by Henry A. Giroux What happens to the memory of history when it ceases to be testimony? – James Young[1] At a time when both political parties, anti-public intellectual pundits and mainstream news sources view the purpose of higher education … Continue reading Higher education and the promise of insurgent public memory
by Henry A. Giroux As universities turn toward corporate management models, they increasingly use and exploit cheap faculty labor while expanding the ranks of their managerial class. 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. As Debra Leigh Scott points out, “administrators now outnumber faculty on every campus across the country.”[1] There is more at stake here than metrics. Benjamin Ginsberg views this shift in governance as the rise of what he … Continue reading Taking notes 32: Beyond neoliberal miseducation
by Angelo J. Letizia In a recent article, Dr. Henry Giroux argued that we may be witnessing the dismantling of democracy (Giroux, 2013). He pointed to the neoliberal assault on public education and the transformation of public education into workforce training for the global economy at the hands of state and federal law makers (Giroux, 2013). Giroux’s remarks are sobering. They may actually be more telling than even he realized. Perhaps the neoliberal assault on education is not the destruction of democracy, but rather something much more profound; it may be the end of the Enlightenment. While it is impossible … Continue reading End of Enlightenment? Not if we fight for it
by Henry A. Giroux The University is a critical institution or it is nothing. — Stuart Hall Let me begin with the words of the late African-American poet, Audre Lorde, who was in her time a formidable writer, educator, feminist, gay rights activist and public intellectual who displayed a relentless courage in addressing the injustices she witnessed all around her. She writes: Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into … Continue reading Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University
Philosophers for Change 