7 7 What happens to the memory of history when it ceases to be testimony?
—JAMES YOUNG
AT A TIME WHEN BOTH POLITICAL PARTIES, anti-public intellectual pundits, and mainstream news sources view the purpose of higher education almost exclusively as a way station for training a global workforce and generating capital for the financial elite, it becomes more difficult to reclaim a history in which the culture of business is not the culture of higher education.1 This is certainly not meant to suggest that higher education once existed in an ideal past in which it functioned only as a public good by providing a public service in the interest of developing a democratic polity. Higher education has always been fraught with notable inequities and anti-democratic tendencies. But it also once demonstrated a much needed awareness of both its own limitations and the potential role it might play in attacking social problems and deepening the promise of a democracy to come. As difficult as it may seem to believe, John Dewey’s insistence that “democracy needs to be reborn in each generation, and education is its midwife” was taken seriously by many academic leaders.2 Today, it is fair to say that Dewey’s once vaunted claim has been willfully ignored, forgotten, or made an object of scorn.3
Throughout the twentieth century, there have been flashpoints in which the struggle to shape the university in the interest of a more substantive democracy was highly visible. Those of us who lived through the 1960s—when higher education was perceived as a significant threat to the power of the military, corrupt governments and corporations, and the ultra-rich—remember a different image of the university than the one we see today. Rather than narrow its focus to training potential MBAs, define education through the lens of mathematical utility, indoctrinate young people into the culture of capitalism, decimate the power of faculty, and turn students into mindless consumers, the university was under pressure to define itself as a place that educated people to be wellrounded workers, citizens, and critical agents. That is, it served, in part, as a crucial public sphere that held power accountable, produced a vast array of critical intellectuals, joined hands with the anti-war and civil rights movements, and robustly challenged what Mario Savio once called “the machine”—an operating structure infused by the rising strength of the financial elite that posed a threat to the principles of critique, dissent, critical exchange, and a never-ending struggle for inclusivity. The once vibrant spirit of resistance that refused to turn the university over to corporate and military interests is captured in Savio’s moving and impassioned speech on December 2, 1964, on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley:
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears, upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all.4
The 1960s may have been the high point of the period in American education in which the merging of politics, justice, civil rights, and the search for truth made clear what it meant to consider higher education as a democratic public sphere. Not everyone was pleased or supported this explosion of dissent, resistance to the Vietnam War, and struggle to make campuses across the United States more inclusive and emancipatory. Conservatives were deeply disturbed by the campus revolts and viewed them as a threat to their dream worlds of privatization, deregulation, militarization, capital accumulation, and commodification. What soon emerged was an intense struggle for the control of higher education. For instance, the Powell Memo released on August 23, 1971, and authored for the Chamber of Commerce by Lewis F. Powell, Jr., identified the American college campus “as the single most dynamic source” for producing and housing intellectuals “who are unsympathetic to the [free] enterprise system.”5 Powell, who would later be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, recognized that one crucial strategy in changing the political composition of higher education was to convince university administrators and boards of trustees that the most fundamental problem facing universities was the lack of conservative educators, or what he labeled the “imbalance of many faculties.”6
The Powell Memo was designed to develop a broad-based strategy not only to counter dissent but also to develop a material and ideological infrastructure with the capability to transform the American public consciousness through a conservative pedagogical commitment to reproduce the knowledge, values, ideology, and social relations of the corporate state. Not only did the Powell Memo understand and take seriously the educative nature of politics. Powell also realized it was possible to reproduce a society in which conformity could be bought off through the swindle of a neoliberal mantra that used the discourse of freedom, individuality, mobility, and security to serve the interests of the rich and powerful. The Powell Memo was the most influential of a number of ideological interventions in the 1970s that developed political road maps to crush dissent, eliminate tenure, and transform the university into an adjunct of free-market fundamentalism. Powell recognized how culture could deploy power and how education could be used in a variety of spheres as a form of public pedagogy with its own institutions, intellectuals, and ideas to further the interest of market fundamentalism. But it certainly was not the first shot fired as part of a larger conservative struggle to shape American higher education.7
