For 1 in 6 people in the United States, hunger is a very real struggle. Many people believe that the problems associated with hunger are confined to small pockets of society, certain areas of the country, or certain neighborhoods, but the reality is much different.
Right now, millions of Americans are at risk of hunger. These are often hard-working adults, children and seniors who simply cannot always make ends meet and may be forced to go without food…
In 2012, 16.1 million or approximately 22 percent of children in the U.S. lived in poverty.
Feeding America. Hunger Facts. 2014
De Russische annexatie van de Krim en de permanente onrust in Oekraïne hebben in het Westen langzamerhand een begin van paniek doen ontstaan. Na de Koude Oorlog heeft wat we toen de Vrije Wereld noemden bij gebrek aan de volgende globale tegenstander haar defensie verwaarloosd. In het begin werd dat in dit deel van de wereld als een geweldig voordeel beschouwd.
H.J.A. Hofland. Provinciaal Europa. 2 april 2014
Mainstream-opiniemaker Hofland stelt impliciet dat het 'gebrek aan de volgende tegenstander' geen 'geweldig voordeel' was, want daardoor is de 'defensie' verwaarloosd van 'de Vrije Wereld,' met hoofdletters. Niet de armen en hongerigen in 'de Vrije Wereld' veroorzaken 'paniek' bij de economische en politieke elite en haar woordvoerders, maar 'het gebrek aan de volgende' vijand. Goddank is er voor de elite nog altijd Rusland om de aandacht af te leiden. De neoliberale zegeningen kunnen na het verdrijven van de democratisch gekozen regering van Oekraïne nu ook daar met geweld worden doorgedrukt. Twee vliegen in één klap, de wapenindustrie heeft een nieuwe klant, én Oekraïne kan als 'vrije markt' gebied een lage-lonen-land worden dankzij de shock and awe-doctrine van het neoliberalisme. Bovendien kan de westerse bevolking door zijn 'politiek-literaire elite' via de oude en beproefde Koude Oorlogsretoriek wederom gemobiliseerd worden en het westerse militair-industrieel complex kan opnieuw worden gelegitimeerd. Zonder NAVO hadden de Russen hier al op de stoep gestaan, zo suggereert de propaganda. Dat deze bangmakerij lariekoek is, blijft onbelangrijk voor de commerciële massamedia die het nu eenmaal moeten hebben van sex, spanning en sensatie, oftewel, in de woorden van de Britse auteur John Berger
Consumptie en communicatie zijn tegenwoordig verenigd in een diabolische vennootschap, en uit deze vennootschap bestaat datgene wat wij kennen als de media. Eerst en vooral vertegenwoordigen de media een economisch contract waardoor alles wat er in de wereld gebeurt wordt gekoppeld aan het mechanisme van de verkoop. (Stemverheffing 1992)
Al in 1949 concludeerde de redactie van het Amerikaanse Fortune Magazine zonder een greintje ironie dat
it is as impossible to imagine a genuine democracy without the science of persuasion [i.e. propaganda] as it is to think of a totalitarian state without coercion. The daily tonnage output of propaganda and publicity... has become an important force in American life. Nearly half of the contents of the best newspapers is derived from publicity releases; nearly all the contents of the lesser papers... are directly or indirectly the work of PR departments.
Als opiniemaker is Hofland een klein schakeltje in de grote propagandamachine van de neoliberale religie. Aan dat feit heeft hij al zijn werkzaam leven lang het imago en inkomen te danken dat hij nu heeft. Zo ver, zo goed, geen vuiltje aan de lucht. Dat wil zeggen: voor hem, maar niet voor zijn slachtoffers. Voor hen heeft Hoflands intens leugenachtige voorstelling van zaken vernietigende consequenties. Het al vijf eeuwen durende agressieve expansionisme van het Westen gaat nu onder aanvoering van de VS nog steeds door. Niet alleen leidt dit tot grootscheepse bloedbaden, verwoesting en traumatisering van de overlevenden elders, maar ook tot de psychische verwoesting van de westerse militairen die het moorden daadwerkelijk moeten uitvoeren. Omdat deze feiten geen rol van betekenis spelen in het werk van de 'vrije pers,' zoals de commerciële journalistiek zichzelf graag noemt, zal ik hier eerst enkele feiten geven:
. Depression and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (an anxiety disorder that follows experiencing a traumatic event) are the most common mental health problems faced by returning troops.
. Psychiatrists project that 1 in 3 U.S. soldiers will suffer from PTSD after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan (or both). The rate for PTSD is two times higher for those men and women who served two tours, which makes up approximately 40 percent of all U.S. troops.
