Gaza and the Unsettling Equality of Academic Freedom

Abstract In June 2024, the University of Minnesota withdrew its offer of appointment to Professor Raz Segal to head the university's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Drawing on the Segal case, this essay offers a conceptual and philosophical history of academic freedom especially in US universities. What makes the principle of academic freedom so charged is that it is not only the institutional manifestation of the very principle of the modern university but also the intimation of an equality very different from the equality involved in free speech. Attending especially to these two aspects of the principle of academic freedom, the essay traces the differences and relations between four discourses around it: the liberal-professional, which emphasizes the role of the university as a public space separate from action; the neoliberal, which denies the publicness of the university and makes education a private activity; the neoconservative, which cannot allow for education, even as a private activity if it conflicts with the neoconservative vision of society; and the egalitarian-minor, which works with a more expansive notion of the public and insists that the university also has a responsibility to those marginalized both within the university and within society.