Again, thank you Mike, for taking the time to write to me. Yes, I know the work of bell hooks--she, like Edward Said, is an essential voice in our times. Glorious dissenters who fashion a body of work out of their knowledge and their heart, out of the history of their own marked bodies. They are some of the many writers targeted by the Right wing's ongoing attacks on "left-leaning" universities--but those of us who shared bell's writings with our students know the gleam she brought to their thinking, their recognition of her portrait of gender, race, culture and of her fierce self. These public university rooms, besieged by so many constrictions from so many fundamentalist desires for silence or from so little federal economic support, must always be a matter of our concern. Once in New York, we turned our back and free higher education died.