Many conservatives see higher education as a threat to their reactionary and corporate oriented interests and would like to defund higher education, privatize it, eliminate tenure, and define the working conditions of faculty to something resembling the labor practices of Walmart workers.
Henry GirouxIn Quebec, in spite of police violence and threats, thousands of students demonstrated for months against a former right-wing government that wanted to raise tuition and cut social protections. These demonstrations are continuing in a variety of countries throughout the globe and embrace an investment in a new understanding of the commons as a shared space of knowledge, debate, exchange and participation.
Henry GirouxThis violence is so pervasive. We see it in our schools, where we have more security guards now than teachers. We see it in California where more prisons are being built than colleges. It goes on and on. We see it in a trillion-dollar war budget, politics becoming an extension of war rather than vice versa. This violence is like a fog. It covers everything.
Henry GirouxPeople often say that Trump "speaks the truth," right? But I think what really is happening is he's become a symbol of the kind of cynicism the American public feels towards politicians. He embodies, and he's mobilizing, that cynicism. Because people have no faith in politics anymore. People actually believe that politics is dead, because it's bought and sold.
Henry GirouxThe merging of the military-industrial complex, surveillance state and unbridled corporate power points to the need for strategies that address what is specific about the current warfare and surveillance state and the neoliberal project and how different interests, modes of power, social relations, public pedagogies and economic configurations come together to shape its politics.
Henry Giroux