“The Trouble with Thinking”: Threatened Scholars and Supporters Respond to Challenges to Academic Freedom
Homa Hoodfar, Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Concordia University (left) and Asli Vatansever, Peace Academic from Turkey, gave keynote addresses at the Threatened Scholars Integration Initiative conference in Berlin on “The Trouble with Thinking: Transnational Dialogues on Academic Freedom.”
Over a daylong exchange, scholars forced to leave their countries due to academic repression shared their stories with academics working within threatened scholar support organizations as both groups sought to find new approaches for meeting the challenges they face.
“A Transnational, Shared Task”
During their introductions, conference organizers Kerry Bystrom, Associate Professor of English and Human Rights at Bard College Berlin and Aysuda Kölemen, also of Bard College Berlin, started from the acknowledgment that threats to academic freedom once seemed confined to countries in Central and Eastern Europe and some Global Majority nations. But a more recent surge in populist and governments across Europe and North America alongside world events has changed that paradigm, they said, with scientists and scholars facing attacks in Iran, Turkey, Russia, North Macedonia, Poland, Hungary, Germany, and the US. As governments and other powerful social forces struggle to capture political power in these places, the attacks are manifesting as censorship and policy changes and in some places as actual repressive force, the organizers said.
Bystrom said “Today I would suggest it is impossible to picture the world as divided into zones of danger and safety, with an abyss between them. There is rather a continuum of openness and closure.” In response, “The defense of academic freedom is a transnational, shared task,” she said.
Bystrom pointed out that in the past few years, academics and rights defenders on the political right and left have converged on the importance of academic freedom. She went on to call for a “shared recognition” among higher education institutions that they must come together to confront difficult problems “in ways that center respect and dignity.”
“Not Just an Invention of the West”
In her keynote address on “Building a Global Academic Community: The Urgency of an International Convention,” Homa Hoodfar, a Canadian-Iranian sociocultural anthropologist and Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Concordia University, discussed the state of legal infrastructure in support of academic freedom.
In 2016, Hoodfar was indicted and imprisoned in Iran on charges of "dabbling in feminism and security matters." As an inmate, she found herself educating her interrogators on the concept of academic freedom, which she said made her realize the need for building an international convention on the issue.
After being released, Hoodfar discovered that creators of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had drafted protocols on academic freedom but never included them in their pivotal convention adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. She then engaged in a series of talks on the importance of mobilizing for recognition of academic freedom as a universal right and actively affirming the global history of academic freedom and promoting it as a potential international policy guideline. Calling on scholars to act collectively, using various existing international documents and scholarly debate, she also sought to suggest a working definition of academic freedom that legal and political advocates across the globe could implement.
“We need to recall and represent historical evidence to encourage other nations to see academic freedom not just as an invention of the West but also something in which they have a share,” said Hoodfar. She also acknowledged that while the recent efforts in creating the current Academic Freedom Index provide a comprehensive assessment of the right to pursue knowledge in 179 countries and territories, further infrastructure was needed to support academic freedom and legitimize the right to think and question norms.
Thomas Keenan, Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College, pointed out the crucial distinction between the theory of academic freedom and the practice of scholar defense. He upheld Hoodfar’s point that human rights declarations can serve as useful catalysts, giving advocates legitimacy as they protest rights infringements in various countries and seek to liberate detainees.
Responding to Current Escalating Threats
Jennifer Ruth, Professor of Film and Associate Dean of the College of the Arts at Portland State University, provided the example of current crackdowns on pro-Palestine campus protests in the US leading to a climate where “Faculty and students everywhere in the United States are under a regime of repression that rivals or exceeds that which existed during the McCarthy era.”
She went on to quote political philosopher Judith Butler, who says in The Palestine Exception: What's at Stake in the Campus Protests?, a documentary co-directed by Ruth, that "Many of the principles that we thought were more or less stable in academic communities -- academic freedom, freedom to assemble -- have become quite frail and we've seen many university administrators treat students in particular as if they were criminals or a threat to academic life."
Ruth noted that after the war on Gaza started, right-wing politicians, who had been campaigning to delegitimize higher education with significant success in some states during the previous years, used the protests on campuses as an opportunity to escalate their efforts. With that shift, university presidents have been grilled before Congress and boards of trustees “became activated across the country, aggressively exercising and publicly performing their control over university presidents and universities.”
Other panelists explored topics including the possibilities of speaking freely about Palestine in Germany, pressure tactics used by the Turkish government to purge universities, the importance of building universities in exile to sustain space for free thought, and questions of direct versus self-censorship.
The conference's second keynote speaker, Asli Vatansever, a labor sociologist and Peace Academic from Turkey, called to broaden understandings of academic freedom from "the absence of overt oppression, censorship or direct intervention" to consider its economic requirements. She noted the need to recognize the “tricky relationship between job security and academic freedom,” suggesting that precarity itself, in the widespread condition of adjunct labor which defines the Western academy, makes true academic freedom difficult.
In the light of shifting political dynamics across the globe, speakers were eager to share their observations of the various forces actively challenging, or fully ignoring, the recognition of academic freedom as a transnational human right. As a means of responding, they exchanged a multitude of approaches and apparatuses that could be implemented to help safeguard it.
Post Date: 12-06-2024