We need to make clear that the economic crisis has to be matched by a crisis of ideas. That's the problem, right? The economic crisis is not matched by a crisis of ideas. That's where the war is going to be fought.

With no adequate role to play as consumers, many youth are now considered disposable, forced to inhabit "zones of social abandonment" extending from homeless shelters and bad schools to bulging detention centers and prisons.

Rejecting the notion that democracy and markets are the same, young people are calling for an end to the poverty, grotesque levels of economic inequality, the suppression of dissent and the permanent war state.

Under neoliberalism everyone has to negotiate their fate alone, bearing full responsibility for problems that are often not of their own doing. The implications politically, economically and socially for young people are disastrous and are contributing to the emergence of a generation of young people who will occupy a space of social abandonment and terminal exclusion.

Schools resemble the culture of prisons.

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.

If the government were to invest that money in higher education and public services, these would be far better investments. But administrators and academics in the U.S. for the most part don't make these arguments; instead they have retreated from defending the university as a citadel of public values and in doing so have abdicated any sense of social responsibility to the idea of the university as a site of inspired by the search for truth, justice, freedom, and dignity.