Empire Of Illusion: The End Of Literacy And The Triumph Of Spectacle

Hedges blames elite higher education institutions for many of the problems facing the United States. Such institutions care less about teaching students critical thinking skills than they do about preparing such students to become “competent systems managers” (89). Elite institutions discourage independent intellectual inquiry and instead promote learning broken up into highly specialized disciplines and vocabularies. These divisions make collective understanding amongst disciplines difficult.

Hedges interviews Henry Giroux, an English and Cultural Studies professor at McMaster University. Giroux is an outspoken critic of the university’s role in what he refers to as the “military-industrial-academic complex” (91). According to Giroux, an intimate relationship exists between universities, corporations, and governments. He claims that “corporate and Pentagon money was now funding research projects, and increasingly knowledge was being militarized in the service of developing weapons of destruction, surveillance, and death” (91).

According to a student at UC Berkeley, relatively little political action or interest is observable on campus. Instead, students are fragmented into separate groups according to ethnicity and professional focus. The corporate influence is blatantly obvious, however, thanks to Berkeley’s interest in cultivating corporate relationships. For example, Berkeley displays its corporate affiliations publicly. Coca-Cola is sold exclusively at football games, and Cingular and Allstate advertise at California Memorial Stadium. In 1997, British Petroleum and UC Berkeley struck a deal to research biofuels using the university’s resources.

The specialized groups at Berkeley that determine social behavior can be observed in other institutes of higher education. Hedges finds that he is unable to understand the academic jargon used by a former classmate at Harvard Divinity School. Such language prevents understanding and access across specialties, keeping each specialty “locked in its narrow role” (98).

Students admitted to elite universities are often part of an exclusive class that has its own language and code of behavior. Members of this class live in exclusive communities and have little contact with others outside of their circle.

Though elite schools claim to be committed to diversity, diversity at elite schools is often measured by race rather than class. Students without financial resources rarely have access to higher education, and a family’s finances is often linked to race. Schools such as Yale and Harvard admit many students each year who are the children of alumni or the children of those who make significant donations to the university.

Hedges explains that the failure of the American economy is a direct result of the neglect of the humanities in higher education. Leaders in charge of the political and economic systems think primarily in narrow terms which uphold that same systems. These leaders are not capable of thinking in new ways which would help overthrow the system. Students who train in these institutions and neglect the study of humanities become afraid to take risks. They learn from their universities that what matters most is making money and getting ahead, rather than thinking critically and challenging the systems in charge. Hedges predicts that if society fails to understand the forces at work beneath political appearances, then “we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society, and wields power through naked repression” (90).

While the humanities are in decline at colleges and universities, majors that provide vocational training are on the rise. Hedges compares universities to “high priced occupational training centers” (109). While liberal arts schools close, for-profit universities such as The University of Phoenix and DeVry continue to grow in popularity. Such schools only provide job training for students.

In the end, Hedges determines that “moral autonomy” (112) is necessary to resist evil, yet moral autonomy is precisely what the corporate university complex seeks to eliminate in its students.