Search This Blog
Showing posts sorted by date for query neoliberalism. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query neoliberalism. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Sunday, January 4, 2026

Higher Education Inquirer Resources, Spring 2026

[Editor's note: Please let us know of any corrections, additions, or broken links.  We always welcome your feedback.]  

This list traces how U.S. higher education has been reshaped by neoliberal policies, privatization, and data-driven management, producing deepening inequalities across race and class. The works examine the rise of academic capitalism, growing student debt, corporatization, and the influence of private interests—from for-profit colleges to rankings and surveillance systems. Together, they depict a sector drifting away from its public mission and democratic ideals, while highlighting the structural forces that created today’s crises and the reforms needed to reverse them.











Ahn, Ilsup (2023). The Ethics of Educational Healthcare: Student Debt, Neoliberalism, and Justice. Palgrave Macmillan.
Alexander, Bryan (2020). Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education. Johns Hopkins Press.
Alexander, Bryan (2023). Universities on Fire. Johns Hopkins Press.
Alexander, Bryan (2026). Peak Higher Ed. Johns Hopkins Press.
Angulo, A. (2016). Diploma Mills: How For-profit Colleges Stiffed Students, Taxpayers, and the American Dream. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Apthekar, Bettina (1966). Big Business and the American University. New Outlook Publishers.
Apthekar, Bettina (1969). Higher Education and the Student Rebellion in the United States, 1960–1969: A Bibliography.
Archibald, R. & Feldman, D. (2017). The Road Ahead for America's Colleges & Universities. Oxford University Press.
Armstrong, E. & Hamilton, L. (2015). Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. Harvard University Press.
Arum, R. & Roksa, J. (2011). Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. University of Chicago Press.
Baldwin, Davarian (2021). In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. Bold Type Books.
Barr, Andrew & Turner, Sarah (2023). The Labor Market Returns to Higher Education. Oxford University Press.
Bennett, W. & Wilezol, D. (2013). Is College Worth It? Thomas Nelson.
Berg, I. (1970). The Great Training Robbery: Education and Jobs. Praeger.
Berman, Elizabeth P. (2012). Creating the Market University. Princeton University Press.
Berman, Elizabeth Popp & Stevens, Mitchell (eds.) (2019). The University Under Pressure. Emerald Publishing.
Berry, J. (2005). Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education. Monthly Review Press.
Berry, J. and Worthen, H. (2021). Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education. Pluto Books.
Best, J. & Best, E. (2014). The Student Loan Mess. Atkinson Family Foundation.
Bledstein, Burton J. (1976). The Culture of Professionalism. Norton.
Bogue, E. Grady & Aper, Jeffrey (2000). Exploring the Heritage of American Higher Education.
Bok, D. (2003). Universities in the Marketplace. Princeton University Press.
Bousquet, M. (2008). How the University Works. NYU Press.
Brennan, J. & Magness, P. (2019). Cracks in the Ivory Tower. Oxford University Press.
Brint, S. & Karabel, J. (1989). The Diverted Dream. Oxford University Press.
Burawoy, Michael & Mitchell, Katharyne (eds.) (2020). The University, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Inequality. Routledge.
Burd, Stephen (2024). Lifting the Veil on Enrollment Management: How a Powerful Industry is Limiting Social Mobility in American Higher Education. Harvard Education Press
Cabrera, Nolan L. (2018). White Guys on Campus. Rutgers University Press.
Cabrera, Nolan L. (2024). Whiteness in the Ivory Tower. Teachers College Press.
Cantwell, Brendan & Robertson, Susan (eds.) (2021). Research Handbook on the Politics of Higher Education. Edward Elgar.
Caplan, B. (2018). The Case Against Education. Princeton University Press.
Cappelli, P. (2015). Will College Pay Off? Public Affairs.
Carney, Cary Michael (1999). Native American Higher Education in the United States. Transaction.
Cassuto, Leonard (2015). The Graduate School Mess. Harvard University Press.
Caterine, Christopher (2020). Leaving Academia. Princeton Press.
Childress, H. (2019). The Adjunct Underclass. University of Chicago Press.
Chomsky, Noam (2014). Masters of Mankind. Haymarket Books.
Choudaha, Rahul & de Wit, Hans (eds.) (2019). International Student Recruitment and Mobility. Routledge.
Clay, Kevin (2026). I Guess This Is Activism?: Youth, Political Education, and Free-Market Common Sense. University of Minnesota Press.  
Cohen, Arthur M. (1998). The Shaping of American Higher Education. Jossey-Bass.
Collins, Randall (1979/2019). The Credential Society. Columbia University Press.
Cottom, Tressie McMillan (2016). Lower Ed.
Cottom, Tressie McMillan & Darity, William A. Jr. (eds.) (2018). For-Profit Universities. Routledge.
Domhoff, G. William (2021). Who Rules America? Routledge.
Donoghue, F. (2008). The Last Professors.
Dorn, Charles (2017). For the Common Good. Cornell University Press.
Eaton, Charlie (2022). Bankers in the Ivory Tower. University of Chicago Press.
Eisenmann, Linda (2006). Higher Education for Women in Postwar America. Johns Hopkins Press.
Espenshade, T. & Walton Radford, A. (2009). No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal. Princeton University Press.
Faragher, John Mack & Howe, Florence (eds.) (1988). Women and Higher Education in American History. Norton.
Farber, Jerry (1972). The University of Tomorrowland. Pocket Books.
