Did Higher Education Ever Have a Soul? A Response to Frank Bruni

In his New York Times opinion piece, “I’m Watching the Sacrifice of College’s Soul,” Frank Bruni laments the erosion of academic rigor and the rise of artificial intelligence in the college classroom. He worries that students read less, care more about networking, and rely too much on AI to write their papers. And he ties this perceived moral decay to the broader culture war era under a second Trump administration.

But if we are truly asking whether college has lost its soul, the answer lies not just in classroom etiquette, grade inflation, or even AI. These are surface symptoms. The deeper rot goes back much further—and runs much deeper.

In 2025, as student debt surpasses $2 trillion, adjuncts live paycheck to paycheck, and billion-dollar university endowments sit idle amid growing social crises, the question lingers like a ghost in the lecture hall: Did higher education ever have a soul?

Bruni suggests that something noble has been lost. But to mourn a fall from grace assumes there was grace to begin with. It assumes the soul of higher education was once intact—whole, ethical, virtuous. That assumption demands interrogation.

A Soul in Theory
From the founding of Harvard in 1636 to the post-WWII GI Bill expansion, there have always been idealistic threads: Socratic dialogue, liberal education, shared governance, land-grant missions to uplift the working class. Thinkers like John Dewey and W.E.B. Du Bois believed that education could be democratic and emancipatory, a crucible for ethical development and social justice.

But for every Du Bois, there was a Booker T. Washington being positioned to serve capitalism. For every land-grant university, there were extractive relationships with Indigenous lands and communities. For every golden age of college access, there were doors closed to women, Black Americans, and the working poor.

The soul, it seems, has always lived uneasily beside the dollar.

The Neoliberal Turn
In the last half-century, the contradictions have only grown starker. Beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating in the Reagan era, higher education became increasingly privatized, commodified, and financialized. Universities morphed into entrepreneurial corporations, presidents became CEOs, students became customers, and faculty became precarious gig workers. The soul of higher education—if ever there was one—was sold off in pieces. Not in a single transaction, but through thousands of small decisions: outsourcing food services, patenting research, expanding sports empires, launching predatory online programs, partnering with Wall Street, and calling it “innovation.”

Today, we see the results:

For-profit colleges and edtech firms exploiting vulnerable populations.

Public universities chasing out-of-state tuition while abandoning their mission to serve local and working-class communities.

DEI initiatives used as branding while workers on campus remain underpaid, underinsured, and over-policed.

Boards of trustees stacked with bankers, developers, and tech executives more loyal to markets than to mission.

And beyond the classrooms that Bruni mourns, darker truths persist—truths rarely explored in glossy alumni magazines or New York Times op-eds:

Fraternities continue to operate as quasi-criminal enterprises, protected by wealthy alumni and timid administrations. Hazing deaths, sexual assault, racial abuse, and alcohol-fueled violence are treated as unfortunate exceptions, rather than the predictable outcomes of a toxic culture of entitlement and silence.

NCAA football, the crown jewel of many flagship universities, thrives on the unpaid labor of student-athletes whose bodies are sacrificed for weekend entertainment and television contracts. Behind the pageantry lie lifelong injuries, untreated concussions, and a trail of lawsuits over traumatic brain damage—while coaches and athletic directors rake in seven-figure salaries.

These are not footnotes to the story of higher education’s moral decline. They are the story—central to understanding what kind of “soul” has actually animated American higher education for decades.

A Soul in Struggle
Yet to say higher education never had a soul would be to erase the people who have fought—and still fight—for it to matter.

The soul has lived in the pushback: in student protests for civil rights and against apartheid; in hunger strikes for living wages and union recognition; in the quiet resilience of community college faculty who refuse to give up on their students despite impossible workloads and poverty wages. It’s found in the Black campus movements of the 1960s and today, in the labor organizing of adjuncts and graduate students, and in underfunded tribal colleges and HBCUs resisting systemic neglect.

And the soul is alive in critique itself—in those willing to ask not only what students are learning, but why the university exists, who it serves, and who it exploits.

Where Do We Go from Here?
Frank Bruni mourns the death of something noble. But perhaps what’s dying isn’t the soul of higher education—it’s the illusion that the soul was ever fully alive within institutions so deeply enmeshed in money, hierarchy, and exclusion.

If higher education once had a soul, it now lies fragmented—compromised by institutional betrayal, bureaucratic inertia, and a corporate logic that values prestige over people. But to ask whether it ever had a soul is to ask whether the soul resides in institutions at all, or in the people struggling within and against them.

Perhaps we shouldn’t romanticize the past, but neither should we resign ourselves to the present.

The soul of higher education may never have been whole. But it has always been contested. And in that contest—between commerce and conscience, exclusion and liberation, silence and speech—we may yet find the spark to reimagine what education could be.

Because if the university is to be saved, its soul must be fought for—not assumed, and certainly not bought.

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Sources:

• Bruni, Frank. “I’m Watching the Sacrifice of College’s Soul.” New York Times, July 14, 2025.

• U.S. Department of Education. Federal Student Aid Portfolio Summary. https://studentaid.gov/data-center

• The Century Foundation. “The Adjunct Crisis.”

• Flanagan, Caitlin. “Death at a Penn State Fraternity.” The Atlantic, November 2017.

• NPR. “Inside the Secret World of College Fraternities.”

• ESPN. “Concussion Lawsuits and the NCAA.”

• The Chronicle of Higher Education. “How Billion-Dollar Endowments Avoid Spending.”

• The Guardian. “Inside America’s College Debt Machine.”

• American Association of University Professors (AAUP). “Trends in Faculty Employment Status.”

• The Intercept. “EdTech and the Exploitation of Students.”

• Washington Post. “DEI for PR, Not for Pay.”

• Inside Higher Ed. “Boards of Trustees: Who They Really Represent.”

