Neoliberalism AC Edited for

Districts
 SV Framing
Morality is worthless is a world of continuous brutalism our
foremost ethical obligation is to recognize and destroy
oppressive power relations.
Evans and Giroux 15 Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the
University of Bristol. PhD from Carnegie-Mellon University & Pioneer in Critical
Pedagogy. Disposable Futures: Critique of Violence. TruthOut. May 6 th, 2015.
http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/30589-disposable-futures-critique-of-
violence
Our critique begins from the realization that violence has become ubiquitous , "settling like some all-enveloping
excremental mist ... that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now."[22] We cannot escape its
spectre. Its presence is everywhere. It is hardwired into the fabric of our digital DNA. Capitalism in fact has always thrived on its consumption. There is,
after all, no profit in peace. We are not calling here for the censoring of all representations of violence as if we could retreat into some sheltered

the violence we are exposed to is

protectorate. That would be foolish and intellectually dangerous. Our claim is both that

heavily mediated, and that as such we are witness to various spectacles that serve[s] a distinct political function, especially as they either work

to demonize political resistance or simply extract from its occurrence (fictional and
actual) any sense of political context and critical insight. Moving beyond the

spectacle by making visible the reality of violence in all of its modes is both necessary
and politically important. What we need then is an ethical approach to the problem of violence such that its occurrence is
intolerable to witness. Exposing violence is not the same as being exposed to it, though the former too often comes as a result of the latter. The corrupting
and punishing forms taken by violence today must be addressed by all people as both the most important element of power and the most vital of forces
shaping social relationships under the predatory formation of neoliberalism. Violence is both symbolic and material in its effects and its assaults on all
social relations, whereas the mediation of violence coupled with its aesthetic regimes of suffering is a form of violence that takes as its object both
memory and thought. It purges the historical record, denying access to the history of a more dignified present, purposefully destroying the ability to

connect forms of struggle across the ages. Memory as such is fundamental to any ethics of responsibility. Our critique of violence
begins, then, as an ethical imperative. It demands a rigorous questioning of the normalized culture

of violence in which we are now immersed. It looks to the past so that we

may understand the violence of our present. It looks to the ways that ideas about the future shape the
present such that we learn to accept a world that is deemed to be violent by design. This requires a proper critical

reading of the way violence is mediated in our contemporary moment; how skewed
power relations and propagators of violence are absolved of any wider
blame in a pedagogical and political game that permits only winners and losers;
how any act of injustice is made permissible in a world that enshrines
systemic cruelty.
Three implications:
a) any ethical calculation is distorted through the lens of
normalized oppression objectivity is impossible to achieve in
face of the spectacle of violence.
b) ethics will always come second to the interests of the
powers-that-be; abstract discussions of morality pacify the
academy by distancing us from the horrors of the status quo
and prevent an ethical society from ever instantiating in the
real world.
c) the ACs impacts are cyclical oppressive power structures
strategically shut down resistance until there is none and their
violence can continue unchallenged. We need change and we
need it now
 Neolib Framing
Neoliberalism is a social reality that feeds off the subjugation
and inequality within society.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/26885-henry-giroux-on-
the-rise-of-neoliberalism?tmpl=component&print=1
We're talking about an ideology marked by the selling off of public goods to private interests; the attack on social provisions;
(Neoliberalism) the rise of the corporate state organized around privatization, free trade, and
deregulation; the celebration of self-interests over social needs; the celebration of profit-making as the essence of democracy
coupled with the utterly reductionist notion that consumption is the only applicable form of citizenship. But even more than that, it
the market serves as a model for structuring all social
upholds the notion that
relations: not just the economy, but the governing of all of social life. I think that as a mode of governance, it is really quite
dreadful because it tends to produce identities, subjects and ways of life driven by a kind
of "survival of the fittest" ethic, grounded in the notion of the free, possessive individual and committed to the
right of individual and ruling groups to accrue wealth removed from matters of ethics and social cost. That's a key issue. I mean, this
is a particular political and economic and social project that not only consolidates class power in the hands of the one percent, but
operates off the assumption that economics can divorce itself from social costs, that it doesn't have to deal with matters of ethical
these policies across
and social responsibility, that these things get in the way. And I think the consequences of
the globe have caused massive suffering, misery, and the spread of a massive
inequalities in wealth, power, and income. These massive dislocations have also produced serious mental health crises. We
are witnessing a number of people who are committing suicide because they have lost their pensions, jobs and dignity. We see the
attack on the welfare state; we see the privatization of public services, the dismantling of the connection between private issues and
public problems, the selling off of state functions, deregulations, an unchecked emphasis on self-
interest, the refusal to tax the rich, and really the redistribution of wealth from the middle and working classes to the ruling
class, the elite class, what the Occupy movement called the one percent. It really has created a very bleak
emotional and economic landscape for the 99 percent of the population throughout
the world.

