giroux-youth in a suspect society

Youth in a Suspect Society: Education Beyond the Politics of Disposability

Henry A. Giroux*

AbstractAs the United States becomes increasingly more authoritarian in its role as a national(in)security state, its use of surveillance, its suspension of civil liberties, its plundering ofpublic goods, its assault on the social state, its suspension of basic social services, and itsincreasing use of torture and pure thuggery on the political level, it has become clear thatthe current generation of young people are no longer viewed as an important socialinvestment or as a marker for the state of democracy and the moral life of the nation.Young people have become a generation of suspects in a society destroyed by themarriage of market fundamentalism, consumerism, and militarism. This article analysesthe various economic and political conditions that relegate youth to the lowest nationalpriority as part of a broader effort to connect the current war against young people to thecrisis of democracy itself. At stake here is the ongoing political project of remindingadults of their ethical and political responsibility to future generations and to retheorisethe category of youth as a powerful referent for a critical discussion about the long termconsequences of current neoliberal policies while also gesturing towards the need forputting into place those conditions that make a democratic future possible. Moreover, thearticle argues that while young people increasingly become the ‘vanishing point’ ofmoral debate, it is crucial to revive a discourse of critique and possibility that connectsthe imperatives of an inclusive democracy with the purpose and meaning of highereducation and the role of academics as public intellectuals.

Within the last two decades, the United States has increasingly moved from a liberaldemocracy to a punishing society, one that reflects the presence of an emergingauthoritarianism, particularly under the Bush administration. Most people around the worldare aware of the precipitous decline of democracy in the United States and there is a generalglobal consensus that the domestic and foreign policies put into place since 2000 rightlyqualify the Bush administration as, in the words of former President Jimmy Carter, ‘theworst in history’ (cited in Associated Press 2007). In fact, Carter’s assessment seems tamecompared to comments made over the last few decades by writers as renown as RobertKennedy, Jr., Seymour M. Hersh, and Gore Vidal, each of whom has argued that the UnitedStates has displayed the earmarks of an authoritarian regime. Worth repeating is a New York

* Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. He is authormost recently of The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex andAgainst the Terror of Neoliberalism.

112 CURRENT ISSUES IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE VOLUME 20 NUMBER 1

Times editorial that appeared on the last day of 2007, insisting that under the administrationof George W. Bush, the United States has become unrecognisable as a democratic country.It states:

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. ... In theyears since 9/11, we have seen ... the President, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn hispowers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans,wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant. Wehave read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers [plotted] to allow Mr. Bush to turnintelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths andresponsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sureit didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them. ... Hundreds of men, swept up on thebattlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. ... Inother foreign lands, the CIA set up secret jails where ‘high-value detainees’ were subjectedto ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped,so that ‘experts’ could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, afterconsultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know. The CIAcontracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners –some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports – to be tortured intomaking false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let gowithout any apology or hope of redress (New York Times 31 December 2007:A20).

Sidney Blumenthal (2006), former senior adviser to President Clinton echoes theseconcerns, claiming that the Bush administration has created a government that istantamount to ‘a national security state of torture, ghost detainees, secret prisons, renditionsand domestic eavesdropping’. But Bob Herbert (2006:A25), an op-ed writer for the NewYork Times, goes even further arguing that all of the surreptitious activities of the Bushregime offer Americans nothing less than a ‘road map to totalitarianism’.

Under the administration of George W. Bush, the majority of Americans have spent thelast eight years watching the hollowing out of the social state and its meagre governmentprovisions along with a serious credit fallout and an unprecedented subprime mortgagecrisis, resulting in the foreclosure of millions of houses and providing an exemplary case ofgreedy financial markets out of control (Krugman 2007). At the same time, Americans havewitnessed the Bush administration waste billions of dollars on a morally indefensible warin Iraq while offering billions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest individuals andcorporations in the country. In fact, we are entering a new Gilded Age nourished by apolitics of greed and a ruthless market fundamentalism and increasingly celebrated by thedominant media. Spread out across this neoliberal landscape are desolate communities,gutted public services, weakened labour unions, 37 million poor people, 47 millionAmericans without health insurance, and a growing number of either unemployed orunderemployed workers. If the Gilded Age has returned with a vengeance, so has the olderlegacy of rampant unregulated capitalism, merger mania, and a new class of Robber Baronsdressed up as corporate power brokers with enormous political influence. Like its 19th-century counterpart, the new Gilded Age is marked by an increasing concentration ofwealth among the privileged few while the number of poor Americans increases andinequality reaches historic high levels.1 As Peter Drier (2007) points out:

