Neointellectuals: Willing Tools on a Veritable Crusade

Philip Kovacs

University of Alabama in Huntsville, Alabama, USA

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Rule by an economic class may be disguised from the masses; rule by experts could not be covered up. It could be made to work only if the intellectuals became the willing tools of big economic interests.[1]

Both Maxine Greene and Paulo Freire remind us that obstacles must be named before being transcended. I write then with the intention of naming, and I name with the hope of transcending. For the purposes of this paper, transcendence means the replacement of a homogenizing public school system—one that indoctrinates children towards corporatism, economism, militarism, and crass consumerism—with a more humanizing schooling—schooling that helps children develop the capacities necessary for the development of a pluralistic and organic democratic social order, flawed as some might find humanization and democracy to be. As naming each impediment along that expansive continuum would 1) read more like a shopping list than a persuasive argument and 2) depress even the most persistent optimist, I limit this analysis to one type of obstacle: the neointellectual. Simply put, the neointellectual is a “willing tool” who uses power, politics, and fear to perpetuate anti-democratic school initiatives.

The Public Intellectual: That Which They Are Not

The term public intellectual originates from the “Dreyfus affair,” and though not without its own problems, offers a foundation for understanding the neointellectual.[2] Alfred Dreyfus, a member of the French armed forces found guilty of treason and exiled was, according to the “learned men” who spoke out in his defense, falsely accused and deported because he was Jewish. After public protest on the part of a number of these men, officials acquitted Dreyfus and allowed him to return from exile. Pierre Bourdieu explains that the incident was seminal in the genesis of the public intellectual because in speaking out publicly to support Dreyfus, the intellectuals “affirmed their antivalues in ordinary social life, ethics—notably in sexual matters—and politics.”[3] Said differently, they were willing to publicly level their intellect in opposition to political, social, and cultural norms, incidents, and happenings, rather than remain aloof and removed observers. Their engagement, asserts Bourdieu, unnerved the “defenders of the social order.”[4] The defenders of the social order, those fighting vigorously to maintain the status quo, might be thought of as the precursors to the neointellectual, as they used their power and influence to deligitimate and undermine the “learned men.”

Understood as individuals using intellect to publicly critique those in power, the public intellectual existed before and beyond the Dreyfus affair. Bourdieu traces the term to the mid 18^th century, arguing that philosophers who participated in the French Revolution deserve the title.[5] Richard Hofstadter, among others, contends that it was a group of intellectuals who argued the United States into existence in both private and public venues.[6] Ralph Waldo Emerson, traveling the countryside lecturing on a variety of topics, is another example of the public intellectual, moving from meeting-house to meeting-house speaking his truth “boldly.” John Dewey certainly qualifies, as he did not limit his work to life inside of the academy. More contemporary public intellectuals include individuals such as Edward Said, the late Susan Sontag, bell hooks, Cornell West, and Noam Chomsky, all individuals who use intellect to problematize power, oppression, deceit, dominance, and injustice.

Chomsky, voted the world’s top public intellectual in a 2005 poll, offers a more refined definition of the term.[7] He contends, “it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth [little t] and to expose lies.”[8] Moreover, and important to remember as the Office of the Inspector General and the House of Representatives investigate the Bush administration for massive fraud concerning the Reading First program, Chomsky argues that public intellectuals exist to “expose the lies of governments, [and] to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.”[9] Extending beyond Chomsky, Edward Said argues that the term

…has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely swept under the rug.[10]

Public intellectuals, as defined by Chomsky and Said, serve people in the face of corporate or federal power, expose the lies of governments, and confront orthodoxy and dogma. Neointellectuals turn that definition on its head. Neointellectuals serve power in the face of people, using pseudoscience and fear to forward corporate orthodoxy and dogma, sweeping people and issues “under the rug” as they work to maintain the present social order: high capitalism. A short history and a contemporary critique will justify this claim.

Neointellectuals: Willing Tools

In his response to Walter Lippman’s The Phantom Public, John Dewey argued that U.S. citizens would never succumb to rule by an intellectual class. “Rule by an economic class may be disguised from the masses,” explained Dewey, but “rule by experts could not be covered up. It could be made to work only if the intellectuals became the willing tools of big economic interests.”[11] In the 80 years that have passed since Dewey’s claim, hundreds of intellectuals have indeed become the willing tools of big economic interests. Housed in neoconservative/neoliberal think tanks, institutes, and foundations and in universities nationwide, individuals who claim to be researchers, scientists, and scholars generate working papers, policy briefs, and journal articles in order to build public and political support for neoconservative and/or neoliberal legislation ranging from global military conflicts to educational policy such as No Child Left Behind. The creation of think tanks and the neointellectual class, the merging of experts and big economic interests, has been a longstanding political project, part of a larger effort to remake the United States in ways more friendly to capitalism.

In the decade following the defeat of Barry Goldwater, members of the far right reacted to what they perceived to be a growing threat, coordinated by a liberal intelligentsia, to the American way of life.[12] Two individuals in particular, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell and former Treasury Secretary William Simon, attempted to galvanize corporate leaders, wealthy philanthropists, and disaffected politicians, urging them to protect American business interests from what they perceived to be an overbearing federal government.[13] Their proposed solution to this “rising tide of socialism” was the creation of a well-funded network of organizations dedicated to shaping opinion and policy in ways favorable to capitalism; neointellectuals would become the public and political actors for doing so.

Powell, concerned that the “assault on the enterprise system” was “gaining momentum and converts,” circulated a private memo detailing strategies for dealing with the “Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries” whom he believed to be destroying America.[14] His suggestions for eliminating these threats included monitoring campuses for liberal bias and placing conservative scholars within universities; evaluating textbooks (at both the collegiate and secondary levels) to make sure America was being portrayed positively; using the media (television, radio, and the press) to advance conservative ideology; publishing in both popular and scholarly journals; using paid advertisements to shape opinion; and becoming active in courts at all levels of government.[15] David Horrowitz, who leads a crusade against “dangerous” professors; Diane Ravitch, E. D. Hirsch, and Chester Finn, who monitor and create texts with the intent of keeping the United States under a positive light; Armstrong Williams, a living, breathing, paid advertisement; and Margaret Spellings, who repeatedly distorts research to market NCLB, are all neointellectuals who continue to answer Powell’s call.