NL policies have been justified with empty promises of

freedom and well-being. These moral principles have been
twisted and molded into excuses to subjugate people less
fortunate than us. Giroux 2:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/26885-henry-giroux-on-
the-rise-of-neoliberalism?tmpl=component&print=1

Democracy has really become two things for a whole range of anti-democratic politicians, anti-intellectuals, and the people who
support these policies. Democracy basically is a word they use, but they empty it, and invert its meaning to justify the most anti-
democratic practices and policies, meaning that it's a term that has nothing to do with questions of justice, nothing to do with
questions of rights, nothing to do with questions of legality. As a matter of fact, it becomes a term of deception and diversion - a kind
of counterfeit term that's used to justify a whole range of policies that actually are anti-democratic. It's oxymoronic. The other side
of this is that the financial elite and oligarchs despise democracy since they know that NL is the antithesis of
real democracy because it feeds on inequality; it feeds on privilege, it feeds on massive
divisiveness, and it revels in producing a theater of cruelty. All you have to do is look at the way it enshrines a kind of rabid
individualism. It believes that privatization is the essence of all relationships. It works very hard to eliminate any investment in
public values, in public trust. It believes that democracy is something that doesn't work, and we hear and see this increasingly from
the bankers, anti-public intellectuals and other cheerleaders for neoliberal policies. What shocks me about NL in all of its forms is
how utterly unapologetic it is about the misery it produces. And it is unapologetic not just in
that it is indifferent to the violence it causes, but it is also blames the very victims
that suffer under these policies. The vocabulary of NL posits a false notion of freedom, which it
wraps in the mantle of individualism and choice, and in doing so reduces all problems to private
issues, suggesting that whatever problems bear down on people, the only way to understand them is through the restrictive
lens of individual responsibility, character and self-resilience. In this instance, the discourse of character and
personal responsibility becomes a smoke screen to prevent people from
connecting private troubles with larger social and systemic
considerations.

Neoliberalism champions a narrative of self-responsibility that

justifies all forms of oppression.
Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Bristol. PhD from
Carnegie-Mellon University & Pioneer in Critical Pedagogy. Disposable Futures:
Critique of Violence. TruthOut. May 6th, 2015. http://www.truth-
out.org/progressivepicks/item/30589-disposable-futures-critique-of-violence
Following on from the enduring legacy and inspiration of Zinn and other cautionary voices of political concern such as Paulo Freire, our critique begins from the supposition that mass

with the
violence today must be understood by comprehending the ways in which systemic cruelty is transformed into questions of individual pathology. What is more,

burden of guilt placed on the shoulders of the already condemned, those

whose lives are rendered disposable, we must question more rigorously
the imaginaries of violence, which instigate a forced partaking in a system
that encourages the subjugated to embrace their oppression as though it were their

liberation. Nowhere is this more apparent today than in the doctrine of "resilience" which, as critiqued elsewhere, forces us to accept our vulnerabilities without providing us with the

Neoliberalism's culture of
tools for genuine transformation of those systematic processes that render us insecure in the first place.[2]

violence is reinforced by what Zsuza Ferge calls the "individualization of the social,"[3] in which all
traces of the broader structural forces producing a range of social problems such as widening inequality and mass poverty disappear. Under the regime of

neoliberalism, individual responsibility becomes the only politics that

matters and serves to blame those who are susceptible to larger systemic
forces. Even though such problems are not of their own making ,
neoliberalism's discourse insists that the fate of the vulnerable is a
product of personal issues ranging from weak character to bad choices or simply
moral deficiencies. This makes it easier for its advocates to argue that "poverty is a

deserved condition."[4]

Thus the Standard for this debate is resisting neoliberalism

 Inherency
Our right to the 1st amendment has become corrupted,
colleges and universities, through the liberalization of free
speech, has redefined its terms to where all forms of assembly
and speech are criminalized only making them effective when
its illegal.
Mitchell 1
- Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuses Maxwell School:
2003 (The Liberalization of Free Speech: Or, How Protest in Public Space is
Silenced Stanford Agora Vol. 4
But, of course, the Supreme Court had considered New Yorks law before in the 1920s in the famous Gitlow case.8 Then, the Court
upheld the conviction of the radical Benjamin Gitlow after Gitlow had published a tract called The Left-Wing Manifesto, during the height of the
Palmer Raids in 1919. Oliver Wendell Holmes (joined by Louis Brandeis) wrote a famous dissent in the Gitlow case, arguing that Gitlows pamphlet in no
way presented a clear and present danger to the state and, therefore, Gitlows conviction under New Yorks criminal anarchy law should be overtuned.

the
The majority in this case, however, upheld Gitlows conviction and in the process affirmed both the constitutionality of the New York law, and

States right to police some forms of speech . Assuming, first, that the due process clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment covered the liberties outlined in the First Amendment, the Court, second, argued that the freedom of speech and of the press which is
secured by the Constitution, does not confer an absolute right to speak or publish, without responsibility, whatever one may choose.10

