The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex

Henry A. Giroux
Paradigm Publishers (2007)
Reviewed by Anthony J. Nocella, II
SUNY Cortland

Henry Giroux’s ground-breaking and timeless entry, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, could be the single reason why “higher” education might be saved from the hands of corporatization and militarization. Giroux, a leading figure in education, media studies, cultural studies, and critical theory, begins the book with one of the most profound questions I have ever come across. “What is the task of educators at a time when the forces of democracy appear to be in retreat and the emerging ideologies and practices of militarization, corporatism, and political fundamentalism bear down on every aspect of individual and collective experience” (p. 1)? Is it our task as educators to roll-over and allow military and corporate influence to rule academia with no regulation or limits in sight? If so we are doomed to see departments of critical thought marginalized, if not closed down, with faculty forced to refocus their intellectual interests or to simply find a new job.

Further, as Giroux explains, we are already seeing education, which is the most important tool for freedom and democracy, become increasingly difficult to afford. If one decides to attend college they are forced into debt for most, if not all, of their life. Education is at risk of becoming entirely a privilege for the financial elite to be educated not on issues of freedom, peace, and citizenship, but profit, control, and domination; not to run businesses, but countries as corporations who are backed by the military.

The first chapter, Arming the Academy, discusses how in this corporatized society campuses are putting profit as a priority and becoming increasingly militarized. With funding coming directly from the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and intelligence agencies, we are signing over our syllabi of critical thinking for a commitment of educating on “… war, violence, fear, surveillance, and the erosion of civic society more generally” (p. 22). By proclaiming that everything done there is in the name of education, academia has become the ultimate training ground and method of developing legitimacy for future warlords to carry out the protection of capitalism and corporatization.

While we do not see the affects of this in our classrooms yet, when the war is over and with the economy in a heap of trouble, we will see our military and mid-level management going back to college not for education, but for skills to enter the workforce in order to make money. This will be possible because the tenure-track positions are very strategically being given to non-academics such as CEOs of fallen banks and former military and government leaders such as Condoleezza Rice. This, along with the now common hiring of adjuncts instead of full-time tenured faculty, is weakening the protection of critical thinking. By demanding more full-time positions, not only the faculty is protected, but so are the fundamental principles of academia. Critical thinking scholars must understand that the fight is not between tenured and adjuncts, but between protecting intellectual freedom from this capitalist corporatization and militarization of campuses.

University in Chains provides crucial insights and an antidote to the state of universities today that those concerned with human rights, anti-war, critical pedagogy, and freedom of critical thought in higher education will find of great value. Giroux’s brilliant design of the book, from the development of corporate universities to the relationship between military and academia, ends not in hopelessness, but in a call to break the chains of these dominating industrial complexes, and to proclaim that the protection of academia is the most important battle that students, faculty, and staff must unite together to fight for!