• NLRB Rulings and Union Filings, 2010–2025.

Indeed and the Illusion of Opportunity: The Platform Monopoly on Jobs and Careers

In the platform-dominated economy, Indeed.com has established itself as the central marketplace for jobseekers and employers alike, boasting tens of millions of listings across industries and geographies. But behind its user-friendly design lies a powerful, opaque system that reinforces labor precarity, exploits the desperation of the underemployed, and facilitates fraud and exploitation—including through job scams designed to funnel people into for-profit colleges and dubious training schemes.

Indeed’s rise is emblematic of a larger pattern in the U.S. political economy, where platforms extract profit from human need—especially from the millions of Americans struggling to find secure employment in a shrinking labor market. While claiming to connect jobseekers with opportunity, Indeed increasingly operates as a gatekeeper and a filter, favoring employers with the ability to pay for prominence, and quietly profiting from a user base navigating worsening inequality.

From Opportunity to Exploitation: The Platform Economy

Indeed’s near-monopoly over online job listings positions it as the Amazon of employment—a central aggregator of job ads, resume submissions, employer reviews, and workforce data. Its business model is rooted in ad-based revenue: companies pay to boost job visibility, while jobseekers receive a flood of suggested listings—many of which are irrelevant, low-quality, or outright deceptive.

One particularly disturbing trend: a growing number of "job postings" on Indeed are not job offers at all, but veiled advertisements for for-profit colleges and unaccredited training programs. These listings typically appear legitimate, bearing the titles of medical assistant, phlebotomist, cybersecurity technician, or paralegal. But once an applicant shows interest, they are quickly routed to admissions representatives, not employers. In short, they’ve fallen for a bait-and-switch scheme.

Indeed does little to prevent these tactics. Despite flagging mechanisms and user complaints, scammers and aggressive recruiters return repeatedly under new listings or shell company names. And because these advertisers pay to promote their listings, there is a built-in conflict of interest: Indeed profits from ads designed to exploit vulnerable jobseekers, many of whom are already burdened by unemployment, underemployment, or student debt.

The Job Training Charade: A National Problem

As labor economist Gordon Lafer argues in The Job Training Charade, job training programs have long functioned as a public relations tool for elected officials, who promise “skills-based solutions” rather than structural labor reform. Publicly funded retraining programs and for-profit career schools capitalize on this narrative, convincing jobseekers that their struggles stem from a personal “skills gap” rather than systemic inequality.

Indeed’s platform reinforces this logic by flooding users with listings that promote training and certification programs as prerequisites for jobs that often don’t exist or pay poorly. Even in legitimate industries—like healthcare and IT—the overabundance of credential inflation and unnecessary gatekeeping leads to further debt accumulation without guaranteeing meaningful work.

As Lafer writes, “Training has become a substitute for economic policy—a way of appearing to do something without actually improving people’s lives.” And Indeed is a willing partner in this substitution, profiting from a constant churn of dislocated workers trying to retool their résumés and lives to meet an ever-shifting set of employer demands.

The Educated Underclass and Platform Paternalism

Gary Roth, in The Educated Underclass, identifies another critical aspect of this ecosystem: the overproduction of college graduates relative to the needs of the labor market. As more people earn degrees, the wage premium diminishes, and once-secure professions become crowded with overqualified applicants chasing scarce opportunities.

Indeed’s platform becomes the proving ground for this underclass: college-educated workers competing for service jobs, temp contracts, or entry-level roles barely above minimum wage. Meanwhile, the site’s tools—resume scores, AI-based job match algorithms, and automated rejection letters—reinforce the idea that unemployment is a personal failure rather than a structural outcome.

This is platform paternalism at its worst. Jobseekers are “nudged” into applying for low-quality work, “encouraged” to pursue unnecessary training, and surveilled through behavioral data that is packaged and sold to employers and third-party marketers. Career development becomes not a public good but a private product—sold back to workers in pieces, with no guarantee of outcome.

Job Scams and Regulatory Blind Spots

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general have received thousands of complaints about online job scams—including fake recruiters, phony employers, and misleading school advertisements. Yet enforcement remains weak, and platforms like Indeed enjoy limited legal liability, protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields them from responsibility for user-generated content.

Even when caught, fraudulent advertisers often reappear. As one whistleblower told The Higher Education Inquirer, “We’d flag scam listings, and two days later they’d pop back up under a new name. It was like a game of whack-a-mole—and no one at the top cared.”

Indeed's user agreement explicitly disclaims responsibility for the authenticity of job listings. And although the company has instituted basic verification and reporting tools, they are inadequate to stem the tide of predatory postings, especially those tied to the multibillion-dollar for-profit education industry.

A Broken System Masquerading as Innovation

The consolidation of online job markets under platforms like Indeed represents a profound shift in the political economy of labor. No longer mediated by public institutions or strong unions, the search for work is now a privatized experience, managed by algorithms, monetized through ads, and vulnerable to deception.

To be clear: Indeed does not create jobs. It creates the illusion of access. It obscures labor precarity behind UX design and paid listings. It enables fraudulent training pipelines while pushing the burden of risk and cost onto workers. And it profits from the widening chasm between what higher education promises and what the economy delivers.

At The Higher Education Inquirer, we demand accountability—not just from institutions of higher learning but from the platforms that now mediate our futures. The illusion must be pierced, and jobseeking must be reclaimed as a public function, free from predation, profiteering, and platform capture.

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Sources:

• Lafer, Gordon. The Job Training Charade. Cornell University Press, 2002.

• Roth, Gary. The Educated Underclass: Students and the Promise of Social Mobility. Pluto Press, 2019.

• U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). “Job Scams: What You Need to Know.” 2024.

• Recruit Holdings. Annual Reports and Investor Presentations, 2020–2024.

• U.S. Department of Labor. “Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements.” 2023.