1 On a global level, inequality has risen to extreme levels. For instance, ‘the richest 2 percent of adults in theworld own more than half the world’s wealth. More specifically, the richest 1 percent of adults owned 40 percent of global assets in the year 2000, and ... the richest 10 percent of adults accounted for 85 per cent of theworld’s total. In contrast, the assets of half the world’s population account for barely 1 per cent of globalwealth’ (Glantz 2006).

JULY 2008 YOUTH IN A SUSPECT SOCIETY 113

Wealth has become even more concentrated during the Bush years. Today, the richest onepercent of Americans has 22 per cent of all income and about 40 per cent of all wealth. Thisis the biggest concentration of income and wealth since 1928. In 2005, average CEO paywas 369 times that of the average worker, compared with 131 times in 1993 and 36 timesin 1976. At the pinnacle of America’s economic pyramid, the nation’s 400 billionaires own1.25 trillion dollars in total net worth – the same amount as the 56 million Americanfamilies at the bottom half of wealth distribution. Meanwhile, despite improvements inproductivity, the earnings of most workers have been stagnant, while the cost of health care,housing, and other necessities has risen.

It gets worse. Bush’s policies have nourished and strengthened a number of anti-democraticforces, fostering a distinctive type of authoritarianism in the United States, including themilitarisation of everyday life, an imperial presidency, the rise and influence of right-wingChristian extremists, and a government draped in secrecy that is all too willing to suspendcivil liberties (Hedges 2007). This emerging authoritarianism is largely legitimated throughan ongoing culture of fear and a form of patriotic correctness designed to bolster a rampantnationalism and a selective popularism (Giroux 2007). Fear is mobilised through both thewar on terrorism and ‘the sovereign pronouncement of a “state of emergency” [which]generates a wild zone of power, barbaric and violent, operating without democraticoversight in order to combat an “enemy” that threatens the existence of not merely and notmainly its citizens, but its sovereignty’ (Buck-Morss 2003:29). As Stanley Aronowitz(2001:160) points out, the national security state is now organised through ‘a combinationof internal terrorism and the threat of external terrorism’, which works to reinforce ‘its mostrepressive functions’. Finally, we have entered a period in American life where an all-pervasive market rationality strips democracy of any substance and leaves entirepopulations vulnerable to what Orlando Patterson (1982) calls a kind of ‘social death’. Howelse to explain the government response to Hurricane Katrina, the jailing of young peopleas adults, the massive growth of incarceration among the poor, especially people of colour,the racist discourse of purity and nationalism used by many Republicans to disparageimmigrants from South America, and the increasing disinvestment in public life andgovernment provisions for the poor (Giroux 2006a, 2006b)?

The consequences of the new authoritarianism and its policies have had a particularlydevastating effect on youth in the United States, especially those who are marginalized byclass and race. No longer seen as a social investment or the central element of the socialcontract, youth are now viewed as either consumers or potential soldiers on the one hand,or as troubling, reckless, and dangerous on the other. The relentless assault against youthcannot be separated from the ongoing devaluing of democracy itself, which has graveimplications not only for countries directly influenced by American power such as Iraq, butalso for the rest of the world. As the United States becomes increasingly more authoritarianin its role as a national (in)security state, its use of surveillance, its suspension of civilliberties, its plundering of public goods, its suspension of basic social services, and itsincreasing use of torture and pure thuggery on the political level, it has become clear thatthe current generation of young people are no longer viewed as an important socialinvestment or as a marker for the state of democracy and the moral life of the nation. Youngpeople have become a generation of suspects in a society destroyed by the marriage ofmarket fundamentalism, consumerism, and militarism. But the point here is not merely toargue that youth are our lowest national priority, but to understand the importance ofconnecting the crisis in democracy to the current war against young people in order both toremind adults of their ethical and political responsibility to future generations and to re-theorise what it means to invest in youth as a symbol for nurturing civic imagination andcollective resistance in the face of the suffering of others, especially among young people.Youth provide a powerful referent for a critical discussion about the long term


