Re: Dear Keith Windschuttle

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Dear Keith,
>
> Just read your piece on Chomsky.
>
> http://www.cis.org.au/Policy/winter03/polwin03-6.htm
>
> Nice work.  Love the bit where you denounce him for spending 'most of his 
> adult life... in the critique of other intellectuals'.  Such a contrast to 
> what you've had to do in recent years.

Speaking of rude attacks on worthy people by rightwing yahoos, here's 
something on Marxmail subscriber Peter McLaren and fellow radical educator 
Henry Giroux in the Hoover Institution journal. 
http://www.educationnext.org/20034/77.html. The reviewer seems perturbed by 
the accusation that their views on education are inseparable from a 
critique of capitalism. He must not be aware of developments such as these:

NY Times, Sept. 6, 2003
The Academic Industrial Complex
By FELICIA R. LEE

At the University of Illinois, more than 1,000 classes on hundreds of 
subjects were canceled during the last academic year because of severe 
budget cuts. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, meanwhile, is 
getting $25 million worth of money and materials from Microsoft as part of 
a five year-partnership with the company to develop educational technologies.

The combination of sometimes desperate financial need and innovative ways 
to make money is a hallmark of a new era in the relationship between 
corporate culture and higher education. In articles, symposiums and a host 
of new books, scholars and educators have been warning that the traditional 
mission and standards of the university are at risk of being compromised by 
increasing commercialization.

Financial pressures, of course, have always existed. But a series of 
developments over the last 20 years or so ? a university's ability to 
patent and license scientific discoveries, the Internet's potential to 
market ideas, and a competitive cultural ethos that relies more and more on 
rankings in many fields of endeavor, including college admissions ? are 
creating new ethical quandaries. At the same time, government financing for 
college is decreasing, and tuition covers only a portion of the rising 
cost, which goes up about 6 percent a year. The university, critics warn, 
is in danger of selling its soul.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/06/arts/06UNIV.html




Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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