If, for some reason, you feel a need to read the literary equivalent of sticking knitting needles in your eyes, have I got a book for you: Henry Giroux’s, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. The whole book is a mixture of baseless assertions, generalizations from anecdotes, and non-existent fact-checking, an unmitigated disaster from start to finish.
If you’re going to have an entire book about neoliberalism, it helps to actually define the term. What is this thing that’s at war with higher ed, exactly? But the task of defining terms is apparently beneath Giroux. As near as I can tell, his definition of neo-liberalism includes a hefty dose of militarism, so when he says “neo-liberal” he really means something close to: “the Dick Cheney wing of Republican Party”, but it’s impossible to know for sure.
The book does not, in fact, have a continuous narrative; rather, it’s a hastily slapped-together mix of a half-dozen articles or speeches, some of which are pretty tangential to higher education. In the first two chapters, the “war” on higher education consists of governments (particularly the US government) spending money on the military and not on higher ed. In two others, the enemy is academics themselves, refusing to be “public intellectuals”. As with “neo-liberalism”, Giroux chooses to leave “public intellectuals” undefined, but it appears to be synonymous with “agreeing with, and acting like, Henry Giroux”.
There are really only two chapters which deal directly with higher education. One is about the 2012 “Maple Spring” in Quebec. It’s utterly uncritical of the students and their aims, and makes some utterly fantastical claims about government and its motives. In it, one learns that the Quebec tuition fee hike was caused by funds being diverted towards Canada’s “burgeoning military budget”, despite the fact that: a) Canada’s military budget has been going down since 2010; and, b) military expenditures are a federal, not a provincial responsibility. Giroux, originally from the US, is clearly deeply confused about Canadian federalism, claiming at one point that Jean Charest had no trouble “contributing” $4.7 billion towards the cost of the new F-35s – which is a unique interpretation of the federal taxing power, to be sure.
The only other article that focusses specifically on events in higher education takes the Penn State child sexual assault scandal and – I wish I were making this up – uses it as a metaphor for what’s happening to young people and higher education in general. Seriously. But then again, offensive metaphors and comparisons seem to be something of a Giroux speciality: at one point early in the book he declares that the situation of adjuncts in US universities is “no better” than the condition of Cold War political prisoners and dissidents in communist countries (Move aside Solzhenitsyn, we’ve got some under-employed post-docs here!).
It’s not all dreary: I quite enjoyed the bit where he managed to shoehorn his wife’s name into a listing of great intellectuals writing on neo-liberalism (Friere! Bourdieu! Searls Giroux!). But overall, this is just cartoon Chomskyism. If that kind of thing turns you on, you’ll like it. If not, save your money.
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The Irish president recently spoke of the “ecumenism of blame” specifically regarding ‘the political class’, where everyone is tarred and feathered as guilty by definition, and this can be extended to this word too. I’ve been maintaining for a while that we need a Godwin’s Law for neoliberalism (and occasionally globalization too): first one to use “neoliberal” loses the argument. It’s used to shut down debate rather than to open things up for analysis or discussion.
I was only perusing this site to get a sense of schtick, given your article in the Globe today. This review is curious and perhaps a good indicator of how much stock one should put in your interpretation of Stats Can data.
I had never read Giroux before clicking on the link you provided above. You claim that he doesn’t define neoliberalism beyond “including a hefty dose of militarism.” I found it a bit strange that an author could be so sloppy. So, I read the FIRST PARAGRAPH of his book where HE DEFINES IT CLEARLY and it doesn’t have much of anything to do with militarism.
At best, you need a new eye prescription. Maybe you just don’t like what he has to say? I bet I can find some data in that Stats Can survey that completely inverts your interpretation as well.
Your comment is disingenuous at best, and an intentional lie at worst. His first paragraph is just him blustering about neo-liberalism, but in no way a formal definition, as would be the basis of a serious book, by a “doctor”. Speaking of his “doctorate” it’s merely an honorary doctorate, not a formal academic one, which goes a long way towards explaining his appalling lack of argumentation, both in his books, and especially in his speeches.
I had the great displeasure of hearing one of “Dr.” Giroux’s speeches on the radio, and it brought back memories of speeches I heard in my youth during Eastern Europe’s era under communist rule – an all around babbling and appeal to emotion in every sentence with nary a shred of supporting evidence or logical support. I am glad to see this review, and disappointed at your dishonest response.
As I read Mr. Usher’s attack on Dr. Giroux’s latest book, I am struck by the clear bias through which he responds to the work, and the intellectual vacuum in which he seems to be operating. His “review,” which is more of a lambasting than any substantive commentary, falls far short of even a fundamental understanding of widely recognized concepts – particularly for those who are academics.
