8 8 IDEOLOGICAL FUNDAMENTALISM AND political purity appear to have a strong grip on society in both the United States and Canada.1 This can be seen in the endless attacks on reason, truth, critical thinking, informed exchange, and dissent itself. The endpoint of such attacks can be grasped in comments in which an academic at West Point publishes a paper claiming, without irony, that dissident intellectuals should be the subject of drone attacks.2 As bizarre as this appears, the ideology that informs it was on full display when Wesley Clark, a liberal and former presidential candidate, called for internment camps for “radicalized Americans.”3 While such comments appear extreme, there is an element of truth in these extremes that points to the dark side of American politics and culture. Paraphrasing Theodor Adorno, there is always some truth to be found in such exaggerations. Such attacks are not just endemic to the United States. Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, routinely attacks intellectuals and journalists whom he says are “committing sociology” by including critical analysis in their communication of facts and statistics—in other words, critics who are intelligent enough to value context, brave enough to hold power accountable and take seriously their role as engaged public intellectuals. Insinuating that sociological analysis is tantamount to “committing” an egregious sin, if not a criminal act, becomes a way for Harper and his conservative cronies to argue for the condemnation and removal of critical thought from both the university and public discourse. His disdain for any form of scientific evidence proving that climate-warming trends are due to human activities has resulted in the Canadian government banning federal scientists from sharing their findings with their colleagues and the public. For fear that scientists might provide evidence that climate change is the result of human activity over the past century, the government has banned them from releasing their research or talking publicly about their work.4 The Canadian government’s defense of dirty oil has become synonymous with an act of brazen censorship.
Comments like Canada’s prime minister’s provide only a glimpse of a wholesale ideological and policy shift by the Canadian federal government under his conservative leadership. A number of scientists and academics have indicted the Harper government for what increasingly appears to be its systematic suppression of ideas that challenge Harper’s views on climate change. They have pointed to “a pattern that has seen the . . . government reduce media access to scientists and cut funding and programs.” 5 In this instance, scientists are being censored because they have provided evidence for the destructive effects of climate change, among other social and environmental research that might put into question a lack of government response and proper oversight regarding corporate power, industrial development, and financial markets.
In the United States political illiteracy seems to be the one qualification, besides great wealth, that gets one elected to political office. For example, prominent Republican Party politicians from Marco Rubio to Scott Walker deny that climate change is produced by human activity while Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal rejects evolutionism and supports teaching creationism in the public schools.6 At the same time, American mass culture, especially its obsession with celebrities, mind-deadening reality TV, and game shows smother the American public with a rampant idiocy that reinforces a prevalent anti-intellectualism that often serves to legitimate the normalized view that there is nothing wrong with experiencing violence primarily as entertainment. All this provides the foundation for paralyzing most forms of critical and engaged agency. Censorship, state secrecy, a sustained attack against whistleblowers, and violations of civil liberties are now matched by the increased use of censorship in public schools, the rewriting of textbooks to remove progressive ideas and struggles, and the reduction of mainstream media to a combination of entertainment and the elimination of any form of critical analyses.7 The search for the truth has been transformed into an attack on the truth. In part, this is evident with the ongoing manufacture of lies, hate, and misrepresentation that takes place daily on conservative and religious radio stations, Fox News, and other corporate-controlled media.8
Ideological fundamentalism might be expected in a society that has become increasingly anti-intellectual and displays a growing commitment to commodities, violence, privatization, the death of the social, and the bare-bones relations of commerce. But it is more surprising when it appears in universities, especially among so-called liberals and progressives. This is a moralism marked by an inability or reluctance to imagine what others are thinking. This type of ideological self-righteousness by so-called progressives and elements of the orthodox left is especially dispiriting because it makes a mockery of academic freedom, and often condemns other positions even before they are heard or are available to be discussed and analyzed.
