Artificial Intelligence, Mass Surveillance, and the Quiet Reengineering of Higher Education

The Higher Education Inquirer has approached artificial intelligence not as a speculative future but as a present reality already reshaping higher education. Long before university leaders and consultants embraced Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an abstract promise, HEI was using these tools directly while documenting how they were being embedded into academic institutions. What has become increasingly clear is that AI is not merely an educational technology. It is a structural force accelerating corporatization, automation, and mass surveillance within higher education.

Artificial intelligence enters the university through the language of efficiency and personalization. Administrators speak of innovation, student success, and institutional competitiveness. Yet beneath this language lies a deeper transformation. Teaching, advising, grading, counseling, and evaluation are increasingly reduced to measurable functions rather than human relationships. Once learning is fragmented into functions, it becomes easily automated, monitored, outsourced, and scaled.

This shift has long been visible in for-profit and online institutions, where scripted instruction, learning management systems, predictive analytics, and automated advising have replaced meaningful faculty engagement. What is new is that nonprofit and elite universities are now adopting similar systems, enhanced by powerful AI tools and vast data collection infrastructures. The result is the emergence of the robocollege, an institution optimized for credential production, labor reduction, and data extraction rather than intellectual growth.

Students are told that AI-driven education will prepare them for the future economy. In reality, many are being trained for an economy defined by automation, precarity, and diminished human agency. Rather than empowering students to challenge technological power, institutions increasingly socialize them to adapt to it. Compliance, constant assessment, and algorithmic feedback replace intellectual risk-taking and critical inquiry.

These developments reinforce and intensify inequality. Working-class students, student loan debtors, and marginalized populations are disproportionately enrolled in institutions where AI-mediated education and automated oversight are most aggressively deployed. Meanwhile, elite students continue to receive human mentorship, small seminars, and insulation from constant monitoring. Artificial intelligence thus deepens a two-tier system of higher education, one human and one surveilled.

Mass surveillance is no longer peripheral to higher education. It is central to how AI operates on campus. Predictive analytics flag students as “at risk” before they fail, often without transparency or consent. Proctoring software monitors faces, eye movements, living spaces, and biometric data. Engagement dashboards track clicks, keystrokes, time spent on screens, and behavioral patterns. These systems claim to support learning while normalizing constant observation.

Students are increasingly treated as data subjects rather than citizens in a learning community. Faculty are pressured to comply with opaque systems they did not design and cannot audit. The data harvested through these platforms flows upward to administrators, vendors, private equity-backed education companies, and, in some cases, government and security-linked entities. Higher education becomes a testing ground for surveillance technologies later deployed across workplaces and society at large.

At the top of the academic hierarchy, a small group of elite universities dominates global AI research. These institutions maintain close relationships with Big Tech firms, defense contractors, and venture capital interests. They shape not only innovation but ideology, presenting AI development as inevitable and benevolent while supplying talent and legitimacy to systems of automation, surveillance, and control. Ethics initiatives and AI principles proliferate even as accountability remains elusive.

Cultural warnings about technological obsolescence no longer feel theoretical. Faculty are told to adapt or be replaced by automated systems. Students are told to compete with algorithms while being monitored by them. Administrators frame automation and surveillance as unavoidable. What is absent from these conversations is moral courage. Higher education rarely asks whether it should participate in building systems that render human judgment, privacy, and dignity increasingly expendable.

Artificial intelligence does not have to dehumanize higher education, but resisting that outcome requires choices institutions have largely avoided. It requires valuing human labor over scalability, privacy over control, and education as a public good rather than a data pipeline. It requires democratic governance instead of technocratic management and surveillance by default.

For years, the Higher Education Inquirer has examined artificial intelligence not as a neutral tool or a distant threat, but as a technology shaped by power, profit, and institutional priorities. The future of higher education is not being determined by machines alone. It is being determined by decisions made by university leaders, technology firms, and policymakers who choose surveillance and efficiency over humanity.

The question is no longer whether AI will reshape higher education.
The question is whether higher education will resist becoming a fully surveilled system that trains students to accept a monitored, automated, and diminished future.

