Selling Armageddon

In an age defined by manufactured crises, weaponized ignorance, and the commodification of fear, a disturbing coalition has emerged—one that profits not from progress, but from collapse. This coalition spans billionaires and bomb makers, Ivy League technocrats and evangelical foot soldiers, data miners and doomsday preachers. They aren't just predicting the end of the world. They're selling it.

The title Selling Armageddon captures a disturbing trend within American society—and particularly within the intersection of higher education, technology, and political ideology—where fear, fatalism, and anti-intellectualism have become not just cultural phenomena but profit centers.

The Profiteers of the Apocalypse

Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, a vocal critic of democracy and champion of techno-libertarianism, is emblematic of this ethos. Thiel's investments in surveillance, biotech, and defense contractors like Palantir are not just financial bets—they are ideological declarations. He has publicly said that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. Instead, Thiel supports strongmen, deregulated markets, and technological sovereignty for elites.

Thiel has also funneled money into right-wing institutions and figures that sow distrust in public institutions, especially higher education. Simultaneously, he and other members of the "techno-elite" invest in private learning incubators, surveillance infrastructure, and seasteading projects that imagine life after democracy—or after the planet.

These billionaires are preparing for Armageddon not by preventing it, but by monetizing it: funding bunkers in New Zealand, buying private islands, or investing in orbital real estate. As The Guardian once asked, “What happens when the people who make our futures no longer believe in the future?”

Enter Elon Musk, who brings to the Armageddon marketplace a particularly seductive brand of techno-messianism. Musk has built an empire not just on electric cars and space rockets, but on a narrative that humanity is doomed unless it follows his vision: Mars colonization, AI supremacy, and deregulated everything. His companies depend on government contracts, foreign labor, non-unionized workplaces, and public subsidies—all while he rails against the very institutions that enabled his rise.

Musk’s appeal lies in his ability to market collapse as innovation. Colonizing Mars is framed not as escapism for the rich, but as salvation for the species. Neuralink’s experiments on animals and humans are marketed as “progress.” Buying and gutting Twitter—now X—is portrayed as “free speech absolutism,” even as it becomes a haven for far-right propaganda and anti-intellectual conspiracy theories. Musk does not offer solutions for Earth. He sells a lifeboat for elites—and a live stream of the ship sinking for the rest.

The War on Higher Education: Enter Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, is one of the most visible faces of the new anti-intellectual populism. Kirk, who has no college degree himself, built a political empire by demonizing higher education and promoting a gospel of grievance. Funded in part by the same billionaire class that bankrolls tech libertarians like Thiel and lionizes Elon Musk, Kirk has launched aggressive campaigns to surveil, blacklist, and harass professors and students who challenge conservative orthodoxy.

His Turning Point “Professor Watchlist” is not just an attack on individuals—it is an assault on the very notion of critical inquiry. In Kirk’s universe, universities are not flawed institutions to be reformed but radical breeding grounds to be destroyed. He promotes a worldview in which faith is pure, facts are suspect, and feelings of persecution are monetized.

While Kirk claims to be fighting “Marxism” and “wokeness,” what he is actually selling is obedience—particularly to corporate power, Christian nationalism, and militarized borders. His audience is taught that the future is a war, and they must choose sides: us vs. them, believers vs. traitors, patriots vs. professors.

Naomi Klein and the Shock Doctrine of Now

Naomi Klein’s work, especially The Shock Doctrine, offers a crucial lens for understanding how crises—real or manufactured—are used to erode public institutions and consolidate wealth. The COVID-19 pandemic, mass shootings, climate catastrophes, and political chaos have each served as moments of opportunity for privatizers, war profiteers, and ideological extremists.

In her more recent writings, Klein explores how conspiracy culture and fascist-adjacent movements have merged with wellness grifts and anti-science ideologies to create a new reactionary consumer base. Higher education has been both target and tool in this ecosystem—either accused of being too “woke,” or silently complicit in the march toward corporate authoritarianism.

