TikTok is the Smallpox of the 2020s

In the 18th and 19th centuries, smallpox was more than a disease—it was a weapon. European colonizers intentionally spread it to weaken and destroy Indigenous populations. The infamous case of Lord Jeffrey Amherst in 1763, when British forces distributed smallpox-infected blankets to Native communities during Pontiac’s War, stands as one of the most notorious examples of biological warfare in history. Smallpox was terrifying not only because of its lethality, but because it struck at the heart of populations with no immunity. It reshaped the demographic and political order of North America for centuries.

Biological warfare did not end with the colonial period. The 20th century brought industrialized efforts: the Japanese Imperial Army’s Unit 731 conducted horrific experiments during World War II, weaponizing plague and anthrax. The United States and the Soviet Union pursued their own offensive bioweapons programs well into the Cold War, stockpiling pathogens with the potential to devastate civilian populations. The logic of such programs was clear—disease could be used to destabilize entire societies more effectively than conventional warfare.

Today, the battleground has shifted from bodies to minds. Social media platforms—TikTok foremost among them—serve as delivery systems for disinformation and psychological contagion. Where smallpox spread through blankets and close contact, TikTok spreads through algorithms designed to maximize engagement. What once took weeks to devastate a community can now happen in hours, with a video or meme reaching millions before fact-checkers or educators can respond.

The analogy is not metaphorical flourish. Both smallpox and social media weaponization exploit vulnerabilities: biological susceptibility in the first case, and cognitive-emotional susceptibility in the second. Both create dependencies: populations weakened by disease became reliant on colonial powers, while users conditioned by TikTok’s endless scroll become dependent on an algorithm that thrives on outrage, spectacle, and division.

Weaponization of social media takes many forms. Disinformation campaigns around elections, climate change, and public health spread faster than corrections. Extremist groups use TikTok’s short-form videos to recruit younger audiences with humor and cultural references. State actors experiment with algorithmic nudges to destabilize adversaries, just as Cold War militaries once experimented with viruses in clandestine labs.

Universities are not insulated from this epidemic. Students now arrive on campus carrying not only smartphones but cognitive frameworks shaped by algorithmic feeds. Professors struggle to compete with the authority of viral influencers. Entire institutions have found themselves dragged into controversy over short clips that strip away context but ignite outrage. The terrain of higher education is increasingly defined by psychological contagion, much as earlier centuries were defined by outbreaks of smallpox.

If smallpox forced the development of public health measures, TikTok and other social media platforms demand the development of new digital immunities: critical media literacy, institutional resilience, and transnational cooperation to blunt the impact of algorithmic manipulation. Without such measures, the scars may not appear on skin, but they will mark a generation in cognition, behavior, and trust.

Just as history judges the weaponization of smallpox as a crime against humanity, it may one day judge the weaponization of social media in the same light. The question is whether societies will act before the damage becomes irreversible.

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Sources

• Alibek, K., & Handelman, S. (1999). Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World. Delta.

• Crozier, A. (2022). “Colonialism, Contagion, and the History of Smallpox in North America.” Journal of Colonial History, 23(3), 245–268.

• DiResta, R. (2018). “The Information Wars.” Foreign Affairs, 97(6), 146–155.

• Lakoff, A. (2017). Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency. University of California Press.

• Meselson, M., et al. (2000). “The Sverdlovsk Anthrax Outbreak of 1979.” Science, 266(5188), 1202–1208.

• Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs.

“You Don’t Need a Tariff. You Need a Revolution”: A Viral Wake-Up Call—Or CCP Propaganda?

In a clip that’s rapidly gone viral among both left-leaning critics of neoliberalism and right-wing populists, a young Chinese TikTok influencer delivers a searing indictment of American economic decline. Fluent in English and confident in tone, the speaker lays bare what many struggling Americans already feel: that they’ve been conned by their own elites.

“They robbed you blind and you thank them for it. That’s a tragedy. That’s a scam,” the young man declares, addressing the American people directly.

The video, played and discussed on Judging Freedom with Judge Andrew Napolitano and Professor John Mearsheimer, has sparked praise—and suspicion. While the message resonates with a growing number of Americans disillusioned by the bipartisan political establishment, some are asking: Who is behind this message?

 
A Sharp Critique of American Oligarchy

In his 90-second monologue, the influencer claims U.S. oligarchs offshored manufacturing to China for profit—not diplomacy—gutting the middle class, crashing the working class, and leaving Americans with stagnating wages, unaffordable healthcare, mass addiction, and what he calls “flag-waving poverty made in China.” Meanwhile, he says, China reinvested its profits into its people, raising living standards and building infrastructure.

“What did your oligarchs do? They bought yachts, private jets, and mansions… You get stagnated wages, crippling healthcare costs, cheap dopamine, debt, and flag-waving poverty made in China.”

He ends with a provocative call: “You don’t need another tariff. You need to wake up… You need a revolution.”

It’s a blistering populist critique—and one that finds unexpected agreement from Mearsheimer, who said on the show, “I basically agree with him. I think he’s correct.”
A Message That Cuts Across Party Lines

The critique echoes themes found in Donald Trump’s early campaign rhetoric, as well as long-standing leftist arguments about neoliberal betrayal, corporate offshoring, and elite impunity. It’s the kind of message that unites the American underclass in its many forms—service workers, laid-off factory employees, disillusioned veterans, and student debtors alike.

Mearsheimer went on to argue that the U.S. national security establishment itself was compromised—that its consultants and former officials had deep financial ties to China, making them unwilling to confront the geopolitical risks of China’s rise. According to him, elites were more invested in their own gain than in the national interest.

But that raises an even more complicated question.

 
Is This an Authentic Voice—or a CCP Production?

The most provocative—and potentially overlooked—aspect of this story is the medium itself: TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, a company under heavy scrutiny for its ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Could this slick, emotionally resonant video be part of a broader soft-power campaign?

The Chinese government has invested heavily in media operations that shape global narratives. While the content of the message may be factually accurate or emotionally true for many Americans, it’s not hard to imagine the CCP welcoming—if not engineering—videos that sow further division and distrust within the United States.

The video’s flawless production, powerful rhetoric, and clever framing—presenting China as the responsible partner and the U.S. as self-destructive—align closely with Beijing’s global messaging. Add to this the timing, with U.S.-China tensions running high over tariffs, Taiwan, and global power shifts, and the question becomes unavoidable:

Is this sincere grassroots criticism… or a polished psychological operation?

The answer may be both. It’s entirely possible that the young man believes everything he’s saying. But it’s also likely that content like this is algorithmically favored—or even quietly encouraged—by a platform closely tied to a government with every incentive to highlight American decline.
Weaponized Truth?

This is not a new tactic. During the Cold War, both the U.S. and the USSR employed truth-tellers and defectors to criticize their adversaries. But in today's digital landscape, the boundaries between propaganda, whistleblowing, and legitimate dissent are more porous than ever.

The Higher Education Inquirer has reported extensively on how American elites—across both political parties—have betrayed working people, including within the halls of higher education. That doesn’t mean we should ignore where a message comes from, or what strategic purpose it might serve.

The danger is not just foreign interference. The greater danger may be that such foreign-origin messages ring so true for so many Americans.
A Closing Thought: Listen Carefully, Then Ask Why

The influencer says:

“You let the oligarchs feed your lies while they made you fat, poor, and addicted… I don’t think you need another tariff. You need to wake up.”

He’s not wrong to say Americans have been exploited. But if the message is being boosted by a rival authoritarian state, it’s worth asking why.

America’s problems are real. Its discontent is justified. But as in all revolutions, the question is not only what we’re overthrowing—but what might take its place.

Sources:

Judging Freedom – Judge Andrew Napolitano and Professor John Mearsheimer

TikTok (ByteDance) ownership and CCP ties – Reuters, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal

The Higher Education Inquirer archives on student debt, adjunct labor, and corporate-academic complicity

Pew Research Center – Views of China, U.S. Public Opinion

Congressional hearings on TikTok and national security, 2023–2024

Digital Dope: How Internet Addiction Mirrors the Great Crises of Gin, Opium, Meth, and Fentanyl

In the 18th century, gin swept through the working-class neighborhoods of London, offering brief euphoria and long-term devastation. In the 19th century, opium dulled the pain of colonialism and industrial collapse. The 20th century brought methamphetamine and its promise of energy and escape, followed by fentanyl—cheap, potent, and deadly.

Now, in the 21st century, we face a new form of mass addiction: not chemical but digital. The most addictive substances of our time are not smoked, snorted, or injected—they are streamed, swiped, and scrolled.

The internet, once hailed as a revolution in knowledge and communication, has been weaponized into an empire of distraction and dependency. Social media, pornography, and online gambling—backed by surveillance capitalism and unchecked corporate power—are engineered for compulsive use. And like the addictive epidemics of the past, they are eroding individual agency, family life, and the very foundations of civic society.

The Gin Craze and the Algorithmic Binge

In 18th-century Britain, the Gin Craze turned city streets into open-air taverns. Cheap, potent alcohol flooded the market, leading to widespread addiction, crime, and social decay. The state profited from taxes while the poor drowned in despair.

Today’s equivalent is the infinite scroll. Social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook—like gin—are engineered to be consumed endlessly. The user is reduced to a set of engagement metrics. Like the gin drinker numbing pain, the social media user seeks validation, escape, or identity in a flood of curated images and outrage. Depression, anxiety, and loneliness have exploded, especially among teens and young adults. Suicides, particularly among girls, have surged in tandem with social media usage.

Opium Dens and the Porn Empire

The opium den offered oblivion. It soothed pain but eroded will. Victorian elites warned of its moral decay while quietly indulging themselves.

Today, online pornography is the new opium—widely available, hyper-stimulating, and often degrading. Once confined to private spaces, it is now accessible to children, monetized by multi-billion-dollar platforms, and normalized by mainstream culture. The effects—especially on young people—include desensitization, unrealistic expectations, isolation, and difficulty forming real-life relationships.

Research has shown that excessive porn consumption alters brain chemistry similarly to addictive drugs. It hijacks the reward system, rewires sexual expectations, and in many cases, contributes to erectile dysfunction, compulsive behavior, and emotional detachment.

Meth, Fentanyl, and the Speed of the Feed

Meth promised productivity; fentanyl promises relief. Both deliver destruction.

Digital addiction today mimics the frenetic highs of meth and the numbing power of fentanyl. The constant rush of notifications, likes, and headlines overstimulates the brain and crushes attention spans. Apps and games are engineered like slot machines, delivering intermittent reinforcement that keeps users hooked. The average smartphone user touches their phone over 2,500 times a day.

University students struggle to read long texts or concentrate for extended periods. Professors battle declining classroom attention and rising rates of anxiety and burnout. Like meth, the digital feed gives the illusion of efficiency while grinding the mind into dust.

Online Gambling: Casino in Your Pocket

The rise of online sports betting and casino apps has brought Vegas to every dorm room and bedroom. Targeted ads on Instagram and YouTube lure young people into betting with "free" money. Many students—especially young men—develop compulsive behaviors, losing thousands before they graduate. Some turn to credit cards, payday loans, or family bailouts.

States, like governments in the gin and opium eras, have embraced online gambling for its tax revenues. Universities, meanwhile, remain largely silent—even as students destroy their finances and futures through legalized digital addiction.

Higher Education: From Ivory Tower to Digital Trap

Colleges were once sanctuaries of thought and reflection. Today, they are nodes in the digital economy—where learning management systems monitor clicks, and students are nudged toward screens at every turn. Social interaction is filtered through group chats and Reddit threads. Pornography, gambling, and endless scrolling are a click away on the same device used to write term papers and attend virtual lectures.

Even counseling services are digitized. The solution to tech addiction, students are told, is often more tech—apps that monitor screen time, AI chatbots for mental health, or video therapy that feels detached and impersonal.

The Profiteers and the Pushers

In every addiction crisis, there are profiteers: distillers, opium traders, pharmaceutical companies, and cartels. Today, Big Tech plays the same role. Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Pornhub, DraftKings, FanDuel, and hundreds of smaller apps compete for attention with algorithms that exploit human weakness.

Their business model depends on addiction. They study neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and micro-targeted advertising with military-grade precision. Like the drug lords of the past, they deny responsibility while reaping billions.

And just as the poor suffered most in the gin and opioid crises, it is the working class, the unemployed, the chronically ill, and the disconnected who fall hardest into the digital pit.

The Need for Radical Intervention

Digital addiction is not a moral failing—it’s a public health emergency. Like past addiction epidemics, the solution requires:

• Public awareness campaigns

• Stricter age and content regulation

• Taxation on digital vice industries

• Digital literacy education at all levels

• Offline spaces and activities that foster real connection and attention

Higher education must lead. Not by digitizing every service, but by teaching students to reclaim their minds, their time, and their agency. Faculty must model mindful engagement and challenge the corporatization of the university by tech companies. Administrators must reconsider their reliance on LMS systems, data harvesting, and digital surveillance.

Will We Wake Up in Time?

In the past, addiction crises forced society to reflect on what was lost: family cohesion, civic virtue, mental clarity, and freedom itself. We stand again at such a crossroads. The digital drug is in every hand, and the overdose is slow—but devastating.

Like gin, opium, meth, and fentanyl, the internet addiction crisis is about more than chemicals—it’s about despair, disconnection, and exploitation. And like those earlier epidemics, it is not an individual failing, but a systemic one. The good news? As with past crises, awareness is the first step toward recovery. The question is: Will we act before another generation is lost?

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The Higher Education Inquirer continues to investigate the intersection of capitalism, addiction, and the commodification of human attention. Reach out if you have a story to share.

How might we do climate action in academia under a second Trump administration? (Bryan Alexander)

With the reelection of Donald Trump, a candidate who has flaunted his desire for autocracy—aided and abetted by a Republican-controlled Congress that will not constrain him with guardrails—the United States is now poised to become an authoritarian state ruled by plutocrats and fossil fuel interests. It is now, in short, a petrostate.

–professor Michael Mann, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

How can we do climate crisis work within the higher education ecosystem under a second Trump administration?

With today’s post I’d like to explore strategic options in the present and near future. This is for everyone, but I’ll conclude with some self-reflection. My focus here will be on the United States, yet not exclusively so.

(I’ve been tracking possibilities for a Trump return for a while. Here’s the most recent post.)
Climate change under Trump: pressures on higher education

To begin with, the threat is that president Trump will undo federal support for climate action across the board (for evidence of this, see statements in Agenda 47, Project 2025, and elsewhere). Beyond the federal government, Trump can cause spillover effects at state and local levels. This should strengthen red states, counties, and cities in anti-climate policies and stances.

That governmental change will likely have direct impacts on higher education. About two thirds of American colleges and universities are public, meaning state-owned and -directed and therefore quite exposed to political pressures. Academics working in those institutions will be vulnerable to those forces, depending on their situation (institutional type, what a government actually does, the structural supports for units and individuals). How many academics – faculty, staff, students – will be less likely to undertake or support climate action? Will senior administrators be similarly disinclined to take strategic direction for climate purposes?

Beyond governments, how would the return of Trump to national power, complete with Republican control of Congress and the Supreme Court, shape private entities in their academic work? I’m thinking here of non-governmental funders, such as foundations, along with the many businesses which work with post-secondary education (publishers, ed tech companies, food service, etc.). Researchers studying global warming might have a harder time getting grants. Some funders might back off of academics doing climate work of all kinds. This can impact private as well as public academic institutions.

