The Brown University Killing, the Educated Underclass, and the Politics of Control

When a killing becomes associated with an elite institution such as Brown University, the public narrative hardens quickly. The event is framed as an unforeseeable rupture—either the product of individual pathology or evidence that universities have failed to control dangerous people in their midst. Missing from both accounts is a deeper examination of how elite higher education produces an educated underclass, how mental illness is managed rather than treated, how international students are uniquely exposed to risk, and how mass surveillance and reporting regimes increasingly substitute for care.

Elite universities project an image of abundance: intellectual freedom, global opportunity, and moral seriousness. Yet beneath that image lies a population living with chronic insecurity. Graduate students, adjuncts, postdoctoral researchers, and international students occupy a paradoxical position—highly educated, institutionally dependent, and structurally disposable. They are central to the university’s labor model and global prestige, yet peripheral to its safety nets and decision-making structures.

Mental illness must be addressed directly, but not in the reductive way it is often invoked after violence occurs. Campus mental health systems are overwhelmed, under-resourced, and shaped by liability concerns rather than therapeutic commitments. Students in severe psychological distress frequently encounter long waitlists, fragmented care, or administrative responses that blur the line between support and discipline. Crisis is managed, not resolved.

For international students, these failures are magnified. Visa status is typically contingent on continuous enrollment and academic performance. A mental health crisis can threaten not only a student’s education but their legal right to remain in the country. Seeking help may carry perceived—or real—risks: loss of funding, forced leaves of absence, housing instability, or immigration consequences. Cultural stigma, racism, language barriers, and social isolation further discourage engagement with already inadequate systems.

Rather than expanding care, universities have increasingly expanded surveillance. Elite campuses now operate dense ecosystems of monitoring: security cameras, access controls, data analytics, behavioral intervention teams, and anonymous “concerned citizen” tip lines. These systems are justified as preventative safety measures, but they often function as tools of social control. “Concerning behavior” is deliberately undefined, allowing subjective judgments to trigger institutional scrutiny.

Such systems disproportionately affect those who already stand out—students who are foreign, mentally ill, socially isolated, or racially marginalized. For international students in particular, being flagged by a tip or threat assessment process can escalate rapidly, drawing in campus police, local law enforcement, or federal immigration authorities. Surveillance does not replace care; it displaces it.

In the aftermath of violence, political responses tend to reinforce this displacement. Donald Trump’s reactions to campus-related violence and crime have followed a consistent pattern: emphasis on “law and order,” denunciations of universities as irresponsible or ideologically corrupt, and calls for stronger policing, harsher penalties, and increased monitoring. Mental illness is often invoked rhetorically, but rarely accompanied by proposals for expanded treatment, housing stability, or protections for vulnerable students—especially non-citizens.

This framing matters. When elite campus violence is interpreted through a punitive lens, it legitimizes further surveillance, broader reporting mandates, and closer coordination between universities and law enforcement. It shifts responsibility away from institutional structures and onto individuals deemed dangerous or deviant. For foreign students and members of the educated underclass, this environment deepens fear and discourages help-seeking, even as pressure intensifies.

The concept of the educated underclass helps explain why these dynamics are so volatile. Contemporary higher education produces vast numbers of highly trained individuals for a shrinking set of secure positions. International students are recruited aggressively, charged high tuition, and celebrated as evidence of global prestige, yet offered limited pathways to stable employment or belonging. Universities benefit enormously from this arrangement while externalizing its human costs.

None of this excuses violence. Accountability is essential, and the suffering of victims must remain central. But focusing exclusively on individual blame—or on punitive political responses—allows institutions to preserve comforting myths about themselves. It obscures how structural precarity, untreated mental illness, immigration vulnerability, and surveillance-based governance interact in predictable ways.

What incidents connected to elite universities ultimately reveal is not merely individual failure, but institutional contradiction. Universities claim to value diversity while subjecting foreign students to heightened scrutiny. They speak the language of wellness while expanding systems of monitoring and reporting. Political leaders denounce campuses while endorsing the very control mechanisms that exacerbate isolation and distress.

Until universities invest seriously in mental health care, protect international students from cascading penalties, and confront the harms of surveillance-first approaches—and until political leaders move beyond carceral reflexes—elite campuses will remain places where suffering is managed rather than addressed. When that management fails, the consequences can be catastrophic.

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Sources

American Psychiatric Association. Mental Health in College Students.
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/college-students/mental-health-in-college

Eisenberg, D., et al. “Mental Health and Academic Success in College.” The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2009.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books.

Institute of International Education. Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange.
https://opendoorsdata.org

Lipson, S. K., & Eisenberg, D. “Mental Health and Academic Attitudes and Expectations in University Populations.” Journal of Adolescent Health, 2018.

Monahan, Torin. Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity. Rutgers University Press.

Newfield, Christopher. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Johns Hopkins University Press.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security. SEVP Guidance for International Students.
https://www.ice.gov/sevis

Trump, Donald J. Public statements and campaign remarks on crime, universities, and law enforcement, 2016–2024.

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

NCAA Football Is Dirty… And It Always Has Been

For more than a century, college football has wrapped itself in pageantry, school colors, marching bands, and the language of amateur virtue. It has sold itself as character-building, educational, and fundamentally different from professional sports. Yet from its earliest days to the present NIL era, NCAA football has been marked by exploitation, corruption, racial inequality, physical harm, and institutional hypocrisy. The truth is not that college football has recently become “dirty.” It has always been this way.

College football emerged in the late 19th century as a violent, chaotic game played almost exclusively by elite white men at private Northeastern universities. By the 1890s, dozens of players were dying each season from on-field injuries. In 1905 alone, at least 18 young men were killed. The brutality became so extreme that President Theodore Roosevelt summoned university leaders to the White House, demanding reforms to save the sport—or shut it down entirely. The NCAA’s predecessor organization was born not to protect players, but to protect football itself.

From the beginning, control and image management mattered more than athlete welfare.

As the sport spread nationally in the early 20th century, universities discovered football’s power as a marketing and fundraising engine. Gate receipts financed campuses, built stadiums, and elevated institutional prestige. With that money came cheating. Schools openly paid players under the table, provided fake jobs, and created academic loopholes to keep athletes eligible. The NCAA responded not by ending exploitation, but by codifying “amateurism”—a concept designed to deny players compensation while preserving institutional profit.

That amateur ideal was always selective. Coaches became highly paid public figures, administrators gained power and prestige, and universities used football to attract donors and students. Players, meanwhile, were expected to risk their bodies for scholarships that could be revoked, often steered into academic programs that prioritized eligibility over education. The system worked exactly as intended.