Further, the Court held, That a State in the exercise of its police power may
punish those who abuse this freedom by utterances inimical to the public welfare, tending to corrupt public morals, incite crime, or disturb
the peace, is not open to question.11 Finally, a State may punish utterances endangering the
foundations of organized government and threatening its overthrow by unlawful means.12 On much of this Holmes did not
disagree. His dissent in Gitlow was based in earlier decisions and dissents he had written for the Court in the wake of World War 1.13 These

earlier cases, established the standards for the right that many now
consider the foundation of contemporary American liberty: the right to free speech. Or more
accurately, at the end of World War I, the Supreme Court, with Justice Holmes taking the lead, began to
develop the language that allowed for the regulation of speech such that
it could be protected as an ingredient necessary to the development and
the strength of the state. It began to find a way to limit speech, rather than
to outlaw it altogether. If the majority in Gitlow had not yet come around to this view, later Courts did, finding in Holmess
decisions the language necessary to begin the project of liberalizing free speech in the U.S.15 This liberalization was

predicated on a seeing at the heart of speech a separation in space and

time between what is said and the effects of utterances. This is the very
basis of Holmess (the) clear and present danger test (currently used in
courts). Each of the Defendants in these cases was convicted for making
speeches that were deemed to have the possibility of being effective and
therefore to portend violence or to undermine the legitimate interests of the state. Each
conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court. The irony of free speech jurisprudence in the US,

therefore, is that its (free speechs) liberalization is grounded in its

repression. This conclusion is doubly obvious, and doubly interesting, when the content of the four convictions is remembered. The prominent
socialist Eugene Debs was convicted for merely praising draft resisters for their moral courage.17 Charles Schenck, an official of the Socialist Party in
Philadelphia, was convicted for calling the draft a form of involuntary servitude outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment, and recommending that men
petition the 15. government to object to the draft law.18 Frohwerk, the editor of a small circulation German-language newspaper, was convicted for writing
that the US had no chance of defeating Germany in the war and thus draftees who refused to enlist could not be faulted.19 And Abrams, along with four
fellow Russian radicals, was convicted for throwing leaflets out of a New York window protesting US intervention in Russia following its revolution.20

Holmes first laid out his language concerning clear and present danger in the Schenck case. 21 The question in every case, Holmes intoned, is
whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about
substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.22 He also said a few other things that bear repeating,
especially now: When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in a time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not
be endured so long as men fight and no Court could regard them as protected by any Constitutional right.23 However, Holmes clarified: We admit that in
many places and in ordinary times, the defendants would have been within their constitutional rights. But the character of the act depends upon the
circumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a
panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force.24. 7 So, even when not at war, the

government may strongly circumscribe speech . There are two issues that are crucial here to the
construction of a fully liberal theory of free speech. The first is that what
makes a difference in the nature of speech is where that speech occurs.
There would be nothing wrong, presumably, with falsely shouting fire , even in a
time of war, in the middle of the wilderness , or even on a busy street, if there is adequate room to move. The

trick for speech regulation, therefore, becomes and became for the Court one of spatial
regulation. Regulation of location, or place, becom(ing) the surrogate for the regulation of
content.25 The second crucial point Holmes makes is to distinguish between the content of
speech and the possibility that such speech might have an effect .26 My purpose in
the remainder of this essay is to examine the intersection of these two issues to show how contemporary speech

laws and policing effectively silence dissident speech in the name of its promotion

and regulation. As the Court has moved away from a regime that penalizes
what is said in essence liberalizing free speech it has simultaneously created a means to
severely regulate where things may be said, and it has done so, in my estimation, in a way
that more effectively silences speech than did the older regime of
censorship and repression. It could be argued to put all this another way that the death of
William Epton received the attention it did precisely because the way his speech was policed seems so anachronistic now. It certainly seems a heavy-

handed means of silencing opposition. It seems illiberal.A more liberal approach to silencing opposition
to keeping it from being heard is to let geography, more than
censorship, do the silencing. And this is the direction American law is
tending. In what follows I will make my argument clear first 25 through a historical geography of First Amendment law and the evolution of the
public forum doctrine, and then by looking at three case studies that show(s) how regulating the where of speech

effectively silences protest. The implication of my argument is that under

the speech regime currently being constructed in the United States,
dissident speech can only be effective when it is illegal . And, as I will briefly suggest in the
Epilogue, that implication may be profoundly important should (as seems quite likely) the Federal Government overlay this liberal regime with a return to

. Perhaps ironically, the

more illiberal and repressive means of handling dissidents in the name of homeland security

further implication is that a boisterous, contentious, politics of the

street is more necessary now than ever if any effective right to free
speech is to be retained.

