this suggests a reordering of state and federal priorities to make that happen. For instance, the military budget could be cut by two-thirds and those funds invested instead in public and higher education. There is nothing utopian about this demand, given the excess of military power in the United States, but addressing this task requires a sustained critique of the militarization of American society and a clear analysis of the damage it has caused both at home and abroad. Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, with the efforts of a number of writers such as Andrew Bacevich, has been doing this for years and offers a treasure trove of information that could be easily accessed and used by public intellectuals in and outside of the academy. A related issue, as Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, and others have argued, is the need for public intellectuals to become part of a broader social movement aimed at dismantling the prison-industrial complex and the punishing state, which drains billions of dollars in funds to put people in jail when such funds could be used to fund public and higher education or other social supports that may help prevent criminalized behaviors in the first place. The punishing state is a dire threat not only to public and higher education but also, more broadly, to democracy itself. It is the pillar of the authoritarian state, undermining civil liberties, criminalizing a range of social behaviors related to concrete social problems, and intensifying the legacy of Jim Crow against poor people of color. The US public does not need more prisons; it needs more schools.
Second, academics, artists, journalists, and other cultural workers need to connect the rise of subaltern, part-time labor in the university as well as the larger society with the massive inequality in wealth and income that now corrupts every aspect of American politics and society. Precarity has become a weapon both to exploit adjuncts, part-time workers, and temporary laborers and to suppress dissent by keeping them in a state of fear over losing their jobs. Insecure forms of labor increasingly produce “a feeling of passivity born of despair.”77 Multinational corporations have abandoned the social contract and any vestige of supporting the social state. They plunder labor and perpetuate the mechanizations of social death whenever they have the chance to accumulate capital. This issue is not simply about restoring a balance between labor and capital, it is about recognizing a new form of serfdom that kills the spirit as much as it depoliticizes the mind. The new authoritarians do not ride around in tanks; they have private jets, they fund right-wing think tanks, and they lobby for reactionary policies that privatize everything in sight while filling their bank accounts with massive profits. They are the embodiment of a culture of greed, cruelty, and disposability.
Third, academics can fight for the rights of students to get a free education, a formidable and critical education not dominated by corporate values, to have a say in its shaping, and to experience what it means to expand and deepen the practice of freedom and democracy. Young people have been left out of the discourse of democracy. They are the new disposable individuals, a population lacking jobs, a decent education, and any hope of a future better than the one their parents inherited. They are a reminder of how finance capital has abandoned any viable vision of the future, including one that would support future generations. This is a mode of politics and capital that eats its own children and throws their fate to the vagaries of the market. If a society is in part judged by how it views and treats its children, US society by all accounts has truly failed in a colossal way and, in doing so, provides a glimpse of the heartlessness at the core of the new authoritarianism.
Last, public intellectuals should also address and resist the ongoing shift in power relations between faculty and the managerial class. Too many faculty are now removed from the governing structures of higher education and as a result have been abandoned to the misery of impoverished wages, excessive class loads, no health care, and few, if any, social benefits. This is shameful and is not merely an issue of the education system but a deeply political matter, one that must address how neoliberal ideology and policy have imposed on higher education an antidemocratic governing structure that mimics the broader authoritarian forces now threatening the United States.
I want to conclude by quoting from James Baldwin, a courageous writer who refused to let the hope of democracy die in his lifetime, and who offered that mix of politics, passion, and courage that deserves not just admiration but emulation. His sense of rage was grounded in a working-class sensibility, eloquence, and heart that illuminate a higher standard for what it means to be a public and an engaged intellectual. His words capture something that is missing from the US cultural and political landscape, something affirmative that needs to be seized upon, rethought, and occupied by intellectuals, academics, artists, and other concerned citizens—as part of both the fight against the new authoritarianism and its cynical, dangerous, and cruel practices, and the struggle to reclaim a belief in justice and mutuality that seems to be dying in all of us. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin writes:
One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found—and it is found in terrible places. . . . For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
Chapter one
Dystopian Education in a Neoliberal Society
In the United States and abroad, public and higher education is under assault by a host of religious, economic, ideological, and political fundamentalists. As regards public schools, the most serious attack is being waged by religious conservatives and advocates of neoliberalism whose reform efforts focus narrowly on high-stakes testing, skill-based teaching, traditional curriculum, and memorization drills.1 Ideologically, the pedagogical emphasis is the antithesis of a critical approach to teaching and learning, emphasizing a pedagogy of conformity and a curriculum marked by a vulgar “vocationalist instrumentality.”2 At the level of policy, the assault is driven by an aggressive attempt to disinvest in public schools, replace them with charter schools, and remove state and federal governments completely from public education in order to allow education to be organized and administered by a variety of privatizing, market-driven forces and for-profit corporations.3 In this instance, public schools are defined through practices of repression, removed from any larger notion of the public good, reduced to “simply another corporate asset bundled in credit default swaps,” valuable solely for their rate of exchange and trade value on the open market.4 Clearly, public education should not be harnessed to the script of cost-benefit analyses, the national security state, or the needs of corporations, which often leads to the loss of egalitarian and democratic values, ideals, and responsibilities.
At the same time, a full-fledged assault is also being waged on higher education in North America, the United Kingdom, and various European countries. While the nature of the assault varies across countries, there is a common set of assumptions and practices driving the transformations of higher education into an adjunct of corporate power and values. The effects of the assault are not hard to discern. Universities are being defunded, tuition fees are skyrocketing, faculty salaries are shrinking as workloads are increasing, and faculty are being reduced to a subaltern class of migrant laborers. Corporate management schemes are being put in place, “underpinned by market-like principles, based on metrics, control, and display of performance.”5 The latter is reinforcing an audit culture that mimics the organizational structures of a market economy. In addition, class sizes are ballooning, curriculum is stripped of liberal values, research is largely assessed for its ability to produce profits, administrative staffs are being cut back, governance has been handed over to paragons of corporate culture, and valuable services are being either outsourced or curtailed.
The neoliberal paradigm driving these attacks on public and higher education abhors democracy and views public and higher education as a toxic civic sphere that poses a threat to corporate values, power, and ideology. As democratic public spheres, colleges and universities are allegedly dedicated to teaching students to think critically, take imaginative risks, learn how to be moral witnesses,
