Moral Capital and Locus of Control

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

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

Quality of Life as Moral Imperative

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

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

The Industry’s Manufactured Moral Capital

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

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

Reclaiming Moral Capital 

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

Temperance

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

Celibacy

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

Critical Thinking

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

Solidarity

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

Nonviolent Strategies in an Era of Global Threat

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

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

Mass Surveillance as a Threat to Moral Agency

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

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

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

Toward a More Honest Locus of Control

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

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

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

Fahmi Quadir, Adtalem, and the High-Stakes Ethics of Short-Selling

In the realm of Wall Street, few figures challenge the system from within quite like Fahmi Quadir. Known in financial circles as “The Assassin,” Quadir has made a name—and a mission—for herself by exposing fraud and predatory behavior in publicly traded companies. But unlike most short-sellers chasing profits on volatility, Quadir brings a moral clarity to her work, emphasizing that short-selling can be an instrument of justice when practiced with rigor, purpose, and transparency. Her recent campaign against Adtalem Global Education, a for-profit college conglomerate, underscores the power—and danger—of this approach.

Fahmi Quadir is the founder and Chief Investment Officer of Safkhet Capital, a short-only hedge fund she launched in 2017 at the age of 26. Safkhet is not your typical Wall Street operation. Built on deep forensic research and a mission to hold corporations accountable, the firm takes bold, high-conviction positions against companies it believes are engaged in deception, exploitation, or fraud.

Quadir's career trajectory is as unlikely as it is impressive. She originally planned to pursue a PhD in mathematics, but a series of encounters at New York’s National Museum of Mathematics—funded by quantitative finance giants like Renaissance Technologies—introduced her to a world where market dynamics and moral imperatives could collide. She quickly realized that capital markets held not just monetary power, but the potential to drive social change. With no formal finance background, she was identified by hedge fund insiders as a natural fit for short-selling. She dove in, eventually appearing in the 2018 Netflix documentary Dirty Money, which chronicled her pivotal role in the takedown of Valeant Pharmaceuticals.

In February 2024, Quadir spoke at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business during an event hosted by the Corporations and Society Initiative (CASI). In a conversation moderated by JD/MBA student Thomas Newcomb, she unpacked her approach to short-selling—one defined by intellectual rigor, emotional resilience, and moral conviction.

"Short selling means you borrow shares from your bank, sell them, and hope the price drops so you can buy them back at a lower price and pocket the difference," Quadir explained. “But prices can go up infinitely. The potential losses on a short are also infinite.”

That risk, she emphasized, is not theoretical—it’s lived. “You need to withstand a lot of pain,” she said. “Short-selling isn't for everyone. It’s about doing uncomfortable work, challenging popular narratives, and being willing to look like a fool—until you're proven right.”

And yet, in Quadir’s view, this discomfort is necessary. “Shorting is important for the functioning of our markets. It provides liquidity and price discovery. But in a tiny corner of the market, there are those of us who are using short selling as a way to expose injustice and correct bad capital market behavior.”

Quadir focuses on companies she believes are harming customers or committing fraud, rather than chasing momentum or hype. “We avoid situations of mass delusion,” she noted, “because mass delusion can stay delusional forever.”

Her most famous case remains the takedown of Wirecard AG, a German electronic payments firm that collapsed in 2020 amid massive accounting fraud. Safkhet's 25% short position on Wirecard was the culmination of years of research and collaboration with whistleblowers and law enforcement. It was a textbook example of what Quadir calls "story-driven" short-selling—piecing together a company's past to uncover the rot at its core.

She recounted a chilling origin story involving Wirecard’s founders, Markus Braun and Jan Marsalek—who is now a confirmed Russian agent—and an Austrian billionaire with ties to adult entertainment who allegedly used intimidation tactics to force a takeover. “When that’s part of your origin story,” she said, “whatever comes after is going to be epic.”

But Quadir’s sights have recently turned toward a different kind of fraud—one operating under the guise of education. In January 2024, Safkhet Capital released a detailed short report on Adtalem Global Education, labeling it a “toxic byproduct of an imperfect higher education system.” The report highlighted Adtalem’s dependence on federal student aid—more than 70% of its revenue—and exposed dismal outcomes at its institutions, including Walden and Chamberlain universities, both of which serve a disproportionately high number of Black and working-class women.

The report also noted a financial responsibility score of 0.2 out of 3.0—far below the threshold used by the U.S. Department of Education to flag institutions at risk of mismanaging federal funds. In Quadir’s view, Adtalem wasn’t just financially shaky—it was “completely uninvestable.”

The market agreed. Following Safkhet’s report, Adtalem’s stock dropped 19% in a single day, with further losses in the days that followed. The company attempted to halt trading and accused Quadir of “short and distort” tactics—a claim that fell flat. “It was very satisfying after that hold was released to see the market validate our thesis,” she said. “Their strategy backfired.”

At Stanford, Quadir reflected on why she made the Adtalem report public: “There was an informational vacuum around this company. The shareholder base was largely passive. No one was doing the kind of research or analysis we were doing.”

But Quadir is quick to point out that short-sellers alone cannot fix a broken system. “Nothing is going to change if there isn’t enforcement,” she said. “We need to have some high-profile cases where people go to jail. These characters continue to get away with it or settle, and what happens? Their stocks go up.”

She remains hopeful, however, that markets—if given the right incentives—can self-correct. “I think the greatest believers in market efficiency have to be short sellers. I believe capital markets can correct bad behavior, and that benefits all of us.”

Short-selling, when practiced ethically, is not about sabotage. It is about storytelling, investigation, and risk—a lot of risk. Quadir’s approach requires patience, emotional stamina, and intellectual courage. It is not for the faint of heart. But in a world where regulators are often captured and media attention can be fleeting, short-sellers like Quadir play an essential, if controversial, role.

Her work against Adtalem is not just a case study in financial activism. It is a call to reexamine how markets reward failure, how federal funds prop up predatory institutions, and how silence—especially in higher education—can be bought. As Quadir puts it, “We have the power to affect change. We just have to be willing to take the hits.”

Sources

This article draws significantly from the February 2024 Stanford Graduate School of Business event, A Conversation with Fahmi Quadir, Wall Street’s Fearless Short Seller, hosted by the Corporations and Society Initiative (CASI). The event transcript and summary are available at https://casi.stanford.edu/news/conversation-fahmi-quadir-wall-streets-fearless-short-seller.

Additional information was compiled from the Safkhet Capital short report on Adtalem Global Education (January 2024), publicly available statements by Adtalem Global Education, coverage of Adtalem’s stock movement by MarketWatch and Bloomberg, investigations into Wirecard by the Financial Times, and Quadir’s portrayal in the 2018 Netflix documentary Dirty Money.