And absent our right for assembly and speech, the university
will construe any form of civil disobedience as domestic
terrorism if they dont like it preventing dissidents from
contesting neolib.
Mitchell 2
2 - Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuses Maxwell
School: 2003 (The Liberalization of Free Speech: Or, How Protest in Public Space is
Silenced Stanford Agora Vol.
As the preceding argument has indicated, the liberalization of free speech has not always been progressive. And it has not been progressive in both senses of the term. It
has not marched steadily forward, uninterrupted, towards the shining light of freedom, to become ever more liberal, ever more just. Rather, to the degree it has been liberalized, this has
occurred in fits and starts, with frequent steps backwards or to the side rather than forward. Like any social history, that is, the history of free speech is not a linear one of ever-
expanding enlightenment; like any social history it is a history of ongoing struggle. Nor has it been progressive in the sense of necessarily more just, as a close focus on the geography of

Geographical analysis has shown that what sometimes appears as

speech makes clear.

a progressive reinforcement of a right to speech and assembly is really in

fact a means towards its suppression.169 Nonetheless, whatever rights have been won, have been won through struggle and
 . Civil disobedience, by labor activists and other
often not by following the law, but by breaking it

picketers, by civil rights marchers, by anti-war protesters, and by Free

Speech activists (as with the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the
sixties), has forced often illiberal theories of speech and assembly to be
reconsidered. But against these struggles has to be set a history of
governmental recidivism: the Palmer raids and Red Scare of 1919-1920,
the Smith Act of 1940, the McCarthy era, and the antics of COINTELPRO in the
1960s and 1970s, are just a few of the more well-known moments of
repression, often cloaked in law and justified as urgent legitimate state
interests at a time when serious challenges were being made to the established
order or when other exigent factors induced panic within the government and the public at large. The history of speech and assembly, that is, can be told as an on-going
struggle against recurring illiberalism. We are, , now reentering an illiberal phase , and if I am right that civil disobedience

has always been necessary to winning and securing rights to assembly and speech, there is a great deal to be deeply concerned abou t. For the closing off

of space to protest has made civil disobedience all the more necessary right at the moment when new
laws make civil disobedience not just illegal, but potentially terroristic. The witchs brew of

Supreme Court spatial regulation of speech and assembly and new antiterrorism laws portends
deep trouble for those of us who think we have a duty as well as a right to
transform our government when we think it is in the wrong, a duty and a
right for which street protest is sometimes the only resource. Within six weeks of the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress had passed, and (under )the President signed into law, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools

Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (USA PATRIOT Act).170 Among its many provisions, the Act defines as domestic terrorism, and
therefore covered under the Act, acts dangerous to human life that are in violation of the criminal laws, if they appear to be intended to influence the policy of a government by

Acts of civil
intimidation or coercion and if they occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.171 As Nancy Chang argues:

disobedience that take place in the United States necessarily meet three of the five
elements in the definition of domestic terrorism : they constitute a
violation of the criminal laws, they are intended to influence the
policy of a government, and they occur primarily within the territorial
jurisdiction of the United States. Many acts of civil disobedience, including the blocking of streets and points of egress by nonviolent
means during a demonstration or sit-in, could be construed as acts dangerous to human life that appear to be intended to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or

As a result, protest activities that previously

coercion, which case they would meet the crimes remaining elements.

would most likely have ended with a charge of disorderly conduct under a
local ordinance can now lead to federal prosecution and conviction for
terrorism.172 As the space for protest has become more and more tightly zoned, the likelihood that laws will be broken in the course of a demonstration a demonstration
seeking to influence a policy of government increases. And, of course, the very reason for engaging in a demonstration is to coerce, even if it is not to directly intimidate. One
should not be sanguine about the or placed between intimidate and coerce. It means just what it says: coercion or intimidation will be enough for prosecution.173 Now even civil
disobedience can be construed as an act of terrorism. The intersection of the new repressive state apparatus being constructed in the wake of September 11 with nearly a century of

We may soon come to long

speech and assembly liberalization portends a frightening new era in the history of speech and assembly in America.

for those days when protest in public space was only silenced through the
strategic geography of the public forum doctrine.

In the squo, neoliberalism has proliferated in the university

and society-civic engagement is K2 deconstruct market driven
values.
Williams
Williams 15 Jo Williams (Lecturer, College of Education at Victoria University),
"Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public
pedagogy," Australian Journal of Adult Learning, November 2015 AZ
More than ever the crisis of schooling represents, at large, the crisis of democracy itself and any attempt to understand the attack on public schooling and
higher education cannot be separated from the wider assault on all forms of public life not driven by the logic of the market (Giroux, 2003:7) Fin al lucro
en educacin, nuestros sueos no les pertenecen (end profit making in education, nobody owns our dreams 1 ) (slogan of the Chilean student movement,

