THREATS TO THE INTEGRITY OF HIGHER EDUCATION

 Harry Targ

 

One of the most thorough, analytical, and historical analyses of the relationship between the capitalist economy, the state, and higher education was provided by political scientist, Clyde W. Barrow (Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education 1894-1928, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). Although his focus was on the rise of the modern university in the “age of reform” (from the 1890s until the 1920s), many of his insights are relevant today, another era of educational “reform.”

 According to Barrow, the modern university had its roots in the period of rising capitalism after the Great Depression of the 1870s to the 1890s when mergers created an economic system in which a few hundred corporations and banks came to dominate the entire U.S. economy. Interlocking directorates of corporations and banks created a system of financial speculation, concentrated wealth, and a capitalist state.

Higher education, once dominated by theological pursuits, was refashioned to serve the needs of modern capitalist society. The need for scientific and technical skills coupled with a trained work force stimulated the establishment of educational institutions that could produce credentialed graduates who would serve the capitalist system. Also theoretical work and classroom education was required to educate the young to celebrate the blessings of the economic system and the conduct of the government. Young people learned about the desirability of market economies, the country’s long tradition of democratic institutions, and the manifest destiny of the United States.

 

Barrow provides data to show that members of university Boards of Trustees, the key decision makers in these institutions, came largely from big corporations, huge banks, and law firms which served big business.. There were never representatives of broader citizens groups such as labor unions on these boards.

During the early twentieth century, Trustees worked to establish an administrative class that could carry out the day-to-day operations of the university and manage the faculty who were the producers of the mental products the university was assigned to produce. Managerial procedures were adopted to control mental labor in the classroom and the laboratory. Metrics were institutionalized to evaluate the rates of productivity of the faculty; from measuring enrollments, publications, and the rankings of the university. Federal and state governments and foundations funded the construction of a national university system that would serve the interests of twentieth century capitalism.

During periods when domestic crises or war occurred which often stimulated critical analyses from universities, faculty were disciplined or fired for expressing critical views. The educational mission was to serve the interests of the economic elites and the state, not to provide a venue for critical thinking and debate about issues important to society.

Barrow summarized his findings about higher education:

Individual institutions were developing into centralized corporate bureaucracies administered according to nationally standardized measurements of productivity and rates of return on investment. The entire educational enterprise was being restructured within these standards as a production process that was increasingly integrated into local or regional markets for labor, information, research and professional expertise. The process was more and more a planned undertaking...(123)

This description of the emergence of the modern university system about one hundred years ago bears resemblance to the wrenching changes that are occurring in higher education in the twenty-first century. First, further economic elites still dominate educational institutions as members of Board of Trustees.

Second, when economic or political crises occur Boards of Trustees, and their advisers in think tanks and political organizations,  demand increasing efficiencies in the production and teaching of knowledge. Programs that could not be justified as good “investments” became vulnerable. The humanities disciplines had to be justified by their use value to the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines.

Third, metrics have become omnipresent. Colleges and universities are using quantitative instruments to measure “creativity,” “critical thinking,” “personal satisfaction,” “teacher effectiveness,” and faculty “productivity.” University administrators strongly imply that if the activities at their institutions are not measurable in the narrow numerical sense, they should not be supported.

Fourth, the nature of debate in the university is circumscribed. University policies, in response to organizations of professors and students, have expanded rights to “academic freedom” and have provided some job security through tenure. But, as recent legislative action and administrative decisions suggest, attacks on tenure (which is a right to job security that all workers should enjoy if they perform their duties) and faculty and students who raise criticisms of public policy proceeds. are creating an intellectual environment which stifles honest discussion and creativity.

There are two additional features that have emerged in the twenty-first century. First, the modern university has become a research and personnel recruitment arm of the Department of Defense and core military contractors. A recent article in the Association of American Universities (AAU) describes this trend vividly.

https://www.aau.edu/newsroom/aau-university-led-teams-win-awards-to-advance-defense-research?utm_medium=email&utm_source=rasa_io&utm_campaign=newsletter

Second, the modern university has been thoroughly privatized. Services that used to be part of the university system, from food service, to janitorial, to a multiplicity of tasks that are vital to the university community, have been contracted out to corporations, often with links to members of Boards of Trustees. In addition, universities which are major employers in communities, levy undo pressure on local governments to secure tax incentives and patterns of deregulation that advance the interests of private investors.

