This is a review of
"University in Chains: Confronting the
Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" by Henry Giroux,
published in 2007 by Paradigm, written by a youth worker for
anyone who is a student, or works or lives with young people.
 Imagine a
society where the education system and the military forces serve
the same purpose, and that purpose is only to maintain the
wealth of a small group of people. In that same society, fear
and surveillance are used to keep the masses in check, while the
will of the wealthy runs roughshod over the ability of everyday
people. It is a society where “life [imitates] art in the form
of bad reality TV, or worse: a “military definition of reality”
grips every single person’s reality, making violence okay and
peace the exception, and squashing anyone who thinks any kind of
critical thoughts about what goes on everyday.
Can you dream up that place, like the bad memory of the worst
history lesson you ever received in junior high? Does a clear
picture come to you?
Now, imagine one institution within that society that has the
power, the capacity to actually change it. This is a place with
a clearly defined mission and purpose, and that is Democracy.
Young people and their elders come to this institution to
identify, examine, criticize, dismantle, reconstruct and make
new meaning out of Democracy everyday. The role of this
institution is public, and despite the will of the elite within
the society, this institution is funded by the public. It is the
one place with the ability to overcome the injustice of the
society described above by mutually engaging all those within
its sanctuary in a common cause and common actions designed to
challenge the society and demand change with practical, powerful
and hopeful force.
Can you imagine that institution? Do the possibilities and
hopefulness ring familiar, or are they too far away to conjure
up a clear picture?
In
Henry
Giroux’s new book,
The University in Chains: Confronting the
Military-Industrial-Academic Complex , that society and
that institution are named, brought out to stand trial in a
damning indictment that stands on the shoulders of President
Dwight Eisenhower, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Senator
William Fulbright and those of dozens of others who have tried
to call out this message before. The difference is that Giroux
understands what those before him may not have: our society is
not on the edge of falling into the hell of militarization: We
are already there.
Giroux uses only four chapters in under 200 pages to make the
point that the military-industrial-academic complex is killing
Democracy in America today. He starts with a complex
introduction that bears down on the question of what educators
should be doing while Democracy appears to be dying a thousand
deaths in the United States today. He lays out the course of his
argument by drawing clear lines between the roles of control,
capitalism, conquest and complacency in America today, showing
the reader that there is no greater urgency today than this. In
his introduction Giroux is not single-minded about the solution;
however, he is realistic. Drawing from more than thirty years of
teaching in universities across the U.S., Giroux positions his
call for action in those institutions. But make no mistake: in
this book the message is larger than the focus. This
introduction, on its own, paints a clear picture of how sick our
society is. Then he dives into the problem.
The first chapter, entitled “Arming the Academy: Higher
education in the Shadow of the National Security State,” is a
brutal assembly of reality that jarred me as I read it. Opening
with quotes from
President Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell speech to
the American public at the close of his presidency, Giroux
details the morbid tendency that colleges and universities have
shown over the last 50 years as they take give up their jobs of
protecting and promoting Democracy in the U.S. He details a grim
history filled with research deals and funding streams that all
point at moving the U.S. towards a military state, and touches
on the brief dissent that movement faced in the 1960s and 70s.
Giroux also shows that as the Vietnam War ended and Watergate
began to leave the American imagination, the “dissenters went
home and a fog of historical and social amnesia descended over
the county…” Almost as soon as that picture is clear, Giroux
charges readers to wake up to the reality that politicians today
have forgotten that “military is to democracy as fire is to
water”. The desire to make money has clouded the vision of this
nation’s political leaders, as both “liberals and conservatives
alike” have turned a blind eye to the fact that the military is
sleeping with industry, and they have succeeding in seducing the
academy into bed with them.
Giroux then details specific ways that university life has been
redefined by militarization, and what the outcomes of that are.
He spells out broad connections between the case of
Maher Arar,
Cointelpro, and Hurricane Katrina – not as a conspiracy, but
instead as a reality check that is almost too much to take in.
In this first chapter Giroux also calls out popular media again,
this time calling out Bush copycatting the movie Top Gun, and
examining the ways television shows make it okay for the
military to take over the country and “shred up the
Constitution”. In this first chapter Giroux creates a powerful
tool for youth workers as he isolates the effects of cultural
tools popular with young people – including the Internet, video
games, hip hop culture, and professional sports – and how these
tools are being used against youth in order to recruit them
willingly into the military machine. Giroux cites evidence that
the Pentagon has “created one of the largest private databases
on youth in the country” just for recruiting purposes. This is
where the connections between corporations and universities
really start to shine.
If all of that sounds a little too broad, consider Giroux’s
closing for the first chapter, in which he writes about the
complex situation we are in, and the, “…danger to the promise of
democracy at home and abroad, and to the very meaning of
democratic politics and the sustainability of human life.” In
other words, we cannot wait for a simple explanation, because
there’s no such thing. This is deep, it is difficult and we
cannot wait until Fox News simplifies it into a convenient sound
bite.