On the international side, Trump’s promised withdrawal from the Paris agreement and his repeated dismissal of climate change might make it harder for American academics to connect with global partners. Without simplifying too much, non-American academics might find Trump 2.0 an extra barrier to partnering with peers in the United States, especially if their national or local governments also took up anti-climate positions. International businesses developing decarbonization goods and services might step back from a newly Trumpified America (here’s one recent example).

Beyond those entities we should expect various forms of cultural resistance to climate work. Leaders from Trump and Vance on down can stir up popular attitudes and actions; the anti-immigrant focus on Springfield, Ohio gives one example. Politically-engaged individuals can challenge, threaten, or attack academics whom they see as doing harmful actions along climate lines.

On the other hand, academics might draw support from governments, businesses, nonprofits, and individuals who resist MAGA and seek to pursue climate goals. We could see governmental climate energies devolve below the federal level to states and below. Hypothetically, a professor in, say, California or Vermont might fare better than peers in Texas or South Carolina.

To be fair, political boundaries might not be cut and dried. Climate disasters might change minds. Republicans who benefit from the surviving pieces of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act might decide not to oppose academics doing climate work. The low costs of solar can trump (as it were) ideology. And insurance companies seem likely to continue their forceful actions of denying coverage and increasing fees in especially endangered areas.

I’ve been speaking of the academic population as a whole, but we should bear in mind the district experience of campus leaders (presidents, chancellors, system administrators, provosts, vice presidents, deans) in this situation. They play a decisive role in supporting climate action through setting strategic directions, developing programs, and, of course, providing funding. In my experience of researching academic climate action and thinking I’ve found this population to be, all too often, resistant to the idea for a variety of reasons: perceived lack of faculty interest; concerns about board/state government politics; anxieties about community response; fears of financial challenges. Then the Gaza protests happened and campus leaders seem to me even more nervous about taking public stances. How will they act under a new Trump administration?

Recall that politicians can bypass those leaders. The recent Texas A&M story is illustrative in this regard. A state politician decided that the university should no longer offer a LGBTQ studies minor. Campus faculty and its president refused to end the program, but the institution’s board unilaterally terminated it. It’s easy to imagine parallel cases for climate activity, from offering a sustainability degree to overhauling buildings to reduce their carbon footprint, only to be met by a politician’s enmity.
Academic options and possibilities

So what can we do now?

One option is for those doing climate work to just keep on doing it, damning the torpedoes. After all, climate action has historically elicited blowback and hostility, so Trump 2.0 is nothing new. Perhaps it’s a difference in kind, not degree. Academics who see themselves having institutional or other backing (tenure, private funding, benefactors) may just continue. Some might relish the prospect of a public fight.

The public/private divide might be a powerful one. Being employed by, or taking classes at, a state university makes climate politics potentially powerful, even dispositive. Blue states might double down on climate action, which could take the form of new regulations forcing campuses to decarbonize more rapidly or to include global warming in general education. Red states, in contrast, can disincentivize faculty, staff, and students from the full range of climate action, making teaching, research, campus operational changes more difficult, even dangerous.

In contrast, academics affiliated with private colleges and universities might enjoy greater political latitude, at least in terms of direct governmental authority. Some might find themselves constrained by their non-governmental institutional affiliations – i.e., by their churches, if they’re a religious school. Economic and cultural pressures can also hit academics in private institutions. That said, we could see private campuses take a leading role compared with their public colleagues.

What new forms might academic climate action take?

We could well see new informal support networks appear, perhaps quietly, perhaps openly. This could take place via a variety of technological frameworks, from Discord to email. People involved will need others working on the same lines. There are already some formal networks, like AASHE and Second Nature. They might serve as bulwarks against hostility. We could also see new nonprofits form to support academic climate action.

Another tactic might be to establish a for-profit company to do climate work. This might sound strange, but businesses often appeal to the famously business-friendly GOP. An LLC or S-corp doing climate work in higher education could look less Green New Deal-y.

Will we see academics become more public in their climate research, perhaps participating in government lobbying, civic demonstrations, or more? After all, four more years of Trump means we will see increased American greenhouse gas emissions. The crisis is worsening, and that fact might engage more faculty, staff, and students to resist. Perhaps campuses will become centers or hubs of all kinds of climate action.

Furthermore, we might see more direct action. American colleges and universities have seen little of this so far, as opposed to European institutions. There have been some initial, tentative signs of this outside of the academy, like Just Stop Oil spray painting an American embassy in the United Kingdom.



Might we see American students, staff, faculty letting the air out of SUVs, damaging oil infrastructure, pie-ing fossil fuel company executives, or more?

A very different tactic for academics to consider is to be stealthy in order to avoid hostile attention. Not talking about one’s new climate class on social media, not sharing global warming research on TikTok, not doing a public talk in the community might be appealing tactics. Similarly, scholars might avoid publishing in open access journals in favor of those behind high paywalls. We could organize using private messaging apps, like Signal.

We could also stop. We might judge the moment too dangerous to proceed. Think about the largest population of faculty, adjuncts, who have so little workplace protections. They might deem it safer to go dark for a few years until things are less dangerous. Consider academics in various forms of marginalization – by race, religion, gender, professional position – as well as those with non-academic pressures (financial, familial). How many of us will pause this work for the time being?

Those academics who are committed to climate work are thinking about such choices now. And some may be participating in conversations about these options.

Let me close on a moment of self-reflection.

I’ve been doing climate research for years as part of my overall work on higher education’s future. This has taken many forms, including a scholarly book, blog writing, teaching, and a lot of presentations, both in-person and virtual. I have been participating in several networks of like-minded folks. I’ve hosted and interviewed climate experts in various venues. Overall, I work climate change into nearly everything I do professionally.

Yet I am an independent, as some of you know. I do not have a tenured or full time academic position. I don’t have independent wealth backing me up. Doing climate work is increasingly risky. To the extent that people know my commitment, I might quietly lose work, allies, colleagues, supporters. I have seen some signs of this already. Similarly, the public nature of what I do opens me up to the possibility of public attacks. I have not yet experienced this.

My philosophy of work – heck, of life – is that it’s better when shared with other people, hence my longtime preference for sharing so much of what I do online. This makes my work better, I think. Yet now, with a new and energetic conservative administration in the country where I live and do most of my work, perhaps this is too risky. I’ve already received advice to run dark, to do climate and other work underground.

Or maybe this is me overthinking things, starting at shadows. These are possibilities, each contingent on many factors and developments in a sprawling and complex academic ecosystem. We could see versions of all of the above playing out at the same time. Some presidents may boldly lead their institutions into accelerated climate action, while others forbid faculty and staff from any such activity. Some professors may launch new climate-focused classes while others delay teaching theirs for years. Staff members in a blue state might set up organic farms and push for fossil fuel vehicle parking fees, while others focus on other topics and keep their heads down. Some of us will make content for public view while others head underground.

Everything I know about climate change tells me this is a vast, civilization-wide crisis which humanity is struggling to apprehend, and that academia can play a significant role in addressing it if we choose to do so. Today I do not feel comfortable advising individuals on what each person should best do in this new political era. But I want to place the options before the public for discussion, to the extent people feel they should participate.

I hope I can keep doing this work. It needs to be done.

(thanks to the Hechinger Report and many friends including Karen Costa and Joe Murphy)

 

 

Bryan Alexander is an award–winning, internationally known futurist, researcher, writer, speaker, consultant, and teacher, working in the field of higher education’s future. He is currently a senior scholar at Georgetown University.  This article was originally published at BryanAlexander.org.

PragerU and the Culture War: Manufacturing Myths in Higher Education and Beyond

In the evolving landscape of American media and education, PragerU stands out as a well-funded propaganda machine disguised as an educational institution. Despite the name, Prager University is not a university. It does not grant degrees, offer accredited courses, or submit to academic oversight. Instead, it produces short, emotionally charged videos designed to reshape young minds around a rigid conservative ideology—an ideology increasingly aligned with Christian nationalism, market fundamentalism, and historical denialism.