. 30 percent of soldiers develop mental problems within 3 to 4 months of being home.
. An estimated 20 percent of returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans turn to heavy drinking or drugs once they return to the U.S.
. Between 10 and 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Possible consequences of this internal injury include anger, suicidal thoughts, and changes in personality.
. In 2010, an average of 22 veterans committed suicide every day. The group with the highest number of suicides was men ages 50-59.
Een ter zake kundige is de Amerikaanse onafhankelijke journaliste en fotografe dr. Ann Jones, van wie het werk in tien talen is verschenen. In haar boek They Were Soldiers. How the Wounded Return from America's Wars — The Untold Story (2013) schreef ze over het opvallend hoge percentage moorden en zelfmoorden onder Amerikaanse veteranen:
the killings continued, month by month, year after year, covered mostly in local newspapers. Many of the murders smacked of something truly threatening — a kind of private warfare waged by soldiers who had got the hang of killing and the habit.
Zoals gebruikelijk in het neoliberale kapitalisme wordt bijna elk maatschappelijk probleem geïndividualiseerd en daarmee politiek onschadelijk gemaakt. Dat is ook hier het geval, door 'het medicaliseren' van de problemen wordt voorkomen dat 'inconvenient political and moral issues' aan de orde komen. Jones:
So far have we come from the days when moral principles had something to do with the conduct of our wars and our soldiers that even when veterans set a 'trend… for being involved in killing' right here at home, as one newspaper put it, advocates will speak up to blame not the homicidal soldiers, nor the officers who misled them, nor the presidents who threw them into needless wars of choice, nor Congress or the citizens who looked the other way, and certainly not war itself, but Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)…
How then is a soldier burdened by guilt to expiate the wrong he has done to himself and others? How is he to share it with those who sent him to war? How is he even to know that a numbed society still subscribes to the moral principle he learned as a child? 'Thou shalt not kill,' for example.
Remember that PTSD is said to arise not from the psyche of the stricken individual but from the emotional trauma inflicted by a catastrophic event in the real world.
Ann Jones die zelf langere tijd tussen Amerikaanse soldaten in Afghanistan doorbracht en langdurige berichtte over conflicten in het Midden-Oosten, Azië en Afrika weet, in tegenstelling tot de leunstoel-strateeg Hofland en zijn 'politiek-literaire elite' in Nederland, van nabij waarover ze schrijft. Haar kennis is niet gebaseerd op een theoretisch model, maar berust op de werkelijkheid. En anders dan een opiniemaker als Hofland sprak zei met direct betrokkenen:
A Marine veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan told me that a VA therapist (VA. Veterans Administration. svh) labeled her with PTSD though she had neither experienced nor complained of a traumatic event. Instead she had spoken of feeling 'a kind of moral revulsion from life in the U.S. after seeing how people in the rest of the world live.' Many returned soldiers have that same feeling, coupled with a smoldering rage at having lost the lives that once, in their innocence, would have contented them — the family trips to Walmart, the Happy Meals at McDonald's with all the kids. That's a world they can't fit into anymore because, as the Marine veteran said, 'We've seen the price the world pays for "The American Way of Life."' They are unable to resume their old lives, not because of injury or trauma, though that's part of it for some, but because they know too much. She said, 'Try to get a little help for hyper vigilance and the VA hands you a medical diagnosis and a bunch of prescriptions to shut you up. We've seen a lot and learned things that Americans ought to know. But we're the last people they want to be on the loose — the "crazy vets of Vietnam," back again.'
