American public higher education is in trouble. Besieged by declining state and Federal support for more than 30 years, public colleges and universities are facing a "game-changing" set of challenges that threaten to alter the very nature of the institutions. As two recessions withered state budgets in the first decade of the 21st…

In this three-part paper, Richard Quantz proclaims that it was the spirit of the free school movement that originally attracted him to the social foundations of education and to the philosophy of education. He wonders what has happened to the progressive movement--the one that embraced Ivan Illich's call to "deschool society" and called…