The Right-Wing Roots of EdTech

The modern EdTech industry is often portrayed as a neutral, innovative force, but its origins are deeply political. Its growth has been fueled by a fusion of neoliberal economics, right-wing techno-utopianism, patriarchy, and classism, reinforced by racialized inequality. One of the key intellectual architects of this vision was George Gilder, a conservative supply-side evangelist whose work glorified technology and markets as liberating forces. His influence helped pave the way for the “Gilder Effect”: a reshaping of education into a market where technology, finance, and ideology collide, often at the expense of marginalized students and workers.

The for-profit college boom provides the clearest demonstration of how the Gilder Effect operates. John Sperling’s University of Phoenix, later run by executives like Todd Nelson, was engineered as a credential factory, funded by federal student aid and Wall Street. Its model was then exported across the sector, including Risepoint (formerly Academic Partnerships), a company that sold universities on revenue-sharing deals for online programs. These ventures disproportionately targeted working-class women, single mothers, military veterans, and Black and Latino students. The model was not accidental—it was designed to exploit populations with the least generational wealth and the most limited alternatives. Here, patriarchy, classism, and racism intersected: students from marginalized backgrounds were marketed promises of upward mobility but instead left with debt, unstable credentials, and limited job prospects.

Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn of Harvard Business School popularized the concept of “disruption,” providing a respectable academic justification for dismantling public higher education. Their theory of disruptive innovation framed traditional universities as outdated and made way for venture-capital-backed intermediaries. Yet this rhetoric concealed a brutal truth: disruption worked not by empowering the disadvantaged but by extracting value from them, often reinforcing existing inequalities of race, gender, and class.

The rise and collapse of 2U shows how this ideology plays out. Founded in 2008, 2U promised to bring elite universities online, selling the dream of access to graduate degrees for working professionals. Its “flywheel effect” growth strategy relied on massive enrollment expansion and unsustainable spending. Despite raising billions, the company never turned a profit. Its high-profile acquisition of edX from Harvard and MIT only deepened its financial instability. When 2U filed for bankruptcy, it was not simply a corporate failure—it was a symptom of an entire system built on hype and dispossession.

2U also became notorious for its workplace practices. In 2015, it faced a pregnancy discrimination lawsuit after firing an enrollment director who disclosed her pregnancy. Women workers, especially mothers, were treated as expendable, a reflection of patriarchal corporate norms. Meanwhile, many front-line employees—disproportionately women and people of color—faced surveillance, low wages, and impossible sales quotas. Here the intersections of race, gender, and class were not incidental but central to the business model. The company extracted labor from marginalized workers while selling an educational dream to marginalized students, creating a cycle of exploitation at both ends of the pipeline.

Financialization extended these dynamics. Lenders like Sallie Mae and Navient, and servicers like Maximus, turned students into streams of revenue, with Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) trading debt obligations on Wall Street. Universities, including Purdue Global and University of Arizona Global, rebranded failing for-profits as “public” ventures, but their revenue-driven practices remained intact. These arrangements consistently offloaded risk onto working-class students, especially women and students of color, while enriching executives and investors.

The Gilder Effect, then, is not just about technology or efficiency. It is about reshaping higher education into a site of extraction, where the burdens of debt and labor fall hardest on those already disadvantaged by patriarchy, classism, and racism. Intersectionality reveals what the industry’s boosters obscure: EdTech has not democratized education but has deepened inequality. The failure of 2U and the persistence of predatory for-profit models are not accidents—they are the logical outcome of an ideological project rooted in conservative economics and systemic oppression.

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Sources

• EdSurge. “What a New Strategy at 2U Means for the Future of Online Higher Education.” August 5, 2022. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2022-08-05-what-a-new-strategy-at-2u-means-for-the-future-of-online-higher-education

• Newswire. “2U Faces Lawsuit for Pregnancy Discrimination.” June 2015. https://www.newswire.com/news/2u-faces-lawsuit-for-pregnancy-discrimination

• Christensen, Clayton M. and Michael B. Horn. Disrupting Class. McGraw-Hill, 2008.

• McMillan Cottom, Tressie. Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy. The New Press, 2017.

• Cellini, Stephanie Riegg. “For-Profit Higher Education: An Assessment of Costs and Benefits.” National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012.

• Rosenthal, Elisabeth. An American Sickness. Penguin, 2017.

The (A)Moral Reasoning Behind Clayton Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation

Clayton Christensen’s theory of Disruptive Innovation—hailed by Silicon Valley executives and higher education reformers alike—presents itself as a neutral, even benevolent, framework for understanding technological and organizational change. Yet beneath its managerial gloss lies a lineage and logic deeply rooted in an (a)moral worldview: one that tolerates, if not encourages, alienation, economic insecurity, and the erosion of labor rights in the name of efficiency and market “progress.”