Dezelfde weerzin van de Amerikaanse veteranen herken ik als journalist. Telkens wanneer ik als journalist uit conflictgebied terugkwam, werd ik in Nederland onmiddellijk met de zelfgenoegzame betweterigheid geconfronteerd van politici en mijn collega's die vanuit alle comfort en veiligheid geen enkele empathie bezaten met hun slachtoffers elders. Zonder de feiten te kennen hadden ze al een volstrekt vrijblijvende mening die ze overal rondbazuinden. Consequentieloos voor henzelf, niet voor hun slachtoffers. Ik wist wat ik zelf voelde en sinds ik in 1974 tijdens een reis door de VS met Vietnam-veteranen was opgetrokken, wist ik hoe zij zich voelden. Het liefst had ik de Nederlandse betweters een geweldige schop onder hun achterste willen geven. Het onvermogen van de polder pers om zich te verplaatsen in de positie van haar slachtoffers is weerzinwekkend. De oorlog, die de opiniemakers op hun schaakbord spelen, is virtueel en zonder bloed, zonder uitpuilende darmen. De werkelijke oorlog, die de soldaten in de praktijk brachten, is georganiseerd moorden, stukken lichaam die door de lucht vliegen. Bovendien zijn in moderne oorlogen de meeste slachtoffers burgers. Jones:
it was generally things the soldiers did of their own volition — things not strictly part of their job — that truly got to them. They confided some of these things to a young reporter for the Colorado Springs Gazette. They said that discipline broke down, and they were 'so mad and tired and frustrated' by the elusive enemy that 'You came to close, we lit you up. You didn't stop, we ran your car over with the Bradley.' (That's a 27-ton armored vehicle on tracks, easily mistaken for a tank.) Soldiers hit by an IED fired machine guns and grenade launchers in every direction to 'light the whole area up.' One soldier said, 'If anyone was around, that was their fault. We smoked 'em.' Others said they 'shot random cars, killing civilians. Taxi drivers got shot for no reason. Guys got kidnapped and taken to the bridge and interrogated and dropped off.'
Some soldiers reported that they regularly used stun guns and hollow bullets, outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, but easily purchased online from the United States and received by military mail. The reporter wrote:
'In the vicious confusion of battle in Iraq and with no clear enemy, many [soldiers] said training went out the window. Slaughter became a part of life. Soldiers in body armor went back for round after round of battle that would have killed warriors a generation ago. Discipline deteriorated. Soldiers say the torture and killing of Iraqi civilians lurked in the ranks. And when these soldiers came home to Colorado Springs suffering the emotional wounds of combat, soldiers say, some were ignored, some were neglected, some were thrown away and some were punished. Some kept killing — this time in Colorado Springs.'
Other soldiers killed themselves.
Het psychische resultaat van alle verschrikkingen die op het geweten van individuele jonge mensen rust, wordt verhuld achter de letters PTSD. Jones:
Those four magic letters can now paper over the hole in a soldier's soul and cover that seeping wound in his conscience with a shiny stick-on label: 'psychological disorder.' Demeaning as that tag may be for a suck-it-up warrior, it may also be a relief for him to think the pain is only in his head after all. There are pills for that. But apparently for… many others, the wounds went deeper. They seem to have penetrated to that place inside where memories lurk of violation and betrayal, war crimes witnessed and performed — crimes against others and crimes against the moral self — the kind of memories some guys brag about, some keep secret, and some can't live with anymore. […]
The damage that the catastrophic events of war inflict upon soldiers assumes a darker irony when traumatized soldiers return home to traumatize their partners and children — soldiers like moody husbands of wives who gather at Walter Reed (Army Medical Center. svh) to learn from mental health experts how to handle their partners with kid gloves: soldiers like the parade of rapists, batterers, and murderers from Fort Bragg, Fort Carson, Fort Hood, and Joint Base Lewis McChord who march through these pages.
De eigen daders, tevens slachtoffers van het het westerse neo-koloniale expansionisme vindt men niet terug in het geopolitieke schaakspel van Hoflands 'politiek-literaire elite,' waar volgens hem geen 'natie zonder [kan].' Het individu, de mens achter de pionnen, is in een neoliberale 'democratie' onzichtbaar, volstrekt onbelangrijk, hij maakt geen geschiedenis, maar ondergaat die slechts. Democratie is voor de woordvoerders van de elite een propagandistische term voor de ware macht.
In 1984 schreef de Amerikaanse historicus Marvin Olasky dat de grondlegger van de public relations-industrie, de Amerikaan Edward Bernays, in het begin van de twintigste eeuw 'een van de eersten' was geweest 'to realize fully that American 20th Century liberalism would be increasingly based on social control posing as democracy, and would be desperate to learn all the opportunities for social control that it could,' terwijl zijn vakgenoot, Stewart Ewen in zijn studie PR! A Social History of Spin (1996) tot de slotsom kwam dat al vanaf de jaren twintig van de vorige eeuw 'the mass media, dominated by commercial interests, would provide subservient channels through which as broad public might be schooled to a corporate point of view.' Ewen, die de vercommercialisering van de politiek intensief bestudeerde, constateerde dat
It is not the people who are in charge, but that the people's desires are in charge. The people are not in charge, the people exercise no decision making power within this environment. So democracy is reduced from something which assumes an active citizenry to something which now increasingly is predicated on the idea of the public as passive consumers. What you essentially are delivering them is doggy treat.
