In his landmark book The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills argues that social scientists (and educators) have an obligation to address the question of truth and its political meaning during a time of widely communicated nonsense. He further argues that in addition to a politics of truth, social scientists have to support the values of reason and human freedom. He also believed that the role of social scientists was to disturb, bear witness, and resist systems of oppression. In this view, intellectuals have to have a deep sense of commitment and civic courage while “writing with vigor and clarity for the general reader [in order] to sustain the idea and the hope of a public culture.”[1] These principles, in the age of emerging fascism, are under attack in the age of gangster capitalism by a horde of anti-public intellectuals and far-right members of the GOP.

Source: Educators as Public Intellectuals in an Age of Tyranny: Confront, Fight Back and Organize – CounterPunch.org