• Brody, Leslie. “Students Lured Into For-Profit Colleges Through Fake Job Ads.” Wall Street Journal, 2022.

• Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019.

• Glassdoor, Indeed, and CareerBuilder community complaint forums (2021–2025).

Chegg: A Critical History of a Disruptor Turned Controversy Machine

Chegg, once hailed as a Silicon Valley disruptor democratizing access to education, has undergone a profound and troubling transformation since its founding in 2005. What began as a textbook rental company evolved into a billion-dollar homework help empire—an empire that, critics argue, has done more to undermine academic integrity than to foster genuine learning. Its business model capitalized on the structural weaknesses of American higher education and, in the process, normalized a shadow system of paid cheating.

Origins: Textbooks, Student Debt, and Disruption

Chegg was born at the intersection of inflated textbook costs and the neoliberal university. Founders Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra sought to bring the efficiencies of the sharing economy to the campus bookstore. In its early years, Chegg attracted investor attention by promising cheaper textbook rentals—a modest but important service in an era of spiraling student debt.

But as textbook rentals became commodified, Chegg pivoted. By the early 2010s, it was building a suite of digital services: step-by-step solutions, tutoring, and subscription-based homework help under its Chegg Study brand. When Chegg went public in 2013, it promoted itself not just as a tech company, but as a partner in “student success.” In reality, it had found a way to turn student desperation into a profitable SaaS model.

Homework Help or Cheating-as-a-Service?

Chegg’s transformation into a homework help platform would eventually earn it a darker moniker: “Cheating-as-a-Service.”

Nowhere is this critique more powerfully detailed than in education journalist Derek Newton’s Cheat Sheet, a Substack project dedicated to exposing the industrial-scale cheating facilitated by platforms like Chegg, Course Hero, and Studypool. Newton, who has tracked the issue since 2019, documented case after case in which students used Chegg not to learn—but to submit answers for graded assignments and exams. Faculty across disciplines and institutions began reporting widespread cheating enabled by Chegg, especially during the remote learning surge triggered by COVID-19.

In one issue of Cheat Sheet, Newton wrote:

“Chegg isn’t an education company. It’s a cheating company. It monetizes academic dishonesty, obfuscates accountability, and deflects responsibility while raking in millions in subscription revenue.”

According to Newton, Chegg’s "ask an expert" function—where students submit specific questions and receive solutions within minutes—became a tool of choice for real-time cheating during online exams. Despite university honor codes, many students saw Chegg as a normalized part of academic life. Meanwhile, Chegg’s refusal to proactively block cheating or cooperate fully with universities left institutions scrambling.

Pandemic Profits and Ethical Collapse

During the COVID-19 pandemic, as universities shifted online, Chegg’s subscriber base soared. Students confined to Zoom classrooms flocked to digital platforms for support—or shortcuts. By 2021, Chegg had nearly 7 million subscribers and posted annual revenues of $776 million. Its stock price peaked above $100 in February 2021.

But that growth came with growing backlash. Professors and academic integrity officers called for investigations. Some universities demanded IP logs and timestamps from Chegg in academic misconduct cases. In response, Chegg adopted a policy of releasing user data only under subpoena—shifting the burden to faculty and administrators.

Chegg, for its part, insisted it was simply offering "study support" and denied facilitating cheating. But the evidence presented in Newton’s Cheat Sheet and other academic publications told a different story.

Collapse, AI Disruption, and Image Repair

In 2023, a new threat emerged: OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Free, flexible, and fast, ChatGPT began to supplant Chegg for the same user base. In a rare moment of corporate honesty, Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig told investors that ChatGPT was impacting the company’s subscriber growth. Wall Street panicked. Chegg’s stock plummeted, its valuation shrank, and the company began rounds of layoffs—first 4% of its workforce, then 23% in 2024.

Desperate to stay relevant, Chegg pivoted again—this time toward “CheggMate,” its proprietary AI chatbot built in partnership with OpenAI. Yet the damage to its brand, and its future, was already apparent.

By 2025, Chegg was struggling to define its purpose in a rapidly changing education tech landscape. Its subscription model had been undermined by free AI. Its name remained tainted by years of academic dishonesty. And efforts to shift into AI tutoring raised further concerns about data privacy, surveillance, and automation in learning.

A Mirror of Higher Education’s Failures

Chegg’s rise and fall cannot be understood in isolation. It thrived in a system where students are overburdened, instructors are underpaid, and administrators look the other way as long as graduation rates and tuition dollars remain stable. Its gig-based backend—where underpaid "experts" supply answers for a global audience—mirrors the adjunctification of academic labor itself.

Derek Newton’s Cheat Sheet and other critical reporting have exposed how edtech platforms exploit the credibility crisis in higher education. The real scandal isn’t just that Chegg exists—it’s that the ecosystem made it necessary.

Conclusion

Chegg’s legacy may one day be viewed not as a revolution in learning, but as a symptom of higher education’s marketized decline. Like diploma mills and for-profit colleges before it, Chegg served the needs of students abandoned by the system—but did so at the cost of academic trust and intellectual growth.

As the AI era unfolds, and companies like Chegg scramble to reposition themselves, the Higher Education Inquirer will continue to ask: who profits, who pays, and who is left behind?

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Sources

• Derek Newton, Cheat Sheet newsletter: https://cheatsheet.substack.com

• Chegg Inc. 10-K and Investor Calls (2015–2025)

• The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Is Chegg Helping or Hurting?”

• Inside Higher Ed, “Chegg, ChatGPT, and the New Arms Race in EdTech”

• Bloomberg, “Chegg Warns of ChatGPT Threat”

• Reddit threads: r/Professors, r/College, r/AcademicIntegrity

• The Markup, “Chegg’s Gig-Economy Model and Academic Labor”

• The Atlantic, “The Cheating Economy”

• Higher Education Inquirer Archives on EdTech and Academic Integrity

EdTech on Reddit: A View from the Ground Floor

On the surface, the education technology sector still markets itself as innovative, exciting, and essential. But a closer look at one of the most active online forums for education technology professionals—Reddit’s r/edtech—reveals something more conflicted. Beneath the surface hype, professionals, educators, and developers are wrestling with deep questions about impact, sustainability, and purpose. 

