In this essay, I explore the relationship between the politics of the production of knowledge and partisan attempts to interfere with it. I argue that, despite changing historical contexts, the line between this politics (understood as contests about meaning and power) and partisanship has never been secured. That is because there is a tension inherent in knowledge production that cannot be resolved by legislation, administrative fiat, or academic punditry. Academic freedom mediates the tension but does not resolve it because knowledge production is inherently critical of prevailing norms (whether in the sciences, social sciences, or humanities)—norms whose partisans seek to defend their integrity and their truth. The tension between politics and partisanship is the state (or the fate) of democratic higher education in America.

Founded in 2008 through a partnership between Northwestern University and Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF), Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) educates creative, ethi-cal, and impactful communicators, and contributes both to Northwestern’s excellence and the rise of Qatar as a knowledge-based society. NU-Q’s vision is multidisciplinary, multimodal, multilingual, and focused on the Global South as an intellectual and creative space for research and teaching. NU-Q positions itself as an “em-bedded institution” in which U.S. higher education overlaps with regional and “Southern” circuits of academic exchange that catalyze critical debates on enduring and emerging issues, and enables a relationship between the university and the world that is globally competitive and locally resonant. NU-Q is a distinctive university dedi-cated to that vision.