Harry Targ
Smith, Alan, and Mike Seal. 2021. "The Contested
Terrain of Critical Pedagogy and Teaching Informal Education in Higher
Education" Education Sciences 11, no. 9: 476.
https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11090476
“The assault on academic freedom and autonomy by right-wing political forces has been escalating in recent months. At the University of North Carolina, the governing boards and a major donor interfered in the tenure case of Nikole Hannah-Jones. Vaccination and mask mandates have been suppressed at colleges in red states around the country. Presidential searches at the University of South Carolina, Fayetteville State University, and elsewhere were hijacked to insert political allies of governing boards. Recent events at the University of Florida have raised those problems to a new level. The time for strategizing and threading needles is over. This is an all-out assault, and faculty members are now being enlisted in the effort to dismantle our representative democracy.” (Holden Thorp, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 1, 2021 https://www.chronicle.com/article/stand-up-for-what-you-believe-president-fuchs?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_3127281_nl_Academe-Today_date_20211102&cid=at&source=ams&sourceid=&cid2=gen_login_refresh)
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Political debates today increasingly
involve the character of higher education. Current controversies have emerged
over the teaching of critical aspects of American history, such as those
dealing with race, class, gender, the environment, and the United States role
in war and foreign intervention. These debates raise questions about higher
education and the political agendas of the federal government, state
governments, prominent universities themselves, the corporate sector, and
particularly powerful economically driven interest groups, such as the Koch
Foundation, which wish to restructure the role of faculty, students, and traditional
curricula and research, in the 21st century.
Interests Served by Higher Education
In his presidential address to the
Society for the Study of Social Problems in 2000, Robert Perrucci refers to
"Galileo's crime." He argues that while most claim that Galileo
was punished for proposing that the planets moved around the sun, others have
pointed out that he was condemned because "he chose to communicate his
findings about the earth and the sun, not in Latin, the medium of the educated
elite, but in Italian, the public vernacular, parola del popolo,"
Robert Perrucci, “Inventing Social Justice: SSSP and the Twenty-First Century, Social Problems, May, 2001.
This thought, for me, constitutes a
parable for the history of higher education as we know it. In my view it
is not unfair to suggest that institutions of higher education have always been
created and shaped by the interests of the ruling classes and elites in the
societies in which they exist. This means they serve to reinforce the
economic, political, ideological, and cultural interests of those who create
them, fund them, and populate them.
In Robert Paul Wolff ‘s book, The
Ideal of the University (1970), the author identifies the historical
university as the training ground for theology, literature, and law. In each
case, sacred or secular canonical texts were studied with a microscope. Their
study was designed to reify and transmit the core knowledge claims, ethics, and
laws across generations. Wolff's description, quoted below and written fifty
years ago, about a reality hundreds of years earlier might still resonate with
us today:
Thus, the activity of scholarship is in the first instance a
religious and literary activity, directed toward a given corpus of texts,
either divine or secular, around which a literature of commentary
accumulated. The corpus is finite, clearly defined, growing slowly as each
stage in the progress of Western civilization deposited its masterpieces in the
Great Tradition. Though the tradition may contain pregnant, emotionally
powerful commentaries upon life and men's affairs, the scholar's concern is
with the textual world, not with the world about which the text speaks. (Wolff, 5)
Wolff (1970), James Berlin, Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, Refiguring
College English Studies, (1996), David N. Smith, Who Rules the Universities? An Essay on Class Analysis (1974) as
well as others added to this discussion an analysis of how the university
changed in the late nineteenth century to serve the needs of rising industrial
capitalism in Europe and North America. The university shifted in the
direction of serving new masters: from the clerics and judges to the
capitalists. Plans were instituted in elite universities to develop
"departments," compartmentalizing knowledge so it could be fashioned
for use in research and development; human relations, making the modern
corporation more efficient; developing communications, branding, and accounting
skills; and developing good citizens. Elite universities initiated the
changes that made higher education more compatible with and an instrumentality
of modern capitalism. The model then "trickled down" to less
prestigious universities, which in the end became even more effective
developers and purveyors of knowledge for use in capitalist societies.
Wolff quoted Clark Kerr, the former president of the University of California
system and the target of the student movement in that state in the 1960s, who
hinted at this theme of connectedness between certain societal needs, power,
and education, and a parallelism between the era of the industrial revolution
and the quarter century after World War II:
The American University is currently undergoing its second
great transformation. The first occurred during roughly the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, when the land grant movement and German
intellectualism were together bringing extraordinary change. The current
transformation will cover roughly the quarter century after World War II.
The university is being called upon to educate previously unimagined numbers of
students; to respond to the expanding claims of national service; to merge its
activities with industry as never before; to adapt to and rechannel new
intellectual currents. By the end of this period, there will be a truly
American university; an institution unique in world history, an institution not
looking to other models but serving, itself, as a model for universities in
other parts of the globe.
(Wolff, 33-34)
For Kerr, the modern
"multiversity," responding to the needs of society as reflected in
federal and corporate research funding, was obliged to produce scientists,
engineers, and doctors, what we call today the STEM fields. This
university, he said, was "a model" for higher education around the
world.