Race made the exploitation even starker. For much of the 20th century, Black athletes were excluded outright or limited by quotas, especially in the South. When integration finally occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, it did not bring equity. Black players disproportionately filled the most physically punishing positions, generated enormous revenue, and remained shut out of coaching, administrative leadership, and long-term financial benefit. The plantation metaphor—uncomfortable as it is—has endured because it fits.

Throughout the postwar era, scandals became routine. Academic fraud at powerhouse programs. Boosters laundering payments. Universities covering up recruiting violations while publicly moralizing about rules and integrity. The NCAA positioned itself as a regulator, but enforcement was inconsistent and often political. Blue-blood programs negotiated slaps on the wrist while smaller schools were hammered to make examples. Justice was never blind; it was strategic.

Meanwhile, the physical toll on players worsened. As athletes grew larger, faster, and stronger, the sport became more dangerous. Concussions were downplayed for decades. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) was ignored until it could no longer be denied. Players suffering brain injuries were dismissed as weak, while universities and conferences cashed ever-larger media checks. The NCAA claimed ignorance, even as evidence mounted and lawsuits piled up.

The television era transformed college football into a billion-dollar entertainment industry. Conference realignment chased broadcast revenue, not regional tradition or student well-being. Athletes were asked to travel cross-country on school nights, miss classes, and perform under relentless pressure—all while being told they were “students first.” The hypocrisy became harder to conceal.

By the early 21st century, the contradictions finally cracked. Legal challenges exposed the NCAA’s amateurism rules as a restraint of trade. Courts acknowledged what players had long known: universities were profiting massively from their labor while denying them basic economic rights. Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) was not a revolution—it was an overdue concession.

Yet even in the NIL era, the dirt remains. The system still lacks transparency. Booster-driven collectives operate in legal gray zones. Players are encouraged to chase short-term deals without long-term protections. There is no guaranteed healthcare beyond enrollment, no pension, no real collective bargaining for most athletes. Coaches can leave at will; players are scrutinized, transferred, or discarded.

The NCAA insists it is reforming. Conferences promise stability. Universities speak the language of athlete empowerment. But the underlying structure remains unchanged: unpaid or under-protected labor generating extraordinary wealth for institutions that claim educational mission while operating like entertainment corporations.

College football’s defenders often say, “It’s always been this way,” as if that excuses the harm. In reality, that phrase is an indictment. From the deadly fields of the 1900s to the concussion-ridden stadiums of today, from Jim Crow exclusion to modern NIL chaos, the sport has been built on control, denial, and profit.

The problem with NCAA football is not that it lost its way. It never had one.

What is new is not the dirt—but the visibility. Players now speak openly. Courts intervene. Fans question the myths. The mask is slipping, and the century-old fiction of purity is harder to maintain. Whether that leads to real change—or merely a cleaner narrative over the same exploitative core—remains to be seen.

But history is clear. College football did not fall from grace.

It was born compromised.

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Sources

– National Collegiate Athletic Association, History of the NCAA
– Michael Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle
– Taylor Branch, “The Shame of College Sports,” The Atlantic
– Allen Sack & Ellen Staurowsky, College Athletes for Hire
– ESPN Investigations and NCAA Infractions Reports
– Boston University CTE Center research on football-related brain injury
– U.S. Supreme Court, NCAA v. Alston (2021)

Scientific Authority: A Century of Bias in the Name of Progress

For more than a century, the authority of “science” has been used not only to cure disease or explain the universe but also to justify bigotry, exploitation, and exclusion. From eugenics to IQ testing, from biological determinism to race science, various pseudoscientific movements have cloaked prejudice in the language of objectivity and legitimacy. This history—still echoing in higher education, medicine, and public policy—demands deeper public understanding.

Eugenics and the Birth of Scientific Racism

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as evolutionary theory gained public attention, a darker interpretation emerged: eugenics, the idea that human populations could be improved through selective breeding. Championed by Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, eugenics quickly became a popular movement in the United States and Europe. Its adherents—often university-educated scientists and physicians—used statistical arguments and anatomical studies to promote forced sterilizations, anti-immigration laws, and the institutionalization of people deemed “unfit.”

Elite universities like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford were central to the eugenics movement. Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, supported restrictions on Jewish enrollment, while professors like Charles Davenport led major eugenics research projects, funded by the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation. These efforts culminated in U.S. policies such as the Immigration Act of 1924 and Supreme Court rulings like Buck v. Bell (1927), which legitimized the sterilization of “feeble-minded” individuals. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously wrote, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The Globalization of Bigoted Science

Eugenics was not limited to the United States. In Germany, American eugenic ideas influenced Nazi racial laws and programs. German doctors and scientists adopted race hygiene as state policy under Hitler, leading to sterilizations, medical experiments, and mass murder—what began as “science” ultimately culminated in the Holocaust.

Yet after World War II, even as Nazi atrocities were exposed, many in the West continued promoting soft forms of scientific bigotry under different names. Race-based intelligence theories were repackaged for Cold War audiences. Psychological studies, for instance, used IQ testing—originally developed by Alfred Binet for individualized education—as tools to argue for the innate intellectual inferiority of Black, Indigenous, and immigrant populations. American psychologists like Arthur Jensen and later Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein (The Bell Curve, 1994) insisted on a genetic basis for racial disparities in intelligence and income. Their ideas were roundly criticized but widely circulated in elite circles and conservative think tanks.

Medical Racism and Human Experimentation

Bigotry under the banner of science was not limited to intelligence testing. In medicine, scientific racism was used to justify brutal experimentation on marginalized populations. The most infamous case is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932–1972), in which Black men in Alabama were denied treatment for syphilis by the U.S. Public Health Service so researchers could observe the disease’s natural progression. These men were never told they had syphilis, even after penicillin became widely available in the 1940s.

In Puerto Rico and other U.S. colonies, women were used in early birth control trials without informed consent. Poor people, incarcerated people, and mentally ill individuals were also subjected to invasive procedures under the guise of scientific advancement.

Even today, racial biases continue to shape medical education and practice. Myths such as Black people having “thicker skin” or feeling less pain still influence clinical decision-making, leading to disparities in treatment and outcomes.

The Rhetoric of “Objectivity” and the Persistence of Bias

What makes science-based bigotry particularly dangerous is the claim to objectivity. Unlike openly ideological or religious justifications for inequality, scientific arguments seem neutral, rational, and data-driven. This gave them an air of credibility that allowed policymakers, judges, and educators to embed discriminatory practices into laws, institutions, and curricula.

Throughout the 20th century, bigoted science influenced criminal justice (through phrenology and “criminal anthropology”), education (through tracking and segregated schooling), and labor markets (through biased aptitude testing and “merit-based” hiring). University researchers were frequently at the forefront of these movements, aided by philanthropic funding and government contracts.

