The Brown University Killing, the Educated Underclass, and the Politics of Control

When a killing becomes associated with an elite institution such as Brown University, the public narrative hardens quickly. The event is framed as an unforeseeable rupture—either the product of individual pathology or evidence that universities have failed to control dangerous people in their midst. Missing from both accounts is a deeper examination of how elite higher education produces an educated underclass, how mental illness is managed rather than treated, how international students are uniquely exposed to risk, and how mass surveillance and reporting regimes increasingly substitute for care.

Elite universities project an image of abundance: intellectual freedom, global opportunity, and moral seriousness. Yet beneath that image lies a population living with chronic insecurity. Graduate students, adjuncts, postdoctoral researchers, and international students occupy a paradoxical position—highly educated, institutionally dependent, and structurally disposable. They are central to the university’s labor model and global prestige, yet peripheral to its safety nets and decision-making structures.

Mental illness must be addressed directly, but not in the reductive way it is often invoked after violence occurs. Campus mental health systems are overwhelmed, under-resourced, and shaped by liability concerns rather than therapeutic commitments. Students in severe psychological distress frequently encounter long waitlists, fragmented care, or administrative responses that blur the line between support and discipline. Crisis is managed, not resolved.

For international students, these failures are magnified. Visa status is typically contingent on continuous enrollment and academic performance. A mental health crisis can threaten not only a student’s education but their legal right to remain in the country. Seeking help may carry perceived—or real—risks: loss of funding, forced leaves of absence, housing instability, or immigration consequences. Cultural stigma, racism, language barriers, and social isolation further discourage engagement with already inadequate systems.

Rather than expanding care, universities have increasingly expanded surveillance. Elite campuses now operate dense ecosystems of monitoring: security cameras, access controls, data analytics, behavioral intervention teams, and anonymous “concerned citizen” tip lines. These systems are justified as preventative safety measures, but they often function as tools of social control. “Concerning behavior” is deliberately undefined, allowing subjective judgments to trigger institutional scrutiny.

Such systems disproportionately affect those who already stand out—students who are foreign, mentally ill, socially isolated, or racially marginalized. For international students in particular, being flagged by a tip or threat assessment process can escalate rapidly, drawing in campus police, local law enforcement, or federal immigration authorities. Surveillance does not replace care; it displaces it.

In the aftermath of violence, political responses tend to reinforce this displacement. Donald Trump’s reactions to campus-related violence and crime have followed a consistent pattern: emphasis on “law and order,” denunciations of universities as irresponsible or ideologically corrupt, and calls for stronger policing, harsher penalties, and increased monitoring. Mental illness is often invoked rhetorically, but rarely accompanied by proposals for expanded treatment, housing stability, or protections for vulnerable students—especially non-citizens.

This framing matters. When elite campus violence is interpreted through a punitive lens, it legitimizes further surveillance, broader reporting mandates, and closer coordination between universities and law enforcement. It shifts responsibility away from institutional structures and onto individuals deemed dangerous or deviant. For foreign students and members of the educated underclass, this environment deepens fear and discourages help-seeking, even as pressure intensifies.

The concept of the educated underclass helps explain why these dynamics are so volatile. Contemporary higher education produces vast numbers of highly trained individuals for a shrinking set of secure positions. International students are recruited aggressively, charged high tuition, and celebrated as evidence of global prestige, yet offered limited pathways to stable employment or belonging. Universities benefit enormously from this arrangement while externalizing its human costs.

None of this excuses violence. Accountability is essential, and the suffering of victims must remain central. But focusing exclusively on individual blame—or on punitive political responses—allows institutions to preserve comforting myths about themselves. It obscures how structural precarity, untreated mental illness, immigration vulnerability, and surveillance-based governance interact in predictable ways.

What incidents connected to elite universities ultimately reveal is not merely individual failure, but institutional contradiction. Universities claim to value diversity while subjecting foreign students to heightened scrutiny. They speak the language of wellness while expanding systems of monitoring and reporting. Political leaders denounce campuses while endorsing the very control mechanisms that exacerbate isolation and distress.

Until universities invest seriously in mental health care, protect international students from cascading penalties, and confront the harms of surveillance-first approaches—and until political leaders move beyond carceral reflexes—elite campuses will remain places where suffering is managed rather than addressed. When that management fails, the consequences can be catastrophic.

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Sources

American Psychiatric Association. Mental Health in College Students.
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/college-students/mental-health-in-college

Eisenberg, D., et al. “Mental Health and Academic Success in College.” The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2009.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books.

Institute of International Education. Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange.
https://opendoorsdata.org

Lipson, S. K., & Eisenberg, D. “Mental Health and Academic Attitudes and Expectations in University Populations.” Journal of Adolescent Health, 2018.

Monahan, Torin. Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity. Rutgers University Press.

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

U.S. Department of Homeland Security. SEVP Guidance for International Students.
https://www.ice.gov/sevis

Trump, Donald J. Public statements and campaign remarks on crime, universities, and law enforcement, 2016–2024.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs.

The Five Pillars of the College Meltdown

Demographics

The first pillar of the College Meltdown is demographic decline. Following the Great Recession, U.S. birthrates dropped sharply, creating a smaller pipeline of traditional college-age students. Nathan Grawe’s projections and WICHE’s Knocking at the College Door reports point to a steep enrollment cliff between 2025 and 2029, with some regions—particularly the Midwest and Northeast—facing the most severe contractions.

Case Study: Dozens of small private colleges in the Midwest, such as Iowa Wesleyan University (closed in 2023), have already succumbed to shrinking student pools. These closures foreshadow the demographic cliff that will hit hardest in tuition-dependent institutions.

Economics

The second pillar is economic fragility. Tuition and fees have risen faster than inflation and wages, leaving families burdened with debt. Student loan balances now exceed $1.7 trillion, with many graduates trapped in lifetime debt peonage. State disinvestment has shifted costs onto students, while tuition-dependent small colleges and regional universities face existential threats.

Case Study: The collapse of Mount Ida College in Massachusetts (2018) illustrates how tuition-driven institutions can fail suddenly when enrollment drops and debt obligations mount. Similar financial stress has led to mergers, such as the consolidation of Pennsylvania’s state universities.

Integrity (Fraud and Trust)

The third pillar is integrity. Enrollment fraud has become a systemic issue, with ghost students, bots, and synthetic identities siphoning off Pell Grants and other aid. Documented losses exceed $100 million annually, but California officials estimate that nearly a third of applications in 2024 were fraudulent. Fraud not only drains resources but also distorts enrollment data, masking the severity of demographic decline and eroding trust in higher education institutions.