Zo worden zowel hondenhapjes als presidenten op de 'vrije markt' verkocht aan een massa van wie verwacht wordt braaf te gehoorzamen. En de schakel in dit geheel is de mainstream journalistiek, die via een mainstream-opiniemaker als H.J.A. Hofland verneemt dat door Rusland 'een begin van paniek' in het Westen is 'ontstaan,' terwijl tegelijkertijd geen 'paniek' ontstaat wanneer in het rijkste en zwaarst bewapende imperium in de geschiedenis 1 op de 6 inwoners honger lijdt, en dat de 'U.S. MIDDLE CLASS NO LONGER WORLD'S RICHEST' is, als gevolg van de neoliberale doctrine die de kloof tussen rijk en arm wereldwijd almaar groter maakt. Hoewel de
United States will spend an astounding $653 billion on the military in 2014, more than 56 percent of the entire discretionary budget,
waarover het Congres kan beschikken, én de Amerikaanse 'defensie-uitgaven' sinds de val van de Sovjet Unie zijn verdubbeld, beweert opiniemaker Henk Hofland met een adembenemend 'populistisch alarmisme,' dat 'Na de Koude Oorlog' de zogeheten 'Vrije Wereld' door het 'gebrek aan de volgende globale tegenstander haar defensie [heeft] verwaarloosd.' Daarentegen is de realiteit van het neoliberale fundamentalisme, waarbij 85 miljardairs evenveel bezitten als 3,5 miljard wereldbewoners tezamen, voor Hofland en de andere westerse mainstream-propagandisten geen enkele reden om in 'paniek' te raken. Die werkelijkheid is voor de woordvoerders van de gevestigde wanorde een natuurlijk gegeven, een waarheid waaraan niet kan worden getornd, net zo min als in de middeleeuwen het bestaan van God ter discussie kon staan. Elk systeem heeft zijn eigen dogmatici, Henk Hofland is de bekendste geestelijke van de polder. Later meer.
The Change Within: The Obstacles We Face Are Not Just External
April 21, 2014
(Reuters/China Daily)
This is a story about bad timing.
One of the most disturbing ways that climate change is already playing out is through what ecologists call “mismatch” or “mistiming.” This is the process whereby warming causes animals to fall out of step with a critical food source, particularly at breeding times, when a failure to find enough food can lead to rapid population losses.
The migration patterns of many songbird species, for instance, have evolved over millennia so that eggs hatch precisely when food sources such as caterpillars are at their most abundant, providing parents with ample nourishment for their hungry young. But because spring now often arrives early, the caterpillars are hatching earlier too, which means that in some areas they are less plentiful when the chicks hatch, threatening a number of health and fertility impacts. Similarly, in West Greenland, caribou are arriving at their calving grounds only to find themselves out of sync with the forage plants they have relied on for thousands of years, now growing earlier thanks to rising temperatures. That is leaving female caribou with less energy for lactation, reproduction and feeding their young, a mismatch that has been linked to sharp decreases in calf births and survival rates.
Scientists are studying cases of climate-related mistiming among dozens of species, from Arctic terns to pied flycatchers. But there is one important species they are missing—us.Homo sapiens. We too are suffering from a terrible case of climate-related mistiming, albeit in a cultural-historical, rather than a biological, sense. Our problem is that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude—that moment being the tail end of the go-go ’80s, the blastoff point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world.Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere.
This deeply unfortunate mistiming has created all sorts of barriers to our ability to respond effectively to this crisis. It has meant that corporate power was ascendant at the very moment when we needed to exert unprecedented controls over corporate behavior in order to protect life on earth. It has meant that regulation was a dirty word just when we needed those powers most. It has meant that we are ruled by a class of politicians who know only how to dismantle and starve public institutions, just when they most need to be fortified and reimagined. And it has meant that we are saddled with an apparatus of “free trade” deals that tie the hands of policy-makers just when they need maximum flexibility to achieve a massive energy transition.
Confronting these various structural barriers to the next economy is the critical work of any serious climate movement. But it’s not the only task at hand. We also have to confront how the mismatch between climate change and market domination has created barriers within our very selves, making it harder to look at this most pressing of humanitarian crises with anything more than furtive, terrified glances. Because of the way our daily lives have been altered by both market and technological triumphalism, we lack many of the observational tools necessary to convince ourselves that climate change is real—let alone the confidence to believe that a different way of living is possible.
And little wonder: just when we needed to gather, our public sphere was disintegrating; just when we needed to consume less, consumerism took over virtually every aspect of our lives; just when we needed to slow down and notice, we sped up; and just when we needed longer time horizons, we were able to see only the immediate present.
