Límite. Revista Interdisciplinaria de Filosofía y Psicología Volumen 10, Nº 34, 2015, pp. 5-16

NEOLIBERALISM’S WAR AGAINST HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE ROLE OF PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS

LA GUERRA DEL NEOLIBERALISMO CONTRA LA EDUCACIÓN SUPERIOR Y EL ROL DE LOS INTELECTUALES PÚBLICOS

Henry A. Giroux* McMaster University, Ontario.

Recibido septiembre de 2015/Received September, 2015 Aceptado noviembre de 2015/Accepted November, 2015

RESUMEN

Bajo el reinado del neoliberalismo, las decisiones económicas y políticas no toman en cuenta los costos sociales y el pensamiento crítico y la responsabilidad social es todavía minada por la supresión de los disidentes, un asalto a la educación superior como una esfera democrática y pública, y un intento en progreso de suprimir el trabajo de los educadores cuya obra se esmera por conectar el conocimiento académico con importantes temas sociales y desarrolla formas de educación crítica cuyo objetivo es trasladar problemas privados en preocupaciones públicas mientras se promueve lo que Paulo Freire alguna vez en educación llamó la práctica de la libertad. Este artículo examina las cuestiones relacionadas con qué clase de educación se necesita para los estudiantes para ser ciudadanos informados y activos en un mundo que crecientemente ignora sus necesidades, o su futuro, y qué papel podrían tener los educadores en este proyecto como intelectuales públicos. El artículo argumenta que es tiempo para que los educadores desarrollen un lenguaje político en el cual los valores cívicos y la responsabilidad social –y las instituciones, tácticas, y propósitos a largo plazo para apoyarlos– lleguen a ser centrales para vigorizar y fortificar una nueva era de compromiso cívico, un sentido renovado de la acción social, y un apasionado movimiento social internacional con la visión, la organización y un conjunto de estrategias capaces de desafiar la pesadilla neoliberal que ahora asola el globo y vacía de significado la política y la democracia. Palabras Clave: Neoliberalismo, Capitalismo de Casino, Pedagogía, Intelectuales Públicos, Democracia Radical, Educación Crítica, Permanencia en el Cargo, Valores basados en el Mercado.

ABSTRACT

Under the rein of neoliberalism, economic and political decisions are removed from social costs and the flight of critical thought and social responsibility is further undermined by both the suppression of dissent, an assault on higher education as a democratic public sphere, and an ongoing attempt to suppress the work of educators whose work strives to connect scholarship to important social issues and develop forms critical education whose aim is to translate private troubles into public concerns while promoting what Paulo Freire once education as the practice of freedom. This article examines the related questions of what kind of education is needed for students to be informed and active citizens in a world that increasingly ignores their needs, if not their future, and what role might educators play in this project as public intellectuals. The article argues that it is time for educators to develop a political language in which civic values and social responsibility—and the institutions, tactics, and long-term commitments that support them—become central to invigorating and fortifying a new era of civic engagement, a renewed sense of social agency, and an impassioned international social movement with the vision, organization, and set of strategies capable of challenging the neoliberal nightmare that now haunts the globe and empties out the meaning of politics and democracy. Key Words: Neoliberalism, Casino Capitalism, Pedagogy, Public Intellectuals, Radical Democracy, Critical Education, Tenure, Market-based Values.

* McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest, Department of English & Cultural Studies. henry.giroux@ gmail.com 6 Henry A. Giroux

Across the globe, a new historical conjuncture The hidden notion of politics that fuels this is emerging in which the attacks on higher education market-driven ideology also informs a more as a democratic institution and on dissident public Western-style form of neoliberalism in which the voices in general–whether journalists, whistleblowers, autonomy of democratizing institutions are under or academics–are intensifying with sobering conse- assault not only by the state but also by the rich, quences (Giroux, 2007; Radack, 2012; Greenwald, bankers, hedge fund managers, and the corporate 2014). The attempts to punish prominent academ- elite. In this case, corporate sovereignty has replaced ics such as Ward Churchill, Steven Salaita, and traditional state modes of governance and now it is others are matched by an equally vicious assault on powerful corporate elites who despise the common whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy good. As the South African Nobel Prize winner in Hammond, and Edward Snowden and journalists literature, JM Coetzee (2013), points out, the new such as James Risen. Under the aegis of what Risen power elite “reconceive of themselves as managers calls the “homeland security-industrial complex” of national economies” who want to turn universities (Risen, 2014), it becomes difficult to separate the into training schools equipping young people with war on whistleblowers and journalists from the war the skills required by a modern economy”. Viewed on higher education–the institutions responsible as a private investment rather than a public good, for safeguarding and sustaining critical theory universities are now construed as spaces where and engaged citizenship. students are valued as human capital, courses are Marina Warner (2014) has rightly called these determined by consumer demand, and governance assaults on higher education, “the new brutalism in is based on the Walmart model of labor relations. academia”. It may be worse than she suggests. In fact, For Coetzee, this attack on higher education, which the right-wing defense of the neoliberal dismantling is not only ideological but also increasingly relies of the university as a site of critical inquiry in many on the repressive, militaristic arm of the punishing countries is more brazen and arrogant than anything state, is a response to the democratization of the we have seen in the past and its presence is now university that that reached a highpoint in the 1960s felt in a diverse number of repressive regimes. For all across the globe. In the last forty years, the as- instance, the authoritarian nature of neoliberalism sault on the university as a center of critique and and its threat to higher education as a democratic democratization has intensified, just as the reach of public spheres was on full display recently when the this assault has expanded to include intellectuals, multi-millionaire and Beijing-appointed leader of campus protesters, an expanding number of minor- Hong Kong, Leung Chunying, told pro-democracy ity students, and the critical formative cultures that protesters that “allowing his successors to be chosen provide the foundation for a substantive democracy in open elections based on who won the greatest (Coetzee, 2013). number of votes was unacceptable in part because Coetzee’s defense of education provides an it risked giving poorer residents a dominant voice important referent for those of us who believe that in politics”. Offering an unyielding defense for the university is nothing if it is not a public trust China’s authoritarian political system, he argued and social good; that is, a critical institution infused that any candidate that might succeed him “must be with the promise of cultivating intellectual insight, screened by a ‘broadly representative’ nominating the civic imagination, inquisitiveness, risk-taking, committee, which would insulate Hong Kong’s next social responsibility, and the struggle for justice. chief executive from popular pressure to create social Rather than defining the mission of the university provisions and allow the government to implement in terms that mimic market-based ideologies, more business-friendly policies to address economic” modes of governance, and neoliberal policies, the issues (Bradsher & Buckley, 2014). This is not just questions that should be asked at this crucial time an attack on political liberty but also an attack on in American history concern how the mission of dissent, critical education, and public institutions the university might be better understood with that might exercise a democratizing influence on respect to both developing and safeguarding the the nation. In this case, the autonomy of institutions interests of young people at a time of violence such as higher education is threatened not only and war, the rise of a rampant anti-intellectualism, by the repressive practices of the state but also by the emerging specter of authoritarianism, and the neoliberal economic policies. threat of nuclear and ecological devastation. What

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might it mean to define the university as a public numerical data and, most of all, austerity mea- good and democratic public sphere rather than as sures. This is a form of neoliberal or corporatized an institution that has aligned itself with market education wedded to market-driven values and the values and is more attentive to market fluctuations culture of positivism, one that lacks any democratic and investor interests than educating students to vision. This is the vision of accountants who have be critically engaged citizens? Or, as Zygmunt no interest in the public good. Bauman and Leonidas Donskis (2013) write: “how The mantras of neoliberalism are now well will we form the next generation of … intellectuals known: government is the problem; society is and politicians if young people will never have a fiction; governance should be market-driven; an opportunity to experience what a non-vulgar, deregulation and commodification are vehicles non-pragmatic, non-instrumentalized university is for freedom, social needs must be subordinated like?” It is in the spirit of such considerations that I to self-interests, finance culture should govern all first want to address those larger economic, social, of social life, and higher education should serve and cultural interests that threaten this notion of corporate interests rather than the public good. In education, especially higher education. addition, the yardstick of profit has become the With the advance of a savage form of casino only viable measure of the good life while civic capitalism and its dreamworlds of consumption, engagement and public spheres devoted to the privatization, and deregulation, not only are demo- common good are viewed by many politicians and cratic values and social protections at risk, but also their publics as either a hindrance to the goals of the civic and formative cultures that make such values a market-driven society or alibis for government and protections intelligible and consequential to a inefficiency and waste. sustainable democratic society. As public spheres, In a market-driven system in which economic once enlivened by broad engagements with common and political decisions are removed from social costs, concerns, are being transformed into “spectacular the flight of critical thought and social responsibility spaces of consumption” and financial looting, the is further accentuated by what Zygmunt Bauman flight from mutual obligations and social respon- calls “ethical tranquillization (McCarthy, 2007)”. sibilities intensifies and has resulted in not only a One result is a form of depoliticization that works devaluing of public life and the common good, but its way through the social order, removing social also a crisis in the radical imagination, especially relations from the configurations of power that shape in terms of the meaning and value of politics itself them, substituting what Wendy Brown (2006) calls (Kurlantzick, 2013). One index of such a crisis, as “emotional and personal vocabularies for political Mike Davis points out, is that we live in an era in ones in formulating solutions to political problems”. which there is a super saturation of corruption, Consequently, it becomes difficult for young people cruelty, and violence” that fails any longer to too often bereft of a critical education to translate outrage or even interest (Fisher, 2009)”. private troubles into public concerns. As private Thomas Frank (2012) goes a bit further insist- interests trump the public good, public spaces are ing that “Over the course of the past few decades, corroded and short-term personal advantage replaces the power of concentrated money has subverted any larger notion of civic engagement and social professions, destroyed small investors, wrecked the responsibility. Under the restricted rationality of regulatory state, corrupted legislators en masse and the market, pubic spheres and educational realms repeatedly put the economy through the wringer. necessary for students to imagine alternative futures Now it has come for our democracy itself”. And, and horizons of possibility begin to disappear. yet, the only questions being asked about knowledge The question of what kind of education is needed production, the purpose of education, the nature of for students to be informed and active citizens in a politics, and our understanding of the future are de- world that increasingly ignores their needs, if not termined largely by market forces. In this discourse, their future, is rarely asked (Aronowitz, 2008). In education is reduced to training, public values are the absence of a democratic vision of schooling, it transformed into crude instrumental values, and, is not surprising that some colleges and universities public and higher education are reduced to operating are increasingly opening their classrooms to corpo- systems, posing problems that can only be solved rate interests, welcoming money from billionaire through quantification, effective programming , donors such as the conservative Koch brothers,

