Review: The University in Chains by Giroux

The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (The Radical Imagination)

by Henry A. Giroux A Review

 First part: powerful and convincing; Second part: polemical and arrogant

After the first (and only truly substantive chapter), I would have given this work 4 stars; having (with difficulty) swallowed the next three chapters, I had to revise this rating down to 2 stars.

In the first part of the book, Giroux makes a compelling argument that institutionalized forms of academics have succumbed to the national security state and to a mythico-masculine idealization of American imperialism. Giroux writes that this military-industrial-academic complex has taken over American universities, that the intersection of corporatism and militarization legitimizes and normalizes a constant state of terror/fear (especially embodied in our culture since 9/11), and that the academy is a contested terrain in which such struggles manifest in a unique and singular way.

Though this first part is clearly rooted in an Enlightenment-democracy-model of education and thus has its agenda and ideological orientation, it's not ostentatiously polemical. The second part, however, degenerates rapidly into polemical rantings: he complains that Horowitz speaks in "sweeping monolithic terms" of "the Left", while speaking in sweeping monolithic terms of the "formidable alliance of far-right-wing foundations", conservative talk-show hosts, thinktanks, and the like. He bemoans that the "right" uses a rhetoric of fear and terror, while urging us to consider his argument on terms that engender fear (this is, after all, a "dark time", characterized by "dark" forces that threaten democracy and all that is good in America, and so on). In other words, Giroux uses the language and rhetoric of the "right" in his "leftist" rant, and is thus not any more "academic" or "professional" in his tone than those he so adamantly condemns.

On a personal note--not that Giroux ever feels compelled to share his background as a context for his views--I am a liberal in academia, not an outraged "rightist." What does outrage me, however, is the doublespeak of the "left": instead of practicing a politics of reconciliation, as we preach, some of us choose to continue divisive dialogue.

A typical example: After lamenting that democracy is not respected in the academy, Giroux asserts that "because students disagree with an unsettling idea doe not mean that they have the authority, expertise, education, or power to dictate for all their classmates... [what the curriculum should be]"... and that there is "no language for conservative students to become conscious of their own ignorance". I challenge Dr. Giroux to critically examine these assertions: does he truly want to claim that students (in a democratic academy, student who are supposedly critical thinkers, Enlightened rationalists, etc) are in fact powerless to challenge their curriculum?? And SHOULD BE?? because they do not have "the authority, expertise, education".. or "language" to understand their "ignorance"?? Whoa...