Autonomy of higher education profoundly compromised?

Check out an interview with McMaster University Professor Henry A. Giroux in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed. Giroux is the author of The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex. As the title makes plain, Giroux believes that President Eisenhower’s famous warning about the “military-industrial complex” applies also to the Academy.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the interview:

Q: You start your book with President Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex. Why was academe left out and how does the warning apply to higher education?

A: Why the academy was left out of Eisenhower’s original speech is a matter of open speculation, but it has been argued that some of Eisenhower’s advisors felt that including the term in the original formulation would have unduly besmirched the sanctity of higher education. And more importantly, it would have targeted and discredited higher education at the Ivy League schools, which played a major role in educating the rich and powerful classes with the knowledge, values, and skills necessary to assume leadership in business and government. At the same time, Eisenhower clearly recognized that the arms industry, the defense establishment, and their Congressional supporters represented a combination of unwarranted power and influence whose existence presented a danger to the university in its capacity as “a fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery.”

He was particularly concerned about the influence the military-industrial-academic complex would have on the autonomy of research, teaching, and a culture of learning conducive to educating an informed and critical citizenry. In light of the growing militarization and corporatization of American society, the transition in the last 30 years of the United States from a liberal-welfare state to a warfare state, it is clear that the semi-autonomous nature of higher education has been more profoundly compromised, especially with the increasing withdrawal of state and federal funding for higher education.

I began with Eisenhower’s speech in the book in order to underscore that at least historically there was a deep concern about the autonomy of the university and the necessity for it to have some remove from the influence of military and corporate power. Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial-academic complex strikes me as more worrisome today than when it was delivered in 1961. While some critics might believe that higher education is a hotbed of left-wing radicalism and that college campuses are “intellectually akin to North Korea,” as the notable syndicated columnist George Will once quipped, the fact is that the greatest threat faced by higher education is its annexation by the military-industrial complex and its attack by a well funded group of right wing ideologues and foundations, the result being a fundamental change in the university’s relationship with the larger society that necessarily signals a crisis in democracy and the critical educational foundation upon which it rests….