Musk, like Thiel and Kirk, has leveraged this blend of libertarianism and grievance politics—tapping into populist rage while making his wealth on the back of public resources. Together, they represent a new ruling class that doesn’t just tolerate ignorance—they capitalize on it.

“Freedom Cities”: Privatized Utopia, Public Disaster

A key component of the Armageddon economy is the “Freedom City” project—a concept championed by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and now embraced by Trump Republicans. On the surface, these cities promise deregulation, innovation, and technological advancement. But beneath the buzzwords is a vision of society in which public governance is replaced by corporate fiefdoms.

In Freedom Cities, there are no public universities—only credential mills optimized for employer branding. There are no town halls—only shareholder meetings. Laws are written by venture capitalists, not legislatures. These cities are not democratic experiments—they are controlled environments designed to ensure elite survival and labor discipline. Education is not about knowledge; it’s about code bootcamps, ideological training, and loyalty to corporate overlords.

Some Freedom City backers go so far as to frame these cities as escapes from the “decay” of American democracy. In this vision, the United States itself becomes disposable—its lands and labor extracted, its public institutions hollowed out, its higher education system replaced with behavioral conditioning and biometric surveillance.

Freedom Cities are the spatial manifestation of fatalistic capitalism—a place to survive the collapse that capitalism itself caused.

The Israel Factor

Nowhere is this more visible than in the militarization of university discourse around Israel and Palestine. Pro-Israel lobbying groups, sometimes in collaboration with groups like Turning Point USA and tech influencers on X, have used massive funding and public pressure to silence academic dissent, criminalize protest, and reshape curricula. Many elite universities have openly collaborated with defense contractors, some of whom profit from technologies tested on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

This is not merely about Israel—it is about the normalization of permanent war as a condition of life. It is about desensitizing the public to state violence, turning morality into a partisan debate, and monetizing surveillance and repression. These policies, developed in the name of “security,” are later imported back into the United States—on campuses, in classrooms, and across the border.

Selling the End of Knowledge

The university was once imagined as a refuge from the chaos of the world—a place to build better futures. But in this dystopian moment, education is being stripped for parts. Faculty are adjunctified and silenced. Student debt is an albatross. Basic humanities departments are being gutted, while programs in cybersecurity, defense studies, and corporate law are growing.

We are educating people to manage collapse, not prevent it.

Instead of cultivating critical thinkers, institutions churn out bureaucrats for empire and engineers for oligarchs. The architects of Armageddon do not fear higher education—they co-opt it, fund it, rebrand it, and turn it against its original purpose.

Preventing Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

To resist the forces selling Armageddon, we must reclaim higher education as a public good—one grounded in ethics, truth-seeking, and planetary survival. We must refuse the logic of fatalism and reject the grifters who profit from despair. And we must name the forces—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk, the boosters of Freedom Cities, defense contractors, and neoliberal university presidents—that see crisis not as a call for solidarity, but as a sales pitch.

Because if we don’t, the end of the world won’t come with fire or flood.
It will come with a branded dome, a loyalty app, biometric gates—and a tuition bill.

---

The Higher Education Inquirer is committed to investigative journalism that challenges elite narratives and exposes structural injustices in academia and beyond.

Tech Titans, Ideologues, and the Future of American Higher Education

American higher education is under pressure from within and without—squeezed by financial strain, declining enrollment, political hostility, and technological disruption. But the greatest challenge may be coming from a group of powerful outsiders—figures with deep influence in politics, technology, and media—who are actively reshaping how education is perceived, delivered, and valued. Among them: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Alex Karp, and Charlie Kirk. Each brings a different ideology and strategy, but their combined influence represents an existential threat to traditional colleges and universities.