Over the past four decades, as the economic and ideological

inspired by the French student uprisings of May-June 1968)

depravity of neoliberal(ism) policy and its market-driven logic (D. W. Hursh and Henderson, 2011) has

been brought to bear on every aspect of education , the very concept of

public has been negated. Characteristics such as user-pays, competition,

assaults on teachers, and mass standardised-testing and rankings, are among the
features of a schooling, which is now very much seen as a private rather
than public good (Giroux, 2003). The question of public education as a democratic
force for the radical transformation of a violently unjust society seems rarely if ever asked, and
a dangerous co-option and weakening of the language and practice of progressive pedagogy has
occurred to the extent that notions of inclusion and success are increasingly
limited to narrowly conceived individualist and competitive measures of market advantage. As Giroux notes the
forces of neo-liberalism dissolve public issues into utterly privatised and individualistic concerns (2004:62), and despite ongoing official rhetoric the only

form of citizenship increasingly being offered to young people is consumerism (2003:7 ). Neoliberal education sees
students and young people as passive consumers, the emphasis of schooling on learning how to be
governed rather than how to govern (Giroux, 2003:7). In such a context the space
for a public pedagogy, based on challenging the hegemony of neoliberal
ideology and aligned with collective resistance, appears limited at best.
And yet, every day people, teachers, students and communities do engage
in political struggle, enacting pedagogies that seek to unveil rather than
continue to mask the political structures and organisation that ensures
power remains in the hands of the few, and at the service of the few, at
the expense of the rest of us. Giroux characterises public pedagogies as
defined by hope, struggle and a politicisation of the education process. He
argues for a politics of resistance that extends beyond the classroom as
part of a broader struggle to challenge those forces of neo-liberalism that
currently wage war against all collective structures capable of defending
vital social institutions as a public good (Giroux, 2003:14). Central to Girouxs
argument is the need for critical educators to look to, value, and engage
in and with social movements as they emerge and develop as sites of
resistance. To take sides, speak out, and engage in the hard work of debunking corporate cultures assault on teaching and learning, orient
their teaching for social change, connect learning to public life and link knowledge to the operations of power (Giroux, 2004:77). He argues

that progressive education in an age of rampant neoliberalism requires an

expanded notion of the public, pedagogy, solidarity, and democratic
struggle (Giroux, 2003:13), and that moreover, educators need to work against a politics of certainty and instead develop and engage in
pedagogical practice that problematises the world and fosters a sense of collective resistance and hope (2003:14). A neoliberal vision of the good citizen
and good student presumes passivity, acceptance of the status quo and an individualistic disposition. Critical pedagogues must seek out and embrace
opportunities to support and celebrate collective political action, not only because it develops a sense of social and political agency but also because it
constitutes a powerful basis for authentic learning and active and critical citizenship in an unjust world (Freire, 1970). The Chilean student movement
stands as one such example of challenging and inspiring counter-practice and a reclaiming of pedagogy as political and public. For ten years students
have filled Chiles streets, occupied their schools and universities, and organised conferences, public Remaking education from below: the Chilean student
movement as public pedagogy 499 meetings, political stunts, creative actions and protests. Students and young people have been at the centre of the
largest and most sustained political action seen in Chile since the democratic movement of the 80s, which eventually forced out the Pinochet dictatorship.
Despite global trends in the opposite direction, the Chilean students have fundamentally influenced a nationwide education reform program constituting
significant changes to the existing system which has been described as an extreme example of market-driven policy (Valenzuela, Bellei, and Ros,
2014:220). Most importantly, they have forced and led a nationwide dialogue on the question of education and social justice in Chile and an interrogation
of the current, grossly inequitable and elitist model (Falabella, 2008). This article begins by reviewing the experiences of the Chilean student movement to
date and offering a brief explanation of the historical development of the education system it seeks to dismantle. It then considers the movement as an
example of public pedagogies, concluding with a discussion of how it might inform notions of radical educational practice and a return of the student and
pedagogue as authentic and critical subjects.
Offence
 First is Protest Movements
Free speech zones destroy students discourse and should be
prohibited.
Hudson 16
(David L. Hudson Jr. is a First Amendment expert and law professor who serves as First Amendment
Ombudsman for the Newseum Institutes First Amendment Center. He contributes research and
commentary, provides analysis and information to news media. He is an author, co-author or co-editor
of more than 40 books, including Let The Students Speak: A History of the Fight for Free Expression in
American Schools (Beacon Press, 2011), The Encyclopedia of the First Amendment (CQ Press, 2008)
(one of three co-editors), The Rehnquist Court: Understanding Its Impact and Legacy (Praeger, 2006),
and The Handy Supreme Court Answer Book (Visible Ink Press, 2008). He has written several books
devoted to student-speech issues and others areas of student rights. He writes regularly for the ABA
Journal and the American Bar Associations Preview of United States Supreme Court Cases. He has
served as a senior law clerk at the Tennessee Supreme Court, and teaches First Amendment and
Professional Responsibility classes at Vanderbilt Law School and various classes at the Nashville School
of Law), "How Campus Policies Limit Free Speech," Huffington Post, 6/1/2016

