With
the advent of Neoliberalism, we have witnessed the production and
widespread adoption within many countries of what I want to call the
politics of economic Darwinsim. As a theater of cruelty and mode of
public pedagogy, economic Darwinism removes economics and markets from
the discourse of social obligations and social costs. The results
are all around us ranging from ecological devastation and widespread
economic impoverishment to the increasing incarceration of large
segments of the population marginalized by race and class. Economics now
drives politics, transforming citizens into consumers and compassion
into an object of scorn. The language of rabid individualism and
harsh competition now replaces the notion of the public and all forms of
solidarity not aligned with market values. As public
considerations and issues collapse into the morally vacant pit of
private visions and narrow self-interests, the bridges between private
and public life are dismantled making it almost impossible to determine
how private troubles are connected to broader public issues. Long term
investments are now replaced by short term profits while compassion and
concern for others are viewed as a weakness. As public visions
fall into disrepair, the concept of the public good is eradicated in
favor of Democratic public values are scorned because they subordinate
market considerations to the common good. Morality in this
instance simply dissolves, as humans are stripped of any obligations to
each other. How else to explain Mitt Romney’s gaffe caught on video in
which he derided “47 percent of the people [who] will vote for the
president no matter what”?[i]
There was more at work here than what some have called a cynical
political admission by Romney that some voting blocs do not matter.[ii]
Romney’s dismissive comments about those 47 percent of adult Americans
who don’t pay federal income taxes for one reason or another, whom he
described as “people who believe that they are victims, who believe the
government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they
are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it,”[iii] makes clear that the logic disposability is now a central feature of American politics.
As
the language of privatization, deregulation, and commodification
replaces the discourse of the public good, all things public,
including public schools, libraries, transportation systems, crucial
infrastructures, and public services, are viewed either as a drain on
the market or as a pathology.[iv]
The corrupting influence of money and concentrated power not only
supports the mad violence of the defense industry, but turns politics
itself into mode of sovereignty in which sovereignty now becomes
identical with policies that benefit the rich, corporations, and the
defense industry.”[v]
Thomas Frank is on target when he argues that “Over the course of the
past few decades, the power of concentrated money has subverted
professions, destroyed small investors, wrecked the regulatory state,
corrupted legislators en masse and repeatedly put the economy through he
wringer. Now it has come for our democracy itself.”[vi]
Individual
prosperity becomes the greatest of social achievements because it
allegedly drives innovation and creates jobs. At the same time, massive
disparities in income and wealth are celebrated as a justification for a
survival of the fittest ethic and homage to a ruthless mode of
unbridled individualism. Vulnerable populations once protected by
the social state are now considered a liability because they are viewed
as either flawed consumers or present a threat to a right-wing Christian
view of America as a white, protestant public sphere. The
elderly, young people, the unemployed, immigrants, and poor whites
and minorities of color now constitute a form of human waste and are
considered disposable, unworthy of sharing in the rights, benefits, and
protections of a substantive democracy. Clearly, this new politics
of disposability and culture of cruelty represents more than an
economic crisis, it is also speaks to a deeply rooted crisis of
education, agency, and social responsibility.
Under
such circumstances, to cite C. W. Mills, we are seeing the breakdown of
democracy, the disappearance of critical intellectuals, and “the
collapse of those public spheres which offer a sense of critical agency
and social imagination.”[vii]
Since the 1970s, we have witnessed the forces of market fundamentalism
strip education of its public values, critical content, and civic
responsibilities as part of its broader goal of creating new subjects
wedded to consumerism, risk-free relationships, and the destruction of
the social state. Tied largely to instrumental purposes and
measurable paradigms, many institutions of higher education are now
committed almost exclusively to economic goals, such as preparing
students for the workforce. Universities have not only strayed from
their democratic mission, they seem immune to the plight of students who
have to face a harsh new world of high unemployment, the prospect of
downward mobility, debilitating debt, and a future that mimics the
failures of the past. The question of what kind of education
is needed for students to be informed and active citizens is rarely
asked.[viii]
Within
both higher education and the educational force of the broader cultural
apparatus– with its networks of knowledge production in the old and new
media– we are witnessing the emergence and dominance of a powerful and
ruthless, if not destructive, market-driven notion of education,
freedom, agency, and responsibility. Such modes of education do not
foster a sense of organized responsibility central to a democracy.
Instead, they foster what might be called a sense of organized
irresponsibility–a practice that underlies the economic Darwinism and
civic corruption at the heart of American and, to a lesser degree,
Canadian politics.