Donald Trump’s second rise to power has included a full-spectrum attack on elite and public institutions of higher learning. From threats to strip funding from schools that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, to freezing billions in research grants at elite institutions like Harvard, Trump has positioned universities as enemies in a broader cultural and political war. His proposed education policy emphasizes trade schools and short-term credentials over liberal arts and research, while his administration has floated revoking accreditation from institutions that resist his agenda. Rather than investing in public education, the Trump agenda calls for punishment, privatization, and obedience. And for institutions that don’t comply, there are growing threats of taxation, defunding, and public humiliation.

Elon Musk is undermining higher education in a different way. Musk has openly mocked the need for college degrees, suggesting that “you can learn anything online for free.” While that’s partly rhetoric, it’s also a blueprint for disruption. His experimental school Astra Nova already offers a glimpse into a post-institutional future—one that favors creative, independent thinking over traditional credentialing. Now, with plans to launch the Texas Institute of Technology & Science, Musk is betting that elite training can happen outside the bounds of accreditation and federal oversight. Musk’s future is technocratic and libertarian, with universities seen as bloated, slow-moving, and culturally out of touch.

Peter Thiel’s vision is even more radical. Thiel has compared American higher education to the Catholic Church before the Reformation—rich, corrupt, and intellectually bankrupt. His Thiel Fellowship pays young people to skip college entirely, offering $100,000 to start companies instead of accumulating debt. He argues that universities reward conformity and delay adulthood. For Thiel, colleges don’t just fail to prepare students—they actively mislead them. His endgame is a decentralized, market-driven system in which talent rises through initiative and capital, not credentials.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, presents yet another threat—this time from artificial intelligence. Altman doesn’t reject learning, but he does question the institutions that monopolize it. With tools like ChatGPT and future AI tutors, Altman envisions personalized, real-time learning for everyone, everywhere. In this model, universities risk becoming obsolete—not because they are wrong, but because they are too slow and too expensive. Altman has also pushed universities to take a more active role in shaping AI policy; if they don’t, the tech industry will do it for them. The message is clear: adapt or be replaced.

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, is building a new kind of corporate university. Through programs like the Palantir Meritocracy Fellowship and “Semester at Palantir,” Karp is recruiting students directly out of elite schools—particularly those disillusioned by what he sees as anti-Israel sentiment or campus censorship. These programs offer practical, high-paid experience that bypasses traditional academic pathways. Karp’s vision doesn’t require the elimination of universities—it just renders them unnecessary for the most competitive jobs in tech and intelligence. His model suggests a future in which corporations, not universities, decide who is qualified.

Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, has weaponized the culture war to delegitimize higher education entirely. Kirk’s brand of activism portrays universities as corrupt, anti-American indoctrination centers. Through social media campaigns, donor networks, and student chapters, he has built an infrastructure of resistance against academic institutions. His goal isn’t reform—it’s replacement. Through efforts like the Freedom College Alliance, Kirk is helping to build a parallel educational system rooted in conservative Christian values, classical curricula, and ideological purity. In Kirk’s world, higher education isn’t broken—it’s the enemy.

Together, these six men are shaping a new, fragmented future for American education. Some want to burn it down. Some want to replace it. Some want to privatize it or profit from its collapse. What they share is a conviction that traditional universities no longer serve their intended purpose—and that a new model, rooted in tech, politics, or religion, must take its place.

This isn’t a theoretical debate. Universities are already responding—cutting liberal arts programs, racing to implement AI tools, rebranding themselves as career accelerators, and seeking favor with donors who increasingly resemble these disruptive outsiders. For those who resist, the future may include not just funding cuts, but political investigations, lawsuits, and public smear campaigns.

Higher education faces a stark choice. It can double down on its public mission—defending critical thinking, civic engagement, and social mobility—or it can retreat into elite credentialing and survival mode. What it cannot do is ignore the forces gathering at its gates. These forces are rich, powerful, ideologically driven—and they are not waiting for permission to remake the system.

