Growing and increasingly legitimate socioeconomic inequalities and abandonment of the project of educating a public for citizenship are at once cause and effect of public divestment from universities and public universities' departure from a mission of providing broad liberal arts education to the many. Put the other way around, curtailed access to public universities, along with their changing mission and content, reflects and intensifies contemporary dedemocratizing tendencies in Euro-Atlantic nation-states generally and the United States in particular.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 366