Rather than open up conversations, this type of pedagogical terrorism closes them down and then collapses into a kind of comedy of intellectual boasting while assuming the moral high ground. Hubris becomes more than shameful in this instance; it becomes toxic, blinding the ideological warriors to their own militant ignorance and anti-democratic rhetoric while shutting down any notion of the university as a democratic public sphere. What is lost here is how a pedagogy of repression assumes a revolutionary stance when in fact everything about it is counterrevolutionary. In the end, this suggests a kind of theoretical helplessness, a replacing of careful analysis with the inability to think, a discourse of denunciation, and a language overflowing with binarisms of good and evil. What is at risk here is both the moral collapse of politics and the undermining of the very nature of critical thought and agency. Of course, this raises the question of how one survives in the university without being in exile, or at the very best existing with one foot inside and one foot outside the institution.
Attacks from both the left and the right have been waged against critics who speak outside the box of normalized political positions, though the right has had far more power in waging and sustaining such attacks. Historically, these would include figures ranging from Scott Nearing, Paul Sweezy, and I. F. Stone to more recent radicals such as Ward Churchill, Norman Finkelstein, and Steven Salaita. One can hear echoes of such attacks on women who criticize some versions of what might be called a lingering “all boys” club in administration; critics of Israel’s state policy and its government; anyone who calls for overcoming political fragmentation among the left; and theorists who speak of the need for emancipatory forms of leadership and authority while refusing the anarchist-inspired so-called leaderless revolution in favor of long-term organizations and political strategies. And so it goes.
And then there are those academics who write and talk about pedagogy in the tradition of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and Paulo Freire. Such academics, already tainted by their association with education and pedagogy, are often viewed as not being abstract enough or are relegated to the garbage can of “theory” because they believe that matters of agency and culture are as important as economic and political structures. Any attempt to connect theory to important social issues is often dismissed as anti-theoretical or, even worse, anti-intellectual. What the fundamentalists cannot understand is that the call for lifting ideas into public life supports the assumption that theory is crucial but that it should also be accessible and address important social issues. In this instance, matters of politics, morality, and connection are not stripped from theory, but give it life, room to breathe, and provide a connection with the rhythms of everyday life.
In other cases, intellectual capacity and insight collapse into biology as certain individuals and groups are excluded from voicing a position because they are deemed not authentic enough. When Paulo Freire was alive, there was a group of ideologically orthodox feminist editors at the Harvard Educational Review who argued that he should not be published in the journal because he was considered a white male voice expounding critical pedagogy. Under such circumstances, the poisonous embrace of a deadening essentialism and paralyzing binaries turned critical pedagogy into the alleged enemy of feminists and minorities. In this instance, a zeal for political purity drove an embrace of a version of intellectual moralism in which all that was left politically was what the writer Richard Rodriguez calls “an astonishing vacancy.”9
How can one not be in exile working in academia, especially if one refuses the cliques, mediocrity, hysterical forms of resentment, backbiting, and endless production of irrelevant research? The spaces of retreat from public life in the academy have become dead zones of the imagination mixed with a kind of brutalizing defense of their own decaying postures and search for status. Leadership in too many academic departments is empty, disempowering, and utterly rudderless, lacking any vision or sense of social responsibility. Students are constantly being told that they should feel good instead of working hard and focusing. Too many academics no longer ask students what they think, but how they feel. Everyone wants to be a happy consumer. When students are told that all that matters for them is feeling good and that feeling uncomfortable is alien to learning itself, the critical nature of teaching and learning is compromised.
This is an academic version of the Dr. Phil TV show, and often results in modes of infantilizing pedagogy that are as demeaning to students as they are to professors, who now take on the role of therapists speaking in terms of comfort zones but rarely offer support in the interest of empowering students to confront difficult problems and risk feeling “unsafe” if it means examining hard truths or their own prejudices and those of others—in other words, learning to think for themselves. This is not to suggest that students should feel lousy about themselves, that they shouldn’t feel good, or that educators shouldn’t care about their students. To the contrary, caring in the most productive sense means providing students with the knowledge, skills, and theoretical rigor that offer them the kinds of challenges that engage them and help them, in turn, feel good about what they accomplish through developing their capacity to grow intellectually, emotionally, and ethically. As Victoria Harper puts it, a longer lasting and more productive sense of well-being emerges when students have “learned to grapple with difficult material, understand critical ideas, and even start to engage in real dialogue.”10
In the neoliberal university, there seems to be a pathological disdain for community, trust, and collaboration. As the bounds of sociality and social responsibility are undermined, all that is left is a kind of sordid careerism and the quest for status and some financial crumbs from corporations and defense contractors. What remains is the insufferable cultural capital of academics driven by self-interest and bounded by the private orbits in which they live. These are academics who have surrendered to a regime of conformity and instrumental rationality while reducing politics to something done during one’s leisure time. At their most cartoonish moment, these academics appear to inhabit a kind of cultural capital made visible by their desire to tattoo an Oxford degree on their foreheads and speak with a British ruling-class accent.
