Liberty and Information | ASECS 2026
A.R. Hanlon
Colby College
arhanlon@colby.edu
Given the time constraints, I’ll present the skeleton of an argument in eight parts, and then you can help me flesh out or debone as necessary.
The Enlightenment is not a bag of ideas. One approach to the historical Enlightenment is what I call the ‘bag of ideas’ Enlightenment: the Enlightenment is constituted foremost by ideas in political philosophy, pamphleteering, and the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth century, such as:
Locke’s contractarian liberalism in the Second Treatise
Defoe’s railing against tyranny in The True-Born Englishman
Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman
And of course the founding documents of the Haitian, French, and US revolutions
N.B. The ‘bag of ideas’ model of the Enlightenment is sometimes the ‘Enlightenment good’ liberalism of Steven Pinker, but also the ‘Enlightenment bad’ or ‘dark Enlightenment’ intellectual tradition of Horkheimer and Adorno, an Enlightenment of enslavement, rapaciousness, and hubris.
The Enlightenment was an epistemic event. A second, familiar, way of understanding the historical Enlightenment is Siskin and Warner’s ‘the Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation,’ which I think turns out to be the better way, for reasons I’ll come to. In this version, it’s less the political philosophy of Locke than the epistemology of Bacon that constitutes the Enlightenment. To explain and understand the natural world we have to engage in heuristic mediation, to use systems and tools to prod nature until it prods us back, in iterations of empirical experimentation and feedback, and only then can we say we know something.
What we often call an ‘age of liberty’ was more like an ‘age of information.’ As Ann Blair and others have shown, the historical Enlightenment underwent what many experienced then as an ‘information explosion’ or ‘information overload,’ characterized by 50-fold growth in library collections and the proliferation and circulation of print genres, another form of mediation. The modern concept of ‘data’ emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Credibility was key to navigating the ‘information age.' The concept of ‘information’ changed over the course of the eighteenth century, at least in the English-language tradition. What was in Bacon’s time a cognitive action, the information or shaping of the mind, became by the end of the the eighteenth century a thing that can could circulate in the world—like a bill of morality—and a mass noun, ‘information’ as the stuff that informs. Informers can be trustworthy or not; information can be reliable or suspect. The concept of information becomes an epistemic concept, bound up with questions of what makes knowledge credible and reliable.
Accordingly, the greater Enlightenment legacy for how we understand academic freedom today is not the liberal tradition in political philosophy, but the epistemic tradition of information as that which mediates our knowledge of the world.
Anther way of putting it: academic freedom is no longer primarily a liberty problem; it’s now an information problem. Here’s a short, not at all exhaustive list of threats to academic freedom:
Administrators concurred about institutional reputation and ideological capture
Reactionary governments who view liberalism and leftism as threats to their political objectives
Professionalization in higher education, part of which is students who want power to intimidate faculty into giving them the grade they ‘need’
The forced uptake of generative AI and what Rita Raley calls ‘dataveillance’ through institutional content management systems
We are living a second Enlightenment of computation. I think a remaking of the information landscape is what we’re dealing with right now and is at the heart of all of these challenges to academic freedom, both in practice and to traditional notions of the concept itself. We’re witnessing a new paradigm for how information is collected, mediated, and scaled. Here are some examples:
Generative AI has been called a ‘language machine’ and a ‘culture machine’ (I’m thinking of Lief Weatherby here), but foremost it’s a Francis Bacon machine, an iteration machine. It probes its information environment for feedback at a rate unfathomable in terms of human cognition.
Today’s information explosion is less an ‘explosion’ than a total suffusion. It’s not drinking from a fire hose, it’s opening your mouth 100 meters under water. Misinformation and disinformation about academic life, research, teaching, what professors think, how we spend our time, what students think, etc. is constitutive; it makes more than discourse, it makes our reality. In concrete terms, it makes the college and the university: It enables students to appeal to higher authorities to bully faculty; it makes administrative policy and procedure; it shapes faculty speech and behavior in and beyond the workplace; it circumscribes what we can and can’t put on the syllabus.
Academic freedom is a concept belonging to the liberal order. But the reactionary illiberalism that’s taken hold in this country and others was made possible by a collective failure to recognize that what’s happening with information is not simply more—not simply ‘overload’—but something new and different. We are dealing with an emergent information landscape in which rights, arguments, reasons, and evidence matter differently if they don’t matter less. At present, titrating the flow of information is more powerful than having good or credible information.
Precisely at this moment when the world is most desperate for an understanding of information that’s up to task, the world hates the university most. Accordingly, I think any advancement on the liberty front of academic freedom will be downstream from working out how to recalibrate ourselves for this information paradigm. I don’t think this means abandoning the liberal ideals that underwrite academic freedom, but it might mean thinking beyond the traditional battlegrounds of persuasive argumentation and collective action, unionization, and so on. We become so used to petitioning and pamphleteering on yesterday’s terms that we don’t notice the ground opening up beneath our feet, and this is not the best of all possible worlds.