A Brief History of U.S. Financial Downturns and Collapses: Speculation, Deregulation, Environmental Stress, and the Crises to Come

Since the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States has experienced repeated financial collapses—economic convulsions shaped by cycles of speculation, deregulation, and systemic inequality. While official narratives often frame these crises as isolated, unexpected events, the truth is more systemic. Time and again, economic downturns have been driven by elite greed, weakened regulatory institutions, and the exploitation of both people and the planet. Today, amid climate chaos, digital finance, and eroding public trust, the United States stands on the brink of another, potentially greater, financial reckoning.

The country’s first financial panic, in 1792, was triggered by speculative schemes in government securities. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s efforts to stabilize the new economy through the Bank of the United States led to rampant speculation on public debt. A brief crisis followed when overextended investors panicked. A few years later, the Panic of 1797 resulted from overleveraged land investments and a tightening of British credit. These early shocks revealed a fundamental pattern: deregulated markets rewarded insiders and punished everyone else.

Throughout the 19th century, financial panics became a fixture of American capitalism. The Panic of 1819, the nation’s first true depression, followed a credit boom tied to western land speculation and aggressive lending by the Second Bank of the United States. As cotton prices collapsed and farmers defaulted on loans, banks failed, and mass unemployment followed. The Panic of 1837, catalyzed by President Andrew Jackson’s dismantling of the national bank and his hard-money policies, triggered a deep depression that lasted through most of the 1840s. The financial collapse of 1857, in turn, stemmed from global trade imbalances, railroad speculation, and the failure of major financial institutions like the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company.

Even at this early stage, economic expansion was fueled by environmental exploitation. Railroads cut through forests and Indigenous territories. Monoculture farming destroyed topsoil. Western land, viewed as limitless, was extracted for immediate profit, with no regard for sustainability or stewardship.

The late 19th century’s Gilded Age brought a series of devastating crashes that reflected the unchecked power of monopolists and financiers. The Panic of 1873, known as the beginning of the Long Depression, began with the collapse of Jay Cooke & Company, a bank overinvested in railroads. The depression persisted for years and was marked by widespread unemployment, strikes, and a backlash against corporate excess. In 1893, another railroad bubble burst, leading to bank runs, industrial failures, and one of the worst economic downturns of the century. At every turn, environmental damage—from deforestation to mining disasters—intensified.

The 20th century began with new waves of speculation and consolidation, culminating in the infamous crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. In the 1920s, the U.S. economy boomed on the back of industrial expansion, easy credit, and a largely unregulated stock market. Wall Street profits masked deep inequality and rural poverty. When the bubble burst in October 1929, the collapse wiped out millions of investors and plunged the country into a decade-long depression. Environmental catastrophe followed in the form of the Dust Bowl, a man-made disaster brought about by overfarming and soil mismanagement across the Great Plains. Families lost both their farms and their future, creating a mass migration of the economically displaced.

In response, the Roosevelt administration implemented the New Deal, which included financial reforms like the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and public investment in infrastructure. But by the late 20th century, many of these safeguards were systematically dismantled. The wave of deregulation began in earnest during the Reagan era. The Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s, a direct result of financial deregulation and speculative lending, cost American taxpayers more than $160 billion. At the same time, environmental protections were weakened, leading to an explosion of toxic sites and a spike in chronic health problems, especially in low-income communities.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the rise of Silicon Valley and the dot-com bubble marked a new chapter in speculative capitalism. Investors poured money into tech startups with little revenue or product. The bubble burst in 2000, wiping out trillions in paper wealth and exposing the fragility of digital economies built on hype rather than value. This was followed by the more devastating crash of 2008, the result of subprime mortgage fraud, unregulated derivatives, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999. Wall Street firms packaged risky home loans into complex securities and sold them across the globe. When the housing market collapsed, so did the global financial system.

The 2008 crash led to the Great Recession, which resulted in millions of foreclosures, lost jobs, and deep cuts to public services. African American and Latinx communities, already targeted by predatory lenders, were especially hard hit. At the same time, sprawling housing developments—many built in environmentally fragile areas—were abandoned or devalued, further highlighting the links between financial speculation and ecological risk.

