22 Not Self-Indulgence, but Self-Preservation: Open Access and the Ethics of Care

How might certain forms of academic publishing—especially scholar-led, community-owned, open-access platforms, and presses—enable better forms of institutional life conducive to personal flourishing and the increase of public knowledge (and to lubricating the important connection between the two), especially at a time when the University is swarming with managerial technocrats invested in privatizing and outsourcing higher education, students are saddled with staggering levels of debt, and the casualization of academic labor is at an all-time high?
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This question feels particularly acute at a time when the University is more than neck-deep in accelerating the quantification of long-entrenched (and toxic) forms of research and career gatekeeping, and thus the Academy no longer feels like a hospitable place within which to practice what some call “academic freedom.”
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There is perhaps no concept that is less debatable among faculty-researchers than academic freedom, yet I've personally seen so little of it in actual practice (even when “secured” by tenure—in the US context, at least), partly because of the myriad ways in which scholars are coerced (subtly and otherwise) to follow certain methodologies of thought and to seek particular, peer-approved modes and outlets for the dissemination of their work, outside of which it is believed only bad or mediocre scholarship could result. And thus, there isn't much academic freedom in the precise place where it is cherished and argued for as a high ethical good.