REVIEWS of NO UNIVERSITY IS AN ISLAND
Publisher's WEekly
No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom Cary Nelson. New York
Univ., $27.90 (300p) ISBN 978-0-8147-5859-5
Nelson (Revolutionary Memory), president of the American Association of
University Professors, tackles the state of American college campuses in a
world of identity politics and culture wars. This is an insider's book in
some ways; there's not much general public curiosity about the university's
internal mechanisms of hiring, paying, and firing, but Nelson recounts
internecine arguments (for example, his debates with Stanley Fish and David
Horowitz) with enough clarity and detail to be fully accessible and
consistently interesting. Nelson revisits exemplars of the crisis in
academic freedom (the controversies surrounding Ward Churchill and Norman
Finkelstein, among others). There's the surprising revelation of the impact
of Hurricane Katrina on major universities in New Orleans (“tenured faculty
were fired with scant notice, no due process, no stated reasons, and no
appeal except to the very administrators who terminated them”). He addresses
the issues raised by “the massive shift to contingent labor (graduate
students, part-time faculty, and full-time faculty off the tenure track) in
the academy” and argues for faculty collective bargaining, not mere
unionization. Nelson's feisty intellectual manifesto is kept rooted—and
readable—by personal recollections, felicitous turns of phrase, and
scrupulous fairness. (Mar.)
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