We need to get rid of the growing army of temporary workers now filling the ranks of academy. This is scandalous; it weakens both the power of the faculty and exploits these workers.

History remains an open horizon that cannot be dismissed through appeals to the end of history or end of ideology.

If American society wants to invest in its young people, it has an obligation to provide them with an education in which they are challenged, can learn to take risks, think outside the boundaries of established ideologies, and expand the far reaches of their creativity and critical judgment. This demands a pedagogy that is complicated, taxing and disruptive.

Of course, there are also faculty who are discouraged from speaking critically about social issues because of the increasing assumption in American society that any form of critique which calls official power into question is somehow un-American. This absurd attempt to define any critique of official power as unpatriotic has a chilling effect on faculty, especially when such views and the names of the people to whom they are ascribed are widely disseminated in right-wing and dominant media outlets.

Trump erases the ability to recognize suffering and to try to understand the conditions that produce it, the ability to become a moral witness in the face of injustices. Trump erases that. Trump appeals to a population in which that becomes irrelevant. And that is so dangerous, at this particular time.

There is an attempt to deskill teaches by removing matters of conception from implementation. Teachers are no longer asked to be creative, to think critically, or to be creative. On the contrary, they have been reduced to the keeper of methods, implementers of an audit culture, and removed from assuming autonomy in their classrooms.

Everyone is now a customer or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in bottom-line, cost-effective terms. Freedom is no longer about equality, social justice, or the public welfare, but about the trade in goods, financial capital, and commodities.