This is our climate change mismatch, and it affects not just our species, but potentially every other species on the planet as well.
The good news is that, unlike reindeer and songbirds, we humans are blessed with the capacity for advanced reasoning and therefore the ability to adapt more deliberately—to change old patterns of behavior with remarkable speed. If the ideas that rule our culture are stopping us from saving ourselves, then it is within our power to change those ideas. But before that can happen, we first need to understand the nature of our personal climate mismatch.
› Climate change demands that we consume less, but being consumers is all we know.Climate change is not a problem that can be solved simply by changing what we buy—a hybrid instead of an SUV, some carbon offsets when we get on a plane. At its core, it is a crisis born of overconsumption by the comparatively wealthy, which means the world’s most manic consumers are going to have to consume less.
The problem is not “human nature,” as we are so often told. We weren’t born having to shop this much, and we have, in our recent past, been just as happy (in many cases happier) consuming far less. The problem is the inflated role that consumption has come to play in our particular era.
Late capitalism teaches us to create ourselves through our consumer choices: shopping is how we form our identities, find community and express ourselves. Thus, telling people that they can’t shop as much as they want to because the planet’s support systems are overburdened can be understood as a kind of attack, akin to telling them that they cannot truly be themselves. This is likely why, of the original “Three Rs”—reduce, reuse, recycle—only the third has ever gotten any traction, since it allows us to keep on shopping as long as we put the refuse in the right box. The other two, which require that we consume less, were pretty much dead on arrival.
› Climate change is slow, and we are fast. When you are racing through a rural landscape on a bullet train, it looks as if everything you are passing is standing still: people, tractors, cars on country roads. They aren’t, of course. They are moving, but at a speed so slow compared with the train that they appear static.
So it is with climate change. Our culture, powered by fossil fuels, is that bullet train, hurtling forward toward the next quarterly report, the next election cycle, the next bit of diversion or piece of personal validation via our smartphones and tablets. Our changing climate is like the landscape out the window: from our racy vantage point, it can appear static, but it is moving, its slow progress measured in receding ice sheets, swelling waters and incremental temperature rises. If left unchecked, climate change will most certainly speed up enough to capture our fractured attention—island nations wiped off the map, and city-drowning superstorms, tend to do that. But by then, it may be too late for our actions to make a difference, because the era of tipping points will likely have begun.
April 21, 2014
Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism, Democracy and the University as a Public Sphere
Tuesday, 22 April 2014 09:44By Victoria Harper, Truthout | Interview
Henry A. Giroux. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)This story wasn't funded by corporate advertising, but by readers like you. Can you help sustain our work with a tax-deductible donation?
Public Intellectual Henry Giroux speaks with Truthout about his new book and its exploration of how neoliberalism makes it harder for poor children to attend college and forces debt-ridden students into an intellectual and moral dead zone devoid of imagination.
Truthout contributor, director of Truthout's Public Intellectual Project and Truthout Board member Henry A. Giroux responds to questions about how the excesses of neoliberal politics have reshaped and subverted the democratic mission of higher education, as expressed in his new book.
Henry A. Giroux | Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education Haymarket Books (March 18, 2014) Chicago, Illinois, 240 pages
Victoria Harper: Welcome, Henry. In your latest book, Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education, neoliberalism is a central organizing idea in shaping your view of education. Can you provide a general working definition of what it is and how it threatens higher education?
Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism has many forms, but these forms share a number of characteristics. Not only is it the latest stage of predatory capitalism, but it is also part of a broader project of restoring class power and consolidating the rapid concentration of capital, particularly financial capital. More specifically, it is a political, economic and political project that constitutes an ideology, mode of governance, policy and form of public pedagogy. As an ideology, it construes profit making as the essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and upholds the irrational belief that the market cannot only solve all problems but serve as a model for structuring all social relations. It is steeped in the language of self-help, individual responsibility and is purposely blind to inequalities in power, wealth and income and how they bear down on the fate of individuals and groups. As such, it supports a theater of cruelty that is scornful of any notion of compassion and concern for others. As a mode of governance, it produces identities, subjects, and ways of life driven by a survival of the fittest ethic, grounded in the idea of the free, possessive individual, and committed to the right of ruling groups and institutions to accrue wealth removed from matters of ethics and social costs.
Under neoliberalism, desire is wedded to commodities and the private addictions of the market. As a policy and political project, neoliberalism is wedded to the privatization of public services, the dismantling of the connection of private issues and public problems, the selling off of state functions, the elimination of government regulation of financial institutions and corporations, the elimination of the welfare state and unions, liberalization of trade in goods and capital investment, and the marketization and commodification of society.
