Introduction: Why Taking Back Higher Education Matters

Abstract

This book represents our desire to offer some speculation about and critical questioning of two events in post-civil rights America. The first has to do with the current state of American political culture: the declining interest in and cynicism about mainstream national politics, its decidedly negative impact on the democratic process, and how such entrenched dispositions might be reversed. Emptied of any substantial content, democracy appears imperiled because individuals are unable to translate their privately suffered misery into broadly shared public concerns and collective action. Civic engagement now appears impotent and public values have become expendable as a result of the growing power of multinational corporations to shape the content of most mainstream media. Political exhaustion and impoverished intellectual visions are fed by the increasingly popular assumption that there are no alternatives to the present state of affairs.¹ For many people today, citizenship is about the act of buying and selling commodities (including political candidates), rather than broadening the scope of their freedoms and rights in order to expand the operations of a substantive democracy. Market values, coupled with a resurgent bigotry, undercut the possibility of a language in which vital social institutions can be defended as a public good.