The
anti-democratic values that drive free market fundamentalism are
embodied in policies now attempting to shape diverse levels of higher
education all over the globe. The script has now become overly familiar
and increasingly taken for granted, especially in the United States and
increasingly in Canada. Shaping the neoliberal framing of public
and higher education is a corporate-based ideology that embraces
standardizing the curriculum, top-to-down governing structures,
courses that promote entrepreneurial values, and the reduction of
all levels of education to job training sites. For example, one
university is offering a master’s degree to students who commit to
starting a high-tech company while another allows career officers to
teach capstone research seminars in the humanities. In one of these
classes, the students were asked to “develop a 30-second commercial on
their ‘personal brand.’”[ix]
Central
to this neoliberal view of higher education is a market-driven paradigm
that wants to eliminate tenure, turn the humanities into a
job preparation service, and reduce most faculty to the status of
part-time and temporary workers, if not simply a new subordinate class
of disempowered educators. The indentured service status of such
faculty is put on full display as some colleges have resorted to using
“temporary service agencies to do their formal hiring.”[x]
Faculty in this view are regarded as simply another cheap army of
reserve labor, a powerless group that universities are eager to
exploit in order to increase the bottom line while disregarding the
needs and rights of academic laborers and the quality of education that
students deserve.
There
is no talk in this view of higher education about shared governance
between faculty and administrators, nor of educating students as
critical citizens rather than potential employees of Wal-Mart.
There is no attempt to affirm faculty as scholars and public
intellectuals who have both a measure of autonomy and power. Instead,
faculty members are increasingly defined less as intellectuals than as
technicians and grant writers. Students fare no better in this debased
form of education and are treated either as consumers or as restless
children in need of high-energy entertainment—as was made clear in the
recent Penn State scandal. Nor is there any attempt to legitimate higher
education as a fundamental sphere for creating the agents necessary for
an aspiring democracy. This neoliberal corporatized model of higher
education exhibits a deep disdain for critical ideals, public spheres,
and practices that are not directly linked to market values, business
culture, the economy, or the production of short term financial gains.
In fact, the commitment to democracy is beleaguered, viewed
less as a crucial educational investment than as a distraction that gets
in the way of connecting knowledge and pedagogy to the production of
material and human capital.
Higher Education and the Crisis of Legitimacy
In
the United States, many of the problems in higher education can be
linked to low funding, the domination of universities by market
mechanisms, the rise of for-profit colleges, the intrusion of the
national security state, and the lack of faculty self-governance, all of
which not only contradicts the culture and democratic value of higher
education but also makes a mockery of the very meaning and mission of
the university as a democratic public sphere. Decreased financial
support for higher education stands in sharp contrast to increased
support for tax benefits for the rich, big banks, the Defense Budget,
and mega corporations. Rather than enlarge the moral imagination
and critical capacities of students, too many universities are now
wedded to producing would-be hedge fund managers, depoliticized
students, and creating modes of education that promote a
“technically trained docility.”[xi]
Strapped for money and increasingly defined in the language of
corporate culture, many universities are now “pulled or driven
principally by vocational, [military], and economic considerations while
increasingly removing academic knowledge production from democratic
values and projects.”[xii]
College
presidents are now called CEOs and speak largely in the discourse of
Wall Street and corporate fund managers while at the same time moving
without apology or shame between interlocking corporate and academic
boards. Venture capitalists scour colleges and universities in search of
big profits to be made through licensing agreements, the control of
intellectual property rights, and investments in university spinoff
companies. In this new Gilded Age of money and profit, academic subjects
gain stature almost exclusively through their exchange value on the
market. It gets worse as exemplified by one recent example. BB&T
Corporation, a financial holdings company, gave a $1 million gift to
Marshall University’s business school on the condition that Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand [Paul Ryan’s favorite book] be taught in a
course. What are we to make of the integrity of a university
when it accepts a monetary gift from a corporation or rich patron
demanding as part of the agreement the power to specify what is to be
taught in a course or how a curriculum should be shaped? Some
corporations and universities now believe that what is taught in a
course is not an academic decision but a market consideration.
