Evidence-based interpretations are good—they don’t violently impose a single understanding.

I engage my profession as a humanities professor to draw the link between questioning and life, for that link is already at stake when scholars lose their jobs, universities lose their programs, and instructors are laid off because of the questions they pose, the presuppositions they call into question in order to advance a more livable and just form of life. Fanon has already drawn this link in a way that we must keep in mind. The attack on scholars is aimed at their scholarship and implies a judgment about what a university should include or exclude. To understand this form of power, we need the forms of thought supplied by universities, including the humanities, but we also need a way to relate the existential risk that thinking can imply to the institutions that bear responsibility for keeping critical thought alive. I am struck by the fact that when we draw attention to the plight of endangered scholars, we generally start with a sequence of events, or we ask them to tell their stories, or we explain how it came about that they signed petitions, received warnings, and then the police were at the door; the legal document served; the sudden discovery that they are locked out of the university, or that it is too dangerous to come to the university. In other words, being fired, censored, threatened, or expelled takes place through a sequence of events where interpretations and judgments have been made and executed, and the injustice of these acts is established through narrative means. Understanding how censorship and expulsion works requires an ability to construct a narrative and conduct an interpretation. An interpretation based on evidence is crucial not just in a court of law for the purpose of illuminating an injustice but also in a humanities classroom, where the point is to learn how to work with a text, to understand how it communicates what it does, the kind of evidence it supplies for its claims, and what relationship to the world it seeks to open or close.

Fanon sugests that questioning is, or can be, a matter of life and death, a decision to build a human world or let the world dissolve into inhumanity. But he also points to a kind of freedom that is helpful for us to remember as we broach the question of academic freedom—a freedom that requires moving beyond established parameters of knowledge. Although some invoke academic freedom to justify their circulation of falsehoods and hatreds, it is important to remember that academic freedom is a faculty right that comes to exist within institutions that establish norms for academic inquiry. We can quarrel about whether some of those norms are justified, as we do within institutions in which we are obligated to demonstrate the claims we make. That obligation to demonstrate our claims, what we seek to know, and why, exists across the disciplines both in our research and as a practice of our teaching. In the humanities and the arts, demonstration takes many forms: we are bound to the organization of words on a page or images on a screen or a canvas when we give an interpretation, or we present the archives that establish and elide the histories yet to be told. When a student treats a character in fiction as a person, we try to explain how the character belongs to the fiction even as it resonates with our lives. We ask students to find the part of the text that can ground that interpretation, and we ask for a reading of that passage, a way of getting bound up with the text that yields an interpretation that shows that the text has been understood. There is no one right interpretation, but ungrounded speculation that bypasses the material at hand fails, in my view, to qualify as a good reading. We seek to demonstrate that difference when we teach students how to think critically and judge well. At the same time, in the course of reading, we come up against the limits of disciplines and the constraining, if not destructive, character of certain categories and modes of thought. Critique, as an operation of thought, does not always stay within the bounds, since one of its aims is to question what and how thought is bounded, and whether those limits should be dismantled in the name of another university, or another world.