Conservatives have a long history of viewing higher education as a cradle of left-wing thought and radicalism. As early as the 1920s, conservatives were waging an ideological war against liberal education and the intellectuals who viewed higher education as a site of critical dialogue and a public sphere engaged in the pursuit of truth and in developing a space where students learned to read both the word and the world critically. Conservatives were horrified by the growing popularity of critical views of education and modes of pedagogy that connected what students were taught both to their own development as critical agents and to the need to address important social problems, a theme taken up by many academic novels of which Bernard Malamud’s A New Life was especially insightful. During the McCarthy era, criticism of the university and its dissenting intellectuals cast a dark cloud over the exercise of academic freedom, and many academics were either fired or harassed out of their jobs because of their political activities outside the classroom or their alleged communist fervor or left-wing affiliations. In 1953, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) was founded by Frank Chodorov in order to assert right-wing influence and control over universities. ISI was but a precursor to the present era of politicized and paranoid assaults on academics. In fact, the first president of ISI was William F. Buckley, Jr., who catapulted to fame among conservatives in the early 1950s with the publication of God and Man at Yale, in which he railed against secularism at Yale University and called for the firing of socialist professors. Another former president of ISI, T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr., delivered the following speech to the Heritage Foundation in 1989, one that perfectly captures the elitist spirit and ruling-class ideology behind ISI’s view of higher education:
We must . . . provide resources and guidance to an elite which can take up anew the task of enculturation. Through its journals, lectures, seminars, books and fellowships, this is what ISI has done successfully for 36 years. The coming of age of such elites has provided the current leadership of the conservative revival. But we should add a major new component to our strategy: the conservative movement is now mature enough to sustain a counteroffensive on that last Leftist redoubt, the college campus. . . . We are now strong enough to establish a contemporary presence for conservatism on campus, and contest the Left on its own turf. We plan to do this greatly by expanding the ISI field effort, its network of campusbased programming.8
ISI was an early effort on the part of conservatives to “‘take back’ the universities from scholars and academic programs regarded either as too hostile to free markets or too critical of the values and history of Western civilization.”9 As part of a larger project to influence future generations to adopt conservative ideology and leadership roles in “battling the radicals and PC types on campus,” the ISI now counts as one among many right-wing foundations and institutes to have emerged since the 1980s that target college students and campuses by providing numerous scholarships, summer programs, and fellowships.10
In the 1980s, the idea of higher education flourishing as a democratic public space in which a new multiethnic, middle-class generation of students might be educated was viewed as a dire threat to many conservatives. The most famous advocate of the position against accessible and inclusive higher education was the conservative academic Allan Bloom.11 Bloom responded to this alleged threat with a discourse that was as hysterical as it was racist. In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom was clear in his claim that admitting people of color to Ivy League schools was an insult to white elites whom he considered the only constituents qualified to manage and lead American society. The hidden structure of politics was quite visible in Bloom’s work and revealed unapologetically his deeply held belief that the commanding institutions of the economy, culture, and government should be headed by mostly white, ruling-class males who were privileged and eager to do their best to maintain the classist and racist structure that defined the United States at that particular historical moment. This was an era in which left-wing academics and critical academic fields were under siege. A battle over the terrain of higher education was being aggressively waged under the political and academic leadership of right-wing reactionaries, such as Governor Ronald Reagan (who began his career by attacking leftists like Angela Davis at the University of California, Berkeley) and the former president of Boston University, John Silber (who prided himself on firing and denying tenure to numerous left educators, including myself).12 These attacks took place at the same time in which there was a growing movement to define colleges as workplaces, with teachers subject to the same Tayloristic managerial techniques used in industry.13 In fact, right-wing governors in states such as Florida, Texas, and Wisconsin have intensified this type of assault on higher education.
The culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s then gave way to the new McCarthyism of the post-9/11 era, which took a dangerous turn that far exceeded the attacks marked by the culture wars of the earlier period. In the aftermath of 9/11, the university was once again under attack by a number of right-wing organizations emboldened by a growing culture of fear and unflinching display of jingoistic patriotism. This was particularly exemplified by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which issued a report shortly after the attacks accusing an allegedly unpatriotic academy of being the “weak link in America’s response to the attack.”14 The legacy of a full-fledged new style McCarthyism was resuscitated as academics and others who looked critically at the imperialistic registers of American foreign policy were routinely dismissed from their jobs or made the object of public shaming. Some universities in Ohio, California, and other states started requiring job applicants to sign statements confirming they did not belong to any terrorist groups. Academics who criticized the war in Iraq or questioned the Bush administration’s use of torture often found their names on blacklists posted on the Internet by right-wing groups such as Campus Watch and Target of Opportunity.
