Across the U.S. at institutions of higher education, the steady march of jackboots crushes teachers’ unions and academic freedom. The corporations own the jackboots and the fascist logic as well.

Campus brochures that used to advertise that teachers could “make a difference in the lives of students,” that teachers and students together could develop meaningful programs and events, and that the concerned citizenry of the surrounding community could have an impact on the development of future generations and by extension, local, state, federal, and global issues, have been re-written.

Papa has a brand new bag, as James Brown would say.

Today, Papa is selling life insurance, corporate partnerships, and benevolent guidance for ever conceivable relationship on the college campus. Papa guides and nurtures now a new way of being in this period of corporate enlightenment: “[B]ecoming a corporate partner is a way to simply, efficiently and proactively manage all your connections to the university.”

Pepsi knows best!

But the Pepsi Corporation is not alone. For years, students, faculty, and staff at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) have been vocal and emphatic about their position on war. “No war!” (Independent Media Center, Santa Cruz, February 19, 2003), but the administration at UCSC is not listening. Students, faculty, and staff “organize, march, and denounce the war” while the university invites aid from the US Military.

The largest source of military funds at UCSC, the article continues, is the Office of Naval Research (ONR). In return for the money, the UCSC conducts “scientific research on campus,” recruits “physicists, chemists, engineers, and others by the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore… UC researchers and graduates are readily funneled into them for the purposes of researching, and designing new nuclear weapons.”

Good deals for the future in which perpetual warfare is a reality!

Do you think the college and university brochures, websites, or the campus counselors encourage students to major in an area of study under Humanities? No corporate advertisement and newspeak on the Internet, on the television, and on the billboards have already educated students to follow the money…

And more -

There is a discourse to be learned and advanced: There are enemies everywhere, young man, young woman. Enemies in your home, your neighborhood, town, state, across the nation and abroad. And there is money for you to think of ways to annihilate them!

But have we also reached a point in which many, and not all traditional transgressors, can chuckle at the absurdity of corporate enlightenment?

Fresno State University has its “Save Mart Center” and the University of Maryland its “Comcast Center” (Parentdish.com). Blue Cross and Blue Shield offered $15 million to the University of Iowa in exchange for the school naming its Public Health department after the corporation (Parentdish.com, August 2007). At the University of Missouri-St. Louis, “corporate support for UMSL students is highly valued” (www.umsl.edu/services/develop/support/corp-partners).

I didn't know it until recently, but I am a student at Nike University…

Recently, a faculty head of an American Studies at a large Midwestern university was guest on one a radio program. African American Studies is this faculty’s area of study. The voice belongs to one who knows but who also observes his subject at a distance. It cannot be helped.

At the end of some fifteen minutes of discussing race, whites, and Black Americans, a young Black male caller intrudes: why do schools and universities fear teaching U.S. history? Why do white teachers, specifically, fear teaching U.S. history?

What do whites fear, he asked - that people of color, if they were told the truth, would hate white people?

Let the chips fall where they may, said the caller. Teach U.S. history!

I hear the speaker mention Arizona. Arizona? And I am now looking at his department’s website. I can see the speaker, male, white, and youngish. I see a predominantly white faculty, including women. Possibly two members may have been non-white but not Black. Most of the faculty teaches Indigenous, African American, and Mexican American studies.

Arizona!

I emailed the speaker and received a prompt response. He did not mean to suggest that only whites in Arizona feared the response of people of color if the true history of the U.S. were taught. It is endemic, yes!

And he is aware of racial make up of his department. They are working on this problem! (It is only 2011!).

It is an old problem: Imagined impurities is feared and replaced with artificial representations of purity. Corporate partnerships are the last stand in the foundational warfare against racial impurities. The U.S. is the greatest country on the planet - and we liberal and conservative faculty and administrators alike will see to it that this narrative is the one the student learns first and foremost! All else is the narrative of heretics.

In a subsequent email, I used the words of another white chair of Black studies at a major Midwestern university who listened as I spoke of white fear and who responded with - I do not expect it to change anytime soon! Smart! The maintenance of the American Empire begins in the classroom, where racist and anti-working class attitudes and views help to legitimize the exploitation of people of color globally. White liberals and their counterparts would hope the order of things does not change anytime soon!