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Sources

Higher Education Inquirer, Robocolleges, Artificial Intelligence, and the Dehumanization of Higher Education

Higher Education Inquirer, AI-Robot Capitalists Will Destroy the Human Economy (Randall Collins)

Higher Education Inquirer, University of Phoenix: Training Folks for Robowork

Higher Education Inquirer, “The Obsolete Man”: A Twilight Zone Warning for the Trump Era and the Age of AI

Higher Education Inquirer, Stanford, Princeton, and MIT Among Top U.S. Universities Driving Global AI Research (Studocu)

Higher Education Inquirer, Tech Titans, Ideologues, and the Future of American Higher Education — 2026 Update

Higher Education Without Illusions

In 2025, the landscape of higher education is dominated by contradictions, crises, and the relentless churn of what might be called “collegemania.” Underneath the polished veneer of university marketing—the glossy brochures, viral TikToks, and celebrity endorsements—lurks a network of systemic pressures that students, faculty, and society at large must navigate. The hashtags trending below the masthead of Higher Education Without Illusions capture the full spectrum of these pressures: #accountability, #adjunct, #AI, #AImeltdown, #algo, #alienation, #anomie, #anxiety, #austerity, #BDR, #bot, #boycott, #BRICS, #climate, #collegemania, #collegemeltdown, #crypto, #divest, #doomloop, #edugrift, #enshittification, #FAFSA, #greed, #incel, #jobless, #kleptocracy, #medugrift, #moralcapital, #nokings, #nonviolence, #PSLF, #QOL, #rehumanization, #resistance, #robocollege, #robostudent, #roboworker, #solidarity, #strikedebt, #surveillance, #temperance, #TPUSA, #transparency, #Trump, #veritas.

Taken together, these words map the terrain of higher education as it exists today: a fragile ecosystem strained by debt, automation, political polarization, and climate urgency. Students are increasingly treated as commodities (#robostudent, #strikedebt), faculty are underpaid and precarious (#adjunct, #medugrift), and universities themselves are subjected to the whims of markets and algorithms (#algo, #AImeltdown, #robocollege).

Financial pressures are unrelenting. The FAFSA system, once intended as a bridge to opportunity, now functions as a tool of surveillance and debt management (#FAFSA, #BDR). Public service loan forgiveness (#PSLF) continues to be delayed or denied, leaving graduates to navigate the twin anxieties of indebtedness and joblessness (#jobless, #doomloop). Meanwhile, austerity measures squeeze institutional budgets, often at the expense of research, mental health support, and academic freedom (#austerity, #anomie, #anxiety).

Automation and artificial intelligence are now central to the higher education ecosystem. AI grading tools, predictive enrollment algorithms, and administrative bots promise efficiency but often produce alienation and ethical dilemmas (#AI, #AImeltdown, #roboworker, #bot). In this context, “robocollege” is not a metaphor but a lived reality for many students navigating hyper-digitized classrooms where human mentorship is increasingly rare.

Political and cultural currents further complicate the picture. From the influence of conservative campus organizations (#TPUSA, #Trump) to global shifts in power (#BRICS), universities are battlegrounds for ideological and material stakes. Moral capital—the credibility and legitimacy of an institution—is increasingly intertwined with corporate sponsorships, divestment movements, and climate commitments (#moralcapital, #divest, #climate). At the same time, greed and kleptocracy (#greed, #kleptocracy) permeate administration and policy decisions, eroding trust in higher education’s social mission.

Yet amid this bleakness, there are threads of resistance and rehumanization. Student debt strikes, faculty solidarity networks, and advocacy for transparency (#strikedebt, #solidarity, #transparency, #rehumanization) reveal a persistent desire to reclaim the university as a space of collective flourishing rather than pure financial extraction. Nonviolence (#nonviolence), temperance (#temperance), and boycotts (#boycott) reflect strategic, principled responses to systemic crises, even as anxiety and alienation persist.

Ultimately, higher education without illusions demands that we confront both the structural and human dimensions of its crises. Universities are not just engines of credentialing and profit—they are social institutions embedded in broader networks of power, ideology, and technology. A recognition of #veritas and #QOL (quality of life) alongside the demands of #collegemania and #enshittification is essential for any hope of reform.

The hashtags are more than social media markers—they are diagnostics. They chart a system in flux, exposing the frictions between automation and humanity, austerity and access, greed and moral responsibility. They call on all of us—students, educators, policymakers, and citizens—to act with accountability, solidarity, and courage.

Higher education without illusions is not pessimism; it is clarity. Only by naming the pressures and contradictions can we begin to imagine institutions that serve human flourishing rather than perpetuate cycles of debt, alienation, and social inequality.

Sources & Further Reading:

• An American Sickness, Elisabeth Rosenthal

• Medical Apartheid, Harriet Washington

• Body and Soul, Alondra Nelson

• HEI coverage of student debt, adjunct labor, and AI in higher education

The Meritocratic Mask Is Crumbling (Glen McGhee)

“The Merit Ladder”

You unlock the door to a university, and the corridor stretches infinitely upward. Every student walks the same stairwell, one step at a time. The walls are adorned with clocks, calculators, and grade sheets, ticking and tallying as if the universe itself measured effort with perfect fairness.