Resistance from Within Science

It is important to note that many scientists, doctors, and educators resisted these abuses. Activists like W.E.B. Du Bois, a sociologist and the first Black American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, used empirical research to debunk racist theories. In the mid-20th century, geneticists like Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould challenged biological determinism, showing that racial categories have no firm biological basis and that environmental factors play a dominant role in shaping intelligence and behavior.

Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981) exposed the flawed data and assumptions behind IQ science and craniometry. Lewontin, meanwhile, demonstrated that genetic variation within racial groups far exceeded variation between them, undercutting race as a meaningful biological concept.

Legacy and Modern Manifestations

Despite these corrections, echoes of science-based bigotry persist. Racial disparities in standardized testing, policing algorithms, facial recognition software, and genetic research reflect uncritical assumptions about “objectivity” and “merit.” Tech companies and university researchers now traffic in new forms of algorithmic bias that often reproduce the old hierarchies under new names.

Moreover, white supremacist groups and alt-right ideologues continue to misuse evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and social psychology to justify racial segregation and misogyny. The internet has made this misinformation harder to regulate and easier to disseminate.

Scientific Authority

The history of science-based bigotry reveals a troubling pattern: when scientific authority is wielded without ethical oversight or historical awareness, it can become a weapon of oppression. Higher education institutions—many of which played central roles in promoting pseudoscientific racism—must reckon with this legacy. That means more than issuing apologies or renaming buildings; it requires a critical reassessment of how knowledge is produced, validated, and applied.

Understanding the misuse of science in the past is essential to ensuring that the knowledge of the future uplifts rather than excludes. A truly democratic science must be self-critical, historically informed, and deeply engaged with questions of power and justice.

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Sources:

• Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. W.W. Norton, 1981.

• Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. Harvard University Press, 1985.

• Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Doubleday, 2006.

• Lombardo, Paul A. Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

• Lewontin, Richard C. “The Apportionment of Human Diversity.” Evolutionary Biology, vol. 6, 1972, pp. 381–398.

• Allen, Garland E. "The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910–1940: An Essay in Institutional History." Osiris, vol. 2, 1986, pp. 225–264.

• Duster, Troy. Backdoor to Eugenics. Routledge, 2003.

• Reverby, Susan M. Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy. University of North Carolina Press, 2009.You said:

100 Ways the Trump Administration Has Undermined the Environment, Human Rights, World and Domestic Peace, Labor, and Knowledge

The Trump administration, since returning to power in 2025, has escalated attacks on the foundations of democracy, the environment, world peace, human rights, and intellectual inquiry. While the administration has marketed itself as “America First,” its policies have more often meant profits for the ultra-wealthy, repression for the working majority, and escalating dangers for the planet.

Below is a running list of 100 of the most dangerous actions and policies—a record of how quickly a government can dismantle hard-won protections for people, peace, and the planet.

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I. Attacks on the Environment

1. Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement—again.

2. Dismantling the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

3. Opening federal lands and national parks to oil, gas, and mining leases.

4. Gutting protections for endangered species.

5. Allowing coal companies to dump mining waste in rivers and streams.

6. Rolling back vehicle fuel efficiency standards.

7. Subsidizing fossil fuel companies while defunding renewable energy programs.

8. Suppressing climate science at federal agencies.

9. Greenlighting pipelines that threaten Indigenous lands and water supplies.

10. Promoting offshore drilling in fragile ecosystems.

11. Weakening Clean Water Act enforcement.

12. Dismantling environmental justice programs that protect poor communities.

13. Politicizing NOAA and censoring weather/climate warnings.

14. Undermining international climate cooperation at the UN.

15. Allowing pesticides banned in Europe to return to U.S. farms.

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II. Undermining World Peace and Global Stability

16. Threatening military action against Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea.

17. Expanding the nuclear arsenal instead of pursuing arms control.

18. Cutting funding for diplomacy and the State Department.

19. Withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO).

20. Weakening NATO alliances with inflammatory rhetoric.

21. Escalating drone strikes and loosening rules of engagement.

22. Providing cover for authoritarian leaders worldwide.

23. Walking away from peace negotiations in the Middle East.

24. Blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza, Yemen, and other war-torn areas.

25. Expanding weapons sales to Saudi Arabia despite human rights abuses.

26. Using tariffs and sanctions as blunt instruments against allies.

27. Politicizing intelligence briefings to justify military adventurism.

28. Abandoning refugee protections and asylum agreements.

29. Treating climate refugees as security threats.

30. Reducing U.S. participation in the United Nations.

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III. Attacks on Human Rights and the Rule of Law

31. Expanding family separation policies at the border.

32. Targeting asylum seekers for indefinite detention.

33. Militarizing immigration enforcement with National Guard troops.

34. Attacking reproductive rights and defunding women’s health programs.

35. Rolling back LGBTQ+ protections in schools and workplaces.

36. Reinstating bans on transgender service members in the military.

37. Undermining voting rights through purges and voter ID laws.

38. Packing the courts with extremist judges hostile to civil rights.

39. Weaponizing the Justice Department against political opponents.

40. Expanding surveillance powers with little oversight.

41. Encouraging police crackdowns on protests.

42. Expanding use of federal troops in U.S. cities.

43. Weakening consent decrees against abusive police departments.

44. Refusing to investigate hate crimes tied to far-right violence.

45. Deporting long-term immigrants with no criminal record.

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IV. Attacks on Domestic Peace and Tranquility

46. Encouraging militias and extremist groups with dog whistles.

47. Using inflammatory rhetoric that stokes racial and religious hatred.

48. Equating journalists with “enemies of the people.”

49. Cutting funds for community-based violence prevention.

50. Politicizing natural disaster relief.

51. Treating peaceful protests as national security threats.

52. Expanding federal use of facial recognition surveillance.

53. Undermining local control with federal overreach.

54. Stigmatizing entire religious and ethnic groups.

55. Promoting conspiracy theories from the presidential podium.

56. Encouraging violent crackdowns on labor strikes.

57. Undermining pandemic preparedness and response.

58. Allowing corporations to sidestep workplace safety rules.

59. Shutting down diversity and inclusion training across agencies.

60. Promoting vigilante violence through online platforms.

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V. Attacks on Labor Rights and the Working Class