To forestall these trends, faculty and students, as Barrows suggests, need to understand that “education has been and remains a contested terrain.”  Most educators believe that the primary purpose of the university is or should be to stimulate a discussion of ideas in an environment of intellectual diversity and a multiplicity of disciplines.

 

 

The Bells of Rhymney

I was aimlessly typing away on my laptop this morning when in the background, the wonderful folk music station, Folk Alley, played Pete Seeger's "The Bells of Rhymney." I remember as a kid seeing Pete Seeger perform this song in the 50s in a modest venue in a Chicago suburb. For some reason, the analysis in the song-capitalism, a ruling class, exploitation, horrific working conditions for miners-stuck with me all the years since. And reflecting today on the lyrics, I came to the conclusion that the song, its lyrics and analysis, its passion, and its suggestion of class struggle is just as relevant in 2026 as it was in the 1930s when it was written, or the 1950s when I first heard it. And the power of the analysis is captured in the phrase, "Even God is Uneasy."

 https://youtu.be/WqXPkMKxWJE?si=PM_cJW9y58MC75Bc

Pete Seeger was a world-renowned folksinger and political activist who was born in Patterson, New York on May 3, 1919 to musicologist Charles Seeger and classical musician Constance Seeger. He was exposed to the music of the rural south on tours with his parents. Seeger began to play the banjo as a teenager. After two-years of study at Harvard, Seeger began a lifetime career studying and singing the folk music of people from all over the world.

During his early years of exposure to and adaptation of what he regarded as people's music, Seeger was influenced by musicians who created an enduring genre of musical culture that would flower and grow in post-war America. These included Woody Guthrie, Hudie Leadbetter (Leadbelly), Lee Hayes, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Aunt Molly Jackson, and the folk archivist Alan Lomax. Before embracing a career as a solo performer, Seeger organized and played with the Almanac Singers, before and during World War II and the Weavers from 1948 until the 1960s. In later years, Seeger would perform with many folk artists and activists, including the Freedom Singers, civil rights activists, and Woody's son, Arlo Guthrie. Over the years Seeger has written hundreds of songs and performed them at over a thousand concerts.

After recording popular songs such as "On Top of Old Smoky" and "Good Night Irene", he and the Weavers were blacklisted in the 1950s for their leftwing connections. Seeger was called to testify before the red-baiting House Committee on On-American Activities (HUAC) in 1955 and sited for contempt of Congress when he refused to answer their questions, on first amendment grounds, about his political beliefs. Seven years later, a Federal Court of Appeals reversed the conviction and one-year sentence on a technicality. For much of the 1960s Seeger was prohibited from performing on network television. In January,1968, after much conflict between the CBS network and comedians Tommy and Dick Smothers, Seeger was allowed to sing his anti-Vietnam war song, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" before a nationwide audience. With passion, Seeger chanted: "We are waist deep in the big muddy and the big fool says to push on."

While Seeger's music and politics has reflected virtually every progressive cause from the late 1930s until the present, his work was influenced by the variety of social movements current during different historical periods. In the late 1930s, as Seeger was learning his craft and experiencing rural life, he and Woody Guthrie performed songs about the working class and trade union organizing. Many performances were in solidarity with efforts to organize factory workers into the Congress of lndustrial Organizations (CIO).

Seeger and his friends sang songs about anti-imperialism as well: for the democratic forces fighting fascism in Spain and opposing war in Europe. After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union and World War II ensued, he and the rest of the folk left began singing songs in support of a popular front against fascism. After the war, and for years to follow, Seeger composed and sang songs opposing the cold war, nuclear war and later the Vietnam war.

After visiting the South in the early sixties, he put his talent behind the southern freedom movement. He helped transform an old spiritual into the anthem of the civil rights movement, "We Shall Overcome" and brought the Freedom Singers, young civil rights activists from the south to folk concert audiences in the north in 1963. He exhorted his audiences to join the struggle tor civil rights and he particularly applauded young people who, he said, had taken the lead in fighting for civil rights.

As sixties movements diversified, Seeger's music did as well. He began to sing songs about women's rights, 1'I'm Gonna Be An Engineer," and the environment, "Sailing Down This Golden River."

