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 Their theory of disruptive innovation framed traditional universities as outdated and made way for venture-capital-backed intermediaries.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 Harvard Business School Paradox: Ethics, Elites, and the Theatre of Honesty

For the first time in nearly 80 years, Harvard University has taken the extraordinary step of revoking the tenure of a faculty member—Francesca Gino, a former professor at Harvard Business School (HBS) known for her widely publicized research on ethics, decision-making, and organizational behavior. The irony of her downfall—accused of academic dishonesty while researching honesty—has been noted by nearly every outlet covering the story. But a deeper question lingers: What does Gino’s story tell us about Harvard Business School and the neoliberal system it both serves and symbolizes?

Ethics as Performance in a Neoliberal Order

Gino, once celebrated for championing ethical behavior and "rebel talent," now stands accused of falsifying data in multiple academic papers. But HBS’s brand of ethics—delivered through expensive executive programs and best-selling books—is part of a larger performance in which corporate elites are taught to appear virtuous while perpetuating systems that concentrate wealth, exploit labor, and externalize harm.

In this context, ethics becomes less about justice or truth and more about managing perceptions. The fall of Francesca Gino is dramatic, but the real ethical crisis lies not in her alleged misconduct alone—it lies in the institutional contradictions embedded within HBS itself. Harvard Business School doesn’t just teach capitalism; it molds the gatekeepers of global capital. Its mission is not merely to educate but to replicate and legitimize a system that increasingly rewards the few at the expense of the many.

HBS: The Training Ground for Economic Power

From Wall Street executives to Silicon Valley disruptors, the alumni of Harvard Business School include some of the most powerful figures in global finance and industry—many of whom have presided over layoffs, environmental degradation, and financial schemes with far more damaging consequences than academic fraud.

The school’s ethos is rooted in neoliberal values: deregulation, privatization, shareholder primacy, and labor "flexibility." These principles have driven inequality to historic levels, eroded public trust in institutions, and created a permanent underclass of precarious workers—including the adjuncts and support staff who toil in the shadows of Harvard's gilded brand.

That Gino was one of Harvard’s highest paid employees, earning over $1 million a year, underscores the commercialization of academia. Her high-profile persona, media presence, and prolific publication record made her not just a scholar but a product—one the institution proudly marketed until it became inconvenient.

The Politics of Academic Accountability

The revocation of Gino’s tenure has been portrayed as a triumph of academic accountability. But it also reveals the selective nature of institutional justice. While Harvard moved swiftly to investigate and sanction Gino, other faculty members in elite institutions—some with clear ties to ethically questionable industries or discriminatory practices—remain unscathed, protected by the very power structures they serve.

Moreover, this case unfolds against a broader political backdrop in which Harvard, like other elite universities, is entangled in legal and ideological battles with the federal government. From fights over DEI initiatives and student visas to federal funding for research, the university’s moral posturing often masks a pragmatic calculus: preserving its endowment, its influence, and its brand.

A System that Rewards Deception

That Harvard Business School fostered—and then disowned—a figure like Francesca Gino should surprise no one. The institution’s most infamous alumni include architects of the 2008 financial crisis and leaders of corporations known for tax evasion, union busting, and regulatory capture. In such a system, the real problem isn’t dishonesty—it’s getting caught.

Gino’s downfall may satisfy the university’s need for a scapegoat, but it doesn't address the deeper malaise at the heart of elite business education. Harvard Business School produces managers, not moral leaders. It shapes ideologies, not communities. And in doing so, it offers up a sanitized vision of capitalism in which individual ethics can redeem systemic violence.

Conclusion: The Theatre of Respectability

Francesca Gino’s tenure revocation is a symbolic gesture—one that reinforces the illusion that elite institutions police themselves rigorously. But the real fraud is more abstract and far more consequential: it is the fraud of presenting institutions like Harvard Business School as guardians of ethical capitalism, while they actively reinforce the economic logic of exploitation.

In a just world, the moral bankruptcy of neoliberalism would be exposed not by a professor’s faked data, but by the suffering of workers laid off for shareholder gains, the communities displaced for private equity ventures, and the global inequities entrenched by the very graduates these schools send into the world.

Until then, we are left with what Gino herself once studied: the subtle science of dishonesty. Only now, the lab is Harvard—and the experiment is ongoing.

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