Case Study: California Community Colleges uncovered tens of thousands of fraudulent applications in 2021–2022, with bots and synthetic identities targeting federal aid. This distorted enrollment figures and forced institutions to spend millions on fraud detection systems.

Governance and Labor

The fourth pillar is governance and labor. Higher education has been corporatized, with growing reliance on Online Program Managers (OPMs), outsourcing, and profit-driven models. Faculty labor has been deskilled, with adjuncts and contingent instructors making up the majority of teaching staff. Administrative bloat contrasts with shrinking instructional budgets, and some institutions resemble “robocolleges” with minimal full-time faculty presence.

Case Study: The University of Phoenix, once the largest for-profit college, closed hundreds of campuses and shifted to online models heavily reliant on OPMs. Meanwhile, adjunct faculty at many regional universities report poverty wages and no job security, even as administrative salaries rise.

Culture and Public Trust

The fifth pillar is cultural erosion. Public confidence in higher education has plummeted, dropping from 57 percent in 2015 to just 36 percent in 2024. Skepticism about the value of a degree has grown, with alternatives like certificates, apprenticeships, and direct-to-work pathways gaining traction. Political polarization and media narratives of closures, mergers, and scandals reinforce the perception of a system in meltdown.

Case Study: Gallup polls show declining trust across political and demographic groups. Regional newspapers covering closures of institutions like Green Mountain College (Vermont, 2019) and Becker College (Massachusetts, 2021) amplify public skepticism, reinforcing the narrative that higher education is no longer a safe investment.

The Pillars Weakening 

The College Meltdown is not the result of a single factor but the convergence of demographics, economics, integrity failures, governance issues, and cultural distrust. Each pillar weakens the foundation of higher education, and together they accelerate its unraveling. Case studies from across the country show that the meltdown is not theoretical—it is already happening. Recognizing these interconnected forces is essential if policymakers, educators, and communities hope to address the crisis before the collapse becomes irreversible.

Renting While Educated: The Housing Crisis and the Rise of the Educated Underclass

In the United States, a college degree once promised a path to stability — a steady job, a livable wage, and a secure place to call home. Today, that promise has fractured. Millions of degree-holders and would-be graduates find themselves unable to afford even modest housing, trapped in what can only be described as the educated underclass: people with credentials but without the economic security those credentials were supposed to guarantee.

The latest data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) makes clear that the housing crisis is not just about poverty — it is about the shrinking distance between the working poor and the working-educated. The gap between wages and rent has widened so dramatically that even college-educated workers, adjunct faculty, nonprofit staff, social workers, and early-career professionals are drowning in housing costs.

The Housing Wage and the Broken Promise of Higher Ed

According to NLIHC’s Out of Reach 2025 report, a full-time worker in the U.S. needs to earn $33.63 an hour to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment and $28.17 an hour for a one-bedroom. That’s far higher than what many degree-holders earn, especially those in education, public service, healthcare support, and the nonprofit sector.

The academic workforce itself is emblematic of the problem: adjunct instructors with master’s degrees — sometimes PhDs — often earn poverty-level wages. Yet the rents they face are no different from those of skilled professionals in high-paying industries.

Higher education promised mobility; instead, it delivered a generation of renters one missed paycheck away from eviction.

An Educated Underclass Renting in Perpetuity

NLIHC’s data shows a national shortage of affordable housing: only 35 affordable and available homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income renters. While this crisis hits the lowest-income Americans hardest, it also drags down millions of educated workers who now compete for the same shrinking stock of affordable units.

This convergence — between the working poor and the working educated — reflects a structural breakdown:

• New graduates carry student debt while starting in low-wage jobs.

• Millennial and Gen Z workers face rents that have grown far faster than wages.

• Former middle-class professionals, displaced by automation and recession, re-enter the workforce at lower wages that no longer match their credentials.

• Public-sector and nonprofit workers do “mission-driven” work but cannot afford to live in the communities they serve.

Increasingly, higher education is not a safeguard against housing insecurity — it is a gateway into it.

The Spiral: Student Debt, Rent Burden, and Delayed Adulthood

The educated underclass faces a double bind:
High rents prevent saving, while student debt prevents mobility.

NLIHC data shows that renters who are cost-burdened (spending more than 30% of income on housing) or severely cost-burdened (over 50%) are forced to cut spending on essentials. For many degree-holders, this means:

• Delaying or abandoning homeownership

• Working multiple jobs to cover rent

• Moving back in with parents

• Delaying marriage and child-rearing

• Relocating constantly in search of slightly cheaper housing

This is not “adulting” — it’s economic triage.

The educated underclass is increasingly indistinguishable from the broader working class in terms of economic vulnerability, yet still burdened by expectations that their degrees should have delivered them stability.

When Housing Costs Undermine Higher Education Itself

The affordability crisis is reshaping entire higher education ecosystems:

• Students struggle to find housing close to campus, leading to long commutes, couch surfing, or dropping out.

• Graduate students and postdocs — essential academic labor — increasingly rely on food aid, emergency grants, and organizing unions just to survive.

• Colleges in high-cost cities cannot hire or retain staff because employees cannot afford to live nearby.

• Public institutions face declining enrollment because families see no payoff to degrees that lead to poverty wages and unaffordable housing.

If higher education cannot provide a pathway out of housing insecurity, its legitimacy — and its future — is in question.

Toward Real Solutions: Housing as an Educational Issue

Solving this crisis requires acknowledging a simple truth: housing policy is higher-education policy.
The educated underclass is not a natural outcome of individual failure; it is the product of a system that overcharges for education and underpays for labor while allowing rents to skyrocket.

Real solutions would include:

• Large-scale public investment in deeply affordable housing

• Expansion of rental assistance and housing vouchers

• Living-wage laws that reflect real housing costs

• Student-housing development tied to public colleges

• Forgiveness of rental debt accumulated during economic shocks

• Strengthening unions among educators, adjuncts, graduate workers, and other low-paid professionals

The promise of higher education cannot be realized while a degree-holder earning $20, $25, or even $30 an hour still cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment.

The Verdict: Housing Is the Fault Line of the New Class Divide

NLIHC’s data confirms what millions of renters already know: the U.S. housing market punishes workers regardless of education level, and higher education no longer protects against precarity. The educated underclass is not a fringe category — it is becoming the norm.