Seeger wrote extensively over the years, for example in the folk magazine Sing Out, and in books about folk music and has been interviewed from time to time in magazines.

However, his political philosophy was best reflected in his music. Shaped by the Marxist lens and popular front politics characteristic of the era when he began performing, four key concepts inform his music.

First, his songs reflect historical context, the material conditions of peoples' lives, and the contradictory character of the lives of his subjects.

Second, much of his work revolves around class, race, and, more recently, gender. The folk genre, as it evolved, celebrated the lives of workers and down-and-out men and women who struggled in the face of economic and political adversity. Seeger took the admonition of his comrade Woody Guthrie seriously when Woody wrote that he hates songs that put people down and make them feel that they are no good.

Third, Seeger's music since the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s was informed by opposition to war and U.S. imperialism (although his lyrics might not use the word). "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?'' is one of many songs performed by Seeger that articulated the belief that war was futile and destructive of the human community. During the latter phase of his career, his songs conceptualized how a materialistic economy has made war on the environment.

Finally, much of Seeger's work offered an alternative vision of society that emphasized simplicity, harmony between people and between people and nature, equality, and freedom from class exploitation, racism, and sexism. While his work emphasized how economic and political systems and dogmatic ideologies threatened the human condition, he also sang about a better tomorrow; "It's Darkest Before the Dawn," and of course, Woody Guthrie's anthem, "This Land is Your Land."

Looking at the corpus of folk music in the twentieth century, particularly a folk music that links culture and politics, Pete Seeger perhaps is the most seminal artist/activist. He popularized rural southern music, working class music, the artistry of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, and was the link in the chain between these figures and Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Bob Dylan of the 1960s.

In "Quite Early Morning: Seeger sings that it is "darkest before the dawn."

Some say that humankind won't long endure
But what makes them so doggone sure?
I know that you who hear my singing
Could make those freedom bells go ringing
I know that you who hear my singing
Could make those freedom bells go ringing

And so keep on while we live
Until we have no, no more to give
And when these fingers can strum no longer
Hand the old banjo to young ones stronger
And when these fingers can strum no longer
Hand the old banjo to young ones stronger

So though it's darkest before the dawn
These thoughts keep us moving on
Through all this world of joy and sorrow
We still can have singing tomorrows
Through all this world of joy and sorrow
We still can have singing tomorrows

https://youtu.be/NiMUqjS2MQs?si=icDg2kgo-s_5bWj4

*****************

So let’s get back to work.

GENOCIDE AND THE SHAPING OF POLITICAL CULTURE TODAY

Harry Targ

Political Culture

In the 1960s political scientists introduced two concepts to help explain how and why members of a polity develop their world views and how these views become an operating personal philosophy of political life. The first concept was “political socialization,” addressing the processes by which we learn about our immediate community and the culture at large. Research showed that people learned, for the most part, to respect their political institutions, political figures, and the processes of governance that dominate their lives. People learn about all this in the home, at school, in the media, and among reference groups. The research tended to show that people “learn their politics” at an early age, and not much changes. (Much of the research was based on data before the upheavals of the 1960s.)

The second concept was largely content based: the idea of “political culture.” Political culture referred to the pattern of beliefs, symbols, and myths that dominate whole societies. Therefore, from the vantage point of stability, the task of societies and political systems was to “teach” the dominant political culture to the citizenry.

These two influential concepts in the literature of political science emphasized implicitly, if not explicitly, the maintenance of the status quo. And paralleling the dominant historical narratives discussed above, stability was the motif of academic theorizing. As the theories of social movements suggest, people sometimes come together to demand change, and, as Howard Zinn has told us, that history is really the struggle between those who want to maintain systems as they are and those who seek change.

Is Israel Committing Genocide?

Below is the language of Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on Genocide initiated in 1948. Is there any doubt that the government of Israel is engaging in genocidal policies against the Palestinian people in the Gaza strip?

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Both Israel and the United States are signatories to the Genocide Convention. However, the Bush administration is fully supportive of Israel’s policies.

