ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the place of critical pedagogy in the author's professional practice. It is also a call to leftists and radical professors who are at private and well-funded institutions, whose institutions are more politically progressive and who have more support for critical approaches to education. Although academics are not frontline freedom fighters, there is a contingent who believes people are indeed struggling against powerful institutional and societal structures that have mark palpable physical, legal and cultural clashes within the broad US higher education system. Activist-academics, or academic freedom fighters, promote democratic education because: it makes sense to educate everyone equally with the aim of bettering the whole of society; and there is a basic love linked to this commitment that cannot be quantified but that is directed at helping disenfranchised populations whose agency has been compromised by those in power.
