Higher Education for Democracy

William G. Tierney

Description

Democracy and higher education are inextricably linked: universities not only have the ability to be key arbiters of how democracy is advanced, but they also need to reflect democratic values in their practices, objectives, and goals. Framed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing crisis of structural racism, Higher Education for Democracy explores academe's role in advancing democracy by using a cross-national comparison of Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Hong Kong to develop strategies that universities can employ to strengthen democracy and resist fascism. William G. Tierney argues that if academe is to be a progenitor in the advancement of democracy, then we need to consider five areas of change that have been significant across national contexts amid both globalization and neoliberalism: inequality, privatization, the public good, identity, and academic freedom. Taking a comparative approach and drawing on scholarly literature, archival research, and interviews, Higher Education for Democracy aims to understand these changes and their implications and to position higher education in defense of democracy in a globalized economy framed by fascism.
Acknowledgments
Preface

1. Globalization, Neoliberalism, and Their Discontents

2. The Democratic Imperative of Higher Education

3. Identity Matters

4. Understanding Academic Freedom and Free Speech on Campus

5. Understanding What Modern Universities Do: Goods and Services

6. Academic Competencies for the Twenty-First Century

7. Academic Responsibility: Toward a Cultural Politics of Integrity

Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• Éducation
• Education
• Tertiary education

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438484518
• Langue: English

Extrait

HIGHER EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY
HIGHER EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY
The Role of the University in Civil Society
WILLIAM G. TIERNEY
Cover image: Zola aux outrages by Henry de Groux, 1898.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Tierney, William G., author.
Title: Higher education for democracy : the role of the university in civil society / William G. Tierney.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020041500 | ISBN 9781438484495 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438484518 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Education, Higher—Political aspects. | Education, Higher—Aims and objectives. | Universities and colleges—Political aspects. | Democracy and education. | Civil society.
Classification: LCC LC171 .T54 2021 | DDC 378.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041500
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
1 Globalization, Neoliberalism, and Their Discontents
2 The Democratic Imperative of Higher Education
3 Identity Matters
4 Understanding Academic Freedom and Free Speech on Campus
5 Understanding What Modern Universities Do: Goods and Services
6 Academic Competencies for the Twenty-First Century
7 Academic Responsibility: Toward a Cultural Politics of Integrity
Notes
References
Index
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the support I have received from the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. My students, research assistants, postdoctoral students, and colleagues helped me think through what I present here. Monica Raad and Diane Flores, who staff the Center for us, are the absolute best at what they do. Although many individuals read a part of this book, Michael Lanford provided extraordinary help in his editing and feedback. He’s a gem. Rebecca Colesworthy at SUNY Press has been thoughtful, positive, fun, and reflective about how to improve the text; I’ve been very lucky to work with her. I had the good fortune to put the finishing touches on this manuscript first at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Lake Como, Italy, and then at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, before the pandemic closed down the world. I could not have had better environments to complete this book. Through it all, Barry Weiss has been my sounding board and best friend.
Preface
When I speak to my students about the relatively leisurely times I had when I went to college it seems like I am referring to a foreign land about which they have no knowledge. Today seems entirely different from yesterday. One point I make in this text, however, is that the past and present help determine the future; there is no linear inevitability. I started the book before COVID-19 arrived on the scene and closed down the world. Moreover, although I have long supported Black Lives Matter, the murder of George Floyd created a new urgency for me to think through what I am writing here.
We are always in a time of change, and the contexts in which we exist matter a great deal. What I resist, however, is those who say, “Everything must change” as if there is an abrupt rupture from today to tomorrow. Such an assumption is historically naïve, and frequently enables antidemocratic forces to constrict the public good. Given the fiscal challenges the pandemic has created, we hear, for example, that the end of academe as we know it is near. However, for over a generation, when higher education has faced a crisis, such a response has been inevitable.
Tech boosters now say that an online revolution is about to happen, which will disrupt all of academe. Online learning certainly has grown over the last decade, and some students seem to learn just fine that way. However, I do not find the argument that all our colleges and universities are going to fold like a house of cards very convincing. Clayton Christenson, and before him, Peter Drucker, have been academic Jeremiahs saying, “The end is near,” Drucker suggested the end of higher education in 1997, and since 2011 Christenson has predicted that half of higher education will go out of business. It has not happened, however. Even today, when academe faces the worst economic crisis in a century because of the pandemic, sober predictions are that about 5% of the 4,000 postsecondary institutions face closure. Two hundred institutional closures are certainly significant, but it does not represent total disruption and devastation for the postsecondary system.
Similarly, the protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis rightfully called for dramatic reforms, not only in policing, but in all organizations, and academe is certainly included. Change, however, is not a singular event, and instead requires ways to think through bringing about systemic reforms, rather than rely on singular acts. I am pleased, for example, that racist monuments finally have fallen on our campuses and elsewhere, but the removal of a statue of a confederate general hardly suggests that we have resolved the systemic problem of racism.
I make the case here that we need to think about what we want higher education to look like after this pandemic is eliminated. Racism is not going away simply because many of us want it to be eliminated. Online higher education is not going to overwhelm all of higher education simply because business gurus say it will. And threats to democracy will not be overcome without a significant concerted effort by those of us in higher education.
Academe in the twenty-first century has four key goals. We need to educate students so that they are employable. We need to do research and conduct service in our communities that advances the public good. We need to continue to act as a gateway out of poverty and into the middle and upper class. We need to engage as an academic institution and imbue in our students the skills necessary to advance democracy in a multicultural society.
The pandemic, along with the ongoing crisis of structural racism, frame the context in which higher education functions today. The world is different from when I began the book—and it will be different still by the time the reader has the text in hand. Change is inevitable, but it does not alter what I am arguing here about the essential role of higher education in creating a more equitable and democratic future. How we define and enact that role is up to us.
CHAPTER ONE
Globalization, Neoliberalism, and Their Discontents
Why are you so afraid of the word “Fascism”? Just a word—just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours—not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini—like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days—and have ’em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again. …
Country’s too big for a revolution. No, no! Couldn’t happen here!
—Sinclair Lewis, It Couldn’t Happen Here
I entered academic life as a college freshman in 1971. I retired as a professor in 2020. What changed in almost a half-century? Don’t worry. This is not yet another elegiac academic memoir. I have no interest in recalling the “good old days,” as if when I was a college student everything was great and today everything is terrible. Times change. Contexts change. People change. What I will explore is how those times and contexts and people have changed. Because of these changes, I intend to put forward a new way to position higher education in what I have come to think of as a globalized economy.
When I graduated from Tufts University in 1975, I did not worry very much about finding work; jobs were plentiful for someone with a college degree. I joined the Peace Corps, learned Arabic, and spent two years in Morocco. A large part of my decision to join the Peace Corps was not only my Irish Catholic family background, in which volunteer work was encouraged, but also because I got a college degree during the Vietnam War. I had a great many discussions in and out of class about what our obligations were as citizens. I worked at a homeless shelter during college to earn some money. I picked up a lot at the Pine Street Inn in Boston’s red-light district. I learned not only from the guys who were homeless, but also from the hard-scrabble men who worked there, most of whom were veterans, and the police who worked to make extra cash in their off-hours in the cavernous lobby trying to maintain a semblance of peace among 300 homeless men. All the police disagreed with me—they hated my long hair, my left-leaning views, my protest against the Vietnam War. We also all got along. One cop drove me home after our shift; we argued the whole way, and we shook hands as I got out of the police car every week.
I came back from the Peace Corps, picked up a master’s degree at Harvard, worke