This chapter argues that educational environments must always be open to fostering our critical capacities for thinking, interpreting, and judging, rather than closed to them. For when they are closed, they become breeding grounds for those who decree that “experts” in democraticdemocracy educationdemocratic education and critical thinkingcritical thinking, i.e., proponents of critical pedagogycritical pedagogy, should be kept out of the classroom and eliminated from the university. And when this occurs, the fight to render late academelate academe extinct is severely compromised. Our critical capacities for thinking, interpreting, and judging are a major means of hastening the extinctionextinction of late academeextinctionof late academe.