Academia is now characterized by a withdrawal into the private and the irrelevant. Solidarity, rigor, public scholarship, and integrity are in short supply in most departments. So is sanity. Under such circumstances, exile seems less like a refuge than a revitalized kind of public space where a new language, a new understanding of politics, and new forms of solidarity can be nurtured among the displaced and those viewed as the threatening other—that is, among those who refuse the neoliberal machinery of social and political death that now defines education solely as a source of profit and mode of commerce. The renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s comments on his notion of welcoming exile under certain circumstances should not therefore surprise us, especially in light of his own experience of marginality in American scholarship. But what must be understood is that his position does not constitute a celebration of marginality; rather, it is an affirmation to keep going in the midst of what sometimes appears as a form of academic madness driven by forces that undermine the university as a democratic public sphere. Bauman writes:
I need to admit, however, that my view of the sociologists’ vocation does not necessarily overlap with the consensus of the profession. Dennis Smith has described me as an “outsider through and through.” It would be dishonest of me to deny that denomination. Indeed, throughout my academic life I did not truly “belong” to any school, monastic order, intellectual camaraderie, political caucus, or interest clique. I did not apply for admission to any of them, let alone did much to deserve an invitation; nor would I be listed by any of them—at least unqualifiedly—as “one of us.” I guess my claustrophobia—feeling as I do ill at ease in closed rooms, tempted to find out what is on the other side of the door—is incurable; I am doomed to remain an outsider to the end, lacking as I [do] the indispensable qualities of an academic insider: school loyalty, conformity to the procedure, and readiness to abide by the school-endorsed criteria of cohesion and consistency. And, frankly, I don’t mind.11
Although I don’t want to romanticize positions of marginality, they may represent the only spaces left in the university where one can develop a comprehensive vision of politics and social change. Such spaces are well placed in producing interdisciplinary work, more than willing to challenge the often deadening silos of some versions of identity politics, and make connections with social movements outside the university. Maybe the space of exile is one of the few spaces left in neoliberal societies where one can cultivate a sense of meaningful connection, solidarity, and engaged citizenship that goes beyond allegiance to interest groups and an immersion in a deadly conformism and culture of mediocrity. Exile might be the space where a kind of double consciousness can be cultivated that points beyond the structures of domination and repression to what the poet Claudia Rankine calls a new understanding of community, politics, and citizenship in which the social contract is revived as a kind of truce in which we allow ourselves to be flawed together. She writes:
You want to belong, you want to be here. In interactions with others you’re constantly waiting to see that they recognize that you’re a human being. That they can feel your heartbeat and you can feel theirs. And that together you will live—you will live together. The truce is that. You forgive all of these moments because you’re constantly waiting for the moment when you will be seen. As an equal. As just another person. As another first person. There’s a letting go that comes with it. I don’t know about forgiving, but it’s an “I’m still here.” And it’s not just because I have nowhere else to go. It’s because I believe in the possibility. I believe in the possibility of another way of being. Let’s make other kinds of mistakes; let’s be flawed differently.12
To be “flawed differently” works against a selfish desire for power and a sense of belonging as a given as well as the narrowed circles of certainty that define fundamentalisms of all ideological stripes. It suggests the need to provide room for the emergence of new democratic public spheres, noisy conversations, and a kind of alternative third space informed by compassion and a respect for the Other. Under such circumstances, critical exchange matters not as a self-indulgent performance in which the self simply interviews itself but as public act, a reaching out, a willingness to experience the Other within the space of exile that heralds a democracy to come. This would be a democracy where intellectual thought informs critique, embodies a sense of integrity, and reclaims agency in the service of justice and equality.