Not
only does neoliberalism undermine both civic education and public
values and confuse education with training, it also treats
knowledge as a product, promoting a neoliberal logic that views schools
as malls, students as consumers, and faculty as entrepreneurs. It gets
worse. As Stanley Aronowitz points out, [t]he absurd neoliberal
idea that users should pay for every public good from parks and beaches
to highways has reached education with a vengeance”[xiii]
as more and more students are forced to give up attending college
because of skyrocketing tuition rates. In addition, thousands of
students are now saddled with debts that will
bankrupt their lives in the future. Unfortunately, one measure of this
disinvestment in higher education as a public good can be seen in the
fact that many states such as California are spending more on prisons
than on higher education.[xiv]
Educating low income and poor minorities to be engaged citizens has
been undermined by an unholy alliance of law and order conservatives,
private prison corporations, and prison guard unions along with the rise
of the punishing state, all of whom have an invested interest in
locking more people up, especially poor minority youth, rather than
educating them. It is no coincidence that as the U.S., and Canada
to a lesser degree, disinvests in the institutions fundamental to a
democracy, it has invested heavily in the rise of the prison-industrial
complex, and the punishing-surveillance state. The social costs of
prioritizing punishing over educating is clear in one shocking
statistic provided by a recent study which states that “by age 23,
almost a third of Americans or 30.2 percent have been arrested for a
crime…that researches say is a measure of growing exposure to the
criminal justice system in everyday life.”[xv]
Questions
regarding how education might enable students to develop a keen sense
of prophetic justice, utilize critical analytical skills, and cultivate
an ethical sensibility through which they learn to respect the rights of
others are becoming increasingly irrelevant in a market-driven and
militarized university. As the humanities and liberal arts are
downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself
caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young
people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports.
If
the commercialization, commodification, and militarization of the
university continue unabated, higher education will become yet another
one of a number of institutions incapable of fostering critical inquiry,
public debate, human acts of justice, and public values. But the
calculating logic of the corporate university does more than diminish
the moral and political vision and practices necessary to sustain a
vibrant democracy and an engaged notion of social agency. It also
undermines the development of public spaces where matters of dissent,
critical dialogue, social responsibility, and social justice are
pedagogically valued– viewed as fundamental to providing students with
the knowledge and skills necessary to address the problems facing the
nation and the globe. Such democratic public spheres are especially
important at a time when any space that produces “critical thinkers
capable of putting existing institutions into question” is under siege
by powerful economic and political interests.[xvi]
Higher
education has a responsibility not only to search for the truth
regardless of where it may lead, but also to educate students to make
authority and power politically and morally accountable while at the
same time sustaining “the idea and hope of a public culture.”[xvii] Though questions regarding whether the university should serve strictly public
rather than private interests no longer carry the weight of forceful
criticism they did in the past, such questions are still crucial in
addressing the purpose of higher education and what it might mean to
imagine the university’s full participation in public life as the
protector and promoter of democratic values.
What
needs to be understood is that higher education may be one of the few
public spheres left where knowledge, values, and learning offer a
glimpse of the promise of education for nurturing public values,
critical hope, and a substantive democracy. It may be the case
that everyday life is increasingly organized around market principles;
but confusing a market-determined society with democracy hollows out the
legacy of higher education, whose deepest roots are moral, not
commercial. This is a particularly important insight in a society where
the free circulation of ideas are not only being replaced by ideas
managed by the dominant media, but where critical ideas are increasingly
viewed or dismissed as banal, if not reactionary. Celebrity culture and
the commodification of culture now constitute a powerful form of mass
illiteracy and increasingly permeate all aspects the educational force
of the wider cultural apparatus. But mass illiteracy does more than
depoliticize the public, it also becomes complicit with the suppression
of dissent. Intellectuals who engage in dissent and “keep the idea
and hope of a public culture alive,”[xviii]
are often dismissed as irrelevant, extremist, or un-American. Moreover,
anti-public intellectuals now dominate the larger cultural landscape,
all too willing to flaunt co-option and reap the rewards of venting
insults at their assigned opponents while being reduced to the status of
paid servants of powerful economic interests. At the same time,
there are too few academics willing to defend higher education for its
role in providing a supportive and sustainable culture in which a
vibrant critical democracy can flourish.
These
issues, in part, represent political and pedagogical concerns that
should not be lost on either academics or those concerned about the
purpose and meaning of higher education. Democracy places civic demands
upon its citizens, and such demands point to the necessity of an
education that is broad-based, critical, and supportive of meaningful
civic values, participation in self-governance, and democratic
leadership. Only through such a formative and critical educational
culture can students learn how to become individual and social agents,
rather than merely disengaged spectators, able both to think
otherwise and to act upon civic commitments that “necessitate a
reordering of basic power arrangements” fundamental to promoting the
common good and producing a meaningful democracy.
Dreaming the Impossible
Reclaiming
higher education as a democratic public sphere begins with the crucial
project of challenging, among other things, those market
fundamentalists, religious extremists, and rigid ideologues who harbor a
deep disdain for critical thought and healthy skepticism, and who look
with displeasure upon any form of education that teaches students to
read the word and the world critically. The radical imagination in this
discourse is viewed as dangerous and a dire threat to political
authorities. One striking example of this view was expressed recently by
former Senator Rick Santorum who argues that there is no room for
intellectuals in the Republican Party. Needless to say, education is not
only about issues of work and economics, but also about questions of
justice, social freedom, and the capacity for democratic agency, action,
and change, as well as the related issues of power, inclusion, and
citizenship. These are educational and political issues, and they should
be addressed as part of a broader effort to re-energize the global
struggle for social justice and democracy.