consequences of current policies while also gesturing towards the need for putting intoplace those conditions that make a democratic future possible. All too often young peoplehave become the ‘vanishing point’ of moral debate, considered irrelevant because they areallegedly too young or excluded from civic public discourse because they are viewed asdangerous and depraved. It is in keeping with this need to register youth as the theoretical,moral, and political centre of gravity that I want to address the urgent and related crises ofdemocracy in higher education and the role of academics as public intellectuals.

While the United States has never been free of repression, there is a special viciousnessthat marks the current regime. War, violence and an attack on human rights coupled withthe assault on the social state and the rise of an all-encompassing militarism make thisgovernment stand out for its anti-democratic policies. The varied populations madedisposable under a militarized neoliberalism occupy a globalised space of ruthless politicsin which the categories of ‘citizen’ and ‘democratic representation’, once integral tonational politics, are no longer recognised. In the past, people who were marginalised byclass and race could at least expect a modicum of support from the government, eitherthrough basic social provisions or because they still had some value as part of a reservearmy of unemployed labour. That is no longer true. Under the ruthless dynamics ofneoliberal ideology there has been a shift away from the possibility of getting ahead to themuch more deadly task of struggling to stay alive. Many now argue that this new form ofbiopolitics is conditioned by a permanent state of class and racial exception in which, asAchille Mbembe (2003:40) asserts, ‘vast populations are subject to conditions of lifeconferring upon them the status of living dead’.

Disposable populations are less visible, relegated to the frontier zones of relativeinvisibility and removed from public view. Such populations are often warehoused inschools that resemble boot camps, dispersed to dank and dangerous workplaces far from theenclaves of the tourist industries, incarcerated in prisons that privilege punishment overrehabilitation, and consigned to the increasing army of the permanently unemployed.Rendered redundant as a result of the collapse of the social state, a pervasive racism, agrowing disparity in income and wealth, and a take-no-prisoners neoliberalism, anincreasing number of individuals and groups are demonised and criminalised either byvirtue of their status as immigrants or because they are young, poor, unemployed, disabled,or confined to low-paying jobs. This is particularly true for young people, who areportrayed increasingly as a generation of suspects.

One register of the growing racism, inequality, and poverty in America can be found inthe endless stories of young people of colour dying because of a lack of adequate health careas in the case of Deamonte Driver, a seventh grader in Prince George’s County Maryland,who died because his mother lacked the health insurance to cover an $80 tooth extractionand was unable to find an oral surgeon willing to treat her son. By the time he was admittedand diagnosed in a hospital emergency room, the bacteria from the abscessed tooth hadspread to his brain and, in spite of the level of high-quality intensive treatment he finallyreceived, he eventually died. Racism is also on display in the growing re-segregation ofpublic schools in the United States as well as the wholesale resort to punishment andincarceration in the case of poor black and brown students. Howard Witt (2007), a writerfor the Chicago Tribune, reports that:

In every state but Idaho, a Tribune analysis of the data shows, black students are beingsuspended in numbers greater than would be expected from their proportion of the studentpopulation. In 21 states ... that disproportionality is so pronounced that the percentage ofblack suspensions is more than double their percentage of the student body. And on averageacross the nation, black students are suspended and expelled at nearly three times the rateof white students.


In other words, under the biopolitics of neoliberalism conditions have been created in whichmoral responsibility disappears and politics offers no space for agency or the provisions fora decent life.

Each of these examples raises the fundamental question of what it might mean in lightof these anti-democratic tendencies to take youth seriously as a political and moral referentin order to gauge not only the health of a democratic society, but also to define theobligations of adults to future generations of young people? For over a century, Americanshave embraced as a defining feature of politics the idea that all levels of government wouldassume a large measure of responsibility for providing the resources, social provisions, andmodes of education that enable young people to prepare in the present for a better future,while expanding the meaning and depth of an inclusive democracy. This was particularlytrue under the set of policies inaugurated by President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Societyprogrammes of the 1960s, designed to eliminate both poverty and racial injustice.

