What is the intellectual’s role in times of crisis? We might begin by reversing the proposition: what does the intellectual call a crisis and what does that labeling conceal? What horrors, violences, terrors, and injustices are obscured when subsumed in the language of “crisis”?

What is the crisis? Is it the fascistic and White supremacist policies of the Trump administration? Is it the abandonment of diversity, equity, and inclusion by liberal and juridical institutions? Is it the banning of Black, queer, and ethnic studies, or the shuttering and consolidation of their hard-fought and hard-won departments? Is it capitalism’s corruption of democracy, its gilding the pathway to authoritarianism in gold and computer chips made of minerals extracted from the Congo? Is it the near-complete gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the forms of political abandonment that have followed? Is it the terrorization and detention of hundreds of thousands of people by ICE and the fatal shootings of people who dare stand witness to state violence? Is it the unhinged and unvarnished face of US imperialism seen in abduction, assassination, warmongering, economic blockade, and siege upon other nations? Is it the mass sexual violence inflicted on thousands of Sudanese women? Is it the tens of thousands of slain, maimed, starved, and orphaned Palestinian children funded by our tax dollars? Is it the now-exposed sexual exploitation of young girls at the hands of moneyed political elites documented in the Epstein files? Is it the warming planet? The corporate-bought press? The collapse of literacy? The relentless expansion of the carceral state? The outsourcing of thought to AI and sociality to screens? The exploitation and disposability of Amazon workers and contingent faculty alike? The mass shootings at schools, grocery stores, and places of worship? Is it gas prices, wage stagnation, inflation, skyrocketing health insurance premiums, companies profiting off sickness rather than wellness, is the crisis that it’s too expensive simply to stay alive? 

Crises abound.

Political crises notwithstanding, the experience of being on a college campus can be a dissociating one. Some administrators abdicate responsibility for social concerns; some professors avoid discussing present issues and use their research as escape. Meanwhile, students seeking to break the veneer of the apolitical idyllic campus and draw attention to the crises are arrested, prosecuted, and swiftly disciplined. Business as usual reigns at the college or university that has been remade in the image of the market.[1]

It was in the 1960s and 1970s that many intellectuals from Civil Rights, Black Power, New Left, and Third Worldist traditions came to understand education as a terrain of struggle where one of the central things at stake was intellectual and institutional integrity. Their movements advocating for Free Speech, Anti-War, Black and Ethnic Studies, and Anti-Apartheid drew attention to how racist, capitalist, and imperialist social and political norms produced structures of alienation on campus and in the larger world. They transformed their research and lived experiences into analyses of world systems, institutional structures, and ideological formations, building fields and departments that understood crisis-informed intellectual work as social responsibility. 

Their historical task was clear: to transform universities from sites of “learning” into ones of “consciousness.” For much of modern history, universities trained students in the habits of class reproduction. Learning meant mastering lessons, acquiring credentials, and securing white-collar employment. This model of education dislocated students from the collective consciousness of the masses who bore disproportionally the brunt of society’s crises. In a speech at the University of Georgia in 1979, Civil Rights and Black Power activist Kwame Ture declared, “The job of the university here, it’s to put you to sleep.”[2] The metaphor of sleep suggests that the university engages in a form of political defanging or neutralization that keeps students from living in awareness. 

Likewise, education theorist and writer Toni Cade Bambara noted the presence of “sleepwalkers” on campuses, students who cope with the inadequacy and irrelevance of their educations by living in dislocated bifurcated worlds. Instead, Bambara dreamed of a university that was attentive to political and social realities. Teaching students at the City College of New York, she supported programs that established courses on abortion, guerilla warfare, and the radical press as part of a more pressing project to collapse “the terrifying gap between academia and the real world.” Bambara compiled her reflections on these educational experiments in her collection of essays titled, “Realizing the Dream of the Black University.”[3]

