Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom

Joan Wallach Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her books include Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996); The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011); Sex and Secularism (2017), and Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia, anniversary edition, 2017).Joan Wallach Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Her books include Sex and Secularism (2017) and Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia, thirtieth anniversary edition, 2018). She is a long-standing member of the American Association of University Professors Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

Carolyn M. Rouse, coauthor of Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment:
Joan Scott’s incisive account of the numerous assaults on academic freedom is a timely intervention in the so-called free speech debates. Scott reminds us that the search for truth requires freedom on the part of experts to challenge prior knowledge and established theories. The forces arrayed against academic freedom, she reminds us, would love to do away with public education altogether,which in any functioning democracy is simply unacceptable.

Hank Reichman, chair of the American Association of University Professors Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure:
For decades, Joan Scott has been a passionate and thoughtful advocate for academic freedom. In these penetrating essays, she explores the often subtle tensions between free inquiry and disciplinary authority, critique and orthodoxy, disruption and civility, as well as the distinctions and interplay between academic freedom and freedom of speech, which underpin academic freedom as an ethical practice essential to the academy's future.

Michael Bérubé, author of author of What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education:
Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom is brilliant and written with admirable clarity and style. This book could not be more timely or important.