The Courage to Imagine Anew: Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and the Defense of Higher Learning, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Courage to Imagine Anew: Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and the Defense of Higher Learning

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

October 29, 2025

In these uncertain times, I find myself returning to the classics—not for comfort, but for clarity. They remind me that turmoil is not new, that every age must wrestle with its own angels and demons. As an English literature major and Spanish minor, I learned to live among these voices of the past and to listen for the echoes of our present in their words.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1968) is one such companion. Written in the wake of England’s failed republican experiment—after the execution of King Charles I, through the brief, flickering hope of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, and on the threshold of the restoration of the Stuart monarchy—it speaks to the ache of disillusionment and the stubborn endurance of faith. An anguished Milton wrote in the ruins of a republic that had promised liberty but delivered repression.

The poem’s power lies not just in its Biblical scope but in its political imagination: a meditation on what happens when institutions of knowledge, justice, and conscience are corrupted by ambition and fear. Satan’s rebellion against Heaven becomes a haunting allegory for power unmoored from morality—a warning about how even noble ideals can be twisted into tyranny when pride replaces principle.

We are living through a similar unraveling. Across the United States, and acutely here in Texas, the assault on higher education feels like a slow-motion reenactment of Milton’s epic fall. Legislation like Senate Bill 17 and Senate Bill 37 strip universities of their moral and intellectual autonomy—erasing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and eliminating faculty governance under the guise of “neutrality.” In truth, these policies are not about neutrality at all; they are about control. They mirror Satan’s own delusion in Paradise Lost: the belief that power justifies itself, that domination can masquerade as Divine order.

The recent waves of faculty dismissals in Texas, the silencing of critical inquiry, censorship campaigns, and the hollow rhetoric of “viewpoint diversity”—about which I have blogged (Valenzuela, 2025)—all echo Milton’s vision of a paradise undone by deceit. Yet Milton also reminds us that knowledge cannot be banished, nor truth extinguished; even in exile, the spirit of inquiry endures. It is in that spirit that we must resist—not with despair, but with the steadfast conviction that education itself is an act of freedom.

Our universities—once sanctuaries, however imperfect—for the free exchange of ideas are being recast as instruments of ideological conformity. Project 2025, with its blueprint for dismantling public institutions, bears the same logic as Milton’s fallen angels—an architecture of chaos disguised as reform, where destruction is framed as renewal and submission is sold as freedom.

And yet Paradise Lost does not end in despair, but in a quiet, hard-won grace—one that I encourage us to lean into. When Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden, they do not turn against one another or the world that has cast them out; instead, they walk hand in hand, “through Eden took their solitary way.” Their loss is real and profound, but so is their potential. Exile becomes not an ending, but the beginning of a new human story:

“Some natural tears they dropp’d, but wip’d them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.” — Paradise Lost, Book XII

In that moment, Milton reminds us that exile can also be the beginning of resistance—that even as institutions crumble, new communities of conscience can rise. We, too, walk that road now. As scholars, educators, and citizens, our task is not only to lament the loss of paradise but to rebuild it—to reclaim the moral and intellectual commons that sustain democracy itself.

What is at stake in this moment is more than academic freedom—it is the survival of an educated democracy. Across states and systems, educators are rising to defend the university as a public good, not a partisan instrument. The broader defense of education is, at its heart, a defense of truth, inquiry, and the capacity for moral imagination. Like Milton, we must see beyond the ruins toward the possibility of renewal, for if paradise is lost through arrogance and deceit, it is restored through wisdom, solidarity, and an expansive vision of what a good and virtuous education can be.

In doing so, we walk in the footsteps of Milton—across centuries of struggle and renewal—and honor his enduring question: not whether paradise can be restored, but whether we have the courage to imagine it anew. For the record, whoever said a Humanities or Liberal Arts degree is esoteric—or that our Western literary canon is worthless? Hardly so, even as its exclusivity has remained an issue. It has always been about survival—about learning to think, to write, to question, and to dream our way through the darkness of despair toward the light of freedom.

In times such as these, when truth itself is politicized and education reduced to utility, the humanistic tradition reminds us that freedom begins in the mind—and that imagination, not ideology, is the truest measure of a free and open society.

References

Milton, J. (1968). Paradise lost & paradise regained, Signet.

Valenzuela, A. (2025, Aug. 26). The fight for higher education: A minority perspective on both the liberal University and President Michael Roth. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas.