The Prestige of Partnership — and the Problem of Unclear Payoff

For more than a decade, 2U has presented itself as a premier intermediary between elite universities and the expanding global audience for online higher education. The company’s roster of partners includes some of the most recognizable names in academia, as well as a growing list of selective, mid-tier, and international institutions. On its public site, 2U highlights collaborations with universities such as Yale, Northwestern, North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Pepperdine, Maryville, and the University of Surrey. The message is unmistakable: if universities of this caliber trust 2U with their online programs, then students should as well.

These partnerships have fueled the impression that 2U-supported programs deliver high-quality, academically rigorous education backed by prestigious institutional brands. For many learners, especially working adults, international students, and career switchers, such arrangements offer a seemingly ideal blend: the name of an elite university, the flexibility of online learning, and access to fields where credentials are increasingly necessary.

Yet beneath the glossy presentation and impressive partner list, fundamental questions remain unanswered. Despite working with many of the world’s most respected institutions, 2U still does not provide sufficient data to determine the true value of the programs it supports. Even as universities lend their names and curricula, the real-world outcomes of students enrolled in 2U-powered programs remain opaque.

The core difficulty lies in the mismatch between the prestige of the institution and the limited transparency around program performance. For years, 2U issued annual “Transparency and Outcomes” reports designed to demonstrate impact and accountability across its portfolio. But the most recent report available to the public is from 2023. In the fast-moving world of online education—where competition has intensified, student expectations have shifted, and 2U itself has undergone significant financial turmoil—data that old is no longer a reliable indicator of the current state of programs.

This lack of updated reporting is especially notable given 2U’s recent trajectory. After years of rising debt and declining investor confidence, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2024. Although it has since emerged under new ownership with a streamlined balance sheet, questions persist about its future direction, the stability of its services, and whether its partnerships will endure in their current form. For universities, outsourcing key functions such as marketing, recruitment, student support, and technological infrastructure may expand enrollment and revenue, but it also raises concerns about the consistency and quality of the student experience—areas that become even more vulnerable when the partner company faces financial strain.

This structural opacity makes it nearly impossible for students, policymakers, or even universities themselves to determine whether these programs provide a meaningful return on investment. A degree or certificate bearing the name of Yale or Pepperdine may confer a level of brand recognition, but what does it signify in practice? Are students completing programs at comparable rates to on-campus peers? Are they finding jobs in their fields? Are they earning more than they would have without the credential? Are they satisfied with the instruction, advising, and support they receive? Without rigorous, current, and independently verified data, these remain open—and critical—questions.

The challenge is not solely financial or operational. It is also conceptual. The surge in online learning has created a vast gray zone between institutional brand and educational substance. While universities retain control over academic content, the underlying delivery mechanisms are increasingly intermediated by firms like 2U. Students may assume that an online master’s degree from a prestigious university carries the same weight as an on-campus equivalent, but the learning environments, student services, and community-building opportunities differ dramatically. In many cases, the online experience is shaped more by 2U’s systems and staff than by the university itself.

For prospective students, the implication is clear: a well-known university name is not a guarantee of value. For universities, the stakes are equally high. Partnering with a third-party company can expand their reach, but it can also blur the boundaries of academic identity and accountability. And for anyone tracking the direction of higher education more broadly, 2U’s situation serves as a cautionary example of how prestige can mask the absence of meaningful transparency—and how quickly the economics of online learning can shift.

Until 2U produces up-to-date, independently verifiable data about program quality and student outcomes, the value of its offerings remains an open question. The partnerships look impressive. The marketing is compelling. But the evidence is missing.

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Sources

2U Partners Page
2U 2023 Transparency and Outcomes Report
2U announcements on new degree partnerships and expansions
Washington Post coverage of 2U’s 2024 bankruptcy filing
PR Newswire statements on 2U’s financial restructuring and emergence as a private company

Kleptocracy, Militarism, Colonialism: A Counterrecruiting Call for Students and Families

The United States has long framed itself as a beacon of democracy and upward mobility, yet students stepping onto college campuses in 2025 are inheriting a system that looks less like a healthy republic and more like a sophisticated kleptocracy entwined with militarism, colonial extraction, and digital exploitation. The entanglement of higher education with these forces has deep roots, but its modern shape is especially alarming for those considering military enlistment or ROTC programs as pathways to opportunity. 