61. Weakening the Department of Labor’s enforcement of wage theft.

62. Blocking attempts to raise the federal minimum wage.

63. Undermining collective bargaining rights for federal workers.

64. Supporting right-to-work laws across states.

65. Allowing employers to misclassify gig workers as “independent contractors.”

66. Blocking new OSHA safety standards.

67. Expanding exemptions for overtime pay.

68. Weakening rules on child labor in agriculture.

69. Cutting unemployment benefits during economic downturns.

70. Favoring union-busting corporations in federal contracts.

71. Rolling back protections for striking workers.

72. Encouraging outsourcing of jobs overseas.

73. Weakening enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in workplaces.

74. Cutting funding for worker retraining programs.

75. Promoting unpaid internships as a “pathway” to jobs.

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VI. Attacks on Intellectualism and Knowledge

76. Defunding the Department of Education in favor of privatization.

77. Attacking public universities as “woke indoctrination centers.”

78. Promoting for-profit colleges with predatory practices.

79. Restricting student loan forgiveness programs.

80. Undermining Title IX protections for sexual harassment.

81. Defunding libraries and public broadcasting.

82. Politicizing scientific research grants.

83. Firing federal scientists who contradict administration narratives.

84. Suppressing research on gun violence.

85. Censoring federal climate and environmental data.

86. Promoting creationism and Christian nationalism in schools.

87. Expanding surveillance of student activists.

88. Encouraging book bans in schools and libraries.

89. Undermining accreditation standards for higher education.

90. Attacking historians who challenge nationalist myths.

91. Cutting humanities funding in favor of military research.

92. Encouraging political litmus tests for professors.

93. Treating journalists as combatants in a “culture war.”

94. Promoting AI-driven “robocolleges” with no faculty oversight.

95. Gutting federal student aid programs.

96. Allowing corporate donors to dictate university policy.

97. Discouraging international students from studying in the U.S.

98. Criminalizing whistleblowers who reveal government misconduct.

99. Promoting conspiracy theories over peer-reviewed science.

100. Normalizing ignorance as a political strategy.        

The Trumpian Apocalypse: How Administrative Reinterpretation Exposed the Fiction of Democratic Higher Education (Glen McGhee)

The Trump administration’s surgical use of administrative reinterpretation did not simply dismantle higher education’s most visible equity programs — it stripped away the legitimacy claims the sector has relied upon for over a century. In doing so, it revealed something more unsettling than policy reversals: the democratic higher education Americans thought they knew never truly existed.

No sweeping new laws were required. No constitutional amendments. The transformation came through the withdrawal of federal complicity in maintaining a carefully cultivated fiction — a legitimacy performance in which inclusion and meritocracy were projected as foundational values, while exclusion and class reproduction were embedded in the architecture.

Equity Promises Without Structural Protection

The much-publicized “Dear Colleague” letter that accused colleges of violating civil rights law “each time they considered race” laid bare the core contradiction: the same institutions that marketed themselves as engines of inclusion were designed, from inception, to sort, stratify, and exclude. The fact that entire diversity and equity initiatives could vanish overnight through reinterpretation of existing statutes proves they were never structurally embedded. They were tolerated when politically expedient, discarded when they became politically inconvenient.

Programs that genuinely challenged the hierarchy — Durham Tech’s Hope Renovations training women for the trades, the Bulls Academy opening pharmaceutical careers to Black and Hispanic workers — were eliminated without legal resistance. Their removal revealed the sector’s true operating principle: “talent development” was always subordinate to talent sorting.

The Budget Axe and the “Chaos Tax”

When $31 billion in Title IV funding disappeared through budget reconciliation — a process requiring only a simple majority — the fragility of higher education’s federal compact was exposed. For community colleges, which had long claimed an “integral role” in local economies, this was a rude awakening. No amount of social necessity translated into political protection.

The fallout produced what insiders now call the “chaos tax” — institutional leaders devoting their days to survival drills rather than educational missions. That presidents of community colleges needed emergency coalitions just to interpret shifting federal obligations underscored the truth: institutional autonomy was never real, only a bureaucratic convenience allowed by Washington.

Civil Rights as a Tool of Authoritarianism

Perhaps the most shocking revelation was that statutory authority already existed to erase equity programs using the very civil rights laws meant to protect them. The administration’s use of Title VI to dismantle diversity initiatives inverted the democratic intent of the statute, showing that the framework for authoritarian control was baked into the law from the beginning.

Elite universities and community colleges alike were subject to the same redefinitions. Harvard’s prestige and billion-dollar endowment proved no more protective than a rural community college’s role in workforce development. The supposed binary between elite and democratic higher education collapsed into a single truth: neither had the structural autonomy necessary to resist political capture.

The Collapse of the Meritocratic Narrative

TRIO programs for first-generation students, adult education for immigrants, and work-study opportunities for low-income students were dismissed as “relics of the past.” Such rhetoric reframes decades of access expansion — from the GI Bill to community college growth — not as permanent democratic commitments, but as temporary political accommodations.

Seen in this light, the Trump administration did not destroy democratic higher education — it exposed its nonexistence. The sector’s dependence on federal tolerance, rather than embedded democratic principle, made authoritarian capture a matter of timing, not possibility.

The Trumpian Apocalypse

What we are witnessing is more than a partisan policy shift; it is what can only be called a “Trumpian Apocalypse” — an unveiling that forces recognition of the fragility and contingency of higher education’s democratic image. The apocalypse here is revelatory: myths of meritocracy, stability, and institutional resilience dissolve under the reality that these institutions were always bureaucratically dependent and politically vulnerable.

This revelation exceeds the sector’s ability to respond, even its ability to conceptualize the rupture. For generations, Americans were conditioned to see colleges and universities as permanent fixtures of civil society — stable, meritocratic, autonomous. The rapid evaporation of protections and programs has shown that this stability was never structural, only circumstantial.

What remains is not just a policy vacuum, but an ontological crisis. Higher education must now confront the truth that its democratic character was never intrinsic, only performed — and that once the performance ceased to serve the state, it was abandoned without ceremony.

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Sources

• U.S. Department of Education, “Dear Colleague Letter” on Title VI compliance (2025)

• Congressional Budget Office, Title IV Funding Reductions via Budget Reconciliation (2025)

• Program case studies: Durham Tech’s Hope Renovations; Bulls Academy workforce development initiative

• Historical analysis of the GI Bill and community college expansion, American Council on Education archives

• Interviews with community college presidents involved in Education for All coalition (2025)

• Harvard University endowment and diversity program litigation filings, 2024–2025

The Digital Dark Ages of Higher Education: Greed, Myth, and the Ghosts of Lost Knowledge

In a time of unprecedented data collection, artificial intelligence, and networked access to information, it seems unthinkable that we could be slipping into a new Dark Age. But that is precisely what is unfolding in American higher education—a Digital Dark Age marked not just by the disappearance of records, but by the disappearance of truth.

This is not a passive erosion of information. It is a systemic, coordinated effort to conceal institutional failure, to commodify public knowledge, and to weaponize mythology. It is a collapse not of technology, but of ethics and memory.