Founded in 2009 by talk radio host Dennis Prager, PragerU emerged during the rise of social media and deepening political polarization. The timing was ideal. With traditional civics education struggling and digital content consumption rising, PragerU began churning out five-minute videos purporting to teach the "real truth" about history, race, gender, economics, and science. These slickly produced segments claim to correct misinformation, but in reality they deliver a narrow worldview fueled by grievance, nostalgia, and moral panic.

PragerU content routinely distorts established historical and scientific knowledge. It reframes American slavery as a common global occurrence, rather than as a foundational atrocity that has shaped U.S. legal and economic systems to this day. It minimizes climate change, portraying it as exaggerated fearmongering driven by radical environmentalists, even as the scientific consensus grows increasingly dire. And it routinely dismisses systemic racism, patriarchy, and wealth inequality as myths invented by the political left to divide Americans.

This style of storytelling directly contradicts the evidence-based approaches found in the work of sociologist James Loewen and historian Howard Zinn. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me exposed how mainstream K–12 textbooks sanitize U.S. history by ignoring racism, class struggle, and colonialism. Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States took it further, reframing the American narrative through the voices of the marginalized—the enslaved, the working class, women, and the indigenous. While Loewen and Zinn sought to challenge students to think critically and question power, PragerU does the opposite. It seeks to reassure students that the status quo is righteous and that questioning it is dangerous.

PragerU’s rise also coincides with real, deeply rooted problems in American education. There are serious and measurable deficiencies in literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking among U.S. students and even adults. These educational gaps leave many people vulnerable to simplistic narratives and emotionally charged misinformation. PragerU does not aim to fill those gaps with rigorous content; it exploits them. Its materials demand little from viewers beyond ideological alignment. The videos offer no footnotes, no peer-reviewed sources, and no intellectual challenge—just certainty delivered with polish.

And yet, increasingly, these materials are being welcomed into public school classrooms. In states like Florida and Oklahoma, conservative lawmakers and school officials have approved or endorsed PragerU content as part of the curriculum. This insertion of ideologically driven material into state-sanctioned education is not just alarming—it’s part of a broader attempt to reshape how young people see their country and their place in it.

The broader culture war that PragerU is part of is not simply about liberal versus conservative. It’s about whether education should cultivate independent thinking and historical awareness—or obedient loyalty to a sanitized narrative. PragerU paints itself as a corrective to “leftist indoctrination,” but what it offers is another form of indoctrination: one that demands allegiance to a version of America that never existed, where racism was a glitch, climate change is hysteria, and capitalism is above critique.

Its media tactics are savvy. PragerU’s videos are short, colorful, and emotionally potent—perfectly crafted for young viewers raised on TikTok and YouTube. While teachers fight to hold students’ attention with limited resources, PragerU offers a packaged worldview that feels easy and affirming. But this ease comes at the cost of intellectual development. True learning requires struggle, contradiction, and evidence—not comforting stories that confirm one’s existing biases.

What’s missing from PragerU’s content is precisely what makes education meaningful: complexity, context, and the capacity to think beyond slogans. When students read Lies My Teacher Told Me or A People’s History, they may feel discomfort, but they also grow. They learn that history is not a patriotic myth but a contested and dynamic struggle over meaning and power.

To respond to PragerU’s growing reach, educators and the public must take the real problems in education seriously. Media literacy, civic education, and historical thinking should be reinforced, not removed. Students must be equipped not just with facts, but with the tools to evaluate competing narratives and sources of information. Schools and universities must resist pressure to adopt content that fails basic tests of intellectual honesty and academic rigor.

PragerU is not simply another voice in a pluralistic conversation. It is part of a movement to reduce education to ideological messaging. It thrives on a public that has been failed by underfunded schools, fractured media, and growing economic insecurity. But recognizing this reality does not mean surrendering to it.

If the goal is to prepare young people to navigate a complex world, we must choose truth over comfort, questioning over certainty, and education over indoctrination.

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For more investigations into education and media, follow the Higher Education Inquirer.

FDA: College students using ‘honey packets’ to enhance sex put themselves at risk (Voice of America Student Union)

With TikTok videos promoting “honey packets,” the supplements marketed as sexual enhancements have become popular on college campuses.

But as Charles Trepany reports in USA Today, the Food and Drug Administration has warned that ingredients in the supplements could be potentially dangerous. (November 2024) 

VOA's Student Union is an online community for college and university students in the U.S., including international students. 

University of Kentucky Athlete Arrested After Infant Found Dead in Closet – Amid Kentucky’s Near-Total Abortion Ban

Lexington, KY (September 3, 2025) — A University of Kentucky student and athlete, 21-year-old Laken Ashlee Snelling—a senior member of the UK STUNT cheer team—has been arrested and charged in connection with the death of her newborn, authorities say.

Allegations and Legal Proceedings

Lexington police were called to a Park Avenue residence on August 27 after they discovered the unresponsive body of an infant hidden in a closet, wrapped in a towel inside a black trash bag. Snelling admitted to giving birth and attempting to conceal both the infant and evidence of the birth, according to arrest documents.

Snelling faces three Class D felony charges:

• Concealing the birth of an infant

• Tampering with physical evidence

• Abuse of a corpse

Each charge carries potential penalties of 1 to 5 years in prison and fines up to $10,000.

At her first court appearance on September 2, Snelling pleaded not guilty and was released on a $100,000 bond, with the court ordering her to live under house arrest at her parents’ home in Tennessee. Her next hearing is scheduled for September 26.

A preliminary autopsy by the Fayette County Coroner’s Office revealed that the infant was a boy, but the cause of death remains inconclusive. Officials confirmed that a thorough death investigation is ongoing.

Context: Kentucky’s Near-Total Abortion Ban

Kentucky currently enforces one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws. Since August 1, 2022, the state’s trigger law has rendered abortion completely illegal, except when necessary to prevent the pregnant individual’s death or permanent impairment of a major, life-sustaining bodily function. No exceptions are made for rape, incest, or fetal abnormalities.

Attempts to challenge the ban have largely failed. A 2024 lawsuit disputing the near-total prohibition was voluntarily dismissed earlier this year, and the law remains firmly in place. Additionally, a constitutional amendment that would have explicitly declared that Kentucky's state constitution does not protect abortion rights was rejected by voters in November 2022.

Public Reaction and Additional Details

Snelling, originally from White Pine, Tennessee, had built a public persona that included cheerleading and pageant appearances. Months earlier, she had posted on TikTok expressing a desire for motherhood—listing “having babies” among her life goals. Viral maternity-style photos—later removed from her social media—have intensified public scrutiny.

A Broader National Context

Snelling’s case arises within a wider national conversation about the legal and societal implications of criminal investigations following pregnancy outcomes. Since the repeal of federal protections for abortion rights, concerns have grown that miscarriages, stillbirths, or even self-managed abortions may now be subject to legal scrutiny—raising fears about reproductive autonomy and medical privacy.

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Sources

• The Guardian: University of Kentucky athlete charged after dead infant found hidden in closet (Sept. 2, 2025)

• People: Univ. of Kentucky STUNT Team Member Arrested After Allegedly Hiding Dead Newborn in Her Closet (Sept. 2, 2025)

• TurnTo10: University of Kentucky athlete pleads not guilty to hiding newborn in closet (Sept. 2, 2025)

• WWNYTV: College student pleads not guilty after dead infant found in closet (Sept. 3, 2025)

• The Sun (UK): Laken Snelling cheerleader baby case (Sept. 2, 2025)

• WKYT: Fayette County coroner releases autopsy results after infant found in closet (Sept. 3, 2025)

• AP News: Kentucky abortion law lawsuit dismissed (2024)

• Wikipedia: Abortion in Kentucky (updated 2025); 2022 Kentucky Amendment 2

• New York Post: Kentucky cheerleader who hid newborn had listed “having babies” as life goal (Sept. 2, 2025)

• Fox News: Kentucky athlete once posted about wanting babies (Sept. 2, 2025)

• India Times: Viral maternity photos of Kentucky student after newborn death case (Sept. 2, 2025)

• Vox: How abortion bans create confusion and surveillance risks (2025)

The Enshitification of Higher Education in the United States

Cory Doctorow’s theory of enshitification—originally coined to describe how digital platforms decay over time—perfectly captures the grim evolution of U.S. higher education. Institutions that once positioned themselves as public goods now exist primarily to sustain themselves, extracting revenue, prestige, and labor at the expense of students, faculty, and the broader public.

