Higher Education Under Attack

This month I will explore the attacks on higher education in the blog (see the Chronicle article “College at Risk”), arguing it is part of the closing of the American mind to any alternatives to neoliberal economics and its corporate/conservative agenda. There will be four posts covering the following issues:

1) The vocationalization of higher education, by focusing more on training future workers for specific jobs than preparing us for social and political life as well (Neoliberalism & the Corporatization of HE)

2) Attacks on the humanities (see the attached 2009 article from Harper’s Link) and liberal professors (UCLA's Dirty 30), undermining the most critical and radical space in academia today.

3) The “audit culture” that has emerged – ranking and numbers creating a business-like mentality that skews the actual quality and effectiveness of schools (

4) The corporatization of colleges and universities (Dissent)

The overarching idea is that higher education is being attacked and undermined as an institution of autonomous, independent research and intellectual work (which has never been completely true, of course) that not only prepares the next generation for work and life but provides empirically-grounded critiques of contemporary politics and culture and strategies and policy reforms that could lead us on a path to a different future. This fits within the attacks on K-12, the media and the public sphere in general, continuing the commodification of education as the neoliberal agenda spreading its wings to influence more and more of the cultural, political and economic spheres by infiltrating their institutions and supplanting their ideological commitments.