How Modern Genocide Shapes Political Culture

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/10/30/forensic_architecture_eyal_weizman_gaza_genocice

The concepts of political culture and genocide came to mind while watching the Amy Goodman interview with Eyal Weizman on the “architecture of genocide.” Weizman described how the Israeli military was systematically stamping out any evidence of not only the Palestinian people but their buildings, institutions, and the very ground on which they existed. It seems that the Israeli’s learned from the Holocaust experience that if any remains of the victimized peoples exists, their buildings, their property, their land, historians can reconstruct the horrific character of the experience of genocide.

In the case of Gaza and the West Bank today, any vestige of people, institutions, buildings, or even land that existed before the genocide is being systematically eliminated. It is as if the goal is to be able to deny that Palestinians, Gaza, the West Bank, and for sure the Nakba ever existed or occurred. 

And on reflection denying the existence of the original occupants of the Western Hemisphere and their extermination had been a long-term project of every United States government. And it is particularly a project of the current Trump administration, to eliminate the history of peoples-native Americans, African American, “immigrants,” and women. Their histories, as reflected for example in the writings of Howard Zinn, have constituted an impediment to total and complete rule by the minority.

In sum, along with the UN Convention on Genocide, the oppressors engaged in genocide today are trying to eliminate the history of a people, their land, and their artifacts to someday create the illusion that they, in this case the Palestinians, never existed.

"Jared Kushner unveiled an ambitious vision Thursday for a cosmopolitan Gaza Strip that will attract investment and tourists after years of war — looking much like his father-in-law President Trump’s call for converting the war-torn Mediterranean territory into a “Riviera of the Middle East.”

 https://nypost.com/2026/01/22/us-news/jared-kushner-shows-off-renderings-of-futuristic-gaza/

PROCESSES OF CHANGE AND PATTERNS OF RESISTANCE: November 3 and Beyond

 Harry Targ

People Have the Power: Patti Smith

https://youtu.be/y6Wz3i_BYUc?si=wY187eyiM_EwPfpw

Let no one deny that the midterm election victories on November 3, 2026 were of historic importance. But progressives must interrogate these victories, particularly to agitate and organize for more qualitative economic and political change in the United States and the world.

For starters, five generalizations come to mind from last night's historic victories: 

First, issues matter. Time after time in victory statements candidates referred to what they thought motivated voting behavior: the need for healthcare for all, living wages, affordable day care, reduced energy prices, no to the debilitating environment of data centers, greater care for the survival of the nature, an end to a grotesquely unequal economic system, and an end to wars, militarism, support for genocide, and military spending, and a condemnation of corruption. And it was clear that voters were revolted by the domestic repression and cruelty of ICE.

Second, as several victors made clear in their speeches, their victories were not just personal or Democratic Party but victories of the working class at large.

Third, the victories in key venues were driven by the massive voter participation by African Americans, Latinos, women, and youth and increasingly marginalized urban workers and farmers.

Fourth, while opponents of the devastation of the United States political and economic system, a devastation that has its roots in the capitalist system itself, have much to celebrate today, much more work needs to be done. The Trump Administration has two more months to serve, and the enthusiasm of the present must be translated into radical change in the Democratic Party and the cumbersome institutions that derail fundamental policy change at national, state, and local levels. This means continued organization inside and outside the conventional arena. In a sense, November 3 was only a new beginning. Now progressives must organize based upon the articulation of new visions of a possible humane and environmentally sensitive society., compellingly communicated to everyone.

 Finally, perhaps most fundamentally, the outcomes of November 3, prove that the American people have not lost their basic humanity. The brutalies of the policies of the Trump Administration and its allies at the state and local level have been deemed as hateful, cruel, antidemocratic, and corrupt by majorities of Americans. For those who have lost faith in the American people (particularly some on the left) think again. And as the essay below suggests, resistance is part of our history.

Change

Upon historical reflection we have seen many paths to social/political/ economic change. Some are great leaps, others incremental movements from one kind of political order to another. The Russian Revolution had its roots in multiple failed mobilizations and an outburst of protest in 1917 that led to a reformist, then a revolutionary government that step by step moved the society along. Not all the moves were wise, humane, or in keeping with original goals, but they were changes, nevertheless. For China, revolution entailed a long military struggle and the same case for Vietnam. Lastly, the Cuban case involved armed struggle, followed by policy implementations of various sorts.