As a form of public pedagogy, neoliberalism casts all dimensions of life in terms of market rationality. One consequence is that as a form of casino capitalism it legitimates a culture of harsh competitiveness and wages a war against public values and those public spheres that contest the rule and ideology of capital. It saps the democratic foundation of solidarity, degrades collaboration, and tears up all forms of social obligation.
What is new about neoliberalism, especially in the United States is that it has abandoned the social contract and any viable notion of long-term investments in social goods. It is indifferent to human fragility and suffering, and remakes everything into commodified objects or reified financial transactions. It creates emotionally bleak landscapes for the 99% and excessive fantasies of greed and power for the 1%. Its vision of the future is dystopian, and it is driven by machineries of social and civil death. Given the scope and power of neoliberalism, the book attempts to illustrate how it works politically, economically and pedagogically.
In what ways does neoliberalism threaten higher education?
Higher education is one of the few public spheres left where students can learn to think, engage in critical dialogue, be self-reflective about their relationship to themselves, others and the larger world, all the while steeping themselves in the best ideas, values and skills that various modes of science, history, culture, literature and other traditions can teach them. Under neoliberalism, any public sphere that educates young people to be critical and engaged citizens is seen as dangerous to the established order. This is one of the reasons that the right hates the legacy of the '60s, because it reminds them of the power of students to question the established order and make power accountable while demanding that education function as a democratic public sphere. Moreover, education provides opportunities for those multiracial and working-class individuals previously unable to get a decent education. This is viewed as a threat to a largely white dominated public sphere.
These are some of the reasons why education is being massively defunded while students are trapped into tuition increases that decrease the possibility of poor students from going to college, while forcing existing students into a intellectual and morally dead zone that robs them of their imagination and forces them to think about their lives and careers solely in terms of survival tactics - how to pay off their loans as quickly as possible in order to be free of debt. The current assault threatening higher education and the humanities in particular, cannot be understood outside of the crisis of disposability, public values, ethics, youth, and democracy itself. What is also important to recognize is that since the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, a new model for running the university emerged that relied on corporate management styles, values, and institutional formations. This marked the rise of the corporate university which now defines all aspects of governing, curriculum, financial matters, and a host of other academic policies. The corporate university is the ultimate expression of neoliberal values and social relations, which are defined by a top-down authoritarian style of power.
What is distinct about the current threat to higher education and the humanities in particular is the increasing pace of the corporatization and militarization of the university, the squelching of academic freedom, the rise of an ever-increasing contingent of part-time faculty, the use of violence to squelch peaceful student dissent, and the view that students are basically consumers and faculty providers of a saleable commodity such as a credential or a set of workplace skills.
Particularly disturbing here is the war on faculty and the ongoing attempts to impose modes of governance based on a business model, one that reduces faculty to part-time help with no power or security. Faculty are being turned into a labor forces that mimics Walmart workers while the managerial class is expanding, draining off funds from faculty and students, and governing the university as if it were a branch of General Motors and Disneyland.
More striking still is the slow death of the university as a center of critique, vital source of civic education, and crucial public good. Many faculties are now demoralized as they increasingly lose their rights and power. Many now find themselves staring into an abyss, either unwilling to address the current attacks on the university or befuddled over how the language of specialization and professionalization has cut them off from not only connecting their work to larger civic issues and social problems but also developing any meaningful relationships to a larger democratic polity. As an adjunct of the academic-military-industrial complex, 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. Hence, students are treated like commodities and data to be ingested and spit out as potential job seekers for whom education has been reduced to a form of training.
Students are now taught to ignore human suffering and to focus mainly on their own self-interests and by doing so they are being educated to exist in a political and moral vacuum. Education under neoliberalism is a form of radical depoliticization, one that kills the radical imagination and the hope for a world that is more just equal, and democratic society.
You write that academics have an important role to play as public intellectuals in higher education. Can you elaborate on that role?
I tried to stress in the book that not only were many academics under siege as a result of the increased corporatization and militarization of higher education, but that many had succumbed to the seductions of power, while a minority took a very different role and were attempting with great difficulty to engage in modes of teaching and scholarship that addressed wider civic values and crucial social problems.
In the first instance, I write about what I called gated intellectuals. That is, academics who have become comfortable with the rewards of power and in doing so buy into defining themselves as servants of established power, accepting the transformation of the university in an appendage of the marketplace, and doing what they can to legitimate such a poisonous vision of higher education. They generally are technicians who have no vision and expect very little for their students and are largely concerned about turning research and teaching into acts of commerce. Gated intellectuals have no interest in helping to construct a more just world or using their knowledge and skills to help students and others come to a better understanding of how power works and what it means to inhabit a discourse of rigor, morality, and responsibility.