But something is wrong. Some students float effortlessly upward, their steps silent, their progress smooth. Others stumble on invisible obstacles, their feet dragging in ways the rules do not explain. They glance at the walls, at the clocks, at the calculators—every metric insists they are equal, every announcement proclaims fairness. Yet the disparity is undeniable.

A voice echoes from the ceiling, calm, clinical: “Merit is universal. Merit is measurable. Merit is scale-invariant.” The students nod, forced to believe, even as they watch their neighbors leap ahead. Some students whisper, “It’s not the merit—it’s the ladder.” And indeed, the ladder is uneven, its rungs hidden, shifted by invisible hands of wealth, culture, geography, and health.

In this world—the stairwell of American higher education—the illusion of fairness is maintained with meticulous care. But every so often, a student notices the truth, and then the voice falters, the clocks pause, and the corridors ripple with the secret that can no longer be hidden. For the myth of meritocracy is collapsing. The ladder was never fair, and now, as the illusion fades, everyone will see it.

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The Scale-Invariance Claim

For more than a century, American higher education has rested on an elegant but unspoken assumption: that the rules of meritocracy are scale-invariant. The ideology promises that any student—regardless of wealth, geography, culture, family background, or health—can climb the credential ladder. A student from a low-income rural household competes on the same metric as a student from an affluent suburb. A community college student is measured by the same ruler as an Ivy League undergraduate. Merit, the story goes, is constant across all scales.

This is the deep mathematical promise embedded in the system:
(X, merit) ≅ (X, λ·merit) for all λ > 0.
Change the scale—money, social capital, proximity, cultural background—and the metric of “merit” supposedly remains unchanged. Hard work is invariant. Ability is invariant. The measurement of learning is invariant.

But no part of this has ever been true. To understand the experience, one could step into Kafka’s The Trial, where invisible, arbitrary rules govern the fates of all, or into the unsettling dimensions of The Twilight Zone, where a carefully maintained illusion of fairness masks structural control. Episodes like “The Obsolete Man” or “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” illustrate societies where uniform rules are proclaimed but inequities are baked into every interaction—a perfect mirror for the fiction of meritocracy.

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The Characteristic Scales American Higher Ed Pretends Not to Have

Every foundational element of U.S. higher education has a characteristic scale. Once these scales are made visible, the meritocratic myth dissolves.

Financial scale.
With little money, a student cannot attend or persist. With substantial wealth, barriers disappear. Financial rescaling completely changes outcomes.

Social capital scale.
A family with generations of college experience confers knowledge, networks, and expectations that directly affect admissions, persistence, and post-graduation trajectories. First-generation students navigate blind. The system is not invariant under social capital rescaling.

Geographic scale.
Proximity to selective universities, high-performing high schools, or robust community college systems radically alters opportunity. Rural and small-town America operates at a completely different scale.

Cultural and linguistic scale.
Students whose home culture mirrors academic expectations “fit.” Students from culturally distant communities must perform costly translation work. This is not a scale-invariant environment.

Health and disability scale.
Students without health barriers move cleanly through the system. Students with disabilities or chronic illness face friction at every stage. Their outcomes follow a different curve.

A genuinely scale-invariant system would show consistent outcomes across all these starting positions. American higher education shows the opposite. The system has always been scale-dependent—and merit was never the dominant term.

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The Measurement Problem the Meritocracy Never Solved

The ideological foundation requires not only a scale-invariant world but a scale-invariant measurement system. GPA, grades, test scores, papers, and degrees must reliably track some underlying construct called “merit” or “learning.”

Higher education never developed such a construct. “Learning” is not stable across institutions or contexts. It is socially constructed daily by instructors with different philosophies, different constraints, and different biases. There is no psychometric framework that defines a scale-invariant measure of learning. The closest attempts—standardized testing regimes—have repeatedly collapsed under their own inequities.

Yet the system pretends that a 3.8 at an Ivy and a 3.2 at a regional university reflect a universal metric rather than two entirely different grading cultures.

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Grade Inflation and AI Cheating: The Mask Slips

Recent trends expose how fragile the entire measurement fiction has become.

Elite universities give A grades at unprecedented rates. Two-thirds of all grades at some institutions are now A’s. GPA averages well above 3.7 are defended as “signs of excellence,” but in practice they are rescalings of the ruler itself. Institutions under competitive prestige pressure simply adjust the metric to protect their reputation.

