Forum Post: Beyond the Limits of Neoliberal Higher Education: Global Youth Resistance and the American/British Divide

Gonna get bunch of blank stares, but oh well. OWS concerns are being taken seriously in intellectual/academic circles, which is important.

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Clearly, any institution that makes a claim to literacy, critical dialogue, informed debate, and reason is now a threat to a political culture in which ignorance; stupidity, lies, misinformation, and appeals to the common sense have become the only currency of exchange. And this seems to apply as well to the dominant media. How else to explain the widespread public support for politicians in the United States such as Herman Cain, who is as much of a buffoon as he is an exemplary symbol of illiteracy and ignorance in the service of the political spectacle. If fact, one can argue reasonably that the entire slate of presidential Republican Party candidates extending from Rick Santorum to Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann embody not simply a rejection of science, evidence, informed argument, and other elements associated with the Enlightenment, but a deep seated disdain and hatred for any vestige of a critical mind. Ignorance now replaces knowledge and impotence with power. Almost every position they take harks back to a pre-Enlightenment period when faith and cruelty ruled the day and ignorance became the modus operandi for legitimating political and ethical impotence. Under such circumstance, it is not surprising that higher education, or for that matter any other critical public sphere in the United States and increasingly in England, occupies a high profile target for dismantlement and reform by [neo]liberal and right-wing politicians and other extremists. While there is ample commentary on the dumbing down of the culture as a result of the corporate control of the dominant media, what is often missed in this argument is how education has come under a similar attack and not simply because there is an attempt to privatize or commercialize such institutions.

Under casino capitalism, higher education matters only to the extent that it promotes national prosperity and drives economic growth, innovation, and transformation. But there is more at stake here in turning the university into an adjunct of the corporation, there is also an attempt to remove it as one of the few remaining institutions left in which dissent, critical dialogue, and social problems can be critically engaged. There is a sustained attempt on the part of the corporate elite, right wing fundamentalists, and others to disconnect the university from its role as a democratic public sphere capable of producing a critical formative culture and set of institutions in which complicated ideas can be engaged, authority challenged, power held accountable, and public intellectuals produced. Young people in the United States now recognize that the university has become part of ponzi scheme designed to place on students an unconscionable amount of debt while subjecting them under the power of commanding financial institutions for years after they graduate. Under this economic model of subservience, there is no future for young people, there is no time to talk about advancing social justice, addressing social problems, promoting critical thinking, cultivating social responsibility, or engaging non-commodified values that might challenge the neoliberal world view.

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Neoliberal and right-wing political attacks on higher education and the rise of student protests movements in England and the United States, in particular, must be viewed within a broader political landscape that goes far beyond a critique of massive increases in student tuition. A broader analysis is needed to provide insights into how neoliberal policies and modes of resistance manifest themselves in different historical contexts while also offering possibilities for building alliances among different student groups across a range of countries. What both the UK and the US share is a full-fledged attack by corporate and market-driven forces to destroy higher education as a democratic public sphere, despite the ongoing “desirability of an educated population to sustain a vibrant democracy and culture that provides a key component of the good life.” Viewed as simply a training ground for the corporate order, higher education will surely default on the promise of a democratic future for young people and any investment in a social state capable of creating the conditions in which it becomes possible for young people to imagine another world outside of the economic Darwinism that now bears down on every aspect of their lives.

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http://www.truth-out.org/beyond-limits-neoliberal-higher-education-global-youth-resistance-and-americanbritish-divide/1320688