On the other hand, there are those academics who are both clever and frivolous, anti-political and often indifferent to the growing plight of human suffering. Their academic work is often utterly privatized and unconnected to important social issues and always haughty - and they were quite unaware of the caricatures they had become. And while they are not directly complicit with the workings of the corporate university, they have become irrelevant by virtue of their jargonized language, cerebral convolutions, and their refusal, as James Baldwin once put it, "to disturb the peace." There is also the issue of careerism and the powerful force it exercises in undermining intellectual courage, which has given way to the comfortable space of accommodation. In this instance, the notion of the public intellectual has given way to the "public relations intellectual," the overheated talking head spewing out sound bites to various media outlets.
In the second instance, there are also a number of academics who are public intellectuals who model what it means to be to connect their scholarship to important public issues, work across a number of disciplines, address a variety of audiences, and refuse a notion of education that is compatible with the vision of accountants. Such intellectuals 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. In this case, I argue in the book for intellectuals who not only teach students how to be critical, to search for the truth, but also to understand education as the practice of freedom.
At a time of rising authoritarianism and state and corporate violence in the United States and elsewhere, academics 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. Put simply, I argue in the book that academics have a duty to enter into the public sphere unafraid to take positions and generate controversy, functioning as moral witnesses, raising political awareness, and making connections to those elements of power and politics often hidden from public view. Too many intellectuals focus on how something can be done efficiently rather than ask if it is right or wrong, if it benefits human kind and the planet rather than simply being reduced to an empty form of neoliberal instrumentality.
What I find particularly interesting in this book is that you do not simply focus on the language of critique but also what you have called a politics of educated hope, and you do so by pointing to the inspiring role that students in Quebec and New York City have played in both resisting the corporatization of the university and connecting their struggles over higher education to broader social, political and economic issues.
Students get a bad rap in the dominant media, and this was particularly true for the protesters in Quebec and for the Occupy Movement in the US. And, of course, they have not only been demonized but have also been the subject of indiscriminate state violence, especially by the police on and off college campuses. What I tried to do was illustrate the nature of the struggles they were addressing in the academy and how those struggles related to larger social issues. For instance, in Quebec, the students organized for two years to change the ideas that people had about the necessity of raising tuition, allowing the university to be defined in utterly market-driven terms, and what it meant politically to connect the raising of tuition to the attack on the social state in general. This was an amazing display of the radical imagination at work that went far beyond simply demonstrations and single-issue politics. Not only did they inspire students across the globe but reinforced and broadened the political struggles being waged by students in the United States. Together these movements, coupled with other student movements in Chile, France, and Greece, created a crisis of legitimacy for casino capitalism and broadened the debate about what a real democracy might look like if fashioned by the 99 percent rather than by the 1 percent. I wanted to stress that both of these movements understood fully not only that democracy, as hijacked by the established austerity-pushing traditional political parties, was an attack on the very nature of democracy itself, but that education was central to politics as part of the struggle to change the way people think and act in the face of oppressive powers. This generation of young people represent the best hope we have for refusing a life ruled by debt collection agencies, reclaiming education as the practice of freedom, and a recognition that the majority of commanding institutions under neoliberalism no longer serve the needs of most young people or the larger public. Most importantly, I wanted to make clear that these various movements brought the issue of class power and the importance of the radical imagination back into political debates across the globe.
This book concludes with an interview with Michael A. Peters in which you merge the political and the personal in ways that speak to the conditions that many academics are facing as well as what it means to be a working-class intellectual in the US. Can you elaborate?
I wanted to conclude with an interview that provides a historical context for much of the work on critical pedagogy, youth studies, social justice, cultural politics and higher education that I address in this book. For me, this work has not been easy. As a working-class intellectual, I found myself for much of my career in universities that were largely hostile to my experiences, cultural capital, and the critical scholarship that informed my work. This was particularly true of my experiences at Boston University, where I was denied tenure by the right-wing fundamentalist, John Silber, who was the president of the university. And this was after going through the entire tenure process at all levels with unanimous votes for tenure. It was also true of my time at Penn State, where I had to endure a couple of deans who lacked any vision, were mean-spirited, and intellectually vacuous. Fortunately, these dreadful experiences were not true for my time at Miami University and not true for my current position at McMaster University, in which both institutions generously provided the conditions and support for me to do my work and continue my role as a public intellectual. I believe that such narratives and struggles need to be made visible in order to articulate the broader pressures that many academics, marginalized by their backgrounds, experience when they push against the grain or find themselves under assault as part of a hidden curriculum that has a powerful and invisible order of politics. At the same time, my own struggle is not meant to reaffirm the often dystopian nature of the university but to make clear that such spaces are not without their contradictions and that power is never absolute - social and political change is always possible.