Powell also entreated corporate leaders to enter political arenas. “Few elements of American society today,” Powell wrote to his conservative colleagues, “have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders.”[16] “One does not exaggerate to say,” continued Powell, “that, in terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the ‘forgotten man.’”[17] Powell’s solution was for business to become more aggressive and to learn from “labor and other self-interest groups.”

This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assidously [sic] cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.[18]

In terms of political involvement, think tank-housed neointellectuals such as Newt Gingrich, Diane Ravitch, Krista Kaffer, Frederick Hess, Eugene Hickok, Chester Finn, and Jay P. Greene enter political arenas to generate consent for pro-business educational initiatives at local, state, and national levels. Where philosophers of education timidly discuss entering policy arenas, neointellectuals engage aggressively and with determination.

Following Powell, William Simon, President Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury and director of the ultra-conservative John M. Olin Foundation, sought out business leaders and philanthropists to support and finance a “counterintelligentsia” capable of stopping the activities of the “elite intelligentsia” housed primarily in “leftist” universities, which he considered to be dens of socialism and threats to the free market.[19] He is worth quoting at length, as his words underscore the urgency of his argument.

I know of nothing more crucial than to come to the aid of the intellectuals and writers who are fighting on my side. And I strongly recommend that any businessmen with the slightest impulse for survival go and do likewise. The alliance between the theorists and men of action in the capitalist world is long overdue in America. It must become a veritable crusade if we are to survive in freedom.[20]

In order to protect liberty and free enterprise, Simon called on business leaders to act on three fronts. The first was the creation and support of foundations which would house scholars, social scientists, writers and journalists who understood “the relationship between political and economic liberty and whose work [would] supplement and inspire and enhance the understanding and the work of others to come.”[21] “Funds must rush by the multimillions,” wrote Simon, “to the aid of liberty, in the many places where it is beleaguered.”[22] Those funds would come from corporate profits, from foundations, and from individuals.[23] Simon also called on business leaders to “cease the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of economics, government, politics, and history are hostile to capitalism and whose faculties will not hire scholars whose views are otherwise.”[24] “America’s major universities,” continued Simon, “are today churning out young collectivists by legions, and it is irrational for businessmen to support them.”[25] Finally, Simon argued

…business money must flow away from the media which serve as megaphones for anticapitalist opinion and to media which are either pro-freedom or, if not necessarily “pro-business,” at least professionally capable of a fair and accurate treatment of procapitalist ideas, values, and arguments.[26]

While corporate America’s successful efforts to reshape universities are beyond the scope of this paper, the rest of Simon’s demands are readily addressed and are pertinent to understanding the neointellectual. Media outlets such as Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and Clear Channel forward messages that are undeniably “pro-business,” often refusing to broadcast messages or advertisements that critique or question conservative causes.[27] At the same time, neointellectuals do not limit themselves to conservative friendly media. Jay P. Greene, for example, appeared on NPR, CNN, and PBS to forward research concerning his manufactured dropout crisis. When Oprah Winfrey, whose show has an estimated 49 million viewers, picked up Bill Gates’ chant that “the schools are failing,” she used Greene’s work for evidence.[28] Responding to Simon’s request that corporations direct “multimillions” to the cause of liberty are conservative foundations such as the John M. Olin Foundation, The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and The Richard and Helen Devos Foundation, who fund hundreds of smaller organizations nationwide.[29] Those organizations use the money to support scholars (both within and outside of universities) such as Paul Peterson, Diane Ravitch, Jay P. Greene, and others who serve as megaphones for the far Right. Unlike public intellectuals who rise organically from multiple publics to confront power, neointellectuals are the products of power, part of a longstanding conservative effort to shape the United States in corporate-friendly ways.

Political Science Abuse and Fear Mongering: Undermining Science, Research, and Scholarship

Chris Mooney’s recent work, The Republican War on Science, offers insight into how neointellectuals generate support for corporate friendly policy. He describes the process as “political science abuse” and/or “pseudoscience.”[30] “Science,” explains Mooney,

amounts to a process—institutionalized at leading universities, research facilities, and scientific journals worldwide—for systematically pursuing knowledge about nature and, in the social sciences, ourselves. As its core, this process features the testing and retesting of hypotheses to ensure that they withstand the most withering scrutiny.[31]

Mooney argues that science becomes politicized and turned into pseudoscience when the scientific process is ignored or tampered with. He calls such tampering “political science abuse,” which he defines as “any attempt to inappropriately undermine, alter, or otherwise interfere with the scientific process, or scientific conclusions, for political or ideological reasons.”[32]

While Mooney does not address education specifically, his framework extends to the field. I employ Mooney’s terminology in an effort to detail how neointellectuals generate support for neoconservative/neoliberal educational reform efforts while at the same time undermining attempts to fashion a more democratic educational reality. According to Mooney, individuals engage in political science abuse by:

• Undermining science itself—dismissing research as irrelevant or flat out false, such as Frederick Hess’s lengthy smear of the American Educational Research Association’s 2007 annual meeting, a place where scholars can go to, amongst other things, “celebrate their own awesomeness.”[33]
• Suppression—quashing scientific reports that don’t support political philosophies, as was the case with a 2004 Department of Education report critical of charter schools.[34]
• Targeting individual scientists—either discrediting scientists or attempting to silence them, as with David Horowitz’s list of dangerous college professors and social scientists.[35]
• Similar targeting occurred when Massachusetts state officials refused to let Alfie Kohn speak at a conference on standardized tests.[36]
• Rigging the process—controlling the input of data in a policy debate by either packing a panel with scientists who are like-minded or by airing one side of the story, as was the case with Reading First.[37]
• Hiding errors and misrepresentations—making false claims or distorting data, as Diane Ravitch recently did when she argued “The Center for Education [CEP] Policy released a report on NCLB, concluding that it was overall having a positive effect on achievement.”[38]
• Jack Jennings, President and CEO of the CEP responded to her claim: “In fact, one of our five main conclusions is that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to prove causality between state test score trends and NCLB.”[39]
• Magnifying uncertainty—hyping scientific uncertainty to prevent one type of action or to allow another, such as when members of the ASM claim there is no scientific evidence supporting teacher certification.[40]
• Relying on the fringe—when politicians handpick experts whose views match what they want to hear, as was the case when John Boehner (R-OH), used one of Jay P. Greene’s “working papers” to support NCLB, arguing there was irrefutable proof that NCLB was a success.[41]
• Ginning up contrary science—generating science in order to manufacture uncertainty or consent, as is the case when neoconservative think tanks, institutes, and foundations manufacture report after report in order to build consensus for accountability based reform and choice initiatives.[42]
• Dressing up values in scientific clothing—claiming scientific justification for purely political moves, such as when market fundamentalists claim competition works, despite having no research to prove it or basing their claims on research with one of the above flaws.[43]

