Higher education in the United States appears to be caught in a strange contradiction. By all objective measures, the American academic system is regarded as one of the finest educational systems in the world. A recent study conducted at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, for instance, evaluated five hundred of the world’s top universities and concluded that “The United States has 80 percent of the world’s twenty most distinguished research universities and about 70 percent of the top fifty. We lead the world in the production of new knowledge and its transmission to undergraduate, doctoral and postdoctoral students. Since the 1930s, the United States has dominated the receipt of Nobel Prizes, capturing roughly 60 percent of these awards.”1 But the American system of higher education is unique not only for the quality of its research universities and its role in

preparing students for emerging industries that drive the new global economy; it is also renowned, in spite of its limitations, as a democratic public sphere that gathers its “force and relevance by its democratic, secular, and open character.”2 Offering faculty a substantial measure of academic freedom and students the opportunity to learn within a culture of questioning and critical engagement, American higher education strongly affirms, at least in principle, the knowledge, values, skills, and social relations required for producing individual and social agents capable of addressing the political, economic, and social injustices that diminish the reality and promise of a substantive democracy at home and abroad. While the American university faces a growing number of problems that range from the increasing loss of federal and state funding, the incursion of corporate power, a galloping commercialization, and the growing influence of the national security state, it nevertheless remains, as Edward Said has insisted, “the one public space available to real alternative intellectual practices: no other institution like it on such a scale exists anywhere else in the world today.”3