The culture wars and the post-9/11 attacks on higher education under the reign of the new McCarthyism were followed by the hollowing out of the social state and the defunding of higher education. The more overt political attacks gave way to an economic war waged against higher education, of which one current example is the attempt by billionaires such as the Koch brothers to turn higher education into nothing more than an ideological factory for neoliberal capitalism. In desperate need of money, more and more universities are selling off naming rights to their buildings, accepting gifts from hedge fund managers, and caving in to the demands of big donors to influence what is taught, what programs deserve to be sustained, and what faculty should be rewarded. At the same time as higher education is being defunded, corporatized, and managed by an expanding class of administrators wedded to a neoliberal model of leadership, permanent faculty has been downsized, creating an exploited and invisible class of underpaid, part-time workers. Many faculty members are now consigned to employment conditions that seem more aligned with Walmart policies: they are stripped of full-time positions; relegated to the status of “stoop laborers”;15 lack power, security, a living wage; and are largely devoid of any hope for a full-time position in the academy in the future. According to the American Association of University Professors, at the present moment, over 70 percent of faculty are now adjuncts barely able to pay their rents, let alone conduct research or exercise any influence over the increasing corporatization and militarization of higher education. Many part-time faculty make less than $21,000 annually, and as journalist Colman McCarthy points out, “slog like migrant workers from campus to campus.”16 A record number of adjuncts are now on food stamps and receive some form of public assistance. Given how little they are paid, this should not come as a surprise though that does not make it any less shameful.17
These throwaway academics are the new invisible poor fighting for better wages, job security, benefits, and full-time positions. The status and exploitation of the labor of part-time workers is reprehensible and is indicative of the degree to which neoliberalism’s culture of cruelty, brutality, and iniquitous power now shapes higher education.18 And though there are a number of serious movements among adjuncts and others to fight against this new form of exploited labor, it is fair to say that such resistance will face an uphill battle.19 The corporatized university will not only fight such efforts in the courts with their bands of lawyers and antiunion thugs, they will also use, as we have seen recently on a number of campuses, the police and other repressive state apparatuses to impose their will on dissenting students and faculty. But if this growing group of what Kate Jenkins calls the “hyper-educated poor”20 joins with other social movements fighting against the war on public goods, militarization, public servants, and full-time workers, then it increases the chance that a new political formation may emerge and succeed in turning the momentum around in this ongoing battle over academic labor and the fate of higher education in the future.
The concerted post-9/11 attacks on higher education suggest it is still a site of intense struggle, and it is fair to say the right wing is winning. The success of the financial elite in waging its war and expanding the influence of a military-industrial-academic complex to serve its own ends is suggested by the elimination of full-time tenured jobs for faculty, the dumbing down of the curriculum, the view of students as customers, the incursion of for-profit businesses on campuses, and the growing stranglehold of neoliberal policies over higher education. It is also suggested in the erasing of public memory. Memory is no longer insurgent; that is, memory’s role as critical educational and political optic for moral witnessing, testimony, and civic courage has been all but obliterated. The new apologists for the status quo instead urge people to “love America,” which means giving up any sense of counter-memory, interrogation of dominant narratives, or retrieval of lost histories of struggle.