If
higher education is to characterize itself as a site of critical
thinking, collective work, and public service, educators and students
will have to redefine the knowledge, skills, research, and intellectual
practices currently favored in the university. Central to such a
challenge is the need to position intellectual practice “as part of an
intricate web of morality, rigor and responsibility” that enables
academics to speak with conviction, use the public sphere to address
important social problems, and demonstrate alternative models for
bridging the gap between higher education and the broader society.
Connective practices are key: it is crucial to develop intellectual
practices that are collegial rather than competitive, refuse the
instrumentality and privileged isolation of the academy, link critical
thought to a profound impatience with the status quo, and connect human
agency to the idea of social responsibility and the politics of
possibility.
Connection
also means being openly and deliberately critical and worldly in one’s
intellectual work. Increasingly, as universities are shaped by a culture
of fear in which dissent is equated with treason, the call to be
objective and impartial, whatever one’s intentions, can easily echo what
George Orwell called the official truth or the establishment point of
view. Lacking a self-consciously democratic political focus, teachers
are often reduced to the role of a technician or functionary
engaged in formalistic rituals, unconcerned with the disturbing and
urgent problems that confront the larger society or the consequences of
one’s pedagogical practices and research undertakings. In opposition to
this model, with its claims to and conceit of political neutrality, I
argue that academics should combine the mutually interdependent roles of
critical educator and active citizen. This requires finding ways to
connect the practice of classroom teaching with the operation of power
in the larger society and to provide the conditions for students to view
themselves as critical agents capable of making those who exercise
authority and power answerable for their actions. Such an intellectual
does not train students solely for jobs, but also educates them to
question critically the institutions, policies, and values that
shape their lives, relationships to others, and myriad connections
to the larger world.
I
think Stuart Hall is on target here when he insists that educators also
have a responsibility to provide students with “critical knowledge that
has to be ahead of traditional knowledge: it has to be better than
anything that traditional knowledge can produce, because only serious
ideas are going to stand up.”[xix]
At the same time, he insists on the need for educators to “actually
engage, contest, and learn from the best that is locked up in other
traditions,” especially those attached to traditional academic
paradigms.[xx]
It is also important to remember that education as a utopian project is
not simply about fostering critical consciousness but also about
teaching students to take responsibility for one’s responsibilities, be
they personal, political, or global. Students must be made aware of the
ideological and structural forces that promote needless human suffering
while also recognizing that it takes more than awareness to resolve
them. This is the kind of intellectual practice that Zygmunt Bauman
calls “taking responsibility for our responsibility,”[xxi] one that is attentive to the suffering and needs of others.
Education
cannot be decoupled from what Jacques Derrida calls a democracy to
come, that is, a democracy that must always “be open to the possibility
of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and
indefinitely improving itself.”[xxii]
Within this project of possibility and impossibility, education must be
understood as a deliberately informed and purposeful political and
moral practice, as opposed to one that is either doctrinaire,
instrumentalized, or both. Moreover, a critical pedagogy should be
engaged at all levels of schooling. Similarly, it must gain part of its
momentum in higher education among students who will go back to the
schools, churches, synagogues, and workplaces in order to produce new
ideas, concepts, and critical ways of understanding the world in which
young people and adults live. This is a notion of intellectual practice
and responsibility that refuses the insular, overly pragmatic, and
privileged isolation of the academy. It also affirms a broader
vision of learning that links knowledge to the power of self-definition
and to the capacities of students to expand the scope of democratic
freedoms, particularly those that address the crisis of education,
politics, and the social as part and parcel of the crisis of democracy
itself.
In
order for critical pedagogy, dialogue, and thought to have real
effects, they must advocate the message that all citizens, old and
young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the
society in which they live. This is a message we heard from the brave
students fighting tuition hikes and the destruction of civil liberties
and social provisions in Quebec and to a lesser degree in the Occupy
Wall Street movement. If educators are to function as public
intellectuals, they need listen to young people all over the world who
are insisting that the relationship between knowledge and power can be
emancipatory, that their histories and experiences matter, and that what
they say and do counts in their struggle to unlearn dominating
privileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others, and
transform, when necessary, the world around them. Simply put, educators
need to argue for forms of pedagogy that close the gap between the
university and everyday life. Their curricula need to be organized
around knowledge of those communities, cultures, and traditions that
give students a sense of history, identity, place, and possibility. More
importantly, they need to join students in engaging in a practice of
freedom that points to new and radical forms of pedagogies that have a
direct link to building social movements in and out of the colleges and
universities.
