Abstract
As corporate power, right-wing think tanks, and military interests jointly engage in an effort to take over higher education, the resistance of educational and other democratic public spheres to a growing anti-intellectualism in American life seems to be weakening. Youth and critical education are the first casualties in the war being waged to force universities and colleges to abandon their autonomy along with their critical role in questioning and promoting the conditions that foster democracy. Instead of serving students and young people, who collectively represent the purpose and future of both education and democracy in the United States, higher education is increasingly administered in a corporate fashion, not only enabling a growing elitism by raising tuition fees but also dangerously embracing a narrow set of interests that put at risk the future of young people, education, and the nation as a whole. scholarships and programs that enable disadvantaged students to attend and graduate from university and college have been ruthlessly cut back or tied to military service. As higher education increasingly becomes a privilege rather than a right, many working-class youth either find it financially impossible to enter college or, because of increased costs, drop out.2 Those students who have the resources to stay in school are feeling the pressure of the job market, increasingly so under the current recession, and rush to take courses and receive professional credentials in business and the biosciences as the humanities lose majors and downsize.3
Democracy is not an institution, but essentially an anti-institutional force, a “rupture” in the otherwise relentless trend of the powers-that-be to arrest change, to silence and to eliminate from the political process all those who have not been “born” into power. … Democracy expresses itself in a continuous and relentless critique of institutions; democracy is an anarchic, disruptive element inside the political system; essentially, a force for dissent and change. One can best recognize a democratic society by its constant complaints that it is not democratic enough.
—Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society1
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Notes
Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society (London: Polity Press, 2001), pp. 54–55.
Anya Kamenetz, Generation Debt (New York: Riverhead, 2006)
Frank Donoghue, The Last Professor: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
David Moltz, “Tenure on the Chopping Block,” Inside Higher Ed (December 3, 2008). Online: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/03/kentucky. Of course, there is a long and venerable tradition that is critical of the university as an adjunct of business interests, power, and culture. One viable starting point would be Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965).
A. Lee Fritschler, Bruce L. R. Smith, and Jeremy D. Mayer, Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2008).
I have taken up this issue in detail in Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education (New York: Palgrave, 2004).
Doug Henwood, After the New Economy (New York: The New Press, 2005).
I discuss this phenomenon in Henry A. Giroux, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007).
Ian Angus, “Academic Freedom in the Corporate University,” in Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments Against Neoliberal Globalization, ed. Mark Coté, Richard J. F. Day, and Greig de Peuter (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 69.
Jennifer Washburn, University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (New York: Basic Books, 2006), p. 227.
I take this issue up in great detail in Giroux and Giroux, Take Back Higher Education; and Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm, 2008).
Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 88.
John Dewey, Individualism: Old and New (New York: Minton, Balch, 1930), p. 41.
Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion Since 9/11 (London: Polity Press, 2005), p. 45.
For an excellent analysis of this attack, see Beshara Doumani, “Between Coercion and Privatization: Academic Freedom in the Twenty-First Century,” in Academic Freedom After September 11, ed. Doumani (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2006), pp. 11–57
Evan Gerstmann and Matthew J. Streb, Academic Freedom at the Dawn of a New Century: How Terrorism, Governments, and Culture Wars Impact Free Speech (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
Tom Abowd, Fida Adely, Lori Allen, Laura Bier, and Amahl Bishara et al., Academic Freedom and Professional Responsibility After 9/11: A Handbook for Scholars and Teachers (New York: Task Force on Middle East Anthropology, 2006), online: http://www.meanthro.org/Handbook-1.pdf.
Jonathan R. Cole, “Academic Freedom Under Fire,” Daedalus 134:2 (2005), pp. 1–23
Ellen Schrecker, “Worse Than McCarthy,” Chronicle of Higher Education 52:23 (February 10, 2006), p. B20.
Joel Beinin, “The New McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East,” in Academic Freedom after September 11, ed. Beshara Doumani (New York: Zone Books, 2006), p. 242.
I take these cases up in great detail in Henry A. Giroux, “Academic Freedom Under Fire: The Case for Critical Pedagogy,” College Literature 33:4 (Fall 2006), pp. 1–42.
Jonathan R. Cole, “The New McCarthyism,” Chronicle of Higher Education 52:3 (September 9, 2005), p. B7.
American Council of Trustees and Alumni, How Many Ward Churchills?: A Study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (Washington, DC: American Council of Trustees and Alumni, May 2006), p. 22.
David Horowitz, “In Defense of Intellectual Diversity,” Chronicle of Higher Education 50:23 (February 13, 2004), p. B12.
See, for instance, John K. Wilson, Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies (Boulder: Paradigm, 2006)
Jennifer Jacobson, “Conservatives in a Liberal Landscape,” Chronicle of Higher Education 51:5 (September 24, 2004), pp. A8–A11.
Stuart Hall, “Epilogue: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life,” in Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: The Thought of Stuart Hall, ed. Brian Meeks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2007), p. 270.
David Horowitz, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006).
Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 4.
David Horowitz, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (New York: National Book Network, 2004), p. 56.
I have taken up the issues of critical pedagogy, democracy, and schooling in a number of books. See Henry A. Giroux, Border Crossings (New York: Routledge, 2005)
Jacques Derrida, “The Future of the Profession or the Unconditional University,” in Derrida Down Under, trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Laurence Simmons and Heather Worth (Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore, 2001), p. 233.
For an excellent analysis of contingent academic labor as part of the process of the subordination of higher education to the demands of capital and corporate power, see Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
These themes in Arendt’s work are explored in detail in Elizabeth Young-Bruehl], Why Arendt Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006)
Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy, Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 147.
Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Trade, 2001).
On the relationship between education and hope, see Coté, Day, and de Peuter, eds., Utopian Pedagogy; and Henry A. Giroux], Public Spaces/Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9/11 (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003)
Zygmunt Bauman cited in Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (London: Polity Press, 2001), p. 4.
Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001), p. 6.
Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11 (Malden: Polity Press, 2005), pp. 25–26.
Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 121.
Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia, 2004), p. 143.
Kimball cited in Lawrence W. Levine, The Opening of the American Mind (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), p. 19.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Polity Press, 2007), p. 8.
Frederick Douglass, “The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies, Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Volume 3: 1855–63, ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 204.
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© 2009 Henry A. Giroux
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Giroux, H.A. (2009). Locked Out: Youth and Academic Unfreedom. In: Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100565_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100565_4
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