More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a sharp recession in 2020. Lockdowns and mass illness disrupted labor markets, supply chains, and public institutions. The federal government responded with massive fiscal and monetary stimulus, which lifted financial markets even as millions lost jobs or left the workforce. Low interest rates and stimulus checks fueled speculative booms in housing, stocks, and digital assets like cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency, originally touted as a decentralized alternative to Wall Street, became a magnet for speculative excess. Bitcoin and Ethereum surged to record highs, only to crash repeatedly. The collapse of major crypto exchanges like FTX in 2022 revealed rampant fraud, regulatory gaps, and a new frontier of financial exploitation. In addition to its financial instability, cryptocurrency mining has significant environmental costs, consuming more electricity than many small nations and accelerating carbon emissions in areas powered by fossil fuels.

The current moment is defined by overlapping crises: speculative bubbles in tech and crypto, a fragile labor market, worsening inequality, and a rapidly destabilizing climate. Insurance companies are retreating from high-risk areas due to wildfires, floods, and hurricanes. Crop failures and water shortages threaten food security. Global supply chains are vulnerable to both pandemics and extreme weather. At the same time, deregulatory fervor continues, with efforts to weaken environmental laws, consumer protections, and financial oversight.

If history is any guide, these trends point toward the likelihood of a greater collapse—one not confined to Wall Street but cascading through housing, education, healthcare, and global systems. Future downturns may not be triggered by a single event like a stock crash or pandemic but by an interconnected series of shocks: climate disaster, resource wars, digital speculation, and institutional failure.

Higher education will not be spared. Universities increasingly rely on endowments tied to volatile markets, student debt, and partnerships with speculative industries. The growth of for-profit colleges, online "robocolleges," and gig-economy credentialism has created a hollow system that produces degrees but not economic security. Many young Americans—especially those from working-class and marginalized communities—now face a lifetime of debt and precarious employment. They are the product of a financialized education system that promised upward mobility and delivered downward pressure.

In the end, financial collapses in the U.S. have never been merely economic—they have been moral and political failures as well. They reflect a system that too often prioritizes speculation over stability, deregulation over justice, and private gain over public good. Some of the wealthiest figures in this system—like Peter Thiel and other techno-libertarian futurists—actively invest in escape plans: buying bunkers in New Zealand, funding longevity startups, or betting on crypto anarchy, all while anticipating societal collapse. But most Americans don’t have the luxury of opting out. What we need instead is a commitment to rebuilding systems grounded in equity, sustainability, and democratic accountability. While the risks ahead are real, so are the opportunities—especially if the people most affected by past collapses organize, speak out, and help shape a more resilient and just future.

For more critical perspectives on inequality, education, and economic justice, follow the Higher Education Inquirer.

Rehumanization in Higher Education: An Alternative to Maximizing Panic and Profit

It's questionable whether the Earth's tech bros (e.g. Gates, Musk, Bezos, Thiel, Zuckerberg) really believe in democracy, but they do believe in enriching themselves, like the robber barons of the 19th century, or going back even further, to myths of flawed rulers and gods of ancient times. A few of these bros, believing mostly in themselves, have suggested that democracy is incompatible with progress. There are probably more of these elites (and their backers) who agree, but on the back stage. 

Today, there are apps for just about everything, and there are some good ones. But there are few signs that the most recent technological innovations have improved the overall existence of humans, the planet we live on, or the many other species with share the planet with. Life is great for some, good for many, and not as happy for many more. Folks feel anxious, alienated, and dehumanized and for good reason.

Rehumanization: An Alternative to Maximizing Panic and Profit 

Despite all this new technology, climate change is an existential threat and its consequences are looming. Wars and conflicts are raging around the world and there are threats of more war. Stock prices have risen, but American Quality of Life (QOL) has not improved significantly. Information for the masses is laced with toxic propaganda. Mental illness is rising. US life expectancy has plateaued. Debt is a normal part of middle class life. People are more sedentary and obese. 