A Dark Age in Plain Sight

Digital decay is usually associated with vanishing files and outdated formats. In higher education, it takes the more sinister form of intentional erasure. Data that once offered accountability—graduation rates, job placement figures, loan default data, even course materials—have become reputational liabilities. When inconvenient, they vanish.

Gainful Employment data disappeared from federal websites under the Trump administration. Student outcomes from for-profit conversions are obscured through accounting tricks. Internal audits and consultant reports sit behind NDAs and paywalls. And when institutions close or rebrand, their failures are scrubbed from the record like Soviet photographs.

This is a higher education system consumed by image management, where inconvenient truths are buried under branded mythologies.

The Robocolleges and the Rise of the Algorithm

No phenomenon illustrates this transformation more starkly than the rise of robocolleges—fully online institutions like Southern New Hampshire University, University of Phoenix, and Liberty University Online. These institutions, driven more by enrollment growth than educational mission, are built to scale, surveil, and extract.

Their architecture is not intellectual but algorithmic: automated learning systems, outsourced instructors, and AI-driven behavioral analytics replace human-centered pedagogy. Data replaces dialogue. And all of it happens behind proprietary systems controlled by Online Program Managers (OPMs)—for-profit companies like 2U, Academic Partnerships, and Wiley that handle recruitment, curriculum design, and marketing for universities, often taking a majority cut of tuition revenue.

These robocolleges aren’t built to educate; they’re built to profit. They are credential vending machines with advertising budgets, protected by political lobbying and obscured by branding.

And they are perfectly suited to a Digital Dark Age, where metrics are manipulated, failures are hidden, and education is indistinguishable from a subscription service.

Myth #1: The College Degree as Guaranteed Mobility

The dominant myth still peddled by these institutions—and many traditional ones—is that a college degree is a golden ticket to upward mobility. But in an economy of stagnant wages, rising tuition, and unpayable debt, this narrative is a weapon.

Robocolleges and their OPM partners sell dreams on Instagram and YouTube—“Success stories,” “first-gen pride,” and inflated salary stats—while ignoring the mountains of debt, dropout rates, and lifelong economic precarity their students face. And when those stories come to light? They disappear behind legal threats, settlements, and strategic rebranding.

The dream has become a trap, and the myth has become a means of extraction.

Myth #2: Innovation Through EdTech

“Tech will save us” is the second great myth. EdTech companies promise to revolutionize learning through adaptive platforms, AI tutors, and automated assessments. But what they really offer is surveillance, cost-cutting, and outsourcing.

Institutions are increasingly beholden to opaque algorithms and third-party platforms that strip faculty of agency and students of privacy. Assessment becomes analytics. Learning becomes labor. And the metrics these systems produce—completion rates, engagement data—are as easily manipulated as they are misunderstood.

Far from democratizing education, EdTech has helped turn it into a digital panopticon, where every click is monetized, and every action is tracked.

Myth #3: The Digital Campus as a Public Good

Universities love to claim that their digital campuses are open and inclusive. But in truth, access is restricted, commercialized, and disappearing.

Libraries are gutted. Archives are defunded. Publicly funded research is locked behind publisher paywalls. Historical documents, administrative records, even syllabi are now ephemeral—stored on private platforms, subject to deletion at will. The digital campus is a gated community, and the public is locked out.

Third-party vendors now control what students read, how they’re taught, and who can access the past. Memory is no longer a public good—it is a leased service.

Greed, Cheating, and Digital Amnesia

This is not simply a story about decay—it is a story about cheating. Not just by students, but by institutions themselves.

Colleges cheat by manipulating data to mislead accreditors and prospective students. OPMs cheat by obscuring their contracts and revenue-sharing models. Robocolleges cheat by prioritizing growth over learning. And all of them cheat when they hide the truth, delete the data, or suppress the whistleblowers.

Faculty are silenced through non-disclosure agreements. Archivists are laid off. Historians and librarians are told to “streamline” and “rebrand” rather than preserve and inform. The keepers of memory are being dismissed, just when we need them most.

Myth as Memory Hole

The Digital Dark Ages are not merely a result of failing tech—they are the logical outcome of a system that values profit over truth, optics over integrity, and compliance over inquiry.

Greed isn’t incidental. It’s the design. And the myths propagated by robocolleges, OPMs, and traditional universities alike are the cover stories that keep the public sedated and the money flowing.

American higher education once aspired to be a sanctuary of memory, a force for social mobility, and a guardian of public knowledge. But it is now drifting toward becoming a black box—a mythologized, monetized shadow of its former self, accessible only through marketing and controlled by vendors.

Without intervention—legal, financial, and intellectual—we risk becoming a society where education is an illusion, memory is curated, and truth is whatever survives the deletion script.

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Sources and References:

• Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol

• Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed

• Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake

• Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains

• U.S. Department of Education archives (missing Gainful Employment data)

• “Paywall: The Business of Scholarship” (2018)

• SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)

• Internet Archive reports on digital preservation

• ProPublica and The Century Foundation on OPMs and robocolleges

• Faculty union reports on librarian and archivist layoffs

• Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education coverage of data manipulation, robocolleges, and institutional opacity

How Neoliberalism Haunts Our Lives: 24/7/365

Neoliberalism isn’t just an economic theory or a dry policy framework. It’s a lived reality that operates around the clock, shaping our lives in ways many people don’t fully see. Neoliberalism tells us that markets solve everything, that individual responsibility trumps social solidarity, and that human worth is best measured by productivity, consumption, and credentialing. Its presence is constant—at work, in education, in healthcare, in housing, even in our relationships.

This is not a new critique. But as the 21st century drags on and late capitalism becomes more extractive, predatory, and digitally surveilled, the impacts of neoliberal ideology have intensified. For the working class, for students, for adjuncts, for debtors, for renters, and for the chronically ill, neoliberalism is not an abstraction—it is a system of permanent exhaustion.

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The Day Begins: Sleep-Deprived and Algorithmically Watched

The neoliberal day begins before the alarm rings. If you’re poor, you may be sleeping in your car or waking up in a crowded home. If you’re middle-class, the first thing you see is likely your phone, already feeding you metrics about your body (sleep scores, heart rate, missed messages). Neoliberal logic tells us our time must be optimized, even our rest must be productive.

Gig workers check their apps to see if they’ll get enough rides or orders to survive. Others log into remote jobs monitored by keystroke trackers, digital timesheets, or AI productivity tools. Control is constant, and surveillance is internalized: we discipline ourselves with planners, metrics, reminders, shame.