One particularly candid thread titled “EdTech is booming, but are we actually solving real problems?” captures the contradictions at the heart of the industry. The discussion, which you can find here, begins with a deceptively simple question that cuts to the core of the field’s current identity crisis.

The post's author reflects on the fast-paced expansion of edtech platforms and tools, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. They point to the increasing ease of starting a company, accessing AI tools, and attracting seed funding, while simultaneously questioning whether these efforts are genuinely improving learning or merely adding noise to an already crowded ecosystem. They ask whether these tools are addressing core issues or simply automating what doesn’t need to be automated.

The responses are both candid and sobering. One veteran of the industry responded bluntly: “Edtech is not booming and has never really been about the ‘real problems.’ It's always been about money and profits over learning outcomes.” That comment received widespread agreement and set the tone for a critical conversation. Others pointed out the industry’s cyclical nature. “Edtech got very drunk on COVID,” said one user. “It drove a huge surge in valuations, but edtech seems committed to these boom/bust cycles every 7–12 years.” The market hype rarely aligns with long-term adoption, and the collapse of post-pandemic funding has only exacerbated this disconnect.

Some posters argued that edtech remains a “vitamin” instead of a “painkiller”—in other words, a nice-to-have rather than a must-have. Others expressed frustration that edtech often duplicates traditional classroom experiences without improving them. One user described much of the industry as “PowerPoint with lipstick.”

Another major theme is the shift in purchasing power and institutional demand. While startups chase direct-to-consumer models or try to sell to companies, the bulk of the market remains in K–12 and higher education institutions. These institutions are now facing budget cuts and reduced federal COVID-era funding. One teacher noted that “schools have less funding and are becoming more risk averse,” making it even harder for edtech startups to gain traction unless they solve very specific problems.

Some edtech insiders also weighed in. A sales representative commented that tools not tied to curriculum—particularly safety and administration tools—are the only ones gaining momentum. In other words, districts may still buy technology, but they’re buying it for infrastructure, not pedagogy. In a parallel conversation, another Redditor emphasized that much of the money is still on the hardware side: Chromebooks, security systems, and basic connectivity tools.

Meanwhile, generative AI remains a wild card. Several posters, including a college professor, described increased interest in AI-powered learning tools, but they also cautioned that few institutions have coherent strategies for integrating them into teaching. Hype continues to outpace effectiveness.

Other users expressed concern about how edtech firms are shaped by investor expectations. One pointed out that venture capital is trying to insert industrial design (ID) approaches into traditional education, often with harmful results. They argued that these approaches not only fail to improve outcomes but also deepen inequality and erode trust in public education.

If r/edtech is a canary in the coal mine, it’s one with a lot of sharp observations and few illusions. The subreddit is a space where industry insiders, educators, and skeptics hash out what’s working, what isn’t, and what’s broken. The consensus seems clear: most edtech products are not solving fundamental problems. The collapse of funding from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds has dried up easy wins. Products that do succeed tend to solve practical administrative problems, not pedagogical ones. Teachers, meanwhile, are being asked to adopt new tools without evidence that they help students learn or reduce their workload.

The Reddit forum serves as an unscripted, unfiltered pulse check on the edtech world. Unlike polished press releases or self-congratulatory conferences, r/edtech offers raw and sometimes painful truths. For researchers, journalists, and education leaders, the subreddit offers a vital look at what the field is thinking when no one is watching. In that sense, it may be one of the most honest barometers of education technology today.

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Source:
“EdTech is booming, but are we actually solving real problems?” Reddit, June 2025.
https://www.reddit.com/r/edtech/comments/1lu23y5/edtech_is_booming_but_are_we_actually_solving/

Los Angeles Community College District Claims to Be Facing State Takeover Amid Allegations of Fraud and Censorship in LAVC Media Arts Department (LACCD Whistleblower)

The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) may be facing state takeover within two years due to overextended hiring and budget mismanagement, as discussed during a May 2025 meeting of the Los Angeles Valley College (LAVC) Academic Senate. Faculty warned that the looming financial crisis could result in mass layoffs—including tenured staff—and sweeping program cuts.

Start Minutes LAVC Academic Senate

“R. Christian-Brougham: other campuses have brand new presidents doing strange things. If we don’t do things differently as a district, from the mouth of the president in two years we’ll be bankrupt and go into negative.
 Chancellor has responsibility
C. Sustin  asks for confirmation that it is the Chancellor that can and should step in to curb campus budgets and hirings.
R. Christian-Brougham: the Chancellor bears responsibility, but in the takeover scenario, the Board of Trustees – all of them – would get fired
E. Perez: which happened in San Francisco
C. Sustin: hiring is in the purview of campuses, so they can’t directly determine job positions that move forward?
R. Christian-Brougham: Chancellor and BoT could step in and fire the Campus Presidents, though.
E. Perez: in next consultation with Chancellor, bringing this up.
C. Maddren: Gribbons is not sitting back; he’s acting laterally and going upward
E. Thornton: looping back to the example of City College of San Francisco: when the takeover happened there the reductions in force extended to multiple long-since-tenured members of a number of disciplines, including English. For this and so many other reasons, it was a reign of terror sort of situation. So we really need to push the Chancellor.”

End Minutes Academic Senate

https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/laccd/Board.nsf/vpublic?open#

The dire financial outlook comes as new scrutiny falls on LAVC’s Media Arts Department, already under fire for years of alleged fraud, resume fabrication, and manipulation of public perception. Central to these concerns is the department’s chair, Eric Swelstad, who also oversees a $40,000 Hollywood Foreign Press Association (Golden Globe) grant for LAVC students—a role now drawing sharp criticism in light of mounting questions about his credentials and conduct.

