If the government were to invest that money in higher education and public services, these would be far better investments. But administrators and academics in the U.S. for the most part don't make these arguments; instead they have retreated from defending the university as a citadel of public values and in doing so have abdicated any sense of social responsibility to the idea of the university as a site of inspired by the search for truth, justice, freedom, and dignity.

Marked by a virulent notion of hardness and aggressive masculinity, a culture of violence has become commonplace in a society in which pain, humiliation and abuse are condensed into digestible spectacles endlessly circulated through extreme sports, reality TV, video games, YouTube postings, and proliferating forms of the new and old media.

The government now requisitions the publics' telephone records and sifts through its emails. It labels whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden as traitors, even though they have exposed the corruption, lawlessness and host of antidemocratic practices engaged in by established governments. Police can take DNA samples of all people arrested of a crime, whether they are proven guilty or not. The United States is incarcerating people in record numbers, imprisoning over 2.3 million inmates while 6 million people at any one time [are] under carceral supervision - more than were in Stalin's Gulag.

Collective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity.

You can't wait neoliberalism out, because the class war will become more consolidated; the punishing state will increase. They'll increasingly solve problems by putting more people in jail and by criminalizing all kinds of behaviors and by appealing to racist attitudes about immigrants, blacks, minorities. They'll just intensify class warfare, that's all. It'll get to the point where the true nature of the authoritarian state will be obvious.

Schools should be democratic public spheres. They should be places that educate people to be informed, to learn how to govern rather than be governed, to take justice seriously, to spur the radical imagination, to give them the tools that they need to be able to both relate to themselves and others in the wider world. I mean, at the heart of any education that matters, is a central question: How can you imagine a future much different than the present, and a future that basically grounds itself in questions of economic, political and social justice?

Students need to learn how to unlearn those elements of a market driven society that deform their sense of agency, reducing them to simply consumers or even worse to elements of a disposable population. So we need to understand who controls the means of public education and the larger forms of what Raymond Williams called the cultural apparatuses of permanent education both in terms of the dangers they pose and the possibilities they harbor.