Freeman, Richard B. (1976). The Overeducated American. Academic Press.
Gaston, P. (2014). Higher Education Accreditation. Stylus.
Gildersleeve, Ryan Evely & Tierney, William (2017). The Contemporary Landscape of Higher Education. Routledge.
Ginsberg, B. (2013). The Fall of the Faculty. Oxford University Press.
Giroux, Henry (1983). Theory and Resistance in Education. Bergin and Garvey Press.
Giroux, Henry (2014). Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books.
Giroux, Henry (2022). Pedagogy of Resistance. Bloomsbury Academic.
Gleason, Philip (1995). Contending with Modernity. Oxford University Press.
Golden, D. (2006). The Price of Admission.
Goldrick-Rab, S. (2016). Paying the Price.
Graeber, David (2018). Bullshit Jobs. Simon and Schuster.
Groeger, Cristina Viviana (2021). The Education Trap. Harvard Press.
Hamilton, Laura T. & Kelly Nielson (2021). Broke.
Hampel, Robert L. (2017). Fast and Curious. Rowman & Littlefield.
Hirschman, Daniel & Berman, Elizabeth Popp (eds.) (2021). The Sociology of Higher Education.
Johnson, B. et al. (2003). Steal This University.
Kamenetz, Anya (2006). Generation Debt. Riverhead.
Keats, John (1965). The Sheepskin Psychosis. Lippincott.
Kelchen, Robert (2018). Higher Education Accountability. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kezar, A., DePaola, T., & Scott, D. (2019). The Gig Academy. Johns Hopkins Press.
Kinser, K. (2006). From Main Street to Wall Street.
Kozol, Jonathan (1992). Savage Inequalities. Harper Perennial.
Kozol, Jonathan (2006). The Shame of the Nation. Crown.
Kraus, Neil (2023). The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement. Temple University Press.
Labaree, David (1997). How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning. Yale University Press.
Labaree, David F. (2017). A Perfect Mess. University of Chicago Press.
Lafer, Gordon (2004). The Job Training Charade. Cornell University Press.
Loehen, James (1995). Lies My Teacher Told Me. The New Press.
Lohse, Andrew (2014). Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy. Thomas Dunne Books.
Lucas, C.J. (1994). American Higher Education: A History.
Lukianoff, Greg & Haidt, Jonathan (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind. Penguin Press.
Maire, Quentin (2021). Credential Market. Springer.
Mandery, Evan (2022). Poison Ivy. New Press.
Marginson, Simon (2016). The Dream Is Over. University of California Press.
Marti, Eduardo (2016). America's Broken Promise. Excelsior College Press.
Mettler, Suzanne (2014). Degrees of Inequality. Basic Books.
Morris, Dan & Targ, Harry (2023). From Upton Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University.
Newfeld, C. (2011). Unmaking the Public University.
Newfeld, C. (2016). The Great Mistake.
Newfield, Christopher (2023). Metrics-Driven. Johns Hopkins Press.
O’Neil, Cathy (2016). Weapons of Math Destruction. Crown.
Palfrey, John (2020). Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces. MIT Press.
Paulsen, M. & Smart, J.C. (2001). The Finance of Higher Education. Agathon Press.
Piketty, Thomas (2020). Capital and Ideology. Harvard University Press.
Reynolds, G. (2012). The Higher Education Bubble. Encounter Books.
Rojstaczer, Stuart (1999). Gone for Good. Oxford University Press.
Rosen, A.S. (2011). Change.edu. Kaplan Publishing.
Roth, G. (2019). The Educated Underclass. Pluto Press.
Ruben, Julie (1996). The Making of the Modern University. University of Chicago Press.
Rudolph, F. (1991). The American College and University.
Rushdoony, R. (1972). The Messianic Character of American Education. The Craig Press.
Schrecker, Ellen (2010). The Lost Soul of Higher Education: New Press.
Selingo, J. (2013). College Unbound.
Shelton, Jon (2023). The Education Myth. Cornell University Press.
Simpson, Christopher (1999). Universities and Empire. New Press.
Sinclair, U. (1923). The Goose-Step.
Slaughter, Sheila & Rhoades, Gary (2004). Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Smyth, John (2017). The Toxic University. Palgrave Macmillan.
Sperber, Murray (2000). Beer and Circus. Holt.
Stein, Sharon (2022). Unsettling the University. Johns Hopkins Press.
Stevens, Mitchell L. (2009). Creating a Class. Harvard University Press.
Stodghill, R. (2015). Where Everybody Looks Like Me.
Tamanaha, B. (2012). Failing Law Schools. University of Chicago Press.
Tatum, Beverly (1997). Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Basic Books.
Taylor, Barret J. & Cantwell, Brendan (2019). Unequal Higher Education. Rutgers University Press.
Thelin, John R. (2019). A History of American Higher Education. Johns Hopkins Press.
Tolley, K. (2018). Professors in the Gig Economy. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Trow, Martin (1973). Problems in the Transition from Elite to Mass Higher Education. Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. 
Twitchell, James B. (2005). Branded Nation. Simon and Schuster.
Vedder, R. (2004). Going Broke By Degree.
Veysey, Lawrence R. (1965). The Emergence of the American University.
Washburn, J. (2006). University Inc.
Washington, Harriet A. (2008). Medical Apartheid. Anchor.
Whitman, David (2021). The Profits of Failure. Cypress House.
Wilder, C.D. (2013). Ebony and Ivy.
Winks, Robin (1996). Cloak and Gown. Yale University Press.
Woodson, Carter D. (1933). The Mis-Education of the Negro.
Zaloom, Caitlin (2019). Indebted. Princeton University Press.
Zemsky, Robert, Shaman, Susan & Baldridge, Susan Campbell (2020). The College Stress Test. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Zuboff, Shoshana (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs. 

