What remains of the utopian promise of the free production and dissemination of knowledge once held by the American university? As the politics of austerity, spiraling tuition fees, privatization, and political repression have ravished our cherished institutions of learning over the last 50 years, the university now resembles more an Althusserian fever-dream than a space of real education. Oriented around academic freedom and anchored in the question of Palestine as a crucial case study, this panel explores the limitations on knowledge-production now imposed on universities both internally and externally; the work that faculty members, AAUP chapters, and unions are doing to defend academic freedom from within; and alternative, community-based spaces of public education.

• Jennifer Ruth is a Professor in the School of Film at Portland State University. She is an editor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom and the director, with Jan Haaken, of the film The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests? which can be screened through Watermelon Pictures, Kanopy, and Collective Eye. She organizes with AAUP and Coalition for Action in Higher Ed.
• Karim Mattar is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  He works at the intersection of Palestine studies, the humanities, and higher education, and is currently working on a monograph titled Writing the Catastrophe: Trauma and Responsibility Across Generations.  A dedicated organizer, he is a members of the Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE) Steering Committee and co-chair of CAHE’s Palestine Caucus.  He currently serves as Faculty Editor of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom, and is preparing a special issue on the theme of “Academic Freedom as a Practice of Democracy.

This session is a part of the larger Jubilee School: College for All series.