Although
there are still a number of academics such as Noam Chomsky, Angela
Davis, Stanley Aronowitz, Slavoj Zizek, Russell Jacoby, and Cornel West
who function as public intellectuals, they are often shut out of the
mainstream media or characterized as marginal, even subversive figures.
At the same time, many academics find themselves laboring under
horrendous working conditions that either don’t allow for them to write
in an accessible manner for the public because they do not have
time—given the often almost slave-like labor demanded of part-time
academics and increasingly of full-time academics as well—or they
retreat into a highly specialized, professional language that few people
can understand in order to meet the institutional standards of academic
excellence. In this instance, potentially significant theoretical rigor
detaches itself both from any viable notion of accessibility and from
the possibility of reaching a larger audience outside of their academic
disciplines.
Consequently,
such intellectuals often exist in hermetic academic bubbles cut off
from both the larger public and the important issues that impact
society. To no small degree, they have been complicit in the
transformation of the university into an adjunct of corporate and
military power. Such academics have become incapable of defending higher
education as a vital public sphere and unwilling to challenge those
spheres of induced mass cultural illiteracy and firewalls of jargon that
doom critically engaged thought, complex ideas, and serious writing for
the public to extinction. Without their intervention as public
intellectuals, the university defaults on its role as a democratic
public sphere capable of educating an informed public, a culture of
questioning, and the development of a critical formative culture
connected to the need, as Cornelius Castoriadis puts it, “to create
citizens who are critical thinkers capable of putting existing
institutions into question so that democracy again becomes society’s
movement.”[xxiii]
Before
his untimely death, Edward Said, himself an exemplary public
intellectual, urged his colleagues in the academy to directly confront
those social hardships that disfigure contemporary society and pose a
serious threat to the promise of democracy. He urged them to
assume the role of public intellectuals, wakeful and mindful of their
responsibilities to bear testimony to human suffering and the
pedagogical possibilities at work in educating students to be
autonomous, self-reflective, and socially responsible. Said rejected the
notion of a market-driven pedagogy, one that created cheerful robots
and legitimated organized recklessness and illegal legalities. In
opposition to such a pedagogy, Said argued for what he called a pedagogy
of wakefulness and its related concern with a politics of
critical engagement. In commenting on Said’s public pedagogy of
wakefulness, and how it shaped his important consideration of academics
as public intellectuals, I begin with a passage that I think offers a
key to the ethical and political force of much of his writing. This
selection is taken from his memoir, Out of Place,
which describes the last few months of his mother’s life in a New York
hospital and the difficult time she had falling to sleep because of the
cancer that was ravaging her body. Recalling this traumatic and pivotal
life experience, Said’s meditation moves between the existential and the
insurgent, between private pain and worldly commitment, between the
seductions of a “solid self” and the reality of a contradictory,
questioning, restless, and at times, uneasy sense of identity. He
writes:
‘Help
me to sleep, Edward,’ she once said to me with a piteous trembling in
her voice that I can still hear as I write. But then the disease spread
into her brain—and for the last six weeks she slept all the time—my own
inability to sleep may be her last legacy to me, a counter to her
struggle for sleep. For me sleep is something to be gotten over as
quickly as possible. I can only go to bed very late, but I am literally
up at dawn. Like her I don’t possess the secret of long sleep, though
unlike her I have reached the point where I do not want it. For me,
sleep is death, as is any diminishment in awareness. ..Sleeplessness for
me is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost; there is
nothing for me as invigorating as immediately shedding the shadowy
half-consciousness of a night’s loss than the early morning,
reacquainting myself with or resuming what I might have lost completely a
few hours earlier. I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of
flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the
identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents
like the themes of one’s life, flow along during the waking hours, and
at their best, they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are
‘off’ and may be out of place, but at least they are always in motion,
in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations
moving about, not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other,
contrapuntally yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I like
to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That
skepticism too is one of the themes I particularly want to hold on to.
With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer
being not quite right and out of place.[xxiv]
It
is this sense of being awake, displaced, caught in a combination of
diverse circumstances that suggests a pedagogy that is cosmopolitan and
imaginative–a public affirming pedagogy that demands a critical and
engaged interaction with the world we live in mediated by a
responsibility for challenging structures of domination and for
alleviating human suffering. As an ethical and political practice,
a public pedagogy of wakefulness rejects modes of education removed
from political or social concerns, divorced from history and matters of
injury and injustice. Said’s notion of a pedagogy of wakefulness
includes “lifting complex ideas into the public space,” recognizing
human injury inside and outside of the academy, and using theory as a
form of criticism to change things.[xxv]
This is a pedagogy in which academics are neither afraid of controversy
or the willingness to make connections that are otherwise hidden, nor
are they afraid of making clear the connection between private issues
and broader elements of society’s problems.