Until wages align with housing costs and the housing system is restructured to serve people rather than profit, the divide between those who can afford stability and those who cannot will continue to widen. And higher education, once marketed as the bridge to a better life, will remain yet another broken promise — one rent payment away from collapse.

Sources
National Low Income Housing Coalition, Out of Reach 2025
NLIHC Research and Policy Briefs
NLIHC Affordable Housing Data and Fact Sheets

Preston Cooper Is Wrong: Enrollment Is Only One of Higher Education’s Many Crises

In a recent American Enterprise Institute article, Preston Cooper insists that the post-2010 collapse in college enrollment is “a correction, not a crisis.” According to Cooper, students are becoming more discerning consumers, abandoning low-value colleges and low-ROI degrees while flocking to higher-quality institutions and more lucrative majors. In this narrative, the system is simply shedding inefficiencies. The market is working.

But this argument is incomplete to the point of distortion. Enrollment decline is not a tidy market correction. It is a symptom of profound structural problems: affordability, inequality, political interference, labor exploitation, deteriorating academic quality, widespread cheating, and the growing reliance on “robocolleges” and automated learning platforms with questionable educational value. Cooper’s analysis ignores all of this and reduces higher education to a single variable—student choices—when the system is being reshaped by forces far larger and more corrosive than consumer preference.

Affordability remains the biggest barrier to access. Surveys repeatedly show that adults who never enrolled or who dropped out cite cost as their primary obstacle, and higher education leaders themselves acknowledge that families often do not understand the real price until they are already overwhelmed. Tuition, fees, housing, food, and transportation are enough to make college inaccessible for millions. This is not a sign of students shopping wisely; it is evidence of a system that has priced out vast segments of the population.

Cooper’s argument also ignores how structural inequalities determine who even reaches the point of decision-making. Research from multiple institutions shows that disparities in academic preparation—rooted in racial segregation, school funding inequity, socioeconomic status, and access to quality teachers—heavily influence college-going patterns. Students from under-resourced schools or low-income families do not have equal access to information, support systems, or opportunities. The idea that they are “choosing” not to attend low-value schools disregards the constraints that shape those choices.

Meanwhile, colleges themselves are destabilizing. Shrinking enrollments and stagnant public funding have produced financial crises across the sector. Even reputable institutions rely on aggressive discounting, program cuts, hiring freezes, and dependence on contingent faculty. Student support services shrink while administrative costs continue to rise. Cooper’s framing of “let the weak fail” overlooks the collateral damage: students denied needed resources, programs eliminated, and entire communities harmed when regional colleges collapse.

The crisis extends beyond finances. Students’ freedom of speech is increasingly under pressure as state legislatures, governors, and politically reactive boards restrict curricula, censor faculty, and monitor student organizations. Expression around race, inequality, gender, and geopolitical issues is under surveillance or actively punished. Whether driven by conservative politics, donor pressure, or administrative fear of controversy, the suppression of student and faculty voices undermines the university’s democratic mission.

Cooper also fails to address the degrading working conditions of adjunct faculty, who now make up the majority of instructors. Adjuncts often earn poverty-level wages, lack health insurance, and have no job security. Many teach at multiple institutions simply to survive. The system Cooper describes as “self-correcting” rests on the exploitation of the people responsible for delivering the education students are supposedly choosing.

Then there are the emerging problems he completely ignores: robocolleges and AI-driven instruction. As institutions cut costs, many outsource teaching to automated platforms, online mega-providers, and algorithmic tutoring systems. These “robocolleges” promise efficiency but often deliver shallow instruction, predatory recruitment, weakened student support, and minimal human interaction. They generate revenue, but not always learning. Cooper assumes that students are leaving low-value institutions, yet many of these automated systems are themselves low-value—and increasingly difficult to regulate or evaluate.

The rise of automated education connects directly to another crisis: academic integrity. AI-assisted cheating is now widespread across campuses. Students, overwhelmed by cost pressures, mental health struggles, large class sizes, and insufficient support, increasingly rely on AI tools to complete assignments without understanding the material. Instructors struggle to identify misconduct, institutions scramble to respond, and genuine learning becomes harder to guarantee. This is not the sign of a system “correcting” itself. It is evidence of a sector that has lost its footing and is failing to uphold educational standards.

Cooper’s argument rests on the assumption that higher education should primarily be judged by short-term labor-market returns. But higher education is more than a job-training pipeline. It is a public good that supports social mobility, civic participation, community development, scientific and cultural advancement, and democratic life. A system that suppresses speech, exploits faculty, overrelies on automated instruction, and cannot distinguish real learning from AI-generated work is not corrected. It is in crisis.

The enrollment decline is real, but it is only the surface. Beneath it lies a system plagued by affordability barriers, entrenched inequality, political intrusion, labor precarity, academic degradation, technological misuse, and rising distrust. To call this a “correction” is to look away from the deeper rot. For students, educators, and communities, it is a crisis—one that demands urgent structural reform rather than market-based optimism.

Sources
National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA). “The Biggest Barriers to Higher Education Enrollment Are Cost and Lack of Financial Aid.”
Inside Higher Ed. “Student Success Leaders Worry About Affordability, AI, and DEI.”
Brookings Institution. “Persistent Gaps in Academic Preparation Generate College Enrollment Disparities.”
Deloitte Insights. “Top Risks in Higher Education.”
Independent Institute. “Higher Education’s Triple Crisis.”
PEN America. “Tracking Campus Free Speech Legislation and Suppression.”
American Federation of Teachers / AAUP. “The Gig Academy: Precarity and the Exploitation of Adjunct Labor.”
The Century Foundation. Analyses of Online Program Management (OPM) and automated higher education risks.
Inside Higher Ed and Times Higher Education reporting on AI-driven cheating and academic integrity.

Moral Capital and Locus of Control

Moral capital has become a contested currency in American public life. It is deployed by political elites to justify austerity, by campus executives to rationalize managerial authority, and by think tanks to discipline the working class. Yet moral capital also rises from below—from students building mutual-aid networks, from adjuncts organizing for fair wages, from communities confronting the harms universities have helped produce. In an era defined by climate peril, surveillance capitalism, and proliferating wars, the stakes of who controls moral capital—and who gets to exercise real agency—have never been higher.

At the center of this struggle lies a fraught psychological and sociological concept: locus of control. Higher education constantly toggles between narratives of internal control (grit, resilience, personal responsibility) and external control (the market, political pressures, funding cycles). Powerful actors encourage an internal locus of control when it shifts blame downward, and an external locus of control when it shields institutional failure. Students, staff, and faculty live suspended in this contradiction, expected to absorb the consequences of decisions made far above them.

