by Mark Stimson
Pedagogies of resistance and freedom of thought are under assault in higher education; they must be cherished, nurtured, and never taken for granted.
I’ve been paying attention to recent news articles about changes in higher education, in the US in particular. Two main themes are emerging from these news reports:
First, Montclair State (NJ), UT Austin, U Chicago, and other institutions are eliminating or scaling back their humanities programs. The driving logic dictates that for higher education to be viable, it must be monetizable; anthropology, philosophy, literature, and the arts are increasingly dismissed as unproductive degrees. The dominant agenda reduces the purpose of higher education to instilling a mindset of fiscal compliance, shaping students for corporate hierarchies. Within this paradigm, the humanities are viewed as a threat.
Predictably, the next casualty is freedom of thought. The University of Iowa’s new Center for Intellectual Freedom is a prime example. The interim director and only faculty in 2025, Luciano I. de Castro, stated: “It’s very unfortunate that students can go through the university without even the opportunity to learn why capitalism works, how it works, and why it has been so successful in producing riches to our society, and why it’s superior to the alternative systems that have been proposed.” The center experienced low enrollment in its initial course offerings, so the Iowa legislators voted to make its courses mandatory for all U of I undergrads. Critics are pointing out the absurdity of making “intellectual freedom” mandatory and the irony of a curriculum that enforces the very orthodoxy it claims to resist.
Conversely, the left-leaning agenda has embraced its own narrowing of thought. A recent article in The Atlantic highlights a dramatic shift in the priorities of the US humanities funding giant Mellon. Under new leadership since 2018, Mellon has narrowed its focus to supporting institutions that commit to a myopic version of social justice, at the expense of the much broader scope of traditional humanities programs. Author Tyler Austin Harper points out that this vision politicises academia and reduces it to activism. While many of the supported programs may be in some sense liberatory, the underlying logic of education for a cause undermines academic freedom and further erodes public trust in the liberal arts. There is irony in this, as well: a liberal institution becoming so powerful and misguided as to create its own hegemony of thought, the dialectic pendulum swinging far enough to the left to deserve critical attention and resistance.
With the above news as a backdrop I am drawn to write about GCAS as an exceptional space of open scholarship and resistance. In the succinct words of Mohanty: Resistance lies in self-conscious engagement with dominant, normative discourses and representations and in the active creation of oppositional analytic and cultural spaces. This commitment forms the sine qua non of GCAS.
Education for critical consciousness, critical pedagogy, pedagogies of resistance and liberation, are variant forms of the same or similar ideas, all of which require self-conscious deconstruction and honest, courageous scholarship. Here I invoke the thinking of Dewey, Gramsci, Freire, hooks and, more recently, Sterling, Giroux and Shiva, who profoundly shape my praxis as a teacher and on my overall thinking on the purpose of education at all levels. These scholars give voice to a constellation of ideas regarding the deep social and ethical implications of education. They remind us that education is never neutral; it always has an agenda, even extending to the architecture of the campus and the arrangement of the furniture in the classroom—normatives embedded in brick and mortar, and power relations carved into wooden lecterns.
Within critical studies we grapple with an array of distinct but interrelated issues and challenges: decolonization of curricula; anti-hegemonic thought; critical theory (and CRT) as prescriptive historicity; Indigenous studies, feminism in its various forms, including ecofeminism; LGBTQ+ studies, DEI, environmental justice, sustainability, and of course critical thinking—a variety of pedagogies each in its own way interrogating and resisting the encroaching corporate and educational hegemonies.
What struck me from my first introduction to GCAS is that these liberatory ideas are lively here, emanating as an emergent phenomenon arising from a wide variety of disciplines, and cultural, educational and political backgrounds. This is not surprising, given that GCAS faculty and students coalesce around two main pillars: affordable education, and freedom of thought. Yet, there is something unexpected, even transcendent in this spirit, a unity of serious liberatory thought coming from a diversity of perspectives. This quality is rare and precious.
For me, the radical praxis of a pedagogy of resistance finds its concrete expression in Permaculture, an effort to align human existence with the natural environment that supports us all. This perspective is the antithesis of the neoliberal/hypercapitalistic agenda currently restructuring higher education. In practice we seek to understand the deep ecology of the place in which we live and to mimic natural functions that support regional plant and animal life: storied gardens, vermicomposting, beneficial soil biology, hydrological restoration, cover crops, companion planting, rewilding…simplicity through balanced complexity, abundance through conscious restraint.
This work requires dynamic, high-order thinking—the polar opposite of industrial agriculture’s obsession with monocropping. Industrial monocropping operates as an exact metaphor for modern higher education: flattening diversity, exhausting the soil, and optimizing purely for yield.
In the past two decades I found myself with my sleeves rolled up teaching college students how to run heavy machinery to create wetlands for wildlife habitats and for irrigating crops. How to find and purchase land, and to build homesteads that are mortgage-free and self-sustaining. How to design and build off-grid renewable energy systems. How to harvest rainwater and to filter it for drinking and bathing. My students do not want jobs or careers per se; for them that economic model is broken. They want to work at things that are important and meaningful, to grow healthy food and to build and live in resilient, sustainable communities of like-minded people. Praxis, indeed, with a measure of hope. Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up, once said Oberlin professor David Orr.
I am thrilled to be a part of the pedagogy of resistance and open scholarship at GCAS as a counter-narrative to the instrumentalization and commodification of college education, and I look forward to seeing how the discourse evolves under these rapidly changing social, political and environmental conditions. “To teach in varied communities not only our paradigms must shift but also the way we think, write, speak” (hooks, 1994).
Look for future posts about AI and ethics in HE, and how Systems Thinking informs and affects my work.
AI statement: with deliberate, conscious restraint, I used the Gemini AI as a final round editorial assistant to spot and resolve ambiguities and to clarify meaning in this otherwise original content.