Militarized Knowledge and Academic Soldiers: Arming the University

If Michel Foucault is right that war is now “the motor behind institutions and order” and “a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently,” then we must try to understand what forces generate this permanent state of war and which side of the battle we want to be on, because, as Foucault insisted, “There is no such thing as a neutral subject.” If we are to heed Foucault’s warning that “We are all inevitably someone’s adversary,”l then we must make our decisions carefully based on an understanding of what kind of world we are currently living in and what kind of world we want to pass on to future generations of young people. Indeed, the war we are faced with today is global in scope as the forces of neoliberalism are on the march, dismantling the historically guaranteed social provisions provided by the welfare state, defining profitmaking as the essence of democracy, imposing rapacious free-trade agreements, saturating noneconomic spheres with market rationalities, and equating freedom with the unrestricted ability of markets to “govern economic relations free of government regulation.”2