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Claims that emotional well‐being is synonymous with successful educational practices and outcomes resonate with contemporary political portrayal of well‐being as integral to ‘social justice’. In Britain, diverse concerns are creating an ad hoc array of therapeutic interventions to develop and assess attributes, dispositions and attitudes associated with emotional well‐being, alongside growing calls to harness subject content and teaching activities as vehicles for a widening array of affective outcomes.\ud \ud There has been little public or academic debate about the educational implications of these developments for the aspirations of liberal humanist education. This article addresses this gap. Drawing on philosophical, political and sociological studies, it explores how preoccupation with emotional well‐being attacks the ‘subject’ in two inter‐related senses; the human subject and subject knowledge. It argues that it is essential to challenge claims and assumptions about well‐being and the government‐sponsored academic, professional and commercial industry which promotes them

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Discussions about freedom of speech and academic freedom today are about the limits to those freedoms. However, these discussions take place mostly in the higher education trade press and do not receive any serious attention from academics and educationalists. In this paper several key arguments for limiting academic freedom are identified, examined and placed in an historical context. That contextualisation shows that with the disappearance of social and political struggles to extend freedom in society there has come a narrowing of academic life and a new and impoverished concept of 'academic freedom' for a diminished idea of the human subject, of humanity and of human potential.