The current call to “love America” is a call to cleanse history in the name of facile patriotism. It does more than celebrate a new form of political illiteracy. Loving America is a discourse of anti-memory, a willful attempt at forgetting the past in the manufactured fog of historical amnesia. This is particularly true when it comes to erasing the work of a number of critical intellectuals who have written about higher education as the practice of freedom, including John Dewey, George S. Counts, W. E. B. Du Bois, the Social Reconstructionists, and others, all of whom viewed higher education as integral to the development of engaged, critical citizens and the university as a democratic public sphere.21
Under the reign of neoliberalism, with few exceptions, higher education appears to be increasingly decoupling itself from its historical legacy as a crucial public sphere, responsible for both educating students for the workplace and providing them with the modes of critical discourse, interpretation, judgment, imagination, and experiences that deepen and expand democracy. As universities adopt the ideology of the transnational corporation and become subordinated to the needs of capital, the war industries, and the Pentagon, they are less concerned about how they might educate students in terms of the ideology and civic practices of democratic governance and the necessity of using knowledge to address the challenges of public life.22 Instead, as part of the post-9/11 military-industrial-academic complex, higher education even more conjoins military interests and market values, identities, and social relations. The role of the university as a public good, a site of critical dialogue, and a place that calls students to think, question, learn how to take risks, and act with compassion and conviction is dismissed as impractical or, indeed, uncomfortably subversive.23
The corporatization, militarization, and dumbing down of rigorous scholarship and the devaluing of the critical capacities of young people mark a sharp break from a once influential educational tradition in the United States, extending from Thomas Jefferson to John Dewey to Maxine Greene. These important thinkers held that freedom flourishes in the worldly space of the public realm only through the work of educated, critical citizens. Within this democratic tradition, education was not confused with training; instead, its critical function was propelled by the need to provide students with capacities that enable them to acquire any knowledge or skills needed to form a “politically interested and mobilized citizenry, one that has certain solidarities, is capable of acting on its own behalf, and anticipates a future of ever greater social equality across lines of race, gender, and class.”24 Other prominent educators and theorists such as Hannah Arendt, James B. Conant, and Cornelius Castoriadis have long believed and rightly argued that we should not allow education to be modeled after the business world. Dewey, along with Thorstein Veblen in particular, warned about the growing influence of the “corporate mentality” and the threat that the business model posed to public spaces, higher education, and democracy. Dewey argued:
The business mind, having its own conversation and language, its own interests, its own intimate groupings in which men of this mind, in their collective capacity, determine the tone of society at large as well as the government of industrial society. . . . We now have, although without formal or legal status, a mental and moral corporateness for which history affords no parallel.25
Dewey and the other public intellectuals mentioned shared a common vision and project of rethinking what role education might play in providing students with the habits of mind and ways of acting that would enable them to “identify and probe the most serious threats and dangers that democracy faces in a global world dominated by instrumental and technological thinking.”26 James B. Conant, a former president of Harvard University, and no progressive, argued that higher education should create a class of “American radicals” who could fight for equality, support public education, elevate human needs over property rights, and challenge “groups which have attained too much power.”27 Conant’s views seem so mutinous today that it is hard to imagine him being hired as a university president at Harvard or any other institution of higher learning. All of these intellectuals offered a notion of the university as a bastion of democratic learning and values, a notion that provided a crucial referent for exploring the more specific question regarding the form of the relationship between corporations and higher education in the twenty-first century. It now seems naive to assume that corporations, left to their own devices, would view higher education as more than merely a training center for future business employees, a franchise for generating profits, or a space in which corporate culture and education merge in order to produce literate consumers.
What has also emerged in this particular historical moment is the way in which increasing numbers of young people are excluded from higher education. As tuition skyrockets, they are being locked out of higher education so as to reinforce the two-tier system that Bloom and others once celebrated. The steep rise in tuition fees, the defunding and corporatization of higher education, and the increasing burden of student debt, along with the widening gap in wealth and income across the entire society, have left many low-income and poor minority youth inhabiting sites of terminal exclusion, ranging from struggling public schools to prisons. As a result, American higher education is increasingly more divided into those institutions educating the elite to rule the world in the twenty-first century and second- and third-tier institutions that largely train students for low-paid positions in the capitalist world economy.
