The life of the mind may be a deeply personal thing, but as embodied in colleges and universities, it is also a very public thing'and the two go hand in hand. Since taking office, the Trump administration has been working to dismantle the global order and the nation's core institutions, including its cultural ones, to strip them of their power. The future of the nation's universities is very much at stake. This is not a challenge that can be met with purely defensive tactics. We must do what should have been done long ago: find our way to a new social contract between universities and the American people. Whatever form it takes, the life of the mind is essential to individual and social flourishing. When I think about its unpredictable byways, I think of my own story. The life of the mind first found me in the third grade on a small elementary-school playground in suburban Southern California, thanks to the work of a schoolyard bully. My family had spent the previous year in France...
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