What might it mean to imagine the university as containing spaces in which the metaphor of exile provides a theoretical resource in which to engage in political and pedagogical work that is disruptive, transformative, and emancipatory? Such work would both challenge the mainstream notion of higher education as a kind of neoliberal factory as well as the ideological fundamentalism that has emerged among some alleged progressive voices. What might it mean to address the work we do in the university, especially with regard to teaching as a form of classroom grace?13 In what follows, I address this issue against the backdrop of ideological fundamentalism I have mentioned above.
Today, the purpose of higher education functions largely to prepare students for what is often called the new global economy. Hence, it is not surprising that many of the advocates of higher education as a training ground for the global workforce also view the more progressive ideals of higher education as a threat to the power of the surveillance state, the ultra-rich, and religious fundamentalists. Under such circumstances, it becomes more difficult to reclaim a history in which higher education views its mission as not only pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge, truth, teaching, and service, but also educates students as engaged critical citizens willing to deepen and expand the ideals of a democratic society. This is certainly not meant to overlook a history of higher education marked by racism and the suppression of dissent. Higher education never existed in an idyllic past in which it only functioned as a public good and provided a public service in the interest of developing a democratic polity. At the same time, its understanding as a public good, however compromised, largely defined its mission.
At a time when the public good is under attack and there seems to be a growing apathy toward the social contract, or any other civic-minded investment in public values and the larger common good, education should be seen as more than a credential or a pathway to a job. It should be viewed as a crucial public sphere for understanding and overcoming the current crisis of agency, politics, and democracy faced by many young people today. One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators and students is the need to reclaim the role that education has historically played in developing critical literacies and civic capacities. At the heart of such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish in a democracy. What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political, and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people to challenge authority and, in the words of James Baldwin, “rob history of its tyrannical power, and illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”14
I have been writing about the relationship among education, pedagogy, and democracy in the United States for over forty years. I have done so because I believe that democracy has become ever more fraught, ever more at risk in the past several decades. If educational institutions choose not to nurture and develop generations of young people who are multi-literate, take on the role of border crossers, embrace civic courage, embrace the practice of being socially responsible, and display compassion for others, it is possible that the democratic mission of higher education will disappear. I believe that any talk about democracy, justice, and freedom has to begin with the issue of education, which plays a central role in producing the identities, values, desires, dreams, and commitments that shape a society’s obligations to the future. Education in this instance provides the intellectual, moral, and political referents for how we both imagine and construct a future better than the one previous generations inherited. Within such a critical project, education is defined not by test scores, or draconian zero-tolerance regimes, but by how it expands the capacities of students to be creative, question authority, and think carefully about a world in which justice and freedom prevail and the common good is reaffirmed. Once students leave the university, their actions and choices should be informed by a broader sense of ethical and social responsibilities and a developing sense of who they are and what kind of world they want to make for themselves and future generations.
Under the current regime of market fundamentalism, education is often narrowed to the teaching of pre-specified subject matter and stripped-down skills that can be assessed through standardized testing. This constitutes a pedagogy of repression, one that kills the imagination, and produces what might be called an “embodied incapacity.” Increasingly, the administration of education suffers a similar fate. It, too, is often defined by a business culture, a rigid embrace of bureaucracy, and corporate strategies rooted in a view of schooling that reduces it to a private act of consumption and an endless search for capital.15 Lost here is the creation of the thinking, speaking, acting human being “competent in matters of truth and goodness and beauty . . . [equipped] for choices and the crucibles of private and public life.”16 In opposition to the instrumental reduction of education to an adjunct of corporate and neoliberal interests that offer no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility, or the demands of citizenship—young people should address the challenge of developing critical approaches to education that illuminate how knowledge, values, desire, and social relations are always implicated in power and related to the obligations of engaged citizenship.