Taking the social contract seriously, American society exhibited at least a willingness tofight for the rights of children, enact reforms that invested in their future, and provide theeducational conditions necessary for them to be critical citizens. Within such a modernistproject, democracy was linked to the well-being of youth, while the status of how a societyimagined democracy and its future was contingent on how it viewed its responsibilitytowards future generations. The end of that project can be seen in the new American realityunder the second Bush administration. Instead of a federal budget that addresses the needsof children, the United States now enacts federal policies that weaken government socialprogrammes, provide tax cuts for millionaires, and undercut or eliminate basic socialprovisions for children at risk. As New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman (2005)points out, compassion and responsibility under the Bush administration have given way to‘a relentless mean-spiritedness’ and to the image of ‘President Bush as someone who takesfood from the mouths of babes and gives the proceeds to his millionaire friends’. ForKrugman, Bush’s budgets have come to resemble a form of ‘top-down class warfare’. Themean spiritedness of such warfare can be seen recently in President Bush’s willingness toveto the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides much needed healthinsurance to low-income children who do not qualify for Medicaid. As a result of this veto,‘nearly one million American children will lose their health insurance’ (Shakir et al 2007).And without any irony intended, Bush attempted to legitimate this disgraceful action byclaiming that ‘it opens up an avenue for people to switch from private insurance to thegovernment’ (Shakir et al 2007). Bush gives new meaning to the neoliberal imperative toprivatise or perish.2

2 Peter Drier (2007) provides a detailed list of additional consequences arising from the class warfare wagedby the Bush administration: ‘For example, Bush has handed the pharmaceutical industry windfall profits byrestricting Medicare’s ability to negotiate for lower prices for medicine. He targeted huge no-bid federalcontracts to crony companies like Haliburton to supply emergency relief, reconstruction services andmaterials to rebuild Katrina while attempting to slash federal wage laws for reconstruction workers. Herepealed Clinton-era ‘ergonomics’ standards, affecting more than 100 million workers, that would haveforced companies to alter their work stations, redesign their facilities or change their tools and equipment ifemployees suffered serious work-related injuries from repetitive motions. He opposed stiffer health andsafety regulations to protect mine workers and cut the budget for federal agencies that enforce mine safetylaws. Not surprisingly, under Bush, we’ve seen the largest number of mine accidents and deaths in years.Bush’s Food and Drug Administration lowered product-labelling standards, allowing food makers to listhealth claims on labels before they have been scientifically proven. His FDA chief announced that theagency would no longer require claims to be based on ‘significant scientific agreement,’ a change that theNational Food Processors Association, the trade association of the $500 billion food processing industry, hadlobbied for. Bush resisted efforts to raise the minimum wage (which had been stuck at $5.15 an hour for nineyears) until the Democrats took back the Congress earlier this year.’


Punishment and fear have replaced compassion and social responsibility as the mostimportant modalities mediating the relationship of youth to the larger social order. Youthwithin the last two decades have come to be seen as a source of trouble rather than as aresource for investing in the future and are increasingly treated as either a disposablepopulation, cannon fodder for a barbaric war in Iraq or Afghanistan, or defined as the sourceof most of society’s problems. Hence, young people now constitute a crisis that has less todo with improving the future than with denying it. As Larry Grossberg (2005:16) points out:

It has become common to think of kids as a threat to the existing social order and for kidsto be blamed for the problems they experience. We slide from kids in trouble, kids haveproblems, and kids are threatened, to kids as trouble, kids as problems, and kids asthreatening.