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standardizing the curriculum, instituting top-down sense of organized responsibility fundamental to governing structures, and generating courses that a democracy. Instead, they encourage what might promote entrepreneurial values unfettered by social be called a sense of organized irresponsibility–a concerns or ethical consequences. practice that underlies the economic Darwinism and Central to this neoliberal view of higher civic corruption at the heart of a debased politics of education in the United States is a market-driven consumption, finance, and privatization. When one paradigm that seeks to eliminate tenure, dismantle combines the university as a Disneyfied entertain- unions, turn the humanities into a job preparation ment center with labor practices that degrade and service, and transform most faculty into an army exploit faculty the result is what Terry Eagleton of temporary subaltern labor For instance, in the recently calls the “death of universities as centers United States out of 1.5 million faculty members, 1 of critique” (Eagleton, 2010). million are “adjuncts who are earning, on average, $20K a year gross, with no benefits or healthcare, Higher Education and the Crisis and no unemployment insurance when they are of Legitimacy out of work (The Blog of Junct Rebellion, 2012)”. Many adjuncts are earning less than entry level fast In the United States and increasingly in Canada, food workers and many “are on food stamps and many of the problems in higher education can be (…) go to food donation centers (Saccaro, 2014)”. linked to diminished funding, the domination of The indentured service status of such faculty is put universities by market mechanisms, the rise of for- on full display as some colleges have resorted to profit colleges, the intrusion of the national security using “temporary service agencies to do their formal state, and the weakened role of faculty in governing hiring” (Jaschik, 2010). the university, all of which both contradicts the There is little talk in this view of higher educa- culture and democratic value of higher education tion about the history and value of shared governance and makes a mockery of the very meaning and mis- between faculty and administrators, nor of educat- sion of the university as a democratic public sphere. ing students as critical citizens rather than potential Decreased financial support for higher education employees of Walmart. There are few attempts to stands in sharp contrast to increased support for tax affirm faculty as scholars and public intellectuals benefits for the rich, big banks, the military, and who have both a measure of autonomy and power. mega corporations. Rather than enlarge the moral Instead, faculty members are increasingly defined imagination and critical capacities of students, too less as intellectuals than as technicians and grant many universities are now encouraged to produce writers or they are punished for raising their voices would-be hedge fund managers, depoliticized against various injustices. Students fare no better students, and modes of education that promote a in this debased form of education and are treated “technically trained docility” (Nussbaum, 2010). as either clients, consumers, or as restless children This reductionist notion of education works well in need of high-energy entertainment as was made with a funding crisis that is now used by conserva- clear in the 2012 Penn State scandal and the ever tives as an ideological weapon to defund certain increasing football scandals at major universities, disciplines such as history, English, sociology, where testosterone fuelled entertainment is given a anthropology, minority studies, gender studies, higher priority than substantive teaching and learn- and language programs as well as attack tenure, ing–to say nothing of student safety and protection. unions, and raise student tuition. One egregious Precious resources are now wasted by colleges example of this neoliberal approach to higher edu- intent on building football stadiums, student dorms cation is on full display in Florida where Governor that mimic resort hotels, and other amenities that Rick Scott’s task force on education attempted to signal the Disneyification of higher education for implement a policy that would lower tuition for students and the Walmart model of labor relations degrees friendly to corporate interests in order to for faculty. For instance, High Point University seeks “steer students toward majors that are in demand to attract students with its first-run movie theater, in the job market” (Alvarez, 2012). Scott’s utterly ice cream trucks, a steakhouse, outdoor hot tubs, instrumental and anti-intellectual message is clear: and dorms with plasma-screen TVs” (Matlack, the university wants people who can be trained for 2012). Such modes of education do not foster a the workforce, not individuals who have the capacity