In the post–World War II era, higher education in the United States was broadly seen as a driver of social mobility, economic growth, and democratic citizenship. The GI Bill and substantial state funding opened college doors to millions. Tuition at public institutions was minimal or nonexistent. Academic freedom, faculty governance, and research for the common good were foundational ideals.

By the 1980s, neoliberal policies began to reshape the higher education landscape. Public disinvestment led institutions to rely more heavily on tuition, philanthropy, corporate partnerships, and student debt. Universities became more bureaucratic and brand-conscious. Students were reframed as consumers, and education as a commodity. Faculty positions gave way to underpaid adjunct labor, and Online Program Managers like 2U, Academic Partnerships (aka Risepoint) and Kaplan emerged to monetize digital learning. Marketing budgets ballooned. Classrooms and research labs became secondary to enrollment targets and revenue generation.

A 2019 Higher Education Inquirer report revealed how elite universities joined the downward spiral. Institutions like Harvard, Yale, and USC outsourced online graduate programs to 2U, employing aggressive recruitment tactics that resembled those of discredited for-profit colleges. Applicants were encouraged to take on excessive debt for degrees with uncertain returns. Whistleblowers likened it to fraud-by-phone—evidence that even the most prestigious universities were embracing an extractive model.

Doctoral education offers a deeper glimpse into how enshitification has hollowed out academia. Sold as a noble pursuit of truth and a path to secure academic employment, the Ph.D. has become, for many, a journey into economic instability, psychological distress, and underemployment. Only a small percentage of doctoral students land tenure-track jobs. Graduate schools continue to admit far more students than they can responsibly support, while providing little preparation for careers outside academia. Mentorship is often lacking, and financial support is frequently inadequate. Many graduate students rely on food pantries, defer medical care, or take on gig work just to survive. Meanwhile, universities benefit from their labor in teaching and research.

International graduate students face even steeper challenges. Promised opportunity, they instead encounter a saturated job market, low wages, and immigration precarity. Their labor props up U.S. research and rankings, but their long-term prospects are often bleak.

The rise of career-transition consultants—like Cheeky Scientist and The Professor Is In—has become a booming cottage industry, a byproduct of the failed academic job pipeline. For most Ph.D.s, what was once considered “alternative academia” is now the only path forward.

Financial hardship compounds the crisis. Graduate stipends in many programs are far below local living wages, especially in high-cost cities like San Francisco, Boston, or New York. Few programs provide retirement benefits or financial literacy resources. The financial toll of earning a doctorate is often hidden until students are years deep into their programs—and years behind in wealth accumulation.

Meanwhile, university medical centers—often affiliated with elite institutions—offer a parallel example of institutional enshitification. These hospitals have long histories of exploitation, particularly of poor and minority patients. Even today, these facilities prioritize affluent patients and donors, while relying on precariously employed staff and treating marginalized communities as research subjects. The disparities are systematic and ongoing. The rhetoric of innovation and healing masks a legacy of racial injustice and extractive labor practices.

Legacy admissions further entrench inequality. While race-conscious admissions have been rolled back, legacy preferences remain largely untouched. They serve to maintain elite networks, ensuring that wealth and access remain intergenerational. These policies not only contradict the rhetoric of meritocracy but also deepen structural inequities in the name of tradition.

Today, higher education serves itself. Institutions protect billion-dollar endowments, award executive salaries in the millions, expand sports programs and real estate portfolios, and depend on underpaid faculty and indebted students. Campuses are rife with inequality, surveillance of student protest, and performative gestures of inclusion, even as DEI initiatives are gutted by state governments or internal austerity.

The consequences are clear. Enrollment is declining. Campuses are closing. Faculty are being laid off. Public trust is eroding. And even elite institutions are feeling the strain. Doctorow’s theory suggests that once a system has fully enshittified, collapse becomes inevitable. The College Meltdown is not hypothetical—it’s here.

And yet, collapse can be a beginning. Higher education must be radically reimagined: public investment, tuition-free education, student debt relief, labor protections, honest admissions policies, and genuine democratic governance. The alternative is more of the same: a system that costs more, delivers less, and cannibalizes its future to feed its prestige economy.

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Selected Sources

Caterine, Christopher L. Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide. Princeton University Press, 2020.

Cassuto, Leonard. The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It. Harvard University Press, 2015.

Kelsky, Karen. The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. into a Job. Three Rivers Press, 2015.

Roberts, Emily. Personal Finance for Ph.D.s. https://www.pfforphds.com

Shaulis, Dahn. “2U Expands College Meltdown to Elite Universities.” Higher Education Inquirer, Oct. 4, 2019. https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2019/10/college-meltdown-expands-to-elite.html

Shaulis, Dahn. “The Dark Legacy of Elite University Medical Centers.” Higher Education Inquirer, Mar. 13, 2025. https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/03/the-dark-legacy-of-elite-university.html

Doctorow, Cory. “TikTok's Enshittification.” Pluralistic.net, Jan. 21, 2023. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

American Association of University Professors. Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2023. https://www.aaup.org

National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Current Term Enrollment Estimates, 2024. https://nscresearchcenter.org

Newfield, Christopher. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.

Goldrick-Rab, Sara. Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Roth, Gary. The Educated Underclass: Students and the Promise of Social Mobility. Pluto Press, 2019.

Teen Vogue. “The Movement Against Legacy Admissions.” Jan. 2, 2025. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/movement-against-legacy-admissions

The Guardian. “‘Affirmative Action for the Privileged’: Why Democrats Are Fighting Legacy Admissions.” Aug. 11, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/aug/11/college-legacy-admissions-affirmative-action-democrats

The Educated Underclass and the Enshittification of Job Platforms

The Higher Education Inquirer has long examined how digital labor platforms shape the trajectories of college graduates. For years, Indeed, LinkedIn, and an expanding universe of niche job boards promised to democratize opportunity and connect graduates to meaningful work. Today, they increasingly represent something else: evidence of a broken system in which educated workers—often carrying significant debt—are funneled into precarious labor markets mediated by platforms whose incentives are misaligned with student success. What Cory Doctorow has described as enshittification is no longer an exception but the operating model.

Indeed’s trajectory is the clearest expression of this decline. The site began as a transparent aggregator designed to make employment searchable and accessible. Over time, it has transformed into a pay-to-play environment in which sponsored listings overshadow organic results, duplicates and recycled ads clutter searches, and misleading postings reduce trust. Users on both sides—job seekers and employers—report diminishing value even as the company extracts more revenue from each.

LinkedIn has followed a parallel arc. Once positioned as a professional network that expanded access and visibility, it now privileges those who can pay for premium placement or “boosted” visibility. The platform’s feed is increasingly dominated by engagement-optimized content, sales pitches, and algorithmic noise. Genuine networking—the discovery of mentors, colleagues, and opportunities—has been pushed to the background by monetized features and incessant upselling. Graduates hoping to build relationships now find themselves navigating a digital marketplace that treats their careers as data points to be monetized.

Niche job boards, often touted as more curated alternatives, have also succumbed to similar dynamics. As private equity money flows into the sector, these boards increasingly rely on subscription fees, visibility boosts, lead-generation schemes, and paywalls that frustrate both applicants and employers. The promise of specialization is overshadowed by the same structural pressures: monetization first, user value second.