Legal responses to Safkhet’s report were also noted from Pomerantz LLP and Block & Leviton, which opened shareholder investigations into Adtalem in January 2024. Data from the U.S. Department of Education regarding Title IV funding and financial responsibility scores was used to contextualize Adtalem’s regulatory risk.

For further background on short-selling’s role in price discovery and enforcement gaps in higher education, see related coverage in The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed.

Presidents, Trustees, Donors, and the Machinery of Genocide: Higher Education’s Complicity in War and Fossil Capital

In a time of global climate catastrophe, endless war, and mounting social unrest, the American higher education system—ostensibly a sanctuary of ethics and enlightenment—has shown its allegiance not to peace or justice, but to power. The presidents of elite universities, their boards of trustees, and their wealthiest donors now stand exposed as key cogs in a machinery that profits from genocide, fossil fuel destruction, and war profiteering. They are not simply bystanders to global injustice; they are its enablers and its beneficiaries.

The Role of University Presidents

University presidents, many with backgrounds in business or law rather than academia, have become institutional CEOs rather than moral stewards. Their silence—or worse, their euphemistic statements—in the face of war crimes and environmental devastation reveals not neutrality but complicity. As students protest U.S.-backed wars and apartheid policies abroad, these leaders respond not with dialogue, but with surveillance, mass arrests, and the suppression of speech.

The university president today is less a defender of academic freedom and more a manager of reputational risk. In the face of genocide in Gaza or mass civilian deaths in Yemen, many presidents remain silent or offer carefully crafted non-statements that betray the moral bankruptcy at the heart of neoliberal academia. Their true constituents are not students or faculty—but the donors and trustees who demand institutional alignment with corporate and political interests.

Trustees as Enforcers of the Status Quo

University trustees are often drawn from the ruling class: hedge fund managers, defense contractors, fossil fuel executives, and venture capitalists. These are not individuals selected for their commitment to education or the common good. They are chosen precisely because of their wealth and their proximity to power.

Their presence on governing boards ensures that universities continue to invest in private equity, fossil fuels, and weapons manufacturers. They help enforce austerity for faculty and students while protecting multi-million-dollar endowments from divestment campaigns. When students call for cutting ties with Israeli defense contractors or fossil fuel companies, it is trustees who push back the hardest.

Donors as Puppeteers

Donors exert a quiet but overwhelming influence on policy, curriculum, and campus climate. Mega-donors like Stephen Schwarzman, Kenneth Griffin, and Leonard Lauder have given hundreds of millions to name buildings, shape public discourse, and suppress dissent. Often, these donations come with invisible strings—ideological conditions that shift the priorities of entire departments or shut down lines of critical inquiry.

In the case of fossil fuels, large gifts from oil and gas interests help sustain "energy centers" at top institutions, which in turn push pro-industry research and obstruct climate activism. In terms of war, donations from defense industry executives or foreign governments with poor human rights records ensure a steady normalization of militarism on campus.

Even genocide, once a line that no institution dared cross, is now rendered a matter of "complex geopolitics" by the same donors who pour money into think tanks and academic centers that sanitize ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

Genocide and the Academy

It is no longer possible to ignore the role of elite institutions in justifying or supporting genocidal policies. When universities accept grants and partnerships with governments or corporations involved in mass displacement, ethnic cleansing, or indiscriminate bombing, they become accomplices in atrocity.

During the ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza, for example, several major U.S. universities have contracts or investments tied to Israeli defense firms or U.S. arms manufacturers whose weapons are used against civilians. Students calling for divestment face violent repression, police brutality, and academic retaliation. The pursuit of justice is punished. The preservation of power is prioritized.

Fossil Fuels and the Death Economy

Despite decades of research proving the existential threat of fossil fuels, many university endowments remain deeply invested in oil, gas, and coal. The divestment movement, led primarily by students, has scored some victories—but these are often cosmetic. Institutions may pull direct holdings while maintaining exposure through private equity or index funds.

Fossil fuel interests also shape research agendas, sponsor misleading "carbon capture" or "clean energy" projects, and silence environmental whistleblowers. Professors who speak out risk losing funding. Departments that challenge fossil capital are marginalized. The truth, as always, is inconvenient.

War as a University Business Model

Finally, the war economy permeates American higher education at every level. Defense contracts support engineering departments. ROTC programs and military recruiting are embedded in campus life. Universities run weapons labs, receive funding from DARPA, and participate in Department of Defense research initiatives. The "military-academic-industrial complex" is not an abstraction—it is the everyday reality of higher ed.

Many of these contracts directly support weapons development used in current conflicts. And as with fossil fuels, the system is built to insulate the university from moral scrutiny. War is framed as "security research." Genocide is called "a contested political issue." Exploitation is rendered invisible through language.

Toward a Reckoning

The American university must decide: Will it continue to serve as a laundering machine for violence, fossil capital, and authoritarian control? Or can it reimagine itself as a truly democratic institution—answerable not to trustees and donors, but to the communities it serves?

That transformation will not come from the top. It will come from students occupying campus lawns, adjuncts organizing for fair wages, and the public demanding transparency and divestment. The reckoning is long overdue.

Until then, university presidents, trustees, and donors will remain what they have become: polished stewards of empire, cloaked in Ivy and moral evasion.

The Higher Education Inquirer continues to investigate the political economy of higher ed, exposing how institutions prioritize power and profit over people and planet.

Stephen Ashley’s Gift and the Reputational Laundering of Elite Wealth

In December 2025, Cornell University announced a $55 million gift from alumnus Stephen B. Ashley to endow the newly named Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment. The university presented the donation as a transformative investment in sustainability, global development, and interdisciplinary research. Yet behind the headlines of generosity lies a pattern that has come to define elite higher education: the use of philanthropy to launder reputations and sanitize wealth accumulated through systems that produce widespread harm.

Ashley’s career exemplifies this dynamic. As a longtime real estate investor and head of The Ashley Companies, he amassed significant wealth. His tenure on the board of Fannie Mae, including as chairman in the mid-2000s, coincided with periods of accounting irregularities, risky mortgage practices, and systemic failures in governance. Fannie Mae’s collapse during the 2008 financial crisis devastated millions of Americans, particularly low-income and minority households, yet board members and executives largely escaped personal consequences. Ashley’s wealth, in part derived from this environment, is now being funneled into a university named for him — transforming historical responsibility into a narrative of generosity.

The pattern extends beyond domestic finance. Ashley also serves on the Founders Council of the Middle East Investment Initiative (MEII), a nonprofit focused on private-sector development in the Middle East. While MEII frames itself as a promoter of economic growth and development, critics argue that such organizations operate within a global financial ecosystem that prioritizes investor stability and elite networks over democratic accountability or local economic agency. Participation in these initiatives may be legal, even philanthropic, but they reinforce Ashley’s image as a global benefactor without confronting the broader systemic power he wields.