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to think critically and act in order to deepen and their educational loans. Students find themselves in strengthen the fabric of a democratic society. Such a world in which heightened expectations have been practices suggest that the attack on higher educa- replaced by dashed hopes and a world of onerous tion is not merely the consequence of an economic debt (Fraser, 2013). Struggling to merely survive, downturn but also the result of “a conservative-led the debt crisis represents a massive assault on the campaign to end higher education’s democratizing imagination by leaving little or no room to think influence on the nation” (Nichol, 2008). otherwise in order to act otherwise. Not only does What has become clear is that universities student debt kill the radical imagination in students are losing their sense of public mission, just as by redirecting their talents to find ways to mostly leadership in higher education is being stripped of survive, it also functions as Noam Chomsky points any viable democratic vision. In the United States, out as a as a device of indoctrination, entwined in college presidents are now called CEOs and move a culture of fear and conformity. Precarity makes without apology between interlocking corporate one vulnerable to fear, shuts down dissent, and and academic boards. With few exceptions, they breeds a form of participatory oppression. This is a are praised as fund raisers but rarely acknowledged particularly important insight in a society where the for the quality of their ideas. Trustees have not only free circulation of ideas is not only being replaced assumed more power in higher education, but are by mass mediated ideas but where critical ideas are largely drawn from the ranks of business, and yet increasingly dismissed as either being too liberal, as in the Steven Salaita case are making judgments radical, or even seditious. As a result, we now live about faculty that they are unqualified to make. It in a world in which the politics of disimagination gets worse. dominates. For instance, public discourses that In this new Gilded Age of money and profit, bear witness to a critical and alternative sense of academic subjects gain stature almost exclusively the world are often dismissed because they do not through their exchange value on the market. For advance narrow economic interests and increase example, BB&T Corporation, a financial hold- the bottom line. ings company, gave a $1 million gift to Marshall In a dystopian society, utopian thought becomes University’s business school on the condition that sterile and paraphrasing Theodor Adorno, thinking Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (Congressman Paul becomes an act of utter stupidity. Anti-public intel- Ryan’s favorite book) be taught in a course. What lectuals now define the larger cultural landscape, all happens to education when it is treated like a too willing to flaunt co-option and reap the rewards corporation? What are we to make of the integrity of venting insults at their assigned opponents while of a university when it accepts a monetary gift being reduced to the status of paid servants of from powerful corporate interests or rich patrons powerful economic interests. But the problem is not demanding as part of the agreement the power to simply with the rise of a right-wing cultural apparatus specify what is to be taught in a course or how a dedicated to preserving the power and wealth of the curriculum should be shaped? Some corporations rich and corporate elite. As Stuart Hall remarked, and universities now believe that what is taught in the state of progressive thought is also in jeopardy a course is not an academic decision but a market in that, as he puts it, “The left is in trouble. It’s not consideration. In addition, many disciplines are now got any ideas, it’s not got any independent analysis valued almost exclusively with how closely they of its own, and therefore it’s got no vision. It just align with what might be euphemistically called a takes the temperature…It has no sense of politics business culture. being educative, of politics changing the way people Not only does neoliberalism undermine both see things” (Williams, 2012). Of course, Hall is not civic education and public values and confuse suggesting the left has no ideas to speak of. He is education with training, it also wages a war on suggesting that such ideas are often removed from what might be called the radical imagination. For the larger issue of what it means to address educa- instance, thousands of students in both the U.S. tion and the production and reception of meaningful and Canada are now saddled with skyrocketing ways of thinking as a pedagogical practice that is debts that will profoundly impact their lives and central to politics itself. He is also saying that the their future, likely forcing them away from public left and progressives are often short of ideas that service jobs because the pay is too low to pay off can move people. In other words, there is no sense

