Harry Targ
Educational Institutions and Ideological
Hegemony
One major element of the maintenance of any political
or economic order is 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 young 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 argued, the educational system not only produces
and reproduces citizenship, but it also reproduces workers, for example giving
young people appropriate skills in language and mathematics. Educational
theorists have pointed out that the character of education develops and changes
as the economy changes, in the US case from small-scale, to industrial, to
monopoly capitalism.
In addition to adding “socialization” to the language
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.
These include 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” and whether war and violence are
“inevitable.” Perhaps most basic in the United States is the
relative acceptance of private property over public goods as a prime value.
In higher education, curricula usually reinforced and
solidified the dominant ideas of the political culture. Often social science
and humanities disciplines repeated standard paradigms about history, what was
great art and philosophy, and what values should be beyond reproach. From the
1940s to the 1960s, the dominant political culture was tinged with virulent
anticommunism and political and economic elites, powerful corporations, and
state institutions oversaw what was defined as legitimate educational content.
Meanwhile business schools and science and engineering
programs trained young people in the skills necessary to enhance the political
economy. The humanities and social sciences grounded student learning in the
acceptable political culture while the fields, what we call STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics) 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.
However, during the 1960s young people became
increasingly engaged in struggles against racism and on campus challenged the escalation of the war
in Vietnam. Many students began to raise
questions about what they were studying and the content of the curriculum. 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.”
Renewed Assaults on Higher Education
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. Discussion, debate, and
critical thinking flowered in higher education, But from the vantage point of
those who ruled, ideological hegemony had to be reimposed in the educational
system. As conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh once proclaimed in the
1990s, “we,’ that is conservatives, control all major institutions except for the
university.
By the new century politicians, university administrators, and economic elites sought to reimpose the traditional political culture by reifying the idea of the market, private over public goods, and in the world at large, the United States and manifest destiny.
History and the Arts were being defunded while college administrators proclaimed that the study of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) were the primary tasks of educational systems. Major funds for STEM education and research came from huge corporations, particularly digital, drug, and agricultural corporations, and the military. And in the spirit of Limbaugh, the Koch Foundation, the Association of Trustees and Administrators (ACTA), the State Policy Network, and the Associated Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) worked with state legislatures to reestablish curricula that Kerr in the past approvingly celebrated in the multiversity. In sum. the university was redesigned 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.
More recently, 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 on education have become fierce.
Now politicians close to such powerful groups launch 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 legal 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, have been attacked for defending academic freedom. The whole
edifice of what John Stuart Mill described a long time ago as “the marketplace
of ideas” has now come under assault.
A
prominent Big Ten university, Purdue, has led the process of transforming
itself into a model neoliberal university, in keeping with the Koch Brothers/
ALEC model of education. The transformation of Purdue University has involved
significant changes including privatization of public control of the
institution; moving into the increasingly competitive online education market;
shifting programs away from an educational mix of science, technology, the
social sciences, and humanities to more STEM and less liberal arts; currying
the favor of huge corporations and enlarged Department of Defense contracts;
establishing programs whereby wealthy alumni fund students’ education with
contractual guarantees by which students pay back the alums; and the
establishment at the university of a “country club” ambience to attract
students.
The
Beginnings of Civic Literacy at Purdue University: Round One in the Fight to Control
Curricula
No one can dispute the value of education about the
nation, the world, and the issues that have and will affect peoples’ lives in
the short-and long-term future. Schools and universities, of course, have
historically been primary venues for disseminating such information. However,
most often politicians have preferred narratives about themselves and others
that they wish to inculcate in the young. But a more desirable form of
information and analysis is one that is diverse, sensitive to one’s own past
and present, and shows respect for narratives and experiences of other peoples
and nations. This kind of “civics” education is complicated and not achieved by
learning isolated facts.
President Mitch Daniels, Purdue University, in the
spring, 2019, proposed that the university require that each graduating senior
at the university demonstrate a knowledge of what he called “civics.” The
members of the Board of Trustees
endorsed the idea and implicitly castigated faculty for not moving
expeditiously to establish a civics certification process for graduating
seniors. But faculty questioned the need for such a certification, what civics
education is, and how to provide for it. Specifically, they asked whether
claims about civics ignorance at Purdue and elsewhere were true. They also
asked whether taking a short-answer test really demonstrated knowledge of the
United States government, its constitution, and the political process. Some
faculty argued that such a need could only be satisfied by at least one course,
perhaps in Political Science or History, that would provide a richer knowledge,
raise competing understandings of the development of the United States
government, and would allow for serious discussions of the strengths and
weaknesses of the American political experience. A ten or twenty item short
answer test, they argued, would not reflect the more subtle and sophisticated
needs of civics education.
