Brave Speech: On Academic Freedom

"We know American violence, power, and success. Is the university prepared to teach us something new?” — June Jordan, 1969

In the spring of 2025, college campuses passed principles in support of academic freedom, calling upon university administrators to “[p]ublicly support faculty under attack and affirm their commitment to defending academic freedom.”  But what does it mean to defend academic freedom and for whom? How do we do so in the face of democratic backslide? And what does this mean in the university system already premised fundamentally upon extraction, tokenization, co-optation, and/or exclusion?

This engaged-research course interrogates the contested meanings of “academic freedom,” drawing together a multiplicity of perspectives and disciplines (history, law, political science, cultural studies, American studies, Black studies, philosophy, critical university studies etc.).  Together, we will ask: Who defines what it is acceptable to think, learn, know, and teach on college campuses? How has this shifted across history and political circumstances? How do we contend with these questions from our current historical juncture?

Throughout the course, we do not take all forms of speech to be commensurate. Rather, we draw from the distinction made by constitutional law scholar Mary Anne Franks between “brave speech,” meant to speak truth to power and “reckless speech,” which deliberately benefits the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable. Nor do we engage these questions in the abstract. Instead, we locate ourselves as students and scholars of particular and differing social locations, histories, and relationships to variegated knowledges in time(s) and place(s).

Ultimately, we ask what it means for communities to lay claim on knowledge production as a creative life giving, affirming, and sustaining practice. We take seriously June Jordan’s 1969 question about the promises and limits of the university as a site that enables us to teach and learn “something new.” Throughout, students will engage in community based research and artistic practice intended to push the bounds of knowledge in exercise of the fundamental collective right to lay claim upon the power of knowing, thinking, and expression.