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of how to make ideas meaningful in order to make Increasingly, public and higher education are them critical and transformative. characterized by pedagogies that disdain social The issue of politics being educative, of rec- responsibility, if not critical thinking itself. In an ognizing that matters of pedagogy, subjectivity, age that embraces trigger warnings, it is becom- and consciousness are at the heart of political and ing official policy to both infantilize students and moral concerns should not be lost on academics convince faculty that they should stay away from and students. As the late Pierre Bourdieu argued, it the disturbing and urgent problems that confront is important for all of us to recognize that the most the larger society. Hiding behind appeals to balance important forms of domination are not only economic and objectivity, it becomes difficult for educators to but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the recognize that being committed to something does side of belief and persuasion. This suggests that it not cancel out what C. Wright Mills (2000) once is crucial to recognize that academics and other called hard thinking. Teaching needs to be rigor- cultural workers bear an enormous responsibility for ous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead challenging this form of domination. Nor should the zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice relevance of education being at the heart of politics of freedom, to a critical sensibility capable of ad- be lost on those of us concerned about inviting the vancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing public back into higher education and rethinking crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles the purpose and meaning of higher education itself. and public issues. Higher education must be defended as a public Some academics claim that faculty should good, one that is indispensable to creating the for- not address important social issues in either their mative culture necessary for students to learn how research or teaching. To do so is to run the risk of to govern rather than be governed. Only through not only becoming incapable of defending higher such a formative and critical educational culture education as a vital public sphere, but also of having can students learn how to become individual and no influence over the conditions of their own intel- social agents, rather than disengaged spectators or lectual labor. Without their intervention as public uncritical consumers. At the very least, they should intellectuals, the university defaults on its role as learn how to think otherwise and to act upon civic a democratic public sphere willing to produce an commitments that “necessitate a reordering of basic informed public, enact and sustain a culture of power arrangements” fundamental to promoting the questioning, and enable a critical formative culture common good and producing a strong democracy. that advances not only the power of the imagina- tion but also what Kristen Case calls moments of Dreaming the Impossible classroom grace. Pedagogies of classroom grace allows students reflect critically on commonsense Reclaiming higher education as a democratic understandings of the world, and begin to question, public sphere begins with the crucial recognition however troubling, their sense of agency, relation- that education is not solely about job training and the ship to others, and their relationship to the larger production of ethically challenged entrepreneurial world. This is a pedagogy that asks why we have subjects, but also about matters of civic engagement, wars, massive inequality, a surveillance state, the critical thinking, civic literacy, and the capacity for commodification of everything, and the collapse democratic agency, action, and change. It is also of the public into the private. This is not merely inextricably connected to the related issues of power, a methodical consideration but also a moral and inclusion, and social responsibility (Searl, 2012). political practice because it presupposes the cre- If young people are to develop a deep respect for ation of critically engaged students can imagine others, a keen sense of social responsibility, as well a future in which justice, equality, freedom, and as an informed notion of civic engagement, educa- democracy matter. tion must be viewed as the cultural, political, and Before his untimely death, Edward Said, moral force that provides the knowledge, values, and himself an exemplary public intellectual, urged social relations to make such democratic practices his colleagues in the academy to confront directly possible and connect human agency to an engaged those social hardships that disfigure contemporary notion of the civic imagination, social justice, and society and pose a serious threat to the promise of the politics of possibility. democracy.1 He urged them to assume the role of