For
Said, being awake becomes a central metaphor for defining the role of
academics as public intellectuals, defending the university as a crucial
public sphere, engaging how culture deploys power, and taking seriously
the idea of human interdependence while at the same time always living
on the border — one foot in and one foot out, an exile and an insider
for whom home was always a form of homelessness. As a relentless border
crosser, Said embraced the idea of the “traveler” as an important
metaphor for engaged intellectuals. As Stephen Howe, referencing Said,
points out, “It was an image which depended not on power, but on motion,
on daring to go into different worlds, use different languages, and
‘understand a multiplicity of disguises, masks, and rhetorics. Travelers
must suspend the claim of customary routine in order to live in new
rhythms and rituals … the traveler crosses over, traverses territory,
and abandons fixed positions all the time.’”[xxvi]
And as a border intellectual and traveler, Said embodied the notion of
always “being quite not right,” evident by his principled critique of
all forms of certainties and dogmas and his refusal to be silent in the
face of human suffering at home and abroad.
Being
awake meant refusing the now popular sport of academic bashing or
embracing a crude call for action at the expense of rigorous
intellectual and theoretical work. On the contrary, it meant combining
rigor and clarity, on the one hand, and civic courage and political
commitment, on the other. A pedagogy of wakefulness meant using theory
as a resource, recognizing the worldly space of criticism as the
democratic underpinning of publicness, defining critical literacy not
merely as a competency, but as an act of interpretation linked to the
possibility of intervention in the world. It pointed to a kind of border
literacy in the plural in which people learned to read and write from
multiple positions of agency; it also was indebted to the recognition
forcibly stated by Hannah Arendt that “Without a politically guaranteed
public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance.”[xxvii]
For
public intellectuals such as Said, Chomsky, Bourdieu, Angela Davis, and
others, intellectuals have a responsibility to unsettle power, trouble
consensus, and challenge common sense. The very notion of being an
engaged public intellectual is neither foreign to nor a violation of
what it means to be an academic scholar, but central to its very
definition. According to Said, academics have a duty to enter into
the public sphere unafraid to take positions and generate controversy,
functioning as moral witnesses, raising political awareness, making
connections to those elements of power and politics often hidden from
public view, and reminding “the audience of the moral questions that may
be hidden in the clamor and din of the public debate.”[xxviii]
At the same time, Said criticized those academics who retreated into a
new dogmatism of the disinterested specialist that separates them “not
only from the public sphere but from other professionals who don’t use
the same jargon.”[xxix]
This was especially unsettling to him at a time when complex language
and critical thought remain under assault in the larger society by all
manner of anti-democratic forces.
The
view of higher education as a democratic public sphere committed to
producing young people capable and willing to expand and deepen their
sense of themselves, to think the “world” critically, “to imagine
something other than their own well-being,” to serve the public good,
and to struggle for a substantive democracy has been in a state of acute
crisis for the last thirty years.[xxx]
When faculty assume, in this context, their civic responsibility to
educate students to think critically, act with conviction, and connect
what they learn in classrooms to important social issues in the larger
society, they are often denounced for politicizing their classrooms and
for violating professional codes of conduct, or, worse, labelled as
unpatriotic.[xxxi]
In some cases, the risk of connecting what they teach to the imperative
to expand the capacities of students to be both critical and socially
engaged may costs academics their jobs, especially when they make
visible the workings of power, injustice, human misery, and the
alterable nature of the social order. What do the liberal arts and
humanities amount to if they do not teach the practice of freedom,
especially at a time when training is substituted for education?
Gayatri Spivak provides a context for this question with her
comment: “”Can one insist on the importance of training in the
humanities in [a] time of legitimized violence?”[xxxii]
In
a society that remains troublingly resistant to or incapable of
questioning itself, one that celebrates the consumer over the citizen,
and all too willingly endorses the narrow values and
interests of corporate power, the importance of the university as a
place of critical learning, dialogue, and social justice advocacy
becomes all the more imperative. Moreover, the distinctive role
that faculty play in this ongoing pedagogical project of democratization
and learning, along with support for the institutional conditions and
relations of power that make it possible, must be defended as part of a
broader discourse of excellence, equity, and democracy.
