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

Collective freedom is one devoid of material bondage and one that supports the institutions necessary for democracy.

Symptoms of ethical, political and economic impoverishment are all around us.

The promises of higher education and previously enviable credentials have turned into the swindle of fulfilment.

Students, in particular, now find themselves in a world in which heightened expectations have been replaced by dashed hopes.

Everyone, especially minorities of race and ethnicity, now live under a surveillance panopticon.

Youth are no longer the place where society reveals its dreams.

Public problems collapse into the limited and depoliticized register of private issues.

Increasingly fed by a moral and political hysteria, warlike values produce and endorse shared fears as the primary register of social relations.

War has become a mode of sovereignty and rule, eroding the distinction between war and peace.

Any dominant ideology operates off the assumption that what it has to say is unaccountable and unquestionable.

There is a need for subjects who find intense pleasure in the commodification of violence and a culture of cruelty.

Increasingly, poor minority and white youth are being funnelled directly from schools into prison.

Everywhere we look we see the encroaching shadow of the police state.

Schools resemble the culture of prisons.

War is one of the nation's most honoured virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.

Getting ahead cannot be the only motive that motivates people. You have to imagine what a good life is.

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

I think the very idea of the social contract is in disarray.