Over the past two months, a troubling wave of digital censorship has quietly erased years of documented allegations. In May 2025, nearly two years’ worth of investigative reporting—comprising emails, legal filings, and accreditation complaints—were scrubbed from the independent news site IndyBay. The removed content accused Swelstad of deceiving students and the public for over two decades about the quality and viability of the Media Arts program, as well as about his own professional qualifications.

In June 2025, a negative student review about Swelstad—posted by a disabled student—disappeared from Rate My Professor. These incidents form part of what appears to be a years-long campaign of online reputation management and public deception.

An AI-driven analysis of Rate My Professor entries for long-serving Media Arts faculty—including Swelstad, Arantxa Rodriguez, Chad Sustin, Dan Watanabe, and Jason Beaton—suggests that the majority of positive reviews were written by a single individual or a small group. The analysis cited "Identical Phrasing Across Profiles," "Unusually Consistent Tag Patterns," and a "Homogeneous Tone and Style" as evidence:

“It is very likely that many (possibly a majority) of the positive reviews across these faculty pages were written by one person or a small group using similar templates, tone, and strategy… The presence of clearly distinct voices, especially in the negative reviews, shows that not all content comes from the same source.”

A now-deleted IndyBay article also revealed emails dating back to 2016 between LAVC students and Los Angeles Daily News journalist Dana Bartholomew, who reportedly received detailed complaints from at least a dozen students—but failed to publish the story. Instead, Bartholomew later authored two glowing articles featuring Swelstad and celebrating the approval of LAVC’s $78.5 million Valley Academic and Cultural Center:

* *"L.A. Valley College’s new performing arts center may be put on hold as costs rise,"* Dana Bartholomew, August 28, 2017.

  [https://www.dailynews.com/2016/08/09/la-valley-colleges-new-performing-arts-center-may-be-put-on-hold-as-costs-rise/amp/](https://www.dailynews.com/2016/08/09/la-valley-colleges-new-performing-arts-center-may-be-put-on-hold-as-costs-rise/amp/)

* *"L.A. Valley College’s $78.5-million arts complex approved in dramatic downtown vote,"* Dana Bartholomew, August 11, 2016.
  [https://www.dailynews.com/2016/08/11/la-valley-colleges-785-million-arts-complex-approved-in-dramatic-downtown-vote/](https://www.dailynews.com/2016/08/11/la-valley-colleges-785-million-arts-complex-approved-in-dramatic-downtown-vote/)

Among the most explosive allegations is that Swelstad misrepresented himself as a member of the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA), a claim contradicted by official WGA-West membership records, according to another redacted IndyBay report.

This appears to be the tip of the iceberg according to other also scrubbed IndyBay articles

Other questionable appointments, payments, and student ‘success stories’ in the Los Angeles Valley College Media Arts Department include:

* **Jo Ann Rivas**, a YouTube personality and former Building Oversight Committee member, was paid as a trainer and presenter despite reportedly only working as a casting assistant on the LAVC student-produced film *Canaan Land*.

(https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2018/los-angeles-district/jo-ann-rivas/)

* **Robert Reber**, a student filmmaker, was paid as a cinematography expert.

(https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2017/los-angeles-district/robert-reber/)

* **Diana Deville**, a radio host and LAVC alumna with media credits, served as Unit Production Manager on *Canaan Land*, but her resume claims high-profile studio affiliations including DreamWorks, MGM, and OWN.

(https://www.tnentertainment.com/directory/view/diana-deville-13338)

The film *Canaan Land*, made by LAVC Media Arts students, has itself raised eyebrows. Filmmaker Richard Rossi claimed that both it and his earlier student film *Clemente* had received personal endorsements from the late Pope Francis. These assertions were echoed on *Canaan Land*'s GoFundMe page, prompting public denials and clarifications from the Vatican in *The Washington Post* and *New York Post*:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/08/17/after-july-miracle-pope-francis-reportedly-moves-roberto-clemente-closer-to-sainthood/]
* [https://nypost.com/2017/08/17/the-complicated-battle-over-roberto-clementes-sainthood/]

Censorship efforts appear to have intensified following the publication of a now-removed article advising students how to apply for student loan discharge based on misleading or fraudulent education at LAVC’s Media Arts Department. If successful, such filings could expose the department—and the district—to financial liability.

But the highest-profile financial concern is the 2020 establishment of the **Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s $40,000 grant** for LAVC Media Arts students, administered by Swelstad:

* [HFPA Endowed Scholarship Announcement (PDF)](https://www.lavc.edu/sites/lavc.edu/files/2022-08/lavc_press_release-hfpa-endowed-scholarship-for-lavc-film-tv-students.pdf)
* [LAVC Grant History Document](https://services.laccd.edu/districtsite/Accreditation/lavc/Standard%20IVA/IVA1-02_Grants_History.pdf)

As a disreputable academic administrator with a documented history of professional fraud spanning two decades and multiple student success stories that aren’t, future grant donors may reconsider supporting the Department programs – further pushing the Los Angeles Valley College and by extension the district as a whole towards financial insolvency. 

Street Psychology: Working-Class Wisdom in the Age of Neoliberalism and Trump

In the United States of 2025—where neoliberal capitalism and creeping authoritarianism grind down the human spirit—there’s an urgent need for a way of thinking, surviving, and resisting that doesn’t come from think tanks or corporate wellness plans. Street Psychology is that way.

