At a time when higher education is under siege all over the globe by market mentalities and moralities, there is an urgent necessity on the part of the American public to reclaim the academy in its multiple forms as a site of critique and a public good, one that connects knowledge and power, scholarship and public life, and pedagogy and civic engagement. The current assault on higher education by the apostles of neoliberalism and religious fundamentalists makes clear that it should not be harnessed to cost-benefit analyses or the singular needs of corporations, which often leads to the loss of egalitarian and democratic pressures. Universities should be about more than developing work skills. They must also be about producing civic minded and critically engaged citizens – citizens who can engage in debate, dialogue and bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance. Universities are some of the few places left where a struggle for the commons, for public life, if not democracy itself, can be made visible through the medium of collective voices and social movements energized by the need for a politics and way of life counter to authoritarian capitalism.

We are living in a time in which democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish – from public schools to health care centers – there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values and the common good. We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of ‘choice’ and a denial of reality – a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death. 1 More and more individuals and groups are becoming imaginary, others defined by a free-floating capitalist class that inscribes them as disposable, redundant and irrelevant. The American public increasingly inhabits zones of hardship, suffering and terminal exclusion. This is all the more reason for scholars to address important social issues and for the university to defend itself as a democratic public sphere.

We live in a world in which everything is now privatized, transformed into “spectacular spaces of consumption,” and subject to the vicissitudes of the national security state. 2 One consequence is the emergence of what the late Tony Judt called an “eviscerated society”- one that is “stripped of the thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities to be found in” any viable democracy. 3 This grim reality has been called a “failed sociality” a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will and open democracy.

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