Activists, Coalitions, Innovators, and Alternative Voices

 College Choice and Career Planning Tools

Innovation and Reform

Higher Education Policy

Data Sources

Trade publications
Posted by at 2 comments:

Saturday, December 20, 2025

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.

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.

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

Friday, December 12, 2025

The Pritzker Paradox: Elite Influence and For‑Profit Exploitation in Higher Education

As the 2028 presidential race accelerates, J.B. Pritzker has emerged as a favored candidate among Democratic power brokers. His public image—competent, pragmatic, socially liberal, and reliably anti-Trump—has been carefully shaped to appeal to voters exhausted by polarization and chaos. But beneath this polished surface lies a deep and troubling contradiction that the public, and especially those affected by the student-debt crisis, cannot afford to ignore. This contradiction, the Pritzker Paradox, stems from the profound dissonance between Pritzker’s public rhetoric about educational opportunity and the private capital networks that have fueled both his family’s wealth and his political ascent.


The Pritzker family has long been intertwined with for-profit higher education and its surrounding ecosystem of lenders, service providers, and private-equity investors. These sectors have collectively played a major role in producing the contemporary student-debt crisis. While J.B. Pritzker often presents himself as a champion of equity, public investment, and educational access, his family’s financial history reveals an alignment with institutions that have extracted billions from low-income students, veterans, and Black and Latino communities through high-cost, low-value educational programs.

This is not simply a matter of past investments. It is part of an ongoing and highly influential political economy in which wealthy Democratic donors, private-equity executives, and education “reformers” operate as a unified class. Central to that class formation is The Vistria Group, a Chicago-based private-equity firm founded by Marty Nesbitt, a close friend of Barack Obama. Vistria stands at the intersection of Democratic power and education profiteering. After the collapse of scandal-ridden chains like Corinthian Colleges and ITT Tech, Vistria did not step in to dismantle the exploitative for-profit model. Instead, it strategically acquired distressed educational assets and reconstructed them into a new generation of institutions that presented themselves as “nonprofits” while maintaining tuition-driven, debt-laden business models. Former Obama administration officials moved seamlessly into Vistria and related firms, raising serious questions about regulatory capture and revolving-door governance.

Pritzker moves within this same Chicago-centered network. His political donors, associates, and advisers overlap significantly with the circles that built Vistria’s ascent. The structural relationships matter more than any single investment. A Pritzker administration would not exist outside this ecosystem; it would be shaped by it. The question, therefore, is not whether Pritzker personally signed a for-profit acquisition deal but whether the political world that produced him can be trusted to regulate higher education fairly and aggressively. The answer, based on the last twenty years of policy and practice, is no.

