Afterword

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview summary of the issues, approaches, and the findings of this book. It points to further considerations to keep in mind in any attempt to create a better future. It reminds the reader of the situation of Socrates’ death and his dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” It also asks that academics and the institutions they work for and help create keep their eyes on both idealism and ideals since so much now shakes them. The sieges on academic freedom and the scope of how they are examined here are identified. Within a diverse but narrow range of emphases, each chapter employs empirical detail to flesh out the structural, organizational, and sometimes unanticipated consequences that combine to create the problem. A vocabulary of thematic terms is laid out to delineate their analysis. “Academic capitalism” is articulated as a descriptor of the overall organizational culture that covers most examples. “Stressors” are policies and practices that work to limit or deny academic freedom. “Indicators” show the relative presence, absence, denial, or general health of academic freedom. It is noted that possible ways out of current constraining trends in the operating system of higher education need not completely ignore or avoid its current mainstreaming of purely practical or strictly economic concerns; such emphases should properly mark only secondary foci of concern below that of the values of education itself and these are impulses that need to be carefully managed. Even that which is considered “sacred” by a society is usually not far distant from the power of money. Academic life is metaphorically imagined as a nest of various strands that research and analysis can unravel for examination; specific individual cases within different nests provide testimony to the human dramas that result when freedoms are challenged. While no clear solutions are offered, the passions involved in these dramas are presented as sources of a kind of renewable energy of the human spirit. This energy is seen in a list of some of the world’s most valuable and enduring books that were written by their authors while in prison.