The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex

by Henry A. Giroux

President Eisenhower originally included 'academic' in the draft of his landmark, oft-quoted speech on the military-industrial-complex. Giroux tells why Eisenhower saw the academy as part of the famous complex - and how his warning was vitally prescient for 21st-century America. Giroux details the sweeping post-9/11 assault being waged on the academy by militarization, corporatization, and right-wing fundamentalists who increasingly view critical thought itself as a threat to the dominant political order. Giroux argues that the university has become a handmaiden of the Pentagon and corporate interests, it has lost its claim to independence and critical learning and has compromised its role as a democratic public sphere. And yet, in spite of its present embattled status and the inroads made by corporate power, the defense industries, and the right wing extremists, Giroux defends the university as one of the few public spaces left capable of raising important questions and educating students to be critical and engaged agents. He concludes by making a strong case for reclaiming it as a democratic public sphere.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education, Politics, Academia, History, Cultural Studies

232 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 2007

About the author

American cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory.

A high-school social studies teacher in Barrington, Rhode Island for six years, Giroux has held positions at Boston University, Miami University, and Penn State University. In 2005, Giroux began serving as the Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

Giroux has published more than 35 books and 300 academic articles, and is published widely throughout education and cultural studies literature. Since arriving at McMaster, Giroux has been a featured faculty lecturer, and has published nine books, including his most recent work, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex.

Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in 2002.

Reviews

[Ioana · Rating 2 out of 5]

After the first (and only truly substantive chapter), I would have given this work 4 stars; having (with difficulty) swallowed the next three chapters, I had to revise this rating down to 2 stars.

In the first part of the book, Giroux makes a compelling argument that institutionalized forms of academics have succumbed to the national security state and to a mythico-masculine idealization of American imperialism. Giroux writes that this military-industrial-academic complex has taken over American universities, that the intersection of corporatism and militarization legitimizes and normalizes a constant state of terror/fear (especially embodied in our culture since 9/11), and that the academy is a contested terrain in which such struggles manifest in a unique and singular way.

Though this first part is clearly rooted in an Enlightenment-democracy-model of education and thus has its agenda and ideological orientation, it's not ostentatiously polemical. The second part, however, degenerates rapidly into polemical rantings: he complains that Horowitz speaks in “sweeping monolithic terms” of “the Left”, while speaking in sweeping monolithic terms of the "formidable alliance of far-right-wing foundations", conservative talk-show hosts, thinktanks, and the like. He bemoans that the "right" uses a rhetoric of fear and terror, while urging us to consider his argument on terms that engender fear (this is, after all, a "dark time", characterized by "dark" forces that threaten democracy and all that is good in America, and so on). In other words, Giroux uses the language and rhetoric of the "right" in his "leftist" rant, and is thus not any more "academic" or "professional" in his tone than those he so adamantly condemns.

(And, on a personal note--not that Giroux ever feels compelled to share his background as a context for his views--I am a liberal in academia, not an outraged "rightist". What does outrage me, however, is the doublespeak of the "left": instead of practicing a politics of reconciliation, as they preach, they continue divisive dialogue.

A typical example: After lamenting that democracy is not respected in the academy, Giroux asserts that “because students disagree with an unsettling idea doe not mean that they have the authority, expertise, education, or power to dictate for all their classmates… [what the curriculum should be:]"... and that there is "no language for conservative students to become conscious of their own ignorance". I challenge Dr. Giroux to critically examine these assertions: does he truly want to claim that students (in a democratic academy, student who are supposedly critical thinkers, Enlightened rationalists, etc) are in fact powerless to challenge their curriculum?? And SHOULD BE?? because they do not have "the authority, expertise, education".. or "language" to understand their "ignorance"?? Whoa...)

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though Giroux echoes a liberal standard in criticizing the militarization and corporatization of higher education, his prose is often redundant, long-winded, and full, of, friggin, commas.

Listen, Giroux's commentary cannot be understood as anything less than patriotic; his sense of the sincere problems within our capitalistic militarized state are legitimate and his research substantiates his claims. It's really just the writing.

I would recommend a better read in Christopher Newfield's Unmaking the Public University.

[Devin Moran · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s not hard to read. After ingesting the hard truths, I did want some resolution. There were little.

[Erendira]

Main LC89 .G53 2007