[Peace-discuss] Democracy & the public university

[C. G. Estabrook]

 From the Ottawa Citizen:

Students, like many other groups in contemporary society, are being 
indoctrinated with notions of privatization, efficiency and distorted ideas 
about capitalism to keep them passive and obedient so rich people who run the 
corporate world can become even more wealthy.

That, in a nutshell, was the gist of a "conversation" libertarian activist Noam 
Chomsky offered to a crowd of more than 400 at Carleton University's Southam 
Hall on Friday.

During the 90-minute gathering, Chomsky proffered a wide-ranging critique of 
western society touching on topics as diverse as student tuition, the greed of 
hedge-fund managers and the efforts of corporate elites to make people feel 
insecure.

Chomsky, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is 
widely acknowledged as the most famous and most cited public intellectual in the 
world. In academic circles he is famous for his linguistic theory that humans 
have an innate capacity for language acquisition. However, Chomsky is probably 
best known for his political activism, particularly his criticism of U.S. 
foreign and domestic policies.

The 82-year-old delivered an afternoon lecture at Carleton entitled Language and 
the Cognitive Science Revolution(s). Later, he took part in a moderated 
discussion on the topic of Democracy and the Public University.

Twice during the session, Chomsky refused to comment on a campaign by a group of 
Carleton students demanding the university divest itself of the stocks of 
companies that do business with Israel. He said it would be "completely 
irresponsible" of him to express an opinion on a situation of which he had no 
knowledge.

On other topics, however, Chomsky, drew applause, and laughter, particularly 
when he said "a public university is supposed to be free."

Chomsky defended that view, arguing that efforts to impose more of the cost of 
education on individuals, along with campaigns promoting the "privatized 
society," reflected the efforts of corporate elites to dominate society in a way 
that made people feel insecure and, therefore, more passive and amenable to 
manipulation. "The business world is basically totalitarian," he said.

Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely 
to think about changing society, Chomsky suggested. "When you trap people in a 
system of debt ... they can't afford the time to think." Tuition fee increases 
are a "disciplinary technique," and, by the time students graduate, they are not 
only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the "disciplinarian culture." 
This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy.

Those who pump the notion of privatization and efficiency are really looking to 
line their own pockets, Chomsky argued. "Efficiency is an ideological concept, 
not an economic concept. The idea that you should privatize for efficiency is 
another way of saying, 'Give it to us.' "

Behind this mindset, Chomsky sees a culture dominated by the very rich. The top 
one per cent of U.S. society -"the CEOs and hedge-fund managers," as he put it 
-have created an economic and political system designed to benefit themselves. 
"Any good political scientist knows that wealth entails control of the political 
system, which is used to increase the concentration of wealth."

Chomsky pointed out that U.S. President Barack Obama had picked as his economic 
advisers "the guys who created the crisis." They, in turn, designed programs 
-bank bail outs, for example -that benefit those who caused the collapse of the 
housing market, not the millions of people who lost their homes.

Such a system, Chomsky said, fosters fear and insecurity among people who, 
burdened by debt, anxious for their jobs or stuck in low-paying jobs, are afraid 
to question or challenge the system. "This is our version of capitalism: a 
system of economic policies that benefit the extremely wealthy, and the rest 
survive as best they can."

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