Pedagogy

Vincent, Jonathan.
A Call to Arms in a Repressive Atmosphere of Educational Acquiescence
Pedagogy - Volume 6, Issue 1, Winter 2006, pp. 189-198

Duke University Press

Jonathan Vincent - A Call to Arms in a Repressive Atmosphere of Educational Acquiescence - Pedagogy 6:1 Pedagogy 6.1 (2006) 189-198 A Call to Arms in a Repressive Atmosphere of Educational Acquiescence Jonathan Vincent Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era. By Henry Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Among the more unsettling media spectacles that flitted across the cable networks during February 2005 was the virtual public stoning of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill. His comparison of employees of the decimated World Trade Center and Pentagon to "little Eichmanns" in an essay titled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" created a backlash of hostility in, ironically, a piece largely about hostile political backlash. The incident figures as one more episode in a barrage of recent political attacks against progressive intellectuals that the current state of emergency in U.S. domestic and foreign policy has ratcheted up to feverish levels. Never mind that the incendiary comparison was part of a larger work devoted to and awarded for the treatment of human rights; or that Churchill is a Native American historian and educator; or that he is a Vietnam veteran; or that his intellectual work is part of a larger structural plea to examine the events of September 11 from the ethically responsible perch of human rather than nationalist...