For many in this new tech world, sh*t jobs are plentiful and good jobs are hard to find. Bitcoin is an alternative (and speculative) currency used for illegal and predatory activity. Online teachers and content creators are throwaway items. You can have prepared food, of varying quality, delivered to your door. Pornography is omnipresent. Mass surveillance is accepted and normalized. Brutality and genocide can be watched like entertainment, to be played over and over or swept away at the touch of a finger. Online robocollege education is available 24/7/365 and cheating is rampant, but for many a degree is just a ticket to be punched in a world of hypercredentialism.   

Some of us are half-conscious of the algorithms of oppression and those who dictate the code, but we have enough faith in technology and the tech bros that it will be ok if we accept certain social realities--and don't fight it or challenge it. If we just go along. However sick, pathological, or evil it is, no matter how greedy these tech bros and their enablers are, "it is what it is." 

How is this progress? And does it have to be this way? We don't think so. There are even models to bring light into the approaching darkness.

That's why we want to highlight the bright spots in higher education in a series called the Rehumanization of Higher Ed. Stay tuned. 

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

This article is an update to our June 2025 Higher Education Inquirer report, Tech Titans, Ideologues, and the Future of American Higher Education. Since that report, the landscape of higher education has evolved dramatically. New developments — the increasing influence of billionaire philanthropists like Larry Ellison, private-equity figures such as Marc Rowan, and the shocking assassination of Charlie Kirk — have intensified the pressures on traditional colleges and universities. This update examines how these forces intersect with ideology, governance, financial power, and institutional vulnerability to reshape the future of American higher education.

American higher education is under pressure from multiple directions, including financial strain, declining enrollment, political hostility, and technological disruption. Yet perhaps the greatest challenge comes from powerful outsiders who are actively reshaping how education is perceived, delivered, and valued. Figures such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Alex Karp, Larry Ellison, and Marc Rowan are steering resources, ideology, and policy in ways that threaten traditional universities’ missions. Each brings a distinct ideology and strategy, but their combined influence represents an existential pressure on the system.

Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, has pledged to give away nearly all his fortune and already directs hundreds of millions toward research, medicine, and education-related causes. Through the Ellison Institute of Technology, he funds overseas campuses and scholarship programs at institutions like the University of Oxford. Ellison represents a “disruptor” who does not challenge degrees outright but reshapes the allocation of educational resources toward elite, globally networked research.

The University of Phoenix cyberbreach is more than another entry in the long list of attacks on higher education. It is the clearest evidence yet of how private equity, aging enterprise software, and institutional neglect have converged to create a catastrophic cybersecurity landscape across American colleges and universities. What happened in the summer of 2025 was not an unavoidable act of foreign aggression. It was the culmination of years of cost-cutting, inadequate oversight, and a misplaced faith in legacy vendors that no longer control their own risks.

The story begins with the Russian-speaking Clop cyber-extortion group, one of the most sophisticated data-theft organizations operating today. In early August, Clop quietly began exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability in Oracle’s E-Business Suite, a platform widely used for payroll, procurement, student employment, vendor relations, and financial aid administration. Oracle’s EBS system, decades old and deeply embedded across higher education, was never designed for modern threat environments. As soon as Clop identified the flaw—later assigned CVE-2025-61882—the group launched a coordinated campaign that compromised dozens of major institutions before Oracle even acknowledged the problem.

Among the most heavily affected institutions was the University of Phoenix. Attackers gained access to administrative systems and exfiltrated highly sensitive data: names, Social Security numbers, bank accounts, routing numbers, vendor records, and financial-aid-related information belonging to students, faculty, staff, and contractors. The breach took place in August, but Phoenix did not disclose the incident until November 21, and only after Clop publicly listed the university on its extortion site. Even after forced disclosure, Phoenix offered only vague assurances about “unauthorized access” and refused to provide concrete numbers or a full accounting of what had been stolen.