This was exemplified recently when the columnist Bob Herbert (2007b:A25) reported in theNew York Times that ‘parts of New York City are like a police state for young men, womenand children who happen to be black or Hispanic. They are routinely stopped, searched,harassed, intimidated, humiliated and, in many cases, arrested for no good reason’.Hollywood movies such as Thirteen, kids, Brick, Hard Candy, and Alpha Dog consistentlyrepresent youths as either dangerous, utterly brainless, or simply without merit. A recentepisode about youth on the widely viewed Sixty Minutes is suggestive of this kind ofdemonisation. Highlighting the ways in which young people alleviate their allegedboredom, the show focused on the sport of ‘bum hunting’, in which young people searchout, attack, and savagely beat homeless people while videotaping the event in a homage tothe triumph of reality television. As reprehensible as this act is, it is also reprehensible tovilify young people by suggesting that such behaviour is in some way characteristic ofyouth in general. Then again, in a society in which politicians and the marketplace canimagine youth only as either consumers, objects, or billboards to sell sexuality, beautyproducts, music, athletic gear, clothes, and a host of other products, it is not surprising thatyoung people can be so easily misrepresented.

The popular demonisation and ‘dangerousation’ of the young now justifies responses toyouth that were unthinkable twenty years ago, including criminalisation and imprisonment,the prescription of psychotropic drugs, psychiatric confinement and zero tolerance policiesthat model schools after prisons. School has become a model for a punishing society inwhich children who violate a rule as minor as a dress code infraction or slightly act out inclass can be handcuffed, booked and put in a jail cell. Such was the case recently in Floridawhen the police handcuffed and arrested six-year-old Desre’e Watson, who was taken fromher kindergarten school to the Highlander County jail where she was fingerprinted,subjected to a mug shot and charged with a felony and two misdemeanours. Her crime? Thesix-year old had thrown a tantrum in her kindergarten class (WFTV.com 2007). Couple thistype of domestic terrorism with the fact that the United States rejected a recent resolutionby the United Nations ‘calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibilityof parole for children and young teenagers. The vote was 185 to 1, with the United Statesthe lone dissenter. Indeed, the United States stands alone in the world in convicting youngadolescents as adults and sentencing them to live out their lives in prison’ (Liptak 2007:A1;also see Stevenson, this volume). In fact, while there are only a handful of cases in othercountries, the United States has 2,225 child offenders who will spend the rest of their livesincarcerated (Gumbel 2005).

The hard currency of human suffering that impacts children is evident in astoundingstatistics that suggest a profound moral and political contradiction at the heart of one of therichest democracies in the world. For example, the rate of child poverty rose in 2004 to 17.6per cent, boosting the number of poor children to 12.9 million. In fact, ‘[a]bout one in three


severely poor people are under age 17’ (Pugh 2007). Moreover, children make up adisproportionate share of the poor in the US in that ‘they are 26 per cent of the totalpopulation, but constitute 39 per cent of the poor’ (Chelala 2006). Just as alarmingly, 9.3million children lack health insurance, and millions lack affordable child care and decentearly childhood education. In the meantime, savage cuts to education, nutritional assistancefor impoverished mothers, veterans’ medical care and basic scientific research help fund taxcuts for the inordinately rich.

Too many youth within this degraded economic, political, and cultural geographyoccupy a ‘dead zone’ in which the spectacle of commodification exists alongside theimposing threat of massive debt, bankruptcy, the prison–industrial complex and theelimination of basic civil liberties. Indeed, we have an entire generation of unskilled anddisplaced youth expelled from shrinking markets, blue collar jobs and the limited politicalpower granted to the middle-class consumer. Rather than investing in the public good andsolving social problems, the state now punishes those who are caught in the downwardspiral of its economic policies. Consequently, the implied contract between the state and itscitizens is broken, and social guarantees for youth, as well as civic obligations to the future,vanish from the agenda of public concern. As punishment, incarceration and surveillancerepresent the face of the new expanded state and market values supplant civic values, itbecomes increasingly difficult ‘to translate private worries into public issues and,conversely, to discern public issues in private troubles’ (Bauman 1999:2).

Black youth are especially disadvantaged since they are often jobless in an economy thatdoes not need their labour and hence constitute a surplus and disposable population. BobHerbert (2007a:A25) points out:

… [B]lack American males inhabit a universe in which joblessness is frequently the norm[and] over the past few years, the percentage of black male high school graduates in their20s who were jobless has ranged from well over a third to roughly 50 per cent ... Fordropouts, the rates of joblessness are staggering. For black males who left high schoolwithout a diploma, the real jobless rate at various times over the past few years has rangedfrom 59 per cent to a breathtaking 72 per cent …These are the kinds of statistics you getduring a depression.

