Cary Nelson's Presentation on Academic Freedom in the Corporate University

The next meeting of the ICR's project on Communications, Culture, and Policy, funded by the Ford Foundation, will be held on Friday, April 16, at 1:30 p.m. in the Peterson Conference Room (231 Gregory Hall). The very distinguished speaker will be Cary Nelson, Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at UIUC. The title of his talk is: "Surveillance on Campus: Academic Freedom in the Corporate University in the Security State."

ABSTRACT The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) established the Special Committee on Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis on the first anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001. The committee was charged with assessing risks to academic freedom and free inquiry posed by the nation's response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Several imperatives led to the creation of the committee. Among them, still-vivid memories of the McCarthy era yielded an awareness of the degree of vigilance needed to avert a recurrence of the excesses of that time: the sweeping claims of threats to national security, the rampant accusations of guilt by association, and the unchecked powers of law-enforcement agencies. Freedom of inquiry and the open exchange of ideas are crucial to the nation's security, and the nation's security and well-being are damaged by practices that discourage or impair freedom, including academic freedom. In light of the current political climate in the USA, Professor Nelson argues that academics need to be able to debate these issues and must begin preparing for a "worst case scenario." Academic freedom must include protection for faculty members' freedom of speech in the context of heightened surveillance and security in all kinds of settings.

Background Reading:

Report of an AAUP Special Committee (2003): "Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis."

Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the English Department he teaches courses on modern poetry and on such theories of interpretation as cultural studies, feminism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and marxism. He is the author or editor of 23 books and over 100 articles. Cary was born in 1946 and grew up in Philadelphia and Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He was active in the anti-war movement in the 1960s and served as a draft counselor during the Vietnam War. He received his B.A. at Antioch College in Ohio and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in New York. Professor Nelson has taught at UIUC since the fall of 1970. His research interests include the modern poetry canon, the preservation of the cultural heritage of the American Left, and the politics of higher education. He discovered and published Edwin Rolfe's anti-McCarthy poems and coedited Madrid 1937, a massive collection of letters written home by American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. Cary edited the first comprehensive anthology of modern American poetry for Oxford University Press. He has also written about contemporary topics like political correctness, hate speech regulations, academic unionization, and the financial crisis in higher education. Cary Nelson is a Vice President of the American Association of University Professors, serves on the Executive Committee of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, and has been a member of the Executive Council of the Modern Languages Association. Among his most recent publications are: Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (2001), and The Wound and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Spanish Civil War (2002). Forthcoming: Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy (2004).