Critical education matters because it questions everything and complicates one’s relationship to oneself, others, and the larger world. It also functions to “keep historical memory alive, to give witness to the truth of the past so that the politics of today is vibrantly democratic.”17 Education has always been part of a broader political, social, and cultural struggle over knowledge, subjectivities, values, and the future. Today, however, public and higher education are under a massive assault in a growing number of countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, because they represent one of the few democratic public spheres that are capable of teaching young people to be critical, thoughtful, and engaged citizens who are willing to take risks, stretch their imaginations, and, most important, hold power accountable.
The attack on education is now matched by a war on youth. Consequently, the current generation confronts a number of serious challenges. They live at a time in which civil liberties, long-term social investments, political integrity, and public values are under assault from a number of fundamentalist groups who exercise power from a wide range of spaces and cultural apparatuses in an age marked by a politics of disposability.18 This is an age defined by a rising number of homeless, a growing army of debt-ridden students, whole populations deprived of basic necessities amid widening income disparities, swelling refugee camps and detention centers housing millions of economic migrants, political refugees and those displaced by ecological catastrophes. And in addition to these millions, more are contained in prisons and jails, mostly nonviolent, mostly poor, and mostly uneducated. The current generation lives at a time in which local police forces are militarized, and drone strikes miss terrorists and wipe out wedding parties. The surveillance state threatens to erase any sense of privacy along with personal and political freedoms, and consuming appears to be the only obligation of citizenship. Legal lawlessness and a politics of disposability are the antidemocratic methods for dealing with those who are unable to pay their debts, violate a trivial rule in school, are unhoused from mental hospitals, or caught jaywalking in poor neighborhoods that make them a prime target for the criminal justice system. The politics of disposability has gone mainstream as more and more individuals and groups are now considered without social value and vulnerable, consigned to zones of abandonment, surveillance, and incarceration.
The culture of fear now drives the major national narratives and in doing so has replaced a concern with social and economic injustice with an obsession regarding the violation of law and order. Fear now propels the mainstream representations, discourses, and stories that define social relations and legitimize dominant forms of power freed from any sense of moral and political responsibility, if not accountability. These conditions raise challenges for existing and future generations, which they will have to address. These might include questions such as: What conditions need to be put in place that will enable young people to develop their critical capacities to be agents of change? What will it take to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline? How will the mechanisms be dismantled that attempt to turn all black men into criminals in the schools and on the streets? How will the widespread anti-intellectualism that enables a culture of thoughtlessness and violence be stopped? What role might education play in putting limits on the growing atomization and isolation of everyday life and the ludicrous assumption that shopping is the highest expression of citizenship?
Education should prepare students to enter a society that badly needs to be reimagined against the ideals of a substantive democracy. Such a task is both a political as well as a pedagogical. Politically, it suggests defining higher education as a democratic public sphere and rejecting the notion that the culture of education is defined solely by the lure of commercial advantage and a crude form of instrumental rationality. Pedagogically, this suggests modes of teaching and learning that take on the task of producing an informed public, enacting and sustaining a culture of questioning, and enabling a critical formative culture that advances not only the power of the imagination but also what Professor Kristen Case calls “moments of classroom grace.”19 Pedagogies of classroom grace allow students to reflect critically on commonsense understandings of the world, and begin to question, however troubling, their sense of agency, relationship to others, and their relationship to the larger world. This is a pedagogy that asks why we have wars, massive inequality, a surveillance state, the commodification of everything that matters, and the collapse of the public into the private. This is not merely a methodological consideration but also a moral and political practice because it presupposes the creation of critically engaged students who can imagine a future in which justice, equality, freedom, and democracy matter.
