Solidarity is our weapon: what the US courts are teaching us about defending academic freedom On the morning of 8 July, sitting in my study in Palmerston North while on leave, I read the Eleventh Circuit's ruling striking down Florida's Stop WOKE Act. The judgment landed in my inbox alongside the usual traffic of a life under attack: media queries about Hindutva, updates from a union colleague on strategies of resistance to attacks on the scholarship of whiteness, the residue of a coordinated harassment campaign traced to a Free Speech Union Council member. I read Judge Britt Grant's words twice. A state that forces an official government line into a college classroom, the court held, imposes exactly the "pall of orthodoxy" that a free society cannot tolerate. A district court had earlier called the law "positively dystopian." I have spent three decades building the culture-centered approach, listening to subaltern communities from Santali villages...
The culture-centred blog of Mohan J. Dutta — Massey University, Aotearoa. Home of The Margins Review: critical intellectual opinions from Aotearoa to the world.