A more modest set of changes over fifty years in the United States was initiated by a New Deal, followed by a Fair Deal, and a Great Society. These were halting and sometimes forestalled more fundamental changes. But I think it is fair to say that in each case the lives of majorities were positively impacted by the change. And whether it is revolutionary or reformist, we want people’s lives to be improved and pain and suffering reduced. Maybe that should be our standard for judging candidates, policies, institutions, and visions. Any all those that improve lives should be supported, only asking how can we do better?

Patterns of Resistance

Of course, ruling classes, oligarchs, generals, and others seek to resist change and reverse it if at all possible. Sometimes regimes emerge which seek to damage rather than improve lives. They seek to reverse progress because such reversal serves their own interests. They use corruption, lies, police forces, and armies to reverse what has already been achieved. Progressives must always be wary of those who will undermine human progress. And when the reactionaries gain power resistances are called for.

                                 MSN

What we are seeing today in the United States and countries elsewhere, are sustained efforts to reverse human progress. But Patterns of Resistance to reversals of human progress must and do emerge to protect what has been gained and to stop the erosion of human progress. Patterns of Resistance in our own day take a variety of forms: protests, rallies, electoral campaigns, popular education, building social movements and political parties, and in some places armed resistance takes place. Those seeking to protect the gains in human progress need to study, learn from, and organize patterns of resistance that are viable in communities, cities, and the nation at large. Patterns of resistance vary. All should be viewed as part of the processes of change that are moving society further in the direction of human progress.

In the dark days of Trumpism, let us celebrate elections in New York, Seattle and elsewhere, the mobilization of communities in Chicago who stand against military thugs, massive rallies in towns and cities throughout the nation, groups who organize against racism, sexism, war, and for access to education and healthcare and give support to our brothers and sisters who oppose armed imperialism in their countries. And, perhaps most of all, we should create unity in our common struggles for uplifting humankind.

HIGHER EDUCATION AND GOVERNMENT: SHAPING THE LEGITIMACY OF THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC ORDER

Harry Targ (a relevant repost)

What radical scholars must therefore rediscover is not merely that intellectuals play a significant role in the reproduction of capitalism and the capitalist state, but that education has been and remains every bit as much a contested terrain as the shop floor, the party caucus, and the halls of legislative assemblies. Clyde W. Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, 9.  

But many professors and other observers said the roller coaster hit a new low Friday afternoon when the (Wisconsin) State Legislature's powerful Joint Finance Committee approved, by a vote of 12-4, the elimination of tenure from state statute. The committee also approved adding new limits to the faculty role in shared governance and procedures for eliminating faculty members in good standing outside of financial exigency. (Colleen Flaherty, “Trying to Kill Tenure,” Inside Higher Education, June 1, 2015).

One of the most thorough, analytical, and historical analyses of the relationship between the capitalist economy, the state, and higher education was provided by political scientist, Clyde W. Barrow (Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education 1894-1928, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). Although his focus was on the rise of the modern university in the “age of reform” (from the 1890s until the 1920s), many of his insights are relevant today, another era of educational “reform.”

According to Barrow, the modern university had its roots in the period of rising capitalism after the Great Depression of the 1870s to the 1890s when mergers created an economic system in which a few hundred corporations and banks came to dominate the entire U.S. economy. Interlocking directorates of corporations and banks created a system of financial speculation, concentrated wealth, and a capitalist state. The capitalist state through pro-corporate and banking regulations, the allocation of tax and other benefits for the wealthy and powerful, and military mobilizations, such as President Cleveland’s use of the United States army to crush workers during the Pullman strike of 1894, helped create twentieth century monopoly capitalism. 

Higher education, once dominated by theological pursuits, was refashioned to serve the needs of modern capitalist society. The need for scientific and technical skills coupled with a trained work force stimulated the establishment of educational institutions that could produce credentialed graduates who would serve the capitalist system. Also theoretical work and classroom education was required to educate the young to celebrate the blessings of the economic system and the conduct of the government. Young people learned about the desirability of market economies, the country’s long tradition of democratic institutions, and the manifest destiny of the United States as it conquered the North American continent and established a global empire from the Philippine Islands, to Cuba, to Central and South America.

Barrow provides data to show that members of university Boards of Trustees, the key decision makers in these institutions, came largely from big corporations, huge banks, and law firms which served big business. Some universities from the Midwest and South were led by trustees who represented regional manufacturing and finance capital, but their outlook and interests paralleled those from the major universities of the Northeast and the major state universities. There were never representatives of broader citizens groups such as labor unions on these boards.

