Peter McLaren on Academic Repression

Noted critical theorist, Dr. Peter McLaren, discusses the issues surrounding the demise of academic freedom and the rise of academic repression.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Academic Repression
• academic freedom
• Peter McLaren
• UCLA
• Life in Schools
• Activism
• Steven Best
• Bill Ayres
• Howard Zinn

[easepleaseme]

The paradox for many universities is that if they refuse corporate funding, public funding won't take up the slack - the governments are scared of the potential threat of the likes of critical theory. The problem therefore is that these costs will be passed onto the student body, making education unattainable - albeit for the elite. I consider this a travesty- very sad indeed.

[tommiewilde]

If faculty members are serious about stopping academic repression, they stop participating in it at their own universities, where they can do something about it directly, if they choose to. (Historically they too rarely have, which largely explains why it persists.) It's always easy to bark ferociously at this evil when it's safely confined to another university; it's when it enters one's own university and the barker falls silent that we're all offered a crucial lesson: UCLA Weeding 101

[tommiewilde]

You can dress up in your "radical" costume and read from the prescribed "radical" script, but you can't say or do a thing that threatens your own corporate master. Accordingly, UCLA and its own "radical" prop here offer students and the public a crucial object lesson on how the so-called radical serves his master to maintain his and his master's self-manufactured façades: UCLA Weeding 101

[tommiewilde]

Accordingly, too, it should be readily apparent to all (except the 'highly educated' and the institution's own highly-paid 'harshest critics') that a system maintaining a Glenn Beck must also maintain a precisely equal counterbalance.