Mooney argues that the Right’s politicizing of science, and the use of the above strategies, began in earnest as a reaction to the wave of environmental, health, and safety rules enacted in the early 1970s, and he cites Lewis Powell as one of the more prominent individuals urging business leaders to ally with scientists in order to protect their interests.[44] Making such alliances possible were the profits Simon wished to see directed to the “theorists” working to protect capitalism. As a result of these profits, borrowing again from Dewey, some “intellectuals became the willing tools of big economic interests.” These “willing tools” deliver their politicized science to public, private, and governmental bodies in order to add legitimacy to various causes, i.e. accountability and choice.

While neointellectuals engage in political science abuse to garner political support for their causes, they engage in fear mongering to manufacture public consent, using mainstream media to reach parents and concerned citizens. In order to make publics more amenable to their policies, neointellectuals provide a number of narratives depicting public schools in various states of crises or danger, harming children, communities, and the country. Blaming groups such as teachers and teacher teachers for a failing public school system, neointellectuals invoke government power, i.e. No Child Left Behind, to “save” children. According to neointellectuals then, the crises and dangers inside U.S. public schools include, but are not limited to:

• A drop out crisis with boys,[45] who are hurt by feminized public school classrooms.[46]
• A drop out crisis in general.[47]
• The terrorist organization known as the NEA.[48]
• Threats from unions in general, who don’t have children’s interests in mind[49] because they are only interested in protecting jobs, limiting accountability and safeguarding their privileges,[50] all of which move public education in an “unsustainable” direction.[51]
• Lazy teachers, who are more interested in job security than performance and who are generally the wrong type of people for the job in the first place.[52]
• Pinko-commie teachers,[53] whose dedication to social justice harms children living in poverty.[54]
• Anti-Judeo, anti-Christian, Paganist teachers who, in addition to sexually corrupting children, regularly work to turn children into spies against their parents.[55]
• Colleges of education, which ignore the nation’s most pressing problems,[56] primarily because “rigorous training in math, science and literacy takes a backseat to theories about victimization and inequality.”[57]
• Wasteful inefficiency, a result of schools extracting as much as possible from taxpayers[58] despite having more money than ever before.[59]
• Rampant, underreported school violence.[60]
• A virulent, anti-American, multicultural curriculum that threatens to break up the cohesiveness of the country.[61]
• A crisis in math.[62]
• A crisis in science.[63]
• A crisis in world history.[64]
• A crisis in social studies.[65]
• Failing middle schools, "where academic achievement goes to die” as a result of a focus on emotional and social development.[66]
• Obsolete high schools, which, in addition to being broken and flawed, cannot teach children, “even when working properly.”[67]
• Activist judges.[68]

Narratives serving to scare citizens into accepting reforms are part of what Frank Furedi calls a politics of fear, defined as the efforts of politicians to “manipulate people’s anxieties in order to realize their objectives.”[69] As Furedi notes, however, it is not just politicians who engage in a politics of fear, as “political elites, public figures, sections of the media and campaigners are directly culpable for using fear to promote their agenda.”[70] Corey Robin extends Furedi’s argument, arguing such figures are necessary because most people “make decisions about what to fear and how [they] respond to fear with the help of trusted intimates and advisors.”[71] Such advisors include parents, friends, and teachers, as well as “more distant mentors” such as neointellectuals who use the media to forward any of the above story lines.

In the case of neointellectuals, fear serves both as a means of frightening citizens into accepting legislation that they might otherwise not accept, or for that matter care about, and as a unifying element for coalition building, connecting individuals and groups who have ideological differences. For example, in their efforts to end public education, neoconservatives who favor strict control of illegal drugs, a merging of church and state, and banning abortion work with neoliberals who may oppose all three. This consensus and unity occurs amongst the policy groups manufacturing the fear, as well as amongst their target audiences, as concerned parents, citizens, and media personalities adopt language and ideas forwarded by neointellectuals, in turn forming alliances which pressure politicians for solutions. Interestingly, importantly, and hopefully, neointellectuals may also serve as motivation for creating coalitions of resistance.

Asking Scholars to Participate in Social Struggles

Who will work to counter the disinformation and the fear mongering of the neointellectual? Will it be philosophers armed with questions and critique? Critical pedagogues armed with class analysis? Post-structural feminists shaking the foundations of the Enlightenment project? It will not be, indeed it cannot be, any of the above if they continue to level their elegant arguments in languages or in spaces that are inaccessible to the vast majority of the stakeholders in public education. Gramsci reminds us of that fact: “The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, “permanent persuader,” and not just a simple orator….”[72]

There are numerous, and often times contradictory, obstacles inherent to higher education which prevent scholars from entering public realms and acting as public intellectuals: these include scholarly duties, unapproachable language, a fetishlike worship of objectivity, various responsibilities toward the academy, the corporatization of the university, and, to a certain extent, postmodern theory.

Brouwer and Squires argue that over time, “pressure to specialize and publish in top journals read only by scholars led to an insularity among scholars, who became more invested in the politics of tenure than in the issues of the people.”[73] While not all professors have ignored “the people” intentionally, Brouwer and Squires remind us that publishing requires the mastery of specific styles of writing, as well as specific jargon, that often results in work unintelligible to the public writ large. Additionally, academic writing tends to be dry and stilted, keeping a tone of “dispassionate objectivity” lest too much emotion color one’s research and/or findings.[74] Because of these requirements

…the modern academic intellectual usually cannot, as earlier generations of intellectuals could and did, pitch his writing at a level that is accessible to a general audience yet does not strike the author’s peers as lacking in rigor….[75]

Even if scholars did alter the tone and pitch of their work in order to make it more accessible (a request I am not making), universities do not currently reward those in search of tenure for publishing in mainstream venues, creating little incentive for busy scholars, burdened by teaching loads and other responsibilities, to write for lay audiences, let alone engaging in strategic and tactical modes of thinking and acting.