It is more and more apparent that the university in America has become a social institution that not only fails to address inequality in society, but also contributes to a growing division between social classes. In essence, it has become a class and racial sorting machine constructing impenetrable financial and policy boundaries that serve updated forms of economic and racial Darwinism. As tuition exceeds the budgets of most Americans, quality education at public and private universities becomes a privilege reserved for the children of the rich and powerful. While researchers attempt to reform a “broken” federal student financial aid system, there is “growing evidence . . . that the United States is slipping (to 10th now among industrialized countries) in the proportion of young adults who attain some post-secondary education.”28
Higher education has a responsibility not only to be available and accessible to all youth, but also to educate young people to make authority politically and morally accountable. This means expanding academic freedom and the possibility and promise of the university as a bastion of democratic inquiry, values, and politics, even as these are necessarily refashioned at the beginning of the new millennium. Questions regarding whether the university should serve public rather than private interests no longer carry the weight of forceful criticism as they once did when raised by Dewey, Veblen, Robert Lynd, and C. Wright Mills in the first part of the twentieth century. Yet such questions are still crucial in addressing the reality of higher education and what it might mean to imagine the university’s full participation in public life as the protector and promoter of democratic values among the next generation. This is especially important at a time when the meaning and purpose of higher education is under assault by a phalanx of right-wing forces attempting to slander, even vilify, liberal and left-oriented professors, cut already meager federal funding for higher education, and place control of what is taught and said in classrooms under legislative oversight.29
Currently the American university faces a growing number of problems that range from the increasing loss of federal and state funding to the incursion of corporate power, a galloping commercialization, and the growing influence of the national security state. It is also currently being targeted by conservative political forces that have hijacked political power and waged a focused campaign against the principles of academic freedom, sacrificing the quality of education made available to youth in the name of patriotic correctness, and dismantling the university as a site of critical pedagogical practice, autonomous scholarship, independent thought, and uncorrupted inquiry. For instance, right-wing politicians such as Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker unapologetically denounce the university as a threat to the success of market forces and go out of their way to defund its operating budget. In Walker’s case, he recently announced that he was slashing $300 million from the state university budget over a two-year period. At the same time, he announced that he is requesting $220 million to build the Milwaukee Bucks a new basketball arena.30 It gets worse: Walker’s disempowering view of higher education was made crystal clear in his attempt to sneak into his new budget an attempt to rewrite the purpose and mission of the university system, one that clearly was aimed at sabotaging the university as a public good. As journalists Mary Bottari and Jonas Persson pointed out:
Buried in his proposed budget bill—on page 546 out of a whopping 1,839—Walker scratched out “the search for truth” and took an ax to Wisconsin Idea, the guiding philosophy that the university is created to solve problems and improve people’s lives beyond the boundaries of the campus. Instead he wanted the university to “meet the state’s workforce needs.” For extra measure, he scratched out “the legislature finds it in the public interest” to provide a system of higher education; he instead made it a “constitutional obligation.”31
Under the current regime of neoliberal savagery and its cruel austerity policies, Walker is not a political exception: he is the rule. The extremist wing of the Republican Party hates the notion that the university might function primarily to address important social issues in the name of the public good. Couple this particular fear and ideological fundamentalism with the rampant idiocy and anti-intellectualism that has become an organizing principle of the new extremists at all levels of government and it becomes clear that public and higher education are prime targets in the struggle to create a fundamentalist-driven culture that supports those identifications, desires, and modes of agency receptive to the rise of an authoritarian society. Their vision for the future of the United States falls only steps short of a police state in which criticism is viewed as a form of treason and even the mildest of liberal rhetoric is vilified or deemed cause for censorship.
In another example, this time in Oklahoma, the state’s politicians and lawmakers have introduced a bill that eliminates the teaching of Advanced Placement U.S. History courses in public high schools.32 The reason behind the bill defies logic and reflects the new stupidity and religious fundamentalism that are at the heart of the conservative suppression of reason and critical thinking. According to Judd Legum, “Oklahoma Rep. Dan Fisher (R) has introduced ‘emergency’ legislation ‘prohibiting the expenditure of funds on the Advanced Placement United States History course.’ Fisher is part of a group called the ‘Black Robe Regiment’ which argues that ‘the church and God himself has been under assault, marginalized, and diminished by the progressives and secularists.’”33 Ben Carson, a potential GOP presidential candidate and pediatric neurosurgeon, stated that the students who finished the course would be “ready to sign up for ISIS.”34 The disparagement of the AP U.S. History course was echoed by the Republican National Committee in a resolution claiming that its lessons were too negative, and reflected “a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.”35 What at first glance appears to be a case of egregious ignorance is in reality a religious fundamentalist attack on any viable notion of historical consciousness and public memory.36 These politicians are the ground troops for the new authoritarianism that rewards and revels in thoughtlessness and despises any criticism of American domestic and foreign policy. Truly the Brownshirts of our time, they are a new breed of ideological muggers whose minds are unburdened by complicated thought, who choke on their own ignorance and sutured political certainties. They represent another one of the forces, in addition to the apostles of a savage neoliberalism and the hedge fund criminals, that are out to destroy public and higher education in the United States, even the weakest liberal version of it in the institutions’ history.
