The cause of human freedom is not advanced by tons of debt weighing on the graduates' generation, which is the battle the Tea Party is fighting for them. If America can't function as a viable economic entity, it won't be advancing any causes.

It's so nice to hear these articulated and presented.

"The Tea Party is, by far, the main offender. Its uncompromising attitude would work perfectly in a place like North Korea". Wow, no mention and zero accountability for the OWS movement, who want an entitlement society. How can you talk about spending and working together if your going to demonize one group and totally ignore the other. I just love open minded liberal elitist's.

With professors like this teaching our young people, no wonder this nation is in decline.

Professor Burns is right about the great challenges today's graduates are inheriting from us, their elders--one of which is "to fix the sorry breakdown in governance in Washington." But when he adds "that will only occur through painful and difficult compromise by both sides," he slides into slides into offering a bromide that misleads, that oversimplifies the problem. The more basic problem is not that individual representatives need to learn to compromise, but that we the citizens are electing to office individuals who lack the personal maturity and wisdom to know both how to fix things and how to work with others in fixing things. We electing people who don't understand the problems we face, or how to fix them, or how to work well with others. This is basically a problem with the electorate. We're electing, and putting into office, people who have strong feelings and convictions about issues, but who don't have the basic skills and competencies needed to plan, look ahead, and govern. We shouldn't blame our representatives in Congress. We put them there. That was our judgment to place them there--our mis-judgment. Let's look to ourselves, to what "we" have been doing that has led us all into our current impasse. Let's have high schools, colleges, and citizen groups look more closely at the personality characteristics of those we have recently or historically elected to office. Let's have courses which study how adults differ in the skills they bring, or are unable to bring, to the tasks of governance for the common welfare. We currently have a track record of electing showy and individually impressive but basically "narcissistic" personalities to office. A narcissistic person is typically very skilled in making favorable impressions upon others, so on first impression they look good and look promising. But at the same time, they typically lack self-awareness, especially of the limits of their qualifications for a job, or even a concept that any qualifications are needed for a job. And while on the surface they know how to please others, temporarily, they lack any deeper understanding of others or the concerns of others. And thus, after getting off to a fine running start, they quickly run into impasses over how to constructively actually address the problems others bring to their attention, and into patterns of negative and dysfunctional relations with others. We, the voters, need to learn how to identify and prioritize people (candidates) who have histories and track records (typically called resumes) that show they have actually faced and addressed successfully in the past, while working well with others, the same kind of issues we wish to elect them to resolve for us, and for the common good.