Some faculty were puzzled by why, in the context of
the existence of a set of university core requirements already in existence,
this idea of a civics certification emerged. One possible source of the idea of
some kind of civics education was seen in a January 2016 report published by
the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), an organization founded by
the State Policy Network, which is tied to the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC) and the Charles and David Koch Foundation. The report called “A
Crisis in Civic Education,” described a survey it sponsored in 2015 that
demonstrated that college graduates and the public in general lacked knowledge
of “our free institutions of government.” It listed examples of some basic
facts about government and history that respondents failed to answer correctly.
These included a lack of understanding of how the constitution could be
amended, which institution had the power to declare war, and who was “the
father of the constitution.”
Perhaps ACTA’s underlying concern was suggested by a
quote in the preface of the document attributed to Louise Mirrer, President of
the New York Historical Society, who received an ACTA award in 2014 “for
Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education.” She said that in the
contemporary world of conflicts between religious, ethnic and racial groups,
Americans need to be reminded of US history “…especially as that
history conveys our nation’s stunning successful recipe, based on the
documents of our founding, for an inclusive and tolerant society.” (Apparently,
she forgot the limitations on the rights of Blacks, women and those without
property to vote in “the documents of our founding.”) In
addition, the report took aim at community service programs, which it asserted
“…give students little insight into how our system of government works and what
roles they must fill as citizens of a democratic republic.”
It is clear, therefore, that what the ACTA report (and
one could reasonably assume what motivated the recommendation of former President
Daniels, himself an award recipient from ACTA), and the Purdue Board of
Trustees regards as civics education was a narrative that celebrates the
American experience. These sources presumed that specific facts about the
Constitution and the Founding Fathers and basic truisms about the United States
as a “melting pot” constituted civics education. Although civics education is
surely a desirable goal of education at every level, K through college, it
requires moving beyond memorizing basic facts to more subtle examinations about
the American experience, including exposing students to debates about how and
why that experience has unfolded in the way that it has.
Key Provisions of the 2024 Indiana Senate
Bill SB 202: Continuing Efforts to Control University Curricula
It
is interesting to note that Indiana State Senator Spencer Deery who introduced
Senate Bill 202 in January 2024 defended the bill by suggesting that distrust
in higher education has increased. While this claim is of dubious merit and has
come from politically conservative places such as ALEC and so-called
“think tanks,” many citizens on and off campus are skeptical of ill-placed and
self-interested investments in the privatization of higher education,
collaborating with real estate and military contractors, and working to expunge
from curricula any courses that promote critical thinking.
To minimize debates, discussion, and critical thinking about the great issues of our time in public universities SB
202 was introduced. It includes a number of provisions that are designed to eliminate discussions of controversial subjects on college campuses by threatening the job security, or tenure, of faculty. The provisions of SB 202 include the following:
“1.Establish a process where university trustees
evaluate faculty up for tenure – a status that gives professors indefinite job
security in most cases – or promotion with “criteria related to free inquiry,
free expression and intellectual diversity.”
2.Require trustees to review a faculty member’s
tenure status every five years.
3.Require state universities to establish procedures
that allow students and employees to submit complaints that a faculty member
isn’t meeting certain criteria related to free inquiry, free expression and
intellectual diversity.
4. Require trustees to adopt a “policy of neutrality”
that limits universities from taking official positions on “political, moral or
ideological issues.”
5.Allow the Indiana House Speaker and Indiana Senate
president to appoint a trustee to a university’s board.
6.Make universities account for spending on diversity,
equity and inclusion efforts on campus and add to those programs to include
“intellectual diversity.”
Dave Bangert, Deery
defends tenure reform bill as blowback grows at Purdue, IU
(basedinlafayette.com)
https://www.basedinlafayette.com/p/deery-defends-tenure-reform-bill
Conclusion
Just as academic critics of child labor, anti-union
policies, World War I, and financial speculation a hundred years ago faced
censure and unemployment, universities are being pressured to circumscribe
accepted debates. While the higher-education system has extended academic
freedom and provided job security for some through tenure, attacks on these
provisions are spreading as the twenty-first century reconstruction of American
higher education proceeds. From
Florida to Indiana (the current SB 202 bill in the Indiana legislature would
circumscribe tenure and what is taught in the classroom), politicians and many
university administrators are committed to destroying the academic freedom, and
the free exchange of ideas, that has made universities in recent times a haven for the pursuit
of knowledge useful for the advancement of society.