During the early twentieth century, Trustees worked to establish an administrative class that could carry out the day-to-day operations of the university and manage the faculty who were the producers of the mental products the university was assigned to produce. Managerial procedures were adopted to control mental labor in the classroom and the laboratory. Metrics were institutionalized to evaluate the rates of productivity of the faculty; from measuring enrollments, publications, and the rankings of the university.

Federal and state governments and foundations funded the construction of a national university system that would serve the interests of twentieth century capitalism. Major foundations generated studies, did surveys, and made recommendations that found their way into institutions and policies of both public and private universities. During periods when domestic crises, such as depressions, and international ones, such as World War I, stimulated critical analyses from universities, faculty were disciplined or fired for challenging the economic system or state policy. The educational mission was to serve the interests of the capitalist elites and the state, not to provide a venue for critical thinking and debate about issues important to society.

Barrow summarized his findings about higher education:

Individual institutions were developing into centralized corporate bureaucracies administered according to nationally standardized measurements of productivity and rates of return on investment. The entire educational enterprise was being restructured within these standards as a production process that was increasingly integrated into local or regional markets for labor, information, research and professional expertise. The process was more and more a planned undertaking directed by the federal government. The construction of a national ideological state apparatus oriented toward solving the problems of capitalist infrastructure, capital accumulation, and political leadership within a capitalist democracy was well under way. (123)

This description of the emergence of the modern university system about one hundred years ago bears resemblance to the wrenching changes that are occurring in higher education in the twenty-first century. First, the further consolidation of capitalist class power in higher education in the current century comes in the aftermath of the Great Recession that began in 2008. United States capitalism continued its transformation from manufacturing to finance as rates of profit from the latter declined. Financial speculation led to banking failures and the collapse of the housing market. Consumer demand shrunk due to rising structural unemployment and falling real wages. And the cost of state support for the provision of education and various social safety nets programs rose. Economic crisis was used to justify austerity policies that included significant reductions in support for higher education. As Naomi Klein suggested, economic shocks facilitated changes in public policy, in this case the adoption of “educational reforms.”

Second, the economic shocks were used by Boards of Trustees, and their advisers in think tanks and political organizations, to demand increasing efficiencies in the production and teaching of knowledge. Programs that could not be justified as good “investments” became vulnerable. The humanities disciplines had to be justified by their use value to the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines.

Third, metrics have become omnipresent. Colleges and universities are using quantitative instruments to measure “creativity,” “critical thinking,” “personal satisfaction,” “teacher effectiveness,” and faculty “productivity.” University administrators strongly imply that if the activities at their institutions are not measurable in the narrow numerical sense, they should not be supported.

Fourth, academic fields are shaped by paradigms, or theories that justify the existing economic and political order. The university is not usually a haven for discussions about the fundamental structures of inequality, racism, patriarchy, the devastation of the environment, or war. In the end, Boards of Trustees, think tanks, university administrators, and federal programs, are committed to a university system that supports the capitalist state. Only limited and circumscribed debate about issues fundamental to economic vitality and political democracy are allowed.  In sum, the university was not created for nor does it prioritize today discussions of fundamental truths.

Finally, as the experience of academic critics one hundred years ago of child labor, anti-union policies, World War I, and financial speculation suggests, the nature of debate in the university is circumscribed. University policies, in response to organizations of professors and students, have expanded rights to “academic freedom” and have provided some job security through tenure. But, as the recent decision made by the Wisconsin state legislature suggests, attacks on tenure (which is a right to job security that all workers should enjoy if they perform their duties) may spread as the twenty-first century “reconstruction of American higher education” proceeds. 

To forestall these trends, faculty and students, as Barrows suggests, need to understand that “education has been and remains a contested terrain.”  Most educators believe that the primary purpose of the university is or should be to stimulate a “marketplace of ideas.” However, the history of higher education, he says, is really about how the university can serve the preservation and enhancement of the capitalist state.