For graduates—especially those from working-class backgrounds—the consequences are profound. They enter the labor market carrying debt, often underemployed, and reliant on platforms that promise opportunity while quietly undermining it. The search for stable employment becomes a cycle of misdirection: applying to ghost jobs, fighting algorithmic opacity, and competing in markets distorted by platform-driven gatekeeping. Instead of delivering upward mobility, digital labor platforms frequently reproduce inequality, masking structural failures in higher education and the U.S. economy behind glossy interfaces and “skills gap” rhetoric.

Employers, meanwhile, face their own frustrations: rising costs for visibility, declining applicant quality driven by algorithmic prioritization of click-throughs rather than fit, and a sense that recruitment has shifted from a relational process to a transactional one. The platforms that were supposed to streamline hiring have introduced new layers of friction, opacity, and expense.

The deeper issue is systemic. Digital labor markets now operate on extractive logic: workers and employers are commodities to be converted into revenue streams. For the educated underclass—graduates who followed the prescribed path but find the rewards collapsing beneath them—these platforms do not solve structural inequality. They obscure it.

Higher education institutions must acknowledge this reality. Career centers cannot simply direct students to LinkedIn or Indeed and hope for the best. Instead, institutions should cultivate critical digital literacy, teaching students how to understand the incentives and limitations of platform-mediated job markets. They must invest in direct employer engagement, build relationships that bypass intermediaries, and challenge the outdated narrative that degrees alone guarantee upward mobility. The task is not merely to help students navigate broken systems but to recognize how these systems perpetuate precarity.

The enshittification of job platforms is not a marginal story. It is a window into the lived experience of millions of graduates—and an indictment of an economy that relies on debt-financed education feeding into precarious labor. The Higher Education Inquirer will continue to track these developments, expose the structural forces behind them, and advocate for approaches that put students and workers before platform profits.

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Sources

Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso, 2023).
Cory Doctorow, “Tiktok’s Enshittification,” Pluralistic (2023).
David Streitfeld, “The Cost of Posting a Job on Indeed Keeps Rising,” New York Times, 2022.
Emily Stewart, “LinkedIn Has a Spam Problem,” Vox, 2023.
Suresh Naidu and Eric Posner, Labor Market Power (2024).
Annie Lowrey, “The College Debt Crisis Is Now a Labor Crisis,” The Atlantic, 2022.
Philipp Staab, Digital Capitalism (Polity, 2019).
Alex Hern, “Job Platforms and the Algorithmic Trap,” The Guardian, 2021.
Higher Education Inquirer archives on digital labor markets, platform capitalism, and the educated underclass.

End of an Era

For now, we have suspended our three decade long run of citizen journalism and will let you know where we go from here.  Two of our other publications, American Injustice and street sociologist are also closed, but remain online for now on Blogger. 

Our Anti-SLAPP lawsuit (Chip Paucek and Pro Athlete Community v Dahn Shaulis) is pending. While the legal bill is enormous, we expect to win. In the meantime, please support independent voices like Richard Wolff, Julie K. Brown, Roger Sollenberger, and Troy Barile. 

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Use the search tools and click on these hashtags for more information from our archives.  

#1stAmendment #2U #accountability #addiction #adjunct #AI #AImeltdown #alcoholism #algo #algorithm #alienation #Ambow #anomie #anti-intellectual #anxiety #Apollo #austerity #BariWeiss 

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#collegemeltdown #credentialism #crypto #CTE #debtcollective #democracy #deportation 

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#umich #underemployment #VA #value #veritas #virtue #Vistria #wikipedia #WWIII #Yale

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   Higher Education and Class Sorting. Image by Glen McGhee

On our last full day of operation, we extend our deepest gratitude to the many courageous voices who have contributed to the Higher Education Inquirer over the years. Through research, reporting, whistleblowing, analysis, and public service, you have exposed inequities, challenged powerful interests, and helped the public understand the realities of higher education. Together, you form a resilient network of knowledge, courage, and public service, showing that collective insight can illuminate even the most entrenched systems. Your dedication has been, and continues to be, invaluable.

Special thanks to:
Bryan Alexander (Future Trends Forum), J. J. Anselmi (author), Devarian Baldwin (Trinity College),  Lisa Bannon (Wall Street Journal), Joe Berry (Higher Education Labor United), Kate Bronfenbrenner (Cornell), Stephen Burd (New America), Ann Bowers (Debt Collective), James Michael Brodie (Black and Gold Project Foundation), Patrick Campbell (Vets Ed Brief), Richard Cannon (activist), Kirk Carapezza (WGBH), Kevin L. Clay (Rutgers), Randall Collins (UPenn), Marianne Dissard (activist), Cory Doctorow, William Domhoff (UC Santa Cruz), Ruxandra Dumitriu, Keil Dumsch, Garrett Fitzgerald (College Recon), Glen Ford (with the ancestors), Richard Fossey (Condemned to Debt), Erica Gallagher (2U Whistleblower), Cliff Gibson III (Gibson & Keith), Henry Giroux (McMaster University), Terri Givens (University of British Columbia), Aaron Glantz, Luke Goldstein (The Lever),  Nathan Grawe (Carleton College), Michael Green (UNLV), Michael Hainline (Restore the GI Bill for Veterans), Debra Hale Shelton (Arkansas Times), Stephanie M. Hall (Protect Borrowers),  David Halperin (Republic Report), Bill Harrington (Croatan Institute), Phil Hill (On EdTech), Investor X (business insider), Robert Jensen (UT Austin), Seth Kahn (WCUP), Hank Kalet (Rutgers), Ben Kaufman (Protect Borrowers), Robert Kelchen (University of Tennessee), Karen Kelsky (The Professor Is In), Neil Kraus (UWRF), LACCD Whistleblower, Michelle Lee (whistleblower), Wendy Lynne Lee (Bloomsburg University of PA), Emmanuel Legeard (whistleblower), Adam Looney (University of Utah), Alec MacGillis (ProPublica), Jon Marcus (Hechinger Report), Steven Mintz (University of Texas), John D. Murphy (Mission Forsaken), Annelise Orleck (Dartmouth), Margaret Kimberly (Black Agenda Report), Austin Longhorn (UT student loan debt whistleblower), Richard Pollock (journalist), Debbi Potts (whistleblower), Jack Metzger (Roosevelt University), Derek Newton (The Cheat Sheet), Jeff Pooley (Annenberg Center), Fahmi Quadir (Safkhet Capital), Chris Quintana (USA Today), Jennifer Reed (University of Akron), Kevin Richert (Idaho Education News), Gary Roth (Rutgers-Newark), Mark Salisbury (TuitionFit), Stephanie Saul (NY Times), Christopher Serbagi (Serbagi Law), Alex Shebanow  (Fail State), Bob Shireman (TCF), Bill Skimmyhorn (William & Mary), Peter Simi (Chapman University), Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (Yale), Gary Stocker (College Viability), Strelnikov (Wikipedia Sucks), Taylor Swaak (Chronicle of Higher Education), Theresa Sweet (Sweet v Cardona), Harry Targ (Purdue University), Moe Tkacik (American Prospect),  Kim Tran (activist), Mark Twain Jr. (business insider), Michael Vasquez (The Tributary), Marina Vujnovic (Monmouth), Richard Wolff (Economic Update), David Whitman, Todd Wolfson (Rutgers, AFT), Helena Worthen (Higher Ed Labor United), DW (South American Correspondent), Heidi Weber (Whistleblower Revolution), Michael Yates (Monthly Review), government officials who have supported transparency and accountability, and the countless other educators, researchers, whistleblowers, advocates, and public servants whose work strengthens our understanding of higher education.