Taking seriously the role of higher education as a democratic public sphere also poses the challenge of teaching students to become agents of social change. Another is to teach them the skills, knowledge, and values that they can use to organize political movements capable of stopping the destruction of the environment, ending the vast inequalities in our society, and building a world based on love and generosity rather than on selfishness and materialism. In this instance, the classroom should be a space of grace—a place to think critically, ask troubling questions, and take risks, even though that may mean transgressing established norms and bureaucratic procedures. At the same time, it is important to remember that schools are not going to change one classroom at a time. Faculty need to organize not just for better pay, but also to once again gain control over their classrooms by altering the modes of governance that are concentrating power in the hands of administrators and reducing most faculty to the part-time status of Walmart workers. That means building a movement to create a different kind of educational system and a more democratic society. It also suggests that academics need to do more than teach behind the safety of their classroom doors. They should also make an effort to be involved in politics, run for local school boards, become publicly engaged citizens, use the power of ideas to move their peers and others, and work to develop the institutions that allow everybody to participate in the creation of a world in which justice matters, the environment matters, and living lives of decency and dignity matters. In short, they can become public intellectuals willing to create the pedagogical, political, and economic conditions that connect learning to social change and pedagogy to the pressing problems facing both the United States and the rest of the globe.
There are many issues that academics in their capacity as public intellectuals can take up and address, of which I will suggest three. First, they can define higher education as a public good and write for multiple audiences, address a range of important social issues, and lend their voices and analyses to the plethora of alternative public spheres opening up online. One important issue they could highlight is that in any democratic society, education should be viewed as a right, not an entitlement, and such a position suggests a reordering of state and federal priorities to make that happen. More specifically, high quality public and higher education should be free, viewed as a crucial social investment. There are a number of countries such as Germany and Mexico in which this is already happening. Funding for free quality education could come from cutting back on military spending and using what is left over to finance higher education costs, implementing what Bernie Sanders calls the Robin Hood tax on stock trading and putting that money into education, jettisoning federal funding for for-profit colleges, and eliminating tuition costs while providing grants and scholarships, especially to poor students.20
Second, academics need to fight for the rights of students to have some say in the development of their education. They are not customers but students who should have the right to a formidable and critical education not dominated by corporate values; moreover, they should have a say in the shaping of their education and what it means to expand and deepen the practice of freedom and democracy. Young people have been left out of the discourse of democracy. They are the new disposables who lack jobs, a decent education, hope, and any semblance of a future better than the one their parents inherited. They are a reminder of how finance capital has abandoned any viable vision of the future, including one that would support future generations. This is a mode of politics and capital that eats its own children and throws their fate to the vagaries of the market. If any society is in part judged by how it views and treats its children, American society by all accounts has truly failed in a colossal way and in doing so provides a glimpse of the heartlessness at the core of the new authoritarianism.
Finally, though far from least, there is a need to oppose the ongoing shift in power relations between faculty and the managerial class. Central to this view of higher education in the United States is a market-driven paradigm that seeks to eliminate tenure, turn the humanities into a job preparation service, and transform most faculties into an army of temporary subaltern labor. For instance, in the United States, out of 1.5 million faculty members 1 million are “adjuncts who are earning, on average, $20K a year gross, with no benefits or health care, and no unemployment insurance when they are out of work.”21 The indentured service status of such faculty is put on full display as some colleges have resorted to using “temporary service agencies to do their formal hiring.”22 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.23 As Noam Chomsky has argued, this reduction of faculty to the status of subaltern labor is “part of a corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility.”24 Too many faculty are now removed from the governing structure of higher education and as a result have been abandoned to the misery of impoverished wages, excessive classes, no health care, and few, if any, social benefits. This is shameful and not merely an education issue but a deeply political matter, one that must address how neoliberal ideology and policy has imposed on higher education an antidemocratic governing structure that mimics the broader authoritarian forces now threatening the United States.
Americans live under the shadow of the corporate state, a culture of fear, and an ongoing spectacle of violence, but the future is still open. The time has come for the public to defend and develop forms of education in which civic values and social responsibility become central to invigorating and fortifying a new era of civic engagement, a renewed sense of social agency, and an impassioned vision, organization, and set of strategies capable of once again making higher education central to the meaning and ongoing struggle to embrace and live out the promise of a substantive democracy. What must be avoided is isolating such reforms by limiting them to particular institutional struggles. It is crucial for educators and others to extend the struggle over workplace governance to faculty in other colleges and universities and to build alliances so that such struggles can be transformed into national and international movements for all workers.