AI cheating accelerates the collapse. Students with resources buy tutoring, editing, and AI-powered writing tools. These tools outperform human novices. The ability to “perform merit” is now directly purchasable. The metric no longer measures writing ability or analytical thinking. It measures access to technology, coaching, and time.

The function of grades has shifted from signaling ability to signaling socioeconomic positioning. What was once ρ(ability) is now ρ(ability + money), with wealth as the dominant term.

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Literary and Cultural Parallels

This collapse is eerily familiar in literature and media. Kafka’s The Trial captures the experience of navigating opaque rules that punish effort unpredictably. Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 show societies that insist on fairness while structurally enforcing inequality. Ellison’s Invisible Man exposes the consequences of climbing a ladder rigged by invisible scales.

The Twilight Zone dramatized these dynamics for mass audiences. Episodes such as “The Obsolete Man”, “Number 12 Looks Just Like You”, and “The Shelter” depict societies where declared rules are universal, yet outcomes are determined by hidden advantages. These narratives echo the experience of students forced to believe in meritocracy even while the structural scales—wealth, family education, geography, culture, health—determine success.

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What “Never Was Meritocratic” Actually Means

When HEI reports that American higher education never was meritocratic, it is not a moral accusation. It is an empirical one. The system was constructed with characteristic scales baked in. Wealth, social capital, proximity, culture, and health have always determined trajectories.

The ideology of merit obscured those scales by promising invariance where none existed. The promise served to justify gatekeeping, tuition inflation, credential inflation, and systematic exclusion. Legacy admissions, donor influence, geographic disparities, and familial educational background were not aberrations—they were structural pillars.

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The Collapse of the Meritocratic Narrative

The contemporary system is unraveling because the myth of scale-invariance—its core ideological justification—has been exposed as untenable.

Grade inflation reveals that institutions adjust the metric to preserve prestige.
AI reveals that performance can be outsourced or purchased.
Credential inflation reveals that degrees are required because employers have no alternative signal—not because the degrees measure anything.
Homeschooling and private micro-schools reflect widespread disbelief in the system’s ability to measure learning.
Employer skepticism shows that the labor market no longer trusts the bachelor’s degree as a signal.

Once the legitimacy of the metric collapses, the legitimacy of the entire structure collapses with it.

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The Devastating Implication: A System Built on a Mathematical Fiction

A truly scale-invariant system would show no significant correlation between wealth and degree attainment, no legacy effects, no geographic disparities, and no demographic patterning. The opposite is true in every dimension.

This system is not failing to fulfill its meritocratic promise. It never could fulfill it. It was designed for scale-dependence and shielded by the promise of scale-invariance.

Now that the mask is slipping, the $80,000 price tags, the exclusionary admissions processes, the credential inflation, and the crushing student debt load are losing their ideological justification. Without the fiction that merit is meaningfully and consistently measured, the system’s rationale dissolves.

The crisis of American higher education is not primarily a financial crisis or a demographic crisis. It is a legitimacy crisis. The foundational myth—meritocracy as scale-invariance—has collapsed. And with it, the justification for the entire credentialing apparatus is beginning to collapse as well.

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Sources
Higher Education Inquirer archives on grade inflation, admissions inequities, and credential inflation.
John Beach’s work on the social construction of “learning.”
HEI reporting on AI cheating, K-12 system collapse, employer distrust, and the shifting meaning of academic credentials.
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
George Orwell, 1984
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Twilight Zone episodes: “The Obsolete Man,” “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” “The Shelter”

Financial Logic and the Limits of Educational Governance: David R. Barker and the Marketization of Postsecondary Policy (Glen McGhee)

 “Barker’s background does not prepare him to navigate this tension. It predisposes him to resolve it in favor of the market—and to treat the casualties as acceptable losses.”

Dr. David R. Barker is an economist, wealthy real estate investor, and long-time Iowa Republican activist who currently serves as Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education under President Donald Trump. A sixth-generation Iowan and former member of the Iowa Board of Regents, Barker previously worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, taught economics and real estate at the University of Iowa and the University of Chicago, and now runs a real estate and finance firm that owns thousands of apartments and commercial properties across the Midwest.

In 2025, Barker was nominated and confirmed to oversee federal postsecondary policy, with a portfolio focused on “outcomes and accountability,” accreditation reform, student aid policy, and aligning federal grants with the administration’s ideological and fiscal priorities. His academic background—most notably his 1991 dissertation, Real Estate, Real Estate Investment Trust, and Closed End Fund Valuation—reveals a conceptual toolkit grounded in financial economics, asset valuation, property markets, and quantitative modeling. That training, reinforced by decades as a real estate investor and governance actor, shapes a distinctively market-oriented understanding of higher education—one that privileges measurable returns, financial discipline, and transactional accountability.

