Harry Targ
Karl Marx in The German Ideology argued in the 1840s that the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas. Almost one hundred years later theorists from the Frankfort School elaborated on Marx’s idea by developing the theory of the “cultural apparatus.” German sociologist Max Horkheimer wrote:
“One function of the
entire cultural apparatus at any given period has been to internalize in men
[and women] of subordinate position the idea of a necessary domination of some
men over others, as determined by the course of history down to the present time.
As a result and as a continually renewed condition of this cultural apparatus,
the belief in authority is one of the driving forces, sometimes, productive,
sometimes obstructive, of human history (quoted in John Bellamy Foster and
Robert
W.
McChesney, “The Cultural Apparatus of Monopoly Capital,” Monthly Review, July/August, 2013).
Ideas do not
spring from the air nor do they arrive untarnished by social reality from Gods
and religion. No, as suggested by Marx, Horkheimer, Gramsci, Chomsky, Foster,
McChesney, and other theorists, ideas are weapons in the continuous struggle
for economic and political domination. Herbert Marcuse added that the
“necessary domination” over people comes from pleasure and enticements in
addition to threats of force. If the image of pleasure does not mollify the
people, then threats of impending pain can be transmitted from parts of the
“cultural apparatus” (education systems, mass media, the internet, patterns of
child rearing, religious institutions), thus legitimizing the application of
force.
As we
prepare for a new year with hope for positive social change, it is worth
reflecting on three central concepts communicated through and justified by the
“cultural apparatus:” markets, police, and the war system.
Markets offer the image of growing pleasure. Economists and
politicians reiterate over and over again that economic development and
political stability require the free flow of markets-- buyers and sellers,
investors and speculators, workers and bosses, and the commodification of
everything. The idea of markets permeates political discussion and is presented
to publics as intimately connected to democracy, freedom, and cultural advance.
Markets may serve as one mechanism among many to distribute goods and services
but are not, as the ideologues suggest, the fundamental way of organizing
society. But we hear over and over the promise that markets will bring to all
humanity. And market fundamentalists add that government programs, visions of
the public good, and community constitute a threat to markets and ultimately
human betterment. On television, the internet, in schools, and everywhere in
the cultural apparatus people are encouraged to consume, enjoy, think primarily
of themselves, and remain obedient to the ongoing order.
According to
the cultural apparatus not all people, because of their own shortcomings, will
be beneficiaries of the pleasures of the market. Consequently, societies
require the construction of police forces
to maintain order. In societies where the threat of violence exists, police are
necessary to protect the citizenry from the violent, the crazed, and the
hateful who see race or exploitation behind their misery. The cultural
apparatus communicates images of violence and mayhem in society such that
people are convinced that police and prisons are the only institutions that
save us from a brutal “state of nature,” based on killing, rape, and robbery.
General sentiment, reinforced by the criminal justice system, suggests that for
majorities of the US population police should be free to act as they choose.
Finally,
politicians, pundits, security analysts, and many scholars point out that human
nature is flawed and as a result there will always be wars. During the brief periods when the United States is not
actively engaged in war, policy makers ruminate on how the United States must
be prepared for the “next” war. Visions of a peaceful world are beyond the
scope of the economic and political system because there are aggressive,
greedy, and crazed nations and terrorists in the larger world.
In sum, markets, the police, and the war
system constitute key concepts embedded in the cultural apparatus and are
central to the interests of the ruling class. The formulation of these key
concepts is left purposefully vague here as is the description of the cultural
apparatus because every aware participant in the political process can fill in
detailed examples. Whether one “consumes” film, videos, computer games, music,
television, or print media, examples of the messages about the legitimacy of
markets, police, and the war system are readily available. The same
self-reflection can be made about the level of centralized control of the
cultural institutions that shape peoples’ consciousness.
Therefore,
while global corporations, banks, police forces, and militaries constitute
material sources of power and control, they are maintained also by core ideas
about markets, police, and the war system. In short, ideas matter. Transforming
society therefore is about changing ideas and who distributes them as well as
the economic and military institutions themselves.