The decision to publish on December 7th is deliberate. In 1941, Americans were engaged in a clearly defined struggle against fascism, a moral fight that demanded national sacrifice. The world in 2025 is far murkier. U.S. militarism now often serves corporate profit, global influence, and the security of allied autocracies rather than clear moral or defensive imperatives.

This is an article for students, future students, and the parents who want something better for their children. It is also a call to pause and critically examine the systems asking for young people’s allegiance and labor.

Higher education has become a lucrative extraction point for political and financial elites. Universities now operate as hybrid corporations, prioritizing endowment growth, real-estate expansion, donor influence, and federal cash flows over public service or student welfare. Tuition continues to rise as administrative bloat accelerates. Private equity quietly moves into student housing, online program management, education technology, and even institutional governance. The result is a funnel: taxpayers support institutions; institutions support billionaires; students carry the debt. Meanwhile, federal and state funds flow through universities with minimal oversight, especially through research partnerships with defense contractors and weapons manufacturers. What looks like innovation is often simply public money being laundered into private hands.

For decades, the U.S. military has relied on higher education to supply officers and legitimacy. ROTC programs sit comfortably on campuses while recruiters visit high schools and community colleges with promises of financial aid, job training, and escape from economic insecurity. But the military’s pitch obscures the broader structure. The United States spends more on its military than the next several nations combined, maintaining hundreds of foreign bases and intervening across the globe. American forces are involved, directly or indirectly, in conflicts ranging from Palestine to Venezuela to Ukraine, and through support of allies such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, often supplying weapons used in devastating campaigns. This is not national defense. It is a permanent war economy, one that treats young Americans as fuel.

At the same time, Russian cybercriminal networks have infiltrated U.S. institutions, targeting critical infrastructure, education networks, and private industry. Reports show that the U.S. government has frequently failed to hold these actors accountable and, in some cases, appears to prioritize intelligence or geopolitical advantage over domestic security, allowing cybercrime to flourish while ordinary Americans bear the consequences. This environment adds another layer of risk for students and families, showing how interconnected digital vulnerabilities are with global power games and domestic exploitation.

For those who enlist hoping to fund an education, the GI Bill frequently underdelivers. For-profit colleges disproportionately target veterans, consuming their benefits with low-quality, high-cost programs. Even public institutions have learned to treat veterans as revenue streams. U.S. universities have always been entwined with colonial projects, from land-grant colleges built on seized Indigenous land to research that supported Cold War interventions and overseas resource extraction. Today these legacies persist in subtler forms. Study-abroad programs and global campuses often mirror corporate imperialism. Research partnerships with authoritarian regimes proceed when profitable. University police departments are increasingly stocked with military-grade equipment, and curricula frequently erase Indigenous, Black, and Global South perspectives unless students actively seek them out. The university presents itself as a space of liberation while quietly reaffirming colonial hierarchies, militarized enforcement of U.S. interests worldwide, and even complicity in digital threats.

For many young people, enlistment is not a choice—it is an economic survival strategy in a country that refuses to guarantee healthcare, housing, or affordable education. Yet the military’s promise of stability is fragile and often deceptive. Students and parents should understand that young Americans are being recruited for geopolitics, not opportunity. Wars in Ukraine, Palestine, and Venezuela, along with arms support to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, rarely protect ordinary citizens—they protect corporations, elites, and global influence. A person’s body and future become government property. ROTC contracts and enlistments are binding in ways that most eighteen-year-olds do not fully understand, and penalties for leaving are severe. Trauma is a predictable outcome, not an anomaly. The military’s mental health crisis, suicide rates, and disability system failures are well documented. Education benefits are conditional and often disappointing. The idea that enlistment is a reliable pathway to college has long been more marketing than truth, especially in a higher-education landscape dominated by predatory schools. Young people deserve more than being used as leverage in someone else’s empire.

