of academic freedom in knowledge production, and iii) the lack of recognition of the transnational nature of academic freedom’. (p. 7)
In this review, I will underscore four points to which I am particularly sensitive and resonate with my ongoing work in ‘societal intolerance and academic freedom’.
First, Dina Kiwan sets the context of the transformation of the university in the neoliberal era, inducing commodification of higher education or in the language of Michael Burawoy (2015) transforming knowledge into a ‘fictitious commodity’. This is also an era of individualization and psychologization, where is it argued that the ‘infantilization’ of society and in particular students, echoing Frank Furedi, can be located within a therapeutic turn in the Western contexts. This turn is evident in the protection of legal and market-oriented interests of higher education institutions. In the same line, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (2018) clearly put it that some stress might be good for students’ resilience while coddling their minds is not.
Second, this context favors stifling academic freedom. If in the authoritarian states, the internalized ‘red lines’ by scholars are frequently referred to in relation to producing ‘sensitive’ knowledge (e.g. gender, sexuality, security, and sectarian politics), this ‘forbidden’ knowledge’ can also be found in many countries including in Liberal democracy. For her, this knowledge of ‘knowable unknown’ is deemed to be too sensitive, dangerous, or taboo to produce and knowing what knowledge not to produce. As such, forbidden knowledge entails not only content but also the structural and sociopolitical processes that operate in policing this sensitive/taboo knowledge. She proposes three dominant discourses of forbidden knowledge, which include, first, concerns relating to the misapplication of research findings, second, ‘uncomfortable truths’, and third, taboo topics.
Third, in contrast to forbidden knowledge, Kiwan examined the conception of ‘legitimate’ knowledge, where legitimacy is constructed in terms of the ‘right to authority’ and its public acceptance. For her, there are ongoing polemical debates that principles of academic freedom sit in tension with principles of diversity of inclusion. Following philosophers of education Eamonn Callan and Sigal Ben-Porath as well as Judith Butler, she construes that inclusivity is a threshold condition for academic freedom or, in effect, a ‘precondition’ for academic freedom. This preconditionality is a way to resolve the debates that have become politicized between right-wing conservative and liberal left-wing positions. Right-wing conservative responses defend arguments in favor of academic freedom, while left-wing responses perceive such arguments as disingenuous attempts to weaponize academic freedom against inclusive knowledge. Kiwan considers that the processes of forbidding knowledge and legitimizing it ‘act through the transnational processes of publishing and dissemination. This occurs at the level of the individual research trying to publish their work and/or being blocked from giving guest lectures’ (p. 137).
Four, one of the forbidden themes is gender. Dina Kiwan points out that in the UK context, the production of knowledge with alternative narratives for certain topics is seemingly blocked from both public domains as well as in academic fora. A UK Professor of Sociology describes his difficulties in publishing the highly publicized case of 2019 protests in Birmingham against the inclusion of LGBT (No Outsiders) in primary education curricula. She quotes one professor of sociology in UK, commenting on No Outsiders issue in Birmingham schools at the moment at Parkfield Primary School:
I’ve not been able to get anything published around the No Outsiders. Within newspapers, no letters to a newspaper, no offer to write something for a paper, article for The Conversation, which is like the house newspaper of universities, they were not interested in having anything on No Outsiders . . . They don’t wish to publish on this topic with a view that is other than the mainstream view of a deficit in the attitudes of Muslim parents. (Kiwan, 2023: 165)
This example is not only about what can be told and cannot be told about gender issues but also in relation to the chilling climate of Islamophobia in the United Kingdom and in Europe in general. In both European media and academic work, particularly in France, there is sometimes denial of the rampant racism against Muslims, most of whom are integrated into society but refuse to be assimilated into cultural majoritarianism. In the last decade, many social scientists in France have been using the word Islamophobia with quotation marks (i.e. ‘Islamophobia’) – as if they do not believe that it constitutes a dangerous social phenomenon that even deserves a label. (Hajjat, 2021).