This is especially troubling because presidents play a decisive role in higher-education oversight. Through the Department of Education, a president can strengthen or weaken borrower protections, set standards for nonprofit conversions, determine enforcement priorities, and decide whether private-equity extraction will be challenged or quietly accommodated. Millions of borrowers harmed by predatory institutions are currently awaiting relief through borrower defense, income-driven repayment audits, and Gainful Employment rules. The integrity of these processes depends on political leadership that is independent from the private-equity interests that helped create the crisis.

Pritzker’s political style—managerial, technocratic, deeply rooted in elite networks—suggests continuity rather than challenge. The neoliberal framework he embodies does not confront structural inequalities; it manages them. It does not dismantle extractive systems; it attempts to regulate their excesses while leaving their core intact. In higher education, this approach has already failed. It is the reason the for-profit sector was allowed to expand dramatically under both Republican and Democratic administrations. It is why private-equity firms continue to control large segments of the educational marketplace through complex ownership structures and shadow nonprofits. And it is why millions of borrowers remain trapped in debts for degrees that offered little or no economic return.

The Pritzker Paradox is therefore not a story about one wealthy governor. It is a story about the consolidation of political and economic power within a narrow elite that has profited handsomely from the financialization of education while promising, cycle after cycle, to reform the very problems it helped create. Vistria exemplifies this dynamic. The Pritzker family’s history echoes it. And a Pritzker presidency would likely entrench it further.

America needs leadership willing to challenge private-equity influence in higher education, not leadership bound to it. The country needs a president who understands education as a public good, not a marketplace. For borrowers, students, and communities harmed by decades of predatory practices, the stakes could not be higher. The choice before the nation is not simply whether Pritzker is preferable to Trump. It is whether the country will continue to entrust its public institutions to elites who speak the language of equity while advancing the interests of the very networks that undermined educational opportunity in the first place.

Sources
Public reporting on Pritzker family investments in for-profit and education-related sectors; investigations by the Senate HELP Committee, GAO, and CFPB; reporting on The Vistria Group’s acquisitions and nonprofit conversions; analyses of private-equity influence in U.S. higher education; academic literature on neoliberalism and elite capture.

Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: ,

Wednesday, December 3, 2025

A Century of American Exploitation: Oil, Crypto, and the Struggle for Latin America’s Universities

Latin America—a region of thirty-three countries stretching from Mexico through Central and South America and across the Caribbean—has spent more than a century fighting against foreign exploitation. Its universities, which should anchor local prosperity, cultural autonomy, and democratic life, have instead been repeatedly reshaped by foreign corporations, U.S. government interests, global lenders, and now crypto speculators. Yet the region’s history is also defined by persistent, courageous resistance, led overwhelmingly by students, faculty, and Indigenous communities.

Understanding today’s educational crisis in Latin America requires tracing this long arc of exploitation—and the struggle to build systems rooted in equity rather than extraction.

1900s–1930s: Bananas, Oil, and the Rise of the “Banana Republics”

Early in the 20th century, American corporations established vast profit-making empires in Latin America. United Fruit Company—today’s Chiquita Banana—dominated land, labor, and politics across Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica. Standard Oil and Texaco secured petroleum concessions in Venezuela and Ecuador, laying foundations for decades of foreign control that extracted immense wealth while leaving behind environmental devastation, as seen in Texaco’s toxic legacy in the Ecuadorian Amazon between 1964 and 1992.

Universities were bent toward these foreign interests. Agricultural programs were geared toward serving plantation economies, not local farmers. Engineering and geological research aligned with extractive industries, not community development.

Resistance did emerge. Student groups in Guatemala and Costa Rica formed part of early anti-oligarchic movements, linking national sovereignty to university reform. Their demands echoed global currents of democratization. Evidence of these early student-led struggles appears in archival materials and Latin American scholarship on university reform, and culminates in the influential 1918 Córdoba Manifesto in Argentina—a radical declaration that attacked oligarchic, colonial universities and demanded autonomy, co-governance, and public responsibility.

1940s–1980s: Coups, Cold War Interventions, and the Deepening of U.S. Oil Interests

During the Cold War, exploitation intensified. In Guatemala, the CIA-backed overthrow of democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 protected United Fruit’s land holdings. Universities were purged or militarized, and critical scholars were exiled or killed.

In Chile, the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende—supported by American corporate giants such as ITT and Anaconda Copper—ushered in a brutal dictatorship. Under Augusto Pinochet, thousands were murdered, tortured, or disappeared, while the Chicago Boys imported radical neoliberal reforms that privatized everything, including the higher education system.

