Commodity Activism

No University Is an Islandoffers a comprehensive account of the social, political, and cultural forces undermining academic freedom. At once witty and devastating, it confronts these threats with exceptional frankness, then offers a prescription for higher education's renewal. In an insider's account of how the primary organization for faculty members nationwide has fought the culture wars, Cary Nelson, the current President of the American Association of University Professors, unveils struggles over governance and unionization and the increasing corporatization of higher education. Peppered throughout with previously unreported, and sometimes incendiary, higher education anecdotes, Nelson is at his flame-throwing best. The book calls on higher education's advocates of both the Left and the Right to temper conviction with tolerance and focus on higher education's real injustices. Nelson demands we stop denying teachers, student workers, and other employees a living wage and basic rights. He urges unions to take up the larger cause of justice. And he challenges his own and other academic organizations to embrace greater democracy.With broad and crucial implications for the future,No University Is an Islandwill be the benchmark against which we measure the current definitive struggle for academic freedom.

Roopali Mukherjee is associate professor of media studies at the City University of New York, Queens College, and the author of The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-Soul Era. Sarah Banet-Weiser is associate professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity and Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship, and coeditor of Cable Visions (NYU Press).