Yet another example of this type of fundamentalism being used as an engine of conformity wrapped in the mantle of American exceptionalism can be found in comments by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani when he challenged President Obama’s loyalty to the United States for what Giuliani construed as weak foreign policy decisions. Giuliani claimed unapologetically at a fundraiser supporting Governor Scott Walker’s bid for the presidency that Obama did not “love America,” and oddly enough that he “doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up through love of his country.”37 For Giuliani and others of his warmongering ilk, patriotism is the lifeblood of empire and any attempt to offer up constructive criticism in which U.S. policies are interrogated is disparaged as an act of negativism, at best, and as un-American or even treasonous at worst.
This poisonous ideology has a long history in the United States and is gaining ground once again with the emergence of a creeping authoritarianism. Moreover, it is an ideology that promotes a deep-seated anti-intellectualism and a climate of fear that crosses over into criticisms of higher education. Giuliani’s comments are not merely idiotic and stupid; they are infused with a racism and militant nationalism reminiscent of the rise of totalitarian ideologies and regimes in the1930s.38 Moreover, they are suggestive of the degree to which all vestiges of democracy, liberty, dissent, and equality have become a liability in a society that is now ruled by the financial elite and ideological barbarians who support this shameful anti-democratic rhetoric and policies that reinforce it. This is the discourse of totalitarianism, and its endpoint is a recapitulation of the worst horrors that history has produced.
Higher education is not going to save the United States from becoming more authoritarian, but its destruction as a democratic public sphere is a crucial signpost as to how far we have tipped over into the nightmare of authoritarianism. The shutting down of higher education as a democratic public sphere is not a definitive marker of defeat. On the contrary, it suggests the need for a new understanding of politics, one in which the university has a crucial role to play in defending radical democracy as the new commons and education as central to a politics that takes it seriously. The winds are changing, and a democratic horizon is coming once again into view. We see it in Europe with the rise of radical political parties in Spain and Greece that connect the struggle over economic power with the struggle to create new modes of agency, culture, education, and ideology, all of which now encourage the linking of politics to larger social movements.
What the current state of higher education suggests is that the left in its various registers has to create its own public intellectuals in sites ranging from universities, schools, and online media to any alternative spaces where meaning circulates. I completely agree with the late Pierre Bourdieu when he insists that it is of enormous political importance “to defend the possibility and necessity of the intellectual” as one who is tirelessly critical of the existing state of affairs.39 Intellectuals have a responsibility to connect their work to important social issues, collaborate with popular movements, and engage in the shaping of policies that benefit all people and not simply a few. At the heart of this suggestion is the need to recognize that ideas matter in the battle against authoritarianism, and that pedagogy must be central to any viable notion of politics and collective struggle. Public intellectuals have an obligation to work for global peace, individual freedom, care of others, economic justice, and democratic participation, especially at a time of legitimized violence and tyranny. There is no genuine democracy without a genuine critique of power. 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—it is central to its very definition. Put simply, academics have a duty to enter into the public sphere unafraid to take positions and generate controversy, function as moral witnesses, raise political awareness, and make connections to those elements of power and politics often hidden from public view. They also have a duty to engage in pedagogical practices that renounce the notion that teaching is an impartial act or practice. As Paulo Freire pointed out, pedagogy is rooted in the ethical responsibility to create the conditions for students to be self-reflective, knowledgeable, and able to connect learning to individual and social change.40 The critical educator’s role is to address important social problems, encourage human agency rather than to mold it, and to promote critical consciousness, which means educating the subject to be a critical and engaged individual and social agent. Pedagogy in this instance is an ethical and political practice that urges students to see beyond themselves, to transcend the call to privilege and self-interest, and to become a subject in the shaping of power, modes of governance, equality, and justice.
Higher education must be widely understood as a democratic public sphere—a space in which education enables students to develop a keen sense of prophetic justice, claim their moral and political agency, utilize critical analytical skills, and cultivate an ethical sensibility through which they learn to respect the rights of others. What is at stake here is for students to create alternative public spheres, particularly with the use of the new media to articulate their voices and make visible ideologies and modes of critical knowledge central to their own struggles. They can fight for unions, create alternative study groups, connect with social movements outside of the university, and work with neighboring communities to unite around struggles that they both have an interest in such as preventing the corporatization of public services, public goods, and the growing paramilitarization of police forces in the United States. They can also produce their own public intellectuals willing to write for alternative media outlets, give interviews on radio stations, and work with journals and book publishers to produce material that inspires and energizes their generation and others struggling to redefine the meaning of democracy.
