BY PAULA LEZAMA

I am a product of public education across borders. Its fragility is not theoretical to me. I come from a context marked by extreme precarity. I was the first in my family to attend college, earned an MA, and this coming May, I will be the first in my family to earn a doctoral degree. Public education has literally and figuratively made my life possible.

This year marks three educational thresholds in my household. As I prepared to finish my degree, my teen is graduating from high school at a public institution amid insecurity about financial aid and curricular narrowing. At the same time, my son’s public elementary school is being closed. Across three different stages of life, we are living through the cascading effects of public education restructuring—away from both the notion of the public and the breadth of education. These losses are not isolated but part of a larger contracting horizon where the decay of public reasoning is masked by forced continuity. I am completing my doctoral studies at a moment when opportunities in my field are diminishing and certain lines of inquiry carry increased exposure to retaliation and professional censoring. The institutional environment of education, once described as the great equalizer, enabled upward mobility. However, it now appears to be recalibrating its commitments backwards. The question then is not whether institutions change—they always do—but what kind of future they are organizing.

There are moments when the present feels Macondian, as though we are watching decline unfold in plain sight while insisting on normalcy—a quiet unraveling that recalls the atmosphere of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The insistence on continuity normalizes an increasingly deranged public discourse and institutional decay, dulling perception and shrinking the horizon of the possible. This short reflection is about the work of the imagination in expanding our perception when the horizon of the possible is narrowing.

Science fiction has long been my refuge, not because it denies reality, but because it reorganizes it. Having lived many of the structural conditions I now study, I turned to speculative worlds for distance. In the novels of the great Isaac Asimov, reason persists across collapsing empires and distant galaxies. Science fiction does not abandon logic; it relocates it. It asks what might follow if the assumptions are changed, if one variable is altered, if institutions were redesigned, and if hierarchies were not inevitably ascriptive. In this sense, imagination is not mere indulgence but a methodological path. It stretches the frame of interpretation beyond the immediate present, restoring historical depth and future consequence.

Asimov famously warned of a persistent “cult of ignorance,” a suspicion toward expertise that mistakes opinion for knowledge. His defense of reason reflects my earliest intellectual commitments, yet I no longer share his confidence that rational debate alone can secure the institutions that sustain it. The anti-intellectualism we are witnessing today reveals the limits of reason when the institutional scaffolding is eroded. The light of reason does not extinguish easily, but it can be dimmed, redirected, and made intermittent.

Here, the insights of Antonio Gramsci become clear. Gramsci reminds us that power operates not only through coercion but also through normalization—through shaping what feels like common sense, rendering particular arrangements as natural and inevitable. At my own institutional home, recent leadership transitions and programmatic restructuring have been framed as institutional recalibration. Yet such shifts participate in a broader redefinition of the university’s intellectual mission. Curricular contraction and the dismantling of critical fields do more than reorganize resources; they signal which lines of inquiry are institutionally protected and which may carry professional risk. The anticipation of consequence—loss of funding, stalled advancement, reputational vulnerability—can be sufficient to narrow the field of permissible thought. What once expanded critical inquiry is gradually repositioned as discretionary, ideological, or expendable.

At a more granular level, Michel Foucault mapped how power and knowledge are co-constitutive. Power does not merely silence; it produces the conditions for reason to be constrained under the threat of disappearance. Surveillance need not be spectacular to be effective. It operates through hiring decisions, evaluation metrics, collapsing of majors, disappearing departments, and shifting professional incentives. Under such an environment, uncertainty becomes regulatory. One need not be explicitly censored to feel the narrowing of the permissible.

If science fiction expands the horizon of possibility, institutional contraction narrows it. Speculative worlds teach us that altering one premise can generate entirely different futures. Universities, at their best, once performed a similar function: They protected spaces where assumptions could be tested and redesigned. When those spaces shrink, what diminishes is not only employment prospects or programmatic breadth. What contracts is the range of possible futures we are collectively permitted to imagine.

There are moments when such contraction feels like finality, as the arc of expansion has reversed. Yet history has never ended, granted it does reorganize. Intellectual work cannot guarantee stability; it does not prevent regression in real time, as we are witnessing. Its task is more modest, I fear, and more enduring: to preserve the capacity to imagine otherwise.

This year, one teen graduates, launching into vagueness; a child loses his school; and I complete a doctorate amid professional uncertainty. These are not isolated events but points along a shifting societal landscape where education is but one site of the broader struggle. To write about it now is not to ignore the world’s larger volatility, but to situate ourselves within it.

In this scenario, if imagination is the first act of intellect, then its defense becomes responsibility. Under constraint, imagination is not escape; it is discipline and method, one that reminds us that the present configuration of the world is not the only one possible.

Paula Lezama is a doctoral candidate in Latin American studies at the University of Texas at Austin with a background in economics and sociology. Her research employs a decolonial political economy approach, integrating participatory, mixed methods, and decolonial frameworks to analyze Afrodescendant women’s collective governance, economies of refusal, and community-defined well-being. She also supports large-scale data projects on immigration policy and education in the United States. She is a 2025–26 American Association of Women Dissertation Fellow and a researcher at the Numbers for Justice Lab.