End of an Era

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

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

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Use the search tools and click on these hashtags for more information from the College Meltdown and Higher Education Inquirer archives.  

#1stAmendment #2025 #2026 #2U #accountability #addiction #adjunct #AFT #AI #AImeltdown #alcoholism #algo #algorithm #alienation #Ambow #anomie #anti-intellectual #anxiety #Apollo #austerity #BariWeiss #Baylor

#BDR #bot #boycott #BRICS #CBS #charliekirk #China #civilwar #climate #collegemania 

#collegemeltdown #collegetown #covid #credentialism #crypto #CTE #debtcollective #degowning #dehumanization #DEI #democracy #deportation 

#dissent #diversity #DOD #DOGE #divest #doomloop #dualenrollment #edtech #edugrift #enshittification #Epstein #epsteinfiles #FAFSA #fascism #FOXnews #freespeech #genocide #Gini #greed #Harvard  #HBCU #Hegseth #HHS #history #ICE #IDR #immigration #incel #India #inequality #Intel #Iran #jobless #kleptocracy #labor #law #lawlessness #lawschool #leadgen #LibertyUniversity #LibertyUniversityOnline #medschool #medugrift #militarization #MIT #moralcapital #Musk 

#myth 

#NASA #NCAA #NDA #NSF #neoliberal #nihilism #nokings #nonviolence #Palantir #Palestine #pandemic #porn #Princeton 

#Pritzger #protest #PSLF #PXED #QOL #rehumanization 

#resistance #Risepoint #robocollege #robostudent #roboworker #Russia #sophistry 

#solidarity #Stanford #strikedebt #surveillance #tech #techbros #temperance #thiel #tiktok #TPUSA #transparency #Trump 

#UATX #UAW #umich #underemployment #USC #VA #value 

#veritas #virtue #Vistria #wikipedia #Yale

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   Higher Education and Class Sorting. Image by Glen McGhee

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

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

Dum spiro spero  (While I breathe, I hope),

Dahn Shaulis and Glen McGhee

A Syllabus of Resistance

Higher education today demands that we strip away illusions. The university is no longer a sanctuary of truth but a contested battleground of austerity, automation, and alienation. Students, adjuncts, and staff are caught in a cycle of debt, precarity, and surveillance. To resist, we need not another glossy strategic plan but a syllabus — a curriculum of solidarity, transparency, and rehumanization.

Debt defines the student experience. Student loan balances now exceed $1.77 trillion, and repayment programs like PSLF and income-driven repayment offer only partial relief. In 2024, as federal student loan payments resumed after a pandemic pause, millions of borrowers simply refused to pay, transforming individual debt into collective action. The Debt Collective has organized strikes and campaigns to cancel student debt, reframing borrowing as a political issue rather than a private burden. This movement challenges whether the entire financing model of higher education can survive.

Faculty labor is equally precarious. More than seventy percent of instructors are contingent, often earning poverty wages without benefits. At Harrisburg Area Community College, over 200 faculty went on strike in November 2025 after years of stalled negotiations, exemplifying a growing national labor movement against stagnant pay and weakened job security. Adjunct faculty unions at Rutgers and elsewhere continue to push back against layoffs and austerity measures. The crisis of contingent labor has moved from quiet exploitation to open confrontation.

Climate crisis compounds the meltdown. Universities expand globally in a frenzy of collegemania, while ignoring ecological collapse. Student activists demand divestment from fossil fuels, but boards often resist. At Princeton, campaigners uncovered that the university owns a controlling stake in PetroTiger, a fossil fuel company, profiting directly from extraction. Edge Hill University in the UK recently committed to divest from both fossil fuels and border security companies after sustained student pressure. The University of Illinois, despite pledging to divest years ago, still faces protests demanding action. These campaigns show that climate justice is inseparable from educational justice.

Surveillance intensifies alienation. Universities increasingly deploy corporate partnerships and AI tools to monitor student dissent. At the University of Houston, administrators contracted with Dataminr to scrape students’ social media activity during Palestine solidarity protests. Amnesty International has warned that tools like Palantir and Babel Street pose surveillance threats to student activists. Truthout reports that campuses have become laboratories for military-grade surveillance technology, punishing dissent and eroding trust. Education becomes transactional and disciplinary, leaving students reporting higher levels of stress and disconnection.

Resistance must also be moral. University governance remains hierarchical and opaque, resembling corporate boards more than democratic institutions. Calls for transparency and veritas are drowned out by branding campaigns and political capture. A pedagogy of resistance must be rooted in temperance, nonviolence, and solidarity. Rehumanization is the antidote to robostudents, roboworkers, and robocolleges. It is the refusal to be bots, debtors, or disposable labor, and the insistence on reclaiming education as a public good.

Developing a Democratic Syllabus of Resistance

This syllabus is not a catalog of courses but a call to action. Debt strikes, adjunct unionization, climate divestment campaigns, and surveillance pushback are fragments of a larger curriculum of resistance. But this syllabus is incomplete without you. Readers are invited to join in creating it — to add new units, case studies, and strategies that reflect the lived realities of students, workers, and communities.

For inspiration, see the Higher Education Inquirer’s earlier piece on Methods of Student Nonviolent Resistance, which documents the long history of campus activism and the evolving tactics of protest, persuasion, and noncooperation. That archive reminds us that resistance is not only possible but essential.

The classroom is everywhere, and the time is now.

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

HELU's Wall-to-Wall & Coast-to-Coast Report: December 2025

 

Upcoming Online Events:

January 21 – HELU Open House February 4 – Library Workers Organizing Meeting & Strategy Session

From the Blog:

End-of-Year HELU Project Reports

Each of these projects grew organically out of a felt need as we set out on our wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast organizing project. Steering committee members, delegates, and at-large members then stepped up to make them happen.

Read more

ICE Seizes UUP and CSEA Members at Hearing

While attending a scheduled immigration hearing on October 29, 2025, Upstate Medical Center UUP member Alex Ramírez González and CSEA member Yan Vázquez, a married couple who fled repression in Cuba, were seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

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“None of us can win it alone”: Northeast Regional Bargaining Summit January 9-10, 2026

To win the higher education system we want will require national, coordinated, multi-union organizing campaigns that build collective power across the sector. As one important step towards this broader goal, HELU is organizing a Northeast Regional Bargaining Summit in Amherst, MA on Jan 9-10, 2026.

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The Long Push for Collective Bargaining in Virginia: A Week in the Life

United Campus Workers of Virginia, CWA 2265, is dedicating January 2026 to getting a strong public sector collective bargaining bill for Virginia. As preparation for passing the bill, we are doing a Higher Ed Week of Action here in Virginia.

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United Campus Workers Arizona smacks Trump “compact” off the table – for now

In October 2025, the Trump Administration took its next swing at higher education — offering nine universities a Compact for Higher Education. Here in Arizona, the University of Arizona (UA) was one of the nine original targets of the administration, and United Campus Workers of Arizona (UCWAZ) was ready to respond.

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HELU Retreat: Big dark cold city, small bright warm group

On December 5 & 6, the city of Detroit and Wayne State University hosted the incoming and outgoing HELU steering committee, other electeds, and staff for a strategic planning retreat and lesson handover.

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Higher Ed Labor in the News:

Illinois State U student support workers file to unionize – WGLT UMaine graduate workers vote to ratify first union contract – Maine Morning Star On-campus unions push back against further pay increases for CSU presidents and execs – CSU LA University Times Penn State faculty file to hold union election. ‘We haven’t had a voice’ – Centre Daily Times Deep cuts at The New School threaten hundreds of positions – The Chief

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