Throughout the region, oil deals disproportionately favored American companies. Mexico and Venezuela saw petroleum wealth siphoned off through arrangements that benefited foreign investors while leaving universities underfunded and politically surveilled. Scholarship critical of foreign intervention was marginalized, while programs feeding engineers and economists to multinational firms were expanded.

Student resistance reached historic proportions. Chilean students and faculty formed the core of the anti-dictatorship movement. Mexico’s students rose in 1968, demanding democracy and university autonomy before being massacred in Tlatelolco. CIA declassified documents reveal that student uprisings across Latin America in the early 1970s were so widespread that U.S. intelligence considered them a regional threat.

1990s–2000s: Neoliberalism, Privatization, and the Americanization of Higher Education

In the 1990s, neoliberalism swept the region under pressure from Washington, the IMF, and the World Bank. After NAFTA, Mexico’s universities became increasingly aligned with corporate labor pipelines. In Brazil, Petrobras’ partnerships with American firms helped reshape engineering curricula. Private universities and for-profit models proliferated across the region, echoing U.S. higher ed corporatization.

Hugo Chávez captured the broader sentiment of resistance when he declared that public services—including education—cannot be privatized without violating fundamental rights.

Students fought back across Latin America. In Argentina and Brazil they contested tuition hikes and privatization. In Venezuela, the debate shifted toward whether oil revenue should fund tuition-free universities.

Indigenous Exclusion, Racism, and the Colonial Foundations of Inequality

One of the greatest challenges in understanding Latin American education is acknowledging the deep racial and ethnic stratification that predates U.S. exploitation but has been exacerbated by it. Countries like Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, and Guatemala have large Indigenous populations that, to this day, receive the worst education—much like Native American communities relegated to underfunded reservation schools in the United States.

Racism remains powerful. Whiter populations enjoy greater economic and educational access. University admission is shaped by class and color. These divisions are not accidental; they are a machinery of control.

There have been important exceptions. Under President Rafael Correa, Ecuador built hundreds of new schools, including Siglo XXI and Millennium Schools, and expanded public education access. In Mexico, the 2019 constitutional reform strengthened Indigenous rights, including commitments to culturally relevant education. Bolivia—whose population is majority Indigenous—has promoted Indigenous languages, judicial systems, and education structures.

But progress is fragile. Austerity, IMF conditionalities, and elite resistance have led to cutbacks, school closures, and renewed privatization across the region. The study you provided on Ecuador documents Indigenous ambivalence, even hostility, toward Correa’s universal education plan—revealing how colonial wounds, cultural erasure, and distrust of state power complicate reform and provide openings for divide-and-conquer strategies long exploited by ruling classes.

These contradictions deepen when Indigenous movements—rightfully demanding no mining, no oil extraction, and protection of ancestral lands—collide with leftist governments reliant on resource extraction to fund public services. This tension is especially acute in Ecuador and Bolivia.

2010s–Present: Crypto Colonialism and a New Frontier of Exploitation

Cryptocurrency has opened a new chapter in Latin America’s long history of foreign-driven experimentation. El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin in 2021, promoted by President Nayib Bukele, transformed the country into a speculative test lab. Bukele has now spent more than $660 million in U.S. dollars on crypto, according to investigative reporting from InSight Crime. Universities rushed to create blockchain programs that primarily serve international investors rather than Salvadoran students.

In Venezuela, crypto became a survival tool amid hyperinflation and economic collapse. Yet foreign speculators profited while universities starved. Student groups warned that crypto research was being weaponized to normalize economic chaos and distract from public-sector deterioration.

Resistance has grown. Salvadoran students have protested the Bitcoin law, demanding that public resources focus on infrastructure, health, and education. Venezuelan students call for rebuilding social programs rather than chasing speculative financial technologies.

Contemporary Student Resistance: 2010s–2020s

Across the region, student movements remain powerful. The Chilean Winter of 2011–2013 demanded free, quality public education and challenged Pinochet’s neoliberal legacy. The movement culminated in the 2019 uprising, where education reform was central.

Mexico’s UNAM students continue to resist corruption, tuition hikes, gender violence, and the encroachment of corporate and foreign interests. The 1999–2000 UNAM strike remains one of the longest in modern higher education.

Colombian students have forced governments to negotiate and invest billions in public universities, framing their struggle as resistance to neoliberal austerity shaped by U.S. policy.

Argentina continues to face massive austerity-driven cuts, sparking protests in 2024–2025 reminiscent of earlier waves of resistance. Uruguay’s Tupamaros movement—largely student-led—remains a historical touchstone.

