'Media Matters' host Robert McChesney:
Our guest today, Noam
Chomsky, joining us on the phones for the full hour.
Noam Chomsky, I
think, needs no introduction. He's a linguist, author, political writer.
And it is a great honor to have you join us today, Noam.
NC - Yep. Glad to be with you.
RM - Let's go to line four, Hawaii, you're on the air with Noam Chomsky.
Caller - Well hello! It's a real pleasure to have a chance to talk with you two gentlemen, and I much appreciate your respective works. And perhaps a unifying theme of both of your works are calls for greater equity in the various institutions of our society. And as such, my question is concerning the current state of higher education. And I'm sorry, I'm taking a bit of a turn to the domestic from the international.
RM - That's quite all right.
RM - Right on. Nonetheless, the current state of, say, young people obtaining a humanities degree with economic considerations, or perhaps exploits, whatever; but landing themselves $50,000 in debt or their parents, or $80,000 in debt, what have you. And I guess my question is: Does Professor Chomsky consider higher education, undergraduate studies, maybe particularly, but in general, does he see that as engendering greater equity in society or lesser? And does he have any observations of some possible reforms to our current system of higher education?
NC - Well, let's take the question of debt, which you mentioned, which is extremely serious. Total debt of college students is huge. It's a massive sum. And we should recall, as I think you probably hinted, that debt is essentially a disciplinary device. If a student leaves college with a heavy debt, they're trapped. They're going to be compelled to move into a career which will help them escape the debt. So, for example, maybe some kid goes to law school because he wants to be a public interest lawyer, from which you make essentially nothing. But if he comes out of law school with a huge debt, he's more or less compelled. He or she is more or less compelled to go into corporate law. And once you get caught up in that system, you easily get absorbed into it. You begin to pick up the values and you're essentially trapped. And it's the same in other cases.
Now, if we look back, there are two questions that will be asked about the debt. First, is it economically necessary? Second, how did it come about? Well, is it economically necessary? Let's take a look at our neighbor, Mexico, a poor country. They have quite a good higher education, college and higher education system. UNAM, the major university is pretty high quality as a lecture there. No fair amount about it. A reasonable facility is very high level. Serious students, terrible salaries, of course. By this, by any reasonable standards, it's quite a good university. Furthermore, in Mexico, the city itself, there's a university which is, I should add, I say this, that Unam is higher education is free. There was an effort about 10 years ago to raise to institute small tuitions that led to a national student strike and the government backed down. The fact students 10 years later are still occupying an administration building on the campus, which is used as a kind of a movement center. The police didn't come in and so on. In Mexico City itself, there is a city university which is not only free but has open admissions with supportive efforts for students who haven't had the right background. I've been there, too, and I don't claim to be an expert on it, but my impression is it's quite successful and high level. This is a poor country, not a rich country like ours. If we go to another rich country, say Germany, they also have free higher education, virtually free. We can go on, but I don't think it's an economic problem. I think it's a question of choice as to how to use resources. And in the United States, they are used to discipline students and to privilege the kinds of students who can pay these colossal costs in rich families, basically.
Well, that's question one. Question two, where's it come from? Well, I've never really seen a careful study of this. This is somewhat speculative, but my impression is that it grew out of the largely took off in the early 70s, and I think it grew out of the deep concern expressed by elites across the spectrum, right to what's called left, over the activism of the 60s and the independence shown by students. They're breaking out of conformity and more generally the shift of large parts of the population into the public arena. People who were expected to be passive in acquiescent began to press their interests and concerns in the public arena, and that led to what was called the crisis of democracy. I'm now quoting views at the what's called the liberal extreme, the trilateral commission, essentially the Carter administration essentially withdrew almost entirely from their ranks. They were concerned that there was an important book called The Crisis of Democracy, in which they said that democracy is being threatened by the fact that there's too much democracy. In the 60s, they said that normally passive and acquiescent parts of the population began to be concerned about their own rights and entered the political arena. Women, farmers, young people, old people, students, working people, in fact the general population, and that created an overload on the state. And therefore we have to have more moderation in democracy. They have to go back to following orders, and they were particularly concerned with what they called, this is their term, not mine, what they called the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. They said they're not doing their job. That's colleges, universities, schools, churches. They're not indoctrinating the young properly, and something has to be done about it. That's the kind of liberal extreme. Go over the right wing, and you have things like the very important Powell memorandum. The memorandum written by the man who later was appointed by Nixon to be Justice Powell. He was at the time a lobbyist, corporate lobbyist, I think for tobacco companies, and he sent around a memorandum of around 1971. It was addressed to the American Chamber of Commerce in the business lobby, and it's worth reading. You can pick it up on the internet. Basically, he said that the colleges, universities are getting out of control. They're becoming a critical business, critical of capitalist ideology. That's his version of the institutions for the indoctrination of the young aren't doing their job. He said, look, he said to the business world, he said, we have the resources. We're just not using them. We should use our resources to ensure that the colleges and universities go back to discipline and support nation to accept the ideology and so on. Those are the two extremes within the political system.