During World War II and the Cold
War, the modern university began to serve powerful new masters. As Charles
Wilson, president of General Electric, advocated in 1944, there was a need to
maintain the coalition of forces that defeated fascism in Europe and Japanese
imperialism in Asia, to stave off new threats to U.S. and global capitalism, and
to forestall a return to the grim Depression economy of the 1930s. To do
that, Wilson said, we needed to increase collaboration between government, particularly
the Defense Department, and corporations and universities. This constituted the
partnership that did much to secure victory during the war. His vision was
referred to as "a permanent war economy."
Shortly after the war a rationale
for this collaboration grew, the threat of international communism. The
military, defense-related corporations, and research institutions had a reason
to work together: to lobby for dollars, do the research, produce the
technologies, train future scientists and engineers for the Cold War, and
educate the broader non-technically trained population in and out of the
university to accept the basic parameters of the Cold War struggle.
Henry Giroux paraphrased President
Eisenhower's warning of a growing military/industrial complex: ". . . the
conditions for production of violence, the amassing of huge profits by defense
industries, and the corruption of government officials in the interest of
making war the organizing principle of society had created a set of conditions
in which the very idea of democracy, if not the possibility of politics itself,
was at stake." Giroux, Henry, The University in Chains, Paradigm, 2007,
14-15).
What kind of claims can be derived
from these formative statements; the variety of literatures of more recent
vintage, arguments of educational theorists such as Giroux; and our
observations of universities, curricula, and academic professions?
First, higher education remains subject to, influenced by, and
financially beholden to governments and corporations. These influences
profoundly shape what professors and graduate students teach and research.
Second, as history shows, conceptions of disciplines, fields,
bodies of knowledge, appropriate methods, fundamental truths pervasive in
disciplines (rational choice in economics and the pursuit of power in political
science) and the academic organization of universities are shaped by
economic interests and politics.
Third, the structure of academic professions -- professional
associations, journals, peer review, the validation of professional work,
definitions of the substance of courses, dominant paradigms governing
disciplines -- is largely shaped by economic and political interest.
Fourth, in the main, the university as an institution is, and has
always been, designed to serve the status quo, a status quo, again governed by
economic and political interest.
Discourse and Contradiction in
Higher Education: The University as “Contested Terrain”
It would be a mistake to leave the
impression that all that the university does is negative, even as it is shaped
by and serves the dominant economic and political interests in society. Within
the confines of what Thomas Kuhn, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (1962) called "normal
science," researchers and educators have made enormous contributions to
society. But even this is not the whole story.
There emerged over the centuries and
decades a view that this institution, the university, should have a special
place in society. It should be, in a term Christopher Lasch used to refer to
the family, "a haven in a heartless world." Through its
seclusion, professors could reflect critically on their society and develop
knowledge that could be productively used by it to solve human puzzles and
problems. This view of higher education diametrically conflicts with the
reality described above.
The Galileo case suggests he was
punished for his theoretical and communications transgressions by the academic
hierarchy of his day. More recently, scholars such as Scott Nearing were
fired for opposing World War I, and over the years hundreds more for being communists,
eccentrics, radicals of one sort or another, or for challenging accepted
professional paradigms. Of particular virulence have been periods of "red
scares," when faculty who taught and/or engaged in activism outside some
mainstream were labeled "communists," which by definition meant they
were traitors to the United States.
In response to the ideal of the
free-thinking scholar who must have the freedom to pursue her/his work,
professional organizations and unions embraced and defended the idea of
"academic freedom." Academic freedom proclaimed that
researchers and teachers had the right to pursue and disseminate knowledge in
their field unencumbered by political constraints and various efforts to
silence them and their work. To encourage young scholars to embrace occupations
in higher education and to encourage diversity of views, most universities in
the United States gave lip service to academic freedom and in the main have
sought to protect the principle in the face of attacks on the university in general
and controversial scholars in particular.
During periods of controversy and
conflict in society at large, universities too become "contested
terrain." That is, external pressures on universities lead
administrators to act in ways to stifle controversy and dissent. The
targets of that dissent and their supporters, and students and colleagues at
large, raise their voices to protest efforts to squelch it. Interestingly
enough, the university, which on the one hand serves outside interests, on the
other hand, prizes independence from outside interests.
The
University in the 21st Century
If the university is conceptualized as the site of
“contested terrain”, as a place where ideas are debated and contested, and students and teachers alike connect
these ideas to their activity in the world beyond the campus, then conceiving
of its impacts only in terms of careers, job satisfaction, and vague references
to well-being is too limited. The
university should be a place where traditional and non-traditional students are
stimulated to develop a deeper understanding of the world and some sense of how
it can be changed for the better.
In addition, the model of the university as “contested terrain” is a communal one, involving teachers, students, and various
communities in the ongoing collective struggle to better understand the world
and conceptualize ways to engage in it. In a very profound sense, attacks on
universities from within and without are attacks on democracy. And for that
reason the university as contested terrain must be defended.
