It would have been conventional to have begun an essay on academic freedom by listing the blatant attempts by the Right to use 9/11 as a pretext for curbing political dissent in academia. After all, Lynne Cheney’s American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), Daniel Pipes’s Campus Watch, David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights, Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), and the David Project sprang into existence shortly after 9/11, and inquisitions geared toward firing subversive faculty such as Ward Churchill are still in process as we write this. But although these blatant encroachments on academia are undeniable and occasion this special issue, the rhetoric of contemporary apocalypse obfuscates the importance historically attached to the university both as a site of cultural, economic, and political reproduction and as a vehicle of social change. Writing in response to right-wing attacks on what was dubbed “political correctness,” Martha Nussbaum saw universities as cultivating humanity and world citizenship through the liberal educational tradition of Socratic questioning and critical inquiry.1 Comparing U.S. universities to those abroad, Nussbaum argued, “In most nations students enter a university to pursue a single subject, and that is all they study. The idea of a ‘liberal education’ — a higher education that is a cultivation of the whole human being for the functions of citizenship and life generally — has been taken up most fully in the United States.”2 The mission of the university is thus to produce citizens who can transcend the dogmas of the nation-state; and yet, ironically, Nussbaum constructs her argument through a narrative of exceptional national education. In the heyday of the Cold War, when twenty-five presidents of America’s most prestigious universities released a policy statement on academic freedom, the prevailing conception of the role of universities in the nation was what John Guillory would associate with school culture — projecting an imaginary cultural unity never coincident with the messy culture of the nation-state.3 The document declared that American universities “have equipped our people with the varied skills and sciences essential to the development of a pioneer country. They have imparted the shape and coherence of the American nation to formless immigrant groups. American ideals have been strengthened, the great cultural tradition of the West has been broadened, and enriched by their teaching and example.”4 Our point is that both liberal reformers and craven administrators have viewed universities as crucial in the formation of a citizenry compliant with dominant conceptions of national identity. Little wonder, then, that in times of crisis, there are renewed calls for universities to simply act as functionaries of the military-industrial complex, as ideological state apparatuses maintaining the race, class, and gender status quo, and as conduits of doctrinaire nationalism.
