[Photo:” Students being arrested in the United States for protesting against Israel’s genocide on Palestinians. Photo: X/@ShayoniMitra.
“via the Orinco Tribute]

By: Henry A. Giroux
Source: Counterpunch

We live in an age of increased disasters and encroaching fascism. This is a historical moment marked by a systemic attempt by an emerging authoritarianism to disable language and dissent of any substantive meaning, remove actions from the grammar of moral witnessing, and disassociate power from institutional justice. As all levels of society are hollowed out, notions of democratic community, the social contract, and compassion give way to a politics in which all matters of responsibility are individualized, privatized, and removed from broader systemic considerations. The habits of oligarchy are animated by fear and reproduced through relentless attacks on human possibilities, while “the disorder of real history is replaced by the orderliness of pseudo-history.”[1] In a time of widespread suffering and unrest, higher education is feared for its critical functions, and students are expected to be silent, unresponsive to wider social issues, and ignore the relationship between the dynamics of power, marginality, and knowledge.  Amid the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the carceral state, faculty, and students are expected to look away or inward, unresponsive to the language of imagined futures.

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