Cornell, like many elite institutions, accepts such gifts with minimal scrutiny, emphasizing the moral and intellectual good the donation enables while obscuring the histories of harm that made the wealth possible. Naming a school dedicated to equity, sustainability, and global development after a figure linked to financial crisis and speculative practices exemplifies the reputational laundering function universities serve for wealthy donors. The institution converts fortunes built in high-stakes, opaque, or socially harmful arenas into lasting prestige, moral capital, and scholarly legitimacy — all while reinforcing its own image as an engine of public good.

This is not a question of legality. Ashley’s wealth is largely untarnished in the courts. It is a question of accountability, ethics, and institutional values. By turning wealth into permanent naming rights, universities like Cornell signal that elite power can be absolved through philanthropy, creating a structural dynamic where generosity replaces responsibility, and reputation is more durable than accountability.

For students, faculty, and the public interested in environmental justice, social equity, and global development, the contradiction is stark. The same systems that generate inequality now fund the study and critique of inequality itself. Elite institutions benefit materially and symbolically from the work of those who profited from structural harm, even as the original consequences fade from public memory. Until universities confront this tension, higher education will continue to function as a reputational laundromat for elite wealth, transforming past systemic damage into present prestige.

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Sources

Cornell University, “Historic Gift Endows New CALS School,” Cornell News
Cornell Sun, coverage of the Ashley School announcement
Federal Housing Finance Agency, Special Examination Reports on Fannie Mae (2005–2008)
Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission materials on Fannie Mae governance
Reuters, coverage of post-crisis shareholder litigation involving Fannie Mae board leadership
Middle East Investment Initiative, Board and Founders Council listings
Aspen Institute, background on MEII origins

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

When Educators Back the Cheating Platform: The Strange Case of Chegg (Glen McGhee)

Chegg — once a poster child for pandemic-era edtech growth — is now in free fall. In 2025 the company announced it would slash 45 % of its workforce, citing plunging web traffic, collapsing revenue, and the onslaught of AI tools that let students bypass paid homework help altogether.

It’s a dramatic reversal for a company that sold itself as a learning aid. But behind that collapse lies an even more troubling paradox: many teacher pension funds and public retirement systems — in whose names educators put decades of trust — hold millions in Chegg stock. Why would those funds invest in a company whose business model many of their own beneficiaries see as unethical, even corrosive?

We’ve seen this pattern before. In the early 2000s, retirement funds like these were major institutional investors in for-profit higher education companies such as EDMC, ITT Tech, and the University of Phoenix. Those institutions promised strong returns but ultimately collapsed under fraud allegations, predatory practices, and declining enrollments. Many public-sector workers indirectly suffered as the funds lost money. Chegg’s story looks eerily similar: high growth promises, an ethically contested business model, and exposure of public retirement funds to extreme financial risk. The repetition suggests a structural pattern: when education is financialized and commodified, the people meant to serve it — educators and students — are exposed to both moral and economic hazards.

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The Downward Spiral: Why Chegg Is Crashing

Chegg’s decline didn’t begin yesterday. It was seeded by technological disruption and a fragile business model dependent on volume, content access, and student compliance. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Bard have undercut Chegg’s core service: paid homework help and explanations. Students can often get free answers faster and more flexibly. Google’s “AI overviews,” which display answer snippets directly in search results, divert traffic away from Chegg’s site, reducing ad and subscription conversions. Chegg has even sued Google, alleging unfair competition.

Earlier in 2025, Chegg laid off 22 % of its staff and closed its U.S. and Canada offices to cut costs. That was supposed to be a stabilization move, but it foreshadowed deeper troubles. The more recent 45 % layoff is sweeping: 388 jobs are being cut, $15–19 million in severance charges are expected, and $100–110 million in cost savings are projected for 2026. Chegg’s stock has lost approximately 99 % of its value since its 2021 peak. Yet the company is still pursuing a pivot toward B2B “skilling” markets, though skeptics doubt whether this can make up for the erosion of its original model. In short, Chegg is facing structural obsolescence. The ecosystem that once made its growth plausible is collapsing around it.

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Pension Funds and the Strange Attraction to Chegg

Several public pension and teachers’ retirement systems hold millions in Chegg: Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System owns $4.5 million, California State Teachers’ Retirement System owns $4 million, New York State Common Retirement Fund owns $13 million, Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Fund owns $9.3 million, California Public Employees’ Retirement Fund owns $5.3 million, a Florida retirement fund owns $3.3 million, Ohio Public Employees Retirement owns $1.5 million, and the Teacher Retirement System of Texas owns $630,000.

These investments raise hard questions. Do pension fund managers assume Chegg will survive its technological disruption? Are they prioritizing short-term returns over long-term reputational or ethical risk? Do they believe the stock is undervalued and thus a “contrarian bet”? Are they following passive index allocations rather than making deliberate choices? Some fund managers defend such investments as fulfilling fiduciary duty: to maximize returns for their beneficiaries within acceptable risk parameters. Ethical considerations, they argue, should not trump financial sustainability — especially in a system underfunded and under stress. But when the bet fails, the consequences fall hardest on retirees, educators, and the public who trusted those funds to safeguard their futures.

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Do We Owe Them Sympathy?

It’s tempting to feel a bit sorry: pension funds losing money is a headline nobody wants. But sympathy is complicated. These funds store and grow the life savings of public-sector workers — teachers, librarians, and staff. A poorly timed speculative investment can damage retiree security and erode public trust. On the other hand, this is no innocent failure; it is a foreseeable risk in backing a business facing existential challenges. It reflects a broader pattern of financialization in education: turning learning into a profit-seeking venture, exposing it to wild swings, and treating educators and students as market participants. Losses are regrettable, especially at the human level, but they also demand accountability. Institutions must explain why they placed trust in Chegg when its vulnerabilities were visible.

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What This Reveals: Institutional Contradiction

This episode exposes several deeper contradictions at the intersection of education, finance, and values. Many educators see Chegg as a threat to academic integrity, yet the institutions managing their retirement funds believed in its upside. Some investors are attracted to the “turnaround bet,” seeing potential in a company trading at a fraction of its former value, though the risk is very high. Some funds may hold Chegg because their portfolios track broad indices, ceding moral discretion to the market. Education has become infrastructure built on venture logic, and the Chegg collapse is a warning: when learning becomes a commodity, its institutions become as unstable as any tech startup. Finally, if pension funds backed a cheating-enabled platform, what else might their capital support, and how does that affect trust in those institutions?

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A Moral and Institutional Reckoning 

Chegg’s collapse is not just a market drama; it’s a moral and institutional reckoning. A company built on a questionable model is now evaporating under AI pressure. Meanwhile, public pension funds — meant to safeguard the futures of educators — placed bets on that very evaporation.