This idea isn't new. It’s an outbreak from earlier projects like Street Sociologist (2009–2012) and American Injustice (2009–2013), digital spaces that chronicled working-class survival under austerity, war, mass incarceration, student loan predation, and the Great Recession. Those projects documented both despair and resistance—voices from the margins that understood the system was not broken but operating as designed. Street Psychology is the next step in that lineage. It names the psychic toll of exploitation and dares to offer tools for survival drawn not from institutions, but from the people themselves.

Street Psychology isn’t a licensed profession or clinical method. It’s a bottom-up philosophy. A way of being that honors grit, grief, memory, and movement. It draws from Black Psychology, Radical Social Work, and the unspoken survival strategies passed down through generations—especially those of the poor, the working class, the dispossessed.

It tells us: you’re not crazy. You’re living in a society that has normalized cruelty.

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Life Under Pressure

In today's America, working people face a perfect storm. Medicaid cuts, climate shocks, unpayable debt, and housing crises are daily facts of life. The Trump regime, emboldened by a Supreme Court that erodes checks and balances, offers little more than political theater and corporate tax breaks. "Law and order" is back—but so are vigilante violence and state repression. In this environment, working-class people are expected to carry on as if nothing is wrong—grinding away at gig jobs, navigating broken transit systems, shouldering invisible pain.

Street Psychology offers no false comfort. It teaches that burnout, anxiety, and despair are not personal failures—they are rational reactions to a system that exploits and isolates. It offers a politics of honesty.

It reminds us that mental health cannot be separated from rent, food, dignity, and debt.

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Lessons from Horror and Triumph

Street Psychology is grounded in history—not the history of presidents and generals, but the people’s history of how folks made it through.

During the Great Depression, when one in four Americans was unemployed, it was mutual aid, union organizing, and government pressure from below that helped form the New Deal—not just FDR’s goodwill. Neighbors shared food. Workers seized factories. Families survived on ingenuity and grit. Street Psychology carries that memory.

During World War II, ordinary people faced rations, displacement, and death on an unprecedented scale. But they also built community resilience. Black Americans moved north and west in the Great Migration, seeking both work and dignity. Women entered the workforce by the millions—not for empowerment branding, but to survive. Trauma was everywhere, but so was collective purpose. Street Psychology remembers that duality.

And in the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the brutal convergence of economic inequality, medical neglect, and state failure. But we also saw mutual aid networks rise overnight. Grocery workers, nurses, delivery drivers, and custodians became the front line—not billionaires or generals. People created community fridges, distributed masks, and organized rent strikes. Even amid mass death and disinformation, something deeply human survived. Street Psychology draws its oxygen from these moments.

It says: we’ve been through hell before—and we’ve learned how to survive together.

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Radical Roots and Collective Healing

Street Psychology stands on the shoulders of Black radical thinkers like Dr. Na’im Akbar and Dr. Wade Nobles, who taught that psychological liberation requires historical truth and cultural self-determination. It borrows from the Radical Social Worker tradition that insists depression and addiction often emerge from exploitation, not deficiency.

It echoes the voices of those doing hard, dirty, “bullshit jobs,” as David Graeber called them—people whose work is exhausting, precarious, and spiritually deadening. It respects those whose minds and bodies are tired because they’ve been used up. And it says plainly: this is not your fault.

Healing begins with naming the madness.

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A People's Practice

Street Psychology thrives outside institutions. It happens in union halls, kitchens, church basements, food pantries, WhatsApp threads. It takes the form of eye contact, a ride to work, a bag of groceries, a story told without shame. It asks us not to fix ourselves to fit a broken world—but to remember we are not alone in our pain or our power.

It teaches that even in a world of distraction and despair, we can practice presence and solidarity. We can re-learn how to listen, how to mourn, how to laugh in defiance.

This psychology is not neutral. It does not pretend to be apolitical. It stands with those being crushed—by the debt collectors, the landlords, the ICE raids, the fascists in suits. It says: you matter. Your struggle matters. And you're not the only one carrying this weight.

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A Call to Reclaim Our Minds

Street Psychology is not a cure. It is not a self-help manual. It is a collective reckoning. A refusal to be shamed into silence or fragmented into diagnosis. It is the unlicensed, unpolished wisdom of people who’ve lived through hell and still show up for each other.

In the age of Trump, AI surveillance, climate breakdown, and economic betrayal, this might be our best chance: to recover the human, to restore the political, and to reclaim the psychological as a shared terrain.

Let’s build a new commons—not just of resources, but of understanding. Let’s build a psychology that is street-smart, justice-rooted, and history-aware.

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Sources & Influences:

• Akbar, Na’im. Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery

• Nobles, Wade. Seeking the Sakhu

• Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs

• Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed

• Radical Social Worker Collective

• Mutual Aid Disaster Relief

• American Injustice (2009–2013) and Street Sociologist (2009–2012) blog archives

• Historical memory from the Great Depression, WWII home front, and COVID-19 mutual aid networks

• People’s CDC, APA, KFF data on structural causes of psychological distress

Street Psychology lives in those who refuse to forget—and who refuse to give up. If you or your community are practicing this in any form, we want to hear from you.

Future Scenarios: A Post-College America (Glen McGhee)

By 2035, the traditional American college system may be a relic of the past. A variety of forces—economic, technological, demographic, and cultural—are converging to transform the landscape of higher learning. Grounded in Papenhausen's cyclical model of institutional change, current data and trends suggest a plausible future in which college campuses no longer serve as the central hubs of postsecondary education. Instead, a more fragmented, skills-based, and economically integrated system may rise in its place.

Since 2010, college enrollment in the U.S. has declined by 8.5%, with more than a million fewer students than before the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 80 colleges have closed or merged since 2020, and many experts forecast a sharp acceleration in closures, especially as the so-called “demographic cliff” reduces the pool of traditional-age college students. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia projects a potential 142% increase in annual college closures by the end of the decade.

