I think Mr. Giroux is mostly correct on the facts:
[T]hey sought aggressively to restructure its modes of governance, undercut the power of faculty, privilege knowledge that was instrumental to the market, define students mainly as clients and consumers, and reduce the function of higher education largely to training students for the global workforce. ...
Increasingly aligned with market forces, higher education is mostly primed for teaching business principles and corporate values, while university administrators are prized as CEOs or bureaucrats in a neoliberal-based audit culture. Many colleges and universities have been McDonalds-ized as knowledge is increasingly viewed as a commodity resulting in curricula that resemble a fast-food menu.While I'd phrase it very differently, he hasn't said anything I think is wrong. And that's precisely the point--Mr. Giroux and I can look at the same facts and come to completely different conclusions. Our priors diverge, and therefore also our conclusions.
The key to Mr. Giroux's error (in my view) is the meaning of the word "they" at the top of the above quote. "They" refers to "neoliberals," that ill-defined boogeyman of all evil. Mr. Giroux's lede sentence sets the tone.
Neoliberalism has become the dominant ideology of the times and has established itself as a central feature of politics. Not only does it define itself as a political and economic system whose aim was to consolidate power in the hands of a corporate and financial elite, it also wages a war over ideas.Then Mr. Giroux starts putting words in my mouth.
Advocates of neoliberalism have always recognized that education is a site of struggle over which there are very high stakes regarding how young people are educated, who is to be educated, and what vision of the present and future should be most valued and privileged.As an advocate for "neoliberalism" (interpreted as belief in laissez-faire capitalism), that doesn't accurately express my opinion at all. Education may be a "site of struggle," but the stakes are not very high. Indeed, I think academia is gradually rendering itself inconsequential. It's an institution that is increasingly relevant only to Yankee progressives--or about 20% of the population.
Far from influencing society, academia is obsessed with political correctness, which turns it into a laughing-stock. Indeed, it's Trump's response to that trend that helped elect him. Higher ed's opposition to free speech and open inquiry further narrows its reach and influence.
Accordingly, real debate about serious issues is moving off campus, to--among other places--the intellectual dark web, or even to the pages of Counterpunch. No serious conversation about "climate change", evolutionary psychology, gender differences, sociology, or even economics can take place on a college campus. Even new technology increasingly arises off-campus--be it space flight, artificial intelligence, and (most importantly) fracking.
In a word, college is becoming a waste of time and money. It's gradually going the way of Sears, Roebuck & Co--an idea whose time has passed.
Let's consider one of Mr. Giroux's facts. He is indeed correct that colleges increasingly "define students mainly as clients and consumers." Would he have it otherwise? What does he propose instead?
He never really says. The closest he gets is this:
[N]eoliberalism undermines the ability of educators and others to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and the civic courage necessary to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. As an ideology, neoliberalism is at odds with any viable notion of democracy which it sees as the enemy of the market.Which doesn't really explain anything. It sounds like colleges should proselytize something like a religious faith--hope, as a solution to "desolation and cynicism." Of course colleges used to do that: the original mission of Harvard was to train clergy, and their motto was "For Christ and Church." Mr. Giroux seems animated by that same Yankee spirit, even if the specifics of his religion are different.
Here, as I see it, is the basic rule: Students know more about their own future than anybody else. I was a professor of chemistry, and no doubt I knew more about chemistry than the average 20-year-old. That's why they paid me to teach them. But, facing a class of 100, I knew nearly nothing about them as individuals: not their ambitions, their talents, their interests, nor their circumstances.
I can't even predict the larger future for them. I likely know less about the impact of technology than they do. I don't know who will be president in 2021, much less in 2025. I can't even predict what the stock market is gonna do tomorrow morning!
So I surely have no right to tell students "You need to know some chemistry to be prepared for the future!" My school requires all students to take two science classes on the assumption that the faculty collectively can predict the future--indeed, every student's individual future--better than students can predict it themselves. Of course that's not true. The faculty--collectively or otherwise--are completely clueless.
So I am completely against rigid distribution requirements. Students should be allowed to take what they want, which will be what they're good at, which will likely be most relevant to their future. Perhaps it's appropriate for me to say "Gee, taking a chem class is a good idea. You'll learn about how nature works, and that's useful." I can give them advice--even good advice. But I can't claim any special insight into their future.
My school requires two semesters of foreign language study. For some students that's probably a really good idea. For most it's surely a waste of time and money. Likewise, all students are required to take a class in "diversity," which cynics like me think is a course in brainwashing (and not a very successful one--on net it probably increases Trump's vote total). Again, some students will enjoy a course in "diversity," and they might even vote for Elizabeth Warren. More power to them--I'm not against "diversity" classes. They just shouldn't be required.
Of course students aren't very good at predicting the future, either. Most of them will get it wrong. But surely they're better at predicting their own futures than the faculty are. And therefore students should be treated as customers. The curriculum--the classes they actually take--has to be left up to them. Smart ones will ask for advice--and I'll tell them to take more chemistry. But the decision has to be theirs.
The customer is always right.
If students aren't customers, then, according to Mr. Giroux, the faculty should be in charge.
[F]aculty must reclaim their right to control over the nature of their labor, shape policies of governance, and be given tenure track lines with the guarantee of secure employment and protection for academic freedom and free speech.That phrase--"shape policies of governance"--is saying that the faculty should control the curriculum. In a narrow sense I agree--the chemistry faculty should decide how chemistry is to be taught. But we have no right to tell students what they need for the future, and therefore we have no legitimate authority to impose course requirements on students (beyond narrow disciplinary prerequisites).
Mr. Giroux is granting the faculty an authority they don't deserve. His claim dates from medieval times when there was very little social change, and the only reason to attend college was to enter the clergy. In those days the faculty was a guild that guarded its privileges as tightly as any other guild.
But the world is not like that anymore. The world is too complicated to be entrusted to a self-interested guild. Mr. Giroux's plea to protect the professoriate needs to be rejected.
Further Reading:
