Violence. Brad Evans
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racism. Intellectuals need to create the public spaces in which identities, desires, and values can be encouraged to act in ways conducive to the formation of citizens willing to fight for individual and social rights, along with those ideals that give genuine meaning to a representative democracy.
Any discussion of the fate of higher education must address how it is shaped by the current state of inequality in American society and how it perpetuates it. Not only is such inequality evident in soaring tuition costs, inevitably resulting in the growing exclusion of working- and middle-class students from higher education, but also in the transformation of over two-thirds of faculty positions into a labor force of overworked and powerless adjunct faculty members. Faculty need to take back the university and reclaim modes of governance in which they have the power to teach and act with dignity, while denouncing and dismantling the increasing corporatization of the university and the seizing of power by administrators and their staff, who now outnumber faculty on most campuses.
In return, academics need to fight for the right of students to be given an education not dominated by corporate values. Higher education is a right, not an entitlement. It should be free, as it is in many other countries, and, as Robin D. G. Kelley points out, this should be true particularly for minority students. This is all the more crucial as young people have been left out of the discourse of democracy. Rather than invest in prisons and weapons of death, Americans need a society that invests in public and higher education.
There is more at stake here than making visible the vast inequities in educational and economic opportunities. Seeing education as a political form of intervention, offering a path toward racial and economic justice, is crucial in reimagining a new politics of hope. Universities should be subversive in a healthy society. They should push against the grain and give voice to the voiceless, the powerless, and the whispers of truth that haunt the apostles of unchecked power and wealth. Pedagogy should be disruptive and unsettling, while pushing hard against established orthodoxies. Such demands are far from radical and leave more to be done, but they point to a new beginning in the struggle over the role of higher education in the United States.
SEVEN
WHEN LAW IS NOT JUSTICE
Rule of law may be good for business, but in many parts of the world it’s not enough to ensure basic rights.
Who actually gets to speak on behalf of the globally oppressed? The importance of language and the capacity to speak for oneself has been a central concern for the post-colonial theorist and activist, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Such concerns expose the operations of power at the level of discourse and how they become integral to how we come to understand the normalization of oppression and the denial of rights “within” normative, progressive, and legal frameworks. Recognizing the limits of legalistic and developmental approaches to human rights, this conversation covers a range of issues from the violence of poverty, the problem of law, and the legacy of Frantz Fanon to the ways the imperialism of canonical thinkers such as Immanuel Kant might be affirmatively sabotaged. This provides a new opening into the meaning of revolution and how it might be detached from the violent dialectics of history.
Brad Evans interviews Gayatri Chakrvorty Spivak
July 13, 2016
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a university professor in the humanities at Columbia University, New York. Her books include Nationalism and the Imagination and An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization.
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