Another major factor preventing scholars from being more public, and therefore more political, with their work has been the worship of “pure science,” the pursuit of mythical objectivity and the ultimate shunning of conducting research for political ends. As Michael Burawoy succinctly explains, “the ‘pure science’ position that research must be completely insulated from politics is untenable since antipolitics is no less political than public engagement.”[76] Not only is all research political, all research is value laden (and therefore never objective), as subjective individuals ultimately determine questions, interpret data, and draw conclusions.[77] It is therefore incumbent on those entering public spheres to make their values clear while avoiding the pseudo-science, bias, and manipulation characteristic of neointellectuals.

While postmodern theory has done a great deal to debunk the myth of objectivity, postmodern thought can stand in opposition to academics acting as prophetic pragmatists. On one hand, postmodernist thinkers tend to reject “master narratives” such as the Enlightenment (and its inherent notions of justice, freedom and democracy); on the other, they rarely offer solutions to the various issues they spend so much time critiquing. Postmodernism, while recognizing diverse voices and problematizing totalitarian uses of Enlightenment ideals—achievements to be celebrated—has failed to offer anything for those voices to organize around or act together towards. Richard Rorty correctly laments

…the Foucauldian academic Left in contemporary America is exactly the sort of Left that the oligarchy dreams of: a Left whose members are so busy unmasking the present that they have no time to discuss what laws need to be passed in order to create a better future.[78]

While the “Foucauldian academic Left” remains busy interrogating, neoconservatives and neoliberals work on various projects designed, arguably, to maintain a limited democratic order.

Christine Shea, critiquing the Enlightenment, argues that

…while the Enlightenment dream entered history as a progressive force promising to liberate humankind from ignorance and irrationality, its nightmarish fulfillment in the concentration camps, Hiroshima, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf have obliterated any continuing naïve commitment to its social ideals.[79]

Before post-theorists get too carried away obliterating, Peter McLaren (predating Rorty) offers Shea a poignant rejoinder:

We court disaster unless we realize that totality and universality should not be rejected outright, but only when they are used unjustly and oppressively as global, all-encompassing, and all-embracing warrants for thought and action in order to secure an oppressive regime of truth.[80]

While it is true that certain elements of the Enlightenment have been used oppressively—Marx in Stalin’s hands needs less comment here than America’s current democratic initiatives abroad—progressives must not avoid narratives that might benefit children developing in an evolving world.

Rather than abandoning Enlightenment ideals totally, which would allow neoconservative and neoliberal educational reconstructionists to continue their assault on public education unimpeded, progressive scholars must find ways to use the collective voices identified and legitimated by postmodern theorists in order to build coalitions capable of working against neoconservative/neoliberal change agents. In addition to coalition building, scholars must offer, and work to realize, alternatives to the status quo. The task is halfway completed, as the educational Left is not short on alternatives, counter-narratives, or articulations. Completing the work requires rejecting the postwhatever abandonment of Enlightenment goals and possibilities, as “the Enlightenment, with all its problematic pretensions to universality, continues to ground any progressive politics that intellectuals can imagine.”[81] One such solution is for progressive scholars to act publicly, making their voices heard across various publics and privates, as well as before local, state, and federal legislative bodies.

Border Crossers

Importantly, I am not asking all scholars to act as public intellectuals as that would reek of the same standardization forwarded by neoconservative and neoliberal reformers. Rather, I want to argue for departmental support of scholars with the specific function of acting as public intellectuals, border crossers who take department work and make it known in public, private, and legislative spheres. This requires some translation of scholarly work. John Raulston Saul asserts that “the principal occupation of the academic community is to invent dialects sufficiently hermetic to prevent knowledge from passing between territories.”[82] While Saul raises a valid concern, such hermeticism, I contend, is occasionally necessary to produce and explore multiple physical, intellectual, and spiritual realms. Therefore, I am not asking scholars to abandon such pursuits or to dumb down their work. I am, however, asking them to consider working with public intellectuals so that their work reaches appropriate audiences in languages those audiences can access and understand. The failure of scholars to make their work known, to explain why inquiry, the humanities, interdisciplinary study, and higher education in general are critical to the future of our democracy, has resulted in the under-funding and elimination of university programs that support all four.

Henry Giroux’s work is instructive here. “If the university is to remain a site of critical thinking, collective work, and social struggle,” and therefore wedded to democracy, then

…public intellectuals need to expand its meaning and purpose. That is, they need to define higher education as a resource vital to the moral life of the nation, open to working people and communities whose resources, knowledge, and skills have often been viewed as marginal.[83]

Important to that expansion, arguably, is making those people and communities aware of what resources, skills, and knowledges exist for individual and community growth and development. Again Giroux:

the educator as public intellectual becomes responsible for linking the diverse

experiences that produce knowledge, identities, and social values in the university to the quality of moral and political life in the wider society; and he or she does so by entering into public conversations unafraid of controversy or of taking a critical stand.[84]

Here I would add that this linking must be conducted in spheres accessible to public, private, and legislative bodies using language that various groups can understand and utilize. Burying research in obscure journals read by handfuls of academics undeniably (and importantly) furthers scholarship, but if these ideas are kept for the elite few, they remain foreign both to the public at large and to the legislators purportedly representing those publics, which partially explains how the public could come to see “public” universities as a waste of tax dollars. This isolation only serves to further what Hofstadter called anti-intellectualism in the public writ large, as all of the “intellects” are busy hiding their research away in journals rather than engaging. If John McGowan is to be believed, and “fifteen percent of the population reads eighty-five percent of the books that get read in the United States,” then an undeniably even smaller percentage spends time reading academic journals.[85] Philosopher David Hull concurs, asserting “that publishing a paper is roughly equivalent to throwing it away.”[86] (The irony of spending hours working on this paper is not lost on the author.)