We might feel a pang of sympathy for the financial losses. But our greater duty is to probe the judgment of those entrusted with public capital, and to demand coherence between values and investment. If the administrators of teacher retirement funds cannot align ethics with asset allocation, then their claims to serving the public good are weakened — and so is the trust on which the idea of public education depends.

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Sources

Barron’s: “Chegg Is Suing Google. The Stock Is Sinking.”
Reuters: “Chegg to lay off 22% of workforce as AI tools shake up edtech industry.”
SF Chronicle: “Bay Area educational tech company slashes 248 jobs as students turn to AI tools for learning.”
The Cheatsheet Substack: “Meet Chegg’s Biggest Backers.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Work in Public Education and Hate Chegg? You Might Be an Investor.”
Wikipedia: “Chegg”

The Meritocratic Mask Is Crumbling (Glen McGhee)

“The Merit Ladder”

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

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

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

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

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The Scale-Invariance Claim

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

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

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

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The Characteristic Scales American Higher Ed Pretends Not to Have

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Measurement Problem the Meritocracy Never Solved

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

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

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

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Grade Inflation and AI Cheating: The Mask Slips

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

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

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

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

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Literary and Cultural Parallels

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

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

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What “Never Was Meritocratic” Actually Means

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

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

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The Collapse of the Meritocratic Narrative

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

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

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

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The Devastating Implication: A System Built on a Mathematical Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

The Harvard Business School Paradox: Ethics, Elites, and the Theatre of Honesty

For the first time in nearly 80 years, Harvard University has taken the extraordinary step of revoking the tenure of a faculty member—Francesca Gino, a former professor at Harvard Business School (HBS) known for her widely publicized research on ethics, decision-making, and organizational behavior. The irony of her downfall—accused of academic dishonesty while researching honesty—has been noted by nearly every outlet covering the story. But a deeper question lingers: What does Gino’s story tell us about Harvard Business School and the neoliberal system it both serves and symbolizes?

Ethics as Performance in a Neoliberal Order

Gino, once celebrated for championing ethical behavior and "rebel talent," now stands accused of falsifying data in multiple academic papers. But HBS’s brand of ethics—delivered through expensive executive programs and best-selling books—is part of a larger performance in which corporate elites are taught to appear virtuous while perpetuating systems that concentrate wealth, exploit labor, and externalize harm.

In this context, ethics becomes less about justice or truth and more about managing perceptions. The fall of Francesca Gino is dramatic, but the real ethical crisis lies not in her alleged misconduct alone—it lies in the institutional contradictions embedded within HBS itself. Harvard Business School doesn’t just teach capitalism; it molds the gatekeepers of global capital. Its mission is not merely to educate but to replicate and legitimize a system that increasingly rewards the few at the expense of the many.

HBS: The Training Ground for Economic Power

From Wall Street executives to Silicon Valley disruptors, the alumni of Harvard Business School include some of the most powerful figures in global finance and industry—many of whom have presided over layoffs, environmental degradation, and financial schemes with far more damaging consequences than academic fraud.

The school’s ethos is rooted in neoliberal values: deregulation, privatization, shareholder primacy, and labor "flexibility." These principles have driven inequality to historic levels, eroded public trust in institutions, and created a permanent underclass of precarious workers—including the adjuncts and support staff who toil in the shadows of Harvard's gilded brand.

That Gino was one of Harvard’s highest paid employees, earning over $1 million a year, underscores the commercialization of academia. Her high-profile persona, media presence, and prolific publication record made her not just a scholar but a product—one the institution proudly marketed until it became inconvenient.

The Politics of Academic Accountability

The revocation of Gino’s tenure has been portrayed as a triumph of academic accountability. But it also reveals the selective nature of institutional justice. While Harvard moved swiftly to investigate and sanction Gino, other faculty members in elite institutions—some with clear ties to ethically questionable industries or discriminatory practices—remain unscathed, protected by the very power structures they serve.

Moreover, this case unfolds against a broader political backdrop in which Harvard, like other elite universities, is entangled in legal and ideological battles with the federal government. From fights over DEI initiatives and student visas to federal funding for research, the university’s moral posturing often masks a pragmatic calculus: preserving its endowment, its influence, and its brand.

A System that Rewards Deception

That Harvard Business School fostered—and then disowned—a figure like Francesca Gino should surprise no one. The institution’s most infamous alumni include architects of the 2008 financial crisis and leaders of corporations known for tax evasion, union busting, and regulatory capture. In such a system, the real problem isn’t dishonesty—it’s getting caught.

Gino’s downfall may satisfy the university’s need for a scapegoat, but it doesn't address the deeper malaise at the heart of elite business education. Harvard Business School produces managers, not moral leaders. It shapes ideologies, not communities. And in doing so, it offers up a sanitized vision of capitalism in which individual ethics can redeem systemic violence.

The Theatre of Respectability

Francesca Gino’s tenure revocation is a symbolic gesture—one that reinforces the illusion that elite institutions police themselves rigorously. But the real fraud is more abstract and far more consequential: it is the fraud of presenting institutions like Harvard Business School as guardians of ethical capitalism, while they actively reinforce the economic logic of exploitation.

In a just world, the moral bankruptcy of neoliberalism would be exposed not by a professor’s faked data, but by the suffering of workers laid off for shareholder gains, the communities displaced for private equity ventures, and the global inequities entrenched by the very graduates these schools send into the world.

Until then, we are left with what Gino herself once studied: the subtle science of dishonesty. Only now, the lab is Harvard—and the experiment is ongoing.

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The Higher Education Inquirer continues to investigate the contradictions and inequalities embedded in American higher education, especially as they relate to labor, class, and power. Follow us for more independent, critical analysis.

Elite Universities and Their Failure to Uphold International Law: A Crisis of Legitimacy

Elite U.S. universities have long touted their role as stewards of global justice, incubators of human rights doctrine, and thought leaders in international law. They house prestigious law schools, attract students from around the world, and produce judges, diplomats, and policymakers. Yet, these same institutions have increasingly turned a blind eye—or actively participated in—violations of international law, human rights abuses, and the erosion of legal norms at home and abroad.

Universities like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, NYU, and Georgetown are global brands. Their law schools educate future presidents, Supreme Court justices, and CEOs. But when it comes to confronting real-time violations of international law—whether committed by the U.S. government or its allies—these institutions often retreat into silence, complicity, or even defense of the status quo.

Selective Outrage and Legal Amnesia

International law, including the Geneva Conventions and principles of the United Nations Charter, is supposed to guide nations in the prevention of war crimes, the treatment of civilians, and the right to self-determination. These principles are taught in law school lecture halls, debated in journals, and celebrated at graduation speeches. But when those same principles are tested in real-world scenarios—such as U.S. drone warfare, the occupation of Palestinian territories, or the extrajudicial imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay—most elite universities fail to take a public stance.

