Corporate control of public sphere

In fact a whole institute – the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King’s College London - a collaborative project between several universities including KCL and Israel’s Interdisciplinary Centre Herzliya was originally conceived as a project explicitly intended to challenge the academic boycott by funder Henry Sweetbaum, who had first offered the money to the LSE.

Contrary to that, witness the stark warning from Thomas Jefferson about drifting from studying the human arts and sciences in academia. Jefferson himself was a staunch supporter of what has been, until lately, the traditional definition of college education. He believed that such studies were inestimable in having a functioning democracy: “In a republican nation, whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.” He added to that the critical need for “an informed citizenry” in the democratic process. As he wrote to his nephew, an integrated, cross-disciplinary college education enhances just that process by providing the skills and information content needed for “the art of reasoning.”

when students become simply commoditized as mere future job-holders, when education is defined as the numbers of successful passing grades in courses and in graduation numbers, when content-based education that deepens the human mind and widens the human perspective are downplayed as “irrelevant” to the marketplace, and when education is hollowed out into a matter of creating new or better employees, as Obama’s plan clearly states, then education is clearly in trouble in America.

Note that this danger to education is not due to teacher incompetence, as the media and right-wing politicians like to portray it. It is because of a lack of vision from those politicians and college administrators who cannot see anything but the flow of money, and who are allowing the revered institutions to be hollowed out and die by using them as conduits of capital.

One egregious example of this neoliberal approach to higher education is on full display in Florida where Gov. Rick Scott's task force on education attempted to implement a policy that would lower tuition for degrees friendly to corporate interests in order to "steer students toward majors that are in demand in the job market." (14) Scott's utterly instrumental and anti-intellectual message is clear: "Give us engineers, scientists, health care specialists and technology experts. Do not worry so much about historians, philosophers, anthropologists and English majors." (15)

In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker drew up a proposal to remove the public service philosophy focus from the university's mission statement, which states that the university's purpose is to solve problems and improve people's lives. He also scratched out the phrase "the search for truth" and substituted both ideas with a vocabulary stating that the university's goal is to meet "the state's work force needs."

What both Scott and Walker make clear is not only that their brand of free-market fundamentalism undermines both civic education and public values, but also that it confuses education with training.

Moreover, this market fundamentalism wages a war on what might be called the radical imagination.

David Graeber is right in insisting that "student loans are destroying the imagination of youth." As he puts it, "If there's a way of a society committing mass suicide, what better way than to take all the youngest, most energetic, creative, joyous people in your society and saddle them with, $50,000 of debt so they have to be slaves?" (18)

One result is a form of depoliticization that works its way through the social order, removing social relations from the configurations of power that shape them, and substituting "emotional and personal vocabularies for political ones in formulating solutions to political problems."

Nor should the relevance of education being at the heart of politics be lost on those of us concerned about inviting the public back into higher education and rethinking the purpose and meaning of higher education itself. 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.

In this instance, teaching needs to be rigorous, self-reflective and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues and connecting private troubles and public issues.

What we don't need are modes of governance that reduce faculty to clerks, or forms of pedagogy rooted in modes of infantilization, conformity and repression. Instead of models of governance that vacate egalitarian and democratic principles, we need pedagogical practices that create leaders, people capable of envisioning a more just and democratic world and willing to struggle for it.

In opposition to such a debased view of educational engagement, educators need a pedagogy of disruption.

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." (24)

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. As part of a broader discourse of excellence, equity and democracy, we must defend the distinctive role that faculty play in this ongoing pedagogical project of shaping the critical rationalities through which agency is defined and civic literacy and culture produced, along with support for the institutional conditions and relations of power that make them possible.

While there is a growing public concern over rising tuition rates along with the crushing debt students are incurring, there is little public outrage from academics over the money squandered on the military budget, and billions of dollars wasted on military projects like the F-35 stealth fighter jet (average cost for three variants is $178 million), which over the lifetime of the project (55 years) is expected to cost $1.5 trillion - and by the way, they can't fly in the rain. Democracy needs a Marshall Plan in which funding is sufficient to make all levels of education free, while also providing enough social support to eliminate poverty, hunger, inadequate health care and the destruction of the environment. There is nothing utopian about the demand to redirect money away from the military, powerful corporations and the upper 1%.

The current state of inequality in higher education is most pronounced not simply in rising tuition and the growing exclusion of working and middle-class students, as serious as these issues are, but in the transformation of more than two-thirds of faculty positions into an army of exploited, overworked and powerless academic laborers. This shameful Walmarting of academic labor needs to be challenged and changed as soon as possible. Higher education will lose its critical focus and ability to teach students how to think critically and learn how to take risks as long as a large number of faculty are relegated to the status of part-time workers who are struggling just to make ends meet financially. Clearly, the call to take back higher education from the corporations and religious and political fundamentalists will not take place unless faculty are provided with full-time positions, tenure, benefits and the power to influence the meaning, purpose and operation of higher education. Faculty need to take back the university and reclaim modes of governance in which they have power while denouncing and dismantling the increasing corporatization of the university and the seizing of power by administrators and their staffs who now outnumber faculty on most campuses.

Fourth, academics need to fight for the rights of students to be given a formidable and critical education not dominated by corporate values, and to have a say in the shaping of their education and what it means to expand and deepen the practice of freedom and democracy. Young people have been left out of the discourse of democracy.

Universities should be subversive in a healthy society; they should push against the grain, and give voice to the voiceless, the unmentionable and the whispers of truth that haunt the apostles of unchecked power and wealth.

We live at a time when it is more crucial than ever to believe that the university is both a public trust and social good. At best, it is a critical institution infused with the promise of cultivating intellectual insight, the imagination, inquisitiveness, risk-taking, social responsibility and the struggle for justice.