Quality of Life as Moral Imperative

Quality of Life—once peripheral to higher education policy—is now a defining moral issue. Students and workers contend with unstable housing, food insecurity, unsafe campuses, inaccessible mental health care, and relentless economic pressures. For many, these burdens are compounded by existential crises: climate anxiety, global conflicts, democratic backsliding, and precarity amplified by technological surveillance.

Institutions often portray these crises as personal challenges requiring self-management. But Quality of Life is not an individual moral failure; it is a metric of collective conditions. When a university community’s quality of life declines, it signals a profound imbalance between agency and structure—a distorted locus of control.

The Industry’s Manufactured Moral Capital

Universities have long crafted narratives that elevate their own moral standing while displacing responsibility onto individuals. The “grateful striver” student, the “self-sacrificing” adjunct, the “visionary” president—these tropes protect managerial systems from scrutiny and allow elites to accumulate moral capital even as Quality of Life deteriorates for everyone else.

This manufactured moral authority collapses under existential pressures. As campuses confront heatwaves, flooding, militarized policing, housing crises, widening wars, and state-sanctioned surveillance, it becomes impossible to sustain the fiction that individuals can simply “grit” their way to stability.

Reclaiming Moral Capital 

Moral capital is not owned by institutions. It can be reimagined, reclaimed, and reoriented. Four longstanding modes of internal discipline—temperance, celibacy, critical thinking, and solidarity—take on new urgency when placed in the context of planetary and political crisis.

Temperance

Temperance, stripped of its historical misuse, becomes a strategy of mindful refusal in the face of consumption-based exploitation. It includes rejecting burnout culture, resisting technological tools that monitor student behavior, and refusing to internalize blame for systemic failures. In an era of climate breakdown, temperance also signifies ecological responsibility—a modest but meaningful form of internal control aligned with global survival rather than institutional convenience.

Celibacy

Broadly interpreted, celibacy represents intentional self-limitation that protects one’s emotional and cognitive bandwidth. Amid surveillance-driven social media, algorithmic manipulation, and institutions that increasingly commodify student identity, celibacy can be a form of psychological sovereignty. It creates space for reflection in a world designed to keep people reactive, distracted, and easily governed.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking remains the academy’s most subversive tradition—especially when deployed against the university itself. It helps students analyze the interplay between personal agency and systemic constraint. It equips them to understand climate injustice, militarism, and the geopolitics of knowledge production. And it exposes the ways mass surveillance—from learning analytics to campus police technologies—erodes autonomy and shifts the locus of control away from individuals and communities toward powerful institutions.

Solidarity

Solidarity transforms private moral commitments into collective action. It breaks the isolation manufactured by surveillance systems, precarity, and competitive academic cultures. Solidarity has historically been the source of the most effective nonviolent strategies—from civil rights sit-ins to anti-war mobilizations to student debt strikes. Today, as geopolitical conflicts escalate and authoritarian tendencies rise, the power of organized nonviolence becomes an existential necessity. It is one of the few tools capable of confronting militarized policing, resisting state repression, and challenging the corporate infrastructures that profit from crisis.

Nonviolent Strategies in an Era of Global Threat

Nonviolent action remains a potent form of moral capital—and one of the most effective forms of collective agency. Research across conflicts shows that sustained, mass-based nonviolent movements often outperform violent struggles, especially against highly resourced opponents. For universities, which increasingly collaborate with defense contractors, data brokers, and state surveillance agencies, nonviolent resistance has become both a safeguard and a moral compass.

Sit-ins, teach-ins, encampments, divestment campaigns, and labor actions reassert external locus of control as something communities can influence—not by force, but by moral clarity, strategic discipline, and the refusal to comply with harmful systems.

Mass Surveillance as a Threat to Moral Agency

Mass surveillance is now woven into the fabric of academic life. Learning management systems track student behavior down to the minute. Proctoring software uses biometrics to police exams. Campus police drones and public-private security networks feed data into law enforcement databases. Administrative dashboards quantify student “risk” and worker “efficiency” in ways that reshape institutional priorities.

This surveillance apparatus corrodes moral capital by reducing human judgment to automated metrics. It also distorts locus of control: individuals are told to take responsibility while being monitored and managed by opaque systems far beyond their influence.

Reclaiming agency requires dismantling or limiting these systems, demanding transparency, and reasserting human dignity in spaces now governed by algorithms.

Toward a More Honest Locus of Control

Moral capital and locus of control are not academic abstractions. They are lived realities shaped by climate disruption, war, inequality, and surveillance. Higher education must stop using moral narratives to deflect responsibility and instead cultivate practices that reinforce real agency: temperance, celibacy, critical thinking, solidarity, and the disciplined power of nonviolent resistance.

In a world marked by existential threats, reclaiming moral capital from below is not simply an intellectual exercise—it is a condition for survival, and a pathway to collective liberation.

Sources
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Erica Chenoweth & Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Astra Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone

The College Meltdown: Pruning in Chernobyl

Since the fallout of Occupy Wall Street in 2011, a small but persistent movement has sought to expose the widening inequities and systemic failures in U.S. higher education. We have agitated, analyzed, and educated, warning that the “market-driven” model championed by elite managers—presidents, trustees, CFOs, and state policymakers—would erode both academic quality and access. Today, that warning has become reality.

The College Meltdown is not a metaphor. It is a literal unraveling of an ecosystem where public support has eroded, tuition has skyrocketed, and students are left with crushing debt. Colleges are shuttering campuses, programs are disappearing, and adjuncts—already the backbone of instruction—face insecure employment. Meanwhile, neoliberal administrators, entrusted with guiding institutions through turbulence, have mostly engaged in cosmetic pruning rather than systemic reform.

This is not accidental. The managerial class in higher education—driven less by pedagogy than by budgets, branding, and financialization—has embraced austerity measures that protect elite interests while passing costs to students and staff. Endowment growth, athletics spending, and executive compensation often take priority over the academic mission. HBCUs and tribal colleges, already underfunded, bear the brunt of this mismanagement.

Efforts to stabilize the system have been tepid at best. Proposals for meaningful structural reform, from debt relief to state reinvestment, are watered down by political and market pressures. Neoliberals tout efficiency and innovation, yet rarely address the underlying moral crisis: the deliberate prioritization of profit over learning, and the failure to cultivate a socially responsible citizenry.