At the current time, however, solutions to these widespread social problems have becomedifficult to imagine, let alone implement. For many young people and adults today, theprivate sphere has become the only space in which one can cling to any sense of hope,pleasure, or possibility. Culture as an activity in which young people actually produce theconditions of their own agency through dialogue, community participation, public stories,and political struggle is being eroded. In its place, we are increasingly surrounded by a‘climate of cultural and linguistic privatization’ (Klein 1999:177) in which culture becomessomething you consume, and the only kind of speech that is acceptable is that of the fast-paced shopper. In spite of neoconservative and neoliberal claims that economic growth willcure social ills, the language of the market has no way of dealing with poverty, socialinequality or civil rights issues. It has no respect for non-commodified values and novocabulary for recognising and addressing social justice, compassion, decency, ethics or,for that matter, its own anti-democratic forms of power.

In order to strengthen the public sphere, we must look to its most widespread institutions,undo their metamorphoses into means of surveillance, commodification and control, andreclaim them as democratic spaces. Schools, colleges, and universities come to mind -because of both their contradictions and their democratic potential, their reality and theirpromise. In what follows, I argue that the purpose and meaning of higher education must beaffirmed if youth are to remain a political and moral referent in our society and in a future


whose democratic possibilities can only be seized if young people are provided with theknowledge, capacities and skills they need to function as social agents, critical citizens,empowered workers and critical thinkers. But such a task must begin by analyzing thedegree to which higher education’s role as a democratic public sphere is now beingthreatened by a number of anti-democratic tendencies.

Higher Education and the Crisis of the SocialThe powerful regime of forces that increasingly align higher education with a reactionarynotion of patriotic correctness, market fundamentalism and state-sponsored militarismpresents difficult problems for educators. As the 21st century unfolds, higher educationfaces both a legitimation crisis and a political crisis. As a handmaiden of the Pentagon andcorporate interests, it has lost its claim to independence and critical learning. Turning itsback on the public good, the academy has largely opened its doors to serving private andgovernmental interests and in doing so has compromised its role as a democratic publicsphere. In keeping with the progressive impoverishment of politics and public life over thepast two decades, the university is increasingly being corporatised, militarised anddummified, transformed into a training ground for corporate, military, and right-wingvalues rather than a public sphere in which youth can become the critical citizens anddemocratic agents necessary to nourish a socially responsible future. Strapped for moneyand increasingly defined in the language of a militarized and corporate culture, manyuniversities are now part of an unholy alliance that largely serves the national security stateand the business policies of transnational corporations while decoupling all aspects ofacademic knowledge production from democratic values and projects (Henwood 2005).College presidents are now called Chief Executive Officers or CEOs and speak largely inthe discourse of Wall Street and corporate fund managers. Venture capitalists scour collegesand universities in search of big profits to be made through licensing agreements, thecontrol of intellectual property rights, and investments in university spin-off companies.

In this new Gilded Age of money and profit, academic subjects gain stature almostexclusively through their exchange value on the market. While the vision of education isbeing narrowed and instrumentalised, the Bush administration attempts to wield morecontrol over colleges and universities, cut student aid, plunder public services, and pushstates to the brink of financial disaster. As higher education increasingly becomes aprivilege rather than a right, many working-class youth either find it financially impossibleto enter college or, because of increased costs, drop out. Those students who have theresources to stay in school are feeling the pressure of the job market and rush to take coursesand receive professional credentials in business and the biosciences as the humanities losemajors and downsize. Not surprisingly, students are now referred to as ‘customers,’ whilesome university presidents even argue that professors should be labelled as ‘academicentrepreneurs’ (Giroux 2007). Tenured faculty are called upon to generate grants, establishclose partnerships with corporations, and teach courses that have practical value in themarketplace. There is little in this vision of the university that imagines young people asanything other than fodder for the corporation or appendages of the national security state.What was once the hidden curriculum of many universities – the subordination of highereducation to capital – has now become an open and much celebrated policy of both publicand private higher education.