As noted by Mr. Neumann in a comment above, the definitions are there if Mr. Usher chose to read the book. That aside, perhaps Mr. Usher is unfamiliar with the concept of “neoliberalism” being ensconced in administration rather than in intellectual endeavors. Perhaps he is one of the few who do not know the meaning of “neoliberalism” or “public intellectual.”
As an academic, and even an informed individual, I have no problem grasping these concepts. Just to help out a bit, “neoliberalism” is a politico-economic belief in the benefits of free and unfettered capitalism, including such things as: unfettered free trade, deregulation, and privatization /corporatization of public functions (including education). Certainly this is something that Mr. Usher, who makes his bread and butter as a private outside consultant to higher education, might be accused of supporting.
“Public intellectual” on the other hand, is a term of long standing going all the way back to Ralph Waldo Emerson. There have been some good addresses at institutions even Mr. Usher would find respectable such as: MIT (Lightman) and Daniel Drezner of Tufts speaking at Boston University (2008). Heck, even Wikipedia has a fairly nice discussion of the concept (not appropriate as an academic reference, but offered here in the spirit of accessibility which is part of public intellectualism).
I live in the U.S., so I make no claim for deep understanding of the Canadian system. However, I do read and follow Canadian issues. While certainly, Canada has not apparently gone as far down the path of the corporatization of higher education that the U.S. has, it is a process that is well in motion, along with neoliberalism at other levels of public endeavor and responsibility. For Mr. Usher’s sake, by “corporatization” I mean this in three broad contexts:
1) the application of business concepts to the structuring and decision-making in higher education – including the construction of “profit centers” within institutions;
2) the increasing outsourcing of aspects of facilities, administration, and instructional tasks to private corporations (for example, why would any institution of higher education need to hire outside consultants to do basic policy analysis and planning when they are up to their necks in highly skilled experts?);
3) the increasing pandering to “business” to do both workforce training as well as industry focused research and development.
This “creeping corporatization” and neoliberalism (we do know what that word means now, yes?) places not for profit education in general, and higher education in particular, in a globally competitive economic environment at the same time that decreasing public funds are available to go towards this critically necessary public function. It is not even matter that there may or may not have been reductions in military spending, if those are met with a decreasing proportion of economic support to higher education. Certainly costs are not going down and every reduction or loss of public dollars for education must by force be made up out of private funds (from increasing tuition to pandering to business interests, to outsourcing critical functions) – all a neoliberal’s wet dream.
In closing, I find it highly disturbing that a person so obviously dependent upon higher education funding would jeopardize his meal ticket with such a blatantly biased and personalized attack on Dr. Giroux and his work.
Lightman http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/lightman.html
Drezner – http://danieldrezner.com/research/publicintellectuals.doc
Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual#Public_intellectual_life
Thank you, Franz and Rowan for reassuring me that my incredulity at what was termed a “review” was not misplaced.
I don’t have your level of understanding or clarity of phrase and was left wondering how to comment about this piece. I am not an academic, though I’ve spent my life as an educator and librarian and consider myself reasonably intelligent and capable of informed and evidenced argument. However, I have little confidence and admit to being more intuitive than learned and often find myself grasping for a succinct and moderate way to express my concerns.
You have more than adequately summarised my feelings about this skewed “review” of Giroux’s work and I thank you for that.
Mr. Usher and I must be reading different books. “Neoliberalism” is clearly defined and explained on the first page of Dr. Giroux’s book, and the definition is regularly expanded on as the book progresses. This is called developing one’s argument. Furthermore, the general thrust of what is said in this book is blatantly obvious everywhere, namely that corporate interests are slowly but surely (and sometimes not so slowly) increasing their influence over education, which is now sliding down the slope to “training,” not education at all. Professors and administrators prostrate themselves at the feet of the corporate monolith to keep their jobs, tying themselves into impossible intellectual knots trying to show that the study of the classics (or any other humanity) will in fact “profit” society in a measurable way. Who suffers from this? Our students and our disciplines, which are now attracting fewer and fewer students because they have been persuaded that they will not get “better” (high-paid) jobs unless they become engineers, lawyers, doctors or CEOs. “Faculties of Business” are opening up at universities– these are not academic or intellectual institutions, but bastions of the profit-and-loss mentality as their grants get bigger and bigger and their Armani-suited students go out into the world armed with their copies of Malthus, Ricardo and Friedman (if they are still read). This needs to be stopped soon if we want to encourage critical thinking rather than mass conformity, creativity rather than slavish following, vision rather than mundane factuality. Dr. Giroux is to be commended for having the courage, as a (thankfully) still-employed professor, to speak out on behalf of the thousands of students unwittingly headed, like so many lemmings, over the corporate cliff.