Our own engagement, since 2011, has aimed to shine light on these contradictions. We have chronicled how policies favoring privatization, corporate partnerships, and debt-financed tuition have created conditions ripe for collapse. We have amplified voices of students and faculty navigating these pressures. And we have challenged complacency in the academy, insisting that higher education be measured not just by financial metrics but by its capacity to educate, empower, and expand human potential.

“Pruning in Chernobyl” captures the essence of this moment: managerial actors trimming the edges while radioactive structural failures spread unchecked. Unless institutions confront the root causes—inequality, extractive financial models, and an erosion of public purpose—the meltdown will deepen. Our work remains to educate the public, hold decision-makers accountable, and imagine a higher education system that nurtures learning rather than merely managing decline.

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Sources:

1. Higher Education Inquirer Archives, 2016–2025.

2. American Injustice Archives, 2008-2012. 

“How to Survive, Not Thrive”: The Chronicle’s Misleading Advice to Adjuncts

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published Erik Ofgang’s piece, “How to Thrive as an Adjunct Professor.” The article is framed as practical guidance from one contingent faculty member to others — a survival manual for the academe’s most disposable workers. But the framing itself is the problem. The Chronicle is not a neutral outlet dispensing helpful tips. It is an institution firmly embedded in the higher-ed Establishment, and its editorial choices reflect the interests of those who run that Establishment.

The suggestion that adjuncts can “thrive” is not merely optimistic; it is ideological. It normalizes a labor system built on underpayment, instability, and silent suffering. It helps institutions maintain a two-tier caste system in which tenure-line faculty enjoy stability, voice, and benefits, while adjuncts scramble semester-to-semester without a guarantee of renewed employment or even basic respect.

The Chronicle’s article treats precarity as a lifestyle challenge rather than a structural failure. That framing deflects attention away from institutional responsibility. The reason adjuncts have to piece together multiple jobs, endure last-minute course assignments, and live without healthcare is not that they lack good strategies. It is because universities — including the ones that proudly subscribe to the Chronicle — have chosen to replace stable academic jobs with contingent, low-paid labor.

Turning exploitation into a self-help genre is a subtle form of gaslighting. Instead of pressuring institutions to create full-time positions, support collective bargaining, or reduce administrative bloat, the Chronicle encourages adjuncts to “adapt” and “manage” their conditions. Resilience becomes a substitute for rights. Coping becomes a substitute for reform. The system remains untouched.

The omissions in the Chronicle’s piece are revealing. There is no mention of organizing, even as adjuncts across the country unionize in record numbers. There is no scrutiny of universities’ vast expenditures on athletics, luxury facilities, and administrative expansion. There is no questioning of the billion-dollar endowments that coexist with poverty-level adjunct wages. Instead, the Chronicle defaults to the safest possible narrative: individuals should adjust; institutions should not.

This is not accidental. The Chronicle’s core readership includes the provosts, deans, trustees, and HR architects who built the adjunct system. It is financially and culturally aligned with the sector’s leadership. Its survival depends on not alienating them. That alignment shapes what it chooses to publish — and what it chooses not to. Pieces that counsel adjuncts to quietly endure their exploitation are palatable to the Establishment. Pieces that call out structural injustice are not.

Adjunctification is not an unfortunate side effect of financial pressures. It is a deliberate strategy to reduce labor costs and weaken faculty power. It is part of a decades-long reorganization of higher education around managerial priorities and corporate values. Any article that ignores these realities in favor of “tips” is engaging in misdirection.

In truth, adjuncts don’t need advice on how to “thrive.” They need living wages, multiyear contracts, healthcare, respect, and a seat at the table. They need a labor system that recognizes teaching as the core mission of higher education rather than a cost center to be minimized. They need the kind of systemic change that the Chronicle rarely demands — because demanding it would mean criticizing the very institutions that sustain the Chronicle’s prestige and its business model.

The Chronicle’s soft-pedaled advice is not harmless. It is part of the ideological infrastructure that protects the higher-education status quo. If the sector is ever to become less exploitative, those who report on it must stop reassuring adjuncts that survival is a form of success and start holding institutions accountable for creating the conditions adjuncts are forced to endure.

HEI exists precisely because the mainstream higher-ed press will not.

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Sources

Erik Ofgang, “How to Thrive as an Adjunct Professor,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 6, 2025.
American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Data Snapshot: Contingent Faculty in US Higher Ed.
Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (NYU Press, 2008).
Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges (2017).
Gary Rhoades, “Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor” (SUNY Press, 1998).
Claire Goldstene, The Struggle for the Soul of Higher Education (2015).
Devarian Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower (2021).

Neoliberalism and the Global College Meltdown

Over the past four decades, neoliberalism has reshaped higher education into a market-driven enterprise, producing what can only be described as a global College Meltdown. Once envisioned as a public good—a tool for civic empowerment, social mobility, and national progress—higher education in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China has been transformed into a competitive market system defined by privatization, debt, and disillusionment.

The United States: From Public Good to Profit Engine

Nowhere has neoliberal ideology had a more devastating effect on higher education than in the United States. Beginning in the 1980s, with the Reagan administration’s cuts to federal grants and the expansion of student loans, higher education funding shifted from public investment to individual burden. Universities adopted corporate governance models, hired armies of administrators, and marketed education as a private commodity promising personal enrichment rather than collective advancement.

The results are visible everywhere: tuition inflation, student debt exceeding $1.7 trillion, and the proliferation of predatory for-profit colleges. Elite universities transformed into financial behemoths, hoarding endowments while relying on contingent faculty. Meanwhile, working-class and minority students were lured into debt traps by institutions that promised upward mobility but delivered unemployment and despair.

The U.S. College Meltdown—a term that describes the system’s moral and financial collapse—is a direct consequence of neoliberal policies: deregulation, privatization, and austerity disguised as efficiency. The profit motive replaced the public mission, and the casualties include students, adjuncts, and the ideal of education as a democratic right.

The United Kingdom: Marketization and Managerialism

The United Kingdom followed a similar trajectory under Margaret Thatcher and her successors. The introduction of tuition fees in 1998 and their tripling in 2012 marked the formal triumph of neoliberal logic over public investment. British universities became quasi-corporate entities, obsessed with league tables, branding, and global rankings.

The result has been mounting student debt, declining staff morale, and a hollowing out of intellectual life. Faculty strikes over pensions and pay disparities underscore a deeper crisis of purpose. Universities now function as rent-seeking landlords—building luxury dorms for international students while cutting humanities departments. The logic of “student-as-customer” has reduced education to a transaction, and accountability has been redefined to mean profit margin rather than social contribution.