“One can best recognize a democratic society by its constant
complaints that it is not democratic enough.” With this quote
from
Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist, Giroux pounds into
the second chapter of University in Chains, unleashing his
critical analysis upon the institution of higher education. He
pounds out the complicity of pharmaceutical companies, “branded”
universities and corporate donations to government agencies that
are merely driven by profit and greed, rather than any notion of
the public good. In an institution (universities) where the
workers (professors) once had the greatest authority, Giroux
names the terrible role models of today’s administrators who
relish in their authority over their labor pool, including
Boston University,
Rio Salado College in Tempe, Arizona
where more than 98% of faculty are part-time employees, and the
University of Illinois, which plans to launch an entirely
for-profit campus to “provide access to high-quality education…
to the people of Illinois.” Who are “the people” in this case?
That’s right – the people who can afford it!
It only becomes more brutal as Giroux identifies that the ways
professors are expected to teach, the ways administrators handle
their budgets and the ways the corporate environment of the
university “inspires fear and insecurity in academics terrified
about maintaining tenure, getting it, or for that matter simply
securing a part-time position…” That puts a different face on
the college professor I had who I thought was simply an uptight
deal-breaker. Much like his “cousin” in public K-12 schools who
is throttled by No Child Left Behind, that professor and many
more like him are strangled by this gigantic monster who has no
name – only teeth and claws – and is choking the life out of
him.
Giroux demands that we wake up to the reality that Democracy is
Fragile, and that the university might be one of the only places
available where critical members of society can make “visible
the urgency of a politics necessary to reclaim democratic
values, identities, relations and practices.”
In his third chapter Giroux details the proof of a constant,
powerful pressure universities have felt since the attack of
Joseph McCarthy, the powerful 1950s U.S. senator who spearheaded
a broad movement that has continued to squeeze the life out of
democracy in America to this day. After showing how the people,
foundations and think tanks responsible for the
military-industrial-academic complex, Giroux explores the
connections with “efforts to roll back the welfare state and
dismantle all institutions that serve the public good.” With a
government that makes it tough to conduct non-terrorism focused
research, it is no wonder why the U.S. now chooses to
“selectively restrict the free flow of independent or critical
knowledge and ideas…”
It should come as no surprise that there is a deliberate effort
by many people inside and outside of the universities to stop
critical thinking about Middle Eastern studies today. This same
movement is conveniently funded and driven by the same motives
as the corporatized university, which is namely the complex that
is thwarting critical pedagogy, too. “The attack against Middle
Eastern studies… has opened the door to a whole new level of
assault on academic freedom, teach authority, and critical
pedagogy.” While there are people out there fighting against
that practice, Giroux examines how they often ignore the public
nature of their work simply to focus on universities themselves.
In this chapter Giroux breaks down the relevance of this book
for all supporters of The Freechild Project when he explains a
fundamental core of our activities: “What makes critical
pedagogy so dangerous… is that central to its very definition is
the task of educating students to become critical agents who
actively question and negotiate the relationships between theory
and practice, critical analysis and common sense, and learning
and social change.” This is the essence of what the purpose of
Freechild has been, and why I continually examine his work to
help me understand the depth and purpose of my own. The “acts of
conformity” that “substitute risk taking” driving much of youth
work today must be challenged, because at the center of those
shams is the apathy, disregard and disingenuous notion that
youth can be nothing more than we want them to be – and that is
simply not true.
The “openness, debate and engagement” inside of critical
pedagogy is brought to the forefront in the last chapter of
University in Chains, called “Breaking the Chains: A strategy to
retake the university” – but maybe it should have been called “A
strategy to retake our society.” When Giroux writes “higher
education must be engaged as a public sphere that offers
students the opportunity to involve themselves in the deepest
problems of society and to acquire the knowledge, skills, and
ethical vocabulary necessary for modes of critical dialogue and
forms of broadened civic participation,” I can’t help but think
that is what we need of our K-12 learning institutions, our
nonprofit youth programs and our community activism groups. Call
me hopeful, but I think this charge can extend far beyond
colleges and universities, and deep into the lives of the
youngest people among us. Expanding on his report of the state
of the university today, Giroux goes on to inspire me further.
He writes,
“In fact, the greatest challenge facing higher education centers
on the collective task of developing a politics that extends
beyond nation-state and reclaiming the academy as a democratic
sphere willing to confront the myriad global problems that
produce needless human suffering, obscene forms of inequality,
ongoing exploitation of marginalized groups, rapidly expanding
masses of disposable human beings, increasing forms of social
exclusion, and new forms of authoritarianism.”
That is the
greatest challenge facing the collective work of all youth
workers, as well! My friends in social work talk about the
needless human suffering all day. Teachers I have worked with
dwell on the obscene forms of inequality that face themselves
and their students everyday. A colleague in D.C. who is a
national organizer for a global human rights group told me about
the ongoing exploitation facing her constituency just last week.
And the disposable human beings, social exclusion and
authoritarianism are at the core of my own analysis!
Giroux closes his book by echoing
Hannah
Arendt’s call for real
places and spaces where people can “come together to talk, think
critically, and act on their capacities for empathy, judgment
and social responsibility.” University in Chains offers a
powerful tool for anyone who works with young people to expand
their own thinking and gain new insight into the power and
possibility of our society, our institutions and the Democracy
we share.
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