Dangerous Intrusions
Robin Truth Goodman · American book review/The American book review · 2008
Page 13 May–June 2008 Dangerous Intrusions Robin Truth Goodman HenryA. Giroux has done it again. In his usual passionate and inspiring mode of intensive scrutiny, theoretical engagement, and faith in the future of social change, he has diagnosed, diagrammed, and interrogated a glaring political problem of our times. Full of countless egregious examples of the weakening of the public nature of higher education and the corollary crippling of engaged critical citizens, The University in Chains employs new research and concepts in humanities scholarship in order to explain the deepening assault on democracy instigated through the War on Terror, the expansion of neoliberalism, and the influence of ideological fundamentalism on political life. The University in Chains takes on three principle forms of dangerous intrusion in the current configuration of the university: militarism, market forces, and a right-wing silencing of politics and critique. Giroux shows that the military is increasingly present within educational institutions in the form of, for example, No Child Left Behind’s stipulation that federal funding be tied to military recruitment, the sprouting up of Homeland Security research centers on university campuses, the increasing involvement of CIA needs and pressures on the direction of sociological and anthropological investigation, the opening up of teaching positions for military personnel , the privatization of segments of higher education (including the increasing technologization of classrooms and online courses), and the drying-up of source funding for new scientific research and the subsequent dependence of laboratories on Pentagon grants for projects—making universities, says Giroux , into “the handmaidens of war.” This combines with a militarization of culture on a much broader basis, like in the intensification of combat-like video games, the tying of militarism with patriotism and masculinity, the growth of civilian militias, “zero tolerance” policies in urban schools, and the criminalization of society in the blurring of social services and criminal justice, to name just a few. What is at stake in this militarization of social life, Giroux points out, is the neutralization of democratic politics, the collapse of all politics into the politics of security, the burying of the concept of civic virtue beneath an ethic of armed force, and a decreasing awareness in the US public of the human suffering brought to bare globally through such a legitimizing of violence. Alongside militarization, the university’s mission of developing deliberation, argumentation, and critique is compromised by the increasing control exercised on universities by corporations.As a result, not only has faculty governance become ever more marginalized, but also faculty has been downsized, department management has been hierarchized, specializations have become more narrow, professionalism is debased, faculty have lost their rights over the instructional materials they produce, an increasing percentage of classroom teaching has been “flexibilized” through the substitution of part-time and adjunct labor for full-time lines, and “successful ” research is increasingly justified in accordance with the bottom-line. Not only that, but certain sectors of higher education have taken on the exclusive function of training corporate employees, as when BMW gave Clemson University $10 million to build an automative research center, where BMW wrote both the curriculum and hiring procedures, or when IBM sponsored its own departmental major at North Carolina State University, with a curriculum tailored for work at IBM. With the growing instrumentalization of knowledge, this trend leads, concludes Giroux, to a diminished defense of the university as “one of the few public spheres available,” where dialogue, questioning, and a language of critique and possibility “makes visible the urgency of a politics necessary to reclaim democratic values, identities, relations, and practices.” Giroux then goes on to explore in impressively rich detail the McCarthyism-like crackdown on left academics following 9/11. Giroux presents an in-depth account first of the ungrounded targeting of Professor Ward Churchill by the University of Colorado whose dismissal Giroux was prescient to predict. This controversy extended to the national level as Ward Churchill, representing new non-traditional and anti-canonical academic disciplines emergent in the humanities, became the focus-target of the federal government for a speech he gave after 9/11 where he used the label “little Eichmanns” to describe the spy agencies housed in the World Trade Center, and...