Higher education has a responsibility not only to search for the truth regardless of where it may lead, but also to educate students to make authority and power politically and morally accountable. Higher education is one of the few public spheres left with the potential to sustain a democratic formative culture. When it is engaged in communicating critical knowledge, values, and learning, it offers a glimpse of the promise of education for nurturing public values, educated hope, and a substantive democracy. 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. Only through such a formative and critical educational culture can students learn how to become individual and social agents rather than merely disengaged spectators. It is imperative that current and future generations be able to think independently and to act upon civic commitments that demand a reordering of basic power arrangements fundamental to promoting the common good and producing a meaningful democracy.
Anyone with an interest in democracy’s survival should be aware of education’s political role as it shapes how people think, desire, and dream, and must struggle to make education central to a new politics. As a number of theorists from Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams to Paulo Freire, Maxine Greene, and Stanley Aronowitz have argued for the last fifty years, education is a crucial to the development of any radical political formation. To challenge the neoliberal stranglehold on all cultural and education institutions in the United States, such a formation would need to envision and develop new educational programs—extending from the creation of online journals and magazines to the development of alternative schools—as well as launch a comprehensive defense of those formal educational institutions that have historically acted as a safeguard for democracy.
In this struggle for democratic renewal, there is a need to reclaim an insurgent public memory and the lost or suppressed narratives of older progressive battles in order both to learn from them and to build upon their insights. This is necessary to enable educators and others to rethink the meaning of politics, reclaim the radical imagination, launch a comprehensive education program that speaks to the concrete issues bearing down on people’s lives, and develop new political formations capable of merging the various struggles together under the wide banner of a post-capitalist democracy that “serves people over corporations.”41 If education does not become the center of politics, democracy as an ideal and site of struggle will fail to inspire and energize a new generation of young people. Surely, then, what awaits is a new wave of domestic terrorism that will descend on the United States, and which is already becoming visible in the signs of an emerging police and surveillance state. At stake here is the need to take seriously Pierre Bourdieu’s insistence that “the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion.”42 As Professor Tariq Ali has mentioned in a different context, the history of the struggles and suppression of the American working class, Communist Party, and other progressive movements have been all but erased: “This is a history that is not emphasized. This wretched neoliberalism has downgraded the teaching of history. It is the one subject they really hate.”43 It is well worth remembering that politics undermines its pedagogical functions and democratic goals when it underestimates “the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle.”44
Such a failure on the part of progressive movements to engage the educative nature of politics generally produces not only the tactics of vanguardism but also strategies that overlook the challenge of getting people to think differently and to invest something of themselves in an insurgent politics in which they can recognize hope and their own future. Not only is there a need to challenge, disrupt, and interrogate the market imaginaries, visions, and vocabularies that undermine the great ideals that a range of social movements have fought for in the past, there is also the need to combine the educative task of changing hearts and minds with sustained efforts to build robust, large-scale organizations and what sociologist Nancy Fraser calls “large-scale public powers.”45 The Occupy movement taught us that “emancipatory ideas [should] not be confined to separate enclaved arenas where only those who already believe in them are exposed to arguments for them.”46 Occupy created a large umbrella movement under the call to eliminate inequality in a wide range of areas extending from the economic realm to a variety of spheres that included all manner of exclusions based on race, sexual orientation, and the destruction of the environment. At the same time, however, Occupy failed to create a strong presence because it lacked the capacity for large-scale coordination and long-term organization. That is, it failed to develop and sustain a public space in which a broad-based movement could be mobilized in the interest of creating sustainable counter-publics. Tariq Ali captures this failure perfectly in his comment:
I was sympathetic to the Occupy movement, but not to the business of not having any demands. . . . They should have had a charter demanding a free health service, an end to the pharmaceuticals and insurance companies’ control of the health service, a free education at every level for all Americans. The notion, promoted by anarchists such as John Holloway, that you can change the world without taking power is useless. I have a lot of respect for the anarchists that mobilize and fight for immigrant rights. But I am critical of those who theorize a politics that is not political. You have to have a political program.47
Surely any movement that wants to challenge neoliberal capitalism should have the courage to put forth an agenda with radical demands. These might include a call to break up big banks; a tax on trading; free education for all; free health care; a guaranteed basic income; drastic reductions in the military budget to create a jobs program; investing in crucial infrastructure; expanding public transportation; and a high tax rate on big corporations and the salaries of the ultra-rich job destroyers such as the CEOs who run banks, hedge funds, and other rogue financial institutions. Economist Salvatore Babones has put forth a number of additional reforms including extending Medicare to everyone, refinancing social security, ending the incarceration state, making it easy to join a union, setting a minimum living wage, and making it easy for people to vote.48 Bernie Sanders’s economic agenda includes a number of what might be considered radical demands such as reversing climate change, ending the disastrous trade polices such as NAFTA and TPP, creating a single-payer health care system for all, and the breaking up of big banks.49
Such demands would constitute a disruptive political formation in the service of producing social movements that could seriously challenge market fundamentalism rather than accommodate it. Hopefully, such an attempt to create a new radical sensibility would challenge the ways in which people see things, allowing people to invest in issues in which they can see reflected their own values, hopes, and sense of agency. Offering the American public new modes of identification has the potential not only to change “public consciousness, the conventional wisdom about what is possible, [but also to] shift and open up the space for changes in policy.”50 Resistance to oppressive power structures demands a politics, public pedagogy, and political formation that embrace struggle as part of developing a political program on national and international scales that can inspire, energize, and produce a collective show of sustained solidarity. But it also demands a struggle that goes right to the core of how neoliberal power and its repressive machineries work.