The UK’s College Meltdown mirrors that of the U.S.—a story of financialization, precarious labor, and the erosion of public trust.

China: Neoliberalism with Authoritarian Characteristics

At first glance, China seems to defy the Western College Meltdown. Its universities have expanded rapidly, producing millions of graduates and investing heavily in research. But beneath this apparent success lies a deeply neoliberal structure embedded in an authoritarian framework.

Since the 1990s, China’s higher education system has embraced competition, rankings, and market incentives. Universities compete for prestige and funding; families invest heavily in private tutoring and overseas degrees; and graduates face a saturated labor market. The result is mounting anxiety and unemployment among young people—known online as the “lying flat” generation, disillusioned with promises of meritocratic success.

The Chinese model fuses state control with neoliberal marketization. Education serves as both an instrument of national power and a mechanism of social stratification. In this sense, China’s version of the College Meltdown reflects a global truth: the commodification of education leads to alienation, regardless of political system.

A Global System in Crisis

Whether in Washington, London, or Beijing, the pattern is strikingly similar. Neoliberalism treats education as an investment in human capital, reducing learning to a financial calculation. Universities compete like corporations; students borrow like consumers; and knowledge becomes a tool of capital accumulation rather than liberation.

This convergence of economic and ideological forces has created an unsustainable higher education bubble—overpriced, overcredentialized, and underdelivering. Across continents, graduates face debt, underemployment, and despair, while universities chase rankings and revenue streams instead of justice and truth.

Toward a Post-Neoliberal Education

Reversing the College Meltdown requires more than reform; it demands a new philosophy. Public universities must reclaim their civic mission. Education must once again be understood as a human right, not a private investment. Debt forgiveness, reinvestment in teaching, and democratic governance are essential first steps.

Neoliberalism’s greatest illusion was that markets could produce wisdom. The College Meltdown proves the opposite: when education serves profit instead of people, it consumes itself from within.

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Sources:

• Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (2015)

• David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)

• Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed (2017)

• The Higher Education Inquirer archives on the U.S. College Meltdown

• BBC, “University staff strikes and student debt crisis,” 2024

• Caixin, “China’s youth unemployment and education anxiety,” 2023

Epstein, Dershowitz, Summers, and the Long Arc of Elite Impunity

For many observers, Jeffrey Epstein, Alan Dershowitz, and Larry Summers appear as separate figures orbiting the world of elite academia, finance, and politics. But together—and through the long lens of history—they represent something far more revealing: the modern expression of a centuries-old system in which elite institutions protect powerful men while sacrificing the vulnerable.

The Epstein-Dershowitz-Summers triangle is not a scandal of individuals gone astray. It is the predictable result of structures that make such abuses almost inevitable.

The Modern Version of an Old System

Jeffrey Epstein built his influence not through scholarship or scientific discovery—he had no advanced degrees—but by inserting himself into the financial bloodstream of the Ivy League. Harvard and MIT accepted his money, his introductions, and his promises of access to ultra-wealthy networks. Epstein did not need credibility; he purchased it.

Larry Summers, as president of Harvard from 2001 to 2006, continued to engage with Epstein after the financier’s first arrest and plea deal. Summers’ administration accepted substantial Epstein donations, including funds channeled into the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Summers and his wife dined at Epstein’s Manhattan home. After leaving Harvard, Summers stayed in touch with Epstein even as the financier’s abuses became increasingly public. Summers used the same revolving door that has long connected elite universities, Wall Street, and presidential administrations—moving freely and comfortably across all three.

Alan Dershowitz, former Harvard Law Professor and Epstein’s close associate and legal strategist, exemplifies another pillar of this system: elite legal protection. Dershowitz defended Epstein vigorously, attacked survivors publicly, and remains embroiled in litigation connected to the case. Whether one believes Dershowitz’s claims of innocence is secondary to the structural fact: elite institutions reliably shield their own.

Together, Epstein offered money and connections; Summers offered institutional prestige and political access; Dershowitz offered legal insulation. Harvard, meanwhile, offered a platform through which all three profited.

Knowledge as a Shield—Not a Light

For centuries, elite universities have served as both engines of knowledge and fortresses of power. They are not neutral institutions.

They defended slavery and eugenics, supplying “scientific” justification for racial hierarchies.
They exploited labor—from enslaved workers who built campuses to adjuncts living in poverty today.
They marginalized survivors of sexual violence while protecting benefactors and faculty.
They accepted fortunes derived from war profiteering, colonial extraction, hedge-fund predation, and private-equity devastation.

Epstein did not invent the model of the toxic patron. He merely perfected it in the neoliberal era.

A Four-Step Pattern of Elite Impunity

The scandal surrounding Epstein, Dershowitz, and Summers follows a trajectory that dates back centuries:

1. Wealth accumulation through exploitation
   From slave plantations to private equity, concentrated wealth is generated through systems that harm the many to benefit the few.

2. The purchase of academic legitimacy
   Endowed chairs, laboratories, fellowships, and advisory roles allow dubious benefactors to launder reputations through universities.

3. Legal and cultural shielding
   Elite lawyers, confidential settlements, non-disclosure agreements, and institutional silence create protective armor.

4. Silencing of survivors and critics
   Reputational attacks, threats of litigation, and internal pressure discourage transparency and accountability.

Epstein operated within this system. Dershowitz defended it. Summers benefited from it. Harvard reinforced it.

Larry Summers: An Anatomy of Power

Summers’ career illuminates the deeper structure behind the scandal. His trajectory—Harvard president, U.S. Treasury Secretary, World Bank chief economist, adviser to hedge funds, consultant to Big Tech—mirrors the seamless circulation of elite power between universities, finance, and government.

During his presidency, Harvard publicly embraced Epstein’s donations. After Epstein’s first sex-offense conviction, Summers continued to meet with him socially and professionally. Summers leveraged networks that Epstein also sought to cultivate. And even after the Epstein scandal fully broke open, Summers faced no meaningful institutional repercussions.

The message was clear: individual wrongdoing matters less than maintaining elite continuity.

Higher Education’s Structural Complicity

Elite universities were not “duped.” They were beneficiaries.

Harvard returned only a fraction of Epstein’s donations, and only after the press exposed the relationship. MIT hid Epstein’s gifts behind false donor names. Faculty traveled to his island and penthouse without demanding transparency.

