«The Steven Salaita case is one of a long series of egregious attacks on dissent and the left that has been going on since the 1950s. Historically, these would include critics such as Scott Nearing, Paul Sweezy, Staughton Lynd and I. F. Stone. Then, of course, there was the tumult of the sixties and Reagan's attack on Angela Davis on the West Coast which was matched by President of Boston University John Silber's ruthless cleansing of many of us on the left in the 1970s, including myself. And the attacks after that have become legendary, including more recent firings of radicals such as Ward Churchill and Norman Finkelstein.
My own experience in higher education is symptomatic. Denied tenure at Boston University because of my book Theory and Resistance in Education and my friendship with Howard Zinn. My salary frozen for five years at Penn State because of the critical speaking series I ran during that time, bringing in people such as Larry Grossberg, Stanley Aronowitz, Robin Kelley, Carol Becker, etc., utterly marginalized at McMaster University, and so it goes. But all of this is small change compared to what has happened to a generation of academics since the 1990s who have been reduced to slave wages, food stamps, and adjunct jobs.
It is crucial that academics join together with unions, workers, young people, and other social movements to fight this increasingly repressive machine. A poisonous system of neoliberalism has largely destroyed higher education as a public sphere, transformed its mission into the most ignoble of goals, viewed students as customers, knowledge as only instrumental, and faculty as Wal-Mart workers. We are now witnessing a process in which North American universities are rapidly disintegrating, and this slide into market authoritarianism must be reversed because the university may be one of the few spheres left that still contains some spaces from which to refuse the collapse of education into training, the emergence of a politics of conformity, the increasing legitimation of a pedagogy of repression, and the triumph of a mode of governance that believes it is based on the divine right of kings.
Yet, power is never fully equated with domination. There are spaces within the university and in other sites from which to write, teach, speak, and struggle and we need to expand them in order to make the degeneration of the university visible and reverse this deadening trend. What happened to Steven Salaita is but one example of an egregious act of repression that speaks volumes to the need for a mass movement in defense of public goods and a victory of human needs, justice, and freedom over the death-dealing grip of neoliberalism and its endless production of inequality, misery, instrumental rationality, and violence.»
Henry Giroux
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