Engaging public, private, and political organizations means scholars will have to enter spaces and venues that they have traditionally shunned, venues the neointellectuals have used to their advantage. Scholars tasked with acting publicly for democratic change should begin disseminating their work in newspapers, magazines, through radio and television interviews, trade books and on-line. This means scholars must refuse to let the results of their work “speak for themselves,” lest those results are ignored or co-opted and used in ways never intended by the researcher.[87] This also means leaving the protected halls of academia and entering multiple venues (such as public schools, clubs, bookstores, local school boards, state boards of education, federal legislative bodies, courts, etc.) to speak, critique, and respond to questions posed by a public that will hopefully grow more engaged through increased participation in passionate and intelligent discourse. Gordon Mitchell points out two additional benefits to increased contact between academics and nonacademic audiences. He argues that grounding political work

…in a rigorous program of scholarly research checks the dogmatic tendencies of activism. In turn, the drift toward academic provincialism in scholarly research is countered by engagement in public spheres of argument with such engagement continuously putting the meaning and significance of academic work in ‘big picture’ context.[88]

Critical pedagogues argue that the world has been made and can therefore be unmade and remade. I believe the same holds true for academia. Scholars who wish to be a part of realizing a more just democracy must not only adapt to the contours of various groups and associations, they must also work to remake the academy, changing it from an isolating institution to one more engaged with various democratic publics and initiatives.[89] Imagining a world where scholars worked as public intellectuals to serve people in the face of corporate or federal power, to expose the lies of governments, and to confront orthodoxy and dogma, I offer a course of action for doing so.

Developing Infrastructure

Infrastructure comprises “the organizations and functions that support a movement which is based on underlying ideologies or principles. Infrastructure organizations are able to advance positions that are consistent with the ideology for a range of public issues.”[90] Progressive scholars, housed in universities nationwide, could in fact create an infrastructure similar to that which supports neointellectuals, using university space and networks to support information gathering and distribution. This network of democratic public school proponents could engage in a number of activities such as:

• articulating underlying ideologies (i.e. outlining what a democratic education might be);
• conducting and distributing research (on teacher attitudes towards standardization, on media treatment of “non-partisan” reports, etc.);
• creating strategies and coordinating activities (such as email campaigns);
• developing model legislation (such as that produced by the neoliberal American Legislative Exchange Council);
• advising legislators, jurists, politicians, school boards, and other advocacy organizations (this might be done by setting up a liaison within departments of education);
• preparing papers, communications, and programs (at a variety of cognitive levels) for a number of media channels;
• recruiting and training new members;
• and identifying sources of funding.[91]

Given the participation of progressive scholars from various departments around the country, completing each of the above tasks would be relatively straightforward. Immediately, every department of education in the country should have a liaison, possibly a graduate student as part of a graduate school requirement, who works directly with local school boards and elected representatives. Rather than leaving research and theory in journals, departments could and should take ideas to policy makers and make a compelling case for why policy should, or should not, be changed.

While teachers, teacher unions, parents, students, and local PTA’s are obvious partners, progressive scholars must also work to build coalitions with groups who do not have anything to do, ostensibly, with public education. Johnson and Salle argue that groups attacked by the Right—unions, environmentalists, trial lawyers, feminists, scientists, the elderly, international organizations, human rights groups, etc.—have multiple incentives to work cooperatively to counter neoconservative and neoliberal activities. Progressive scholars wishing to realize a democratic public education could be identifying, accessing, and utilizing resources (human, time, and fiscal) to bring diverse groups of people together. Furthermore and importantly, obtaining support from the above groups will facilitate pro-democratic school movements across a number of race, class, and cultural divides.

Maintaining alliances and coalitions, coordinating their work, and amplifying their messages requires capital. While Johnson and Salle seem to believe progressive foundations and wealthy individuals are willing to join the effort to democratize public education, progressive scholars will have to identify numerous sources of income to properly counter neointellectuals. This includes the use of the Internet to garner geographically diverse support for their efforts, a type of grass roots funding all but ignored by progressive scholars.

Finally, in terms of building and maintaining infrastructure, Johnson and Salle believe adopting a business-like approach, coordinating activities, being patient, and planning for the long-term will help ensure success. Adopting a business-like approach does not mean trading souls in for dollar signs; it requires strategic thinking, clear objectives, appropriate staffing, and proper resource management. In the university setting this means coordinating amongst individuals or departments in order to focus energy on one goal at a time. For example, foundations departments nationwide could work together to monitor, debunk, and counter the activities of various neointellectuals. Each university department might pick one individual to monitor, and when that person is active in public or political spheres, progressive scholars could work to reveal and undo their doings. The American Federation of Teachers’ response to John Stossel’s hit-piece on public schools is an excellent example of what I call for here, as it debunks his claims line-by-line.[92] While Arizona State University’s “Think Tank Review Project” is a good start, they have failed to market their important work.[93] The result of their scholarship engagement is an archive of detailed reports that few people utilize for anything save more scholarship.

Importantly, the neointellectuals have been framing, pushing, coordinating, and attacking for some time, and progressive scholars have much work to do. While the task appears disheartening and Herculean at first, progressive educational reformers must not become impatient with the organizational steps that need to be taken to effectively counter high capitalism. As Saul Alinksy reminds us, “to build a powerful organization takes time.”[94]

Amplifying the Message

Neointellectuals aggressively market regulation and choice, tailoring both the message and the messengers in order to resonate more deeply with various publics.[95] While progressive reformers do not yet enjoy the same access to the mainstream media as do neointellectuals, reaching specific audiences is still possible, and tailoring messages to suit specific audiences remains a solid strategy for increasing democratic discourse. Towards that end, progressive educational reformers need to develop and forward narratives that actively counter neointellectual propaganda while at the same time disseminating information that informs multiple publics about what Apple calls “the positive effects of more socially and educationally critical alternatives.”[96]

While offering such alternatives is indeed an important move, doing so in a manner that is accessible to multiple publics is also essential, as progressive scholars have the tendency to offer alternatives embedded in syntax that prohibits individuals from understanding and practicing Apple’s “socially and educationally critical alternatives.”