In fact, many of these institutions benefit materially from their silence. Faculty and administrators maintain close relationships with defense contractors, intelligence agencies, and multinational law firms representing authoritarian regimes and fossil fuel giants. Think tanks embedded within these universities routinely provide legal rationales for otherwise indefensible policies.

Case Studies in Complicity

Harvard Law School, whose alumni include presidents and Supreme Court justices, has been notably quiet about U.S. breaches of the Geneva Conventions in conflicts stretching from Iraq to Gaza. Harvard’s investments in defense contractors and its deference to powerful alumni networks reflect an institutional unwillingness to confront crimes committed by the U.S. or its allies.

Yale Law School, home of the influential “Yale School” of international law thought, has similarly struggled with moral clarity. Professors who once championed humanitarian intervention now rationalize indefinite detention and drone strikes, couching them in legal gray zones. Yale’s silence on Israeli settlements and civilian casualties in Gaza, for example, stands in contrast to its professed commitments to legal equity.

Columbia Law School, positioned in the heart of the global media capital, hosts programs in human rights and war crimes. Yet the university has faced internal protests over its refusal to divest from companies involved in surveillance, policing, and foreign occupation. Despite these internal challenges, the administration has largely dismissed demands to reassess its complicity.

Georgetown Law, with deep ties to U.S. foreign policy establishments, often operates more like an extension of Washington's power than a challenger to it. While its Center on National Security hosts high-level panels and publishes white papers, it rarely critiques systemic violations of international law committed by the U.S. or NATO partners.

The Shield of Academic Neutrality

When challenged, university leaders often invoke the idea of “academic neutrality” or “institutional independence” to avoid taking positions. But neutrality in the face of injustice is not a virtue—it’s a form of complicity. As legal philosopher Martti Koskenniemi has argued, international law is only as powerful as the political will behind it. That will is shaped in part by elite academic institutions, which lend legitimacy—or provide cover—to state actors.

The Silence on Gaza and Genocide

Perhaps the most glaring recent example is the mass death and destruction in Gaza. Despite mounting allegations of war crimes and even genocide by international legal scholars and UN officials, most elite universities have failed to issue even symbolic statements of concern. Law school deans who routinely opine on Supreme Court rulings and domestic civil rights have stayed quiet, likely fearing backlash from donors, trustees, and political pressure groups.

Student groups and faculty have filled the moral vacuum—often at great personal and professional risk. At Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford, students protesting university complicity have faced suspensions, smear campaigns, and law enforcement crackdowns. Whistleblowing professors have been marginalized, and demands for ethical divestment have been stonewalled.

A Crisis of Legitimacy

This failure of moral and legal leadership reveals a deeper legitimacy crisis within U.S. higher education. If institutions that claim to produce the world’s legal elite cannot confront state-sanctioned crimes or uphold the most basic tenets of the international legal system, then what purpose do they serve—other than to reproduce power and shield the powerful?

Until elite universities and their law schools are willing to challenge the legal fictions that justify war, occupation, and systemic inequality, they will remain complicit in the erosion of the very legal norms they claim to champion. The world is watching—and so are their students.

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Sources:

• Harvard Law Review, Silence and Complicity: Legal Academia and the War on Terror, Vol. 137 (2024)

• Columbia Spectator, “Protests and Divestment Demands: Columbia’s Reckoning with Its Global Ties” (2023)

• The Intercept, “Law Schools and the Legalization of Empire” (2022)

• United Nations Human Rights Council Reports on the Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (2023–2025)

• Center for Constitutional Rights, Guantánamo and the Failure of Legal Institutions (2023)

Language in the Age of Fascist Politics (Henry Giroux)

In the age of expanding fascism, the power of language is not only fragile but increasingly threatened. As Toni Morrison has noted, “language is not only an instrument through which power is exercised,” it also shapes agency and functions as an act with consequences. These consequences ripple through the very fabric of our existence. For in the words we speak, meaning, truth, and our collective future are at risk. Each syllable, phrase, and sentence becomes a battleground where truth and power collide, where silence breeds complicity, and where justice hangs in the balance.

In response, we find ourselves in desperate need of a new vocabulary, one capable of naming the fascist tide and militarized language now engulfing the United States. This is not a matter of style or rhetorical flourish; it is a matter of survival. The language required to confront and resist this unfolding catastrophe will not come from the legacy press, which remains tethered to the very institutions it ought to expose. Nor can we turn to the right-wing media machines, led by Fox News, where fascist ideals are not just defended but paraded as patriotism. 

In the face of this crisis, Toni Morrison’s insight drawn from her Nobel Lecture becomes all the more urgent and makes clear that the language of tyrants, embodied in the rhetoric, images, and modes of communication characteristic of the Trump regime, is a dead language. For her “a dead language is not simply one that is no longer spoken or written,” it is unyielding language “content to admire its own paralysis.” It is repressive language infused with power, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties and dehumanizing language, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. “Though moribund, it is not without effect” for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, and “suppresses human potential.” Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, or fill baffling silences. This is the language of official power whose purpose is to sanction ignorance and preserve. 

Beneath its glittering spectacle and vulgar performance, lies a language that is "dumb, predatory, sentimental." It offers mass spectacles, a moral sleepwalking state of mind, and a psychotic infatuation for those who seek refuge in unchecked power. It forges a community built on greed, corruption, and hate, steeped in a scandal of hollow fulfillment. It is a language unadorned in its cruelty and addiction to creating an architecture of violence. It is evident in Trump’s discourse of occupation, his militarizing of American politics, and in his use of an army of trolls to turn hatred into a social media spectacle of swagger and cruelty.



Despite differing tones and political effects, the discourses of the far right and the liberal mainstream converge in their complicity: both traffic in mindless spectacle, absorb lies as currency, and elevate illusion over insight. The liberal mainstream drapes the machinery of cruelty in the language of civility, masking the brutality of the Trump regime and the predatory logic of gangster capitalism, while the far right revels in it, parading its violence as virtue and its hatred as patriotism. Language, once a powerful instrument against enforced silence and institutional cruelty, now too often serves power, undermining reason, normalizing violence, and replacing justice with vengeance. 

In Trump’s oligarchic culture of authoritarianism, language becomes a spectacle of power, a theater of fear crafted, televised, and performed as a civic lesson in mass indoctrination. If language is the vessel of consciousness, then we must forge a new one--fierce, unflinching, and unafraid to rupture the fabric of falsehood that sustains domination, disposability, and terror. The late famed novelist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, was right in stating that “language was a site of colonial control,” inducting people into what he called “colonies of the mind.”

The utopian visions that support the promise of a radical democracy and prevent the dystopian nightmare of a fascist politics are under siege in the United States. Increasingly produced, amplified and legitimated in a toxic language of hate, exclusion, and punishment, all aspects of the social and the democratic values central to a politics of solidarity are being targeted by right-wing extremists. In addition, the institutions that produce the formative cultures that nourishes the social imagination and democracy itself are now under attack. The signposts are on full display in a politics of racial and social cleansing that is being fed by a white nationalist and white supremacist ideology that is at the centre of power in the US—marked by fantasies of exclusion accompanied by a full-scale attack on morality, reason, and collective resistance rooted in democratic struggle. 

