Susan Searls Giroux

Challenging Neoliberalism's New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy

Although critical pedagogy has a long and diverse tradition in the United States, its innumerable variations reflect both a shared belief in education as a moral and political practice and a recognition that its value should be judged in terms of how it prepares students to engage in a common struggle for deepening the possibilities of autonomy, critical thought, and a substantive democracy. We believe that critical pedagogy at the current historical moment faces a crisis of enormous proportions. It is a crisis grounded in the now commonsense belief that education should be divorced from politics and that politics should be removed from the imperatives of democracy. At the center of this crisis is a tension between democratic values and market values, between dialogic engagement and rigid authoritarianism. Faith in social amelioration and a sustainable future appears to be in short supply as neoliberal capitalism performs the dual task of using education to train workers for service sector jobs and produce lifelong consumers. At the same time, neoliberalism feeds a growing authoritarianism steeped in religious fundamentalism and jingoistic patriotism encouraging intolerance and hate as it punishes critical thought, especially if it is at odds with the reactionary religious and political agenda pushed by the Bush administration. Increasingly, education appears useful to those who hold power, and issues concerning how public and higher education might contribute to the quality of democratic public life are either ignored or dismissed. Moral outrage and creative energy seem utterly limited in the political sphere, just as any collective struggle to preserve education as a basis for creating critical citizens is rendered defunct within the corporate drive for efficiency, a logic that has inspired bankrupt reform initiatives such as standardization, high-stakes testing, rigid accountability schemes, and privatization. Cornel West (2004) recently argued that we need to analyze those dark forces shutting down democracy but “we also need to be very clear about the vision that lures us toward hope and the sources of that vision” (p. 18). In what follows, we want to recapture the vital role that critical pedagogy might play as

Universities Gone Wild Big Money, Big Sports, and Scandalous Abuse at Penn State

This article argues that the Penn State scandal both symbolizes the corruption of higher education by big money, big sports, and corporate power and points to what we describe as a symptom of the war on youth. Penn State, like many of its counterparts, has become a corporate university caught in the grip of the military-industrial-academic complex rather than an institution driven by public values and ethical considerations. We argue that the Penn State scandal reveals a hidden order of politics that is a paradigmatic example of mission drift, one largely marked by a retreat from its role as a vital democratic public sphere to an institution willing to subordinate educational values to market values. Stuck in what might be called “an output fundamentalism,” Penn State like many other universities now prioritizes market mechanisms that emphasize performance measures that subordinate and tarnish scholarship with an emphasis on bringing in bigger grants, expanding profits, and narrating itself through the celebrity culture of sports. One consequence is that young people are increasingly defined primarily in market terms and subject to modes of education run like factory assembly lines and shaped in the image of shopping malls and high end entertainment complexes. And as the case of serial abuse that took place on the Penn State campus reveals, they are also considered disposable. We examine this scandal within a wide range of registers and argue that the scandal itself cannot be viewed simply through as a narrative about sexual abuse, a fall from grace for the university, or as a tragic commentary on the career of Coach Joe Paterno.

From the ‘Culture Wars’ to the Conservative Campaign for Campus Diversity: Or, How Inclusion Became the New Exclusion

This article explores the new conservative assault on the university and the relative silence on the part of progressives in response to this challenge. In part, this apparent retreat is a consequence of the vulnerabilities and anxieties of workers in the academy that result from the ongoing corporatization of the university as well as the pervasive culture of fear that permeates the USA in the wake of 9/11, which tends to punish critique as anti-American. As important as such factors are, the current analysis focuses more inwardly on processes of internalization and normalization of the tenets of professionalism and (neo)liberalism in the post-civil rights American academy. Upon careful reexamination of the ‘culture wars’ of the 1980s and 1990s, it locates part of an explanation for such confounding quiet in the ideals that marked the universitys ‘multicultural turn.’ The often limp endorsement and bland acceptance of principles such as ‘nondiscrimination,’ ‘diversity,’ and ‘openness’ in the abstract enabled the Rights ruthless appropriation of the vision and language of civil rights, turning fact and history on their heads.

Don’t Worry, We are all Racists!

Crash is not ‘about’ race. It’s about strangers, others. About how we love to divide ourselves… And that’s so much who we are, as human beings. We will always manufacture differences.   Paul Haggis...

Youth, Higher Education, and the Breaking of the Social Contract: Toward the Possibility of a Democratic Future

Any discourse about the future has to begin with the issue of youth because more than any other group, youth embody the dreams, desires, and commitment of a society’s obligations to the future. This echoes a classical principle of liberal democracy, in which youth both symbolized society’s responsibility to the future and offered a measure of its progress. For most of the twentieth century, Americans have embraced as a defining feature of politics that all levels of government would assume a large measure of responsibility for providing the resources, social provisions, security, and modes of education that simultaneously offered young people a future as well as expanded the meaning and depth of a substantive democracy. Youth not only registered symbolically the importance of modernity’s claim to progress, they also affirmed the importance of the liberal, democratic tradition of the social contract, in which adult responsibility was mediated through a willingness to fight for the rights of children, enact reforms that invested in their future, and provide the educational conditions necessary for them to make use of the freedoms they have while learning how to be critical citizens, all the while enabling the reproduction of that society. Within such a project, democracy was linked to the well-being of youth, while the status of how a society imagined democracy and its future was contingent on how it viewed its responsibility toward future generations.

