[Peace-discuss] Training students for apathy

[David Green]

Paranoid or otherwise, I would add that the whole structural change to academia since the 1960s--reliance on grants, low-paid teaching assistants and adjuncts, cutbacks on tenured faculty in the liberal arts--is part of this process--neoliberalization, if you will. 

DG




________________________________
From: Brussel Morton K. <mkbrussel at comcast.net>
To: C.G.Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
Cc: peace-discuss <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Sent: Thursday, September 10, 2009 11:19:49 AM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Training students for apathy

A pretty weak set of propositions/assertions.  Some highly questionable ones are outlined in red. The last two outlined seem to border on paranoia.  
--mkb


On Sep 10, 2009, at 3:39 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

[What happened to the sixties student, from a student newspaper's talk with Noam Chomsky, September 8, 2009.  I think this is right about the universities of the 1960s and forty years later -- and rarely said.  --CGE]
>
>
>When people talk about “the ‘60s,” what they are thinking of is about two years: 1968-1969, roughly -- a little bit before, a little bit later.And it’s true that student activism today is not like those two years.But, on the whole, I think it’s grown since the 1960s. So, take the feminist and the environmental movements -- they’re from the ‘70s; take the International Solidarity Movement -— that’s from the ‘80s; take the Global Justice Movement (which just had another huge meeting in Brazil) -- that’s from this century.
>
>Plenty of students are involved in these things. In fact, the total level of student involvement in various things is probably as huge as it’s ever been, except for maybe the very peak in the 1960s when the war was a huge issue. Or the Civil Rights Movement in the South that trained many students -— that was the early ‘60s. It’s not what I would like it to be, but it’s far more than it’s been.
>
>Ithink [the current talk about passivity among students is] an effort to induce passivity. The standard picture of the ‘60s that’s presented is that it was a terrible time. It was what’s called “the time of troubles” -- students were going crazy, everything was falling apart, and so on. That’s not what was happening.  It was a time when the country was starting to become more civilized -- thanks largely to the impetus of the activist students.
>
>Elite sectors and centers of power don’t like that lesson. They don’t want that lesson to be learned. They want students to be passive and apathetic. In fact, there was a pretty big backlash to the ‘60s. One of the reasons for the very sharp rise in tuition is to kind of capture students.  If you come out of college with a huge debt, you’re going to have to work it off -- you’re going to have to become a corporate lawyer or go into business or something. And you won’t have time for engaged activism.
>
>The students of the ‘60s were [in college] at that time when the society -- the culture -- was much more open. I mean that a student could take off a year or two and devote it to activism and think, "Okay, I’ll get back into my career later on."  That’s much harder today.  And not by accident.  These are disciplinary techniques.
>
>http://wildcat.arizona.edu/opinions/i-applaud-your-protest-1.436185
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