Within the last decade, a variety of right-wing forces has attacked higher education,threatening not only the principle of academic freedom, but the very notion of the universityas a democratic public sphere. Left-oriented academics such as Ward Churchill, Norman


Finklestein and others are now being fired or denied tenure because they are critical of theAmerican government. Faculty who offer classroom readings that challenge officialversions of US foreign and domestic policy have their names posted on web sites, whichoften label them as un-American while calling on their respective universities to fire them.In some states, laws have been passed that allow students to sue professors whose politicalsensibilities are unsettled or challenged. The State of Arizona is in the process of passing abill that would fine faculty members $500 for advocating a political position in theclassroom. As one legislator put it, ‘You can speak about any subject you want – you justdon’t take a position’ (Jaschik 2007). There is more at issue here than a vile form of anti-intellectualism. A more political analysis would argue that what is being lost in the UnitedStates is a society capable of questioning itself, as the public spaces that promote criticalinquiry, dialogue and engaged citizens are being transformed by jingoistic hyper-nationalistic practices. What is emerging under such conditions is not only an imperialpresidency and a militaristic empire, but also a new type of authoritarianism.

Matters of Hope and Educational PoliticsAddressing education as a democratic endeavour begins with the recognition that highereducation is more than an investment opportunity, citizenship is more than conspicuousconsumption, learning is more than preparing students for the workplace, howeverimportant that task might be, and democracy is more than making choices at the local mall.Reclaiming higher education as a public sphere begins with the crucial project ofchallenging, among other things, those market fundamentalists, religious extremists andrigid ideologues who harbour a deep disdain for critical thought and healthy scepticism, andwho look with displeasure upon any form of education that teaches students to read theworld critically and to hold power and authority accountable. Education is not only aboutissues of work and economics, but also about questions of justice, social freedom, and thecapacity for democratic agency, action and change, as well as the related issues of power,exclusion and citizenship. These are educational and political issues and they should beaddressed as part of a broader effort to re-energize the global struggle for social justice anddemocracy.

If higher education is to reclaim itself a site of critical thinking, collective work, andpublic service, educators and students will have to redefine the knowledge, skills, research,and intellectual practices currently favored in the university. Central to such a challenge isthe need to create conditions that enable academics to speak with conviction, use the publicsphere to address important social problems and demonstrate alternative models forbridging the gap between higher education and the broader society. Increasingly, asuniversities are shaped by a culture of fear in which dissent is equated with treason, the callto be objective and impartial, whatever one’s intentions, can easily echo what GeorgeOrwell called the official truth or the establishment point of view. Lacking a self-consciously democratic political focus, teachers and students are often reduced to the roleof technicians or functionaries engaged in formalistic rituals, unconcerned with thedisturbing and urgent problems that confront the larger society or the consequences of one’spedagogical practices and research undertakings. In opposition to this model, with itsclaims to and conceit of political neutrality, academics should combine the mutuallyinterdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen. This requires finding ways toconnect the practice of classroom teaching with the operation of power in the larger societyand to provide the conditions for students to view themselves as critical agents capable ofmaking those who exercise authority and power accountable.


Academics, in addition to their responsibility to prepare students to engage criticallywith the world, must also recognise the impact their students will have on a generation ofyoung people twice removed from the university. Education cannot be decoupled fromdemocracy. As such, it must be understood as a deliberately informed and purposefulpolitical and moral practice, as opposed to one that is either doctrinaire or instrumentalised,or both. Moreover, a critical pedagogy should be incorporated at all levels of schooling,while clearly gaining part of its momentum in higher education among students who willgo back to the schools, churches, synagogues and workplaces in order to produce new ideas,concepts, and critical ways of understanding the world in which young people and adultslive. This is a notion of intellectual practice and responsibility that refuses the insular,overly pragmatic and privileged isolation of the academy while affirming a broader visionof learning that links knowledge to the power of self-definition and to the capacities ofstudents to expand the scope of democratic freedoms, particularly those that address thecrisis of education, politics and the social as part and parcel of the crisis of democracy itself.This is the kind of intellectual practice that Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘taking responsibilityfor our responsibility’ (cited in Bunting 2003), one that is attentive to the suffering of othersand ‘will not allow conscience to look away or fall asleep’ (Said 2004:143).

