CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Making History in Dark Times: Refuse Numbness. Refuse Silence

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Text of Henry Giroux’s Honorary Degree and Commencement Address at the University of Southern Maine, May 9. 2026.

President Edmundson, distinguished faculty, honored guests, families, and most importantly, graduates.

It is a profound honor to address you on this day of celebration and possibility. This moment is especially meaningful to me because I began my own academic journey here, at what was then Gorham State College. It was here in the 1960s that I first learned that education is not simply about acquiring knowledge, but about learning how to think, question, and imagine the world differently. It was here that I learned that education should be a place where students realize themselves as critical and engaged citizens who can expand and deepen the possibilities of democratic public life.  That experience opened the door to a lifetime of writing, teaching, and reflecting on the meaning and promise of education. USM holds a lasting place in my memory and in shaping who I have become.

Today, as we celebrate your achievements, we should also speak candidly about the historical moment into which you now graduate. Yours is a generation coming of age in a time of profound crisis and unsettling uncertainty. Across the globe, we are witnessing intensifying climate catastrophe, the ever-present shadow of nuclear conflict, widening inequalities that hollow out democracy, a culture of relentless immediacy, rising authoritarianism, and renewed assaults on public institutions, especially higher education.

We are also living through an era in which truth is under siege, where the language of justice has been emptied of meaning, where cruelty is too often normalized as a form of governance, and state violence becomes routine.  In such a moment, education is not a luxury; it is a necessity. It is not simply a pathway to a career, it is a moral and political force, a vital resource for understanding the world and changing it.

Education, at its best, is one of the few spaces left where individuals can learn to think critically, connect private troubles to public issues, revive historical memory, and develop the civic courage necessary to hold power accountable. But such a vision is under attack. Increasingly, education is reduced to training, stripped of its ethical and political dimensions, and aligned with the narrow demands of the market. Even worse, in states such as Florida, Texas, and Idaho, higher education is being transformed into laboratories of indoctrination. In this diminished view, students become consumers, knowledge is reduced to its exchange value, books are banned, history is censored, and the broader mission of education, to cultivate informed, engaged, and compassionate citizens while defending democracy, is pushed to the margins. You must refuse this narrowing of your education and your future, along with this rewriting of America in dangerously authoritarian terms.

One of the most important tasks of education is to enable you to translate private troubles into public issues, to see yourselves not as isolated individuals, but as part of a larger........

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