Phoenix was not alone. Harvard University confirmed that Clop had stolen more than a terabyte of data from its Oracle systems. Dartmouth College acknowledged that personal and financial information for more than a thousand individuals had been accessed, though the total is almost certainly much higher. At the University of Pennsylvania, administrators said only that unauthorized access had occurred, declining to detail the scale. What links these incidents is not prestige, geography, or mission. It is dependency on Oracle’s aging administrative software and a sector-wide failure to adapt to a threat environment dominated by globally coordinated cybercrime operations.

Marc Rowan, co-founder and CEO of Apollo Global Management, has leveraged private-equity wealth to influence higher education governance. He gave $50 million to Penn’s Wharton School, funding faculty and research initiatives and has recently pushed alumni to withhold donations over issues of campus policy and antisemitism. Rowan also helped shape the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence, linking federal funding to compliance with ideologically driven standards. He exemplifies how private wealth can steer university governance and policy, reshaping priorities on a national scale. Together, Ellison and Rowan illustrate the twin dynamics of power and influence destabilizing higher education: immense private wealth, and the ambition to reshape institutions according to their own vision.

With these powerful outsiders shaping the landscape, traditional universities increasingly face pressures to prioritize elite, donor-driven projects over broad public missions. Private funding favors high-prestige initiatives over public-access education, and large contributors can dictate leadership and policy directions. University priorities shift toward profitable or ideologically aligned projects, creating a two-tier system in which elite, insulated institutions grow while public universities struggle to compete, widening disparities in access and quality.

The stakes of this upheaval have become tragically tangible. The assassination of Charlie Kirk in 2025 was a horrific reminder that conflicts over ideology, money, and influence are not abstract. Violence against public figures engaged in higher education policy and advocacy underscores the intensity of polarization and the human costs of these struggles. Such events cast a shadow over campuses, donor boards, and political advocacy alike, highlighting that the battle over the future of education is contested not only in boardrooms and legislatures but in life and death.

Students face shrinking access to affordable, publicly supported higher education, particularly those without means or connections to elite institutions. Faculty may encounter restrictions on academic freedom and institutional autonomy, as donor preferences and political pressures increasingly shape hiring, curriculum, and governance. Society risks losing the traditional public mission of universities — fostering critical thinking, civic engagement, and broad social mobility — as education becomes more commodified, prioritizing elite outcomes over the public good.

Building on our June 2025 report, this update underscores the accelerating influence of tech titans, ideologues, and billionaire philanthropists. Figures such as Ellison and Rowan are reshaping not just funding streams but governance structures, while the assassination of Charlie Kirk painfully illustrates the human stakes involved. Traditional colleges face a stark choice: maintain their public mission — democratic access, critical inquiry, and civic purpose — or retreat into survival mode, prioritizing donor dollars, corporate partnerships, and prestige. The pressures highlighted in June are not only continuing but intensifying, and the consequences — for students, faculty, and society — remain profound.

---

Sources

Fortune: Larry Ellison pledges nearly all fortune (fortune.com)
Times Higher Education: Ellison funds Oxford scholars (timeshighereducation.com)
Almanac UPenn: Rowan gift to Wharton (almanac.upenn.edu)
Inquirer: Rowan donor pressure at Penn (inquirer.com)
Inquirer: Rowan and Trump’s Compact (inquirer.com)
Higher Education Inquirer original article (highereducationinquirer.org)

The Law of Least Effort: Why Billionaires—and Elite Universities—Prefer Stale Ideas Over Bold Thinking

In the modern mythology of Silicon Valley and the Ivy League, billionaires and elite universities are imagined as bold visionaries, pushing humanity forward with daring innovation and world-changing ideas. But scratch the surface of this mythology and what you’ll often find instead is a kind of intellectual laziness—a preference for warmed-over ideas from mid-century science fiction, recycled neoliberal dogma, and technological determinism masquerading as insight.