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public intellectuals, wakeful and mindful of their describes the last few months of his mother’s life in responsibilities to bear testimony to human suffering a New York hospital and the difficult time she had and the pedagogical possibilities at work in educat- falling asleep because of the cancer that was ravaging ing students to be autonomous, self-reflective, and her body. Recalling this traumatic and pivotal life socially responsible. Said rejected the notion of a experience, Said’s meditation moves between the market-driven pedagogy that lacking a democratic existential and the insurgent, between private pain project was steeped in the discourse of instrumental and worldly commitment, between the seductions rationality and fixated on measurement. He insisted of a “solid self” and the reality of a contradictory, that when pedagogy is taken up as a mechanistic questioning, restless, and at times, uneasy sense of undertaking, it loses any understanding of what identity. He writes: it means for students to “be thoughtful, layered, complex, critical thinker[s]” (Cunningham, 2013). ‘Help me to sleep, Edward,’ she once said to For Said, such methodological reification was me with a piteous trembling in her voice that antithetical to a pedagogy rooted in the practice I can still hear as I write. But then the disease of freedom and attentive to the need to construct spread into her brain–and for the last six weeks she slept all the time–my own inability to sleep critical agents, democratic values, and modes of may be her last legacy to me, a counter to her critical inquiry. On the contrary, he viewed it as a struggle for sleep. For me sleep is something mode of training more suitable to creating cheerful to be gotten over as quickly as possible. I can robots and legitimating organized recklessness and only go to bed very late, but I am literally up legalized illegalities. at dawn. Like her I don’t possess the secret of The famed economist, William Black goes so long sleep, though unlike her I have reached far as to argue that such stripped down pedagogies the point where I do not want it. For me, sleep are responsible for creating what he calls crimino- is death, as is any diminishment in awareness. genic cultures, especially in business schools and ..Sleeplessness for me is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost; there is nothing for economics departments at a number of Ivy League me as invigorating as immediately shedding universities. This theme has been more recently the shadowy half-consciousness of a night’s taken up in the book, Excellent Sheep, by William loss than the early morning, reacquainting Deresiewicz, which offers a stinging critique of the myself with or resuming what I might have lost shark-like and survival-of the-fittest pedagogical completely a few hours earlier. I occasionally environments at work in the elite universities. An experience myself as a cluster of flowing indication of this crowning pedagogical disgrace currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid can be found in Oscar winning documentary, Inside self, the identity to which so many attach so Job, which showed how Wall Street bought off much significance. These currents like the themes of one’s life, flow along during the high profile economists from Harvard, Yale, MIT, waking hours, and at their best, they require and Columbia University. For instance, Glenn no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are ‘off’ Hubbard, Dean of Columbia Business School and and may be out of place, but at least they are Martin Feldstein of Harvard got huge payoffs from always in motion, in time, in place, in the form a number of financial firms and wrote academic of all kinds of strange combinations moving papers or opinion pieces favoring deregulation, about, not necessarily forward, sometimes while refusing to declare that they were on the against each other, contrapuntally yet without payroll of Met Life, Goldman Sachs, or Merrill one central theme. A form of freedom, I like Lynch (Ferguson, 2012). to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism too is In opposition to such a debased view of educa- one of the themes I particularly want to hold tional engagement, Said argued for what he called a on to. With so many dissonances in my life I pedagogy of wakefulness. In defining and expand- have learned actually to prefer being not quite ing on Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness, and how it right and out of place (Said, 2000). shaped his important consideration of academics as public intellectuals, I begin with a passage that Said posits here an antidote to the seductions I think offers tremendous insight on the ethical and of conformity and the lure of corporate money that political force of much of his writing. This selec- insures, as Irving Howe (1990) once pointed out tion is taken from his memoir, Out of Place, which caustically, “an honored place for the intellectuals”.

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For Said, it is a sense of being awake, displaced, awareness, making connections to those elements caught in a combination of contradictory circum- of power and politics often hidden from public stances that suggests a pedagogy that is cosmopolitan view, and reminding “the audience of the moral and imaginative–a public affirming pedagogy that questions that may be hidden in the clamor and din demands a critical and engaged interaction with of the public debate”. the world we live in mediated by a responsibility The view of higher education as a democratic for challenging structures of domination and for public sphere committed to producing young people alleviating human suffering. This is a pedagogy capable and willing to expand and deepen their sense that addresses the needs of multiple publics. As an of themselves, to think the “world” critically, “to ethical and political practice, a public pedagogy of imagine something other than their own well-being,” wakefulness rejects modes of education removed to serve the public good, take risks, and struggle from political or social concerns, divorced from for a substantive democracy has been in a state history and matters of injury and injustice. Said’s of acute crisis for the last thirty years (Newfield, notion of a pedagogy of wakefulness includes “lifting 2008). When faculty assume, in this context, their complex ideas into the public space,” recognizing civic responsibility to educate students to think human injury inside and outside of the academy, critically, act with conviction, and connect what and using theory as a form of criticism to change they learn in classrooms to important social issues things.2 This is a pedagogy in which academics are in the larger society, they are often hounded by those neither afraid of controversy nor the willingness who demand “measurable student outcomes,” as if to make connections between private issues and deep learning breaks down into such discrete and broader elements of society’s problems that are quantifiable units. What do the liberal arts and hu- otherwise hidden. manities amount to if they do not function as centers Being awake meant refusing the now popular of critique, repositories for cultivating the radical sport of academic bashing or embracing a crude call imagination, and teach the practice of freedom? for action at the expense of rigorous intellectual and Gayatri Spivak (2010) provides a context for this theoretical work. On the contrary, it meant com- question with her comment: “Can one insist on the bining rigor and clarity, on the one hand, and civic importance of training in [in higher education] in courage and political commitment, on the other. A [a] time of legitimized violence?” pedagogy of wakefulness meant using theoretical C.Wright Mills (2000) was right in contend- archives as resources, recognizing the worldly ing that higher education should be considered space of criticism as the democratic underpinning a “public intelligence apparatus, concerned with of publicness, defining critical literacy not merely public issues and private troubles and with the as a competency, but as an act of interpretation structural trends of our time underlying them”. He linked to the possibility of intervention in the world. insists that academics in their roles as public intel- It pointed to a kind of border literacy in the plural lectuals ought to transform personal troubles and in which people learned to read and write from concerns into social issues and problems open to multiple positions of agency; it also was indebted critique, debate, and reason. Matters of translation, to the recognition forcibly stated by Hannah Arendt connecting private troubles with larger systemic (1977) that “Without a politically guaranteed public considerations are crucial in helping “the individual realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its become a self-educating [person], who only then appearance”. would be reasonable and free”. 3 Yet, Mills also I believe that Said was right in insisting that believed, rightly, that that criticism is not the only intellectuals have a responsibility to unsettle power, responsibility of public intellectuals. As Archon trouble consensus, and challenge common sense. Fung (2011) points out, they can “also join with The very notion of being an engaged public intel- other citizens and young people to address social lectual is neither foreign to nor a violation of what problems, aid popular movements and organizations it means to be an academic scholar, but central to in their efforts to advance justice, and sometimes its very definition. According to Said (2001), aca- work with governments “to construct a world that demics have a duty to enter into the public sphere is more just and democratic”. unafraid to take positions and generate controversy, For those of us who believe that education is functioning as moral witnesses, raising political more than an extension of the business world, it is

