ABSTRACT
The title I have chosen for this paper sounds alarming, maybe even pathetic. Looking at the story behind it — the campaign for an “Academic Bill of Rights” (ABR) which, starting in 2004, Republican lawmakers have introduced in numerous state legislatures and in the US House of Representatives to force American colleges and universities to show and cater for more political diversity in the classroom — one is tempted to argue it is much ado about nothing, or just a hoax. After all, what we see happening here is not democracy, in the understanding of the political wing of the public sphere, fighting an arrogant, self-righteous academy, although we are told this is the case, but a rather gross fight for political power within the “city of knowledge,” aka universities, and for ideological hegemony in American higher education. That said, however, I want to make a point that the incident under consideration stands for more than a silly trifle of American politics. Whatever its outcomes will be, it seems to be more than a tempest in a teapot that one should not take too seriously. Instead, I will try to show, it points at an unsolved query in the troubled relations between the worlds of knowledge and democracy and, moreover, strikes some bewildering new tones in what has been called “knowledge politics.”