In order for pedagogy that encourages critical thought to have a real effect, it mustinclude the message that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equallyempowered, to shape the society in which they live. If educators are to function as publicintellectuals, they need to provide the opportunities for students to learn that the relationshipbetween knowledge and power can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiencesmatter, and that what they say and do counts in their struggle to unlearn dominatingprivileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others and transform, whennecessary, the world around them. A critically engaged pedagogy also necessitates that weincorporate in our classrooms those electronically mediated knowledge forms thatconstitute the terrain of mass and popular culture. I am referring here to the world of mediatexts - videos, films, the Internet, podcasts, and other elements of the new electronictechnologies that operate through a combination of visual and print culture. Such anapproach not only challenges the traditional definition of schooling as the only site ofpedagogy by widening the application and sites of education to a variety of culturallocations, but also alerts students to the educational force of the culture at large, what I havecalled elsewhere the field of public pedagogy.

Finally, I want to emphasize that struggles over how we view, represent and treat youngpeople should be part of a larger public dialogue about how to imagine a democratic future.Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great Protestant theologian, believed that the ultimate test ofmorality resided in what a society did for its children. If we take this standard seriously,American society has deeply failed its children and its commitment to democracy. Theculture of neoliberalism and consumer culture rest on the denial both of youth as a markerof the future and of the social responsibility entailed by an acceptance of this principle. Inother words, the current crisis of American democracy can be measured in part by the factthat too many young people are poor, lack decent housing and health care and attenddecrepit schools filled with overworked and underpaid teachers. These youth, by allstandards, deserve more in a country that historically prided itself on its level of democracy,liberty and alleged equality for all citizens. For many young people, the future looks bleak,filled with the promise of low-paying, low-skilled jobs, the collapse of the welfare state and,if you are a person of colour and poor, the threat of either unemployment or incarceration.We have entered a period in which the war against youth, especially poor youth of colour,offers no apologies because it is too arrogant and ruthless to imagine any resistance. But


power as a form of domination is never absolute and oppression always produces someform of resistance. For these reasons, the collective need and potential struggle for justiceshould never be underestimated even in the darkest of times. To confront the biopolitics ofdisposability and the war on young people, we need to create the conditions for multiplecollective and global struggles that refuse to use politics as an act of war and markets as themeasure of democracy. Fortunately, more and more young people nationally andinternationally are mobilising in order to fight a world dominated by corporate interests andstruggling to construct an alternative future in which their voices can be heard as part of abroader movement to make democracy and social justice realisable.

Education, when connected to social change, can help provide the knowledge, tools, andhope necessary to further motivate these young people, many of whom recognise that theworld stands at a critical juncture, and that they can play a crucial role in changing it. Formany young people, social injustices that extend from class oppression to racial violence tothe ongoing destruction of public life and the environment can no longer be tolerated. Wehave watched young people across the globe march against the injustices of negativeglobalization in recent years. One of the central messages coming from those youthfuldemonstrators is that the revolutionary idea of democracy, as Bill Moyers (2007) points out,is not just about the freedom to shop, formal elections, or the two-party system; it is moresignificantly about ‘the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim theirmoral and political agency’. What needs to be stressed is that these are political andeducational issues, not merely economic concerns. As Hannah Arendt insisted, makinghuman beings superfluous is the essence of totalitarianism, and the war against youth andcritical education suggests a new form of authoritarianism is ready to take over if we cannotwork together to develop a new politics, a new analytic of struggle and, most important, arenewed sense of imagination, vision and hope. We live in a historic moment of both crisisand possibility, one that presents educators, parents, artists, and others with the opportunityto take up the challenge of re-imagining civic engagement and social transformation, butthese activities only have a chance of succeeding if we also defend and reinvigorate thepedagogical conditions that enable the current generation of young people to nurturethoughtfulness, critical agency, compassion, and democracy itself.

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giroux-youth in a suspect society

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