Educators as public intellectuals and the challenge of fascism

Educators across the globe should be looking carefully at the United States’ slide into the abyss of authoritarianism. There is a cost to ignoring how authoritarianism attacks political and social rights, undermines public spheres, and disparages democracy itself. The signals are obvious, especially under the rule of politicians such as GOP Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. As a presidential aspirant, he is pursuing a hard-right agenda in his state, one which he allegedly believes serves as a model for the rest of America. His authoritarian agenda is evident in his banning of books, removal of dictionaries from some libraries, use of state power to dictate school curricula, and his abuse of political power to punish corporations such as Disney that disagree with his attack on LGBTQ people. His unmitigated authoritarianism is also evident in his embrace of white supremacist and antisemitic ideas, his aligning with Fox News and other hate-spreading media to push his authoritarian racist ideology, including his attacks on gender nonconformity and the teaching of African American history. All of these actions are warning signs of a history about to be repeated.

At the current moment, it would be wise for educators to heed the words of Holocaust survivor and brilliant writer Primo Levi who argued in his book, In The Black Hole of Auschwitz, that “Every age has its own fascism.” In his book, The Voice of Memory, Levi elaborates on what he considered the elemental features of fascism. He wrote:

There is only one Truth, proclaimed from above; the newspapers are all alike, they all repeat the same one Truth. …As for books, only those that please the state are published and translated. You must seek any others on the outside and introduce them into your country at your own risk because they are considered more dangerous than drugs and explosives…Books not in favour… are burned in public bonfires in town squares….In an authoritarian state it is considered permissible to alter the truth; to rewrite history retrospectively; to distort the news, suppress, the true, add the false. Propaganda is substituted for information. ¹

Levi’s words remind us of the importance of education as a critical counterweight to the current language of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It is an urgent call to prevent history from being erased or frozen within the boundaries of a reactionary present; it should remind educators of their obligation to teach young people about the necessity of not allowing the horrors of the past to be forgotten. It is also a call to the public to defend and support educators—who keep alive the notion of schools as crucial democratic public spheres—in their efforts to teach students how to think critically, empathize with others, embrace the obligations of moral witnessing, and connect knowledge to the power of self-reflection. It is a call for an education that disturbs, inspires, and is capable of teaching students how to critically analyze “the root causes of injustice and the impact of other systems of oppression.” ²

The role of educators as public intellectuals has never been more important, especially at a time when they are under attack across the globe by far-right radicals, intent on turning them into agents of indoctrination, bigotry, and propaganda. Part of this challenge is to create a new language and mass social movement that work to construct empowering terrains of education, politics, justice, culture, and power that challenge existing systems of white supremacy, white nationalism, manufactured ignorance, and economic oppression.

Education has always been the substance of politics, but it is rarely understood as a site of struggle over agency, identities, values, and the future itself. Education should be a practice of freedom that embraces democratic values and its role as a public good. Unfortunately, it can also be a force for domination. A clear instance of education as a practice of repression is America’s gradual alignment with an updated fascist politics in which thinking becomes dangerous, language is emptied out of any substance, a culture of questioning is denounced, teachers are harassed, and institutions that serve the public good begin to disappear. One typical example will suffice. The American Civil Liberties Union reports that in Idaho, faculty in public universities can be fined and/or put in jail for teaching or engaging in a discussion about abortion. This is more than an attack on academic freedom, it is an attempt to turn the state’s public universities into indoctrination centers for the far right. According to the ACLU:

At Idaho’s public universities, professors who teach, discuss, or write about abortion may now face up to 14 years of imprisonment under Idaho’s abortion censorship law, the No Public Funds for Abortion Act (NPFAA). The law, which prohibits the use of any public funds to “promote” or “counsel in favor of abortion,” has shut down academic inquiry about abortion—one of today’s most urgent social, moral, and political issues—across university classrooms and campuses in the state. Idaho’s abortion censorship law works in tandem with anti-abortion officials’ aggressive enforcement of the state’s abortion laws—among the harshest in the country—to silence speech advocating for abortion access. To avoid jail time as well as ruinous fines and other penalties, professors across academic disciplines have been forced to strip abortion-related content from their curricula, instruction, and scholarship or risk their livelihoods. ³

If the civic fabric and the democratic political culture that sustains democracy are to survive, education must once again be linked to matters of social justice, equity, human rights, history, and the public good. We have along legacy of critical theorists, extending from Antonio Gramsci and John Dewey to Raymond Williams and Edward Said calling for educators to lift their ideas into the public domain, address crucial social issues, encourage human agency, and recognize that the world can be different from how it is portrayed within an authoritarian world view that poses a dire threat to democracy. The great sociologist, C. W. Mills, has a great deal to teach educators about what it means to make education central to politics and to understand culture as an important terrain for social change. In what follows, I want to initially draw upon his work to further address the urgent need for educator to take on the role of public intellectuals in a time of crisis.