What is particularly crucial is that such a struggle takes seriously the pedagogical power of neoliberalism to persuade those over whom it rules that its political and economic apparatuses are inevitable, its organizing principles universal, and the social relations it produces unquestionable. Michael D. Yates is right in claiming that any strategy that resorts to compromising with neoliberalism’s death-dealing machinery in order to get “a few crumbs from its table is a strategy guaranteed to fail.”51 Instead, Yates argues for broad set of related disruptive strategies that confront directly those who hold power along with the institutions they control. He writes:
Initially, we could get as many organizations and individuals as possible to sign on to a list of general principles, formulated as a set of demands and commitments. The demands might include much shorter working hours, early and secure retirement, free universal health care, an end to the link between work and income, an end to all corporate subsidies, bans on fracking and other profit-driven environmental despoliations, an end to the war on terror and the closing of U.S. military bases in other countries, the abolition of the prison system, free schooling at all levels, open borders combined with the termination of U.S. financial support for oppressive governments, community-based policing, and the transfer of abandoned buildings and land to communities and groups who will put them to socially useful purposes. The commitments could embrace as many forms of collective self-help as imaginable (Cuban-style urban organic farming, cooperatives dedicated to education, child care, health, food provision, the establishment of worker-controlled enterprises), a shedding of unnecessary possessions, a willingness to offer material support to local struggles aimed at empowering those without voice, a refusal to join the military or participate in the mindless and dangerous patriotism so prevalent in the United States, and a promise to educate ourselves and others about the nature of the system in whatever venues present themselves to us.52
The current historical moment calls for a politics that is as bold as it is courageous. Moreover, such a politics must be transnational in its scope, global in its sense of responsibility, and capable of creating new democratic public spheres in which it becomes possible to show that private troubles can be linked to larger social issues, and that modes of connection and solidarity can be sustained beyond the private sphere. Only then will the promise and possibility of creating a global commons in the service of a radical democracy come into view.53 Under such circumstances, education becomes a central feature of politics, because, as renowned anthropologist David Price rightly argues, public consciousness of historical memory is one of the primary weapons to be used against the abuse of power and that is why “those who have power create a ‘desert of organized forgetting.’” 54
History is open, and the possibility of producing counternarratives, public memories, and forms of moral witnessing is crucial at a time rife with unrest accompanied by new levels of state terrorism. The emergence of state terrorism and the increasing militarization of society, legitimated through the war on terrorism, require new ways to subvert the theater of cruelty and class consolidation that has the globe in a stranglehold. Neoliberalism in its many punitive forms has exhausted its credibility and now threatens the entirety of human life and the planet itself. Hope is in the air, but it won’t succeed in creating the promise of a new democratic future unless it first recognizes and grapples with the depth of the American nightmare and the collective death wish that lies at its core. We are seeing the beginning of such a struggle among youth of color, especially the Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged after the killing of Trayvon Martin.55 Whether this movement will develop into a powerful political formation remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: it is time for fresh and inspiring visions, radical imagination, workable tactics, new political formations, and sustained, coordinated international struggles. It is time to march into a future that sheds once and for all the dark authoritarianism haunting the present.