Revolution Archives - Steve Salaita

The Inhumanity of Academic Freedom

A transcript of the 2019 TB Davie Memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town, delivered August 7, 2019.

I begin with a straightforward proposition: academic freedom is inhumane. Its inhumanity isn’t of the physical, legal, or intellectual variety. Even at its best, academic freedom is capable of transforming human beings into instruments of bureaucracy. It is inhumane as an ontological category. It cannot provide the very artifact it promises: freedom. To become practicable, academic freedom requires textual boundaries. Under this sort of regime, freedom is merely academic.

Palestine in the Revolutionary Imagination

Finding Palestine among the disinherited.

Beirut’s corniche is a terrific place to contemplate the immovable and the ephemeral. The seaside walkway is one of the city’s few remaining public spaces and the only place where servitude doesn’t divide rich and poor. Tourists mingle among locals, many of them Syrian and Palestinian, and on lucky days entertainment will include oddball breakdancers, daredevil divers, and somebody playing an oud plugged into an amplifier. On a nice Sunday, which in the Eastern Mediterranean is usually a weekly occurrence, crowds are so thick (with pedestrians strolling in bike lanes and bikes weaving through pedestrians) that walking briskly is impossible.