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Education: Credentials Over Knowledge

For students, neoliberal education is a high-cost simulation of opportunity. Degrees are sold as investments in "human capital," with ever-rising tuition and debt. Public funding is replaced by predatory loans, branding consultants, and privatized ed-tech platforms. The curriculum is shaped by market demand, not civic responsibility. Liberal arts are gutted, and adjuncts are paid poverty wages while administrators balloon in number.

The university, once imagined as a space for critical thinking and collective inquiry, is now a debt-fueled credential mill—an HR pipeline for corporations, a subscription model of social mobility that rarely delivers.

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Healthcare: A Business of Despair

Neoliberalism doesn’t take a break when you get sick. In fact, your illness becomes a profit center. In the U.S., the healthcare system is a financial trap. Insurance is often tied to employment; losing your job means losing your access to care. Big Pharma, hospital chains, and insurance conglomerates operate under the logic of maximizing shareholder value—not public health.

Even mental health is commodified. Wellness apps, “self-care” products, and Instagram therapy push the idea that individual solutions will fix systemic problems. Suffering is reframed as personal failure.

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Housing: A Market, Not a Human Right

Housing insecurity is one of neoliberalism’s clearest failures. Real estate speculation, gentrification, and the financialization of housing have made shelter a luxury good. Renters face skyrocketing costs and eviction threats, while homes sit vacant as investment vehicles.

Public housing is stigmatized and underfunded. Homelessness becomes a criminal issue instead of a humanitarian one. You’re told to “pull yourself up” while the ladder is systematically removed.

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Work and Labor: You're Always On

The 9-to-5 is no longer the norm. Neoliberal work is either hyper-precarious or all-consuming. The gig economy pretends to offer flexibility, but in practice it strips away rights, benefits, and security. Professional workers face unpaid overtime, side hustles, and an expectation of constant availability. Labor laws lag decades behind. Union-busting is normalized.

At the same time, those without work are treated with suspicion. Unemployment, disability, and even retirement are framed as moral failings or burdens on the system.

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Nightfall: No Rest for the Weary

At night, the apps don’t sleep. Your data is still harvested. Your bank is still charging fees. Your landlord’s algorithm is still adjusting rent. Your student loan is still accruing interest. Your body, overstressed and under-cared-for, begins to break down.

Even dreams aren’t free: entertainment has been colonized by neoliberal culture, feeding you aspirational lifestyles and endless content to dull your exhaustion. Everything is monetized. Everything is a subscription.

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Resistance in the Cracks

Despite its pervasiveness, neoliberalism is not invincible. People are resisting in small and large ways—through union organizing, mutual aid, alternative media, degrowth activism, and radical pedagogy. These aren’t just political choices; they are survival strategies.

But for resistance to grow, we must name the problem clearly. Neoliberalism is not just a phase of capitalism—it’s an ideology embedded in every institution and mediated by every platform. It isolates us, overworks us, and extracts from us while pretending to offer freedom and choice.

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The 24/7/365 Trap

We live in neoliberalism’s world, but we don’t have to live by its rules. That starts with refusing its myths: that poverty is personal failure, that education is a private good, that health must be earned, that the market is sacred.

As long as neoliberalism governs our lives without challenge, inequality will deepen and democracy will continue to erode. The question isn’t whether we can afford to abandon neoliberalism—the question is whether we can survive if we don’t.

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Sources:

• Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos

• David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism

• Sarah Jaffe, Work Won’t Love You Back

• Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, “Seeing Like a Market”

• Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity

• Michael Hudson, The Destiny of Civilization

• Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man

Volcano Rumbles: Higher Education and the Unfolding Crisis of American Democracy

“When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.”

—Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom

On this Independence Day in 2025, the air is heavy with foreboding. Across the United States, fireworks burst into the sky as if nothing has changed. But below the spectacle lies a country teetering between democracy and authoritarian rule. The institutions tasked with preserving truth, freedom, and critical thought—most notably higher education—are caught in the crossfire of what Erich Fromm warned of nearly a century ago: the rise of modern fascism, not as a dramatic coup, but as a creeping normalization of authoritarian values under the guise of "freedom."

The Rumbles Before the Eruption

In hindsight, the signs were glaring. Corporate capture of the public good. The erosion of academic freedom. The transformation of universities from spaces of inquiry to credential factories and financial instruments. A growing surveillance infrastructure built not only by Big Tech but in concert with university IT departments, data brokers, and online program managers. The rise of so-called “free speech zones” and legislative gag orders that redefined political speech while silencing dissent.

What we are witnessing is not merely political turbulence—it is a full-scale epistemic breakdown, a national forgetting of what education is supposed to be.

The Trump Spending Bill and Project 2025

The reemergence of Donald Trump on the national stage—and his allies' vision through the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—has laid bare the authoritarian designs of a political movement bent on reshaping the federal government into a weapon against its own people. Under the new Trump Spending Bill, long-standing environmental protections, civil rights enforcement, and funding for critical education and research have been gutted. Student aid programs like Pell Grants are under siege, while massive giveaways to corporate polluters and military contractors accelerate.

The Department of Education itself is on life support, with Executive Order 14242 outlining a road map for its dissolution. Academic accreditation is being refashioned into a tool of ideological enforcement. DEI initiatives are being replaced with patriotic education mandates, while campuses are encouraged to police faculty and curricula for "anti-Americanism."

Higher Education: Complicit, Crippled, and Co-opted

Higher education did not arrive at this moment innocently. Elite institutions embraced neoliberalism decades ago, relying increasingly on corporate donations, defense contracts, and hedge fund returns. Many public universities, once proud bastions of working-class mobility, became tuition-dependent and debt-financed enterprises.

For years, scholars warned of growing authoritarian trends in American politics. But those voices—often contingent faculty, graduate students, and independent researchers—were sidelined, their jobs precarious, their influence limited. Meanwhile, college presidents and boards of trustees courted billionaires and politicians, hoping to remain above the fray.

The result is a sector fractured and weakened, unable to mount a coherent defense of democracy. In many places, it has become part of the problem—administered by opportunists, managed by AI-powered surveillance, and staffed by an underclass of overworked adjuncts who barely make a living.

The Yearning for Submission

Fromm’s insight—his warning that many people want to submit—rings especially true today. The cult of personality, the vilification of expertise, and the rise of conspiracy over fact have flourished in a vacuum of meaning and solidarity. Higher education once promised both, but its commodification has left millions alienated, indebted, and skeptical.

The myth of meritocracy—long propped up by institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Phoenix—has collapsed under the weight of its contradictions. People now look elsewhere for answers: to strongmen, to influencers, to AI chatbots, and to nostalgic visions of a past that never truly existed.

What Comes Next?

