TC Record, which comes out of Teachers College at Columbia, is a great source of insight into the thinking of education establishment types.
Here is a review of a new book entitled The University in Chains: Confronting the Military, Industrial, Academic Complex by Henry Giroux.
Giroux is of the opinion that the
rigid ideological, economic, religious chains that are now engulfing higher education, so as to eliminate critical thought, non-commodified and non-militarized forms of knowledge, intellectual engagement with important social issues, and interdisciplinary social formations represent more than an attack on democracy. Such assaults also suggest an attack on politics itself — that is, those forms of teaching, exchange, dialogue, and social relations that refuse ‘to methodically eliminate speaking and acting’ as human beings.
Naturally, the reviewer loves it and endorses Giroux’s idea that not only higher education, but the future of democracy is in peril.
To worry about — much less write a book about — the threat that American higher education might be taken over by right-wing, religious fundamentalists seems pretty silly, but there are plenty of far-left educationists who like to see themselves as the last thin line of defense against neo-fascism.