This institutional unraveling is not solely demographic. Federal disinvestment in research and financial aid, rising tuition (up more than 1,500% since the late 1970s), and increasing underemployment among recent graduates are undermining the perceived and actual value of a college degree. Emerging technologies, particularly AI, are rapidly changing the ways people learn and the skills employers seek. Meanwhile, the proliferation of fake degrees and credential fraud further erodes trust in conventional academic institutions.

In response to these destabilizing trends, four future scenarios offer possible replacements for the traditional college system. Each reflects different combinations of technological advancement, labor market shifts, and institutional evolution.

The Corporate Academy Landscape envisions a future in which large companies like Google, Amazon, and IBM take the lead in educating the workforce. Building on existing certificate programs, these corporations establish their own academies, offering industry-aligned training and credentials. Apprenticeships and on-the-job learning become the primary paths to employment, with digital badges and blockchain-secured micro-credentials replacing degrees. Corporate campuses cluster in major urban centers, while rural areas develop niche training programs related to local industries such as agriculture and renewable energy.

In The Distributed Learning Networks scenario, education becomes fully decentralized. Instead of enrolling in a single institution, learners access personalized instruction through AI-powered platforms, community-based workshops, and online mentorships. Local libraries, maker spaces, and co-working hubs evolve into core educational environments. Learning is assessed through portfolios and real-world projects rather than grades or standardized exams. Regional expertise clusters develop organically, especially in smaller cities and towns with existing community infrastructure.

The Guild Renaissance looks to the past to shape the future. Modeled on pre-industrial apprenticeship systems, professional guilds re-emerge as gatekeepers of career development. These organizations handle training, credentialing, and job placement in sectors such as healthcare, construction, technology, and the arts. Hierarchical systems guide individuals from novice to expert, and regional economies specialize around guild-supported industries. Employment becomes tightly integrated with ongoing learning, minimizing the traditional gap between school and work.

Finally, The Hybrid Workplace University scenario grows out of the shift to remote and hybrid work. With more than one-third of workers expected to remain partially remote, workplaces themselves become learning environments. Education is embedded in professional workflows through VR training, modular courses, and flexible scheduling. As access to learning becomes geographically unrestricted, rural and underpopulated areas may see renewed vitality as remote workers seek lower-cost, higher-quality living environments.

Despite their differences, these scenarios share several transformational themes. Economically, resources formerly directed toward campus infrastructure are redirected toward skills training, research hubs, and community development. Culturally, the notion of lifelong learning becomes normalized, and credentials become more transparent, practical, and verifiable. Socially, traditional notions of campus life give way to professional and civic identity tied to industry specialization or community engagement.

The evolution of quality assurance is also noteworthy. Traditional accreditation may give way to employer-driven standards, market-based performance indicators, and digital verification technologies. Blockchain and competency-based evaluations offer more direct and trustworthy assessments of ability and readiness for employment.

Geographically, these changes will reshape communities in different ways. Former college towns must navigate economic transitions, potentially reinventing themselves as hubs for innovation or remote work. Urban areas may thrive as centers of corporate education and research. Rural regions may find new purpose through specialized training programs aligned with local resources and culture.

If these trends continue, the benefits could be substantial: reduced student debt, more direct paths to employment, faster innovation, and greater regional economic diversity. But challenges remain. The loss of traditional university research infrastructure may hinder long-term scientific progress. Access to elite training may increasingly depend on corporate affiliation, potentially limiting social mobility and excluding those without early access to professional networks. The liberal arts and humanities—once central to American higher education—may struggle to find footing in this new paradigm.

In the broad view, these emerging models reflect a shift away from institutional prestige and toward demonstrable competence. The change is not only educational but societal, redefining what it means to learn, to work, and to belong. Whether this transformation leads to a more inclusive and efficient system or deepens existing inequities will depend on how these new models are regulated, supported, and adapted to public needs.

By 2035, the American educational system may no longer be anchored to age-segregated campuses and debt-financed degrees. Instead, it may revolve around pragmatic, lifelong pathways—deeply integrated with the labor market, shaped by regional strengths, and responsive to continuous technological change.

Sources:

1. National Student Clearinghouse Research Center

2. U.S. Department of Education

3. Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
   4–5. National Center for Education Statistics
   6–9. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index
   10–11. Federal Reserve Bank of New York
   12–13. McKinsey & Co., World Economic Forum
   14–16. U.S. Department of Justice, Accrediting Agencies
   17–19. Company Reports (Google, IBM, Amazon, Apple)
   20–21. U.S. Department of Labor
   22–24. Credential Engine, World Bank, Blockchain in Education Conference

4. Burning Glass Institute
   26–29. EdTech Reports, OECD, Pew Research Center
   30–31. National Apprenticeship Survey
   32–34. Gallup, Stanford Remote Work Project

5. UNESCO Blockchain for Education Report

College grad unemployment surges as employers replace new hires with AI (CBS News)

The unemployment rate for new college graduates has recently surged. Economists say businesses are now replacing entry-level jobs with artificial intelligence.

 

Robocolleges vs. Public Universities: Debt, Dropouts, and a Fraying Future

As the landscape of American higher education continues to shift, the divide between public universities and tech-heavy “robocolleges” has grown increasingly apparent. Once promoted as affordable and innovative, robocolleges are now under scrutiny for fostering high student debt and low graduation rates.

These institutions prioritize automation, outsourcing, and marketing over traditional teaching models, often sidelining academic integrity in favor of scalability.

Comparing Outcomes: Public Universities vs. Robocolleges

Feature	Public Universities	Robocolleges (e.g., for-profit/online-heavy)
Average Student Debt	~$18,350 at graduation	~$29,000 or higher
Graduation Rates	~60% for full-time students	Often below 30%
Support Services	Academic advising, tutoring, career centers	Often outsourced or minimal
Faculty Interaction	In-person, tenured professors	Automated systems or adjuncts
Cost Efficiency	Lower tuition, especially in-state	Higher cost per credit hour
Outcomes	Better job placement and earnings potential	Mixed results, often lower ROI

Sources: National Center for Education Statistics; Higher Education Inquirer research

Who Are the Robocolleges?

