ABSTRACT
Referring to organized onslaughts on the democratic-civic potential of higher education as a war on “memory, agency and the political”, Henry A. Giroux delves into contemporary forms of the American ‘cultural consensus’ with great immediacy. At a time when all critical public spheres aimed at training citizens into a practice of freedom and the struggle for justice are under threat, the university becomes the site of producing a version of self-aggrandizing ‘commonsense’. The latter sees students as human capital and social relations as reproducing what Giroux calls the ‘Walmart model’ of production. The right-wing defence of such strategies is all too predictable, in order for a rule of hate and terror to gain legitimation from an unthinking citizenry. The systematic attacks on faculty tenure and academic autonomy across university campuses in the US foretell a heightened aggression against spaces of civic literacy in the era of Donald Trump. Giroux hints at a set of concrete measures that must make for a politics of radical resistance against this wholesale bartering of democracy for unfreedom – and in the process, force university workers to structure social movements as pedagogical campaigns.
