Introduction:

At a moment when democracy itself is under assault, the crisis of higher education can no longer be understood in narrow institutional terms. It must be read as part of a broader transformation in which universities are being restructured to produce not critical citizens, but compliant subjects, stripped of historical memory, political agency, and the capacity for dissent. Central to this transformation is the quiet but powerful rise of teaching and learning centers, institutions that present themselves as pedagogically neutral while advancing a model of education that is anything but. 

Under the banner of “evidence-based practice,” “student success,” and “best practices,” many of these centers increasingly displace questions of power, history, and democracy with the language of efficiency, assessment, and technique. Pedagogy is severed from its ethical and political foundations and recast as a set of transferable skills, measurable outcomes, and administrative protocols. In this suffocating instrumentalism, teaching is no longer a site of risk, dialogue, and critical engagement, but a managed performance, emptied of vision and stripped of its capacity to challenge the conditions under which knowledge is produced and lived.

What disappears in this technocratic reconfiguration is not simply faculty autonomy, though that loss is real and consequential. What disappears is the very idea of education as a democratic public good, a space in which students learn to connect private troubles to public issues, to think historically, and to engage the world as critical agents. In its place emerges a pedagogy of depoliticization, one that speaks endlessly about methods while remaining silent about democracy, justice, and the formative power of education itself.

It is within this broader context that Paul Schofield’s critique of teaching and learning centers, published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, must be situated.

Paul Schofield’s critique of teaching and learning centers, published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, arrives at a moment when higher education is not simply in crisis but under siege. His argument carries real force. He exposes how these centers, often cloaked in the technocratic language of “evidence-based practice,” erode the pedagogical authority of faculty, flatten disciplinary traditions, and displace genuine intellectual engagement with standardized techniques and managerial oversight. In this diminished vision, teaching loses its intellectual and moral force. What should be a living, dialogical encounter, charged with risk, imagination, and critical possibility, is recast as a bureaucratic performance, measured through metrics, workshops, and institutional compliance rather than by its capacity to unsettle, inspire, and transform.

Schofield is particularly persuasive in revealing what might be called the administrative capture of pedagogy. As faculty defer to external “experts,” the intimate, risky, and intellectually vibrant work of pedagogy is hollowed out. What is lost is not merely autonomy, but the progressive civic function of education, its capacity to provoke, unsettle, and transform both teacher and student. This is a pedagogy emptied of purpose. In its place emerges a pedagogy of conformity, one that privileges efficiency and the cult of instrumentalism over vision and meaning and procedure over purpose.

Yet for all its force, Schofield’s critique ultimately remains incomplete. It names the symptoms but overlooks a powerful body of thought that has long diagnosed the disease and offered a radically different vision of teaching and learning. Missing from his analysis is the rich and enduring tradition of critical pedagogy, along with the equally vital and often intertwined history of feminist pedagogy.

What Is Missing: Critical Pedagogy and the Feminist Imagination

Long before teaching and learning centers began codifying pedagogy into a set of transferable skills, critical educators were arguing that education is never merely technical. Thinkers such as Paulo Freire insisted that pedagogy is always a moral and political practice, one that either reproduces existing relations of domination or opens the possibility for freedom. I have also expanded on this issue in Pedagogy of Resistance

But this tradition was never singular. It was profoundly reshaped and deepened by feminist thinkers including Antonia Darder and bell hooks, who challenged not only the technocratic reduction of education, but also its patriarchal, hierarchical, and exclusionary foundations. At the center of this intervention stand feminist thinkers such as bell hooks, whose notion of engaged pedagogy insists that teaching must be rooted in care, mutual recognition, and the courage to confront structures of domination, including racism, sexism, and class exploitation.

Critical and feminist pedagogy refuses the fiction of neutrality that undergirds much of the discourse surrounding teaching and learning centers. It insists that knowledge is situated, never removed from power; that authority must be interrogated, and that the classroom is a space where agency, identity, and values are produced and contested. In this view, education is not about the efficient delivery of content, but about the creation of conditions in which students can become critical subjects capable of naming and challenging injustice.

This tradition stretches back through the work of thinkers such as Paulo Freire and John Dewey, and is radically expanded by feminist scholars including hooks, Adrienne Rich, and Maxine Greene. Together, they reimagined the classroom as a democratic public sphere, a space where experience matters, where voices are not merely heard but valued, and where learning becomes a collective project of critical inquiry and social transformation.

What Schofield critiques as the loss of disciplinary integrity is real. But what he fails to see is that the deeper crisis lies in the erasure of these critical and feminist traditions, which offer not only a powerful critique of pedagogical technocracy but also an alternative democratic horizon for education.

From Neoliberal Pedagogy to Authoritarian Education

To grasp the full stakes of this omission, we must situate the rise of teaching and learning centers within a broader transformation of higher education. Their emergence is not accidental; it is bound to the rise of neoliberalism and the intensification of authoritarian politics.