As more people revolt against this dystopian project, neoliberal ideology and elements of a fascist politics merge to contain, distract and misdirect the anger that has materialised out of legitimate grievances against the government, controlling privileged elites and the hardships caused by neoliberal capitalism. The current crisis of agency, representation, values and language demands a discursive shift that can call into question and defeat the formative culture and ideological scaffolding through which a savage neoliberal capitalism reproduces itself. This warped use of language directly feeds into the policies of disposability that define Trump's regime.

State Terror and Trump’s Politics of Disposability

As Trump’s regime concentrates power, he invokes a chilling convergence of law, order, and violence, a cornerstone of his politics of disposability. His acts of cruelty and lawlessness, abducting and deporting innocent people, branding immigrants as “vermin,” claiming they are “poisoning the blood” of Americans, and even proposing the legalization of murder for twelve hours, make clear that his violent metaphors are not just rhetorical flourishes. They are policy blueprints. In Trump’s hands, rhetoric becomes a weaponized prelude to atrocity, a tool of statecraft. Threats, hatred, and cruelty are transformed into instruments of governance.

This is not careless talk, it is a brutal and calculated expression of power. Trump’s threats to arrest and deport critics such as Zohran Mamdani reveal his willingness to use the machinery of the state for political extermination. His targets are predictable: immigrants, Black people, educators, journalists, LGBTQ+ individuals, and anyone who dares to challenge his white Christian nationalist, neoliberal, and white supremacist vision. His language does not merely offend, it incites harm, enacts repression, and opens the gates to state-sanctioned violence. It extends the reign of terror across the United States by labeling protesters as terrorists and deploying the military to American cities, treating them as if they were “occupied territories.” 

Trump is not alone. Many of his MAGA follower use these same hateful discourse. For instance, conservative pundit Ann Coulter wrote “in response to a speech by Melanie Yazzie, a Native artist and professor, about decolonization, “We didn’t Kill enough Indians.” This is not simply harsh rhetoric; nor is it a performative display of emboldened hatred and historical forgetting, it sets the stage for state-sanctioned repression and mass violence. What is at stake is more than civic respect. It is democracy itself. When language loses meaning and truth is blurred, tyranny thrives. Trump’s and too much of MAGA discourse is not about persuasion; it is about dehumanization and domination. It functions as statecraft, laying the groundwork for a society where suffering becomes spectacle and repression masquerades as law and order. Language is the canary in the coal mine, warning us that democracy dies without an informed citizenry.

As Eddie Glaude Jr. has powerfully argued, Americans must confront a brutal truth: the creation and expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), now the largest federal law enforcement agency, is not merely a matter of policy, it is a cornerstone of white supremacy. It is a racist institution, entrenched in an immigration policy designed to uphold the values of white nationalism. In the face of shifting demographics, ICE is tasked with an urgent mission—to make America white again, a calculated attempt to turn back the clock on progress, to preserve an imagined past at the cost of justice and humanity.

We now live in a country where class and racial warfare both at home and abroad is on steroids, exposing the killing machine of gangster capitalism in its rawest, most punitive form. Trump supports the genocidal war waged by a state led by a war criminal. Children are being slaughtered in Gaza. Millions of Americans, including poor children, teeter on the edge of losing their healthcare. Funds for feeding hungry children are being slashed, sacrificed to feed the pockets of the ultra-rich. Thousands will die, not by accident, but by design. Terror, fear, and punishment have replaced the ideals of equality, freedom, and justice. Childcide is now normalized as the law of the land. The lights are dimming in America, and all that remains are the smug, ignorant smirks of fascist incompetence and bodies drained of empathy and solidarity.

Gangster Capitalism and the Death of Empathy

Gangster capitalism lays the foundation for Trump’s racist and fascist politics. As I have noted elsewhere, the United States has descended into a state of political, economic, cultural, and social psychosis, where cruel, neoliberal, democracy-hating policies have prevailed since the 1970s. At the core of this authoritarian shift lies a systemic war on workers, youth, Blacks, and immigrants, increasingly marked by mass violence and a punishing state both domestically and internationally. The U.S. has transformed into an empire dominated by a callous, greedy billionaire class that has dismantled any remnants of democracy, while embracing the fascistic ideology of white Christian nationalism and white supremacy. Fascism now parades not only beneath the flag but also under the Christian cross. 

America has shifted from celebrating unchecked individualism, as depicted in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, to the glorification of greed championed by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, and the psychotic avarice of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. This descent into barbarity and psychotic infatuation with violence is further demonstrated by Justin Zhong, a right-wing preacher at Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Indianapolis, who called for the deaths of LGBTQ+ individuals during a sermon. Zhong defended his comments by citing biblical justifications and labeling LGBTQ+ people as "domestic terrorists." 

It gets worse. During a Men’s Preaching Night at Sure Foundation Baptist Church, Zhong's associate, Stephen Falco, suggested that LGBTQ+ people should "blow yourself in the back of the head," and that Christians should "pray for their deaths." Another member, Wade Rawley, advocated for violence, stating LGBTQ+ individuals should be "beaten and stomped in the mud" before being shot in the head. Fascism in America, nourished by the toxic roots of homophobia, now cloaks itself not just in the poisonous banner of the Confederate flag, but also in the sacred guise of the Christian cross.

Welcome to Trump’s America, where empathy is now viewed as a weakness and the cold rule of the market is the template for judging all social relations. One noted example can be found in the words of Trump’s on-and-off billionaire ally, Elon Musk, who dismisses empathy as a naive and detrimental force that undermines the competitive, individualistic ethos he champions. Speaking to Joe Rogan on his podcast, Musk specifically stated that “The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.” As Julia Carrie Wong observes in The Guardian, the stakes extend far beyond casting empathy as a "parasitic plague." Empathy's true danger lies in its role as an enabler—granting permission to dehumanize others and constricting the very “definition of who should be included in a democratic state.” This is a recipe for barbarism, one that allows both states and individuals to turn a blind eye to the genocidal violence unfolding in Gaza and beyond.

Naming the Deep Roots of the Police State

Ruth Ben-Ghiat has warned that “America has been set on a trajectory to become a police state,” pointing to the passage of the Brutal and Bellicose Bill (BBB), which handed ICE a budget larger than the militaries of Brazil, Israel, and Italy combined. But the roots of this state violence go deeper. The foundation was laid under Bush and Cheney, whose war on terror birthed Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, mass surveillance, and extraordinary rendition. What Trump has done is strip these earlier authoritarian practices of all pretenses, elevating them to the status of governing principles.

