Take Back Higher Education

At the beginning for the new millennium, higher education is under siege. No longer viewed as a public good, higher education increasingly is besieged by corporate, right-wing and conservative ideologies that want to decouple higher education from its legacy of educating students to be critical and autonomous citizens, imbued with democratic and public values. The greatest danger faced by higher education comes from the focus of global neo-liberalism and the return of educational apartheid. Through the power of racial backlash, the war on youth, deregulation, commercialism, and privatization, neo-liberalism wages a vicious assault on all of those public spheres and goods not controlled by the logic of market relations and profit margins. Take Back Higher Education argues that if higher education is going to meet the challenges of a democratic future, it will have to confront neo-liberalism, racism, and the shredding of the social contract.

"Henry and Susan Giroux are performing an immense public service with this book. It is a sweeping critique of how our culture, especially the educational establishment, has failed to prepare us for the crises of our time. And it offers hope for the possibility of resisting that and creating a new culture, inspirational and profoundly democratic." - Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States

"Henry and Susan Giroux's extraordinary book is an electrifying call to educators to renounce political passivity and to assume the role of public intellectuals prepared to take back schools and universities from the predations of a business driven ideology that silences dissent and

undermines democracy. A beautifully fashioned work of cultural history, it is also a rich and stimulating brew of elegant analysis and powerful polemic. Teachers from the kindergarten classrooms to the ivory tower will be grateful for the hope and affirmation the Girouxs' have give us. All in all, a magnificent achievement." - Jonathan Kozol

"Here, at last, is a critical study in the social sciences that explores ­ with brilliant iconoclasm ­ the connection between the post 9/11 de-democratization of America, the erosion of its politics and its civil rights, its inexorable drift into rabid conservatism, and recent attacks on the form and substance of higher education. Argued with enormous conviction and considerable insight, Take Back Higher Education does for contemporary pedagogy what the likes of John Dewey did for it long ago: insist that the health of our society depends not on consumption or the rampant production of wealth for the rich, but on educating new generations of citizens for open, informed public engagement, for constructive political involvement, for commitment to a social world built on justice and empowerment for all; in short, for all the things currently under threat in the security-obsessed, frightened USA of the early twenty-first century. Here, in other words, is a charter for real freedom through enlightenment, a charter that ought to have been accomplished two hundred or so years ago, but still requires a good fight. Henry and Susan Giroux have undertaken that fight with vigor, energy, and consummate intelligence." - John Comaroff, University of Chicago

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada.