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By internalizing a blend of ironic distance and earnest appreciation, retrosploitation films tend toward pastiche's evaluatively neutral position between parody and homage—an aesthetic ambivalence matched by a political ambivalence in their fan reception. This middle position toward their historical referents opens the question of to what degree these contemporary films may also imitate the outdated political attitudes found in past exploitation cinema. Yet, when some viewers excuse the anachronistic political incorrectness of retrosploitation films as a temporary escape from critical engagement with contemporary attitudes, others maintain their fan-cultural appeals to connoisseurship by remaining attuned to the political work that these ostensibly regressive films do. Nostalgia's disjuncture between past and present can thus call attention to unresolved social inequalities, particularly if these films encourage us to identify with the viewing expectations of past audiences. Using textual readings and fan responses, this chapter surveys the representational politics in the retrosploitation cycle and its reception, finding openings for more progressive understandings of these films as well.

Two key issues stemming from the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution are discussed: freedom of speech and academic freedom. These two ideals are largely non-existent for faculty members working at private colleges, and universities and they are probably more restricted than faculty at public institutions might imagine. This chapter focuses on U.S. Supreme Court cases (e.g., Garcetti v Ceballos) as well as AAUP definitions of academic freedom. Defamation and other free speech issues are also discussed.

So I return in the end to my one-note song: if academics did only the job they are trained and paid to do— introduce students to disciplinary materials and equip them with the necessary analytic skills—criticism of the kind Maloney mounts would have no object, and the various watch-dog groups headed by David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, and others would have to close shop. But even if this day were to arrive, the academy would not be home free because there would still be the problem I have alluded to but not fully addressed—the problem of money. Who is going to pay for the purified academic enterprise I celebrate in these pages? The unhappy fact is that the more my fellow academics obey the imperative always to academicize, the less they will have a claim to a skeptical public’s support. How do you sell to legislators, governors, trustees, donors, newspapers, etc., an academy that marches to its own drummer, an academy that asks of the subjects that petition for entry only that they be interesting, an academy unconcerned with the public yield of its activities, an academy that puts at the center of its operations the asking of questions for their own sake? How, that is, do you justify the enterprise? As I have already pointed out, you can’t, in part because the demand for justification never comes from the inside. The person who asks you to justify what you do is not saying, “tell me why you value the activity,” but “convince me that I should,” and if you respond in the spirit of that request, you will have exchanged your values for those of your inquisitor. It may seem paradoxical to say so, but any justification of the academy is always a denigration of it. The only honest thing to do when someone from the outside asks, “what use is this venture anyway?” is to answer “none whatsoever,” if by “use” is meant (as it always will be) of use to those with no investment in the obsessions internal to the profession.

This essay shows how Juvenal was not only a topical satirist of his own day, but remains relevant for our own times. Poetry recitals, lectures, seminar papers, the necessity for satire when describing contemporary life, race, class, gender, dishonesty, corruption are all central.