To understand the true implications of Disruptive Innovation, we must situate Christensen’s ideas within a broader intellectual history—one that includes Joseph Schumpeter, Frederick Winslow Taylor, and Herbert Spencer, each of whom advanced theories that exalted economic upheaval while devaluing human costs.

The Schumpeterian Origins of Creative Destruction

Christensen openly acknowledged his debt to Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who coined the term “creative destruction” to describe the perpetual churn of capitalism—where new industries annihilate the old. Schumpeter viewed this cycle as the engine of economic development, but also one driven by elites: entrepreneurs and innovators were the “heroes” of economic evolution, regardless of the collateral damage.

Christensen adapted this logic but rebranded it in less violent terms. "Disruption" became the friendlier cousin of "destruction," but the underlying mechanism remained the same. When cheaper, simpler products or services overtake established incumbents, it is not just businesses that are disrupted, but the workers, communities, and public institutions tied to them. In higher education, this has meant the unbundling of the university, the rise of for-profits and MOOCs, and a managerial push for scalability over scholarship.

Taylorism and the Machinery of Efficiency

The ghost of Frederick Taylor—father of scientific management—also haunts Christensen’s framework. Taylor’s approach sought to maximize efficiency by breaking down labor into measurable units, stripping workers of autonomy and judgment in favor of systematized control. In Christensen’s world, similarly, incumbents are cast as bloated and inefficient, weighed down by tradition, professional norms, and tenured faculty. Disruptors are lean, data-driven, and contemptuous of established hierarchies.

This emphasis on efficiency over humanistic or moral values creates environments where workers (and students) are seen as inputs in a system, not stakeholders with rights or aspirations. The human costs—underemployment, job precarity, and burnout—are either ignored or reframed as necessary steps toward a more “innovative” future.

Herbert Spencer and the Moral Neutrality of the Market

Christensen’s theory also carries echoes of Herbert Spencer, the 19th-century social theorist who popularized “survival of the fittest” as a way to naturalize social hierarchies under capitalism. Like Spencer, Christensen’s logic treats market competition as a force of nature rather than a human construct. Incumbents fail not because of policy failures or exploitation, but because they were not “fit” to survive disruption.

This Darwinian moral neutrality veils itself in the language of progress, but its effects are often regressive. When applied to higher education, it suggests that if small colleges close, if adjuncts replace professors, if students are reduced to customers—it is not a crisis, but evolution. But evolution, in this framework, comes without ethics, without responsibility, and without mourning for what is lost.

Alienation, Anxiety, and the Crisis of Meaning

The consequences of this ideology are not confined to spreadsheets. They are lived out in alienation, anxiety, and a rising sense of meaninglessness in work and study alike. The relentless focus on disruption undermines stable institutions and communal knowledge, replacing them with temporary gigs and modular credentials. As careers give way to “side hustles” and degrees to “certificates,” students and workers alike are left unmoored.

This moral void is not an accident—it is intrinsic to the theory itself. Disruption is not guided by any vision of the good life, democratic values, or collective well-being. Its only metric is market success. It cannot ask whether the loss of a liberal arts college matters, whether an AI tool improves learning, or whether a precarious worker has a future. It can only ask: is it cheaper? Is it scalable?

Suicide and the Human Toll

In extreme cases, this sense of disposability has life-and-death consequences. Research across sectors shows that economic insecurity and job loss are linked to higher rates of suicide, depression, and addiction. The suicides of Uber drivers, the despair of indebted students, and the mental health crisis on campuses are not anomalies—they are the psychological toll of a system that celebrates disruption but discards the disrupted.

Labor Rights in the Age of Disruption

Against this backdrop, the weakening of labor rights is not just a policy issue—it is a direct consequence of the ideology of disruption. Tenure, unions, benefits, job security—these are seen as “barriers” to innovation. The ideal disruptor has no interest in negotiating with labor; it seeks flexibility, not fairness.

In higher education, this has meant an explosion of adjunct labor, the outsourcing of student services, and the dismantling of shared governance. Disruptive Innovation thus functions not merely as a theory, but as a strategy to sideline labor, redefine value, and transfer risk from institutions to individuals.

Toward a Moral Reckoning

It is time to reckon with the (a)moral underpinnings of Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation. Behind its sleek presentation lies a worldview that rationalizes destruction, devalues dignity, and denies responsibility. Its philosophical lineage—from Schumpeter to Spencer—offers little comfort to those displaced, demoralized, or disappeared in its wake.

If higher education is to survive with its soul intact, it must reject the idea that all disruption is good, that all efficiency is progress, and that human costs are externalities. It must ask not just what works, but for whom—and at what cost.