Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education. Henry A. Giroux
and engagement. Civic literacy, in this context, provides a citizenry with the skills for critical understanding while enabling them to actually intervene in society. The right-wing war on education must be understood as a form of organized irresponsibility; that is, it represents a high-intensity assault on those cultures of questioning, forms of literacy, and public spheres in which reason and critique merge with social responsibility as a central feature of critical agency and democratization. As the political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis insists, for democracy to be vital “it needs to create citizens who are critical thinkers capable of putting existing institutions into question so that democracy again becomes . . . a new type of regime in the full sense of the term.”57
The right-wing war on critical literacy is part of an ongoing attempt to destroy higher education as a democratic public sphere that enables intellectuals to stand firm, take risks, imagine the otherwise, and push against the grain. It is important to insist that as educators we ask, again and again, how higher education can survive in a society in which civic culture and modes of critical literacy collapse as it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish opinion and emotive outbursts from a sustained argument and logical reasoning. Equally important is the need for educators and young people to take on the challenge of defending the university. Toni Morrison gets it right:
If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or ménage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us.58
Defending the humanities, as Terry Eagleton has recently argued, means more than offering an academic enclave for students to learn history, philosophy, art, and literature. It also means stressing how indispensable these fields of study are for all students if they are to be able to make any claim whatsoever to being critical and engaged individual and social agents. But the humanities do more. They also provide the knowledge, skills, social relations, and modes of pedagogy that constitute a formative culture in which the historical lessons of democratization can be learned, the demands of social responsibility can be thoughtfully engaged, the imagination can be expanded, and critical thought can be affirmed. As an adjunct of the academic-military-industrial complex, however, higher education has nothing to say about teaching students how to think for themselves in a democracy, how to think critically and engage with others, and how to address through the prism of democratic values the relationship between themselves and the larger world. We need a permanent revolution around the meaning and purpose of higher education, one in which academics are more than willing to move beyond the language of critique and a discourse of both moral and political outrage, however necessary to a sustained individual and collective defense of the university as a vital public sphere central to democracy itself.
We must reject the idea that the university should be modeled after “a sterile Darwinian shark tank in which the only thing that matters is the bottom line.”59 We must also reconsider how the university in a post-9/11 era is being militarized and increasingly reduced to an adjunct of the growing national security state. The public has apparently given up on the idea of either funding higher education or valuing it as a public good indispensable to the life of any viable democracy. This is all the more reason for academics to be at the forefront of a coalition of activists, public servants, and others in both rejecting the growing corporate management of higher education and developing a new discourse in which the university, and particularly the humanities, can be defended as a vital social and public institution in a democratic society.
Beyond Neoliberal Miseducation
As universities turn toward corporate management models, they increasingly use and exploit cheap faculty labor. Many colleges and universities are drawing more and more upon adjunct and nontenured faculty, many of whom occupy the status of indentured servants who are overworked, lack benefits, receive little or no administrative support, and are paid salaries that qualify them for food stamps.60 Students increasingly fare no better in sharing the status of a subaltern class beholden to neoliberal policies and values. For instance, many are buried under huge debt, celebrated by the collection industry because it is cashing in on their misfortune. Jerry Aston, a member of that industry, wrote in a column after witnessing a protest rally by students criticizing their mounting debt that he “couldn’t believe the accumulated wealth they represent—for our industry.”61 And, of course, this type of economic injustice is taking place in an economy in which rich plutocrats such as the infamous union-busting Koch brothers each saw “their investments grow by $6 billion in one year, which is three million dollars per hour based on a 40-hour ‘work’ week.”62 Workers, students, youth, and the poor are all considered expendable in this neoliberal global economy. Yet the one institution, education, that offers the opportunities for students to challenge these antidemocratic tendencies is under attack in ways that are unparalleled, at least in terms of the scope and intensity of the assault by the corporate elite and other economic fundamentalists.
Casino capitalism does more than infuse market values into every aspect of higher education; it also wages a full-fledged assault on the very notion of public goods, democratic public spheres, and the role of education in creating an informed citizenry. When Rick Santorum argued that intellectuals were not wanted in the Republican Party, he was articulating what has become common sense in a society wedded to narrow instrumentalist values and various modes of fundamentalism. Critical thinking and a literate public have become dangerous to those who want to celebrate orthodoxy over dialogue, emotion over reason, and ideological certainty over thoughtfulness.63 Hannah Arendt’s warning that “it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think”64 at the heart of authoritarian regimes is now embraced as a fundamental tenet of Republican Party politics.
Right-wing appeals to austerity provide the rationale for slash-and-burn policies intended to deprive governmental social and educational programs of the funds needed to enable them to work, if not survive. Along with health care, public transportation, Medicare, food stamp programs for low-income children, and a host of other social protections, higher education is being defunded as part of a larger scheme to dismantle and privatize all public services, goods, and spheres. But there is more at work here than the march toward privatization and the neverending search for profits at any cost; there is also the issue of wasteful spending on a bloated war machine, the refusal to tax fairly the rich and corporations, and the draining of public funds in order to support the US military presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The deficit argument and the austerity policies advocated in its name are a form of class warfare designed largely for the state to be able to redirect revenue in support of the commanding institutions of the corporate-military-industrial complex and away from funding higher education and other crucial public services. The extent of the budget reduction assault is such that in 2012 “states reduced their education budgets by $12.7 billion.”65 Of course, the burden of such reductions falls upon poor minority and other low-income students, who will not be able to afford the tuition increases that will compensate for the loss of state funding.
What has become clear in light of such assaults is that many universities and colleges have become unapologetic accomplices to corporate values and power, and in doing so increasingly regard social problems as either irrelevant or invisible.66 The transformation of higher education both in the United States and abroad is evident in a number of registers. These include decreased support for programs of study that are not business oriented, reduced support for research that does not increase profits, the replacement of shared forms of governance with business management models, the ongoing exploitation of faculty labor, and the use of student purchasing power as the vital measure of a student’s identity, worth, and access to higher education.67
As I point out throughout this book, one consequence of this ongoing disinvestment in higher education is the expansion of a punishing state that increasingly criminalizes a range of social behaviors, wages war on the poor instead of poverty, militarizes local police forces, harasses poor minority youth, and spends more on prisons than on higher education.68 The punishing state produces fear and sustains itself on moral panics. Dissent gives way to widespread insecurity, uncertainty, and an obsession with personal safety. Political, moral, and social indifference is the result, in part, of a public that is increasingly constituted within an educational landscape that reduces