Dahn Shaulis and Glen McGhee

The Epic, Must-Read Coverage in New York Magazine (Derek Newton)

The Epic, Must-Read Coverage in New York Magazine

May 15

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Issue 364

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New York Magazine Goes All-In, And It’s Glorious

Venerable New York Magazine ran an epic piece (paywall) on cheating and cheating with AI recently. It’s a thing of beauty. I could have written it. I should have. But honestly, I could not have done much better.

The headline is brutal and blunt:

Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College

To which I say — no kidding.

The piece wanders around, in a good way. But I’m going to try to put things in a more collected order and share only the best and most important parts. If I can. Whether I succeed or not, I highly encourage you to go over and read it.

Lee and Cheating Everything

The story starts with Chungin “Roy” Lee, the former student at Columbia who was kicked out for selling cheating hacks and then started a company to sell cheating hacks. His story is pretty well known at this point, but if you want to review it, we touched on it in Issue 354.

What I learned in this story is that, at Columbia, Lee:

by his own admission, proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment. As a computer-science major, he depended on AI for his introductory programming classes: “I’d just dump the prompt into ChatGPT and hand in whatever it spat out.” By his rough math, AI wrote 80 percent of every essay he turned in.

And:

“Most assignments in college are not relevant,” [Lee] told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” While other new students fretted over the university’s rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as “intellectually expansive” and “personally transformative,” Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort.

The article says Lee’s admissions essay for Columbia was AI too.

So, for all the people who were up in arms that Columbia would sanction a student for building a cheating app, maybe there’s more to it than just that. Maybe Lee built a cheating app because he’s a cheater. And, as such, has no place in an environment based on learning. That said, it’s embarrassing that Columbia did not notice a student in such open mockery of their mission. Seriously, embarrassing.

Continuing from the story:

Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn’t think this is a bad thing. “I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating,” he said.

Also embarrassing for Columbia. But seriously, Lee has no idea what he is talking about. Consider this:

Lee explained to me that by showing the world AI could be used to cheat during a remote job interview, he had pushed the tech industry to evolve the same way AI was forcing higher education to evolve. “Every technological innovation has caused humanity to sit back and think about what work is actually useful,” he said. “There might have been people complaining about machinery replacing blacksmiths in, like, the 1600s or 1800s, but now it’s just accepted that it’s useless to learn how to blacksmith.”

I already regret writing this — but maybe if Lee had done a little more reading, done any writing at all, he could make a stronger argument. His argument here is that of a precocious eighth grader.

OpenAI/ChatGPT and Students

Anyway, here are sections and quotes from the article about students using ChatGPT to cheat. I hope you have a strong stomach.

As a brief aside, having written about this topic for years now, I cannot tell you how hard it is to get students to talk about this. What follows is the highest quality journalism. I am impressed and jealous.

From the story:

“College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.

More:

Sarah, a freshman at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, said she first used ChatGPT to cheat during the spring semester of her final year of high school.

And:

After getting acquainted with the chatbot, Sarah used it for all her classes: Indigenous studies, law, English, and a “hippie farming class” called Green Industries. “My grades were amazing,” she said. “It changed my life.” Sarah continued to use AI when she started college this past fall. Why wouldn’t she? Rarely did she sit in class and not see other students’ laptops open to ChatGPT. Toward the end of the semester, she began to think she might be dependent on the website. She already considered herself addicted to TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit, where she writes under the username maybeimnotsmart. “I spend so much time on TikTok,” she said. “Hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes 12.”

This really is where we are. These students are not outliers.

Worse, being as clear here as I know how to be — 95% of colleges do not care. At least not enough to do anything about it. They are, in my view, perfectly comfortable with their students faking it, laughing their way through the process, because fixing it is hard. It’s easier to look cool and “embrace” AI than to acknowledge the obvious and existential truth.

But let’s keep going:

now, as one student put it, “the ceiling has been blown off.” Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences?

Please mentally underline the “no consequences” part. These are not bad people, the students using ChatGPT and other AI products to cheat. They are making an obvious choice — easy and no penalty versus actual, serious work. So long as this continues to be the equation, cheating will be as common as breathing. Only idiots and masochists will resist.

Had enough? No? Here:

Wendy, a freshman finance major at one of the city’s top universities, told me that she is against using AI. Or, she clarified, “I’m against copy-and-pasting. I’m against cheating and plagiarism. All of that. It’s against the student handbook.” Then she described, step-by-step, how on a recent Friday at 8 a.m., she called up an AI platform to help her write a four-to-five-page essay due two hours later.

Of course. When you ask students if they condone cheating, most say no. Most also say they do not cheat. Then, when you ask about what they do specifically, it’s textbook cheating. As I remember reading in Cheating in College, when you ask students to explain this disconnect, they often say, “Well, when I did it, it was not cheating.” Wendy is a good example.

In any case, this next section is long, and I regret sharing all of it. I really want people to read the article. But this, like so much of it, is worth reading. Even if you read it here.

More on Wendy:

Whenever Wendy uses AI to write an essay (which is to say, whenever she writes an essay), she follows three steps. Step one: “I say, ‘I’m a first-year college student. I’m taking this English class.’” Otherwise, Wendy said, “it will give you a very advanced, very complicated writing style, and you don’t want that.” Step two: Wendy provides some background on the class she’s taking before copy-and-pasting her professor’s instructions into the chatbot. Step three: “Then I ask, ‘According to the prompt, can you please provide me an outline or an organization to give me a structure so that I can follow and write my essay?’ It then gives me an outline, introduction, topic sentences, paragraph one, paragraph two, paragraph three.” Sometimes, Wendy asks for a bullet list of ideas to support or refute a given argument: “I have difficulty with organization, and this makes it really easy for me to follow.”

Once the chatbot had outlined Wendy’s essay, providing her with a list of topic sentences and bullet points of ideas, all she had to do was fill it in. Wendy delivered a tidy five-page paper at an acceptably tardy 10:17 a.m. When I asked her how she did on the assignment, she said she got a good grade. “I really like writing,” she said, sounding strangely nostalgic for her high-school English class — the last time she wrote an essay unassisted. “Honestly,” she continued, “I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”

I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in, and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said. “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”

Unfortunately, we’ve read this before. Many times. Use of generative AI to outsource the effort of learning is rampant.

Want more? There’s also Daniel, a computer science student at the University of Florida:

AI has made Daniel more curious; he likes that whenever he has a question, he can quickly access a thorough answer. But when he uses AI for homework, he often wonders, If I took the time to learn that, instead of just finding it out, would I have learned a lot more? At school, he asks ChatGPT to make sure his essays are polished and grammatically correct, to write the first few paragraphs of his essays when he’s short on time, to handle the grunt work in his coding classes, to cut basically all cuttable corners. Sometimes, he knows his use of AI is a clear violation of student conduct, but most of the time it feels like he’s in a gray area. “I don’t think anyone calls seeing a tutor cheating, right? But what happens when a tutor starts writing lines of your paper for you?” he said.

When a tutor starts writing your paper for you, if you turn that paper in for credit you receive, that’s cheating. This is not complicated. People who sell cheating services and the people who buy them want to make it seem complicated. It’s not.

And the Teachers

Like the coverage of students, the article’s work with teachers is top-rate. And what they have to say is not one inch less important. For example:

Brian Patrick Green, a tech-ethics scholar at Santa Clara University, immediately stopped assigning essays after he tried ChatGPT for the first time. Less than three months later, teaching a course called Ethics and Artificial Intelligence, he figured a low-stakes reading reflection would be safe — surely no one would dare use ChatGPT to write something personal. But one of his students turned in a reflection with robotic language and awkward phrasing that Green knew was AI-generated. A philosophy professor across the country at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt “Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.”

Students are cheating — using AI to outsource their expected learning labor — in a class called Ethics and Artificial Intelligence. And in an Ethics and Technology class. At what point does reality’s absurdity outpace our ability to even understand it?