Under these
Restricting where students can have free speech. In addition, many colleges and universities have free speech zones.

policies, people can speak at places of higher learning in only certain,

specific locations or zones. While there are remnants of these policies from the 1960s, they grew in number in the late 1990s
and early 2000s as a way for administrators to deal with controversial expression. These policies may have a seductive appeal for

administrators, as they claim to advance the cause of free speech. But, free speech

zones often limit(ing) speech by relegating expression to just a few

locations. For example, some colleges began by having only two or three free speech zones on campus. The idea of zoning
speech is not unique to colleges and universities. Government officials have sought to diminish(ed) the
impact of different types of expression by zoning adult-oriented expression, antiabortion protestors
and political demonstrators outside political conventions . In a particularly

egregious example, a student at Modesto Junior College in California named

Robert Van Tuinen was prohibited from handing out copies of the United States
Constitution on September 17, 2013 - the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution. Van Tuinen (Robert) was
informed that he could get permission to distribute th e Constitution if he
preregistered for time in the free speech zone. But later, Van Tuinen was told by an
administrator that he would have to wait, possibly until the next month . In the words of First Amendment

expert Charles Haynes, the entire campus should be a free speech zone. In other words, the default position of school

administrators should be to allow speech, not limit it. Zoning speech is

troubling, particularly when it reduces the overall amount of speech on
campus. And many free speech experts view the idea of a free speech zone as moronic and oxymoronic. College or university campuses should
be a place where free speech not only survives but thrives.

And student protest in the university is key for counter-

hegemonic strategies.
Delgado and Ross 16

Sandra Delgado (doctoral student in curriculum studies at the University of British

Columbia in Vancouver, Canada) and E. Wayne Ross (Professor in the Faculty of
Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada), "Students in
Revolt: The Pedagogical Potential of Student Collective Action in the Age of the
Corporate University" 2016 (published on Academia.edu)
student and university movements also (have)
As students collective actions keep gaining more political relevance,

establish(ed) themselves as spaces of counter-hegemony (Sotiris, 2014). Students are constantly

opening new possibilities to displace and resist the commodification of education offered by mainstream educational institutions. As Sotiris (2014) convincingly argues,

movements within the university have not only the potential to subvert
educational reforms, but in addition, they have become strategic nodes
for the transformation of the processes and practices in higher education ,
and most importantly for the constant re-imagination and the recreation of new forms of subaltern counter-hegemony (p. 1). The strategic

importance of university and college based moments lays precisely in the

role that higher education plays in contemporary societies, namely their
role in the development of new technologies, new forms of production
and for the articulation of discourses and theories on contemporary issues
and their role in the reproduction of state and business personnel . (p.8)
Universities and colleges therefore, have a crucial contribution in the
development of class strategies (both dominant and subaltern), in the production of
subjectivities, (and) in the transformation of collective practices (p.8) The main
objective of this paper is to examine how contemporary student movements are disrupting, opposing and displacing entrenched oppressive and dehumanizing reforms, practices and
frames in todays corporate academia. This work is divided in four sections. The first is an introduction to student movements and an overview of how student political action has been
approached and researched. The second and third sections take a closer look at the repertoires of contention used by contemporary student movements and propose a framework based
on radical praxis that allows us to better understand the pedagogical potential of student disruptive action. The last section contains a series of examples of students repertoires or
tactics of contention that exemplifies the pedagogical potential of student social and political action. An Overview of Student Movements Generally speaking, students are well positioned

They have been actively involved in the politics of education since

as political actors.

the beginnings of the university, but more broadly, students have played a
significant role in defining social, cultural and political environments
around the world (Altbach, 1966; Boren, 2001). The contributions and influences of
students and student movements to revolutionary efforts and political
movements beyond the university context are undeniable. One example is
the role that students have played in the leadership and membership of
the political left (e.g. students role in the Movimiento 26 de Julio - M-26-7
in Cuba during the 50s and in the formation of The New Left in the United
States, among others). Similarly, several political and social movements have either established alliances with student organizations or created their
own chapters on campuses to recruit new members, mobilize their agendas in education and foster earlier students involvement in politics2 (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969).