The Educator Roundtable offers a current example of what I call for here. In order to help scholars bridge the gap between academia and various publics, the organization created a network of editors ranging from elementary level special education teachers to retired professors from Harvard to former newspaper publishers who read and critique op/eds. They use an internal listserv to send submissions to this team, who then offer constructive criticism before they distribute (at local, state, and national levels) pieces for publication. At present, the organization has helped scholars and public school teachers publish over a dozen op/eds in publications ranging from the Denver Post to www.townhall.com, a rather conservative outlet. Additionally, the organization is developing programs for television and radio, as well as creating flash animation for the Internet. Importantly, this programming will not just be anti-neoliberal/neoconservative but pro-democracy, using compelling evidence and good storytelling to explain why citizens are better served by one another than by corporate or religious governance. Towards this end, the Educator Roundtable uses services such as Youtube to broadcast its message. Dr. Deron Boyles spoke before 60 people at the organization’s first meeting in March 0f 2007. The Educator Roundtable posted his presentation online, and the audience grew to over 900.[97]

Entering public spheres will require scholars capable of relating to multiple publics. While most scholars working in universities have little difficulty speaking publicly, experience has led me to conclude that few individuals, scholar or not, are truly gifted speakers. However, speaking publicly is a craft that can be perfected, given the time and teachers to do so, and there is no reason why education departments couldn’t extend their programs to include public engagement. Departments might offer classes that help future teachers (or educational policy analysts) with debate skills so they are not run-over by more experienced speakers. Such classes would include topics such as: framing and language, keeping on message, responding to questions, staying on the attack, resisting bullying, remaining calm, and effectively using voice, diction, and nonverbal behaviors in order to enter and win debates on radio and television, arenas few progressive scholars thrive in.[98]

Participating in the growing blogging community will also be essential for claiming public schools as sites for democratic revival. While a great deal of information disseminated online is useless, there are sites that produce and forward information and ideas that are of great value. Sites such as commondreams.org offer venues for progressive reformers to publish short pieces to an audience upwards of 400,000 a day, an audience larger than most, if not all, scholarly journals. Dailykos.com offers an even larger venue for scholars interested in moving publics, as the site receives over 900,000 unique hits a day.

While participating in the blogging community is one matter, establishing a viable presence on the Internet is another, and scholars wedded to democracy through education cannot afford to ignore the medium. The Educational Policy Studies Lab (EPSL) at Arizona State, Gary Ruskin’s Commercial Alert, and the Forum for Education and Democracy are instructive examples of how the web can be used to counter various narratives. EPSL makes all of its work available to anyone wishing to download it. This bypasses the limited audience reached via journals, encouraging multiple publics to access and utilize their work. Think tanks such as AEI, Fordham, and Heritage have been doing this for years, resulting in their work finding its way into multiple corridors. Importantly, the lab houses the Education Policy Research Unit (EPSL) which, in addition to publishing original research, monitors think tank published research, an important part of challenging neoconservative and neoliberal dominance of school reform efforts. Ruskin’s Commercial Alert engages in similar activities. Its “mission is to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy.”[99] In addition to producing research, Commercial Alert uses direct mailings and grassroots activism to check commercial culture. The Forum for Education and Democracy is perhaps the most illustrative example of what I am calling for. Founded by individuals such as Deborah Meier, George Wood, Gloria Ladson-Billings, John Goodlad, Linda Darling-Hammond, et. al, the organization “supports research, publications, and action projects which promote the democratic purpose of public education.”[100] In addition to maintaining a blog and a mailing list which both informs and critiques, the forum provides: downloadable resources such as papers and other publications, links to other activist groups, event and project calendars, and acts as a hub for individuals and organizations wishing to make a difference.

If the educational Left decided to truly engage in a battle of ideas, graduate social foundation’s students might be charged with maintaining a web presence similar to EPSL’s, Commercial Alert’s, or the Forum for Education and Democracy. In addition to disseminating scholarship and reaching out to like-minded individuals and organizations both nationally and globally, websites could be used as databases, hubs for activism, and recruitment centers. Given that thousands of documents have been scrubbed from ERIC,[101] progressive researchers need to establish databases for all research, especially forms of research directly challenging the neoconservative and neoliberal movement to reform public education. Additionally, newspaper articles, magazine stories, and video clips could be stored for later use, as many mainstream media outlets delete online stories after a specified period of time. Finally, web pages can serve as public spheres for cultivating “citizen scholars,” individuals who can write letters in response to media stories (positive and negative) dealing with public education, vouchers, NCLB, etc. These individuals could use their own skills, coupled with ideas provided on a university’s website, to challenge neointellectual pseudo-science and fear mongering.

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Notes

[1] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: The Swallow Press, Inc., 1927), 205-206.

[2] For more on the origins of the term see Jules Chametzky, “Public Intellectuals—Now and Then,” Melus, (Fall-Winter 2004). Accessed 6/12/06 from http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2278/is_3-4_29/ai_n9507929.

[3] Pierre Bourdieu, “The Corporatism of the Universal: The Role of the Intellectuals in the Modern World,” Telos, no. 81 (Fall 1989): 101.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 100.

[6] See Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism In American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 145.

[7] Duncan Campbell, “Chomsky is Voted World’s Top Public Intellectual.” Story archived online at http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1018-02.htm. Last accessed 07/14/07.

[8] Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” in The Dissenting Academy, Theodore Roszak, ed. (New York: Random House, 1967), 256.

[9] Ibid., 255.

[10] Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage, 2006), 11.

[11] Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 205-206.

[12] See Andrew Rich, Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

[13] William E. Simon, A Time for Truth (New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1978). Lewis D. Powell’s internal-memo, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” available from http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=22. Accessed 08/14/06.

[14] Powell, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] See Simon, A Time for Truth, chapter 7.

[20] Ibid., 233.

[21] Ibid., 230.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid., 231

[25] Ibid., 232

[26] Ibid.

[27] See for example “Clear Channel ‘Censors’ Billboard,” People’s Weekly World Newspaper, online at http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/5519/0/. Last accessed 03/16/07. See also “Give it Back Jim,” online at http://www.giveitbackjim.com/main.asp. This is a campaign launched by the democratic congressional candidate Lois Murphey to force Clear Channel to put up a billboard concerning her opponent’s financial ties to Tom Delay and Jack Abramoff. Last accessed 03/17/07. For a lengthy treatment of neoconservative use of media see former Right wing commentator David Brock’s The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004). See also Joe Conason, Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How it Distorts the Truth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003).

