What Is Really at Risk: Academics or Academia?

This paper argues that the concept of “academic-at-risk” paradoxically facilitates dismissing the growing threats to academic freedoms. In the past, academic solidarity, often summarized as “finding a job elsewhere,” was sustained through personal networks among colleagues. This solidarity has recently been institutionalized, and it began to reduce the academic risk to the job security of academics threatened by governments. This reductionism obscures the reality that it is not just the individual academic whose intellectual autonomy, freedoms, and existence are threatened. Instead, the academy itself, as a specific mode of knowledge production used to confine its relationship with the university, faces existential danger. The paper suggests that maintaining academic freedoms, particularly in the social sciences, requires emphasizing the public nature of knowledge—knowledge produced at the universities is about and belongs to society—and, if necessary, considering new ways of reinstitutionalizing this principle outside of universities.