Many conservatives see higher education as a threat to their reactionary and corporate oriented interests and would like to defund higher education, privatize it, eliminate tenure, and define the working conditions of faculty to something resembling the labor practices of Walmart workers.

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.

The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world.

There appears to be no space outside the panoptican of commercial barbarism and casino capitalism.

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

America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.

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.