At the start of the second decade of the 21st century, young people all over the world are demonstrating against a variety of issues ranging from economic injustice and massive inequality to drastic cuts in education and public services. These demonstrations have and currently are being met with state-sanctioned violence and an almost pathological refusal to hear their demands.

I think people now live in an age in which the only thing - they don't think about getting ahead. They think about surviving.

Youth are becoming the site of society's nightmares.

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current.

When you begin to suggest that dissent, opposition, resistance, the only way to deal with it is not to listen to it and to engage in dialog with it, but basically to label it as anarchy and to repress it with the most violent, in the most violent means possible. I mean, that's essentially an element of neofascism. That's not about democracy.

At the start of the second decade of the 21st century, young people all over the world are demonstrating against a variety of issues ranging from economic injustice and massive inequality to drastic cuts in education and public services. These demonstrations have and currently are being met with state-sanctioned violence and an almost pathological refusal to hear their demands.

With the corporatization and privatization of higher education, it is increasingly more difficult for colleges and universities to expand and deepen democratic public life, produce engaged critical citizens, and operate as democratic public spheres.