Despite
the growing public recognition that market fundamentalism has fostered a
destructive alignment among the state, corporate capital, and
transnational corporations, there is little understanding that such an
alignment has been constructed and solidified through a neoliberal
disciplinary apparatus and corporate pedagogy produced in part in the
halls of higher education and through the educational force of the
larger media culture. The economic Darwinism of the last thirty
years has done more than throw the financial and credit system into
crisis; it has also waged an attack on all those social institutions
that support critical modes of agency, reason, and meaningful
dissent. And yet, the financial meltdown most of the world is
experiencing is rarely seen as part of an educational crisis in which
the institutions of public and higher education have been conscripted
into a war on democratic values. Such institutions have played a
formidable, if not shameless role, in reproducing market-driven beliefs,
social relations, identities, and modes of understanding that
legitimate the institutional arrangements of cut-throat
capitalism. William Black calls such institutions purveyors of a
“criminogenic environment”—one that promotes and legitimates
market-driven practices that include fraud, deregulation, and other
perverse practices.[xxxiii]
Black claims that the most extreme pedagogical expression of such an
environment can be found in business schools, which he calls “fraud
factories” for the elite.[xxxiv]
There
seems to be an enormous disconnect between the economic conditions that
led to the current financial meltdown and the current call to action by
a generation of young people and adults who have been educated for the
last several decades in the knowledge, values, and identities of a
market-driven society. Clearly, this generation will not solve
this crisis if they do not connect it to the assault on an educational
system that has been reduced to a lowly adjunct of corporate interests
and the bidding of the warfare state.
Higher
education represents one the most important sites over which the battle
for democracy is being waged. It is the site where the promise of a
better future emerges out of those visions and pedagogical practices
that combine hope, agency, politics, and moral responsibility as part of
a broader emancipatory discourse. Academics have a distinct and unique
obligation, if not political and ethical responsibility, to make
learning relevant to the imperatives of a discipline, scholarly method,
or research specialization. But more importantly, academics as
engaged scholars can further the activation of knowledge, passion,
values, and hope in the service of forms of agency that are crucial to
sustaining a democracy in which higher education plays an important
civic, critical, and pedagogical role. If democracy is a way of
life that demands a formative culture, educators can play a pivotal role
in creating forms of pedagogy and research that enable young people to
think critically, exercise judgment, engage in spirited debate, and
create those public spaces that constitute “the very essence of
political life.”[xxxv]
Finally,
I want to suggest that while it has become more difficult to imagine a
democratic future, we have entered a period in which young people all
over the world are protesting against neoliberalism and its pedagogy and
politics of disposability. Refusing to remain voiceless and powerless
in determining their future, these young people are organizing
collectively in order to create the conditions for societies
that refuse to use politics as an act of war and markets as the measure
of democracy. They are taking seriously the words of the great
abolitionist Frederick Douglas who bravely argued that freedom is an
empty abstraction if people fail to act, and “if there is no struggle,
there is no progress.”
Their
struggles are not simply aimed at the 1% but also the 99 percent as
part of a broader effort to get them to connect the dots, educate
themselves, and develop and join social movements that can rewrite the
language of democracy and put into place the institutions and formative
cultures that make it possible. Stanley Aronowitz is right in arguing
that “The system survives on the eclipse of the radical imagination, the
absence of a viable political opposition with roots in the general
population, and the conformity of its intellectuals who, to a large
extent, are subjugated by their secure berths in the academy. [At the
same time,] it would be premature to predict that decades of retreat,
defeat and silence can be reversed overnight without a commitment to
what may be termed ‘a long march’ though the institutions, the
workplaces and the streets of the capitalist metropoles.”[xxxvi]
The current protests in the United States, Canada, Greece, and Spain make clear that this is not–indeed, cannot be–only
a short-term project for reform, but a political movement that needs to
intensify, accompanied by the reclaiming of public spaces, the
progressive use of digital technologies, the development of public
spheres, the production of new modes of education, and the
safeguarding of places where democratic expression, new identities, and
collective hope can be nurtured and mobilized. A formative culture
must be put in place pedagogically and institutionally in a variety of
spheres extending from churches and public and higher education to all
those cultural apparatuses engaged in the production and circulation of
knowledge, desire, identities, and values. Clearly, such efforts need to
address the language of democratic revolution rather than the seductive
incremental adjustments of liberal reform. This suggest not only
calling for a living wage, jobs programs, especially for the young, the
democratization of power, economic equality, and a massive shift in
funds away from the machinery of war and big banks but also a
social movement that not only engages in critique but makes hope a real
possibility by organizing to seize power. There is no room for
failure here because failure would cast us back into the clutches of
authoritarianism–that while different from previous historical
periods–shares nonetheless the imperative to proliferate violent social
formations and a death-dealing blow to the promise of a democracy to
come.
Given
the urgency of the problems faced by those marginalized by class, race,
age, and sexual orientation, I think it is all the more crucial to take
seriously the challenge of Derrida’s provocation that “We must do and
think the impossible. If only the possible happened, nothing more would
happen. If I only I did what I can do, I wouldn’t do anything.”[xxxvii]
We may live in dark times as Hannah Arendt reminds us, but
history is open and the space of the possible is larger than the one on
display.