Every country in Latin America has experienced student uprisings. They reflect a truth that Paulo Freire, exiled from Brazil for teaching critical pedagogy, understood deeply: education can either liberate or oppress. Authoritarians, privatizers, and foreign capital prefer the latter, and they act accordingly.

Today’s Regional Education Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed the system into further crisis. Children in Latin America and the Caribbean lost one out of every two in-person school days between 2020 and 2022. Learning poverty now exceeds 50 percent. Entire generations risk permanent economic loss and civic disenfranchisement.

Infrastructure is collapsing. Rural and Indigenous communities suffer the worst conditions. Public investment is chronically insufficient because governments are trapped in cycles of debt repayment to international lenders. Ecuador has not seen a major public-investment program in a decade, as austerity and IMF repayments dominate national budgets.

The result is a system starved of resources and increasingly vulnerable to privatization schemes—including U.S.-style online coursework, ideological “instruction kits,” and for-profit degree mills.

Latin American Universities as Battlegrounds for Sovereignty

Latin America’s universities are shaped by the same forces that have dominated the region’s history: oil extraction, agribusiness, foreign capital, neoliberalism, structural racism, debt, and now crypto speculation. Yet universities have also been homes to transformation, rebellion, cultural resurgence, and hope.

Across more than a century, students—Indigenous, Afro-descendant, mestizo, working-class—have been the region’s fiercest defenders of public education and national sovereignty. Their resistance continues today, from Quito to Buenos Aires, from Mexico City to Santiago.

For readers of the Higher Education Inquirer, the lesson is clear: the struggle for higher education in Latin America is inseparable from the struggle for democracy, racial justice, Indigenous autonomy, and freedom from foreign domination. The region’s ruling elites and international lenders understand that an educated public is dangerous, which is why they starve, privatize, and discipline public schools. Students understand the opposite: that education is power, and that power must be reclaimed.

The next chapter—especially in countries like Ecuador—will depend on whether students, teachers, and communities can defend public education against the dual forces that have undermined it for more than a century: privatizers and fascists.

Sources (Selection)

National Security Archive, CIA Declassified Documents (1971)
InSight Crime reporting on El Salvador Bitcoin expenditures
Luciani, Laura. “Latin American Student Movements in the 1960s.” Historia y Memoria (2019)
The Córdoba Manifesto (1918)
UNESCO, World Bank data on learning poverty (2024)
Latin American studies on United Fruit, Standard Oil, Texaco/Chevron in Ecuador
LASA Forum: Analysis of Indigenous responses to Correa’s education reforms
Periodico UNAL: “The Student Rebellion: Córdoba and Latin America”
Multiple regional news sources on Argentina’s 2024–2025 education protests

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Friday, November 28, 2025

The New Cold War in the Americas: Power, Proxy, and the People Caught in Between

The Western Hemisphere is entering a new and dangerous phase of global rivalry—one shaped by old imperial habits, new economic pressures, and resurgent great-power maneuvering. From Washington to Beijing to Caracas, political leaders are escalating tensions over Venezuela’s future, reviving a familiar script in which Latin America becomes the proving ground for foreign powers and a pressure cooker for working-class people who have no say in the geopolitical games unfolding above them.

What looks like a confrontation over oil, governance, or regional security is better understood as a collision of neoliberal extraction, colonial legacies, and competing empires, each claiming moral authority while pursuing strategic advantage. In this moment, it is essential to remember what history shows again and again: ordinary people—soldiers, students, workers—pay the highest price for elite ambitions.

A Long Shadow: U.S. Intervention in Latin America Since the 1890s

The U.S. role in Latin America cannot be separated from its imperial foundations. Over more than a century, Washington has repeatedly intervened—militarily, covertly, and financially—to shape political outcomes in the region:

  • 1898–1934: The “Banana Wars.” U.S. Marines were deployed throughout the Caribbean and Central America to secure plantations, protect U.S. investors, and maintain favorable governments in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Honduras.

  • 1954: Guatemala. The CIA overthrew democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz after he challenged United Fruit Company landholdings.

  • 1961: Bay of Pigs Invasion. A failed U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.

  • 1973: Chile. U.S. support for the coup against Salvador Allende ushered in the Pinochet dictatorship and a laboratory for neoliberal economics.

  • 1980s: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala. Funding death squads, supporting Contra rebels, and fueling civil wars that killed hundreds of thousands.

  • 1989: Panama. A full-scale U.S. invasion to remove Manuel Noriega, with civilian casualties in the thousands.