ON HIGHER EDUCATION TODAY: ONE EXAMPLE

 

Higher Education Inquirer

Higher Education Without Illusions

Monday, January 27, 2025

Essays in the Transformation of Higher Education (Dan Morris and Harry Targ)

From Upton Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University (lulu.com)

Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Macro and Micro Analyses of Higher Education
Chapter Two: Discourses On Ideology
Chapter Three: Branding
Chapter Four: What Do Universities Do?
Chapter Five: Universities and War:
Conclusion
Appendix

Introduction

In the following pages, you are going to find a lot of specific information about what is happening at one major public research university, but we believe what is happening at Purdue is analogous to a canary in a coal mine. We believe that Purdue under Mitch Daniels, a former George Walker Bush administrator and Governor of Indiana, is becoming a high profile and influential spokesperson for the transformation of public higher education in the 21st century in directions that we find dangerous and that go against how we value higher education. We realize that, while we address extensively institutional changes and policies at Purdue, Indiana’s Land Grant University, our interest is in using this case study to illustrate larger patterns and issues that should be of concern to readers who care about the future of higher education in a broader sense.

Harry Targ's pieces do tend towards a wider-angle perspective than do those by Dan Morris, although both of us rely on our "boots on the ground" level understanding of Purdue to counteract and contest official media versions of what is happening at Purdue. We write at a moment when there is something of a "media desert" in terms of local news coverage of higher education in small markets such as Lafayette, Indiana. We have both tried to work to rectify the "media desert" landscape in our community by contributing to the Lafayette Independent, an electronic newsletter. We appreciate efforts by local journalists such as Dave Bangert and the student staff of the Purdue Exponent to offer coverage of the university in ways that are more substantial, and, often, more critical, than what one finds in the area's only mainstream newspaper, the Journal and Courier, and main local TV news source, and the Purdue NPR radio station, whose ownership in the last year has been mysteriously transferred to an Indianapolis corporation. Paradoxically the richest data for many of the essays below come from the official daily public relations newsletter from Purdue called Purdue Today. This public relations source celebrates Purdue’s latest connections with multinational corporations, the military, and state politics, and provides links to editorials published by Purdue’s President and other officials in the national press. Ironically, oftentimes what Purdue celebrates becomes the data for our more analytical and discursive writings.

Like alternative media sources, we see this book as another intervention in offering an alternative view of what is happening at our campus, but we also write with the hope that readers can apply the readings we bring to Purdue to begin conversations about the promise and problems of contemporary higher education on campuses. The authors wish to praise and encourage further research and activism around the transformations of higher education in general. We identify with what some scholars have referred to as Critical University Studies (CUS). The essays below, we believe, are part of this emerging tradition of critical and self-reflective scholarship.

The authors also wish to identify at least three major elements of the transformation of higher education. First, Purdue, like many other universities, is once again pursuing research contracts with huge corporations, and perhaps most importantly, the Department of Defense. As essays below suggest, Purdue research is increasingly justified as serving the interests of United States “national security.” Often this is conceptualized as helping the United States respond to “the Chinese threat,” rarely identifying what exactly is the threat, or considering the possibility that contributing to a new arms race with a perceived adversary may increase, rather than reduce, the possibility for conflict between nations.

Second, the work below and other writings in CUS, highlight the purposive transformation of the content of higher education. Universities are moving resources away from the liberal arts, creating new programs in “artificial intelligence” and “data science,” and in response to political pressures are diminishing programs that emphasize interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, and the structural problems of race, class, gender, and sexual preference in history and contemporary society. Essays below on “civics literacy” suggest that leading administrators at Purdue, while refusing to defend its universally praised Writing Lab after it was ridiculed on Fox News for its recommendation that student writers select gender-neutral terms such as postal worker when writing about occupations, seek to avoid the controversaries around Critical Race Theory by requiring all students to study in some fashion “civics literacy.” President Daniels has made it clear that the study of civics literacy will illustrate the “vitality” of US political institutions (as opposed to over-emphasizing the slaughter of the original inhabitants of the North American continent or the history of slavery and white supremacy).

Third, the essays below do not dwell enough on the transformation of the university as a workplace. While there have been attacks for years on the tenure system, a system of job security which was initially designed to protect faculty from external political pressures, recent additions to the transformations of the university as a work site should be noted.

