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.

Schools resemble the culture of prisons.

It seems to me that as economics drives politics and money markets set policies, what we have is an enormously powerful emergence of both a police state on the one hand and an incredible culture of cruelty on the other. All of the sudden, shared hopes are replaced by shared fears.

We need to figure how to defend higher education as a public good. If we can't do that, we're in trouble.

The challenges that young people are mobilizing against oppressive societies all over the globe are being met with a state-sponsored violence that is about more than police brutality. This is especially clear in the United States, given its transformation from a social state to a warfare state, from a state that once embraced a semblance of the social contract to one that no longer has a language for justice, community and solidarity - a state in which the bonds of fear and commodification have replaced the bonds of civic responsibility and democratic vision.

The freedom and human capacities of individuals must be developed to their maximum but individual powers must be linked to democracy in the sense that social betterment must be the necessary consequence of individual flourishing.

Once ignorance is weaponized, violence seems to be a tragic inevitability.