A non-militarized route to opportunity requires acknowledging how much talent, energy, and potential is lost to endless war, endless debt, and the growing digital threats that go unaddressed at the highest levels. It requires demanding that federal and state governments invest in free or affordable public higher education, universal healthcare, and stronger civilian service programs rather than military pipelines. Students can resist by refusing enlistment and ROTC recruitment pitches, advocating for demilitarized campuses, supporting labor unions, student governments, and anti-war coalitions, and demanding transparency about university ties to weapons manufacturers, foreign governments, and cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Parents can resist by rejecting the false choice presented to their children between military service and crippling debt, and by supporting movements pushing for tuition reform, debt cancellation, and public investment in youth.

It is possible to build a higher-education system that serves learning rather than empire, but it will not happen unless students and families refuse to feed the machinery that exploits them. America’s kleptocracy, militarism, colonial legacies, and complicity in global digital crime are deeply embedded in universities and the workforce pipelines that flow through them. Yet young people—and the people who care about them—still hold power in their decisions. Choosing not to enlist, not to sign an ROTC contract, and not to hand over your future to systems that see you as expendable is one form of reclaiming that power. Hope is limited but not lost.

Sources

1. U.S. Department of Defense. Defense Budget Overview Fiscal Year 2025. 2024.

2. Amnesty International. “Saudi Arabia and UAE Arms Transfers and Human Rights Violations.” 2024.

3. Human Rights Watch. “Conflicts in Ukraine, Venezuela, and Palestine.” 2024.

4. FBI and CISA reports on Russian cybercrime and critical infrastructure infiltration. 2023–2025.

5. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). National Cybersecurity Annual Review. 2024.

HEI 2025: Over 1.4 Million Annual Page Views From Readers Across the Globe

Over 1.4 million page views from readers across the globe in 2025 reveal a simple but terrifying truth: the promise of a college degree is collapsing before our eyes. Cyber breaches, student debt spirals, for-profit exploitation, and failing oversight have combined to create a system that enriches the few while leaving millions exposed to financial, social, and personal risk. From elite endowments hoarding wealth to underfunded community colleges struggling to survive, higher education is no longer a ladder to opportunity—it is a battleground where power, profit, and policy collide. HEI’s reporting this year has lifted the veil on the forces reshaping American education, revealing a crisis that is urgent, systemic, and global.

Our most-read investigations laid bare a stark reality: a college degree no longer guarantees financial security. Graduates carry crushing debt even as wages stagnate and job markets tighten. Families struggle under the weight of rising costs, while communities confront the fallout of institutions that promise prosperity but deliver instability. The working-class recession is real, and higher education has become both a reflection and a driver of it.

Institutions themselves are showing alarming fragility. The University of Phoenix cyber breach highlighted how even the largest for-profit entities can collapse under operational mismanagement and inadequate oversight. Schools flagged for Heightened Cash Monitoring by the Department of Education illustrate a wider pattern of financial and administrative vulnerability. When governance fails, students suffer, public dollars are jeopardized, and trust in the system erodes.

Profit imperatives have reshaped the very mission of higher education. Fraudulent FAFSA claims, opaque financial practices, and political donations from for-profit entities reveal a sector increasingly beholden to investors and corporate interests. In this bifurcated system, elite universities consolidate wealth while underfunded community colleges, HBCUs, and MSIs struggle to survive. The promise of equal opportunity is under assault, replaced by a marketplace that privileges profit over learning.

HEI has also cast a global lens on these inequities. From Latin America to U.S. territories, higher education is entangled with political power, economic extraction, and social stratification. Internationally, the same forces of exploitation and inequity shape students’ futures, underscoring that the crisis is not merely domestic but systemic and global.

Yet HEI’s work does not end with diagnosis. Solutions are emerging. Federal oversight and transparency must increase, debt relief is imperative, cybersecurity and governance reforms are urgent, and reinvestment in historically underfunded institutions is critical. These measures are necessary to restore integrity and public trust in a system that has long promised more than it delivers.

As we enter 2026, HEI remains committed to relentless investigation and fearless reporting. We will continue to expose failures, hold power accountable, and illuminate both the inequities and the opportunities within higher education. Our 1.4 million page views from readers across the globe in 2025 reflect the urgent need for this work. Higher education is at a crossroads. Informed scrutiny, persistent inquiry, and uncompromising reporting are the only way forward. Hope is limited but not lost. With scrutiny, advocacy, and decisive action, higher education can reclaim its promise as a public good rather than a profit-driven system that leaves millions behind.

