Le poids de la peur : l'érosion silencieuse de la liberté académique. traduction du titre en anglais : The Weight of...

Publié par siel sur 29 Mars 2025, 14:51pm

Catégories : #CULTURE, #PEUPLE sans mémoire..., #DUVALIER

... Fear: The Silent Erosion of Academic Freedom

By Samyuktha Kannan

There was a time when the university was imagined as a space of intellectual risk, where thought could move freely, unrestricted by the anxieties of power or professional survival. That time is long gone. Today, for students and faculty alike, the act of writing – of producing knowledge, of articulating critique—is suffused with fear. Not the productive fear that accompanies intellectual rigor, but the dull ache and exhausting fear of consequence. What will this essay, this paper, this published article mean for my future? Will it cost me a job? A fellowship? A visa? Will it mark me, quietly and irrevocably, as a threat? I remember drafting an abstract for a Marxist conference in Berlin, excited by the possibility of engaging with ideas beyond the sanitized limits of our classrooms. It was a small act – writing a 300-word abstract and submitting – but one that felt, for once, intellectually honest. A faculty member, someone I trusted, pulled me aside. Their warning was not unkind. It was pragmatic, even protective: “You have postgrad applications coming up in a few months. Why invite the wrong kind of attention?” I nodded, understanding what was left unsaid. A line on my CV, a question in an admissions interview, an invisible mark against my name – were risks worth taking? The abstract was never sent. But I realised my mistake a day too late.

The neoliberal university does not need overt censorship; it has perfected the art of silent control. It is not that one is explicitly told what cannot be written—it is that over time, one simply learns what is too dangerous to say. Controversial words disappear from syllabi. Faculty stop assigning texts that might provoke discomfort in the wrong quarters. Students internalize the limits of acceptable inquiry, sculpting their research to fit within an increasingly narrow, apolitical frame. And so, without official prohibitions, entire fields of thought shrink. The range of permissible discourse is not policed through direct suppression but through precarity – through the quiet, unspoken understanding that dissent has consequences.

For many, this fear is not abstract. It is deeply personal, woven into the reality of insecure contracts, shrinking academic jobs, and the quiet but ruthless surveillance of CVs and publication records. A single article, a single critique in the wrong place, can close doors before they even open. In a system where everything – from research funding to job prospects – depends on demonstrating compliance, the most rational choice is silence. And so the university, once imagined as a site of knowledge production, becomes instead a space of careful omission, where what is not written, not spoken, not thought, tells us more than what remains.

The Violence of Silencing: When Ideas Become Personal

At its core, academia is not just a site of learning – it is a space where ideologies collide, evolve, and take form. Disciplines are not built on neutral facts but on contestations, on the ability to question, challenge, and defend ideas. Every field, from history to law, from literature to political theory, is shaped by the ideological commitments of those who inhabit it. To study is not just to accumulate knowledge; it is to position oneself within a larger intellectual and political tradition. And for many scholars, especially those engaged in critical, radical, or anti-establishment thought, this positioning is not merely academic – it is deeply personal. To curb discourse is not just to control what can be said, it is to suffocate the intellectual life of a scholar who is committed to their politics. The violence of this is not always visible, but it is relentless. It is in the quiet revisions of a research proposal to remove a politically charged term. It is in the hesitation before citing a scholar whose work has been deemed controversial. It is in the exhaustion of constantly assessing whether a thought is “safe” enough to articulate. Over time, this does not just limit discourse – it hollows out the very purpose of intellectual inquiry. For those who enter academia not as a careerist project but as a site of political engagement, this erasure is not just professional; it is existential.

SUITE dans le lien.

https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-weight-of-fear-the-silent-erosion-of-academic-freedom/