In this article, the author talks about California's Master Plan for Higher Education, which offered a vision of access, affordability, and quality that was bold, inspiring, and attainable. It was predicated on the understanding that an educational system with such characteristics is essential to the cultural, political, and economic health of a nation and state. The authors of the Master Plan recognized that as California had invented and reinvented itself over a century and a half, higher education has provided the key to hope and recovery, to high expectations and needed corrections. Notwithstanding the recent survey by California's nonpartisan Public Policy Institute, which reaffirmed the public's broad recognition of the quality of the state's universities and the ongoing need for them, the state's political leaders seem unable and unwilling to comprehend or appreciate what the state has accomplished through its robust system of public higher education. The evidence of neglect is in the numbers. It should surprise no one, then, that articles on the fiftieth anniversary of the Master Plan are more funereal than celebratory in tone. Does one face "no direction home" to the vision of the Master Plan, or can one turn this crisis around? For public higher education everywhere, the answer is the same: one can turn the current crisis around, and one must do so. The author argues that a strong liberal education is key both to answering the most vociferous critics of the purpose and performance of public higher education, and to fulfilling educators' obligations to the society in which their students will take their place.