The Military-Intellecutal Complex

More "change" from the Master Swindler (AKA the Swindler in Chief):

One example of the increasingly intensified and expansive symbiosis between the military-industrial complex and academia was on full display when Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, announced the creation of what he calls a new "Minerva Consortium," ironically named after the goddess of wisdom, whose purpose is to fund various universities to "carry out social-sciences research relevant to national security."(1) Gates's desire to turn universities into militarized knowledge factories producing knowledge, research and personnel in the interest of the Homeland (In)Security State should be of special concern for intellectuals, artists, academics and others who believe that the university should oppose such interests and alignments.
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Militarization suggests more than simply a militaristic ideal - with its celebration of war as the truest measure of the health of the nation and the soldier-warrior as the most noble expression of the merging of masculinity and unquestioning patriotism - but an intensification and expansion of the underlying values, practices, ideologies, social relations and cultural representations associated with military culture. What appears new about the amplified militarization of the post-9/11 world is that it has become normalized, serving as a powerful educational force that shapes our lives, memories and daily experiences. As an educational force, military power produces identities, goods, institutions, knowledge, modes of communication and affective investments - in short, it now bears down on all aspects of social life and the social order.

This is how ruling class hegemony is reproduced. This is how the working and middle classes come to internalize the values and interests of society's dominant groups. Perhaps the subaltern, or under-classes are our only hope. Perhaps all the bourgeois theorist of revolution got it all wrong: universities do not constitute an infrastructure of dissent, or sites of revolutionary ferment. Perhaps they are just one more hoop in the great American game know as "gettin mine before you get yours"... Perhaps it is only the 2/3 of Americans who have not experienced that great mind-fuck known as a college education who can effectively distinguish their ass form their elbow.

But alas Henry A. Giroux holds out hope for the revolutionary ideal, and still believes that the university can be reclaimed from the Wall Street and Pentagon swine who currently hold the levers of power (did i mention Condi is coming back to the farm...):

While registering the shift in power toward the large-scale pr oduction of death, disposability and exclusion, a new understanding of the meaning and purpose of higher education must also point to notions of agency, power and responsibility that operate in the service of life, democratic struggles and the expansion of human rights.

Finally, if higher education is to come to grips with the multilayered pathologies produced by militarization, it will have to rethink not merely the space of the university as a democratic public sphere, but also the global space in which intellectuals, educators, students, artists, labor unions and other social actors and movements can form transnational alliances to oppose the death-dealing ideology of militarization and its effects on the world - including violence, pollution, massive poverty, racism, the arms trade, growth of privatized armies, civil conflict, child slavery and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the Bush regime comes to an end, it is time for educators and students to take a stand and develop global organizations that can be mobilized in the effort to supplant a culture of war with a culture of peace, whose elemental principles must be grounded in relations of economic, political, cultural and social democracy and the desire to sustain human life.

About the author:

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include: "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007), and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008).

More from Prof Giroux on the "crisis of actually existing democracy."