Thursday, January 4, 2024
The Threat to Higher Education Today
Harry Targ
The article below was
prepared fifteen years ago, shortly after David Horowitz launched yet another
assault on higher education. He and a variety of organizations such as the
National Association of Scholars (NAS) sought to purge higher education of
critical thought.
Another round of more
sophisticated and highly resourced attacks on higher education were expanded in
the twenty-first century by the Koch Foundation State Policy Networks (SPN). In
this case, state organizations were created, rightwing politicians were supported
for key administrative posts in universities, particularly university
presidencies, and Boards of Trustees representing huge corporations and banks
acted more assertively to destroy the rich diversity of educational experiences
that had been inspired by the 1960s.
With the rise of the
far-rightwing forces around former President Trump, combining corporate elites,
religious fundamentalists, extreme free market advocates, and military
contractors, the attacks today on education, K through university, have become
fierce. Now political puppets have launched attacks on education in state
houses and the halls of
Congress. Critical
Race Theory, rather than being a short-hand description for a body of
scholarship, has been redefined as ideology. Politicians running for office
talk about the Civil War without mentioning slavery as a root cause. Charges
of antisemitism are being used to challenge expressions of intellectual and
political points of view on campuses. Presidents at our most prestigious
universities, women and persons of color, are attacked for defending academic
freedom. The whole edifice of what John Stuart Mill described a long time ago
as “the marketplace of
ideas” is under assault. To borrow from a book title about the 1950s by Marty
Jezer, we are returning to a new “Dark Ages.” It is time for those
who oppose racism, exploitation of workers, patriarchy, environmental
spoilation, and other social ills to stand up in defense of freedom of
speech, education, and the celebration of diversity and debate. ******************************************************************************
***** The essay is an update and
revision of “Higher Education
Today: Theory and Practice,” Monthly
Review Online, posted on August 10, 2009. In his presidential
address to the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 2000, Robert
Perrucci referred to “Galileo’s crime.”
He argued 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” (Perrucci, 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 have served to reinforce the economic, political,
ideological, and cultural interests of those who created them, funded them,
and populated them. |
Wolff (1970), Berlin (1996), Smith
(1974) and 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 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 un-imagined 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. This university, he said,
was “a model” for higher education around the world. During World War II and the cold war, the modern
university served powerful new masters.
As Charles Wilson, president of General Motors, advocated in 1946,
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
justify the need for government (particularly the defense department), corporate,
and university collaboration, a collaboration that did so much to secure
victory during the war. He once
referred to his vision as “a permanent war economy” (Jezer, 31). As the post-war years unfolded, that justification was
created, 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. |
Giroux claimed that in
Eisenhower’s first draft of his famous farewell address he refers to a
“military-industrial-academic complex.”
In it Eisenhower recalled that in prior days scientists tinkered in
their laboratories with experiments that intrigued them. Now, because of huge costs, of course,
scholarship and research required federal and corporate dollars. But, and here is the warning, “. . . the
prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project
allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be
regarded.” Later in the 1960s, J.
William Fulbright, former senator from Arkansas, warning about the influences
of defense spending and the arms industry, wrote that “In lending itself too
much to the purposes of government, a university fails its higher purpose”
(Giroux, 14-15).
What kind of generalizations can be
derived from these formative statements; the variety of literatures of more
recent vintage, such as those by 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 interest and political power.
Third, the sociology of 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 interests of the status quo, a status quo,
again governed by economic and political interest.
Discourse and Contradiction in Higher Education
It would be a mistake to leave the
impression that all that the university does is diabolical, even as it is
shaped by and serves the dominant economic and political interests in
society. Within the confines of what
Thomas Kuhn called “normal science,” researchers and educators have made
enormous contributions to social advancement in scholarship and human
development. However, the argument here
is that the university as we should see it does serve some more centrally than
others. 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, as Lasch
referred 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 to solve human puzzles and problems.
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 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 have 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 in protest of 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. Red Scares in Higher Education |
Ellen Schrecker documented the
enormous impact that the red scare of the 1940s and 1950s had on higher
education in her book, No Ivory Tower:
McCarthyism and the
Universities (1988). She interviewed academic
victims of McCarthyite attacks on faculty at prestigious universities. They were subpoenaed to testify before state
legislative or
Congressional committees about their
former political affiliations and associations.