Students are often considered to be catalysts of political and social

action or barometers of the social unrest and political tension
accumulated in society (Barker, 2008). Throughout history student movements have had a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of political
commitments. Usually, student organizations and movements find grounding and inspiration in Anarchism and Marxism, however it is also common to see movements leaning towards
liberal and conservative approaches. Hence, student political action has not always been aligned with social movements or organizations from the political left. In various moments in
history students have joined or been linked to rightist movements, reactionary organizations and conservative parties (Altbach, 1966; Barker, 2008). Students, unlike workers, come from
different social classes and seemly different cultural backgrounds. As a particularly diverse social group, students are distinguished for being heterogeneous and pluralists in their values,
interests and commitments (Boren, 2001). Such diversity has been a constant challenge for maintaining unity, which has been particularly problematic in cases of national or
transnational student organizations (Prusinowska, Kowzan, and Zieliska, 2012; Somma, 2012). To clarify, social classes are defined by the specific relationship that people have with the
means of production. In the case of students, they are not a social class by themselves, but a social layer or social group that is identifiable by their common function in society
(Stedman, 1969). The main or central aspect that unites student is the transitory social condition of being a student. In other words, students are a social group who have a common
function, role in society or social objective, which is to study something (Lewis, 2013; Simons and Masschelein, 2009). Student movements can be understood as a form of social
movement (LuesherMamashela, 2015). They have an internal organization that varies from traditionally hierarchical structures, organizational schemes based on representative
democracy with charismatic leadership, to horizontal forms of decision-making (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). As many other movements, student movements have standing claims,
organize different type of actions, tactics or repertoires of contention, 3 and they advocate for political, social or/and educational agendas, programs or pleas
 Second is Critical Pedagogy
Free speech is needed to for civic engagement, which the main
primary goal of critical pedagogy. This is true for both intrinsic
and extrinsic reasons- when you leave school speech codes go
away, we have to use the university as a space to learn of the
existence problematic structures and how to fight against
them.
And
Speech restrictions silence critical dialogue.
Giroux 08 PhD from Carnegie-Mellon University & Pioneer in Critical Pedagogy.
Henry Giroux. Rethinking the Responsibility of Critical Education. TruthOut.
December 2nd, 2008. http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/81318:henry-
giroux-rethinking-the-promise-of-critical-education [Brackets for Grammar]
Underlying recent attacks on the university is an attempt not merely to counter dissenting points of
to annihilate all of those remaining public spaces, spheres
view, but to destroy them, and in doing so

and institutions that nourish and sustain a culture of questioning so vital to a

Democratic civil society. Within the conservative rhetoric, dissent is often
equated with treason, and the university is portrayed as the weak link in
the war on terror by powerful educational agencies. Professors who
advocate a culture of questioning and critical engagement run the risk of
having their names posted on Internet web sites - such as DiscovertheNetworks.org and
CampusWatch.org - and being labeled as un-American, while various right-
wing individuals and politicians increasingly attempt to pass legislation that
renders critical analysis a professional and personal liability and to reinforce a
rabid anti-intellectualism under the call, with no irony intended, for balance and intellectual diversity.

Genuine politics begins to disappear as people methodically lose those

freedoms and rights that enable them to speak and act in public spaces, to exercise their individual
right to dissent and to advocate a shared sense of collective responsibility.

Neutrality in the classroom is a flawed concept that

undermines critical thought/engagement with the world by
butchering free flow of thought.
Giroux 1
Henry A. Giroux College Literature Vol. 33, No. 4, The Assault on Higher Education (Fall, 2006), pp. 1-42

balance is a flawed concept and should be understood as a

As Stanley Fish has argued,

political tactic, rather than an academic value (Fish 2005). As a tactic, its purpose is not
simply to get more conservatives teaching in English Departments, promote intellectual diversity, or protect(ing)

conservative students from the horrors of left-wing indoctrination, but to call into question the viability of academic integrity, eliminate critical
scholarship, and undermine the university as a public sphere that educates students as criti cally engaged and responsible citizens in the larger global

context. The concept of balance demeans teacher(s) authority by suggesting that a

political litmus test is the most appropriate consideration for teaching,
and it devalues students by suggesting that they are happy robots, not interested
in thinking but in merely acquiring skills for jobs. In this view, students are
infantilized; they are rendered incapable of thinking critically or engaging
knowledge that unsettles their worldviews, and too weak to resist ideas
that challenge their commonsense understanding of the world. Balance is often
invoked to suggest that students who have to face troubling questions
and ideas are being victimized rather than engaged as thoughtful agents --
the foundation for any viable critical pedagogical experience . As Juan Cole points out,
balance and fairness are not the point of pedagogy, which is rather to get
stu dents to think independently and critically. He writes: The fact is that you will never get agreement on such matters
of opinion, and no university teacher I know seeks such agreement. The point of teaching a course is to

expose students to ideas and arguments that are new to them and to help
them think critically about controversial issues. Nothing pleases teachers more than to see students craft their
own, original argu ments, based on solid evidence, that dispute the point of view presented in class lectures. . . . University teaching

is not about fairness, and there is nobody capable of imposing "fair" views on teachers. It is about provoking students to
think analytically and synthetically, and to reason on their own. In the assigned texts, in class discussion, and in lectures, the
students are exposed to a wide range of views, whether fair or unfair . (Cole,
Juan 2005) Balance for many conservatives has become code for monitoring pedagogical exchange, matched by a call for government intervention.
Balance in the current attack on higher education is used as a rhetorical tool by right wing conservatives and Christian evangelicals whose worldviews are
dominated by fixed dualisms and an ideological rigidity that resents questioning; it is more intent on censoring unpopular views than engaging them. In

balance becomes an ideological weapon to denounce liberal thought, denigrate

this context,

critical thinking, and vanquish a cast of diabolical enemies, conveniently lumped together as radical and un-American. It is diffi cult to
understand what positive function the call to intellectual diversity and balance can have when its interlocutors presume that liberal academics are to be
equated with an evil menace. to be equated with an evil menace.

