The Well-Read Red has been reading up on right-wing attacks on higher education.
I don’t mean the
targetted assasinations of Iraqi academics, nor even the
denials of visas to foreign scholars who have been invited to US conferences or hired to teach at US universities. I mean something more local, what
Henry Giroux has called “the relentless attempt to destroy critical education as a foundation for an engaged citizenry and a vibrant democracy.” Giroux points out that
the attack on all levels of education is evident not only in the attempts to corporatize education, standardize curricula, privatize public schooling, and use the language of business as a model for governance, but also in the ongoing effort to weaken the power of faculty, turn full time jobs into contractual labor, & hand over those larger educational forces in the culture to a small group of corporate interests. Public schooling is increasingly reduced to training and modeled after prisons -- with its emphasis on criminalizing student behavior and its prioritizing of security over critical learning. Educators are now viewed largely as deskilled technicians, depoliticized professionals, paramilitary forces, hawkers for corporate goods, or grant writers.
Giroux doesn’t mention it, but those educators who don’t fit such descriptions are liable to be attacked, as, well, “dangerous”: Last month David Horowitz published a book called “The Professors: The 101 most dangerous academics in America,” listing scholars to the left of center, including luminaroes like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. Another figure on the list, Journalism professor
Robert McChesney, responded that
If Horowitz believes that publicly supported universities have an obligation to have faculties that represent the range of U.S. political opinion, and that it currently tilts too far to the left, he should follow the logic to its obvious resting place. Generals and military officers are far more important to the functioning of a government – and, as history shows in depressingly frequent detail, a much greater threat to democratic governance -- than [are, say,] anthropology professors. In the United States the military is enormous, it is entirely funded by taxpayers, and the officer corps is significantly right-wing Republican. If Horowitz is going on some sort of rampage about getting political balance in important publicly funded professions, he can only be taken seriously if he starts at the Pentagon. When he has established how to do it there we can proceed to the campuses.
Horowitz is also the man responsible for promoting versions of what he calls an “Academic Freedom Bill of Rights”— a title that needs to be interpreted as we do the “Clear Skies” initiative, or the “liberation” of Iraq.
Bills allowing college students the power to sue "dictator professors" who offend their beliefs by teaching material which contradicts those beliefs have been proposed in several states, and Pennsylvania has a congressional board set up to investigate such cases of ‘bias’ in the classroom.
The satirical website
fafblog last year put it this way:
Freedom is ever-marching, and its latest target for emancipation is none other than the Gulag Academia, where millions of students are held hostage by totalitarian educators whose cruel practice of teaching them things they don't already believe could soon be put to an end.
For far too long, higher education has been concerned with "education" and "instruction," mere euphemisms for harsh indoctrination into the totalitarian ideology of Fact. But now students will be given the tools to fight back, to free themselves of their oppressive enslavement to a world in which life evolved over millions of years through natural selection, dinosaurs weren't wiped out six thousand years ago by the flood of Noah, and the evil Xemu was not responsible for the existence of body thetans.
Will students learn more in such an environment? Of course not. But this is precisely the point: America has done so much to oppose tyranny in the form of earthly despots that it can only proceed to liberate humanity from the greatest dictator of all: Reality, which tyrannically insists that we acknowledge That Which Is rather than That Which Would Be More Convenient For Us.
Freed from the tyranny of Reality and the dangerous threat of its advance guard, Information, America's youth will be free to live in a world consisting solely of their own pre-existing beliefs, where messy ideological review and examination of fact have become unnecessary.
More seriously, and more recently,
Sophia McClennen on Counterpunchnoted that although
These attacks have typically been disguised as a defense of student rights . . . really the assault is on the student.
. . . the right now claims that students are victims of indoctrination. Brainwashing and mind control in classrooms constitute a parent's worst fears. . . [and the idea] immediately makes the public suspicious of professors. But let's consider for a moment what such charges presume, especially when they are bundled with the . . . claim that students need more access to conservative faculty.
Throughout the Bush reign the public has been repeatedly asked to uncritically believe, to have blind faith, to sacrifice, and to obey. The connections between the type of public ideally imagined by the administration and the nation's youth should be obvious. If you require an obedient populace, then it is essential that you begin training the youth accordingly. Favoring tests over critique, memorization over engagement, loyalty over social commitment, individualism over community, and so on implies a student educated to passively consume what the government provides rather than to actively participate in the construction of a democratic society. This negative view of the unthinking student repeatedly appears in arguments that assume that students are docile and submissive, easily persuaded to accept their professors' politics. The right also confuses the necessary confrontations that arise in an atmosphere of critical pedagogy with hostility towards students’ views.
What really worries the right, McClennan argues, is not left-leaning faculty, but the intellectually sphisticated students such faculty hope to encourage.
She concludes,
As education becomes increasingly privatized and . . . students increasingly consider education as a consumer product, it will become more and more difficult to encourage students to use the university as a site of social engagement and collective critique. On the positive side, the greatest advantage the left may have in this battle is its respect for the student. Fostering wakefulness over dreams, engagement over loyalty, vigilance over obedience, political activism over passive consumption, and hope over fearfulness may very well be our best weapon.
When I first learned about Huey Long , my mother (b.1921, grew up in Louisiana, among other places) said he was a demagogue. But I thought he sounded like a pretty good guy. He believed in Sharing the Wealth, provided free textbooks, built roads, wanted to provide minimum and maximum income levels. Stuff like that. He wasn't so great on free speech issues. But there's still good to be said of him.
