The public defunding of universities, along with their seizure by corporations and the uber rich, is part of the slow-motion corporate coup d’état. The goal is to enforce conformity and obedience, to train young people to fill their slots in the corporate machine and leave unquestioned the status quo. The accumulation of vast wealth, no matter how nefarious, is prized as the highest good.
The late Italian philosopher's concept of hegemony was startlingly prescient.
Trump has sucked all of the oxygen out of democracy and has put in play a culture and mode of politics that kills empathy, wallows in cruelty and fear and mutilates democratic ideals.
Trump has sucked all of the oxygen out of democracy and has put in play a culture and mode of politics that kills empathy, wallows in cruelty and fear and mutilates democratic ideals.
There is no economic reason why free education cannot flourish from schools through colleges and university.
The left needs a new political conversation that encompasses memories of freedom and resistance. Such a dialogue would build on the militancy of the labor strikes of the 1930s, the civil rights movements of the 1950s and the struggle for participatory democracy by the New Left in the 1960s. At the same time, there is a need to reclaim the radical imagination and to infuse it with a spirited battle for an independent politics that regards a radical democracy as part of a never-ending struggle.
Giroux: What has become clear is that the attack on the social state, workers and unions is now being matched by a full-fledged assault on higher education. Such attacks are not happening just in the United States but in many other parts of the globe where casino capitalism is waging a savage battle to eliminate all of those public spheres that might offer a glimmer of opposition to and protection from market-driven policies, institutions, ideology and values.
Across the globe, a new historical conjuncture is emerging in which the attacks on higher education as a democratic institution and on dissident public voices in general - whether journalists, whistleblowers or academics - are intensifying with sobering consequences. The attempts to punish prominent academics such as Ward Churchill, Steven Salaita and others are matched by an equally vicious assault on whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden, and journalists such as James Risen.
There are disturbing parallels between the kinds of witch hunts against individuals suspected of anti-Israel views and the campaigns to root out alleged Communists during the 1940s and 1950s. Most universities then, as now, did not show great courage in standing up to intimidation by government and other outside groups, while some were actually complicit. More
Modeled after a savage neoliberal value system in which wealth and power are redistributed upward, a market-oriented class of managers largely has taken over the governing structures of most institutions of higher education in the United States. by Henry A. Giroux  PhilosophersforChange.org  March 25, 2014 As universities turn toward corporate management models, they increasingly use More
"The University is a critical institution or it is nothing." - Stuart Hall By Henry A Giroux  Tuesday, 29 October 2013  Truthout | Op-Ed (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout) I want to begin with the words of the late African-American poet, Audre Lourde, who was in her time a formidable writer, educator, feminist, gay rights activist and public intellectual who More
How Big Business Has Triumphed in State Legislatures on Civil Liberties, Higher Education and Energy Wednesday, 18 July 2012 00:00By Steve Horn and Sarah Blaskey, Truthout | Report (Photo: Judge and gavel via Shutterstock) This report is part 3 of a four-part exclusive series, The Other ALECs Exposed. Assaults on civil liberties, public higher education and the ecosystem have been More