This is not a call for despair, but for resistance. If there is hope for American democracy, it lies in reclaiming the public mission of education—not just in words, but in practice.

That means supporting independent and investigative journalism. It means dismantling the corporate stranglehold on curriculum, research, and governance. It means honoring the work of teachers, librarians, and adjuncts who continue to hold the line in the face of overwhelming odds. And it means building alliances with those outside the academy—working families, community organizers, students—who understand that education is not a luxury, but a battleground.

On this Fourth of July, let us not retreat into comfortable myths or cynical fatalism. The volcano is still rumbling. But so too is the conscience of those who refuse to be silenced.

Let us remember: freedom is not inherited—it is practiced, defended, and reimagined in every generation.

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Sources

• Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom (1941)

• Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Project 2025)

• U.S. House of Representatives, 2025 Appropriations Bill

• The Century Foundation, “The Future of Higher Ed in an Age of Authoritarianism” (2024)

• Chronicle of Higher Education, “Colleges Under Siege” (2025)

• Higher Education Inquirer archives

COLLEGE MANIA! America’s Legal High for Families

In America, the pursuit of a college degree has become more than just a step toward a stable future—it’s a culturally sanctioned high, a ritual of aspiration, and a national obsession. “College mania,” as we call it, doesn’t just grip students. It draws in entire families, especially parents who never had the opportunity to attend college themselves. For them, college is a dream they couldn’t fulfill—so they pass it on to their children like a sacred torch.

In today’s America, college mania ranks alongside the thrill of legal marijuana, the rush of sports betting, or the intense puzzle-solving of escape rooms. But while those highs are seen as distractions or vices, the college high is viewed as noble. It’s the American Dream repackaged for the 21st century, and it’s addictive.

The Parents’ Fix

Many parents, especially from working-class or immigrant backgrounds, have internalized the belief that college is the only legitimate path to a better life. Even if they never attended themselves—or perhaps because they didn’t—they want their children to have “more.” More options. More money. More dignity. More safety.

For them, college is the ultimate symbol of success. It’s a way out of generational struggle, an antidote to low-wage work and economic precarity. These parents attend college fairs they don’t understand, cry during campus tours, and invest their savings—and sometimes retirement funds—into test prep, tutoring, and private admissions consultants.

And why wouldn’t they? The entire system—from high school counselors to state and federal policymakers—tells them that college is not just a good idea, but a moral imperative. Not sending your child to college becomes a form of parental failure.

From Hope to Hysteria

College mania often starts early. Children are told in elementary school that their GPA will “matter someday.” By middle school, they’re crafting résumés. High school becomes a war zone of advanced placement courses, volunteer hours, and résumé-building internships. College becomes the grand finale—and parents are cast as both financiers and emotional support staff for the show.

The process has become so intense that some parents—often those who didn’t go to college themselves—feel powerless, swept up in a world of rankings, deadlines, jargon, and predatory loan offers. Many turn to social media for answers, which only fuels the pressure with glossy images of Ivy League acceptance letters and first-day dorm selfies.

The high hits when the letter of acceptance comes. The name-brand college. The merit scholarship. The status symbol. But what comes next isn’t always a soft landing.

The Come-Down

Just like legal highs, the rush of college mania fades fast. Students often find themselves isolated, overwhelmed, or stuck in majors that don’t translate into real employment. Debt piles up. Mental health declines. Parents—who only wanted the best—find themselves watching their children struggle with uncertain futures despite the promise they were sold.

And in the background, an entire industry profits: textbook publishers, loan servicers, admissions consultants, and real estate developers building luxury student housing. Parents and students carry the emotional and financial burden. Institutions rarely do.

The Illusion of Escape

College is marketed as an escape room for the working class—a solvable puzzle with a promised reward at the end. But unlike escape rooms, there are no clues, no guaranteed exit, and often no prize. The thrill comes from trying. The letdown comes from realizing that the door might not open at all.

And yet, families return to the game, generation after generation. College remains the one culturally approved addiction—an expensive, emotionally loaded, legally protected gamble on the future.

College Mania: The American Fixation

College mania isn’t just about education—it’s about class mobility, identity, parental love, and social status. It’s a dopamine rush wrapped in moral virtue, sanctioned by school boards and senators alike. For parents who never went to college, the dream lives on not in themselves, but in their kids. The dream is still alive—but the system surrounding it is broken, bloated, and often brutal.

Until we can rethink what education means—and who it's really for—college mania will continue to dominate American family life. And like all highs, it will leave too many people coming down hard.

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The Higher Education Inquirer documents the myths, markets, and mechanisms of higher education in the United States.

Tracking the Elusive Truth: The Higher Education Inquirer Seeks Decades of Bankruptcy Loan Forgiveness Data

In a modest but potentially revealing inquiry, the Higher Education Inquirer has submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the U.S. Department of Education asking for a count of the number of student loans discharged in bankruptcy from 1965 to 2024. The request, dated June 10, 2025, was acknowledged the same day by the Department’s FOIA Service Center under FOIA Request No. 25-03954-F.

“The Higher Education Inquirer is requesting a count of the number of student loans forgiven in bankruptcy per year from 1965 to 2024.”

It’s a simple request with profound implications. While the nation debates student loan forgiveness through executive action and legislative reforms, the forgotten path of bankruptcy discharge—once a legally viable option for debt relief—has been quietly buried over the past several decades.

A Timeline of Restriction: The Death of Bankruptcy Relief

When the Higher Education Act of 1965 established federal student loans, they were treated like other forms of consumer debt. Borrowers could, in principle, discharge them through bankruptcy just like credit card debt or medical bills.

But that began to change in the late 1970s, as concerns over potential abuse of the system gained traction in Congress. In 1976, a new law prohibited the discharge of federal student loans in bankruptcy within the first five years of repayment unless the borrower could prove “undue hardship”—a vague standard that was rarely met.

From there, the restrictions only grew tighter:

• 1990: The waiting period for dischargeability was extended to seven years.

• 1998: The option to discharge federal student loans in bankruptcy for any reason other than “undue hardship” was eliminated entirely. This meant student loan borrowers had to meet the strict and often inaccessible hardship standard at all times.

• 2005: Under the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), Congress extended the “undue hardship” requirement to most private student loans as well—effectively removing nearly all forms of bankruptcy relief from the table for student debtors.

These changes did not result from clear evidence of widespread abuse. Rather, they were fueled by myths of “deadbeat graduates” walking away from their obligations and by lobbying from banks, guaranty agencies, and debt collection firms that profited from non-dischargeable debt. Meanwhile, evidence of hardship among borrowers grew, especially for those who attended predatory for-profit colleges or dropped out without a degree.