While these perspectives can contribute to cost control and fiscal stewardship, they also generate predictable and consequential blind spots when applied to institutions whose core purposes are epistemic, developmental, and democratic rather than market-optimizing.

Barker’s intellectual formation rests firmly within a positivist epistemological framework that treats value as something discoverable through quantification, comparability, and replicability. Real estate valuation depends on observable data—comparable sales, capitalization rates, discounted cash flows—to arrive at ostensibly objective measures of worth. Higher education, by contrast, encompasses vast domains of inquiry that resist quantification. The humanities and interpretive social sciences generate knowledge through close reading, archival reconstruction, ethnography, phenomenology, and critical theory—methods that foreground context, reflexivity, and meaning rather than numerical outputs.

An institutional ethnographer, for example, does not aim to optimize organizational efficiency but to understand how power, texts, and routines structure everyday academic life, often from the standpoint of marginalized actors. Such work deliberately rejects managerial abstraction in favor of situated understanding. From an asset-valuation perspective, this kind of scholarship appears unproductive, inefficient, or indulgent. Barker’s training offers little conceptual grounding for why a historian’s decade-long archival project on subaltern voices or a philosopher’s engagement with moral reasoning might be intrinsically valuable despite producing no immediate marketable deliverables.

This epistemological mismatch extends directly into student learning. Decades of higher education research conceptualize college as a developmental process encompassing cognitive complexity, identity formation, ethical reasoning, and critical consciousness. Theories such as Chickering’s vectors of identity development, Perry’s scheme of intellectual and ethical growth, and transformative learning theory emphasize qualitative shifts in how students interpret the world and their place within it.

Barker’s emphasis on return on investment and labor-market outcomes aligns instead with a human capital model that treats education as an economic input yielding wage premiums. This transactional framework struggles to accommodate the intrinsic, non-instrumental aims of liberal education—the cultivation of judgment, curiosity, civic responsibility, and reflective self-understanding. When learning is operationalized primarily through employment metrics, the deeper question of how students think, reason, and deliberate disappears from view.

Nowhere is the mismatch more consequential than in faculty governance and academic freedom. American higher education rests on shared governance, articulated in the AAUP’s 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, which recognizes faculty as the primary stewards of curriculum, academic standards, and knowledge production.

Barker’s professional background emphasizes hierarchical authority, executive control, and fiduciary accountability—an orientation that mirrors corporate governance rather than collegial self-rule. His rhetoric echoes the managerial logic of the Jarratt Report era, which reimagined universities as corporate enterprises with academic units treated as cost centers. Barker has publicly described “battling a liberal university establishment,” mapping faculty political affiliations through voter registration data, closing departments, and curbing what he calls “indoctrination sessions.” These remarks reveal a view of faculty not as epistemic authorities but as politically suspect employees requiring surveillance and correction.

Applying asset-management logic to academic departments—judging their worth by enrollment figures or ideological balance rather than disciplinary contribution—misunderstands the distributed authority and intellectual autonomy on which academic quality depends.

Equally alien to financial logic are the tacit and relational dimensions of learning. Liberal education unfolds through mentorship, dialogue, sustained engagement with complexity, and the slow formation of intellectual dispositions. Its most profound effects often emerge years after graduation and cannot be pre-specified as metrics. Barker’s preference for standardizable outcomes and compliance-based accountability—reinforced by the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence—privileges what can be measured over what can be meaningfully understood.

The consequences are especially severe for community colleges and HBCUs. These institutions serve disproportionate numbers of low-income, first-generation, and historically marginalized students. Research consistently shows that equity gaps reflect structural inequalities in K–12 education, funding, and social stratification, not institutional inefficiency or lack of merit. Market-efficiency frameworks misread these realities, interpreting low completion rates as failure rather than as evidence of unmet structural obligations.

Saint Augustine’s University captured this tension in its response to Barker regarding the Compact for Academic Excellence, noting that restrictions on race-conscious policies conflict directly with HBCUs’ statutory mission under Title III of the Higher Education Act. Institutions designed to expand access cannot be evaluated using the same market metrics as selective research universities.

Barker’s antipathy toward critical pedagogy further reveals the limits of his framework. Educational traditions rooted in Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Henry Giroux understand education as inherently political and aimed at developing critical consciousness and democratic agency. Barker’s efforts to eliminate diversity-related accreditation standards and suppress justice-oriented curricula position him in direct opposition to these traditions.