Sources and References

Higher Education Inquirer, various articles, 2025. U.S. Department of Education Heightened Cash Monitoring lists, 2025. University of Phoenix cyber breach reports, 2025. Investigations into FAFSA fraud and for-profit college practices, HEI 2025. Global higher education inequality studies, 2025.

The Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity: Rethinking—and Challenging—America’s Economic Narrative

In a political moment defined by economic confusion, precarity, and widening inequality, the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) has positioned itself as one of the most forceful critics of how the U.S. government measures economic well-being. Founded in 2019 by Eugene “Gene” Ludwig—banking regulator, financier, and longtime critic of official labor statistics—the institute argues that the traditional indicators used by policymakers, economists, and the media no longer reflect the lived experience of most working and middle-class Americans.

LISEP’s core mission is straightforward: to replace or supplement conventional economic indicators with metrics that measure whether ordinary people can live decent, stable, self-supporting lives. In place of headline unemployment levels that minimize underemployment and wage suppression, LISEP developed the True Rate of Unemployment (TRU). Instead of accepting the Consumer Price Index as an indicator of affordability, it created the True Living Cost (TLC). And to evaluate whether households can achieve a baseline level of dignity, the institute introduced its Minimal Quality of Life Index (MQL).

Taken together, these indicators paint a sobering picture. LISEP’s most recent TRU data suggests that nearly one in four Americans—far more than the official unemployment rate—remains functionally unemployed or trapped in low-wage, unstable work. Its analysis of living costs shows that basic necessities such as housing, childcare, food, healthcare, and digital access are rising at rates that far outpace reported inflation. Its income distribution research finds that the bottom 60% of households fall severely short of the after-tax income required to meet even minimal quality-of-life thresholds.

In a time when both parties often claim economic success—pointing to record stock markets, low headline unemployment, and steady GDP growth—LISEP argues that these triumphal narratives obscure the steady erosion of working-class security.

But LISEP’s work does more than diagnose hardship; it challenges the legitimacy of the economic story that the United States tells about itself. That is precisely why its metrics have garnered attention—and controversy.
Methodological Innovations and the Pushback They Attract

Economists, policymakers, labor advocates, and academics have responded to LISEP’s work with a mixture of praise and skepticism. Some see LISEP as filling a critical gap—offering metrics that better capture the realities of gig workers, part-time workers, workers with unpredictable hours, and families priced out of life’s essentials. Others argue that LISEP’s approach risks injecting subjectivity into economic measurement and complicating long-established statistical frameworks.

One major point of debate centers on LISEP’s definition of unemployment. Traditional unemployment statistics only count individuals actively seeking work. LISEP’s TRU metric, by contrast, includes the underemployed, part-time workers who want full-time jobs, and discouraged workers who have given up looking. Critics argue that combining these groups creates a metric that resembles a policy argument more than a neutral measurement. Supporters counter that ignoring these groups produces an artificially rosy portrait of economic health and undervalues persistent structural inequality.

LISEP’s True Living Cost and Minimal Quality of Life indices face a different critique: they define “necessities” more broadly than some economists are comfortable with. Including internet access, basic technology, early childhood education, and modern transportation standards is, according to LISEP, essential to functioning in the 21st-century economy. Critics contend that because these standards go beyond subsistence, the metrics risk shifting from measuring need to measuring aspiration. The institute responds that “subsistence” is not an acceptable measure of human dignity in a wealthy nation.

Other scholars raise questions about transparency. While LISEP publishes summaries and explanations of its methodologies, some economists argue that its approaches would require broader independent replication and peer review to become standard tools. Yet others note that the Bureau of Labor Statistics itself has long used imperfect methods that were never designed to measure well-being—only labor market participation.

Where supporters and skeptics agree is on one point: LISEP has forced a deeply needed conversation about what economic dignity means in the United States today.
Why LISEP Matters for Higher Education and Public Policy

For institutions of higher learning—especially those that produce the economists, policymakers, and journalists who shape public discourse—LISEP’s challenge to economic orthodoxy is a call to scrutiny and humility. Universities continue to rely on traditional metrics in research, teaching, and policy labs, even when these metrics fail to capture the economic and social pressures facing students and their families.

