[Peace-discuss] Re: [sf-core] Militarized Academy

[Dave Roediger]

Laurie Solomon's remarks here are very important.In all of the often romanticized reminiscences concerning the 60s that I read, it is very seldom remarked that one critical achievement of the New Left was its critique of the university as an outpost of white and male supremacy, as a  bureaucratized "knowledge factory," and as an innovator on behalf of empire and militarism. 

Universities are now far more tied to, or tied under, the state and corporations than ever, but left critiques of them are scant and often suppose that making change is just a matter of getting higher education to somehow "live up to its own ideals"--a formulation minimizing the extent to which elitism, corporate- and military-driven research agendas, empire (beginning with "land grant" universities), racist mascots, and cheap labor are historic and contemporary ideals of the university. 

In many cases New Leftists like myself are complicit in such forgetting of struggles and the need to struggle. When, for example, Barack Obama used his high- profile campaign appearance at Columbia University to call for a return of ROTC to that campus, there was scarcely a murmur of protest, including from the many former New Leftists now teaching and administering in universities.

The wonderful recent labor rally on campus posed very basic questions about who and what universities are and ought to be for. The reigning answer for the last 20 years--to get high-paying jobs for graduates so that they can pay off monumental levels of student debt--won't apply in the foreseeable future, as the debts will be there but not the jobs. In such a situation many constituencies could have much to say to each other in defining what a rejuvenated critique of the university would look like and how to support each others' struggles.
peace, 
Dave Roediger

---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:41:49 -0600
>From: "LAURIE SOLOMON" <laurie at advancenet.net>  
>Subject: [sf-core] Militarized Academy  
>To: <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>, <sf-core at yahoogroups.com>
>
>    In light of the story below, one is forced to
>   recognize and confront the problem of academics and
>   intellectuals along academic establishment and the
>   institutions that house them and their projects
>   being a significant part of the problem and not
>   detached from being an integral component of the 
>   and heavily dependent on the military-industrial
>   complex.  They have undeniably been if not open
>   promoters, supporters, facilitators, and even actors
>   in the generation and perpetuation of militarism,
>   neocolonialism, corporate capitalism, socialism for
>   the establishment and its friends, U.S. arrogance,
>    disregard, and respect for the rights and
>   sovereignty of other countries and peoples, etc. for
>   many of decades now. It looks like they will now
>   find all kinds of rationalizations (1) for accepting
>   the largess of the military-industrial complex,
>   governmental gifts of public funding, and
>   establishment privatization of the benefits of
>   publically funded research and research facilities
>   (which many academics also participate in the
>   transformation of the research that they do in
>   public institutions with public monies in profit and
>   profitable ventures in and for their own personal
>   interests - research park is full of many of their
>   start-ups), (2) for buying into new government
>   ventures and intrusions in the future so as to make
>   academia indistinguishable from the
>   government-military-industrial complex and the
>   corporate establishment that it serves and academic
>   and non-academic intellectuals dependent servants
>   -not independent critics - of the establishment and
>   its policies, and (3) for perpetuating the very
>   thing that many of them, symbolically in glib words
>   while secretly profiting from, claim to object to
>   and protest with respect to specific concrete
>   symptoms and consequential instances that are
>   generated by the very programs that they are
>   involved with turning a blind eye to the fact that
>   they are also the monster.  Universities tend to be
>   among the nation's biggest defense and national
>   security sub-contractors, biggest trainers of
>   personnel to be hired by the military-industrial
>   complex to perpetuate and further empower their
>   dominant authority and power over the masses
>   domestically and other nations internationally.
>
>    
>
>   The question is why should academics, intellectuals,
>   and the establishments that they live in not be
>   called upon to clean up their own houses and acts
>   first before we go after other groups and protest
>   their actions.  I fear that one has to come to the
>   conclusion that universities, apart from being
>   research facilities working for the State and
>   private corporations, are mechanisms for socializing
>   and indoctrinating students so as to produce a
>   conformist and well behaved, establishment
>   supporting and dependent, labor force for the
>   military-industrial-governmental complex.  So much
>   for academia as a bastion of free exchange of ideas
>   and intellectual pursuits where discussion and
>   intellectual pursuits are undertaken in their own
>   right and on behalf of private and public
>   organizations for the practical purposes of making
>   profits or reinforcing establishment positions of
>   power and authority or as the producer of scholars
>   and intellectuals as opposed to a vocational school
>   aimed at training people for specific jobs in the
>   public and private sectors.
>
>    
>
>    
>
>   t r u t h o u t | 11.20
>
>    
>
>   Henry A. Giroux | Against the Militarized Academy
>   http://www.truthout.org/112008J Henry A. Giroux,
>   Truthout: "While there is an ongoing discussion
>   about what shape the military-industrial complex
>   will take under an Obama presidency, what is often
>   left out of this analysis is the intrusion of the
>   military into higher education. One example of the
>   increasingly intensified and expansive symbiosis
>   between the military-industrial complex and academia
>   was on full display when Robert Gates, the secretary
>   of defense, announced the creation of what he calls
>   a new 'Minerva Consortium,' ironically named after
>   the goddess of wisdom, whose purpose is to fund
>   various universities to 'carry out social-sciences
>   research relevant to national security.'"
>
>    
>
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