Pronouns, Dignity, and Academic Freedom: How Inclusive Classrooms Advance the University's Epistemic Mission

Abstract On the standard picture, membership in the set of utterances “academic speech” is both necessary and sufficient for an utterance to enjoy the protections of academic freedom. In this article, I challenge the sufficiency claim by showing that there are significant epistemic and pedagogical benefits to be had by delineating a class of utterances that qualify as academic speech but that are not entitled to academic freedom protections. To this end, I adopt Eamonn Callan's (2016) distinction between “intellectual safety” and “dignity safety” and argue that there are some utterances that contribute to intellectually productive learning environments but also undermine the dignity of some members of the classroom. While such utterances count as academic speech (or so I argue), they should not enjoy academic freedom protections because this would be detrimental not only to the instructional and social aims of the university, but also (and perhaps surprisingly) to the knowledge aim. While my account of the relationship between academic speech and academic freedom is not as simple as the standard account, it can bypass two serious objections that the standard account must contend with—namely, that it relies on either a conception of academic speech that is underinclusive , or a conception of academic freedom that is overinclusive . I use these objections to highlight the importance of independence between our theoretical conceptions of academic speech and academic freedom.