In his landmark book The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills argues that social scientists (and educators) have an obligation to address the question of truth and its political meaning during a time of widely communicated nonsense and lies. He further argues that in addition to a politics of truth, social scientists have to support the values of reason and human freedom. He also believed that the role of social scientists was to disturb, bear witness, and to resist systems of oppression. In this view, intellectuals must have a deep sense of commitment and civic courage while “writing with vigor and clarity for the general reader [in order] to sustain idea and the hope of a public culture.” ⁴ These principles, in the age of emerging fascism, are under attack by a horde of anti-public intellectuals and far-right members of the GOP. For Mills, politics, truth, reason, and freedom are central and mutually informing principles guiding the work of public intellectuals. Mills, like Noam Chomsky, Vaclav Havel, bell hooks, Angela Davis and others believed that the role of intellectuals should be to confront important social problems, make power works accountable, address culture as a force for both domination and empowerment, and recognize that everyday life has a politics. In the current historical moment, being a public intellectual is about more than telling the truth and exposing lies, it is also about changing public consciousness as the basis for collective resistance. In this scenario, everyday politics matters. Such a politics must not only speak truth to power but also create the pedagogical conditions that enable people to understand the world in critical and imaginative ways, create social movements, and develop pedagogical approaches to challenge social and economic injustices. Central to such a task was the intellectual’s role in translating private or personal troubles into broader structural, systemic and social issues.

Mills rejected both the notion of the objective or disembodied intellectual, as well as a strangulating notion of indoctrination. In response to the right-wing view that educators should not be political, or that education was not a site of political struggle, he posited that considerations of values, power, and considered judgment cannot be removed from education, and hence were always present in any educational practice. The claims to neutrality and the regressive alleged notions of a “patriotic education” proffered by the far right serve a cover for a white supremacist pedagogy of dogmatism, indoctrination, and repression. Taking sides, viewing education as a public good, and educating young people to develop a historical consciousness, challenge systemic racism, and educating young people to be informed critical citizens are dismissed by the far-right as a form of government indoctrination, especially among groups such as Moms for Liberty, named as a terrorist organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center. ⁵ The irony here is hard to miss, as fascist politicians such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are whitwashing history, waging war on trans-people, and turning schools into white nationalist indoctrination factories. Mills, in his own time recognized that such threats are not only waged against education as a democratic public sphere, but against democracy itself. In response to the far-right denigration of “woke” and the charge that critical education is a naïve and indoctrinating left-wing call to “save the world,” Mills’s words are still relevant. He writes:

I do not believe that social science will 'save the world' although I see nothing at all wrong with 'trying to save the -world'—a phrase which I take here to mean the avoidance of war and the re-arrangement of human affairs in accordance with the ideals of human freedom and reason. Such knowledge as I have leads me to embrace rather pessimistic estimates of the chances. But even if that is where we now stand, still we must ask: if there are any ways out of the crises of our period by means of intellect, is it not up to the educators to state them? ⁶

Defending the role of the intellectual has a long history extending from W. E. B. Dubois and James Baldwin to Toni Morrison and Stuart Hall, among others. Each of these figures have argued that public intellectuals may not have all the answers, but that they can critically frame crucial questions about social issues and refuse to be silent in times of tyranny. This tradition is persistent in centering education as intimately tied to politics. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, public intellectuals believe that “the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical and lie on the side of belief and persuasion.” ⁷ As such, educators and other intellectuals bear an enormous responsibility for providing a critical language capable of both making sense of the unthinkable and challenging diverse forms of domination, while also providing a vocabulary of possibility and educated hope in the search for a more humane future. As Angela Davis notes, generating a new language to address the changing contexts and problems of our time necessitates the generation of “new vocabularies and new theoretical strategies that might propel scholars, artists, advocates, and organizers toward bolder critical engagement with prevailing ideologies” of education, justice, equality, and power. ⁸