  • 2002: Venezuela. U.S. officials supported the brief coup against Hugo Chávez.

  • 2020s: Economic warfare continues. Sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and support for factions opposing Nicolás Maduro all sustain a long-running pressure campaign.

This is not ancient history. It is the operating system of U.S. hemispheric influence.

China’s Expanding Soft Power and Strategic Positioning

While the U.S. escalates military signaling toward Venezuela, China is expanding soft power, economic influence, and political relationships throughout Latin America—including with Venezuela. Beijing’s strategy is centered not on direct military confrontation but on long-term infrastructure, trade, and diplomatic partnerships designed to reduce U.S. dominance.

Recent statements from Beijing underscore this shift. Chinese President Xi Jinping publicly backed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, describing China and Venezuela as “intimate friends” as the U.S. intensifies military pressure in the region. China’s role extends beyond rhetoric: loans, technology transfers, energy investments, and political support form a web of influence that counters U.S. objectives.

This is the new terrain: the U.S. leaning on sanctions and military posture, China leveraging soft power and strategic alliances.

Russia as a Third Power in the Hemisphere

Any honest assessment of the current geopolitical climate must include Russia, which has expanded its presence in Latin America as part of its broader campaign to counter U.S. power globally. Moscow has supplied Venezuela with military equipment, intelligence support, cybersecurity assistance, and diplomatic cover at the United Nations. It has strengthened ties with Nicaragua, Cuba, and other governments willing to challenge U.S. regional dominance.

Russia’s involvement is not ideological; it is strategic. It seeks to weaken Washington’s influence, create leverage in distant theaters, and embed itself in the Western Hemisphere without deploying large-scale military forces. Where China builds infrastructure and invests billions, Russia plays the spoiler: complicating U.S. policy, reinforcing embattled leaders when convenient, and offering an alternative to nations seeking to escape U.S. hegemony.

The result is a crowded geopolitical arena in which Venezuela becomes not just a domestic crisis but a theater for multipolar contention, shaped by three major powers with very different tools and interests.

Neoliberalism, Colonialism, and the Repeating Pattern

Viewed in historical context, today’s crisis is simply the newest iteration of a long-standing pattern:

  1. Colonial logics justify intervention. The idea that Washington must “manage” or “stabilize” Latin America recycles the paternalism of earlier eras.

  2. Neoliberal extraction drives policy. Control over energy resources, access to markets, and geopolitical leverage matter more than democracy or human well-being.

  3. Foreign powers treat the region as a chessboard. The U.S., China, and Russia approach Latin America not as sovereign equals but as terrain for influence.

  4. People—not governments—bear the cost. Sanctions devastate civilians. Military escalations breed proxy conflicts. Migration pressures rise. And working-class youth are recruited to fight battles that are not theirs.

This is why today’s developments must be understood as part of a wider global system that treats nations in the Global South as resources to exploit and battlegrounds to dominate.

A Warning for Those Considering Enlistment or ROTC

In moments like this, the pressure on young people—especially working-class youth—to join the military increases. Recruiters frame conflict as opportunity: tuition money, job training, patriotism, adventure, or stability. But the truth is starker and more political.

Muhammad Ali’s stance during the Vietnam War remains profoundly relevant today. He refused the draft, famously stating that the Vietnamese “never called me [a slur]” and declaring that he would not fight a war of conquest against people who had done him no harm.

The same logic applies to today’s geopolitical brinkmanship. Young Americans are asked to risk their lives in conflicts that protect corporate interests, reinforce imperial ambitions, and escalate global tensions. Venezuelan workers, Chinese workers, Russian workers, and U.S. workers are not enemies. They are casualties-in-waiting of decisions made by governments and corporations insulated from the consequences of their actions.

Before enlisting—or joining ROTC—young people deserve to understand the historical cycle they may be pulled into. Wars in Latin America, proxy or direct, have never served the interests of everyday people. They serve empires.

Sources

  • Firstpost. “Xi Backs Maduro, Calls China and Venezuela ‘Intimate Friends’ as Trump Steps Up Military Pressure.”

  • Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

  • Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine

  • Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change

  • U.S. Congressional Research Service reports on U.S. policy in Venezuela and China-Latin America relations

  • UN Human Rights Council documentation on sanctions and civilian impact


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Monday, November 24, 2025

The Mis-education of Global Elites

For generations, global elites have been positioned—socially, politically, financially—as the people best equipped to shape a better world. They have had the resources to eliminate poverty, curb climate catastrophe, restrain war, expand healthcare, reform universities, and make democratic participation meaningful. Instead, the world they have built is defined by widening inequality, ecological collapse, and a global crisis of legitimacy. Their failure is not accidental. It is the product of a profound mis-education: a system that trains elites not in stewardship or solidarity, but in domination, extraction, and self-preservation.