The police state did not begin with Trump; it evolved through him. Now, we see its terrifying maturity: racial cleansing disguised as immigration policy, hatred normalized as political speech, dissent criminalized, birthright citizenship threatened, and everyday life militarized. This is not politics as usual, it is fascism in real time.

Trump’s fascist politics grows even more dangerous when we recognize that his language of colonization and domination has helped transform American society into what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o chillingly describes as a “war zone.” This war zone now spans the digital terrain—through the internet, podcasts, social media, and educational platforms—becoming a fertile breeding ground for fascist symbols, reactionary values, manufactured identities, and the toxic resurrection of colonial logics. In this battleground of meaning, the language of colonization does more than obscure the truth—it erodes critical thinking, silences historical memory, and disarms the very possibility of empowered agency. What remains in its wake is a nation scarred by suffering, haunted by loneliness, bound by shared fears, and anesthetized by the numbing rituals of a punishing state.

The transformation of America into a war zone finds its most visible expression in the rise of Trump’s omnipresent police state. This authoritarian machinery reveals itself through the mechanisms of state-sponsored terror, a heavily militarized ICE force operating like masked enforcers, and the rapid expansion of detention centers that will increasingly resemble a network of potential forced labor camps. As Fintan O’Toole warns, Trump’s deployment of troops onto the streets of Los Angeles is not merely symbolic—it is “a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation.” In this reorientation, soldiers are no longer defenders of the Constitution but are being retrained as instruments of authoritarian power, bound not by democratic ideals but by obedience to a singular will.

Nevertheless, we resist or refuse to name the fascist threat and the ideological and economic architecture of its politics. Still, we recoil from calling the Trump regime what it is: a fascist state engaged in domestic terrorism. Still, we remain blind to the fact that economic inequality, global militarism, and the genocidal logics of empire are not peripheral issues, they are the center. Why is it so difficult to admit that we are living in an age of American fascism? Why do the crimes of the powerful, at home and abroad, so often pass without scrutiny, while the victims are blamed or erased?

The Collapse of Moral Imagination

What we face is not only a political crisis, partly in the collapse of conscience and civic courage-- a profound moral collapse. The war being waged at home by the Trump regime is not just against immigrants or the poor, it is a war on critical thought, on historical memory, on the courage to dissent. It is a war on every institution that upholds critical thinking, informed knowledge, and civic literacy. This is a genocidal war against the very possibility of a just future—a war not merely against, but for stupidity, for the death of morality, and for the annihilation of any robust notion of democracy. Viktor Klemperer, in his seminal work The Language of the Third Reich, offers a crucial lesson from history: "With great insistence and a high degree of precision right down to the last detail, Hitler’s Mein Kampf teaches not only that the masses are stupid, but that they need to be kept that way, intimidated into not thinking." Klemperer’s analysis reveals that Nazi politics did not arise in a vacuum; it was cultivated in a culture where language itself was the breeding ground of cruelty and control.

Trump’s rhetoric of fear, racial hatred does not emerge in a vacuum. It resonates because it taps into a long and violent history, a history soaked in blood, built on genocide, slavery, colonialism, and exclusion. His language recalls the genocidal campaigns against Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Jews, and others deemed disposable by authoritarian regimes. It is a necrotic lexicon, resurrected in service of tyranny. It gives birth to politicians with blood in their mouths, who weaponize nostalgia and bigotry, cloaking brutality in the false promises of patriotism and “law and order.”

Language as War and the Return of Americanized Fascism

This is not merely a rhetoric of cruelty, it is a call to arms. Trump’s words do not simply shelter fascists; they summon them. They silence dissent, normalize torture, and echo the logic of death camps, internment camps, and mass incarceration. His discourse, laden with hatred and lies, is designed to turn neighbors into enemies, civic life into war, and politics into a death cult and zone of terminal exclusion. Undocumented immigrants, or those seeking to register for green cards or citizenship, are torn from their families and children, cast into prisons such as Alligator Alcatraz, a grotesque manifestation of the punishing state. As Melissa Gira Grant writes in The New Republic, it is "an American concentration camp…built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE," constructed in a chilling display of colonial disregard, and erected on traditional Miccosukee land without so much as consulting the Tribe.

This is the face of modern cruelty: language wielded as a tool to orchestrate a spectacle of violence, designed to degrade, divide, and erase. Culture is no longer a peripheral force in politics; it has become the central weapon in the rise of state terrorism. The language of war and complicity normalizes America’s transformation into a monstrous carceral state, a symbol of state-sponsored terror where due process is suspended, and suffering is not just an outcome but the point itself. 

A culture of cruelty now merges with state sponsored racial terror, functioning as a badge of honor. One example is noted in Trump advisor Laura Loomer, who ominously remarked that "the wild animals surrounding President Donald Trump’s new immigration detention center… will have 'at least 65 million meals." Change.org, along with others such as Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor, noted that her comment “is not only racist, it is a direct emotional attack and veiled threat against Hispanic communities. This kind of speech dehumanizes people of color and normalizes genocidal language.” Her racist remark not only reveals the profound contempt for human life within Trump's inner circle but also highlights how cruelty and violence are strategically used as both a policy tool and a public spectacle. Loomer’s remark is not an aberration, it is a symptom of the fascist logic animating this administration, where death itself becomes a political message. Her blood-soaked discourse if symptomatic of the criminogenic politics fundamental to the working of the Trump regime.

The parallels to history are unmistakable. Loomer’s invocation of death as the outcome of detention recalls the Nazi designation of certain camps as Vernichtungslager, extermination camps, where as Holocaust survivor Primo Levi noted, imprisonment and execution were inseparable. Likewise, the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, though often sanitized in public memory, operated under a similar logic of racial suspicion and collective punishment. The message in each case is clear, as Judith Butler has noted in her writing: some lives are rendered invisible, deemed unworthy of legal protection, of family, of dignity, of life itself. In fascist regimes, such spaces function not only as instruments of punishment but as symbolic theaters of power, meant to instill terror, enforce obedience, and declare which bodies the state has marked for erasure.

For Trump, J.D. Vance, and their ilk, fascism is not a specter to be feared but a banner to be waved. The spirit of the Confederacy and the corpse-like doctrines of white supremacy, militarism, and neoliberal authoritarianism have returned, this time supercharged by surveillance technologies, financial capital, and social media echo chambers. In the spirit of the Trump regime, the symbols of the Confederacy are normalized. Confederate flags are now waved by neo-Nazis in public squares and parades, while Trump renames US warships and 7 military bases after Confederate officers, reinforcing a dangerous nostalgia for a past rooted in racism and rebellion against the very ideals of unity and equality that this nation claims to uphold.