To be awake was to assist one’s people, one’s community. It was to deploy one’s knowledge in service of the people. To wake, be awake, or “woke” originally referred to one’s consciousness and ability to identify, appraise, and mobilize around an analysis of race, class, gender, and imperialism. Awakedness was a quest to enrich education and fortify civil society. Its opponents have intentionally distorted and denigrated this method and decried “wokeism” and “DEI hegemony” as the root of our crises. They weaken institutional and intellectual integrity with their demands for an uncritical glorification of Western civilization, one that is abstracted from histories of dispossession, slavery, and expropriation. Nostalgic for the days when the university served a homogenous elite few, they seek to relegate many of us to realms of dislocation. Dislocation, however, can be mobilized. Historically the most effective critiques of power and inequality have come from the edge, from the colonies, from the ghettos, and from the periphery. A critical position of dislocation without despair or despondence can fuel institutional critique and redistributive transformations.[4]

Can intellectuals and their institutions afford to turn away from crisis, now, at this historical conjuncture? In times when all choices, even the seemingly apolitical ones, only work to facilitate our own immiseration? Student movements in history have led the way time and time again as they fought for universities that were not complicit in war, authoritarianism, apartheid, prisons, fossil fuels, and genocide. It was at these inflection points that students and professors carved out spaces of analysis capable of responding to the crises of their times and they compelled their universities to support them. Today, it is those intellectuals and their fields—the ones most prepared to diagnose crisis, marry clarity of analysis to conscience, and generate solutions—that are under attack.

In 1990, the poet and writer June Jordan penned an article in The Progressive titled “Diversity or Death” in which she described the centrality of diversity to US politics as a struggle to “redistribute power so that people of whatever color or culture or sexual persuasion shall possess equality before the law and due representation in government and due representation in the academic curricula and on the faculties and in the student bodies of our democracy.” For Jordan, diversity was not an issue of liberal inclusion or shallow representation, nor should it have become a watered-down tool of professionalism. It was a demand for the redistribution of power, and an analysis rooted in uncomfortable truths about our collective past. The backlash it has provoked reveals how threatening and how powerful that demand has been. We would be remiss to abandon it now and abdicate our larger intellectual responsibility, which begins with telling the truth plainly and fearlessly about the crises of our times.[5]

Crises abound, yes, and struggle persists. Jordan reminds us that the future is not foreclosed; it is contested, contingent, and ours to fashion. “But we are fortunate,” she wrote. “Not all of the currently powerful are blind. Not all of the currently privileged despise the clear commandments of a democratic state. And, not all of all the rest of us have died.”[6]

Notes

[1] Paraphrasing Wendy Brown on the “stealth revolution” and the relationship between democracy and the market, neoliberalism, and higher education; see, “How Neoliberalism Threatens Democracy,” recorded by New Economic Thinking, 2016, 19:41, accessed April 20, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMMJ9HqzRcE; “Wendy Brown on Education,” recorded by New Economic Thinking, 2016, 10:02, accessed April 20, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFRGHXn0mRc. 

[2] “Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) at the University of Georgia, Part I (February 1, 1979),” recorded by UGA Brown Media Archives, 2021, 52:07, accessed April 16, 2026,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tiy_ViFcTNw.

[3] Toni Cade Bambara, “Realizing the Dream of the Black University & Other Writings,” in Ammiel Alcalay et al., Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Series 7, No. 3 Fall 2017 (Center for the Humanities, the Graduate Center, the City University of New York, 2017), 11-20.

[4] Russell A. Berman, “Higher Education after October 7^th: Drain the Swamp,” Teloscope, May 9, 2024, https://www.telospress.com/higher-education-after-october-7-drain-the-swamp/?srsltid=AfmBOopbGgXPwRJXQ8m4AvJyC8-oVbDgWoc8l4T63Rsd1fB9nU3NY2Lu

[5] June Jordan, “Diversity or Death,” The Progressive, June 1990, 16-17.

[6] Ibid.