Another obstacle to quality teaching and research lies in the fact that the increasing loss of public funding is pushing more universities to align themselves with the national security state, which then faithfully rewards them with billions of dollars in research funds largely dedicated to militarizing knowledge and providing the deadly weapons needed by an ever-expanding warfare state. As a result, faculty find themselves locked into an academic world dominated by military and corporate values, engaging in pedagogical practices that more closely approximate training students than educating them, and being rewarded less for their scholarship and teaching than for their ability to secure outside funding. In this instance, there is an ongoing transformation among faculty in which they become deskilled as intellectuals, reduced to the status of academic entrepreneurs and functioning as unquestioning employees of the military-industrial-academic complex.
A colleague of mine argued that political scientists are doing the equivalent of looking for the keys they lost in the woods under the streetlight, because the light is better there. Having visited Detroit over the holidays I can say that he’s right when it comes to the study of black politics. What jumps out at me about the passage above is the critical distinction Giroux makes between training and educating. The entire interview can be found here.
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