Higher Education and the Fight Against Authoritarianism
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It should not surprise us that the American public has grown numb with the constant echo chamber of state terrorism playing out in multiple sites of attack. Powerful disimagination machines, mainstream media, right-wing propaganda platforms, tech billionaires, have flooded public consciousness with conspiracy theories, historical amnesia, and spectacularized images of immigrants and others being deported to prisons, foreign Gulags, and modern day black holes. These are not simply entertainment outlets; they are pedagogical weapons of mass distraction, breeding civic illiteracy and moral paralysis. Under their influence, the American people have been placed in a moral and political coma.

White Nationalism and Reproductive Control

Nowhere is this more evident than in the mainstream media’s failure to address the racial and ideological foundations of Trump’s agenda. His attacks on Haitian immigrants, the travel ban on seven African countries, the shutting down of refugee programs, and his open-door policy for white Afrikaners from South Africa are not merely racist; they are explicitly white nationalist. The same ideology drives attacks on women’s reproductive rights, revealing the deep racial and gender anxieties of a movement obsessed with white demographic decline. These are not isolated skirmishes, they are interconnected strategies of domination.

These converging assaults, white nationalism, white supremacy, patriarchal control, and militarized life, manifest most vividly in the war on reproductive freedom. White nationalists encourage white women to reproduce, to hold back demographic change, while punishing women of color, LGBTQ+ people, and the poor. It is a violent calculus, animated by fantasies of purity and control.

The Systemic Assault on Democracy

This is a full-spectrum assault on democracy. Every act of cruelty, every racist law, every violent metaphor chips away at the social contract. A culture of authoritarianism is now used to demean those considered other, both citizens and non-citizens, critics and immigrants, naturalized citizens and those seeking such status. They are labeled as unworthy of citizenship now defined by the Trump regime as a privilege rather than a right. Meanwhile, a media ecosystem built on clickbait and erasure renders both such fascists as legitimate while making invisible the roots of suffering mass suffering and fear, all the while, turning oppression into spectacle and silence into complicity.

In this fog, language itself is emptied of meaning. Truth and falsehood blur. As Paulo Freire warned, the tools of the oppressor are often adopted by the oppressed. We now see that the logic of fascism has seeped into the culture, eroding civic sensibility, destroying moral imagination, and rendering resistance almost unspeakable.

The Normalization of Tyranny

Trump’s authoritarian fantasies do not alienate his base, they galvanize it. What was once unthinkable is now policy. What was once fringe has become mainstream. Cruelty is not something to be deplored and avoided at all costs, it is a central feature of power, wielded with theatrical and spectacularized brutality. Under the current acting ICE Director, Todd Lyons, this punitive logic has intensified: Lyons oversees a $4.4 billion Enforcement and Removal Operations apparatus staffed by over 8,600 agents across 200 domestic locations, using militarized tactics, surprise raids, and aggressive targeting of immigrant communities to sustain a regime of fear. ICE’s presence is at the heart of Trump’s hyper-police state, and its funding has been greatly expanded to $170 billion under Trump’s new budget bill, creating what journalist Will Bunch calls Trump’s “own gulag archipelago of detention camps across a United States that’s becoming increasingly hard to recognize.”

Meanwhile, figures like Tom Homan, who led ICE under Trump’s first term, laid the groundwork with Gestapo-style operations, midnight raids, family separations, and public declarations that undocumented immigrants “should be afraid”. As the “border tzar” under Trump, Homan has initiated deportation policies that are even more aggressively violent and cruel that those that took place in Trump’s first term as president. As Bunch notes, take the case of “the 64-year-old New Orleans woman, Donna Kashanian, who fled a tumultuous Iran 47 years ago, volunteered to rebuild her battered Louisiana community after Hurricane Katrina, never missed a check-in with U.S. immigration officials , and was snatched by ICE agents in unmarked vehicles while she was out working in her garden and sent to a notorious detention center.” These horror stories now take place daily in cities extending from Los Angeles to Providence, Rhode Island.

A central player in this current regime of state terrorism, systemic racism, mass abductions, deportations, and the criminalization of dissent is Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff. During Trump’s first term, Miller was the driving force behind the Muslim ban, the family separation policy, and assaults on birthright citizenship, all rooted in an unapologetic white supremacist and eugenicist worldview. In Trump’s second term, he has emerged as the architect of even more draconian measures, pushing for mass deportations, the abolition of birthright citizenship, and the revocation of naturalized citizenship for those who fall outside his white Christian vision of who deserves to be called American.

Far-right white nationalist such as Miller, Tom Homan and Todd Lyons, do not treat cruelty as a regrettable side effect. For them, cruelty is the currency of power. Suffering becomes a spectacle, and violence a ritual of statecraft. Tyranny is not inching forward in silence; it is advancing at full speed, cheered on by those who treat fear as a governing principle and pain as public policy. At stake here is what Timothy Snyder calls the practice of fascist dehumanization.

This is not a passing storm. It is the death throes of a system that has long glorified violence, commodified everything, and fed on division. Trump’s language is not a performance, it is preparation. His words are laying the foundation for a society without empathy, without justice, without democracy.

Reclaiming the Language of Resistance, Reclaiming Democracy

In a decent society, language is the lifeblood of democracy, a vessel of solidarity, truth, and hope. But in Trump’s America, language has become a weapon, dehumanizing, excluding, and dominating. His vision is not a warning; it is a blueprint. We must resist, or we risk losing everything. The stakes are nothing less than the survival of democracy, the retrieval of truth and the refusal to live in a world where cruelty is policy and silence is complicity. 

What is needed now is not only a rupture in language but a rupture in consciousness, one that brings together the critical illumination of the present with a premonitory vision of what lies ahead if fascist dynamics remain unchecked. As Walter Benjamin insisted, we must cultivate a form of profane illumination, a language that disrupts the spectacle of lies and names the crisis in all its violent clarity. At the same time, as A.K. Thompson argues, we must grasp the future implicit in the present. His notion of premonitions urges us to read the events unfolding around us as urgent warnings, as signs of the catastrophe that awaits if we do not confront and reverse the political and cultural paths we are on. It demands that we see the connections that bind our suffering, rejecting the fragmented reality that neoliberalism forces upon us. 

The time for complacency is past. The time for a new and more vibrant language, one of critique, resistance, and militant hope, is now. A language capable not only of indicting the present but of envisioning a future rooted in justice, memory, and collective struggle.

As Antonio Gramsci remarked in his Prison Notebooks, "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." What is clear is that these morbid symptoms have arrived. Yet, alongside the despair they breed, they also present new challenges and opportunities for revitalized struggles. This is where the power of language comes into play—this is the challenge and opportunity for those who believe in the transformative power of culture, language, and education to address not just the nature of the crisis but its deeper roots in politics, memory, agency, values, power, and democracy itself.

[This article first appeared in the LA Progressive.]


By Henry A. Giroux

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His latest book is The Burden of Conscience: Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence (Bloomsbury in 2025). He is LA Progressive's Associate Editor. His website is www.henryagiroux.com