Take Back Higher Education

Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era

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by Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux

Palgrave

Due/Published April 2004, 336 pages, cloth

ISBN 1403964238

Higher education is under siege. No longer viewed as a public good, it is attacked by businesses who want to refashion institutions in the image of the marketplace. Higher education is the target of cultural conservatives who have undermined academic freedom and access by deriding the academy as a hotbed of left-multicultural-radicalism and anti-Americanism. The historic mission to educate students as citizens motivated by democratic values is overshadowed by profit margins. Giroux and Giroux argue that the greatest danger faced by higher education comes from corporatization and educational apartheid. If higher education is to meet the challenges of a democratic future, it must encourage students to be critical thinkers and citizens, as it vouchsafes conditions for educators to produce scholarship in the service of an inclusive democracy.

"Henry and Susan Giroux are performing an immense public service with this book. It is a sweeping critique of how our culture, especially the educational establishment, has failed to prepare us for the crises of our time. And it offers hope for the possibility of resisting that and creating a new culture, inspirational and profoundly democratic." -- Howard Zinn

"Henry and Susan Giroux's extraordinary book is an electrifying call to educators to renounce political passivity and to assume the role of public intellectuals prepared to take back schools and universities from the predations of a business driven ideology that silences dissent and undermines democracy. A beautifully fashioned work of cultural history, it is also a rich and stimulating brew of elegant analysis and powerful polemic. Teachers from the kindergarten classrooms to the ivory tower will be grateful for the hope and affirmation the Girouxs' have give us. All in all, a magnificent achievement." -- Jonathan Kozol

Contents

Introduction
The Post 9-11 University and the Project of Democracy
Race, Rhetoric, and the Contest Over Civic Education
Academic Culture, Intellectual Courage, and the Crisis of Politics
Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogy in the Academy
The Multicultural Miracle: Depoliticizing Race in the Age of Privatization
Neoliberalism Goes to College: Higher Education in the New Economy
Youth, Higher Education, and the Breaking of the Social Contract: Towards the Possibility of a Democratic Future