At stake are fundamentally different answers to the question of what education is for. Market logic prioritizes efficiency, credential exchange, and wage outcomes. Critical and liberal traditions prioritize human development, democratic participation, and knowledge for its own sake. Barker’s training provides no framework for adjudicating between these visions beyond market discipline.

The predictable consequences are already visible: epistemological narrowing, erosion of faculty autonomy, commodification of credentials, punitive accountability for equity-serving institutions, and deregulated accreditation that invites predatory actors. History shows that weakened oversight benefits for-profit extractive models, not students or the public good.

David R. Barker’s expertise equips him to manage balance sheets and assess asset performance. It does not equip him to steward institutions whose central purposes—knowledge creation, human development, and democratic citizenship—cannot be reduced to financial return. The conflict articulated by Saint Augustine’s University between equity mission and market mandate will define the next phase of federal postsecondary policy. Barker’s background does not prepare him to navigate that tension. It predisposes him to resolve it in favor of the market—and to treat the casualties as acceptable losses.

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Sources

American Association of University Professors. Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. 1966.

American Association of University Professors. 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, with 1970 Interpretive Comments.

Barker, David R. Real Estate, Real Estate Investment Trust, and Closed End Fund Valuation. Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1991.

Chickering, Arthur W., and Linda Reisser. Education and Identity. Second edition. Jossey-Bass, 1993.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 1970.

Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2014.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

Jarratt, Alex. Report of the Steering Committee for Efficiency Studies in Universities. Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, 1985.

Nelson, Cary. No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom. New York University Press, 2010.

Perry, William G. Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.

Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Trow, Martin. “Problems in the Transition from Elite to Mass Higher Education.” OECD conference paper, 1973.

U.S. Department of Education. Compact for Academic Excellence. Trump administration policy framework, 2025.

U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education. Accreditation and State Authorization Regulations. Federal rulemakings and guidance, various years.

Yosso, Tara J. “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth.” Race Ethnicity and Education, 2005.

Pete Hegseth, Authoritarian Drift, and the Shrinking Democratic World: What His Latest Rhetoric Means for Ukraine, Taiwan, Latin America—and for the Manufacturing of a New U.S. War

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s latest comments on US military strategy signal a willingness to concede strategic ground, democratic alignment, and even moral authority to China and Russia. His rhetoric is not isolationism so much as resignation, a public abdication of democratic commitments that authoritarians in Moscow and Beijing have been hoping to hear for years.

In Hegseth’s telling, defending democracy abroad is optional, alliances are burdens rather than assets, and the global contest between democratic and authoritarian systems is someone else’s problem. This shift, echoed by others within his political orbit, effectively clears a path for China and Russia to expand their influence unchecked. It is the kind of rhetorical retreat that changes geopolitical behavior long before any formal policy is announced.

For Ukraine, Hegseth’s posture is devastating. Ukraine is not only fighting for its own survival but also anchoring the principle that borders cannot be erased by force. Every time prominent American voices depict Ukraine as a “distraction” or a “European problem,” the Kremlin hears permission. It emboldens Russia’s belief that with enough pressure and enough delay, Western unity will fracture. When U.S. resolve appears uncertain, Russian aggression becomes more likely, not less.

The implications for Taiwan are even more dire. Taiwan’s security rests partly on deterrence—the sense in Beijing that an attempted invasion would trigger an unpredictable coalition response. Hegseth’s rhetoric eats away at that uncertainty. When influential figures suggest Taiwan is too distant, too complicated, or too costly to defend, they send a clear message to Beijing: Taiwan stands alone. That perception, even if strategic theater, is dangerous enough to destabilize the region. It emboldens Chinese hardliners who believe the U.S. is tired, divided, and ready to cede the Western Pacific. For Taiwanese citizens, the erosion of deterrence threatens to collapse the delicate equilibrium that has preserved their democracy for decades.

The damage is not confined to Eurasia. Latin America—long an arena of soft-power competition—is already shifting toward Chinese and Russian influence. As U.S. leaders telegraph indifference or geopolitical fatigue, Beijing and Moscow expand their economic, security, and technological footprint. Surveillance systems, infrastructure deals with opaque terms, paramilitary cooperation, and coordinated disinformation campaigns fill the vacuum Washington helped create. Countries grappling with inequality and political instability increasingly view China and Russia as stable partners—precisely because the United States appears to be backing away. Hegseth’s rhetoric accelerates this hemispheric reorientation.

