Defending Higher Education as a Public Good: The Role of Public Intellectuals in the Neoliberal University

• In Event: Defending Higher Education as a Public Good: The Role of Public Intellectuals in the Neoliberal University With Henry Giroux

Abstract

Within the last few years, the discourses of authoritarianism and the echoes of a fascist past have moved from the margins to the center of politics across the globe. Increasingly higher education has been implicated in this process by becoming less a practice for freedom and public good than a site largely driven by the imperatives of neoliberalism particularly as the culture of education has been transformed into a business culture dominated my corporate modes of governance, the commodification of knowledge, and the transformation of students into clients and customers. This talk challenges this reactionary mode of education and pedagogy and explores how education and critical pedagogy might provide the theoretical and practical grounds for rethinking the purpose of education and the nature of politics itself, and how these two realms are inseparable. Central to such a task is rethinking the role of educators as public intellectuals and their responsibility not only in addressing crucial social problems but also what it might mean to produce those pedagogical practices and formative cultures that are essential to any substantive democracy.

Author

• Henry A. Giroux, McMaster University