Under neoliberalism, education is stripped of its democratic mission and reorganized according to the logic of the market. Students are recast as consumers, faculty as clients, and knowledge as a commodity. This shift produces a crisis of civic illiteracy, a condition in which individuals are unable to connect private troubles to public issues or engage meaningfully in democratic life.

Critical pedagogy anticipated this danger. It warned that when education is reduced to individual achievement and emotional self-management, it not only depoliticizes students but erases the social relations that shape their lives. The language of care, imagination, vision, and history gives way to the language of competition; solidarity is dismissed as weakness; and the classroom becomes a site of quiet accommodation rather than critical resistance. What begins as depoliticization under neoliberalism does not remain benign; it evolves into something far more dangerous.

Today, these tendencies are being intensified by a more overtly authoritarian project. Across the United States and beyond, education is increasingly targeted as a site of ideological control. Curricula are censored, critical race theory is demonized, feminist and queer perspectives are attacked, and educators are surveilled, disciplined, or silenced. What emerges is a pedagogy of terrorism, one that governs through fear, erasure, and repression.

In this context, the technocratic model of pedagogy that Schofield critiques does more than impoverish teaching. It becomes complicit in a broader project of educational repression, one that replaces critical thinking with compliance and transforms the university into an instrument of ideological conformity.

Reclaiming Education as a Democratic and Feminist Project

If Schofield calls for a return to disciplinary seriousness, critical and feminist pedagogy demand something more radical. They call for a redefinition of education itself. Education must be reclaimed as a public good, a space where students are not trained for the market but educated for democracy. This means reclaiming education as a space where critical consciousness becomes a way of life in which students learn to interrogate power, connect their private experiences to larger structural forces, think imaginatively and courageously, in ways that grasp the broader social whole.

At its best, teaching must also embrace the Freirean insistence that education is an ethical and relational practice, one that nurtures the whole person, affirms mutual recognition, and cultivates a deep sense of care and responsibility toward others. Knowledge, in this view, is never an end in itself but a force linked to social responsibility, enabling students not only to interpret the world with clarity but to transform it with courage, and to see themselves as informed, critical citizens capable of collective action. Such a vision demands that the classroom be defended as a democratic public sphere, a vital space where dialogue is not stifled but alive, where dissent is not punished but valued, and where critical inquiry becomes the foundation for imagining and struggling for a more just and humane future.

Such a pedagogy rejects both the technocratic neutrality of teaching centers and the authoritarian demand for ideological conformity. It insists that education is always political, but that this political dimension can be mobilized in the service of justice, equality, and freedom.

Pedagogy in Dark Times: Education Against Fascism

We are living in a historical moment in which fascist politics are no longer a distant memory but a gathering and dangerous reality. As I have long argued, the struggle over education is inseparable from the struggle over democracy itself.

Authoritarian regimes understand what technocrats often ignore: that education shapes consciousness, and consciousness shapes politics. This is why they attack critical thought, erase historical memory, disempower faculty, and seek to control what can be taught and who can teach it. This is a pedagogy of indoctrination, intent on turning higher education into laboratories of conformity while producing dead zones of the imagination.

In such times, pedagogy cannot be reduced to method. It must become a form of resistance. Feminist pedagogy is especially vital here. It offers a language of solidarity against isolation, a practice of care against cruelty, and a vision of collective struggle against the atomization on which authoritarianism depends. It reminds us that education is not simply about producing knowledge, but about producing subjects capable of refusing domination.

Conclusion: Toward a Pedagogy of Resistance and Hope

Schofield is right to warn us about the dangers of pedagogical outsourcing and the erosion of disciplinary knowledge. But his critique must be extended and deepened. The crisis of teaching and learning centers is not simply a matter of misplaced expertise; it is part of a larger struggle over the meaning and purpose of education and its capacity to defend and cultivate democratic subjects, identities, and values.

Critical pedagogy and feminist pedagogy provide the resources for confronting this crisis. They remind us that education is not about adapting to the world as it is, but about imagining and struggling for a world that could be otherwise.

At a time of rising fascism, staggering inequality, and the collapse of moral and civic responsibility, the task of education is clear. It must create the conditions for students to become informed, critical, and engaged citizens, capable of holding power accountable and fighting for a radical democracy.

This is not a call for comfort but a demand for vision and courage, for a clear recognition that education stands as one of the last vital sites of struggle, a place that must refuse to reproduce the anti-democratic order into which the United States has descended and instead nurture the conditions for a more just and democratic future. It demands that we reclaim the classroom as a space of freedom rather than fear, where dialogue displaces silence and hope refuses the paralysis of despair. Above all, it insists that education, at its best, is an act of resistance, a practice of freedom, and a living promise that the future is not closed, but open to struggle, imagination, and transformation.

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