The organizers of this symposium have set us a wonderful, impossible task. In 800 words, they have asked us to diagnose the root problems of the free speech crisis in America today and to propose a concrete reform that would begin to remedy the crisis.

I’m going to approach this in reverse: first by proposing something, and then by describing why it might respond to the crisis of today as I see it. This proposal is creative (you could also call it half-baked), because I’m taking the challenge as I understand it: in these disorienting times, to come up with new ideas that aiming at the roots of the problem.

The proposal is “The People’s College”: a guarantee, to all adults in the United States: You have the right to a two-year college degree at the accredited college of your choice. The state and federal government would provide the funds, with rates capped at those charged by public institutions. Colleges and universities would provide programs, focusing on what they can best provide, and developing new programs that suit local community needs. Learners would seek out the education they most want and need. To participate, colleges would need to meet eligibility standards. These would be designed to strengthen higher education as a sector and at the same time to make it more accountable, public-minded, and democracy-reinforcing. For example, participating institutions would be required to protect academic freedom and free speech, provide education primarily in person, have clear and fair admissions policies, and respect the right of all campus workers to organize. They might also be encouraged to impart critical media skills, involve local community groups and provide opportunities for community service, involve local workers’ organizations and provide pathways to apprenticeships, provide education about how local government works, facilitate transfer credits for further study, and so forth.

Why a People’s College? First, because education matters tremendously, to all of us. Humans are the only species that learns across generations in large-scale, open-ended ways. Education formalizes this learning, helping us to understand our world and find our place within it. Higher education has a profoundly important role in democracy. It not only passes on skills, but also by protects dissent and critical thought, and provides opportunities for belonging, community building, and aspiration. We are also in a period of enormous insecurity for many in this country. We need many collective minds and hands to address vast challenges ahead: adapting to AI, bringing cleaner energy to homes around the country, bringing skilled nursing care to the elderly, and developing ideas that can help us make sense of our rapidly changing world. An educational guarantee might be warranted as economic and jobs policy alone—but the virtues of it for democracy are what makes it interesting for those concerned with free speech.

Many states offer subsidies and grants for community college already, but without the suite of democracy-reinforcing requirements I suggest above. The more ambitious program I’m suggesting here would not only incorporate such conditions, but also be better funded, supported both by states and the federal government, open to all adult learners (those with a high school degree, but not a BA), and to all accredited institutions of higher education. Clearly, the backbone would be community colleges and four-year state universities, for these educate the vast majority of Americans today. If reimbursement rates were keyed to in-state tuition for state universities, it would help sustain public institutions, while inviting private institutions to become more interested in and accountable to their local communities. It would put the challenge to all higher ed institutions: What could you do to better serve adults in your communities? What does the kind of education you can best provide offer to people? The idea here, you could say, is a mashup of free community college programs and Bard College’s successful prison programs and new “micro-colleges,” which provide a liberal arts education including in great books with extraordinary success. And a vastly better program than the one offered by Trump’s terrible “American Academy” proposal.

This is the kind of proposal that could strengthen our democracy and provide an institutional, structural remedy for our free speech crisis if it could: 1) make an institution central to democracy more accessible and accountable, 2) strengthen higher ed as a sector organized to advance learning, knowledge, and critical thought, and 3) help build more durable majorities for inclusive democracy itself, by rapidly providing more avenues for learning and belonging and by mitigating the press of material constraints that crush so many people’s sense of possibility and freedom today. The laissez-faire of the neoliberal age has created forms of insecurity that are readily weaponized by demagogues. And it reordered higher ed in ways that have deeply alienated our natural constituency: people who want to learn, provided the cost doesn’t ruin their lives. Any structural solution to the crisis of democracy needs to address material well-being and security, and not simply “rule of law” institutions.

Take this as exemplary rather than cooked. But the idea here is that we need stronger and more accountable institutions that are not ordered by profit-seeking and market-sociability, but by values of critical inquiry, learning, pluralism, and democratic equality. Higher education is not really that kind of institution today, but there are key aspects upon which to build—and in the process, build more reason for public trust and accountability in higher ed, and more inclusive and democratic forms of the thing itself. The root cause of the crisis in free speech, in other words, is in the concentrated power and domination that structure our political economic order itself. Resolving it requires imagining and building stronger institutions and collectives—ones that can protect pluralistic and genuinely egalitarian forms of democratic life.