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crucial to address a number of issues that connect budget and arms industry. One example of military the university to the larger society while stressing waste is evident in a military project such as the the educative nature of politics as part of a broader F-35 Stealth Fighter jet, which over the lifetime effort to create a formative culture that supports the of the project is expected to cost $1.5 trillion dol- connection between critique and action and redefines lars. Democracy needs a Marshall Plan in which agency in the service of the practice of freedom and funding is sufficient to make all levels of education justice. Let me mention just a few. First, educators free, while also providing enough social support to can address the relationship between the attack on eliminate poverty, hunger, inadequate health care, the social state and the transformation of higher and the destruction of the environment. There is education into an adjunct corporate power. The nothing utopian about the demand to redirect money attack on higher education is difficult to fully com- away from the military, powerful corporations, and prehend outside of the attack on the welfare state, the upper 1 percent. social provisions, public servants, and democratic Second, addressing these tasks demands a public spheres. Nor can it be understood outside of sustained critique of the transformation of a market the production of the neoliberal subject, one who is economy into a market society along with a clear atomized, unable to connect private issues to larger analysis of the damage it has caused both at home public considerations, and is taught to believe in and abroad. Power, particularly the power of the a form of radical individualism that enables a fast largest corporations, has become more unaccount- withdrawal from the public sphere and the claims able and “the subtlety of illegitimate power makes it of economic and social justice. As Stefan Collini hard to identify” (George, 2014). The greatest threat (2014) has argued, under the regime of neoliberal- posed by authoritarian politics is that it makes power ism, the “social self’ has been transformed into the invisible and hence defines itself in universal and “disembedded individual,” just as the notion of the commonsense terms, as if it is beyond critique and university as a public good is now repudiated by dissent. Moreover, disposability has become the new the privatizing and atomistic values at the heart of measure of a savage form of casino capitalism in a hyper-market driven society. which the only value that matters is exchange value. Clearly, in any democratic society, education Compassion, social responsibility, and justice are should be viewed as a right, not an entitlement. relegated to the dustbin of an older modernity that This suggests a reordering of state and federal pri- now is viewed as either quaint or a grim reminder orities to make that happen. Much needed revenue of a socialist past. This suggests, as Angela Davis, can be raised by putting into play even a limited Michelle Alexander, and others have argued that number of reform policies in which, for instance, there is a need for academics and young people to the rich and corporations would be forced to pay a become part of a broader social movement aimed fair share of their taxes, a tax would be placed on at dismantling the repressive institutions that make trade transactions, and tax loopholes for the wealthy up the punishing state. The most egregious example would be eliminated. It is well known that the low of which is the prison-industrial complex, which tax rate given to corporations is a major scandal. drains billions of dollars in funds to put people in jail For instance, the Bank of America paid no taxes when such resources could be used to fund public in 2010 and “got $1.9 billion tax refund from the and higher education. As Ferguson (2012) makes IRS, even though it made $4.4 billion in profits” painfully clear, the police have become militarized, (Snyder, 2013). armed with weapons from the battlefields of Iraq In addition, academics can join with students, and Afghanistan. The United State prison system public schools teachers, unions, and others to locks up more people than any other country in the bring attention to wasteful military spending that world, and the vast majority of them are people of if eliminated could provide the funds for a free color. Moreover, public schools are increasingly public higher education for every qualified young modeled after prisons and are implementing policies person in the country. While there is growing public in which children are arrested for throwing peanuts concern over rising tuition rates along with the at a school bus or violating a dress code. The punish- crushing debt students are incurring, there is little ing state is a dire threat to both public and higher public outrage from academics over the billions of education and democracy itself. The American dollars wasted on a massive and wasteful military public does not need more prisons; it needs more

