Henry Giroux Quotes
The current siege on higher education, whether through defunding education, eliminating tenure, tying research to military needs, or imposing business models of efficiency and accountability, poses a dire threat not only to faculty and students who carry the mantle of university self-governance, but also to democracy itself.
Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2014, p. 15.
Flexner’s ideas influenced American universities, and the movement towards tenure was one of the manifestations; another was that many of the best private universities have as the highest administrative authority the faculty senate not administrators. See {634252} for one political ramification of scholars governing a University. One school faculty senate might have been responsible for an American President running for office.
Hobson, like Mark Twain in America, was a major critic of imperialism.
The University of Wisconsin had a radical faculty member who claimed that the 9-11 attack was the fault of Vice President Cheney and other absurd claims that were supportive of the Muslim Terrorists. Many called for the firing of the faculty member who had academic tenure. The University decided that college students were not going to be fooled or seduced by such absurd statements and that while in this case the statement were controversial and absurd, what would happen when a faculty statement was just controversial. The University agreed with almost all of the other great universities in America with the fact that the risk of a foolish pedant like this is very tiny in contrast to the risk of allowing officials—-academic or political---to to determine what a professor can say. This freedom has made the American University system the envy of the entire world.
Horowitz who preaches against tenure and academic freedom gives his opponents wonderful ammunition to support the concepts. His definition of “idiot” is people who have what he believes is a naïve liberal view of politics whom he argues should not be paid to speak, write and possibly indoctrinate students. So a mathematics professor, teaching algebraic topology, but supports Hezbollah for example should be purged from his job. It is just that point of view that was responsible for having tenure and academic freedom in universities in the first place.
Henry Armand Giroux is an American and Canadian scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. In 2002 Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period.