Approximately at that time, there were changes in how universities function. For example, tuition started going up. Even university architecture changed. Instantly, this is global, not just in the United States, but new university architecture. Quite typically, it's been discussed in the architectural literature. It was designed to avoid open places where students can meet things like, say, Sproul Plaza in Berkeley. They go from one place to another, but a place where they'd gather, meaning get together, have demonstrations, interactions, and so on. All of these changes began. At that time, it's part of very general changes in American society. The economy at the same time began to shift radically from production for use, manufacturing of things people need, to financialization, playing games with money, and offshoring of production. Those were major developments in the 70s, have had a huge effect on the whole society up till today. But I think what happened to the scholars and universities is part of this.
There's also, as you indicated, a corresponding shift towards trying to direct students to commercial, commercially viable activities, things they'll make money from. It varies as to how it's done. I don't know exaggerate, but the tendency is pretty clear. There's also changes in the research agenda. I'm taking my own university, MIT major research university. During the 50s and the 60s, the great growth period of modern American history, in fact, American history altogether. During that period, the university was mainly government funded, actually incidentally by the Pentagon overwhelmingly. It was very free, research. That's why you have things like computers, the internet, the IT revolution, and so on. It was developed in those years, partly at MIT, partly elsewhere, substantially through government initiative and funding and procurement and so on. Over the years, that's changed. So by now, the government funding has shifted from Pentagon to the health-related institutions, international institute of health and so on. There's good reason for that. The cutting edge of the economy has shifted. During the 50s and 60s, it was electronics-based, and the Pentagon was a good cover for developing high-tech electronics-based economy. Over the years, it's shifting towards being biology-based. So the NIH and other similar government institutions are a good cover for funding that next stage of the advanced economy, but also it's shifted towards a commercial funding by private businesses. That has a number of effects.
One effect is it tends to direct research development activities towards more short-term objectives, not long-term computers, for example, were serious research on them again. In the early 1950s, it was almost 30 years before they became marketable and were handed over to private companies for profit. But private enterprise isn't really interested in that. They want short-term results.
The other effect that's noticeable is a shift towards secrecy. Now, a contract can't require secrecy, but there are ways around that. It can be made clear that if you want the grant renewed, you're going to have to keep it secret because it's the company itself that wants the profits, not the economy generally. And that's noticeable in some cases, even led to scandals that reached the front page of the Wall Street Journal. But these tendencies are there, along with them has been the sharp growth of tuition, which I think should be regarded primarily as a disciplinary technique, to way to ensure that the institution is responsible for the indoctrination of the young, do their job better.
Now, there's plenty of resistance to this. I don't want to suggest that this is a description of the way higher education works. The tendencies are there. The effects are there. There's resistance to it. And I think it's something that requires serious thought. Incidentally, the same is true K through 12 schools. So things like no child left behind, Obama was raised to the top and so on. I think these are largely disciplinary programs. Teaching to test is not a way to educate people if you're interested in fostering children's abilities to carry out free, creative, independent work cooperatively, cooperatively with others, which is what education ought to be. But you don't have that when you're teaching for tests and when teachers are, even teachers' salaries, depend on how well students do in tests and not how well they do in being educated. I think all of that has a pernicious effect on the elementary education system.
RM - Thank you so much, Noam, for taking time out of your day and your life to join us here at Media Matters.