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.

Young people oppose those market-driven values and practices aimed at both creating radically individualized subjects and undermining those public spheres that create bonds of solidarity that reinforce a commitment to the common good.

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

Historical memory is a potent weapon in fighting against the desert of organized forgetting and implies a rethinking of the role that artists, intellectuals, educators, youth and other concerned citizens can play in fostering a reawakening of America's battered public memories.

Under the regime of neoliberalism, individual responsibility becomes the only politics that matters, and serves to blame those who are susceptible to larger systemic forces. Even though such problems are not of their own making, neoliberalism's discourse insists that the fate of the vulnerable is a product of personal issues ranging from weak character to bad choices or simply moral deficiencies. This makes it easier for its advocates to argue that poverty is a deserved condition.

Higher educating is defaulting on its obligations to offer young people a quality and broad-based education. This is true in part because the liberal arts and humanities have fallen out of favor in a culture that equates education with training.

Young black men in America have an identity ascribed to them that is a direct legacy of slavery.