Neoliberalism Goes to College: Higher Education in the New Economy

The ascendancy of neoliberalism and corporate culture in every aspect of American life not only consolidates economic power in the hands of the few; it also aggressively attempts to break the power of unions, decouple income from productivity, subordinate the needs of society to the market, reduce civic education to job training, and render public services and amenities an unconscionable luxury. But it does more. It thrives on a culture of cynicism, insecurity, and despair. Conscripts in a relentless campaign for personal responsibility, Americans are now convinced that they have little to hope for—or gain from—the government, nonprofit public organizations, democratic associations, public and higher education, or other nongovernmental social agencies. With few exceptions, the project of democratizing public institutions and goods has fallen into disrepute in the popular imagination as the logic of the market and increasing militarization of public life undermine the most basic social solidarities and blunt intellectual curiosity and conviction. The consequences include not only a state representative of a few elite, corporate interests, but also the transformation of a democratic republic into a national security state. Philosopher Susan Buck-Morss comments on this loss of democratic control: But there is another United States over which I have no control, because it is by definition not a democracy, not a republic. I am referring to the national security state that is called into existence with the sovereign pronouncement of a “state emergency” and that generates a wild zone of power, barbaric and violent, operating without democratic oversight, in order to combat an “enemy” that threatens the existence not merely and not mainly of its citizens, but of its sovereignty. The paradox is that this undemocratic state claims absolute power over the citizens of a free and democratic nation.3

The Post-9/11 University and the Project of Democracy.

September 11, 2001, may well prove a decisive moment in the history of the American university. If, prior to that date, the university was largely understood as a corporate entity whose principle obligation to society was to train a flexible, skilled workforce, in the post-9/11 climate, there seems to be a growing interest in the rhetoric—if not the practice—of civic education, or what it means to teach students to participate as citizens in the moral and political life of a democracy. This renewed interest in its civic mission is largely the result of claims that universities have proven to be the “weak link” in the current war against terrorism. According to this logic, the liberal arts’ preoccupation with postmodernism, multiculturalism, and the tenets of tolerance and “cultural relativism” have resulted in a tragic under-emphasis on (or even overt challenge to) the liberal democratic values it is supposed to instill.3 Although I will claim that the assault on the academy is grievously unfounded, the debates nonetheless open up an opportunity to discuss a number of complex and contested issues, particularly in our moment of crisis, that include: How is democracy variously defined and with what effect? What do calls for civic responsibility and participation specifically demand of citizens? What form of education do citizens require to fulfill such obligations? To what degree do we need to rethink the category of “citizen,” given the globalized context in which we now live? In other words, are we merely citizens of a nation-state, or do we require a more cosmopolitan definition of citizenship? To be sure, I do agree with my more conservative interlocutors that it is now “time to teach democracy.”

The Return of the Ivory Tower: Black Educational Exclusion in the Post-Civil Rights Era

The year 2003 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of W. E. B. Du Bois’s most celebrated publication, The Souls of Black Folk. An astonishing work of literary, historical, and sociological merit, Souls has inspired generations of academicians and activists alike drawn to the politics of identity, the color line, double consciousness, the talented tenth, and theories of race. The year also marks the fortieth anniversary of Du Bois’s death in Ghana in August 1963. Save for Souls, the memory of Du Bois appears perpetually in danger of passing into oblivion, given the concerted efforts on the part of established powers to radically curtail his contributions to twentieth-century social and political thought. It seems that the commemoration of Souls—written by Du Bois in his early thirties—sanctions an official burial of the next 60 years of the author’s life, which were devoted to scholarly examination of and struggle against racist exploitation and exclusion at home and U.S. imperialism and colonialism abroad. Though his relationship to the university was strained, his commitment to education as a primary mechanism for individual self-determination and collective democratization never wavered. Even as he explored the transformative potential of more public sites of pedagogy, he continued to produce groundbreaking studies in urban sociology, histories of the transatlantic slave trade, and his monumental Black Reconstruction in America, as well as several now-classic works in the field of education and numerous works of poetry and fiction (including five novels).

Academic Culture, Intellectual Courage, and the Crisis of Politics in an Era of Permanent War

Pierre Bourdieu, a French Sociologist, was deeply concerned about the role that academics might play as a progressive force in politics. He believed that academics were indispensable, given their rigor as researchers, writers, and teachers in creating the pedagogical conditions that both furthered social and economic justice and challenged the forms of symbolic and material domination being exercised globally, especially under neoliberalism. Rejecting the commonplace assumption that academic work should be separate from the operations of politics, he reclaimed the role of the intellectual as an engaged social agent and “maintained that intellectuals have a fearsome form of social responsibility.”2 Following Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and others, Bourdieu argued that for academics to become engaged intellectuals they had to repudiate the cult of professionalism that has often positioned educators as narrow specialists, unencumbered by matters of ethics, power, and ideology, and wedded to a sterile objectivity that largely serves to justify a retreat into a world of banal academic rituals and unapologetic escapism. Against the cult of professionalism, Bourdieu posited the notion of committed intellectuals in search of “realist” utopias.

Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogy in the Academy

Cultural studies as a field seems to have passed into the shadows of academic interests. Globalization and political economy have become the privileged concerns of left academics as we move into the new millennium. While we do not want to suggest that the newfound interest in globalization and political economy is unwarranted, we do want to stress that cultural studies’s long-standing interest in the interrelationship between power, politics, and culture is much too important at present to be dismissed as the passage of another academic fashion. Matters of agency, consciousness, pedagogy, rhetoric, and persuasion are central to any public discourse about politics, not to mention education itself. In fact, as we argue below, culture is a central sphere of politics; it is the one site that offers both a language of critique and possibility, a sphere in which matters of economy, institutional power relations, globalization, and politics can be recognized, critically understood, and collectively engaged. Hence, the promise of cultural studies, especially as a fundamental aspect of higher education, does not reside in a false opposition between culture and material relations of power, but in a project that bridges these concerns as part of a larger transformative and democratic politics in which matters of pedagogy and agency play a central role.