Exile as a Space of Disruption in the Academy
In this article Giroux again excoriates the culture of “business” which has ravaged the modern university and made us all into automatons doing the business of the managers.
“Under the regime of neoliberalism, too many institutions of higher education have transformed the culture of education into the culture of business and are now characterized by a withdrawal into the private and the irrelevant. In this view, education is driven largely by market forces that undermine any viable vision of education as a public good connected to wider social problems.”
As a counterpoint he calls for the return of the academic as an exile, the person who defends and exhilarates in the preservation of the cultural space of the university as a public good which can “…imagine a more just future”. Read more.
Fall of the Faculty/Rise of the All Administrative University
It might be a good counterpoint to Giroux’s analysis of the “neo-liberal” university to consider Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty. In it he “…provides a compelling and accurate diagnosis of the contemporary ills plaguing the rise of the all-administrative university.” Such an entity, he argues “has been ruinous for students, who foot steadily increasing tuition bills to keep the administrative bloat going, bad for faculty autonomy as contingent labor becomes increasingly prevalent, with the concepts of academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance devolving into relics of the past; and destructive of the public interest as educational institutions classified as not-for-profit enterprises use non-taxable endowment income and indirect cost recovery associated with grants and discoveries—and in some instances grant overhead–to facilitate the creation of organizational wealth, which unsurprisingly goes to increasing administrative salaries and perks instead of to the funding of teaching and research.” Read more.