Again Kiwan book is not only about the West, she underscores that the topic of gender and sexuality knowledge in the curriculum is also controversial in the UAE context. In fact, whether in the Global North or the Global South, academia, contend rightly Kiwan, becomes a place of certain conformity where some forbidden knowledge (i.e. non-orthodox research) will be pushed to the margins. The Journal of Controversial Ideas is one of these margins and where one can find many articles about gender and sexual identities.
Beyond these four points, I would like to push Kiwan’s analysis further in other two points:
First, Spivak once wrote that gender, colonial status, and class co-produce a subject that speaks but is not listened to. For Kiwan this is true particularly in some sensitive political topics: ‘The production of knowledge on Palestine in the US and UK contexts attests to experiences of a hostile working environment and constraints on academic freedom in several interviewee accounts’ (p. 164). This observation is so relevant today during the genocidal war on Gaza as we witness Western genocide-enabling silence, not only at the political level but also among the large sector of media and academia. Some scholars were sacked from their positions in Germany, the United Kingdom and Israel because of their position criticizing the Israeli war in Gaza, as in the case of the renowned and internationally respected Anthropologist Ghassan Hage. 1 Others, researchers and students were detained accused of ‘apology for terrorism’.
Building upon Kiwan’s invitation to weigh free speech with inclusion, this equation does not work well in the chilling climate of polarization. Using this equation, most of the protests against the genocidal war on Gaza become suddenly an act of antisemitism. This ‘inference’ cannot be possible without the mushrooming of ‘psychologizing’ literature on harm and trauma that mediate between free speech with inclusion. This literature often calls for restricting free speech and academic freedom by conjuring up ‘harms’ or ‘rights-violations’. The question I raise here: harms/rights-violations for whom and for what? In the era of excessive identity politics, group rights can conflict with another group’s rights and the harm cannot be without qualification. The problem is that the discussion is not anymore in ethical terms but in legal terms and you may be sued or not recruited or even sacked if you cross the line, particularly in certain political or gender opinions. The whole Kiwan book invites us to the ethical terrain of such discussion but scholars like Ann Cudd (2019) extend this to legal terrain and make the notion of harm jeopardizing critical thinking:
expressions that create a hostile environment oppose inclusion because those who are victims of this hostility are made to feel that they do not belong in the university and claim that it poses a threat to their safety and wellbeing . . . Trauma can be triggered by experiences that shatter our assumptions that the world is benevolent and meaningful, and that the self is worthy. Toxic and oppressive speech are harmful forms of speech because they shatter these assumptions about the world and the self. (Cudd, 2019: 444)
How legal case would evaluate ‘experiences that shatter our assumptions that the world is benevolent and meaningful, and that the self is worthy
The second point is also related to the equation of the tension between academic freedom and ‘Diversity, Equity and Integration’ (DEI) where both Dina Kiwan and
The last point, I wish Kiwan has extended more on the issue of no-platforming where students, faculty and university administration stop guest speakers and for me this is a very serious phenomenon reflecting a terrible societal polarization. Again some examples are related to gender identity or the intolerance to hear different versions of feminism is common in some UK universities: at Oxford University Professor Kathleen Stock, a gender-critical philosopher who was hounded out of her job at Sussex University by trans activists, needed security in order to speak at the Oxford Union and had her participation disrupted. Also, when Dr. Helen Joyce, an Irish academic and journalist, was invited to speak at Gonville & Caius College (Cambridge-UK) on 25 October 2022, its senior leaders criticized her invitation, describing her views as ‘hateful to our community’. 3 Thus, one cannot claim that preventing these speakers is important for balancing the power structure between a powerful group (e.g. conservatives in some countries) and a marginalized group as these speakers come often from the Left and have a specific understanding of feminism. As far as a talk does not generate clear hate speech (see above Brandenburg v. Ohio case’s decision of the US Supreme Court) it ought not to be banned.
In brief, this is a powerful book by a distinguished scholar who has assembled a remarkable collection of compelling reflections on academic freedom and its relationship to the production of knowledge, and to (de-)legitimized and forbidden knowledge where Kiwan de-exceptionalizes the presumed sites of liberal expression.