Students at community colleges, regional publics, and underfunded institutions live the realities LISEP describes: multiple jobs, unpredictable hours, rising food and housing insecurity, and persistent underemployment after graduation. Yet their struggles are too often minimized by conventional indicators that suggest a thriving labor market.

If academia takes LISEP’s work seriously, it could shift research priorities, reshape debates on student debt, influence regional economic development strategies, guide labor-market forecasting, and elevate the experiences of the most economically vulnerable students.

For policymakers, LISEP’s metrics offer a different foundation for assessing whether economic growth is reaching ordinary people. They provide tools for evaluating whether wages are livable, whether childcare is accessible, whether housing is affordable, and whether the economy produces stable, family-supporting jobs. If adopted or even partially embraced, LISEP’s indicators could inform legislation on minimum wage, labor protections, social services, tax reform, cost-of-living adjustments, and more.

The institute’s broader message is simple: the United States cannot address inequality if it continues to celebrate misleading statistics.
A New Economic Narrative

Whether LISEP becomes a permanent influence or a dissenting voice will depend on how policymakers, journalists, and academic economists respond. If its metrics remain on the margins, they will serve as a moral indictment of traditional measures that ignore the reality of economic insecurity. If they are adopted, they could trigger a profound reevaluation of American economic policy—one grounded not in aggregate success but in shared prosperity.

LISEP insists that a healthy economy is not one that grows on paper but one that allows ordinary people to live decently. That premise alone places the institute on the front lines of the battle over how the United States understands its own economic health.
Sources



Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “True Rate of Unemployment (TRU),” 2025, lisep.org.
Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “True Living Cost (TLC),” 2025, lisep.org.
Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “Shared Economic Prosperity (SEP) Measure,” 2025, lisep.org.
PR Newswire, “Majority of Americans Can’t Achieve a Minimal Quality of Life, According to New Ludwig Institute Research,” May 12, 2025.
Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “Wage Inequality Grows With Low-Income Workers Losing Ground,” Press Release, April 16, 2025.

Hyper-Deregulation and the College Meltdown

In March 2025, Studio Enterprise—the online program manager behind South University—published an article titled “A New Era for Higher Education: Embracing Deregulation Amid the DOE’s Transformation.” Written in anticipation of a shifting political landscape, the article framed coming deregulation as an “opportunity” for flexibility and innovation. Studio Enterprise CEO Bryan Newman presented the moment as a chance for institutions and their contractors to do more with fewer federal constraints, implying that regulatory retreat would improve student choice and institutional agility.

What was framed as a strategic easing of oversight has instead arrived as a form of collapse. By late 2025, the U.S. Department of Education has become, in functional terms, a zombie agency—still existing on paper, but stripped of its capacity to regulate, enforce, or even communicate. Consumer protection, accreditation monitoring, program review, financial oversight, and FOIA responses have slowed or stopped entirely. The agency is walking, but no longer awake.

This vacuum has emboldened not only online program managers like Studio Enterprise and giants like 2U, but also a wide array of entities that rely on federal inaction to profit from students. The University of Phoenix—long emblematic of regulatory cat-and-mouse games in the for-profit sector—now faces minimal scrutiny, continuing to recruit aggressively while the federal watchdog sleeps. Elite universities contracting with 2U continue to launch expensive online degrees and certificates whose marketing and outcomes would once have been examined more closely.

Student loan servicers and private lenders have also moved quickly to capitalize on the chaos. Companies like Aidvantage (Maximus), Nelnet, and MOHELA now operate in an environment where enforcement actions, compliance reviews, and borrower complaint investigations have slowed to a near standstill. Servicers once accused of steering borrowers into costly forbearances or mishandling IDR accounts now face fewer barriers and far less public oversight. The dismantling of the Department has also disrupted the small channels borrowers once had for correcting servicing errors or disputing inaccurate records.

Private lenders—including Sallie Mae, Navient, and a growing constellation of fintech-style student loan companies—have seized the opportunity to expand high-interest refinance and private loan products. Without active federal oversight, marketing claims, credit evaluation practices, and default-related consequences have become increasingly opaque. Borrowers with limited financial literacy or unstable incomes are again being targeted with products that resemble the subprime boom of the early 2010s, but with even fewer regulatory guardrails.