China and Russia are also advancing what experts call a “4G war,” leveraging cyber operations to strike at critical infrastructure globally. Power grids, financial networks, transportation systems, and communication backbones are increasingly vulnerable to state-sponsored cyberattacks, which can be executed remotely, anonymously, and at strategic scale. These digital assaults amplify physical geopolitical pressure without conventional troop movements. In a world where the U.S. retreats rhetorically and hesitates militarily, authoritarian cyber campaigns gain a force-multiplying effect: they destabilize economies, undermine public confidence, and signal that authoritarian states can achieve strategic objectives without firing a single shot—while democracies debate whether to respond.

All of this unfolds alongside an unnerving domestic trend: the increasing normalization of deploying the U.S. military inside the United States for political and symbolic ends. The occupation of Washington, D.C., following periods of unrest—an unprecedented show of military force in the nation’s capital—has now become a reference point rather than an aberration. Calls for troops at the southern border have grown louder, more casual, and more openly political. The idea of using active-duty forces for immigration enforcement—long considered a violation of democratic norms—has seeped into mainstream discourse. These domestic deployments do not exist in isolation; they reflect a broader comfort with authoritarian tools at home, even as some political figures argue that defending democracy abroad is unnecessary. It is a worldview that diminishes democracy both outwardly and inwardly.

Compounding these geopolitical and domestic retreats is a disturbing pattern: the willingness of U.S. leaders to manufacture conflict abroad for political gain. In an era when corporate media outlets increasingly avoid stories that challenge concentrated power, The American Prospect continues to do the work journalism was meant to do. Few embody that mission more consistently than David Dayen. His Dayen on TAP newsletters have become essential reading for anyone trying to understand how political decisions intertwine with economic power and democratic fragility.

Dayen’s December 1st dispatch is a masterclass in clarity. While many newsrooms chase horse-race narratives and meme-ready outrage, Dayen focuses on something far more consequential: the construction of a new U.S. war. And disturbingly, it bears the unmistakable imprint of the media-manufactured Spanish-American War—false premises, theatrical moralizing, and elite financial interests waiting eagerly behind the curtain.

The justification being sold to the public is fentanyl trafficking, despite U.S. agencies confirming that fentanyl production in Venezuela is essentially nonexistent. The real audience is a narrow faction of right-wing Venezuelan exiles in South Florida whose political demands have long shaped Senator Marco Rubio’s foreign policy. With an administration drawn to action-based optics and largely unbothered by legality, the machinery of pretextual warfare is already in motion: lethal maritime strikes of dubious legality, deployed carrier groups, unilaterally “closed” airspace, covert operations greenlit, and the political runway being cleared for a possible land invasion.

Hovering over all of this is the unmistakable scent of patronage. The judicial approval of selling Citgo to Elliott Investment Management—Paul Singer’s hedge fund, tightly linked to Rubio’s political ecosystem—raises troubling questions about whose interests are truly being served. Dayen’s reporting suggests a war effort crafted not around national strategy, human rights, or hemispheric stability, but around satisfying a small, wealthy, politically potent constituency.

Yet perhaps the most troubling part of this moment is not only the drift toward authoritarian powers, the normalization of using the military inside the United States, or the manufacturing of new conflicts—but the near-total silence of American universities. Institutions that once prided themselves on fostering democratic discourse, civic literacy, and dissent now largely avoid discussions of foreign policy—particularly when such discussions might anger donors, trustees, or state legislatures. Faculty navigate precarious employment. Administrators fear political retribution. Students, drowning in debt and economic insecurity, have little time or institutional support to engage deeply with global issues. At the very moment when democratic norms are eroding at home and authoritarian influence is expanding abroad, the institutions charged with educating citizens have retreated.

If this trend continues, China and Russia will not simply gain ground. They will redraw the global map. The democratic world will shrink. The consequences will be felt long after the speeches, the staged outrage, and the fundraising cycles have passed. And as U.S. universities remain timid, unwilling or unable to confront collapsing democratic commitments, the vacuum deepens. In a world where silence is interpreted as acquiescence, higher education’s retreat becomes more than a missed opportunity—it becomes complicity.

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Sources

– David Dayen, Dayen on TAP, The American Prospect, December 1, 2025.
– Public statements and broadcasts by Pete Hegseth (2024–2025).
– U.S. Department of State and DoD briefings on Ukraine, Taiwan, and Venezuela.
– DEA and State Department assessments on fentanyl production in Venezuela.
– Court filings relating to the Citgo sale and Elliott Investment Management.
– Reports on PRC and Russian influence in Latin America (CSIS, Wilson Center, academic research).
– Analysis of PRC and Russian cyber operations (“4G war”) on global infrastructure (power grids, transportation, financial systems).
– Congressional statements and policy proposals on U.S. military border enforcement.
– Documentation and analysis of military deployments in Washington, D.C., 2020–2025.

