Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University 

Henry A. Giroux,
McMaster University, Canada

 "The University is a critical institution or it is nothing." - Stuart Hall

I want to begin with the words of the late African-American poet, Audre Lourde, who was in her time a formidable writer, educator, feminist, gay rights activist and public intellectual who displayed a relentless courage in addressing the injustices she witnessed all around her.  She writes:

Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.1

And while Lourde refers to poetry here, I think a strong case can be made that the attributes she ascribes to poetry can also be attributed  to higher education - a genuine higher education.2  In this case, an education that includes history, philosophy, all of the arts and humanities, the criticality of the social sciences, the world of discovery made manifest by science, and the transformations in health and in law wrought by the professions that are fundamental to what it means to know something about the human condition.