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  • Academic Freedom as Intellectual Property:When Collegiality Confronts the Standardization Movement
  • David B. Downing (bio)

One ground of my argument concerns an area of professional life for which virtually no faculty member is trained: collegiality. I mean by this term a cluster of issues relevant to the public management of professional life.

(107)
—Lauren Berlant

The contest for the meaning of academic freedom is taking place on shifting ground according to novel rules . . . the conflation of property rights and 'academic rights' participates in a set of discourses which offer to replace the hierarchies of the academy with the inequalities of the free market, discourses in which freedom can only be understood to mean 'individual free enterprise.'

—Corynne McSherry

A strange reversal seems to have affected some quarters of life in higher education: collegiality has become a bad word. The semantic (and political) shift is just one more sign of the sweeping economic restructuring of the academy when private capital runs deeper into the shrinking public domain once represented by the traditional "social trustee "mission" (Brint 10) of university teaching and research. And the reversal, or betrayal, has a longer history than we might otherwise imagine. The gist of it is that collegiality has too often become a more institutionally sanctioned mask for discrimination rather than an ethos of respect for our differences. The striking thing is that until recently collegiality may have been the most common non-contractual feature of work in higher education even though it also certainly seems to be the case that there never has been much "explicit pedagogy about the contradictions and complexities of institutional life" (Berlant 108). Nor, of course, has there ever been any idyllic past where we were all collegial to each other, so it is clearly not a case of recovering some academic Eden where colleagues have in good faith lived up to the [End Page 56] unspecified ethos implied by our presumed openness to collegial differences of opinion. However often collegiality may have been invoked as a distinct positive attribute of academic life, in these times of economic downsizing, the idealized collegial ethos of respect for our peers may have little effect to mitigate the painful power struggles experienced by those most vulnerable to the flex labor pressures of the Education Management Organization (EMO, Bousquet, Noble). Unless, that is, collegiality can be more powerfully re-scripted into an activist defense of freedom and autonomy for a wider range of educational tasks.

Collegiality has been historically linked to academic freedom. The implicit premise seemed to be that we had to be "free" to be collegial: free to pursue truth and knowledge as liberal subjects seeking our own self-development, and free to manage our own time with respect to the autonomy granted our teaching and research efforts. To this extent, collegiality was a non-contractual but widely shared value of respecting those freedoms among our many different colleagues. "Faculty proclaimed their operating principles of collegiality and consent, their research pursued in a 'community of scholars,' and their teaching as a 'high calling'" (Newfield 80). Respectful behavior towards one's colleagues (in rudimentary ways, a kind of live and let live attitude) was not just a bonus value, but an operational principle keyed to the pivotal function of higher education in modern society: the protection of a public domain where ideas could be openly expressed, shared, and circulated relatively free of capital interests and property laws. As Corynne McSherry explains, "the status that the university gained from its position in the public domain was precisely what would ultimately make it useful to capital. A permanent space of nonproperty was created, a 'knowledge commons' that could legitimate private property in expression and invention—remembering that the (re)creation of a private domain of intangibles was and is justified by the existence of a public domain—and provide new exploitable resources" (54).

Of course, the boundary between public and private has always been a contestable space, and the knowledge produced and exchanged in the university is most often a boundary object signaling, distinguishing, and justifying the borders between public and private uses of that knowledge. Indeed, "the line between academy and capital was less a...

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