Academic. Not leading to a decision; unpractical; theoretical, formal, or conventional. Active. Opposed to contemplative or speculative: Given to outward action rather than inward contemplation or speculation; practical; esp. with ‘life.’
–Oxford English Dictionary

As tendentious as these definitions are, they reference the colliding conceptions from which academic activism issues. The often reductive contrast between theory and practice, thinking and doing, has been used to regulate what is admissible as campus politics as if it were apparent in advance which actions where insufficiently imbued with reflection and which worldly commitments compromised disciplinary or institutional loyalty. Suffice to say that what constitutes the boundary between activity appropriately inside and outside the academy has always been anxiously freighted. The pursuit of practically engaged knowledge has been constituted in a taut exchange with the very powers it has been called upon to serve–persistently, but not exclusively those of the state, of industry, and of professional associations (Newfield, Readings, Chomsky, Starr). In the lineage of the Western university, degrees of critical separation from these authorities were hard fought and conceived of as autonomy or academic freedom (Kant). The emergent disciplinary formations of the late nineteenth century made activist claims for equality within a self-designated professional cohort under the rubric of peer review. This compact, advanced by the Association of American University Professors ceded to administrators institutional control in exchange for non-interference with the pursuit of specialized knowledge–even if manifest as political speech (AAUP, Post, Thelin) to those elevated to the peerage through conferral of tenure.

In considerations of the professions, higher education and the professoriate, there has been widespread concern that the historic project of autonomy that previous manifestations of activism and self-organization had generated has run its course (Burgan, Plater, Derber, Friedson) . There has also been considerable effort dedicated to reversing the erosion of these various freedoms (Nelson and Watt, Bérubé, Schueller and Dawson). Certainly there is much to be gained by doing so. But another palette of academic activism responds to the very different forces of worldliness apparent in higher education today (edufactory, workplace, Featherstone, Groeneveld, Naples and Steck). Recognizing a reconfiguration between what is inside and outside the academy may yield a very different valuation of what counts as activism, where it issues from, and how we might pursue its various trajectories. Doing so requires some rethinking of the current conjuncture of government authority, industrial interest, and professional formation so as to map the potentialities of activism in our midst.

Conventional reports of campus political life shuttle between hyperbolic claims of activist takeovers and tranquil assertions that “outward action” among faculty has run its course and we can now count upon moderate, balanced, and circumspect conduct from the denizens of higher education. A recent New York Times article proclaimed, “The ‘60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire” and surmises that “With previous battles already settled, like the creation of women’s and ethnic studies departments, moderation can be found at both ends of the political spectrum” (Cohen). This would certainly come as news to Ward Churchill and Norman Finkelstein whose writings and utterances thoroughly unsettled those around them and led to dismissals (Abraham, Leupp). While the expressions and occasions of radicalism continue to change, what is retiring is the primacy of faculty interests in shaping the institution, a phenomenon that sociologists Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, referred to in their 1968 study as an “academic revolution.” Faculty influence was of a piece with the rise to power of what Barbara and John Ehrenreich would, writing in the seventies, call professional-managerial class. Alas, developments were not so one-sided. During the 1970s, cascades of militancy, from labor unions whose strike activity was peaking, an expanding range of social movements advancing equality and difference (whose university front promulgated the above mentioned departments), and decolonization movements resulting in third world revolutions, where meeting a potent reaction formation that would rework the social compact within the United States and unleash aggressive proxy wars abroad (Harvey, Klein, Mamdani). The enclosure of professional autonomy in concert with knowledge-making assuming the scale of an economy, shared with its industrial antecedents a rapid loss of old ways as professional expertise and pervasive managerialism were pressed together in service–ministering one another as they might tend themselves.