Community, Unity, Identity, Multiplicity, and Diversity: Are They Compatible?

Academic freedom, which is the cornerstone of meaningful research and education, cannot survive, much less thrive, unless academic communities are committed to making room for multiple viewpoints and ways of knowing. If our decisions are to be both sound and humane, we need to understand emotion and circumstance, as well as logic and outcome.\n Attention to alternative communication modes or ways of knowing is also a focus in Michelle Forrest's "Does Communicative Competence Need to be Re-conceptualised?" Utilizing Derrida's critique of logocentricism, she explores how prevailing notions of communicative competence might be deconstructed in order to better examine differences between linguistic forms and meaning.