Harry Targ
It is obvious that the
maintenance of any political or economic order is based on the education of the young in
such a way as to give legitimacy to it. In the 1960s political scientists began
to study what they called “political socialization:” how and what people learn
about the norms, values, and procedures that govern the maintenance of society.
Some studies found that children begin to accept the virtues of political
institutions, the presidency, the courts, political parties, at very young
ages. What they learn about politics in the home is reinforced and developed in
school systems. Selective presentations of history and the arts is provided by
formal content and repeated rituals, such as the pledge to the flag,
competitive sports, routinized social life such as dances.
In addition, as
theorists such as Jim Berlin have argued, the educational system not only
produces and reproduces citizenship, but it also reproduces workers, giving
young people appropriate skills in language an mathematics. Educational theorists
have pointed out that the character of education develops and changes as the
economy changes, from competitive to industrial, to monopoly capitalism.
In addition to adding
“socialization” to the lexicon of analysis political scientists began to write
about “political culture,” or the values and beliefs that dominate the thinking
of most members of a society. Political culture includes ideas about the basic units of society, individuals
or communities for example, the relative importance in the society of
cooperation or conflict, the role of “human nature” or the role of institutions as primary
forces in shaping society. Perhaps most basic in the United States
is the relative acceptance of private property or public goods as prime values.
In higher education,
curricula reinforce and solidify the dominant ideas of the political culture.
It is seen as social science and humanities disciplines reify standard
paradigms about history, what is great art and philosophy, and what values are
beyond reproach. In the post-World War II period in the United States the dominant
political culture was tinged with virulent anticommunism, the demonic other.
Ruling classes, powerful corporations, and state institutions oversaw what was
defined as legitimate educational content.
Meanwhile business
schools and science and engineering programs were training young people to serve in and promote the dominant political economy. The humanities and social
sciences grounded student learning in the acceptable political culture while the
fields, what we call STEM, trained these same students in the tools of system
maintenance. The former president of the University of California, Clark Kerr,
coined the term “multiversity” to describe the functions of such institutions
in the late twentieth century and he made it clear that the multiversity was
supposed to serve the national security interests of the United States.
As Clark Kerr was
leading the California university system young people became increasingly
engaged in struggles against racism and escalating war in Vietnam. While some educational institutions became more repressive, as with the shootings of
students at Jackson State and Kent State Universities, increased discourse on
college campuses, sometimes initiated by faculty, was critical of the dominant
political culture and its normal functioning, that is training workers for the
economic machine.
The university, to use a workplace metaphor, became
“contested terrain.” Some faculty and students began to criticize the
capitalist system, the war machine, the privatization of the commons, and
histories that seemed to endorse patriarchy and racism. From the vantage point
of those who rule, ideological hegemony had to be reimposed in the educational
system. As conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh once proclaimed, “we,’
that is conservatives, control all major institutions except for the
university.
In the twenty-first
century, efforts of the defenders of capitalism have sought to reimpose the
traditional political culture by privatizing public schools. Not only are
charter schools a profitable source of investment, but they by virtue of their
existence and curriculum reify the idea of the market, private over public
goods, and opposition to teachers as workers and teacher unions, and the
elimination of the tradition of public education entirely.
At the university level,
traditional study of history and the arts (with all their ideological
contestation) are being defunded while colleges and universities define
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as the primary purpose
for having education systems. And major funds for STEM education and research
come from huge corporations, particularly digital, drug, and agricultural
corporations, and the military.
And in the spirit of Limbaugh, the Koch
brothers, the Association of Trustees and Administrators (ACTA), the State
Policy Network, and the Associated Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) have
worked with state legislatures to recreate in the early post-World II days what Kerr spoke
approvingly of the multiversity. In sum. education from kindergarten
through the university is increasingly designed to instill the ideology of the
dominant political culture and to create a twenty-first century work force to
serve the needs of monopoly/finance/global capitalism.
The Indiana Example
Today we see a brutal
assault and destruction of the diversity of scholarship and education at Indiana
University by a MAGA governor and state legislature. While less visible the
same efforts to destroy higher education are occurring at the other major Hoosier university, Purdue. The state legislature passed laws that require annual reviews of instructors to see that they include all perspectives in
their teaching. Even tenured faculty, tenure a long-honored commitment to protect
faculty from capricious attacks on their teaching and research, may be fired if
they do not meet the criteria of “fairness and balance,” (which presumably
would require faculty to present the pluses and minuses of Hitler’s Germany or
the Spanish Inquisition). Legislation also requires these institutions to take complaints from students concerning their professors on any number of
things, often without providing proof or identifying themselves by name.
In addition, Indiana
University which has been known for its multiplicity of language programs must
shut them down if they do not have a sufficient number of majors. About 40 such
language programs have been eliminated. Both universities have been encouraged
to eliminate humanities programs, interdisciplinary programs, and programs that
address diversity, equity, and identities.
https://www.ipm.org/news/2025-09-12/funding-cut-for-iu-programs-that-do-not-advance-american-interests-or-values
The universities have shifted their
resources to artificial intelligence and collaboration with the military and
large pharmaceutical companies. And generally, both universities are prioritizing so-called STEM
education. Legislators and university administrators claim that the only
salient measure of university success is whether college graduates get jobs.
(ironically some data suggests that many STEM college graduates are not finding
jobs and employers in the corporate sector are mostly interested in hiring
graduates who write well, have analytical skills, and have a sensibility about
the world outside the workplace).
All of these changes are
occurring at the same time that both universities have acted in various way to repress
dissenting voices and acts that oppose these changing educational policies and policies of the national
and state governments on race, gender, and support for US wars. At IU, for example, police with weapons were called on campus in response to protests of
US support for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.
In sum, the state
government, college administrators, and the federal government are seeking to
roll back higher education to it historic role of training young people to
serve the society as is and to socialize them to accept the legitimacy of government policies
and US institutions.(Perhaps the most egregious of these policies is to
reduce or eliminate course work and research that address the undersides of US
history such as the experiences of slavery and war).
