Critical autonomy requires contesting professional expertise and defending the university as a public sphere

Evidence

For public intellectuals, critical independence and strategic autonomy must include a willingness to contest the cult of professional expertise and specialization with its emphases on hierarchy, competitiveness, and objective, dispassionate research. This suggests demystifying the dominant politics of professionalism while simultaneously creating institutional spaces for hybridized zones of intellectual work in which faculty can create the conditions for new forms of solidarity consistent with defending the university as a “public sphere, one of the few to remain in the post-Fordist moment, in which many citizens can address and debate public issues” (Williams, 1995:406). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2671

Categorization

• XREF: Doctrine that the university is one of the last public spheres connects to later scholarship on the corporatization and precaritization of higher education.