As was the
requirements of the times, those
ordered to testify could not just admit to their own political activities but
were required to give witness against others who they may have known. Some victims were
former members of the Communist Party, others were signatories to petitions
supporting the Spanish loyalists during their civil war, and still others had
supported banning atomic weapons. The
most troubling element of the red scare story was the fact that university
administrations refused to defend those of their faculty attacked and in
fact, as she reports, some university officials demanded that their faculty
cooperate with the investigatory committees.
Her subjects reported that they received little or no support from
administrators because officials wished to protect their universities from
funding reductions. Education in various fields, because of political threats,
began to reject 1930s and 1940s thinking, which was shaped by the labor and
other struggles of the Depression era.
Literature shifted from privileging proletarian novels to the “new
criticism,” separating “the text” from historical contexts. History began to highlight
consensus-building rather than conflict.
Sociology shifted from class struggle/stratification models of society
to “structural functional” approaches.
Political science rejected theories that emphasized “elitism” and
institutional approaches to emphasizing “pluralism,” in political
processes. For political science, text
books asserted, every citizen in a
“democracy” could somehow participate in political decision-making. In other words, the
military-industrial-academic complex shaped personnel recruitment and
retention and the substance of
research and teaching. Some new
disciplines, such as Soviet studies, were funded and rewarded at selected
universities and the scholars trained at these institutions then secured jobs
elsewhere. Thus, an anti-communist
lens on the world was propagated.
Disciplines with more ready access to research dollars — from
engineering to psychology — defined their research agendas to comport with
government and corporate needs. In response to the university in the
“permanent military economy,” students in the 1960s began to demand new
scholarship and education. Opposition
to the Vietnam War particularly stimulated demands on professors to rethink
the historical character and motivation of United States foreign policy. William Appleman Williams and his students,
the so-called revisionists, articulated a view that the United States
practiced imperialism ever since it became an industrial power. Classrooms where international relations
and foreign policy were taught became “contested terrain” for argumentation
and debate between the older and more benign view of the U.S. role in the
world and the view of the U.S. as imperial power. Dependency and world system theories gained
prominence. The
contestations spread. Students
demanded more diverse and complicated analyses of race and racism in America,
patriarchy and sexism in gender relations, and working-class history. Every discipline and every dominant
paradigm was subjected to challenge.
The challenges were also reflected in radical caucuses in professional
associations and even in some of the more upright (and “uptight”) signature
professional journals. As a result
there was a diminution of red scares in higher education, for a time. |
But the spirit of debate in the
academy diminished after the Vietnam War and especially after Ronald Reagan
became president. Reagan brought back
militant cold war policies, radically increased military expenditures,
declared Vietnam a “noble cause,” and developed a sustained campaign to crush
dissent and reduce the strength of the labor movement. The climate on campus to some degree
returned to the 1950s. However, a whole generation of
60s-trained academics were now tenured faculty at universities around the
country. They had institutionalized
programs in African American Studies, Women’s Studies, Peace Studies, and Middle
East Studies. Critical theorists
populated education schools, American Studies programs, and other pockets of
the university. These faculty continued
the debate with keepers of dominant paradigms, created interdisciplinary
programs, and developed programs shaped by key social issues such as racism,
class exploitation, gender discrimination, and war. But by the 1990s, a new red scare
was surfacing. Some conservative
academics and their constituencies talked about declining standards brought
by the new programs. Others criticized
what they regarded as an insufficiently rosy view of United States
history. They claimed that the United
States was being unfairly condemned for being complicit, for example, in a
holocaust against Native Americans or because slavery and racism were central
to the history of the country. They
formed academic associations and interest groups to defend against critical
scholarship. Then David Horowitz came along. Overseeing a multi-million-dollar
foundation funded by rightwing groups, Horowitz launched a campaign to purify
academia of those who have records of teaching, research, and publication
that he saw as unduly critical of the United States, ruling political or
economic elites, or the global political economy. He opposed those scholar-activists who
participated in political movements or in any way connected their
professional life with their political lives.
