You don't have any vestige of democracy in this country. A report recently came out of Princeton University claiming that, of all the policies that have been made in the last thirty years, 95% of them were in the interest of the rich and had nothing to do with what people wanted - basic services, roads, all of that. They called it an oligarchy.

There is a need for educators, young people, artists and other cultural workers to develop an educative politics in which people can address the historical, structural and ideological conditions at the core of the violence being waged by the corporate and repressive state and to make clear that government under the dictatorship of market sovereignty and power is no longer responsive to the most basic needs of young people - or most people for that matter.

As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports.

Public problems collapse into the limited and depoliticized register of private issues.

The current siege on higher education, whether through defunding education, eliminating tenure, tying research to military needs, or imposing business models of efficiency and accountability, poses a dire threat not only to faculty and students who carry the mantle of university self-governance, but also to democracy itself.

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?

The generation of youth in the early 21st century has no way of grasping if they will ever be free from the gnawing sense of the transience, indefiniteness, and provisional nature of any settlement.