Across the United States, the U.K., Europe, and increasingly the Gulf States and East Asia, elite education has become a finishing school for rulers rather than a training ground for genuine public servants. These institutions—rich in endowment, selective in admission, steeped in prestige—construct worldviews that normalize inequity as efficiency, privatization as innovation, and austerity as necessity. Instead of interrogating the historical and structural forces that produce suffering, elite curricula often neutralize them, reducing political economy to management science and social justice to branding.

This mis-education manifests in global leadership failures. The same graduates who enter parliaments, presidential cabinets, central banks, multinational boards, and international NGOs routinely oversee policies that accelerate inequality and erode the public sphere. Many come from universities with unparalleled research capacity and moral rhetoric, yet preside over housing crises, medical debt catastrophes, and planetary degradation. They authorize wars but rarely experience them. They tout meritocracy while gatekeeping opportunity. They celebrate entrepreneurship while dismantling public goods. Their philanthropic initiatives—often built from profits derived through tax avoidance, monopolization, and labor exploitation—give the appearance of benevolence without altering the underlying systems of harm.

Carter G. Woodson’s warning in The Mis-education of the Negro echoes eerily here: “When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.” Global elites, educated into a narrow ideology that glorifies markets and hierarchy, do not need to be coerced into maintaining destructive systems—they do so voluntarily, believing themselves enlightened.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the corporate education complex itself. Elite universities produce the analysts who rationalize austerity, the managers who coordinate privatization, the consultants who reengineer public institutions to mimic corporations, and the financiers who define the metrics of success. They also cultivate the ideological insulation that shields elites from accountability. When their policies trigger chaos, the explanation is never structural, only technical: markets corrected, externalities emerged, populists disrupted stability. The mis-education of elites ensures they cannot see failure as their own.

Global institutions—from the IMF and World Bank to the UN and WTO—have mirrored this mindset. Their leaders, mostly trained in the same corridors of prestige, have promoted development models that prioritize capital mobility over community well-being, and foreign investment over local sovereignty. Even when faced with overwhelming evidence that structural adjustment, privatized healthcare, or financialization intensify human suffering, the elite worldview persists. The inability—or unwillingness—to imagine alternative systems is not an intellectual deficiency but the logical outcome of an education designed to reproduce power, not challenge it.

Meanwhile, those most affected by global crises—workers, migrants, debtors, students, the poor—are told to adapt, innovate, or sacrifice. They are bombarded with entrepreneurial rhetoric and resilience talk while their material conditions worsen. Political leaders lament social fragmentation but continue to funnel wealth upward. University administrators speak of inclusion while expanding administrative hierarchies and outsourcing labor. Energy executives promise transitions while drilling new pipelines. Tech CEOs warn about misinformation while building the infrastructure that spreads it.

The result is a world where the legitimacy of elites is evaporating. From Santiago to Paris, Lagos to Minneapolis, Delhi to London, mass movements are demanding accountability from institutions that have proven incapable of self-reform. The global backlash against inequality, authoritarianism, and corporate hegemony is not a misunderstanding—it is a recognition that the systems run by elites have failed.

If there is to be a better world, the mis-education of elites must be confronted directly. That means transforming the mission of universities from prestige accumulation to public purpose; replacing managerialism with democratic governance; centering histories of resistance rather than merely histories of empire; teaching economic justice instead of market worship; and training leaders who measure success not by shareholder value or rankings but by human flourishing.

Elites have long claimed exclusive expertise in solving the world’s problems. They have had centuries—and trillions—to prove it. They have failed miserably. A new generation of thinkers, activists, workers, and communities is already building the alternatives. Whether global elites choose to learn from them—or continue along their well-worn path of extraction and denial—will determine the next century.

For now, the record is clear: the institutions that shaped the world’s most powerful people were never designed to create justice. And they haven’t.

Academic Sources

Baldwin, Davarian L. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. Bold Type Books, 2021.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Stanford University Press, 1996.
Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2014.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Khan, Shamus Rahman. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, 1956.
Mkandawire, Thandika. “Institutional Monocropping and Monotasking in Africa.” UNRISD, 2007.
Piketty, Thomas. Capital and Ideology. Harvard University Press, 2020.
Saul, John Ralston. Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. Free Press, 1992.
Sklair, Leslie. The Transnational Capitalist Class. Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.
Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited. W.W. Norton, 2017.
Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-education of the Negro. Associated Publishers, 1933.

Posted by at 3 comments:
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)