And he opposed those academics who participated in academic programs
that were interdisciplinary, problem-focused, and not tied to traditional
fields of study. He published a book
in 2006, The Professors: The 101 Most
Dangerous Academics in America (2006), in which he presented distorted profiles of illustrative
faculty whom he believed had violated academic standards because of a variety
of transgressions. Most of those
identified either engaged in political activity and/or participated in
interdisciplinary scholarly programs that he found offensive: Middle East
Studies, Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, American Studies, and
Peace Studies. In conjunction with
campaigns led by Lynn Cheney, the former vice-president’s wife, and Senator
Joe Lieberman, senator from Connecticut, an organization called the American
Council of Trustees and Alumni was created.
As Giroux summarized it, “. . . ACTA actively supported policing
classroom knowledge, monitoring curricula, and limiting the autonomy of
teachers and students as part of its larger assault on academic freedom”
Giroux, 162). Horowitz,
ACTA, and others who attacked the university targeted visible academics for
scrutiny and persecution. Ward
Churchill, a provocative professor of
Ethnic Studies, at the University of Colorado, was fired after a
university committee was created to review his scholarship because of controversial remarks he made off
campus. Norman Finkelstein, a DePaul
University |
political scientist who had written several books critical
of interpreters of Israeli history and foreign policy, was denied tenure
after a coordinated attack from outside his university led by Harvard Law
Professor Alan Dershowitz.
Distinguished political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
have been the subject of vitriol and false charges of antisemitism because
they published a long essay and book analyzing the “Israeli lobby.” This latest red scare against
higher education had failures and successes.
Horowitz had a visible presence on national cable television and
radio. He used it to attack some of the
101 dangerous professors. However, his
supporters were not able to get any of their legislative proposals to
restrict academic freedom accepted.
But, the new red scare reinforced and legitimized the dominant
paradigms in various academic disciples and created an environment of
intellectual caution in the academy. The attacks on universities and
academic freedom rose again with the rise of the Tea Party and the movement
around Donald Trump. Similarly the Koch Foundation machine relaunched its
assault on higher education: attacking intellectual paradigms such as Critical
Race Theory, calling for an end to tenure, shifting the academic workforce to
more vulnerable adjunct teachers, cutting programs in the Liberal Arts where
discussions of social, economic, and political issues are more likely to be
discussed, and raising claims about how higher education should concentrate
on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) not the
humanities. And now, in 2023-2024
Congressional committees level salacious attacks on university presidents
(three women) using false claims that these presidents somehow supported
antisemitism and in the case of the former President of Harvard engaged in
plagiarism. For an informed discussion of the current political
attacks on the university presidents see; https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/3/harvard_president_claudine_gay_resigns Conclusion We have seen that the university
historically has reflected and represented whatever ruling classes were
prevalent at a given point in time. We
have also seen that the university has been a site of contestation defined by
the principle of academic freedom which justifies critical thought, pedagogy,
and practice. In this latter regard,
Giroux points out, the university has been an uncommon institution in modern
life where full democratic participation in dialogue and critical reflection
could take place. The university (its
educators) must use this democratic space to engage students in reflection
about the pursuit of peace in this violent world, and the striving for social
and economic justice and against racism, sexism, and economic inequality. The future of humanity is at stake. References Aronowitz, Stanley, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Education, Beacon, 2001. |
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Publishing Group, 2000. Giroux, Henry, The University in Chains,
Paradigm, 2007. Goodman, Paul, Compulsory Mis-Education and the Community of Scholars, Vintage, 1964. Gramsci, Antonio, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, 1971,
10. Horowitz, David, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, Regnery, 2006. Illich, Ivan, Deschooling Society: Social Questions, Marion Boyais Publishers, 1999. Jezer, Marty, The Dark Ages: Life in the United States, 1945-1960, South End Press, 1982. Kohl, Herbert, 36 Children, Plume, 1988. Kozol, Jonathan, Death at an Early Age, Bantam, 1968. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X,
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2001, 159-167. Schrecker, Ellen, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, Oxford, 1988. Smith, David N., Who Rules the Universities? An Essay on Class Analysis, Monthly Review, 1974. Students for a Democratic Society, “The Port Huron
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