The Brunner Barrier

The biggest obstacle for borrowers remains the so-called “Brunner test,” a three-prong legal standard established in a 1987 court case, Brunner v. New York State Higher Education Services Corp. It requires borrowers to prove:

1. They cannot maintain a minimal standard of living if forced to repay the loans,

2. Their financial situation is unlikely to improve, and

3. They made a good-faith effort to repay the loans.

Many judges interpreted these criteria narrowly, creating a virtually insurmountable hurdle. Borrowers with severe disabilities, advanced age, or long-term unemployment have been denied relief even when destitute.

What We Still Don’t Know

Despite these legal developments and the hardship they created, data on how many people have succeeded in discharging their student loans through bankruptcy remains remarkably scarce. Advocacy groups and journalists have long questioned why no federal agency tracks this information in a clear, public-facing format.

That’s what prompted the Higher Education Inquirer’s FOIA request—an effort to establish a factual baseline. We asked the Department of Education for an annual count of bankruptcy discharges involving student loans over a 60-year period, from 1965 to 2024.

The Bureaucratic Wall

According to the Department’s FOIA Service Center, the average processing time for such requests is currently 185 business days—about nine months. While the Department did not ask for clarification immediately, it reserves the right to do so within ten business days. Failure to respond to such a request would result in administrative closure of the FOIA—yet another form of delay that keeps the public in the dark.

This bureaucratic stonewalling is part of a larger pattern. While the Department of Education has been quick to announce student loan forgiveness programs under executive orders or settlement agreements, it remains reluctant to shine a light on longstanding failures—especially the erosion of legal remedies like bankruptcy.

A Step Toward Truth and Accountability

The public deserves a clear view of the history and consequences of stripping bankruptcy protections from student borrowers. It’s not just a legal matter—it’s a story of systemic neglect, political pressure, and financial exploitation. Without access to historical data, reform remains a guesswork operation and accountability remains elusive.

We at the Higher Education Inquirer will continue to press for answers. If and when the FOIA request is fulfilled, we will publish the data and conduct a thorough analysis, year by year. We believe that exposing the truth about student loan bankruptcy isn’t just a matter of curiosity—it’s a step toward justice.

If you have experience with student loan bankruptcy, data that could assist our investigation, or simply want to share your story, contact us at gmcghee@aya.yale.edu.

PragerU and the Culture War: Manufacturing Myths in Higher Education and Beyond

In the evolving landscape of American media and education, PragerU stands out as a well-funded propaganda machine disguised as an educational institution. Despite the name, Prager University is not a university. It does not grant degrees, offer accredited courses, or submit to academic oversight. Instead, it produces short, emotionally charged videos designed to reshape young minds around a rigid conservative ideology—an ideology increasingly aligned with Christian nationalism, market fundamentalism, and historical denialism.

Founded in 2009 by talk radio host Dennis Prager, PragerU emerged during the rise of social media and deepening political polarization. The timing was ideal. With traditional civics education struggling and digital content consumption rising, PragerU began churning out five-minute videos purporting to teach the "real truth" about history, race, gender, economics, and science. These slickly produced segments claim to correct misinformation, but in reality they deliver a narrow worldview fueled by grievance, nostalgia, and moral panic.

PragerU content routinely distorts established historical and scientific knowledge. It reframes American slavery as a common global occurrence, rather than as a foundational atrocity that has shaped U.S. legal and economic systems to this day. It minimizes climate change, portraying it as exaggerated fearmongering driven by radical environmentalists, even as the scientific consensus grows increasingly dire. And it routinely dismisses systemic racism, patriarchy, and wealth inequality as myths invented by the political left to divide Americans.

This style of storytelling directly contradicts the evidence-based approaches found in the work of sociologist James Loewen and historian Howard Zinn. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me exposed how mainstream K–12 textbooks sanitize U.S. history by ignoring racism, class struggle, and colonialism. Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States took it further, reframing the American narrative through the voices of the marginalized—the enslaved, the working class, women, and the indigenous. While Loewen and Zinn sought to challenge students to think critically and question power, PragerU does the opposite. It seeks to reassure students that the status quo is righteous and that questioning it is dangerous.

PragerU’s rise also coincides with real, deeply rooted problems in American education. There are serious and measurable deficiencies in literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking among U.S. students and even adults. These educational gaps leave many people vulnerable to simplistic narratives and emotionally charged misinformation. PragerU does not aim to fill those gaps with rigorous content; it exploits them. Its materials demand little from viewers beyond ideological alignment. The videos offer no footnotes, no peer-reviewed sources, and no intellectual challenge—just certainty delivered with polish.

And yet, increasingly, these materials are being welcomed into public school classrooms. In states like Florida and Oklahoma, conservative lawmakers and school officials have approved or endorsed PragerU content as part of the curriculum. This insertion of ideologically driven material into state-sanctioned education is not just alarming—it’s part of a broader attempt to reshape how young people see their country and their place in it.

The broader culture war that PragerU is part of is not simply about liberal versus conservative. It’s about whether education should cultivate independent thinking and historical awareness—or obedient loyalty to a sanitized narrative. PragerU paints itself as a corrective to “leftist indoctrination,” but what it offers is another form of indoctrination: one that demands allegiance to a version of America that never existed, where racism was a glitch, climate change is hysteria, and capitalism is above critique.

Its media tactics are savvy. PragerU’s videos are short, colorful, and emotionally potent—perfectly crafted for young viewers raised on TikTok and YouTube. While teachers fight to hold students’ attention with limited resources, PragerU offers a packaged worldview that feels easy and affirming. But this ease comes at the cost of intellectual development. True learning requires struggle, contradiction, and evidence—not comforting stories that confirm one’s existing biases.

What’s missing from PragerU’s content is precisely what makes education meaningful: complexity, context, and the capacity to think beyond slogans. When students read Lies My Teacher Told Me or A People’s History, they may feel discomfort, but they also grow. They learn that history is not a patriotic myth but a contested and dynamic struggle over meaning and power.

To respond to PragerU’s growing reach, educators and the public must take the real problems in education seriously. Media literacy, civic education, and historical thinking should be reinforced, not removed. Students must be equipped not just with facts, but with the tools to evaluate competing narratives and sources of information. Schools and universities must resist pressure to adopt content that fails basic tests of intellectual honesty and academic rigor.

PragerU is not simply another voice in a pluralistic conversation. It is part of a movement to reduce education to ideological messaging. It thrives on a public that has been failed by underfunded schools, fractured media, and growing economic insecurity. But recognizing this reality does not mean surrendering to it.

If the goal is to prepare young people to navigate a complex world, we must choose truth over comfort, questioning over certainty, and education over indoctrination.

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For more investigations into education and media, follow the Higher Education Inquirer.