There's this nostalgia for the public university that existed after World World 2, when veterans were returning from the war and the government was pumping all this money into making education more affordable and accessible. The problem with these nostalgic narratives is they really crop out the violence of that institution - how the GI Bill was racially discriminatory, how the university continued to create knowledge for the military and imperial purposes, how the university served the function of accumulating surplus populations who could have been engaged in activities - like union organizing - that might have served a threat to liberal capitalism.

Scholar Eli Meyerhoff examines the realities of education under the capitalist university - as a means of social control and a reification agent - and explains why reclaiming the potential, and power, of knowledge won't happen by looking backward to education of the past, but forwards, with a radically democratic, abolitionist frame.

Eli is author of Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World from University of Minnesota Press.