This article presents the author's response to Henry Giroux's "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex." Henry Giroux has written a provocative assessment of the contemporary challenges facing the United States as a society, which over the course of the 20th century had assumed the role of leader and exemplar of the fruitful marriage of education and democratic governance in the global system. Giroux explores the contemporary threats to the integration of education and democracy within the United States by focusing upon three diverse but connected forms of assault on higher education and freedom in the United States. Giroux's critique is a powerful indictment of the anti-intellectual traditions that have existed within the United States from its early history as a British colony. Giroux's book explores the ways in which the events of September 11, 2001, when Islamic militants used civilian aircraft to destroy New York's World Trade Center (WTC) and part of the Pentagon, sparked another episode of the flight from reason that has periodically shaken the American political system. While there is a certain validity to Giroux's argument that the events of September 11, 2001 have provoked a major shift in American political culture, he also identifies the mobilization of American conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s, notably a memo prepared by Lewis Powell in the development of the intellectual siege of the academy that gained momentum after September 2001. Giroux's concerns and analysis form part of a continuous debate about American education and its contribution to the development of American democracy--a relationship that had been addressed by Thomas Jefferson who had argued for the creation of an "aristocracy of virtue and talent" to sustain republican government in the fledgling American republic. Here, the author stresses that Giroux's timely book should remind Americans that, after the departure of the Bush administration, the time for a democratic renewal in America has arrived. (Contains 15 notes.)