Giroux argues that higher education has historically played a crucial role as a democratic public sphere involved in fostering self-governance, debate, and deliberation about public values. Under the justifications of national security, many universities are actively partnering with the CIA and the many other intelligence agencies as well as with the military and military contracting companies in ways that render knowledge across the curriculum instrumental to the imperial foreign policy agenda of the U.S. government. The dangers of this include making university work complicit with atrocities (like the illegal war on Iraq and the long CIA legacy of subverting sovereign foreign governments) and remaking the meaning of higher knowledge as principally for the pursuit of state power. The ideal of disinterested knowledge or the pursuit of critical knowledge in the interests of social justice become casualties.

Likewise, for Giroux the corporatization of higher education transforms broad based education into training: the only promises that appear to matter in the neoliberal model are the economic ones of job preparation and global economic competition. The book engages with the growing contemporary body of literature on the corporatization of the university and contributes to the historical scholarship on military and national security involvements. One of the unique dimensions of the book involves the use of the theoretical concept of biopolitics (the management of life and death) from the work of Foucault, Agamben, and others to address the new ways that power is being wielded, and Giroux proposes new forms of resistance and democratic struggle that involve pedagogy, theoretical analysis, and organizing. The tone is rightfully urgent and impassioned. As Giroux writes, "John Dewey once claimed that 'democracy needs to be reborn in each generation, and education is its midwife.' We live at a time when education needs to be reborn if democracy is to survive in both the United States and the world at large."

Suggested readings:

Slaughter, S. & Leslie, L. (1997). Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Aronowitz, S. (2000). The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning.Boston: Beacon Press.

Giroux, H. & Searls, S. (2006). Take Back Higher Education.  New York: Palgrave.

Nelson, C. (Ed.). (1997). Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.