Early last year I picked up Christopher Priest’s 1974 science fiction novel The Inverted World. Briefly, The Inverted World takes place in a city whose survival depends on the work of a secretive guild whose members winch the city forward on rails, deconstructing and reconstructing the system as they go along, to keep the city safe from an impending and ruinous gravitational field. The city aims for something called the optimum, a theoretical point at which gravity is more or less normal, but which is doomed to fall further out of reach as the city, despite its workers’ best efforts, inches towards its own oblivion.

The world reveals itself to Helward Mann, the novel’s protagonist, when he is sent south of the city on assignment. As he ventures away from the optimum and the crush of the world’s gravity magnifies, the mountains around him become hills, and the hills become flatlands. His traveling companions take on monstrous proportions, grotesquely fat and short, and he has no choice but to give himself in to forces far beyond his understanding or control as the negative curvature of the world is exposed, the terrain on which he stands grows nearly vertical, and gravity verges on infinity.

The professor’s autonomy is increasingly under threat.

The idea of inversion has recurred in my thinking as I’ve evaluated the landscape of academic freedom in the past few years and defended the rights of faculty members trying to chart