Meanwhile:

Adjuncts qualify for food assistance
Students carry life-crippling debt
Administrators earn CEO-level pay
Donors dictate priorities behind closed doors

This is not hypocrisy—it is hierarchy. A system built to serve wealth does exactly that.

A Timeline Much Longer Than Epstein

To understand the present, we must zoom out:

Oxford and Cambridge accepted slave-trade wealth as institutional lifeblood.
Gilded Age robber barons endowed libraries while crushing labor movements.
Cold War intelligence agencies quietly funded research centers.
Today’s oligarchs, tech billionaires, and private-equity titans buy influence through endowments and think tanks.

The tools change. The pattern does not.

Universities help legitimate the powerful—even when those powerful figures harm the public.

Why This Still Matters

The Epstein scandal is not resolved. Court documents continue to emerge. Survivors continue to speak. Elite institutions continue to stall and deflect. Harvard still resists meaningful transparency, even as its endowment approaches national GDP levels.

The danger is not simply that another Epstein will emerge. It is that elite universities will continue to provide the conditions that make another Epstein inevitable.

What Breaking the Pattern Requires

Ending this system demands more than symbolic gestures or public-relations apologies. Real reform requires:

Radical donor transparency—with all gifts, advisory roles, and meetings disclosed
Worker and student representation on governing boards
Strong whistleblower protections and the abolition of secret NDAs
Robust public funding to reduce reliance on elite philanthropy
Independent journalism committed to exposing institutional power

Ida B. Wells, Jessica Mitford, Upton Sinclair, and other muckrakers understood what universities still deny: scandals are symptoms. The disease is structural.

Epstein was not an anomaly.
Dershowitz is not an anomaly.
Summers is not an anomaly.

They are products of a system in which universities serve power first—and truth, only if convenient.

If higher education wants to reclaim public trust, it must finally decide which side of history it is on.

Generation Z and the Fractured American Dream: Class Divide, Debt, and the Search for a Future

For Generation Z, the old story of social mobility—study hard, go to college, work your way up—has lost its certainty. The class divide that once seemed bridgeable through education now feels entrenched, as debt, precarious work, and economic volatility blur the promise of progress.

The new economy—dominated by artificial intelligence, speculative assets like cryptocurrency, and inflated housing markets—has not delivered stability for most. Instead, it’s widened gaps between those who own and those who owe. Many young Americans feel locked out of wealth-building entirely. Some have turned to riskier bets—digital assets, gig work, or start-ups powered by AI tools—to chase opportunities that traditional institutions no longer provide. Others have succumbed to despair. Suicide rates among young adults have climbed sharply in recent years, correlating with financial stress, debt, and social isolation.

And echoing through this uncertain landscape is a song that first rose from the coalfields of Kentucky during the Great Depression—Florence Reece’s 1931 protest hymn, “Which Side Are You On?”

Come all you good workers,
Good news to you I’ll tell,
Of how the good old union
Has come in here to dwell.

Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

Nearly a century later, those verses feel newly urgent—because Gen Z is again being forced to pick a side: between solidarity and survival, between reforming a broken system or resigning themselves to it.

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The Class Divide and the Broken Ladder
Despite record levels of education, Gen Z faces limited social mobility. College remains a class marker, not an equalizer. Students from affluent families attend better-funded universities, graduate on time, and often receive help with housing or job placement. Working-class and first-generation students, meanwhile, navigate under-resourced campuses, heavier debt, and weaker professional networks.

The Pew Research Center found that first-generation college graduates have nearly $100,000 less in median wealth than peers whose parents also hold degrees. For many, the degree no longer guarantees a secure foothold in the middle class—it simply delays financial independence.

They say in Harlan County,
There are no neutrals there,
You’ll either be a union man,
Or a thug for J. H. Blair.

The metaphor still fits: there are no neutrals in the modern class struggle over debt, housing, and automation.

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Debt, Doubt, and the New Normal
Gen Z borrowers owe an average of around $23,000 in student loans, a figure growing faster than any other generation’s debt load. Over half regret taking on those loans. Many delay buying homes, having children, or even seeking medical care. Those who drop out without degrees are burdened with debt and little to show for it.

The debt-based model has become a defining feature of American life—especially for the working class. The price of entry to a better future is borrowing against one’s own.

Don’t scab for the bosses,
Don’t listen to their lies,
Us poor folks haven’t got a chance
Unless we organize.

If Reece’s song once called miners to unionize against coal barons, its spirit now calls borrowers, renters, adjuncts, and gig workers to collective resistance against financial systems that profit from their precarity.

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AI and the Erosion of Work
Artificial intelligence promises efficiency, but it also threatens to hollow out the entry-level job market Gen Z depends on. Automation in journalism, design, law, and customer service cuts off rungs of the career ladder just as young workers reach for them.

While elite graduates may move into roles that supervise or profit from AI, working-class Gen Zers are more likely to face displacement. AI amplifies the class divide: it rewards those who already have capital, coding skills, or connections—and sidelines those who don’t.

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Crypto Dreams and Financial Desperation
Locked out of traditional wealth paths, many young people turned to cryptocurrency during the pandemic. Platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase promised quick gains and independence from the “rigged” economy. But when crypto markets crashed in 2022, billions in speculative wealth evaporated. Some who had borrowed or used student loan refunds to invest lost everything.

Online forums chronicled not only the financial losses but also the psychological fallout—stories of panic, shame, and in some tragic cases, suicide. The new “digital gold rush” became another mechanism for transferring wealth upward.

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The Real Estate Wall
While digital markets rise and fall, real estate remains the ultimate symbol of exclusion. Home prices have climbed over 40 percent since 2020, while mortgage rates hover near 8 percent. For most of Gen Z, ownership is out of reach.

Older generations built equity through housing; Gen Z rents indefinitely, enriching landlords and institutional investors. Without intergenerational help, the “starter home” has become a myth. In America’s new class order, those who inherit property inherit mobility.

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Despair and the Silent Crisis
Behind the data lies a mental health emergency. The CDC reports that suicide among Americans aged 10–24 has risen nearly 60 percent in the past decade. Economic precarity, debt, housing insecurity, and climate anxiety all contribute.

Therapists describe “financial trauma” as a defining condition for Gen Z—chronic anxiety rooted in systemic instability. Universities respond with mindfulness workshops, but few confront the deeper issue: a society that privatized risk and monetized hope.

They say in Harlan County,
There are no neutrals there—
Which side are you on, my people,
Which side are you on?