But that was a few years ago. While some American citizens have yet to awaken from the fog of the mall, others have their eyes wide open and ears fine tuned to catch the deception of doublespeak. While U.S. history is not taught because genocide, enslavement, exploitation, imperialism - torture and terrorism conducted by the U.S. - might disturb the production of future physicists, chemists, bio-engineers etc., the history of resistance cannot be taught by liberal and conservative faculty complicit in corporate benevolence. Resistance is the experience of people who resist!

At the Center for American Progress, Jennifer Washburn is wide awake. Along with her colleagues, Washburn completed a report on the impact of the oil industry on college and university campuses. In her October 14, 2010 expose, “Big Oil Goes to College,” uncovers the extent to which democracy and freedom for college and university administrators is meaningless. Washburn writes that ExxonMobil, Chevron Corp, BP PLC, Royal Dutch Shell Group and ConocoPhillips Co have “forged dozens of multi-year, multi-million dollar alliances with top U.S. universities and scientists to carry out energy-related research.” Ten universities have already agreed to be funded a total of $838 million over the next 10 years. Stanford University, for example, is contracted with ExxonMobil, and the University of California-Berkeley contracted with BP for 500 million. BP’s narrative claims the corporation’s partnership with the university will help to “‘green’ its public image.”

Who does BP think it is fooling?

Washburn continues:

Ever since the birth of the academic freedom movement in the early 1900s, U.S. universities and their faculties have worked strenuously to prevent outside donors (whether a wealthy benefactor, a commercial sponsor, or a federal grant-making agency) from exerting undue influence over faculty teaching, research, and other internal academic governance decisions. The rationale for this is quite straightforward: Without self-governance, research independence and free inquiry are meaningless.

Tell that to these jackboot lickers foregoing truth for the pursuit of money, signing agreements “explicitly” giving “the industry sponsor or sponsors full control” over “the alliance’s main governing body.” Orwell characterized them as people who accept without question ideological limitations and outright restrictions on freedom.

Free inquiry has been exchanged for the free trade in the human mind! Students, already saturated in corporate think now attend these institutions to become future corporate jackboots, following in the footsteps of too many college and university jackboot lickers who are only too pleased to turn passive students into corporate robots. Whether men or women, we are to see in these students, rising above “the people,” the “I,” the State, the corporate authority. Thus, the purity of corporate towers of power remains legitimized and justified.

But there is Kris Hundley writing for the St. Petersburg Times, May 10, 2011. Headlines: “Academic Freedom at Risk - Koch Brothers’ Controlling ‘Donations’ to Florida State University Come with A Heavy Price.” Hundley writes, Charles G. Koch representatives “pledged $15 million for positions in Florida State University’s economics department.” In return, Koch’s representatives “get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting ‘political economy and free enterprise.’”

“Political economy and free enterprise!” Signed in 2008, this agreement led to the appointment of two assistant professors. Think: Free inquiry? No agenda here. No agenda there, either.

David Rasmussen, Dean of the College of Social Science, is happy. His department is able to offer “eight additional courses a year.” And these courses will offer truth or…never mind! Rasmussen is happy! “I have no objections to people who want to help us fund excellence at our university,” he said. “I'm happy to do it.” Of course!

Jennifer Washburn, commenting on this development at Florida State University exclaimed: “This is an egregious example of a public university being willing to sell itself for next to nothing.”

But Papa expects his grandest of servants to be happily, spineless, boot lickers.

The jackboot lickers do not mind that thought outside the circle of corporate think is a challenge and that the “authorities” of corporate logic, having established for consumption a ready-made body of discourse, where even the “pro” and the “con,” previously identified and approved “options,” make for deceptive exercises in absurdity.

The “successful” student or faculty, the “successful” institution itself remains, as long as all parties recognize and obey the power of the authorities - the corporations. And there they meet in a place where there is no darkness (Orwell, 1984) but only the light of corporate sunshine.

It is not too long, however, before enough young citizens, targets of corporate doublespeak, refuse to sustain this artificial anomaly.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.