In any totalitarian society, dissent is viewed as a threat, civic literacy is denounced, and those public spheres that produce engage citizens are dismantled or impoverished through the substitution of training for education.

History remains an open horizon that cannot be dismissed through appeals to the end of history or end of ideology.

What is distinctive about the U.S. is that higher education is under attack not because it is failing but because it is public. It is now considered dangerous because it has the potential to function as a site where a culture of questioning can operate, the imagination can blossom, and difficult questions can be openly debated and critically engaged.

And look, we have young people in this country who are thirty years old living with their parents. We have young people in this country who don't have jobs, who graduate from college and are fed the lie of meritocracy. "You get a degree, you get a job." That's not happening. We have young people who have become the Zero Generation: zero hope, zero employment, zero possibilities. Do we really believe that this young generation is going to stand by and not take note of an economic system that - however it calls itself - has completely betrayed them?

Problems become privatized and removed from larger social issues. This is one task, connecting the personal problems to larger social issues that progressive leftist intellectuals have failed to take on as a major political and educational project.

The historical legacies of resistance to racism, militarism, privatization and panoptical surveillance have long been forgotten and made invisible in the current assumption that Americans now live in a democratic, post-racial society.

It is important to note that Edward Snowden was labeled as a spy not a whistle-blower - even though he exposed the reach of the spy services into the lives of most Americans. More importantly, he was denounced as being part of a generation that unfortunately combined being educated with a distrust of authority.