Adjunctification is a term that refers to the qualitative increase in the hiring of various forms of part time instructors: full-time instructors for a set time period, instructors to teach less than a full complement of courses, and instructors with various arrangements that limit their work life, their ability to do research and prepare for their class time, and their time to serve the many needs of students. The fundamental trend in higher education is to “cheapen” and make insecure instructors, ultimately to destroy the job security that comes with academic tenure. In many cases this impacts negatively on the quality of the educational experience. (In colleges and universities in general about 70 percent of classes now are taught by instructors who are not tenure-line faculty).

And finally, every effort is made by universities to limit and derail the workplace concerns of non-teaching staff, particularly opposing their right to form unions.

One positive development from all of this-destroying the tenure system and job security, adjunctification, increased exploitation of graduate students, and finally restricting the rights and the wages and benefits of staff has been the rise of labor militancy. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and various unions such as the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the United Electrical Workers (UE) with a history of militancy have been organizing graduate students and staff.

In short, the transformation of Indiana’s Land Grant university continues at a rapid pace. And while the essays below concentrate on the developments and forces leading to these changes, the broader point of this collection of essays is to suggest that higher education in the twenty-first century is changing in a rapid and largely deleterious way. The appended essay by Carl Davidson reflects a similar critique of the university during the height of the Cold War. What we are witnessing today is a revitalization of that trend.

For those who value the university as a site for informing students about the world and debating the value of changes occurring in it, the developments highlighted in these essays are a warning. And for faculty and students alike the antidote to the militarization of the university, the transformation of the curricula, and the disempowering of those who work in universities is organizing against those elements of change that are antithetical to the educational process.

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Finally, the authors acknowledge that in the months after we completed our manuscript, Purdue administrators and trustees have announced a series of initiatives without an appropriate level of input from university stakeholders and the wider Lafayette area community:

1. Purdue is building a housing complex near the Discovery Park part of campus to attract higher income earning technologists to relocate in West Lafayette. To encourage new high-income residents, the West Lafayette city government has authorized $5,000 cash incentives for any purchasers of these new housing units adjacent to Purdue. Such offers are not available to lower income earners or students.

2. To deal with record enrollments, Purdue has purchased a privately constructed apartment complex across from campus at a price well more than the cost of its construction.

3. Purdue officials have expanded partnerships with Saab, Rolls Royce, the Raytheon Corporation, one of the world’s five largest military contractors, and undertaken a controversial business mission with the Indiana governor to Taiwan to pursue research and production of semi-conductors, in part to respond to what Purdue officials have described as a ”Chinese threat” to national security in the United States. And with the assistance of the Purdue Research Foundation an environmentally damaging South Korean company SK Hynix is constructing a new semi-conductor factory in West Lafayette.

4.The College of Liberal Arts has announced it will be partnering with the Colleges of Science to develop a new interdisciplinary degree program in artificial intelligence. CLA calls its “new field” of interest, “sociogenomics.”

5. Purdue received an award recognizing its “excellence in counterintelligence,” one of only four such award recipients in 2022. Purdue joins those few universities which protect “sensitive national information from foreign adversaries.” The award announced in Purdue Today, August 24, 2022, noted that the university continues to work with the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) and the FBI.

And More:

“The Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue has created a category of its own. As part of the nation’s leading national security university, it is rapidly becoming the world’s premier institution focused on Tech Statecraft, a new model of diplomacy bridging the gap between technology experts, government officials and policymakers, and business leaders to ensure tomorrow’s tech secures our freedoms,” said (Daniel) Kurtenbach. ‘I’m excited to contribute to the Krach Institute’s already-impressive momentum by enhancing and building its innovative partnerships and relationships to achieve our shared vision of a future that prizes individual freedom through trusted technology.’ ”

https://www.citybiz.co/article/378157/krach-institute-for-tech-diplomacy-at-purdue-names-daniel-kurtenbach-as-chief-growth-officer/

"WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue announced Monday (Oct. 19) that nuclear energy expert Seungjin Kim has been appointed chief nuclear officer to lead the university’s research and workforce development efforts in support of state and national needs." 

https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/2026/Q4/seungjin-kim-appointed-purdues-first-chief-nuclear-officer/?utm_source=sfmcPT&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=261020PurdueToday+-+External&utm_term=Seungjin+Kim+appointed+Purdue%e2%80%99s+first+chief+nuclear+officer&utm_id=1392517