Judith Butler, a philosopher and gender studies scholar, will deliver the Faculty Senate’s 34th annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom.

The event will take place from 4-5:30 p.m. Nov. 14 at Honigman Auditorium in the Law School’s Hutchins Hall. It is free to attend, but registration is required. It also will be livestreamed.

Butler’s lecture is titled “Academic Freedom in a Time of Destruction: Reconsidering Extra-Mural Speech,” and will explore how the distinction between intramural and extramural is difficult to define.

Butler will address questions such as:

• Is a university meant to serve public debate and if so, in what way?
• Is the classroom supposed to be “neutral” on questions of shared public concern?
• Does academic freedom belong only to faculty, or does it also include open debate on campus that includes students and staff?
• What does academic freedom presume about the enduring character of universities?

Butler is a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

They served as founding director of the Critical Theory Program as well as the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs at UC Berkeley, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. They received their Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984.

The annual lecture is named after former U-M faculty members Chandler Davis, Clement Markert and Mark Nickerson, who were called to testify in 1954 before a panel of the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. All three men invoked their constitutional rights and refused to answer questions about their political associations.

The men were suspended from the university. Markert, an assistant professor, was reinstated and eventually gained tenure. Davis, an instructor, and Nickerson, a tenured associate professor, were dismissed.

Several years later, a push was made for the Board of Regents to apologize for what happened. They did not, so the U-M faculty’s Senate Assembly passed a resolution in 1990 expressing deep regret for “the failure of the University Community to protect the values of intellectual freedom” in 1954 and established the annual lecture in honor of the three men.

Tags:

• academic freedom
• Davis Markert Nickerson Academic Freedom Lecture
• Faculty Senate