[28] See The Alliance for School Choice, “Time/Oprah Winfrey Polls.” Accessed 8/13/06 from http://www.allianceforschoolchoice.org/media_center.aspx?IITypeID=3&IIID=2611

[29] See Jeff Krehely, Meaghan House, and Emily Kernan, Axis of Ideology: Conservative Foundations and Public Policy (D.C.: National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, 2004).

[30] Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

[31] Ibid., 14.

[32] Ibid., 17.

[33] See Frederick Hess, “A helpful user's guide to the 2007 AERA Conference,” Education Gadfly 7, no. 13 (April 2007). Accessed 07/17/07 from http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/gadfly/issue.cfm?edition=&id=285#3332.

[34] See Gerald Bracey, “The 15^th Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education,” Phi Delta Kappan 87, no. 2 (October 2005): 145. Available online at http://www.america-tomorrow.com/bracey/EDDRA/. Accessed 3/17/06.

[35] See David Horowitz, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Professors in America (D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc, 2006).

[36] A Massachusetts Superior Court judge recently ruled Kohn’s First Amendment rights were violated. See The Associated Press, “Judge Says DOE at Fault for Silencing MCAS Critic,” Boston.com, 1 August 2006. Accessed 8/15/06 from http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/08/01/judge_says_doe_at_fault_for_silencing_mcas_critic/.

[37] Dr. Jim Horn has done excellent work tracking the Reading First scandal. For example see “Reading First Finding 1B: Conflicts of Interest. Accessed 07/17/07 from http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/2006/09/reading-first-finding-1b-conflicts-of.html.

[38] See Diane Ravitch, “The Chinese Work Ethic and Other News.” Available online at http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2007/06/the_chinese_work_ethic_and_oth_1.html. Last accessed 07/15/07.

[39] Personal correspondence with the author, June 7, 2007. I wrote Jennings to verify Ravitch’s claim.

[40] See, for example, Frederick M. Hess, “The Predictable, But Unpredictably Personal, Politics of Teacher Licensure,” Journal of Teacher Education 56 no. 3 (May/June 2005): 192-198.

[41] See News from the Committee on Education and the Workforce, “New Report Debunks NEA-MoveOn.org Excuses for Poor School Performance; Proves High Standards are Key to Closing Achievement Gaps in Education.” Available online at http://edworkforce.house.gov/press/press108/second/09sept/nclb090904.htm. Accessed 8/13/06.

[42] See Philip Kovacs and Deron Boyles, “Think Tanks, Institutes, and Foundations: Conservative Influence on U.S. Public Schools,” Public Resistance 1, no. 1 (May 2005). Accessed 6/13/06 from http://www.publicresistance.org/journals/1.1-3Institutes.htm#_edn58. The authors focus on four neoconservative organizations and their attempts to undermine public education with the use of in-house reports.

[43] Ibid. Greene circumvents the peer review process by publishing outside of scientific journals, dubbing his research “working papers.”

[44] Mooney, The Republican War on Science, 32.

[45] See Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, Leaving Boys Behind: Public High School Graduation Rates, Civic Report No. 48, April 2006. Accessed 6/26/06 from http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_48.htm.

[46] See Gerry Garibaldi, “The Feminized American Classroom—And How it Hurts Boys,” The Chicago Sun-Times, 6 August 2006. Accessed 8/13/06 from http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_chicsuntimes-the_feminized_american.htm.

[47] See Jay P. Greene, “There's a Dropout Crisis in Dallas Public Schools,” Dallas News, 3 May 2006. Accessed 8/10/06 from http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-winters_03edi.ART.State.Edition1.3800347.html.

[48] See John King, “Paige Calls NEA ‘Terrorist Organization,’” CNN.com, 23 February 2004. Accessed 8/10/2006 from http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/02/23/paige.terrorist.nea/.

[49] See Frederick M. Hess and Martin R. West, “Taking on the Teachers Unions,” AEI Publications, 29 March 2006. Accessed 8/13/06 from http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.24132,filter.all/pub_detail.asp.

[50] See Frederick M. Hess and Martin R. West, “Time to Take on Teachers Union,” AEI Publications, 5 April 2006. Accessed 8/10/06 from

http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.24165,filter.all/pub_detail.asp.

[51] See Howard Fuller and George A. Mitchell, “A Culture of Complaint,” Education Next (Summer 2006). Accessed 8/15/06 from http://www.educationnext.org/20063/18.html.

[52] See Terry M. Moe, “Politics, Control, and the Future of School Accountability,” in No Child Left Behind? The Politics and Practice of School Accountability, ed. Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West (Washington: Brookings, 2003), 84.

[53] See Sol Stern, “Pinko Teachers Inc.,” New York Post, 12 March 2006. Accessed 8/13/06 from http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_nypost_pinko_teachers_inc.htm.

[54] See Sol Stern, “The Ed Schools’ Latest—and Worst—Humbug,” City Journal, (Summer 2006). Accessed 8/10/06 from http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_ed_school.html.

[55] See Joel Turtel, Public Schools, Public Menace: How Public Schools Lie To Parents and Betray Our Children (New York: Liberty Books, 2004-2005), Chapter 2.

[56] See Kate Walsh, “Fwd: Teacher Education: Coming Up Empty,” Ed Excellence, 16 March 2006. Accessed 8/10/06 from http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/publication/publication.cfm?id=353.

[57] See Sol Stern, “When Activism Masquerades as Education,” New York Daily News, 21 July 2006. Accessed 8/10/2006 from http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/story/436703p-367945c.html.

[58] See John T. Wenders, "Pork Barrel Education," Cato.org, 16 August 2005. Accessed 8/13/2006 from http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4210.

[59] See for example Krista Kafer, “The Promise of No Child Left Behind.” Testimony Before the House Budget Committee Democratic Caucus Senate Democratic Policy Committee. Available online at www.heritage.org/Research/Education/tst071703.cfm. Last accessed 11/9/04.

[60] See Neal McCluskey, "Violence in Public Schools: A Dirty Secret," School Reform News, 1 May 2005. Accessed 8/13/06 from http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=17123.