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schools, accessible, low cost health services, and excluded from getting a higher education and, in a living wage for all workers. This type of analysis part, this is because they are left out of the social suggests that progressives and others need a more contract and the discourse of democracy. They are comprehensive understanding of how politics and the new disposables who lack jobs, a decent educa- power are interrelated, of how different registers tion, hope, and any semblance of a life better than of oppression mutually inform each other and can that of their parents. They are a reminder of how be better understood in terms of their connections finance capital has abandoned any viable vision and deeply historical and social relations. of a better future for young people. Youth have Third, academics, artists, journalists and other become a liability in the world of high finance, young people need to connect the rise of subaltern, a world that refuses to view them as important part-time labor–or what we might call the Walmart social investments. And the consequences are model of model of wealth and labor relations–in terrifying. As Jennifer M. Silva (2013) points out both the university and the larger society to the in her book, Coming Up Short, coming of age massive inequality in wealth and income that for young people “is not just being delayed but now corrupts every aspect of American politics fundamentally dismantled by drastic economic and society. No democracy can survive the kind restructuring, profound cultural transformations, of inequality in which “the 400 richest people… and deepening social inequality”. The futures of have as much wealth as 154 million Americans young people are being refigured or reimagined combined, that’s 50 percent of the entire country in ways that both punish and depoliticize them. [while] the top economic 1 percent of the U.S. Silva writes that many young people are turning population now has a record 40 percent of all away from politics, focusing instead on the purely wealth and more wealth than 90 percent of the personal and emotional vocabularies of self-help population combined” (DeGraw, 2011). The Koch and emotional self-management. brothers made 3 million an hour on their dividends Finally, there is a need to oppose the ongo- in 2012. Moreover, they “made enough money in ing shift in power relations between faculty and one second to feed one homeless woman on food the managerial class. Too many faculty are now stamps for an entire year” (Buchheit, 2013). Of removed from the governing structure of higher course, there is more at stake here than making education and as a result have been abandoned to visible the vast inequities in educational and the misery of impoverished wages, an excessive economic opportunities and the corruption of the number of classes to teach, no health care, and few, political process, there is also the corrosion of if any, social benefits. As Benjamin Ginsburg points democracy itself. Democracy in the United States out, administrators and their staffs now outnumber is on life support because, as a recent Princeton full time faculty accounting for two-thirds of the University study noted, it has been hijacked by increase in higher education costs in the past 20 a free-floating class of ultra-rich and corporate years. This is shameful and is not merely an edu- powerbrokers and transformed into an oligarchy cation issue but a deeply political matter, one that “where power is effectively wielded by a small must address how neoliberal ideology and policy number of individuals (Mckay, 2014)”. has imposed on higher education an anti-democratic Fourth, academics need to fight for the rights governing structure. of students to get a free education, be given a for- We may live in the shadow of the authoritar- midable and critical education not dominated by ian corporate state, but the future is still open. The corporate values, and to have a say in the shaping time has come to develop a political language in of their education and what it means to expand and which civic values and social responsibility–and the deepen the practice of freedom and democracy. In institutions, tactics, and long-term commitments many countries such as Germany, France, Denmark, that support them–become central to invigorating Cuba, and Brazil, post-secondary education is free and fortifying a new era of civic engagement, a because these countries view education not as a renewed sense of social agency, and an impas- private right but as a public good. Yet, in some sioned international social movement with the of the most advanced countries in the world such vision, organization, and set of strategies capable as the United States and Canada, young people, of challenging the neoliberal nightmare that now especially from low income groups have been

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haunts the globe and empties out the meaning of raises serious questions about what educators are politics and democracy. going to do within the current historical climate These may be dark times, as Hannah Arendt to make sure that they do not succumb to the au- once warned, but they don’t have to be, and that thoritarian forces circling the university, waiting for the resistance to stop and for the lights to go out. Resistance is no longer an option, it is a necessity.

References

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Notes

1 I have used this example in other pieces, and I use it again because of its relevance. 2 Said, Out of Place, p. 7. 3 Ibid. Mills, “On Politics”, p. 186.

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