You Don't Get the Show: Entrepreneurialism at the Crossroads of Critical Pedagogy

ABSTRACT:Those promulgating a contemporary critical pedagogy have suggested that educators must "meet students where they are." Thus, if our students are fully inculcated within the realm of the neoliberal mindset–whereby the ideology, governmentality, and public policies of revenue production, little governmental support, radical individualism, and the commodification of everyday life is "where they are"—then, I would argue, in order to produce a culturally relevant "pedagogy of the privileged" some of us must cross over into the fundamentally grey area that is academic entrepreneurialism. For the past three years I have led a course entitled "Sport Event Management" within which my students and I led a number of fundraising and programming initiatives that helped provide fiscal support for students studying abroad, faculty development, guest speakers, and the "privatized" maintenance of the Towson University Sport Management Program. In this article I will discuss the challenges, successes, and failures of trying to lead such a course as a self-proscribed critical pedagogue. Oftentimes my students and I were confronted with moral and ethical decisions that made each class different, exhilarating, exciting, and exhausting. In the end, I walked away from the course because I could no longer handle the pressures of dealing with administration hell bent on doing things the "neoliberal way."