Today, the very idea of the university as a space of unconditional freedom seems anachronistic; such are the times we live in. “Academic freedom” is now to be considered a freedom under condition, a freedom amongst other freedoms to which it stands in a relationship of mutual limitation. The model for this system of mutually limiting (or competing) freedoms is cybernetic: its twin goals are homeostasis (stable reproduction of the “primitive” conditions under which it functions) and efficiency (optimal ratio of output to input). The state simultaneously declares its commitment to the utmost self-realization of every individual citizen, and constantly intervenes to manage the “balance” of individual freedoms in order that no particular project of self-realization should locally destabilize the system. Threats to the system as a whole are rare, but the vexations of terrorism, deliberately calculated to elicit a disproportionate response, are severe enough to be treated by it as a source of existential menace.

The radicalisation of students is a risk built into the university’s teaching function, the purpose of which is to reproduce the conditions of knowledge within each new generation so that the research function - which requires a continuous supply of peers competent to discuss new developments - can be upheld. That “there are students in the university” is a fact that must be continually confronted, ideally by graduating them. Yet in the process of acquiring competency, students must undergo a partial deculturation: the worldview of the research community is not that of most people’s “native culture”. One cannot create new researchers in a field without exposing young people to the crisis of knowledge at the root of that field, the irreducible problematic on account of which it - and not merely the spontaneous commonsense of “uninformed” people everywhere - troubles to exist. To be initiated into a field of study is to be seduced by it, to the point where its problems become one’s own. The first thing the student must learn is therefore how to be seduced; and the “best” students are in this sense the most seducible.

When the state declares that the radicalisation of students is a menace that the university must bring under control, it is effectively calling for the evacuation of students from the university, the elimination of students as such. The student body must no longer display its symptoms, but silently and industriously pass the vacant time between admission and graduation. It is up to the individual student to realise his or her “potential”, and nothing else. Teachers who obstruct this process by “imposing” a foreign (and often quite incomprehensible) ideology on innocent learners are no less of a menace, and in turn face calls for them to be disciplined or expelled. It is thus the research function, no less than the teaching function, that is under attack: researchers are forbidden to seduce the young, to give them new problems to worry about. How is one to realize one’s potential as a trainee teacher if one is obliged, along the way, to be concerned about such problems as the meaning of “education”, or the apparent inconsistency between the goals of educators and the institutional forms (schools and universities) through which those goals are mediated?

It is by no means obvious that the most effective challenge to the cybernetic paradigm of the “society of control” lies in staging pseudo-terroristic vexations of one’s own, “non-violent” or symbolically violent provocations that will goad the system into absurd and excessive overreaction. It is not enough to demonstrate that the absurdity is absurd, or that the state’s predictable reaction to that which frightens it is out of all proportion to the real danger presented. Defeating this system is not a matter of restoring commonsense, although in the face of recent stupidities one is tempted to feel that at least this would be a step in the right direction. Academics at Nottingham defended academic freedom by reading sections of the alleged “Al Qaeda Terror Manual” in public, but they did not do so in order to frighten the authorities and provide them with yet another opportunity to flex their (extra-)legal muscle. It was rather a matter of establishing a public discourse on terror that was not governed by the twin goals of maintaining stability and maximising efficiency: a discourse on terror that was not that of the “war on terror”.

It seems to me that an urgent task both inside and outside of the academy - in the “blogosphere”, for example, where the paths of the academic and the “citizen journalist” have sometimes been known to cross - is to develop this public discourse, and to assert not only that “there are students in the university”, but also that there exist students - those willing and able to be seduced, to assume new problems and to take responsibility for them - outside of it. The struggles for both “academic freedom” and the right to be radicalised must continue within the academy, and at the same time be extended across every sector of our society.