The modern university is sustained by academic freedom; it guarantees
higher education's independence, its quality, and its success in
educating students. The need to uphold those values would seem obvious.
Yet the university is presently under siege from all corners; workers
are being exploited with paltry salaries for full-time work, politics
and profit rather than intellectual freedom govern decision-making, and
professors are being monitored for the topics they teach.
No University Is an Island offers a comprehensive account of the social,
political, and cultural forces undermining academic freedom. At once
witty and devastating, it confronts these threats with exceptional
frankness, then offers a prescription for higher education's renewal. In
an insider's account of how the primary organization for faculty members
nationwide has fought the culture wars, Cary Nelson, the current
President of the American Association of University Professors, unveils
struggles over governance and unionization and the increasing
corporatization of higher education. Peppered throughout with previously
unreported, and sometimes incendiary, higher education anecdotes, Nelson
is at his flame-throwing best. will be the benchmark against which we
measure the current definitive struggle for academic freedom.
The book calls on higher education's advocates of both the Left and the
Right to temper conviction with tolerance and focus on higher
education's real injustices. Nelson demands we stop denying teachers,
student workers, and other employees a living wage and basic rights. He
urges unions to take up the larger cause of justice. And he challenges
his own and other academic organizations to embrace greater democracy.
With broad and crucial implications for the future, No University Is an
Island will be the benchmark against which we measure the current
definitive struggle for academic freedom.