The university is not a prison or simply neoliberal factory. It is a site of contradictions and struggles and in my mind one of the most important struggles taking place in the United States. I wanted to use the interview to explore a number of layers at work in the structuring of the university, while at the same time arguing that intellectuals and students need to fight for higher education as a crucial public good. Moreover, the interview provides a glimpse into how the interaction between the private and the public have informed my role of as a public intellectual in higher education and my attempts to develop an understanding of critical pedagogy as central to the very nature of agency, politics and democracy itself.
Amid the pressures of an institution that is rife with the legacy of cultural elitism, class structures, racism and repression, the interview provides an archive and a narrative of critique and possibility, despair and hope, and a glimpse into a particular kind of memory work that illuminates past struggles and the problems of a new historical conjuncture as well as what it means to address them. This interview was particularly aimed at those working-class academics and young people who are presently struggling within higher education, unsure of their role, refusing to be defined by their deficits, and trying to find the courage to make a difference in their roles as scholars, teachers and researchers.
What can educators and others concerned about the future of higher education do to make sure it is not colonized by corporate and other antidemocratic interests?
First, educators and others need to figure out how to defend more vigorously higher education as a public good and how central it is in producing the formative culture necessary to educate young people to be critical and engaged agents willing to fight to deepen and expand the promises of a substantive democracy.
Second, we need to address what the optimum conditions are for educators, artists, activists, etc., to perform their work in an autonomous and critical fashion. In other words, we need to think through the conditions that make academic labor fruitful, engaging and relevant.
Third, we need to turn the growing army of temporary workers now swelling the ranks of the academy into full-time, permanent staff. The presence of so many part-time employees is scandalous and both weakens the power of the faculty and exploits them.
Fourth, we need to educate students to be critical agents, to learn how to take risks, engage in thoughtful dialogue and address what it means to be socially responsible.
Fifth, educators and others must address pedagogy as the practice of freedom. Pedagogy is not about training; it is about educating people to be self-reflective, critical and self-conscious about their relationship with others and to know something about their relationship with the larger world. Pedagogy in this sense not only provides important thoughtful and intellectual competencies; it also enables people to act effectively upon the societies in which they live.
Sixth, educators and others need a new political language with broader narratives that address the totality of society rather than focus on single-based issue politics. I am not against identity politics or single-based issues, but we need to find ways to connect these issues to more encompassing, global narratives about democracy so we can recognize their strengths and limitations in building broad-based social movements. In short, it is imperative that as educators and socially responsible intellectuals, artists, parents and concerned citizens, we must act for justice and against injustice. And such a call to pursue the truth with a small "t" must be shaped by informed judgments, self-reflection, searing forms of critique, civic courage and a deep commitment to education as central to the struggle for democracy and social change. Needless to say, we need to find new ways to connect education to the struggle for a democratic future, which is now being undermined in ways that were unimaginable 30 years ago.
Opposing the forces of domination is important, but it does not go far enough. We must move beyond a language of pointless denunciations and offer instead a language that moves forward with the knowledge, skills, and social relations necessary for the creation of new modes of agency, social movements, and democratic economic and social policies. We need to open up the realm of human possibility, recognize that history is open, that justice is never complete, and that democracy can never be fully settled. I fervently believe in the need for both critique and hope, and have faith that the left can develop the public spheres that make such possibilities possible, whether they be schools, classrooms, workshops, newspapers, online journals, community colleges or other spaces where knowledge, power, ethics, and justice merge to create new subjectivities, new modes of civic courage, and new hope for the future.
Thank you, Henry.
Also see:
Henry A. Giroux | From Penn State to JPMorgan Chase and Barclays: Destroying Higher Education, Savaging Children and Extinguishing Democracy
Henry A. Giroux | Beyond the Swindle of the Corporate University: Higher Education in the Service of Democracy
Henry A. Giroux | The Spectacle of Illiteracy and the Crisis of Democracy
Henry A. Giroux | Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability
Henry A. Giroux | Beyond Neoliberal Miseducation
VICTORIA HARPER
Victoria Harper is Truthout's Managing Editor.
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