Henry A. Giroux holds
the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster
University in Canada. His most recent books include: “Take Back Higher Education” (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), “The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex” (2007) and “Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed” (2008). His latest book is Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability,” (Paradigm.)
Notes.
[i] David Corn, “Secret Video: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He Really Thinks of Obama Voters,” Mother Jones (September 17, 2012). Online: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/secret-video-romney-private-fundraiser
[ii] Naomi Wolf, “How the Mitt Romney Video Killed the American Dream,” The Guardian
(September 21, 2012). Online:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/21/mitt-romney-video-killed-american-dream?newsfeed=true
[iii] Corn, “Secret Video,” http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/secret-video-romney-private-fundraiser
[iv] George Lakoff and Glenn W. G Smith, “Romney, Ryan and the Devil’s Budget,” Reader Supported News, (August 22, 2012). Online:
http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2012/08/23/romney-ryan-and-the-devils-budget-will-america-keep-its-soul/
[v] João Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005). These zones are also brilliantly analyzed in Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (New York: Knopf, 2012).
[vi] Thomas Frank, “It’s a rich man’s world: How billionaire backers pick America’s candidates,”
Harper’s Magazine (April 2012). Online: http://harpers.org/archive/2012/04/0083856
[vii]. C. Wright Mills, The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 200.
[viii]. Stanley Aronowitz, “Against Schooling: Education and Social Class,” Against Schooling, (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), p. xii.
[ix]. Ibid, Kate Zernike, “Making College ‘Relevant’,” P. ED 16.
[xi] Martha C. Nussbaum, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs The Humanities, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 142.
[xii]
Greig de Peuter, “Universities, Intellectuals, and Multitudes: An
Interview with Stuart Hall”, in Mark Cote, Richard J. F. Day, and Greig
de Peuter, eds.,Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 111.
[xiii]. Ibid., Aronowitz, Against Schooling, p. xviii.
[xv] Erica Goode, “Many in U.S. Are Arrested by Age 23, Study Finds,” New York Times (December 19, 2011), p. A15.
[xvi]. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Democracy as Procedure and democracy as Regime,” Constellations 4:1 (1997), p. 5.
[xvii] George Scialabba, What Are Intellectuals Good For? (Boston: Pressed Wafer, 2009) p. 4.
[xix].
Greig de Peuter, Universities, Intellectuals and Multitudes: An
Interview with Stuart Hall,” in Mark Cote, Richard J. F. Day, and Greig
de Peuter, eds. Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments Against Neoliberal Globalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 113-114.
[xx]. De Peuter, Ibid. P. 117.
[xxi]. Cited in Madeline Bunting, “Passion and Pessimism,” The Guardian (April 5, 2003). Available online: http:/books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4640858,00.html.
[xxii]. Giovanna Borriadori, ed., “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides–A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). P. 121.
[xxiii]. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime,” Constellations 4:1 (1997), p. 10.
[xxiv]. Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Vintage, 2000), pp. 294-299
[xxv]. Said, Out of Place, p. 7.
[xxvi]. Stephen Howe, “Edward Said: The Traveller and the Exile,” Open Democracy (October 2, 2003). Online at: www.opendemocracy.net/articles/ViewPopUpArticle.jsp?id=10&articleId=1561.
[xxvii]. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 149.
[xxviii]. Edward Said, “On Defiance and Taking Positions,” Reflections On Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 504.
[xxix]. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 70.
[xxx]. See, especially, Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
[xxxi].
See Henry A. Giroux, “Academic Unfreedom in America: Rethinking the
University as a Democratic Public Sphere,” in Edward J. Carvalho,
ed., “Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11
University,” special issue of Work and Days 51–54 (2008–2009), pp. 45–72. This may be the best collection yet published on intellectual activism and academic freedom.
[xxxii] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Changing Reflexes: Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” Works and Days, 55/56: Vol. 28, 2010, p. 8.
[xxxiii]. Bill Moyers, “Interview with William K. Black,” Bill Moyers Journal (April 23, 2010).
Online at: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04232010/transcript4.html
[xxxiv]. Moyers, “Interview with William K. Black.”
[xxxv]. See, especially, H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edition, revised (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968); and J. Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action [orig. 1935] (New York: Prometheus Press, 1999).
35. Ibid, Aronowitz, “The Winter of Our Discontent,” p. 68.
[xxxvii] Jacques Derrida, “No One is Innocent: A Discussion with Jacques About Philosophy in the Face of Terror,” The Information Technology, War and Peace Project, p. 2 available online: http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/911/derrida_innocence.html