If elite universities have perfected the aesthetic of critique, public universities still embody its mess. But that mess matters. Public universities were once imagined as engines of national integration, mobility, and reasoned dissent. Today, they have become battlegrounds. In many cases, they are starved of funds, over-policed, and vilified in public discourse. Yet, despite their crisis, and sometimes because of it, they remain among the last spaces where political struggle is not just theorised, but lived.