Educational and academic settings naturalize logics of privatization and enclosure. We should resist the university as a space of neoliberal contestation by abandoning it rather than submitting to it.

The interregnum we have entered represents a time of war over fundamen-tally different ways of living, being, and relating. One can see such processes playing out in the realm of formal education in places like the United States where schools and universities have become focal points of the new civil war. Schools, universities, professors, teachers, and school board members are under relentless attack from neofascist forces. Laws are being passed in many US states that ban books and restrict teaching history and social issues related to slavery, native genocide, racism, sexuality, and colonialism. Yet the desire for commons and for modes of life based on difference, reciprocity, and mutuality remain and can never be fully enclosed. The emerging post-neoliberal enclosures represent a war over the future. They can be deconstructed and understood through grounded analysis of political economy and culture in a time of speed, fragmen-tation, and escalating war and ecological disaster. That part is easy. Yet our predicament often feels too big, too abstract, and too complex to effectively challenge or transform. This is precisely why, we would argue, that struggles over educational commons are so vital in the struggle over the future. Some like Jordi Collet-Sabé and Stephen Ball (2023) suggest we should abandon schools and universities. Rather than seeing them as vital sites of antag-onism and contestation over the present and future, their position effectively hands these public spheres over to the most nihilistic and regressive forces in the social body. Moreover, this kind of pseudo-radical posturing detached from pol-itics and material concerns, performs disrespect to countless teachers and stu-dents, who, despite the imperial legacies of schools and universities, struggle to find and create moments of community, engagement, and inspiration that can never be fully enclosed by the logics of capital or liberal modernity. The daily labor, work, interactions, and relations of teachers and students, in countless schools, universities, and communities, actually matters for politics and the future. Ideas matter. Kindness matters. Compassion matters. Joy matters. Edu-cational commons are real and are enacted whenever we gather together to teach, to learn, and to study (Harney and Moten 2013). This includes schools and universities, but also exceeds these institutions, encompassing broader con-testation over formative cultures, meaning, subjectivities, and modes of identi-fication crucial for reviving a sense of radical possibility grounded in democratic relations and aspirations. Commons are a tremendous storehouse of collective wealth, which includes knowledge, language, and culture. This is precisely why educational commons are such a rich site of radical possibility.