Grace of Import-Replacing Inbox (Schumacher Center for a New Economics)

 

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Jane Jacobs in Washington Square Park, New York, 1963. Photograph: Fred W McDarrah  The 45th Annual Schumacher Lectures with Samantha Power and Tyler Wakefield were described as a watershed event for the re-emergence of the Bioregional Movement. Once edited the video will be posted for all to view.   Continuing with our attention to the subject of regional economies, we share this 2010 essay by Susan Witt.  It was written for the book What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, New Village Press. Jane Jacobs served as a beloved mentor to the BerkShares Local Currency project, but sadly passed in April of 2006 just before the currency went into circulation. The Grace of Import Replacement by Susan Witt What I first noticed about Jane Jacobs was the power, breadth, and mobility of her intellect. Only later did I recognize the equally great warmth of spirit that informed her thinking and turned it to a force of change. She stands as one of the most visionary economic thinkers of the last part of the twentieth century. Her intellect was breathtaking. I first heard her speak at her 1983 Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture “The Economy of Regions.” From the podium at Mount Holyoke College she painted an image of regional economies in which myriad small industries produce for regional markets—small industries that depend on local materials, local labor, local capital, local transport systems, and appropriately scaled technology to conduct business. She pictured the fruits of this regional industry spilling over to support a rich cultural life in the city at the hub of the region. This bustling creative energy would then foster new innovation and industry, filling in the “niches” of the economy. The products of a regional economy would be particular to it, using the woods and stones found there—cherry tables, white cedar decks, and granite steps. The choices in the marketplace would vary with the seasons—eagerly anticipated summer berries, autumn apples, the new maple syrup in February, and spring garlic and parsnips. The diversity of products would require a diversity of workers with a diversity of skills, all part of a face-to-face economy of place with its multiple sidewalk contacts “from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow.” Citizens would have direct knowledge of working conditions in offices and factories and home industries; they would see the results of manufacturing practices on hillsides, fields, and rivers. Landowner, banker, shop keeper, entrepreneur, laborer, secretary, teacher, craftsman, and government official would sing together in the community choir, carpool one another’s children to school, and meet at the farmers’ market. They would see the complexity that shapes the regional economy, understand its various elements, remain accountable to each other in maintaining the web of connections that sustains it. Practiced conservationists, they would recognize the necessity of protecting and renewing the natural resources that form the basis of their economy. Yes, there would be products exported to other regions—but only the excess, and in moderation. Yes, there would be imports for their variety, exoticness, their sweet breath of other cultures and places. But at the core of these robust and vital regional economies would be the capacity to meet the economic, social, and cultural needs of the people of the region from within the region, not in a spirit of isolationism but in a spirit of self-determination and with the hope that other regions could achieve similar economic independence. In such a scenario the wealth of one region would not depend on exploiting the natural and human wealth of other regions. Jacobs believed that the best way to achieve such sustainable economies is to examine what is now imported into a region and develop the conditions to produce those goods from local resources with local labor. She referred to this process as “import replacing.” By contrast, the typical economic development model is for a city to use tax credits and other incentives to lure the branch of a multi-national corporation into its environs. Yet without deep roots in the local economy and local community, the same corporation might suddenly leave the area, driven by moody fluctuations in the global economy, and abandon workers and families. Building a regional economic development strategy based on import replacement will require appropriately scaled economic institutions to meet the needs of the local businesses. The elements of any economic system are land, labor, and capital: land and other natural resources are the basis of all production; labor transforms the raw materials into products; and capital organizes the labor and facilitates distribution of the goods. New import replacement businesses will require:  affordable access to land on which to locate the enterprise and gather the raw materials used in production;  capital in amounts and on terms tailored to the business;  a trained, engaged, and supported work force. How a society shapes its institutions for land, labor, and capital will determine if it can meet these requirements. These regionally based economic institutions will not be government driven.  Rather they will be undertaken by free associations of consumers and producers working cooperatively, sharing the risk of building an economy that reflects shared culture and shared values. Small in scale, transparent in structure, designed to profit the community rather than to profit from it, they can help facilitate a community’s desire for safe and fair working conditions; for production practices that keep air, soil, and water clean, renew natural resources rather than deplete them; for innovation in the making and distribution of food, clothing, shelter, and energy; and for a more equitable distribution of wealth. The essay continues with examples of citizen driven tools to galvanize the regional economies imagined by Jane Jacobs. Read more here. Warm wishes, Staff of the Schumacher Center Share this newsletter:  on Facebook on Twitter forward to a friend

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