Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era.

TAKE BACK HIGHER EDUCATION: RACE, YOUTH, AND THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY IN THE POST-CIVIL RIGHTS ERA By Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls-Giroux (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

"When a society wishes to commit suicide, consumerism works quite well." This was one of the graffiti images I had recently noticed on my college campus, and it aroused my thoughts on the role of consumerism and the free market in public life. As I began to read Henry Giroux and Susan Searls-Giroux's book Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era, I began to notice the role of market forces in controlling public spaces such as the university and how this control could, in turn, affect our future as a society and our notion of democracy. The graffiti writer's statement seemed to reflect much of what Giroux and Searls-Giroux speak clearly of in this timely read.

Take Back Higher Education is densely informative with topics spanning from civic education post 9/11 to the effects of neoliberalism on concepts such as democracy, higher education, and liberal arts education, to the role of cultural studies in the academy, the politics of the war in Iraq, the social neglect of youth, and the conservative backlash to Black education in the post-Civil Rights era. In well-articulated arguments, the authors explain the implications for the radical and liberal educator alike. The future of democracy in America and public higher education as a democratic space relies on the ability of educators to understand the interconnectedness of the topics the authors discuss. I will focus my review on the challenge that the authors present educators, but urge readers to discover the book in its entirety.

Take Back Higher Education delineates America's skeptical view of public education, the demise of democracy in a neoliberal age, and the role that educators in higher education must play in fighting for democracy and in preparing students for active participation in a democratic society. The book is divided into three interrelated sections. In the first section Giroux and Searls-Giroux focus their analysis on attacks on the university post 9-11, the national and international impact of the wars in Iraq on today's youth, the role of intellectuals in sustaining democracy, and the role of cultural studies in resisting the influences of neoliberalism. The second section describes the historical conflict and demarcation of citizenship in American society and its implications for civic and liberal arts education. The section analyzes how embattlement over citizenship, particularly with regards to a racially ascribed notion of citizenry (where citizenship is a matter of being versus a matter of doing), has impacted Black education in the United States.

The third section deals with the breaking of the social contract between the youth and the adults of U.S. society. The authors suggest that, at one point, youth were viewed as a viable population worth investing in and fighting for, ensuring the future success of our society. However, the Reagan/Thatcher epoch introduced the idea that, in Thatcher's words, "there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families." One consequence of this is the demonization of youth. The authors explore how minority youth in particular are perceived as problematic, troublesome, and to be controlled. Moreover, the conservative solution to "fixing youth" is to reduce social problems such as economic inequalities down to an issue of personal irresponsibility. Instead of investing funds into social programs, neoliberalism aims to reduce or completely eliminate funding for social welfare programs and privatize all public institutions. The authors argue that allowing the hand of the market to determine the fate of the social good comes at the expense of democracy and civic responsibility. The university is one of many public institutions in jeopardy of privatization as a result of neoliberal policies. Through corporatization, the university's mission has been turned from educating a democratic citizenry into one focused on profit. In the attacks on the university, neoliberalism threatens to colonize one of the last few remaining public spaces and threatens "the meaning of democracy, citizenship, social justice and civic education" (254).

The major idea that runs through the book is the possibility of resistance to the neoliberal attacks on the general notion of democracy and in particular the university as a democratic space. Giroux and Searls-Giroux emphasize the responsibility that educators have to prepare their students to become civically engaged, to create "new vocabularies, experiences, and roles that allow students to develop a sense of leadership, to question what it is they have become within existing institutional and social formations, and 'to give thought to their experiences so that they can transform their relations of subordination and oppression'" (79). This in turn requires educators to resist the depoliticizing of their profession, to circumvent "retreating into their academic specializations," and embrace their responsibility to "link knowledge with action and learning with social engagement" (86).

The authors assert that many scholars and academics get lost in the professionalism of their craft and become little more than intellectuals who deconstruct texts and subsist only within the confines of their academic specialization. This indifferent view of the political nature of scholarship only serves to maintain the status quo of oppression and social inequalities. If one desires a qualitatively different society, free from multifarious forms of oppression, then it is the responsibility of academics to work to produce the type of politically engaged and critically conscious student who will stand side by side with them to protect democracy and the democratic sphere of the university. Moreover, the authors argue that it is the faculty's job to connect their work, intellectually and pedagogically, to the public arena, to a larger audience, while showing students how to become critically engaged in fighting poverty, racial and sexual discrimination, exploitation, and homelessness. This is required, according to Giroux and Searls-Giroux, as a part of the civic duty of intellectuals.

Henry Giroux is known for his work theorizing critical resistance (1983), which calls for individuals, as a part of a larger group process, to maintain a critique of social conditions, to self-reflect, to arduously interpret problems, and to reject political passivity. Continuing the project to develop critical resistance creates spaces of hope and transcendence (Giroux, 1983, p. 108). Take Back Higher Education calls for educators to resist the forces of educational capitalism and engage in a fight against neoliberal influences on higher education and thereby protect the university as one of the last few public spaces of democracy. The university has been a space where democratic discourse existed--a space where individuals can engage in open dialogue, dissent, and debate, creating new ways to address social problems and ethical issues. But the university, as with other public institutions, is experiencing the encumbrance of neo-liberal corporatization that aims to privatize, depoliticize, and reduce the university to a collection of disjointed, specialized departments with market-influenced goals simply to train a highly stratified workforce rather than engage students critically in the process of democratic participation.

It is for this reason that Giroux and Searls-Giroux passionately spend 285 pages providing analyses of the state of higher education and the need to protect it, not only in the name of higher learning but also in the name of democracy. Giroux and Searls-Giroux's recent departure from Pennsylvania State University to Canada's McMaster University has been publicly discussed as an example of the corporate university's indifference to critical scholarship and prioritization of research that directly translates into economic gain. Henry Giroux and Susan Searls-Giroux make a compelling argument with Take Back Higher Education that educators should take a stronger political stance intellectually and pedagogically in the effort to maintain democracy, civil liberties, and justice for all.

NOTE

(1) Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).

REFERENCE

Giroux, H. (1983). Theory and resistance in education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition. New York: Bergin