Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education by Henry A. Giroux

Author:Henry A. Giroux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Higher Education, Social Science
ISBN: 978-1-60846-350-3
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2014-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter five

On the Urgency for Public Intellectuals in the Academy

“The university is a critical institution or it is nothing.”

—Stuart Hall

I want to begin with the words of the late African American poet, Audre Lorde, a formidable writer, educator, feminist, gay rights activist, and public intellectual, who displayed a relentless courage in addressing the injustices she witnessed all around her. She writes:

Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.1

And although Lorde refers to poetry here, I think a strong case can be made that the attributes she ascribes to poetry can also be attributed to higher education—a genuine higher education.2 In this case, an education that includes history, philosophy, all of the arts and humanities, the criticality of the social sciences, the world of discovery made manifest by natural science, and the transformations in health and in law wrought by the professions that are at the heart of what it means to know something about the human condition. Lorde’s defense of poetry as a mode of education is especially crucial for those of us who believe that the university is nothing if it is not a public trust and social good: that is, a critical institution infused with the promise of cultivating intellectual insight, the imagination, inquisitiveness, risk-taking, social responsibility, and the struggle for justice. At best, universities should be at the “heart of intense public discourse, passionate learning, and vocal citizen involvement in the issues of the times.”3 It is in the spirit of such an ideal that I first want to address those larger economic, social, and cultural interests that threaten this notion of education, especially higher education.

As I have stated throughout this book, in spite of being discredited by the economic recession of 2008, market fundamentalism or unfettered free-market capitalism has once again become a dominant force for producing a corrupt financial service sector, runaway environmental devastation, egregious amounts of human suffering, and the rise of what has been called the emergence of “finance as a criminalized, rogue industry.”4 The Gilded Age is back with huge profits for the ultra-rich, banks, and other large financial service institutions while at the same time increasing impoverishment and misery for the middle and working classes. The American dream, celebrating economic and social mobility, has been transformed into not just an influential myth but also a poisonous piece of propaganda. One indication of the undoing of the American dream into an American nightmare can be seen in the fact that “the most striking change in American society in the past generation—roughly since Ronald Reagan was elected President—has been

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