There is a general consensus among academics around the world that higher education is in a state of crisis. Universities are now facing challenges arising from budget cuts, diminishing quality, the loss of academic community, the militarization of research, and the revamping of curricula to fit the needs of the market—all of which contradict the culture of higher education and make a mockery of the very meaning and mission of the university. One consequence of these challenges is that universities and colleges have been increasingly abandoned as public spheres dedicated to deepening and expanding the possibilities for democratic commitments, values, and relations.

The worldwide crisis in higher education has crucial political, social, ethical, and spiri-tual consequences. At a time when market culture is aggressively colonizing everyday life and social forms increasingly lose their shape or disappear altogether, higher education has represented a reassuring permanence. Indeed, higher education has remained a slowly changing bulwark in a landscape of rapidly dissolving, critical public spheres. But higher education in the United States and elsewhere is gradually losing its civic character and commitment to public life as it aligns itself with corporate power and military values. Corporate leaders are now hired as university presidents, tenure-track professors are replaced by contract employees, students are touted as customers, and learning is increasingly defined as instrumental, while critical knowledge is relegated to the dustbin of an impoverished and underfunded liberal arts sector. Questions regarding how education might enable students to develop a keen sense of prophetic justice, promote the analytic skills necessary to hold power accountable, and provide the spiritual foundation through which students learn to respect the rights of others—and also, as Bill Moyers puts it, “claim their moral and political agency”—have become increasingly irrelevant in a market-driven and militarized university.

The calculating logic of the instrumentalized university diminishes the spiritual and political vision needed to sustain a vibrant democracy and an engaged notion of social agency. It also undermines the development of public spaces where matters of dissent, public conscience, and social justice are pedagogically valued and offer protection against the growing anti-democratic tendencies that are enveloping much of the United States and many other parts of the world.

Educating young people in the spirit of a critical democracy by providing them with access to the knowledge, passion, civic capacities, and social responsibility necessary to address the problems facing the nation and the globe also means challenging the existence of rigid disciplinary boundaries, the cult of expertise or highly specialized scholarship un-related to public life, and anti-democratic ideologies that diminish the exercise of academic freedom. Anti-democratic and anti-intellectual tendencies have intensified with the contemporary emergence of a market-based neoliberal rationality. In such a circumstance, higher education in many parts of the world is held hostage to political and economic forces that aim to convert educational institutions into corporate institutions defined by a profit-oriented identity and mission.

The world of American higher education is becoming increasingly divided: Even as some institutions educate the elite to rule the world in the twenty-first century, others are training students for low-paid positions in the capitalist world economy. It is increasingly apparent that the university in America has become a social institution that fails to address inequality in society and that contributes to a growing division between social classes. Instead of being a space for critical dialogue, analysis, and interpretation, the American university is increasingly defined as a space of consumption, where ideas are validated in instrumental terms and valued for their success in attracting outside funding while developing stronger ties to corporate powers.

Equally important, higher education has become a home for knowledge forms, underlying values, practices, ideologies, social relations, and cultural representations associated with the intensification and expansion of military culture. Higher education has no legitimate or ethical reason for engaging in practices that are organized largely for the production of violence.

Prominent educators and theorists such as Hannah Arendt, John Dewey, Cornelius Castoriadis, and C. Wright Mills long believed and rightly argued that we should neither allow education to be modeled after the business world nor sit by while corporate power and influence undermine the semi-autonomy of higher education by exercising control over its faculty, curricula, and students. These public intellectuals shared a common vision and a project that involved rethinking the role that education might play in providing students with the habits of mind and  means of acting that would enable them to identify and address the acute challenges and dangers facing a world increasingly dominated by a mode of instrumental and technological thinking that is morally and spiritually bankrupt. All of these theorists offered us the notion of the university as a bastion of democratic learning and meaningful social values. This is a notion that must be defended in discussions about what form will be taken by the relationship among corporations, the war industries, and higher education in the twenty-first century.

A campaign must be waged against the corporate view of higher education as a training center for future business employees, a franchise for generating profits, a research center for the military, or a space in which corporate culture and education merge, thereby conflating  citizenship, militarism, and consumerism. Higher education has a responsibility not only to search for the truth regardless of where it may lead, but also to educate students to demand that authority remain politically and morally accountable, thereby expanding academic freedom and the role of the university as a democratic public sphere. At a time when the meaning and purpose of higher education are besieged by a phalanx of narrow economic and political interests, it is all the more important to ask whether education should serve the public or private good, and to consider the university as the protector and promoter of democratic values.

What needs to be understood is that higher education may be one of the few public spheres left where knowledge, values, and learning nurture critical hope and a substantive democracy. It may be the case that everyday life is increasingly organized around market principles, but confusing democracy with market relations hollows out the legacy of higher education, whose deepest roots are moral, not commercial. In defending young people’s ability to access and to learn from educational rather than corporate institutions, we must heed the insight of Federico Mayor, the former director general of UNESCO, who insists, “You cannot expect anything from uneducated citizens except unstable democracy.”

Henry A.Giroux is a professor in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada and is the author most recently of The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial Academic Complex (Paradigm 2007). Chronis Polychroniou is an author and journalist who writes frequently on contemporary global, political, economic, and social affairs.