The architecture of war and violence is now matched by a barrage of goods parading as fashion.

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.

The production of knowledge in schools today is instrumental, wedded to objective outcomes, privatized, and is largely geared to produce consuming subjects. The organizational structures that make such knowledge possible enact serious costs on any viable notion of critical education and critical pedagogy. Teachers are deskilled, largely reduced to teaching for the test, business culture organizes the governance structures of schooling, knowledge is viewed as a commodity, and students are treated reductively as both consumers and workers.

Violence comes in many forms and can be particularly disturbing when confronted in an educational setting if handled dismissively or in ways that blame victims.

The propensity to avoid moral considerations was producing not simply a politically illiterate and authoritarian society, but one that was increasingly saturated in violence and a culture of cruelty. Needless to say, all of these forces intensified the increasing militarization and corporatization of higher education, along with the privatizing of everyday life.

The issue is not about raising taxes. The issue is, how do we allocate the wealth that we have? We spend trillions of dollars on a military industrial complex. The United States accounts for 38% of all the military armaments produced in the world. 38%. This is a huge amount of money. People want and need services. They want roads, they want healthcare.

Young black men are considered dangerous, expendable, threatening and part of a culture of criminality.