Operation Get Fired: A Chronicle of the Academic Repression of Radical Environmentalist and Animal Rights Advocate-Scholars

To make reality opaque is not neutral. To make reality lucid, illuminated, is also not neutral. In order for us to do that, we have to occupy the space of the schools with liberating politics. Nevertheless we cannot deny something very obvious. Those who make reality opaque through the dominant ideology, through spreading, multiplying, reproducing the dominant ideology, are swimming with the current! Those who demystify the reproducing task are swimming against the current! Swimming against the current means risking and assuming risks. Also, it means expecting constantly to be punished. I always say those who swim against the current are first being punished by the current and cannot expect the gift of weekends on tropical beaches! – Paulo Freire The myth of contemporary institutions of higher education is that they are scholarly places firmly grounded in the ideal and practice of intellectual freedom. University presidents, it seems, are especially fond of this ivory tower tale and spend time every year promoting their institutional commitment to advancing tolerance for diverse and marginal perspectives, which they see represented in the larger academic discourse taking place across the disciplines. The imaginativ