This is the Law of Least Effort, not in physical labor, but in thought: a cognitive shortcut that prioritizes ideological safety over intellectual risk. Rather than genuinely exploring new paradigms or investing in critical inquiry, the ultra-rich and the institutions that train them tend to return to narrow, well-worn frameworks that preserve their worldview and their power.

Billionaire Boredom Disguised as Innovation

When Elon Musk buys into the fantasy of colonizing Mars, or Peter Thiel pines for libertarian seasteads and eternal life, these are not bold, new ideas—they’re pale echoes of Golden Age science fiction from the 1950s and 60s, regurgitated without reflection. These concepts were radical when Asimov or Heinlein explored them in fiction, but today they are escapist crutches for wealthy men who can’t (or won’t) confront the terrestrial problems their own wealth exacerbates.

The same goes for the obsession with AI, blockchain, or “effective altruism.” These are often less about solving real social issues and more about technocratic avoidance: sidestepping messy problems like poverty, racism, and labor exploitation by fantasizing that code or capital will save us. Billionaires don’t fund utopian social science—they fund Singularity University.

Elite Universities: Safe Havens for Tired Ideas

Elite universities, supposedly the engines of radical thought, are frequently the opposite. These institutions, particularly those with massive endowments like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, are often intellectually risk-averse. Their financial security has made them more conservative, not less.

Rather than promoting critical or emergent perspectives—particularly those from marginalized communities or interdisciplinary thought—these schools cling to narrow forms of prestige knowledge: economics departments that treat market forces as natural law, international relations programs built around Cold War paradigms, or law schools that churn out corporate lawyers while ignoring structural injustice.

Even when elite universities gesture toward innovation, it's often market-driven or Silicon Valley-aligned. Interdisciplinary centers or “impact hubs” are structured to attract corporate partnerships, not challenge the foundations of economic and social power. Faculty who question capitalism, settler colonialism, or the ideology of meritocracy may find themselves pushed to the margins—if not altogether silenced by “donor sensitivities.”

An Educated Class That’s Intellectually Sedated

The elite graduates of these universities—many of whom become the consultants, bankers, tech executives, and policy shapers of tomorrow—are often not trained to be critical thinkers but intellectually domesticated agents of the status quo. Their version of education is a credentialing process, not a transformative one.

They read the canon, cite the correct theorists, nod to diversity in DEI statements, and pursue change only when it doesn't disrupt existing structures. This is intellectual effort only in the performative sense. The goal is fluency in the language of power, not the courage to question it.

The Cost of Cognitive Complacency

What’s lost in this system is incalculable: bold ideas, radical futures, deep ethical inquiry. Instead of investing in indigenous knowledge systems, speculative Black futurisms, transformative pedagogy, or critiques of extractive capitalism, we get another think tank report on “human capital optimization.”

This isn't just boring—it's dangerous. The world is facing intersecting crises: ecological collapse, rising authoritarianism, mass inequality. These cannot be solved with recycled ideas from libertarian science fiction or econometrics models from the Reagan era. They require intellectual courage, democratic imagination, and a willingness to fundamentally reimagine our institutions.

But that kind of thinking doesn’t come from those clinging to the Law of Least Effort. It comes from those excluded from the halls of elite power, working at the margins, asking the uncomfortable questions.

New Worlds Require New Thinking

The problem with the billionaires and the elite universities that shape them isn’t just that they hoard wealth. It’s that they hoard thought. They preserve a narrow intellectual landscape where old ideas are recycled, and challenging paradigms are dismissed as utopian or impractical.

If society wants to move forward, we need to stop mistaking wealth for wisdom, and prestige for insight. It’s time to break the mental monopoly of the elites and invest in thinkers, communities, and institutions that aren’t afraid to do the hard intellectual work—the kind that doesn’t just repeat the past but dares to invent the future.