I first met Joe in 2005 while I was Canada Research Chair in democratic learning at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He had recently accepted a Canada Research Chair in critical studies at McGill University. At the time, I was organizing a regular colloquium series in the department of education at Concordia and invited Joe to come speak about his work to faculty and students with the expectation he would decline my offer due to the extraordinary demands on his own time. Of course I was wrong. Not only did he accept my invitation to speak but took the necessary time to answer all questions about his work from those who joined us on that particularly frosty winter afternoon.

Thanks for your kind words Joe. In a very real sense, contemporary researchers and scholars are confronting a full frontal assault on their academic freedom, and democracy itself is under similar attack. The decree in the US by the National Research Council and more recent signals emitted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada ought to worry all of us who reject the quantification and objectification of human beings. The move toward "scientific" research never affords an accurate picture of what's going on in education at the individual, classroom and school level.

Schools and education are ideally situated to wrap students in ruling ideology by exposing them to the ideas, values and norms favoring the ruling class. Indeed, the development of public education corresponds with the rise of universal suffrage, and schools provided hegemonic interests with an effective means to control and manipulate public perspectives and political participation.