Free Speech, Political Correctness and the Liberal University: Claiming a Proper Space for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the Academy (79407)
Session Chair: Linda Schwartz
Sunday, 14 July 2024 15:25
Session: Session 4
Room: G09 (Ground)
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
Universities have become contested spaces where those who defend the right to free speech are confronted by various voices that demand representation in language and forms of visibility that have been historically suppressed across the academy. Far from Cardinal Newman's notion or "idea of a [liberal] university" (1925), oppositional forces both claim to be acting from the margins of academic discourses; each declares the other dominates the University’s agenda to the detriment of the institution. But neither articulates a position that adequately captures or situates complex tensions that play along the lines of dominant cultural narratives.
Terry Eagleton (2003) has observed that there have been no significant political or ideological forces of currency on a revolutionary scale that have shaped the academy since the cultural upheaval of the 1970s revolutions that demanded an end to modernist meta-narratives with critical, creative inquiry that called those narratives and the ideologies that grounded them into question. Eagleton contends that we have entered a post-revolutionary malaise in the academy: in the long wake of the postmodern turn, there is no meaningful currency or space for vigorous debate and the academy is paralyzed and lacks purpose.
What happens to scholarship "after theory"? Is there a space for dialogical practices in the academy? Other scholars (Côté and Allahar, 2011; Bok, 2017; Critchley, 2010) note that previously marginalized voices have become the dominant voices that now control and limit perspectives that are radically different from their own. Is this a satisfactory re-framing of the current cultural narrative?
Authors:
Linda Schwartz, Booth University College, Canada
About the Presenter(s)
Dr Linda Schwartz is a Independent Scholar at Ambrose University in Canada
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