The following institutions have been identified by the Higher Education Inquirer as leading examples of the robocollege model:

• Liberty University Online: A nonprofit institution with massive online enrollment and over $8 billion in federal student loan debt, especially at the graduate level.

• Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU): With more than 160,000 online students, SNHU has become a leader in automation and AI-driven instruction.

• University of Phoenix: Once the largest for-profit college, now operating as a nonprofit affiliate of the University of Idaho. It has reduced instruction and services by $100 million annually while maintaining high profits.

• Colorado Technical University (CTU): Known for its use of machine learning and data analytics to manage student advising and engagement.

• Purdue University Global: A public university operating a former for-profit model, with deep ties to Kaplan Education and significant outsourcing.

• University of Arizona Global Campus (UAGC): Formerly Ashford University, now part of the University of Arizona system. It offers accelerated online degrees with limited faculty interaction.

The Robocollege Model

These schools rely on automated learning platforms, outsourced services, and aggressive marketing to attract students—often working adults, veterans, and low-income learners. While they promise flexibility and access, critics argue they deliver shallow curricula, minimal support, and poor job placement.

The Consequences

Many students leave robocolleges with significant debt and no degree to show for it. Partnerships with Online Program Managers (OPMs) like 2U and EducationDynamics have drawn criticism for deceptive recruitment practices and inflated costs. Public confidence in higher ed is eroding, and students are increasingly seeking alternative routes to meaningful work.

What’s Next?

As tuition costs rise and outcomes falter, the Higher Education Inquirer will continue investigating whether robocolleges represent a legitimate future for learning—or a cautionary tale of commercialized education gone awry.

Layoffs at UPS and Microsoft Highlight Economic Shifts and Technological Upheaval

This week brought sobering news for American workers as both United Parcel Service (UPS) and Microsoft announced significant job cuts, signaling deeper transformations in the logistics and tech industries. These developments reflect a broader shift toward automation, artificial intelligence, and corporate restructuring—at the expense of labor stability.

At UPS, up to 20,000 jobs are on the chopping block as the company executes what it calls a “network reconfiguration.” The company is closing 73 U.S. facilities as it pulls back from overreliance on Amazon deliveries and responds to declining package volumes. Instead of abrupt firings, UPS has begun offering voluntary buyout packages to its full-time drivers. These packages include pension and health benefits, but the move has drawn sharp criticism from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Union leadership argues that the company is violating the spirit, if not the letter, of its national contract, which mandates the creation of 22,500 new union jobs.

The company's restructuring comes amid ongoing automation in shipping and warehousing, rising costs, and global economic instability. Earlier this year, UPS closed major hubs in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin—moves that signal a long-term realignment in how the company manages logistics. Some analysts see this as the largest transformation of UPS’s infrastructure in decades, one designed to cut costs and compete more aggressively with Amazon and FedEx. But the timing, just months after a much-publicized contract negotiation with the Teamsters, has many workers feeling blindsided.

While UPS sheds labor in the physical world, Microsoft is doing the same in the digital. This week, the company confirmed it will cut approximately 9,000 employees—about 4 percent of its global workforce—as it pivots even more aggressively into artificial intelligence. The layoffs affect sales, marketing, and engineering divisions, but some of the most significant cuts came from the Xbox gaming division. Entire studios have been shuttered, including The Initiative, and long-anticipated projects such as the “Perfect Dark” reboot and Rare’s Everwild have been quietly canceled.

Microsoft leadership has said the cuts are intended to reduce management layers and “streamline for innovation,” but internally, the mood is grim. One executive was criticized for suggesting that laid-off staff should use Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT to deal with the emotional fallout and rewrite their résumés. The post was quickly deleted, but it underscores the growing disconnect between executive leadership and a fatigued workforce. The tech giant is reportedly spending close to $80 billion on AI infrastructure this fiscal year, and workers are feeling the cost.

This is not the first round of layoffs at Microsoft in 2025. The company had previously let go of thousands of employees in January and March as it accelerated AI hiring and scaled down non-essential departments. Workers in online forums and internal Slack groups have expressed confusion and frustration over repeated restructuring that often comes with little transparency or warning.

These two major corporate announcements offer a powerful case study in the forces reshaping the modern economy. At UPS, the pressure comes from changing consumer behavior, automation, and strained labor-management relations. At Microsoft, it’s about replacing human capital with machine learning and making deep structural changes to chase higher profits in an AI-first world. In both cases, the workers pay the price.

For students and faculty in higher education—especially those studying labor relations, supply chain management, computer science, and organizational behavior—these events are a stark reminder that stability in the job market is no longer a given. The old promises of lifelong employment or career ladders within major corporations are being eroded by technological disruption and financialization.

Universities may trumpet partnerships with Microsoft or logistics giants like UPS, but they must also reckon with what these partnerships mean for the future of work. Are students being trained for careers that may not exist in five years? Are institutions complicit in funneling talent into systems that undervalue human labor?

Layoffs at this scale are not isolated events. They are structural. And for millions of Americans—workers, students, graduates—they represent not just temporary hardship, but a preview of the next economic reality.

Sources: Reuters, The Times UK, ABC7, Supply Chain Dive, Polygon, The Verge, Reddit, Teamsters.org

Selling Armageddon

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

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

The Profiteers of the Apocalypse

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

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

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

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

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

The War on Higher Education: Enter Charlie Kirk

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

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

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

Naomi Klein and the Shock Doctrine of Now

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

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

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

“Freedom Cities”: Privatized Utopia, Public Disaster

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

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

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

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

The Israel Factor

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

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

Selling the End of Knowledge

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

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

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

Preventing Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

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

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

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