Also, as I’ve been barking about for some time now, low-stakes assignments are probably more likely to be cheated than high-stakes ones (see Issue 64). I don’t really get why professional educators don’t get this.

But returning to the topic:

After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,”

To read about Jollimore’s outstanding essay, see Issue 346.

And, of course, there’s more. Like the large section above, I regret copying so much of it, but it’s essential reading:

Many teachers now seem to be in a state of despair. In the fall, Sam Williams was a teaching assistant for a writing-intensive class on music and social change at the University of Iowa that, officially, didn’t allow students to use AI at all. Williams enjoyed reading and grading the class’s first assignment: a personal essay that asked the students to write about their own music tastes. Then, on the second assignment, an essay on the New Orleans jazz era (1890 to 1920), many of his students’ writing styles changed drastically. Worse were the ridiculous factual errors. Multiple essays contained entire paragraphs on Elvis Presley (born in 1935). “I literally told my class, ‘Hey, don’t use AI. But if you’re going to cheat, you have to cheat in a way that’s intelligent. You can’t just copy exactly what it spits out,’” Williams said.

Williams knew most of the students in this general-education class were not destined to be writers, but he thought the work of getting from a blank page to a few semi-coherent pages was, above all else, a lesson in effort. In that sense, most of his students utterly failed. “They’re using AI because it’s a simple solution and it’s an easy way for them not to put in time writing essays. And I get it, because I hated writing essays when I was in school,” Williams said. “But now, whenever they encounter a little bit of difficulty, instead of fighting their way through that and growing from it, they retreat to something that makes it a lot easier for them.”

By November, Williams estimated that at least half of his students were using AI to write their papers. Attempts at accountability were pointless. Williams had no faith in AI detectors, and the professor teaching the class instructed him not to fail individual papers, even the clearly AI-smoothed ones. “Every time I brought it up with the professor, I got the sense he was underestimating the power of ChatGPT, and the departmental stance was, ‘Well, it’s a slippery slope, and we can’t really prove they’re using AI,’” Williams said. “I was told to grade based on what the essay would’ve gotten if it were a ‘true attempt at a paper.’ So I was grading people on their ability to use ChatGPT.”

The “true attempt at a paper” policy ruined Williams’s grading scale. If he gave a solid paper that was obviously written with AI a B, what should he give a paper written by someone who actually wrote their own paper but submitted, in his words, “a barely literate essay”? The confusion was enough to sour Williams on education as a whole. By the end of the semester, he was so disillusioned that he decided to drop out of graduate school altogether. “We’re in a new generation, a new time, and I just don’t think that’s what I want to do,” he said.

To be clear, the school is ignoring the obvious use of AI by students to avoid the work of learning — in violation of stated policies — and awarding grades, credit, and degrees anyway. Nearly universally, we are meeting lack of effort with lack of effort.

More from Jollimore:

He worries about the long-term consequences of passively allowing 18-year-olds to decide whether to actively engage with their assignments.

I worry about that too. I really want to use the past tense there — worried about. I think the age of active worry about this is over. Students are deciding what work they think is relevant or important — which I’d wager is next to none of it — and using AI to shrug off everything else. And again, the collective response of educators seems to be — who cares? Or, in some cases, to quit.

More on professors:

Some professors have resorted to deploying so-called Trojan horses, sticking strange phrases, in small white text, in between the paragraphs of an essay prompt. (The idea is that this would theoretically prompt ChatGPT to insert a non sequitur into the essay.) Students at Santa Clara recently found the word broccoli hidden in a professor’s assignment. Last fall, a professor at the University of Oklahoma sneaked the phrases “mention Finland” and “mention Dua Lipa” in his. A student discovered his trap and warned her classmates about it on TikTok. “It does work sometimes,” said Jollimore, the Cal State Chico professor. “I’ve used ‘How would Aristotle answer this?’ when we hadn’t read Aristotle. But I’ve also used absurd ones and they didn’t notice that there was this crazy thing in their paper, meaning these are people who not only didn’t write the paper but also didn’t read their own paper before submitting it.”

You can catch students using ChatGPT, if you want to. There are ways to do it, ways to limit it. And I wish the reporter had asked these teachers what happened to the students who were discovered. But I am sure I know the answer.

I guess also, I apologize. Some educators are engaged in the fight to protect and preserve the value of learning things. I feel that it’s far too few and that, more often than not, they are alone in this. It’s depressing.

Odds and Ends

In addition to its excellent narrative about how bad things actually are in a GPT-corrupted education system, the article has a few other bits worth sharing.

This, is pretty great:

Before OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, cheating had already reached a sort of zenith. At the time, many college students had finished high school remotely, largely unsupervised, and with access to tools like Chegg and Course Hero. These companies advertised themselves as vast online libraries of textbooks and course materials but, in reality, were cheating multi-tools. For $15.95 a month, Chegg promised answers to homework questions in as little as 30 minutes, 24/7, from the 150,000 experts with advanced degrees it employed, mostly in India. When ChatGPT launched, students were primed for a tool that was faster, more capable.

Mentioning Chegg and Course Hero by name is strong work. Cheating multi-tools is precisely what they are.

I thought this was interesting too:

Students talk about professors who are rumored to have certain thresholds (25 percent, say) above which an essay might be flagged as an honor-code violation. But I couldn’t find a single professor — at large state schools or small private schools, elite or otherwise — who admitted to enforcing such a policy. Most seemed resigned to the belief that AI detectors don’t work. It’s true that different AI detectors have vastly different success rates, and there is a lot of conflicting data. While some claim to have less than a one percent false-positive rate, studies have shown they trigger more false positives for essays written by neurodivergent students and students who speak English as a second language.

I have a few things to say about this.

Students talk to one another. Remember a few paragraphs up where a student found the Trojan horse and posted it on social media? When teachers make efforts to stop cheating, to try catching disallowed use of AI, word gets around. Some students will try harder to get away with it. Others won’t try to cheat, figuring the risk isn’t worth it. Simply trying to stop it, in other words, will stop at least some of it.

I think the idea that most teachers think AI detectors don’t work is true. It’s not just teachers. Entire schools believe this. It’s an epic failure of messaging, an astonishing triumph of the misinformed. Truth is, as reported above, detectors do vary. Some are great. Some are junk. But the good ones work. Most people continue to not believe it.

And I’ll point out once again that the “studies have shown” thing is complete nonsense. As far as I have seen, exactly two studies have shown this, and both are deeply flawed. The one most often cited has made-up citations and research that is highly suspicious, which I pointed out in 2023 (see Issue 216). Frankly, I’ve not seen any good evidence to support this idea. As journalism goes, that’s a big miss in this story. It’s little wonder teachers think AI detectors don’t work.

On the subject of junk AI detectors, there’s also this:

I fed Wendy’s essay through a free AI detector, ZeroGPT, and it came back as 11.74 AI-generated, which seemed low given that AI, at the very least, had generated her central arguments. I then fed a chunk of text from the Book of Genesis into ZeroGPT and it came back as 93.33 percent AI-generated.

This is a failure to understand how AI detection works. But also ZeroGPT does not work. Again, it’s no wonder that teachers think AI detection does not work.

Continuing:

It’s not just the students: Multiple AI platforms now offer tools to leave AI-generated feedback on students’ essays. Which raises the possibility that AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.

I don’t have nearly the bandwidth to get into this. But — sure. I have no doubt.

Finally, I am not sure if I missed this at the time, but this is important too:

In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a human. Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education.

As I have said before, OpenAI is not your friend (see Issue 308). It’s a cheating engine. It can be used well, and ethically. But so can steroids. So could OxyContin. It’s possible to be handed the answers to every test you’ll ever take and not use them. But it is delusional to think any significant number of people don’t.

All wrapped up, this is a show-stopper of an article and I am very happy for the visibility it brings. I wish I could feel that it will make a difference.

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