[61] See Gregory Rodrigues, “Why Multiculturalism Should Scare You,” Los Angeles Times, 18 January 2006, M5.

[62] See David Klein, et. al, The State of State Math Standards (D.C.: The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2005). Accessed 8/13/06 from http://www.edexcellence.net/institute/publication/publication.cfm?id=338&pubsubid=1116.

[63] See Paul R. Gross, Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Michael J. Petrilli, Less Than Proficient (D.C.: The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2005). Accessed 8/13/06 from

http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/publication/publication.cfm?id=350.

[64] See “In State Academic Standards, World History Gets Lost in Translation,” 6 June 2006. Press Release accessed 8/13/06 from http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/about/press_release.cfm?id=26.

[65] See Chester E. Finn Jr., “The Social Studies Wars,” The Daily Report, 12 May 2003. Accessed 8/13/06 from http://www.hoover.org/pubaffairs/we/2003/finn05.html.

[66] See Cheri Pierson Yecke and Chester E. Finn, Jr., Mayhem in the Middle: How Middle Schools Have Failed America, and How to Make Them Work (D.C.: The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2005). Accessed 8/20/06 from

http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/publication/publication.cfm?id=345.

[67] See Bill Gates, “Prepared Remarks for the National Education Summit on High Schools,” 26 February 2005. Accessed 8/08/06 from

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/MediaCenter/Speeches/BillgSpeeches/BGSpeechNGA-050226.htm.

[68] See Frederick M. Hess, “When Unaccountable Courts Meet Dysfunctional Schools,” The American Enterprise, (July-August 2006). Accessed 8/15/06 from http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.24573,filter.all/pub_detail.asp.

[69] Frank Furedi, The Politics of Fear (London: Continuum, 2005), 88.

[70] Ibid.

[71] Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 173.

[72] Antonio Gramsci discussing “new” intellectualism. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, trans. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 10.

[73] Brouwer and Squires, “Public Intellectuals, Public Life, and the University,” 205.

[74] See Joy James, “Academia, Activism, and Imprisoned Intellectuals,” Social Justice 30, no. 2 (2003): 5.

[75] Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 53.

[76] Michael Burawoy, “Public Sociologies: Contradictions, Dilemmas, and Possibilities,” Social Forces 82, no. 4 (June 2004): 1605.

[77] For more on this topic see Margaret D. LeCompte, “Some Notes on Power, Agenda and Voice: A Researcher’s Personal Evolution toward Critical Research,” in Critical Theory and Educational Research, Eds. Peter L McLaren and James M. Giarelli (New York: SUNY Press, 1995).

[78] Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Though in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 139.

[79] Christine M. Shea, “Critical and Constructive Postmodernism: The Transformative Power of Holistic Education,” in Critical Social Issues in American Education: Transformation in a Postmodern World, 2^nd ed., H. Svi Shapiro, David E. Purple ed. (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998), 338.

[80] Peter L. McLaren and James M. Giarelli, “Introduction,” in Critical Theory and Educational Research, ed. Peter L McLaren and James M. Giarelli (New York: SUNY Press, 1995), 9.

[81] John Michael, Anxious Intellectuals (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 10.

[82] John Ralston Saul, The Doubters Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense (Toronto: Viking, 1994), 301.

[83] Henry A. Giroux, “Public Intellectuals and the Politics of Education,” Revista Praxis 1, (May 2002): 5-6. Accessed 6/18/06 from http://www.revistapraxis.cl/ediciones/numero1/giroux_praxis_1.htm.

[84] Ibid., 9.

[85] John McGowan, Democracy’s Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 79.

[86] David L. Hull, “The Social Responsibility of Professional Societies,” Metaphilosophy 33, no. 5 (October 2002): 554.

[87] For more on this point see Cathleen Burnett, “Passion Through the Profession: Being Both Activist and Academic,” Social Justice 30, no. 4 (2003): 141.

[88] Gordon R Mitchell, “Public Argument, Action Research and the Learning Curve of New Social Movements,” Argumentation and Advocacy 40, (Spring 2004): 222.

[89] For more on this point see Ellen Earle Chaffee, “Listening to the People We Serve” and Kent M. Keith “The Responsive University in the Twenty-first Century,” in The Responsive University: Restructuring High Performance, ed. William G. Tierney (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Beyond the Corporate University, ed. Henry Giroux and Kostas Myrsiades (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); and Frank Newman, Lara Couturier, and Jamie Scurry, The Future of Higher Education: Rhetoric, Reality, and the Risks of the Market (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), Chapter 12.

[90] David Johnson and Leonard Salle. Responding to the Attack on Public Education and Teacher Unions (Menlo Park: Commonweal Institute, 2004), 44. Pdf accessed

07/23/07 from http://commonwealinstitute.org/reports/ed/EdRespondReport.html. Missing from their work is any discussion of universities.

[91] Ibid.

[92] See The American Federation of Teachers, Stupid On ABC: The John Stossel Agenda (D.C.: The American Federation of Teachers, 2006). Accessed 06/18/06 from http://www.aft.org/presscenter/downloads/sidebyside.pdf.

[93] For more on this important project see http://epsl.asu.edu/epru/epru_2007_thinktankreview.htm.

[94] Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1971), xx.

[95] See Kovacs, “The Anti-School Movement.”

[96] Michael Apple, “Making Critical Pedagogy Strategic—On Doing Critical Educational Work in Conservative Times,” in Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today: Toward a New Critical Language in Education, I. Gur-Ze’ev, ed. (Haifa: University of Haifa Press), 102. Available from http://construct.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/critical-pedagogy-critical-theory-today.pdf#search=%22making%20critical%20pedagogy%20strategic%22.

[97] See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCsu9xwAZJo.

[98] Johnson and Salle, “Responding to the Attack,” 55.

[99] See Commercial Alert’s homepage at http://www.commercialalert.org/.

[100] See the Forum for Education and Democracy’s homepage at http://www.forumforeducation.org/.

[101] See Joe L. Kincheloe, Right-Wing Politics of Knowledge,” in What You Don’t Know About Schools, ed. Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 440-42.

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Author's Details

Dr. Philip Kovacs is Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Alabama, USA, Huntsville AL 35899, 678-612-9242

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Correspondence

kovacs@uah.edu

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