The question lingers like a challenge to policymakers, educators, and investors alike.

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A Two-Tier Future
Today’s economy is splitting into two distinct realities:

• The secure class, buffered by family wealth, education, AI-driven income, and real estate assets.

• The precarious class, burdened by loans, high rents, unstable work, and psychological strain.

The supposed democratization of opportunity through technology and education has in practice entrenched a new feudalism—one coded in algorithms and contracts instead of coal and steel.

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Repairing the System, Not the Student
For Generation Z, the American Dream has become a high-interest loan. Education, technology, and financial innovation—once tools of liberation—now function as instruments of control.

Reforming higher education is necessary, but not sufficient. The deeper work lies in redistributing power: capping predatory interest rates, investing in affordable housing, curbing speculative bubbles, ensuring that AI’s gains benefit labor as well as capital, and confronting the mental health crisis that shadows all of it.

Florence Reece’s song endures because its question has never been answered—only updated. As Gen Z stands at the intersection of debt and digital capitalism, that question rings louder than ever:

Which side are you on?

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Sources

• Florence Reece, “Which Side Are You On?” (1931).

• Pew Research Center, “First-Generation College Graduates Lag Behind Their Peers on Key Economic Outcomes,” 2021.

• Dēmos, The Debt Divide: How Student Debt Impacts Opportunities for Black and White Borrowers, 2016.

• EducationData.org, “Student Loan Debt by Generation,” 2024.

• Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Gen Z Student Debt and Wealth Data Brief, 2022.

• CNBC, “Gen Z vs. Their Parents: How the Generations Stack Up Financially,” 2024.

• WUSF, “Generation Z’s Net Worth Is Being Undercut by College Debt,” 2024.

• Newsweek, “Student Loan Update: Gen Z Hit with Highest Payments,” 2024.

• The Kaplan Group, “How Student Debt Is Locking Millennials and Gen Z Out of Homeownership,” 2024.

• CDC, Suicide Mortality in the United States, 2001–2022, National Center for Health Statistics, 2023.

• Brookings Institution, “The Impact of AI on Labor Markets: Inequality and Automation,” 2024.

• CNBC, “Crypto Crash Wipes Out Billions in Investor Wealth, Gen Z Most Exposed,” 2023.

• Zillow, “U.S. Housing Affordability Reaches Lowest Point Since 1989,” 2024.

Muckraking and the Modern University

From the Gilded Age to the digital era, muckraking has served as a check on concentrated power. It has exposed exploitation in factories, corruption in government, racial terror, and corporate deceit. Today, that same spirit is urgently needed in higher education—an industry that has become both immensely wealthy and profoundly unequal.

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Ida B. Wells and the Moral Foundation of Muckraking (1890s)

Modern investigative reporting begins with Ida B. Wells, who in the late 19th century documented the horrors of lynching and the complicity of institutions in perpetuating racial terror. In Southern Horrors (1892) and The Red Record (1895), Wells used data, testimony, and moral clarity to challenge both white supremacy and institutional silence.

Her courage established muckraking not just as journalism but as moral resistance—a template for confronting systemic injustice, whether in government, business, or education.

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Thorstein Veblen and the Rise of the Business University (1918)

By the early 20th century, universities themselves had become powerful institutions. Thorstein Veblen, in The Higher Learning in America (1918), described how trustees, presidents, and donors increasingly treated scholarship as a commodity. The pursuit of truth was subordinated to the pursuit of prestige and profit. Veblen’s critique presaged the administrative bloat, branding culture, and market-driven priorities now standard in higher education.

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Upton Sinclair and The Goosestep (1923)

Upton Sinclair, in The Goosestep: A Study of American Education (1923), argued that elite universities were “factories for the ruling class.” Trustees dictated policy, suppressed dissenting faculty, and produced graduates conditioned to serve wealth and power. Sinclair’s critique resonates a century later, as universities remain highly responsive to donors and financial interests rather than the public good.

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Jessica Mitford and Corporate Exploitation (1960s)

Jessica Mitford, best known for The American Way of Death (1963), brought investigative rigor to industries that relied on secrecy, public trust, and consumer inattention. Her work exposed how profit motives could exploit vulnerability and regulatory gaps. Mitford’s methodology—meticulous documentation, ethical outrage, and clear writing—provides a model for exposing modern higher education practices that prioritize revenue over students’ welfare.

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Digital Muckraking: OPMs and 2U (21st Century)

In the 21st century, online program managers (OPMs) like 2U, Inc. have commercialized education in new ways. Chip Paucek, co-founder and longtime CEO of 2U, built partnerships with elite universities offering certificates and degrees that were sometimes of questionable value, while profiting from revenue-sharing agreements.

When independent journalists examined these arrangements and their implications for students and adjunct labor, they sometimes faced threats of litigation. The ongoing Paucek v. Shaulis case (filed 2024, and still pending) illustrates the modern challenge: exposing systemic issues in higher education can trigger lawsuits designed to intimidate or silence critics.

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The Chilling Effect of Legal Retaliation

Even unfounded lawsuits can suppress critical reporting. Independent journalists, adjuncts, and whistleblowers often lack the resources to defend themselves against legal pressure. This modern form of censorship echoes the intimidation faced by Wells, Sinclair, and Mitford in their respective eras.

Higher education, increasingly operated like a business, has become vulnerable to this kind of silencing. Public interest and accountability require journalists who are willing to persist despite the risks.

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The Enduring Importance of Muckraking

From Wells’ moral courage, to Veblen’s economic critique, Sinclair’s exposé of elite conformity, and Mitford’s corporate investigations, muckrakers have shaped public understanding and accountability. Today, independent journalism is one of the few mechanisms capable of exposing predatory practices, financial manipulation, and labor exploitation in higher education.

As Wells wrote, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” That light has always been costly—but without it, universities risk becoming oligarchies rather than public institutions.

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Reclaiming the Public Good (If That's Possible) 

Muckraking is civic duty. It insists that higher education be judged not by prestige or endowment size, but by service to students and society. Independent journalists must continue the Wells–Veblen–Sinclair–Mitford tradition, confronting power, exposing exploitation, and demanding accountability.

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Sources

• Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors (1892); The Red Record (1895)

• Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (1918)

• Upton Sinclair, The Goosestep: A Study of American Education (1923)

• Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (1963)

• Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid (2006)

• Elisabeth Rosenthal, An American Sickness (2017)

• Higher Education Inquirer archives, 2014–2025

• Paucek v. Shaulis (filed October 2024, pending 2025)