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In this book, Amy Lai examines the current free speech crisis in Western universities. She studies the origin, history, and importance of freedom of speech in the university setting, and addresses the relevance and pitfalls of political correctness and microaggressions on campuses, where laws on harassment, discrimination, and hate speech are already in place, along with other concepts that have gained currency in the free speech debate, including deplatforming, trigger warning, and safe space. Looking at numerous free speech disputes in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, the book argues for the equal application of the free speech principle to all expressions to facilitate respectful debates. All in all, it affirms that the right to free expression is a natural right essential to the pursuit of truth, democratic governance, and self-development, and this right is nowhere more important than in the university.

"I began this book to articulate my sense of disappointment and alienation from the status I had fought so hard to achieve." A remarkable admission from an alumnus of Harvard Law School who has held tenured professorships in the law schools of Yale and Stanford and has taught in the law schools of Harvard and Chicago.

In this personal reflection on the status of higher education, Julius Getman probes the tensions between status and meaning, elitism and egalitarianism, that challenge the academy and academics today. He shows how higher education creates a shared intellectual community among people of varied races and classes—while simultaneously dividing people on the basis of education and status.

In the course of his explorations, Getman touches on many of the most current issues in higher education today, including the conflict between teaching and research, challenges to academic freedom, the struggle over multiculturalism, and the impact of minority and feminist activism. Getman presents these issues through relevant, often humorous anecdotes, using his own and others' experiences in coping with the constantly changing academic landscape.

Written from a liberal perspective, the book offers another side of the story told in such works as Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals.

An incisive critique of the corporatized university, tracing the entanglement of academic missions with economic, political, and cultural systems.

Advocates of higher education have long contended that universities should operate above the crude material negotiations of economics and politics. Such arguments, ignore the historical reality that the American university system emerged through, and in service to, a capitalist political economy that unevenly combines corporate, state, and civil interests.

As the corporatization of U.S. universities becomes nearly impossible to deny, the common response from many academics has been a superior stand against the contamination of the professional ideal by tainted corporate interests. Inside the Teaching Machine proposes a correction to this view through the lens of historical materialism.

Chaput argues that the U.S. public research university has always been a vital component of the capitalist political economy. While conventional narratives of public higher education emphasize civic preparation and upward mobility, Chaput demonstrates that supposedly egalitarian policies like the Morrill Land-Grant Act and the G.I. Bill served the changing interests of capitalism much as education, creating a professional class that supports the capitalist political economy. Chaput also focuses on the relationship between American universities and globalization, showing how the trend toward professionalization contributes to the production of surplus value, and the ways that the American university model circulates outside the United States. Chaput concludes by advocating rhetorical strategies for the professional who opposes the capitalist logic of the global university system, proposing concrete options for engaging and redirecting globalization within the university system.