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Writing in response to Hannah Arendt’s Men in Dark Times (1968), Philosopher Maxine Greene notes Arendt’s understanding of the need for light—“a space where in which light can be shed on what is happening and what is being said”.

We were always an unlikely pair of collaborators. Our partnership first begins as we, two faculty members from separate campuses in different fields, meet over coffee at a local cafe. It is so hot on this day, of course Hawaiʻi is a warm place, but for some reason, this cafe seems to be the hottest spot on Oahu.

In a recent Australian first-year early childhood teachers education course focused on the study of development, students shared negative feedback stating that they were not taught developmental psychology within the structure of the course.

A very worthy person, an administrator, and whose virtues we highly esteem, is another cog in this neoliberal machine. As the manager of the institute of higher education discoursing on this matter to offer refinement upon our scheme. His position of supporting the thinking student and academic will be conceived that the want of thinking will be well supplied under the guise of managerialism. This will dispose of thinking as students and academics will be tricked into the engaging with the “process” but of reality, the thinking will be ignored as decisions are already made in the name of profit and bottom-line.

After World War II, in a city in the of Reggio Emilia, Italy, a collective of women and the National Liberation Committee (CLN) came together to start a school.

Some persons of a desponding spirit are in great concern about that vast number of academics using the university as a place to voice opinions, disrupt neoliberalism, and question the establishment under the guise of academic freedom, and we have been desired to employ our thoughts what course may be taken to ease higher education of so grievous an encumbrance. But we are not in the least pain upon that matter, because it is very well known that we can position these academics as service providers relieving them of academic freedom and putting them in their place by the neoliberal practices of efficiency, accountability, teaching evaluations, prescribed syllabi, university-wide templates, and class management systems. This way these academics have no time to think, and consequently pine away for want of intellectual nourishment to a degree that if at any time they are accidentally expected to ponder and engage, they have not the scholarly strength to perform it; and thus the university is happily delivered from the evils of the contemplative academic.

The practice of hope, and in particular students, academics, and administrators acting as public intellectuals has relevance beyond schools of education. How do we move our ideas to a large scale? How do we engage the many students across the university? As we continued to talk about our work with colleagues, people said to us, you need to talk to this person or you need to see what they are doing in this place. We were intrigued, moving beyond schools of education seemed to be the next step in this work. So more conversations over food happened, gathering together in university cafes and restaurants adjacent to large research conferences. Emails exchanged furthering articulation of ideas, questions, and implementations. More stories emerged, stories that illustrate how disciplines outside of education create structures and policies that disrupt neoliberalism in higher education. These examples demonstrate practices of hope.