The university is crucial open deliberation can create a new

generation of dissidents fighting against the neoliberal state.
When civil liberties disappear, democratic values and social
activism follow.
Giroux 08 PhD from Carnegie-Mellon University & Pioneer in Critical Pedagogy.
Henry Giroux. Rethinking the Responsibility of Critical Education. TruthOut.
December 2nd, 2008. http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/81318:henry-
giroux-rethinking-the-promise-of-critical-education [Brackets for Grammar]
While higher education is only one site under attack, it is one of the most crucial institutional and
political spaces where Democratic subjects can be shaped , Democratic relations can be
experienced and anti-Democratic forms of power can be identified and critically
engaged. It is also one of the few [a] spaces left where young people can
learn values that refuse to reduce the obligations of citizenship to either
think critically about the knowledge they gain,

consumerism or the dictates of the national security state and develop the
language and skills necessary to defend those institutions and social relations that are

vital to a substantive democracy. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt insisted, a meaningful

conception of politics appears only when concrete spaces exist for people
to come together to talk, think critically and act on their capacities for
empathy, judgment and social responsibility. What all this points to is a dire need for educators and others to recognize
and take measures against the current attack on higher education that is now threatening to erase the ideas and the practices that enable the academy to fulfill its role as a crucial
Democratic public sphere, offering a space both to resist the dark times in which we now live and to embrace the possibility of a future forged in the civic struggles requisite for a viable
democracy.
 Extra shit
(previous ROTB card
Giroux 2
Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University Henry A. Giroux currently is the McMaster
University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in
Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights,
2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), coauthored with
Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City Lights, 2015),
and America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2016). Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of
Directors.

Increasingly, as universities are shaped by an audit culture, the call to be objective and impartial, whatever one's intentions, can easily echo what George
Orwell called the official truth or the establishment point of view. Lacking a self-consciously democratic political

focus, teachers are often reduced, or reduce themselves, to the role of a technician or functionary
engaged in formalistic rituals, unconcerned with the disturbing and urgent problems that confront the larger society

or the consequences of one's pedagogical practices and research

undertakings. Hiding behind appeals to balance and objectivity, too many scholars refuse to recognize that being committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once
called hard thinking. Teaching needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the

dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom, to a

critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and
connecting private troubles and public issues. In opposition to the
instrumental model of teaching, with its conceit of political neutrality and
its fetishization of measurement, I argue that academics should combine the mutually
interdependent roles of (a) critical educator and active citizen . This requires finding ways to

connect the practice of classroom teaching with important social problems

and the operation of power in the larger society while providing the
conditions for students to view themselves as critical agents capable of
making those who exercise authority and power answerable for their
actions. Higher education cannot be decoupled from what Jacques democracy to come, that
is, a democracy that must always "be open to the possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and indefinitely improving itself."33 Within this project of possibility and impossibility,
critical pedagogy must be understood as a deliberately informed and purposeful political
and moral practice, as opposed to one that is either doctrinaire, instrumentalized or both. Moreover, a critical pedagogy should also gain part of its momentum in higher
education among students who will go back to the schools, churches, synagogues and workplaces to produce new ideas, concepts and critical ways of understanding the world in which young people and adults live.
This is a notion of intellectual practice and responsibility that refuses the professional neutrality and privileged isolation of the academy. It also affirms a broader vision of learning that links knowledge to the
power of self-definition and to the capacities of students to expand the scope of democratic freedoms, particularly those that address the crisis of education, politics, and the social as part and parcel of the crisis of

democracy itself. In order for critical pedagogy, dialogue and thought to have real effects, they must
advocate that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the society in which
they live. This is a commitment we heard articulated by the brave students who fought tuition hikes and the destruction of civil liberties and social provisions in Quebec and to a lesser degree in the
Occupy Wall Street movement. If educators are to function as public intellectuals , they need to

listen to young people who are producing a new language in order to talk about inequality and power relations, attempting to create alternative democratic public spaces, rethinking the very nature
of politics, and asking serious questions about what democracy is and why it no longer exists in many neoliberal societies. These young people who are protesting

the 1% recognize that they have been written out of the discourses of justice, equality and democracy and are not only resisting how
neoliberalism has made them expendable, they are arguing for a collective future very different from the one that is on display in the
current political and economic systems in which they feel trapped. These brave youth are insisting that the relationship between knowledge and power can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiences
matter, and that what they say and do counts in their struggle to unlearn dominating privileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others, and transform, when necessary, the world around them