As Michael Peters observes, the conditions that both gave rise to and enable the work of public intellectuals date back to the Enlightenment. Bolstered by liberal notions of freedom of expression, the protections of a legal apparatuses, the rise of book culture, the proliferation of libraries, and the emergence of a reading public, the necessary conditions emerged for the public intellectual to address a wide variety of readers in the public realm. ⁹ What is both crucial and theoretically innovative in Peters’ work is the recognition that the social and political formations that constitute a public have changed dramatically in contemporary times. That is, the cultural apparatuses of print and visual culture have given way to an information age marked by the proliferation of electronic media and online platforms that have a global reach. Put differently, the public intellectual is insert now confronted by a technology that is globally expansive, amplifies an image-based culture, and generates wide-reaching markets. The new digital and media technologies now shape an environment not only marked by “viral technologies,” but also by a landscape that is as conducive to a pedagogy of hatred as it is to pedagogies of critique, hope, and democratic values. ¹⁰ The landscape of education is no longer dominated by traditional institutions of schooling or mainstream media, it is now largely shaped by the social media. These new social and educational formations not only rewrite the relations of culture and power but are central to shaping politics. This proliferation of spaces of communication has in many ways made emancipatory pedagogical formations more subject to attacks by the far-right because they make visible the ideologies and social formations that have produced an upgraded notion of fascist politics.

It is crucial for those who aspire to be public intellectuals to acknowledge that with shifting notions of education, academics have an enormous responsibility in rethinking about the changing nature of pedagogy and the sites in which it takes place. To whom the intellectual speaks and the sites in which conditions exist for their voices to be heard demand a new understanding of what it means to be a public intellectual, to reimagine new sites of struggle, and to envision a rethinking of politics itself. Any viable role for the public intellectual has to begin with the task of making power visible, making social problems understandable, and of speaking to diverse audiences in a discourse that allows them to recognize themselves. Intellectuals in the current moment need to forge new weapons in order to engage in “the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle.” ¹¹

Crucial here is the recognition, considered dangerous to the far-right, that a substantive democracy cannot exist without genuinely critical and informed individuals, and the institutions that educate them. Under such circumstances, higher education must play a central role in protecting the ideals of a critical democracy, its potential agents, and the knowledge, social relations and values that insist it has an important role to play in times of crisis, war, emerging fascism, ecological destruction, and the weakening of civic institutions. At the same time, educators must expose the far-right’s view of education as an exercise in training and the spread of indoctrination. The latter is a particularly dangerous ideology that is increasingly becoming normalized in the United States, and it legitimates a society organized around appeals to manufactured ignorance, racism, class domination, and organized violence.

Educators must face several central questions, emerging from the rich tradition of public intellectuals, in the current moment of organized irresponsibility and fascist politics. What is the role of educators in a time of tyranny, in a society rife with oppression? What is the relationship between our role as educators and democracy? How do we address education as a political project in which learning is central to creating informed citizens and catalyzing social change? How might educators join with others in and out of academia to form a social movement in defense of public goods while also becoming part of a broader international movement? Educators as public intellectuals have an obligation to help a larger public “understand how power works in our time, how it can be made a valuable tool of collective struggle, and how it can be used in the interest of democratic social change.

Educators have a responsibility to embrace a vision and language that enables them to both defend learning as a tool of social change and to struggle for those crucial public spheres that provide the modes of critical literacy and opportunities for people to think and act in an imaginative way. Educators must develop a new language and vision regarding theory, politics, power, agency, and the future. They need a theoretical language that makes education central to politics, fosters critical thinking, and addresses the role of culture, consciousness, and memory as terrains in which agency and politics can be reimagined as part of a broader project of ethical, political, and social changes. Such a language should be comprehensive and able to bring diverse issues together as part of a larger totalizing understanding of how societies develop, define themselves, and bear down on both everyday life and the larger world. Central to this task is the important role that educators might play as public intellectuals by speaking in a rigorous and accessible language to multiple audiences and connecting what Mills called elements of the individual, social, historical, and political imagination, that is, the sociological imagination. Assuming the role of engaged public intellectual, educators, students, artists and other cultural workers face the challenge of believing that their work matters and that they can produce knowledge that that is politically driven, critical, and opens up new analytical horizons. In addition, it is crucial for activists to lift such knowledge into the public realm, making it understandable and meaningful in order for people to recognize themselves in a way that speaks critically to the conditions that shape their lives. As Stuart Hall has observed, changing consciousness and rupturing common sense assumptions can only take place within what he calls a politics of identification. He writes:

There's no politics without identification. People have to invest something of themselves, something that they recognize is of them or speaks to their condition, and without that moment of recognition . . . politics will go on, but you won't have a political movement without that moment of identification. ¹²

Educators also need to develop a language and mode of criticism that dissolves the assumption that capitalism and democracy are synonymous, that the market is the template for all social relations that all problems are individual in nature, and that economic and political actions can be divorced from social costs and ethical responsibilities. The language of social change cannot be frozen within the discourse of an alleged reformed capitalism. Capitalism cannot be reformed because it is incapable of addressing the major social problems it creates--including massive inequalities in wealth and power and environmental destructruction. Neoliberal capitalism must be replaced by a sustainable form of democratic socialism. At the same time, educators should be on the forefront of acknowledging that socialism cannot be implemented simply by changing economic policies. Such change requires a new kind of critical agent, a new script for mobilizing desire, and a change of consciousness. Matters of agency, creativity, compassion, and community must be embraced as part of a radical restructuring of the subject and the grounds for creating a mass movement of resistance and a more just world.

Educators bear enormous obligation as public intellectuals to sustain and expand the values, knowledge, modes of thinking crucial to bringing democratic political culture back to life while reimagining the project of human emancipation itself. Central to such a project is the need for critical educators to protect the conditions of their own labor. In part this means protecting the tenure process, exercising collective control over how power is wielded in the academy, with respect to issues of academic freedom, and a democratizing vision of higher education as a public good. Such a task also means eliminating the inequities that have resulted in the ballooning of part time positions and the casualization of academic positions for most educators in higher education. These problems cannot be solved by simply focusing on forms of economic domination or the policies enacted by far-right politicians.

Critical educators must also focus on how culture as a mode of education produces iniquitous differences among disciplines, bodies of knowledge, identities, and visions of the future. Culture along with education is a central element of politics and is always connected to power and the making of meaning and practices which give significance to both individual identities and how individuals relate to others and the larger world. Educators must work within higher education to create counter-public spheres that affirm thinking as an act of resistance, spaces that promote a culture of questioning, and opportunities for marginalized groups to speak, be heard, and exercise power. As citizen educators, they need to help people become informed, active, creative, and socially responsible members of society and the larger world. They have a responsibility to educate people to be not only knowledgeable and critically informed, but to also be compassionate and caring, refusing to allow the spark of justice to die in themselves and within larger society.

Educators must take active responsibility for raising fundamental questions about the knowledge they produce, how that knowledge gets circulated, and how it is ethically and politically related to broader notions of social change. This means playing a role in shaping the purposes and conditions of matters of agency, consciousness, action, and social relations. The role of educators as critical public intellectuals is a huge undertaking, one that calls on them to look at their work as a political, civic, and ethical practice that combines critical reflection and action as part of a struggle to overcome economic, political, and social injustices. This work cannot be done alone; educators must join with workers, social movements, youth groups, and unions in their fight against the terrorism wrought by neoliberal fascism. The call for educators to engage in collective resistance is especially crucial at a time when white supremacy is on the rise and power is being played out in the merging of racism and a widespread attack on education as a public good. Making the pedagogical more political speaks to modes of resistance that make visible and challenge anti-democratic ideologies and repressive “habits of thought,” reinforced through habits of power at work in both schools and the wider culture. Fascist politics and its goal of racial cleansing, reinforced through an attack on historical consciousness and book banning, must be recognized as a form of tyranny that poses a threat not just to equality but the very possibility of democracy. ¹³

As fascism expands across the globe, and extremism is normalized in a number of countries extending from Hungary and Poland to Italy and the United States, the crisis of politics must be matched by a crisis of ideas. That is, the changing contexts in which new problems emerge must be addressed through a language, theories, and analyses attentive to new historical formations, problems, and challenges. Moreover, if the Left is to become both an educational and political force, it must merge the movement for economic and social justice with a formative culture and educational project that places matters of morality, justice, compassion, care, and civic courage above a predatory neoliberal capitalism that is destroying the planet and ushering in a new age of fascist barbarism. Educators need to think on the edge of possibilities, develop an anti-capitalist vision, and learn how to make social change meaningful and just. These changes must highlight power relations, providing people with a sense of dignity and with access to crucial social support. The urgency of this task demands that educators unite in order to face the challenges that now threaten to destroy humanity. Under such circumstances, resistance is no longer an option, but a necessity.