- Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era
Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux's 2004 study Take Back Higher Education issues a vital warning. As institutions of higher education are increasingly organized by corporate interests and corporate logic as well as by the racist backlash of the post-civil rights era, the future of democracy is at stake. When university classrooms have taken on the function of training corporate workers and overlaying student identities with consumer identities, historical ideas about education for citizenship, moral responsibility, and community engagement are losing ground. At a time when social safety nets and social services are being pillaged in order to fund ballooning military budgets, when—that is—the privatization of public resources is overtaking public policy at ever increasing rates, the authors impart an impassioned and necessary plea in defense of the university as a site of struggle over what democracy as a politics of the public sphere should mean now. In their own words, "[A]n educated and active citizenry is indispensable for a free and inclusive democratic society; democratic politics requires the full participation of an informed populace" (4). [End Page 338]
Giroux and Giroux both have a long history of providing a language linking academic work and cultural theory to broader public issues. In particular, they have taken up the essential challenge of theorizing how education needs to help students think about their relations to the public sphere as the basis for democratic action. What is groundbreaking in Taking Back Higher Education is the way the authors move this analysis into new cultural formations to address how the public sphere is currently under threat. Essentially, Giroux and Giroux lay out what the changing shape of civic thinking has meant for the transformation of literary study in the twentieth century and, further, how the recent reversals in civil rights legislation have been instrumental in altering the understood rationales and purposes of university participation. This historical approach gives to the Girouxs' rich invective an added depth and resonance, while making their already rigorous elucidation of the current political juncture more rigorous still.
The authors trace the crisis in the public sphere back to the nineteenth-century reformulation of English studies from rhetoric to literature. This historical reinterpretation of the English Department's mission helps them to explain the current return to a language of civic education that is surfacing alongside multiculturalism and the culture wars. Borrowing from Rogers M. Smith's paradigm-shifting history of citizenship in the United States, Giroux and Giroux observe that the combination of liberalism—with its focus on the individual choice—and republicanism—with its focus on the public good as the popular desire of the homogeneous public—gave their dominance away to an "ascriptive tradition of Americanism"—a type of exclusive "republican nativism" framed through biological racism and increasingly influenced by natural history. Though admitting the racial and gender limitations of Jeffersonian ideas about education as citizen instruction, the authors still want to re-appropriate the Jeffersonian mandate to produce "effective moral and political leadership, not trained technicians" (147). Under this rubric, literary works were read to teach skills for improving oral and written communication to foster popular participation and self-governance. Only after Darwinism, race thinking, and scientism started to saturate ideas about social progress under Coolidge, heredity replaced civic rights and community participation as higher education's self-justification. At this time, literature—the repository of racial heritage and American "genius" in Coolidge's estimation—took prominence as a pedagogical ideal.
This argument about how changing conceptions of race undergird curricular choices leads the authors to re-examine W. E. B. Du Bois' treatment of education, particularly in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), where they conclude that "'the problem of race' involves the very foundations of American democracy" (172). The authors read Du Bois in order to draw a comparison between the historical situation...