Hyper-deregulation has also destabilized the federal loan system itself. Processing backlogs have grown. Borrower defense and closed-school discharge petitions sit in limbo. Decisions are delayed, reversed, or ignored. Automated notices go out while human review has hollowed out entirely. Students struggling with servicer errors find there is no functioning authority to appeal to—not even the already stretched ombudsman’s office, which is now overwhelmed and under-directed.

Across the sector, the same pattern is visible: institutions and corporations functioning without meaningful oversight. OPMs determine academic structures that universities should control. Lead generators push deceptive marketing campaigns with impunity. Universities desperate for enrollment sign long-term revenue-sharing deals without public transparency. Servicers mismanage accounts and communications while borrowers bear the consequences. Private lenders accelerate their expansion into communities least able to withstand financial harm.

Students feel the effect first and most painfully. They face rising costs, misleading claims, aggressive recruitment, and a federal loan system that can no longer assure accuracy or fairness. The collapse of oversight is not theoretical. It manifests in missed payments, lost paperwork, incorrect balances, unresolved appeals, and ballooning debt. For many, there is now no reliable path to recourse.

Studio Enterprise saw deregulation coming. What it left unsaid is that removing federal guardrails does not produce innovation. It produces confusion, predation, and unequal power. Hyper-deregulation rewards those who operate in the shadows—OPMs, for-profit chains, high-fee servicers, and private lenders—while those seeking education and mobility carry the burden.

This moment is not an evolution. It is an abandonment. Higher education is drifting into an environment where profit extraction flourishes while public protection evaporates. Unless new sources of oversight emerge—federal, state, journalistic, or civic—the most vulnerable students will continue to pay the highest price for the disappearance of the referee.

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Sources

Studio Enterprise, A New Era for Higher Education: Embracing Deregulation Amid the DOE’s Transformation (March 2025).
HEI archives on OPMs, for-profit colleges, and regulatory capture (2010–2025).
Public reporting and advocacy analyses on student loan servicers, including Navient, MOHELA, Nelnet, Aidvantage/Maximus, and Sallie Mae (2015–2025).
FOIA request logs, non-responses, and stalled borrower relief cases documented by HEI and partner organizations (2024–2025).
Federal higher education enforcement trends, 2023–2025.

Moral Capital and Locus of Control

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

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

Quality of Life as Moral Imperative

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

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

The Industry’s Manufactured Moral Capital

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

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

Reclaiming Moral Capital 

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

Temperance

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

Celibacy

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

Critical Thinking

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

Solidarity

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

Nonviolent Strategies in an Era of Global Threat

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

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

Mass Surveillance as a Threat to Moral Agency

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

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

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

Toward a More Honest Locus of Control

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

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

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

The Hidden Costs of ROTC — and the Military Path: Why Prospective Enlistees and Supporters Should Think Twice

[Editor's note: This article was written before West Virginia National Guard troops were shot upon in the occupied District of Columbia. That horrific event makes our point even more salient. No matter how desperate someone may be, we implore folks to think twice before signing anything related to military service under the Trump Administration.] 

For many young Americans, the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) or other military‑linked opportunities can look like a ticket to education, steady income, and a chance to “see the world.” But the allure of scholarships, structure, and economic opportunity often hides a deeper reality — one that includes moral danger, personal risk, and long-term uncertainty.

Recent events underscore this. On November 24, 2025, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) announced it was opening a formal investigation into Mark Kelly — retired Navy captain, former astronaut, and current U.S. Senator — after he appeared in a video alongside other lawmakers urging U.S. troops to disobey “illegal orders.” The DoD’s justification: as a retired officer, Kelly remains subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), and the department said his statements may have “interfered with the loyalty, morale, or good order and discipline of the armed forces.”

This episode is striking not only because of Kelly’s prominence, but because it shows how even after leaving active service, a veteran’s speech and actions can be subject to military law — a stark reminder that joining the military (or training through ROTC) can carry obligations and consequences long after “service” ends.

Moral, Legal & Personal Risks Behind the Promise

When you consider military service — through ROTC or otherwise — it’s important to weigh the full scope of what you may be signing up for:

Potential involvement in illegal or immoral wars: ROTC graduates may eventually be deployed in foreign conflicts — possibly ones controversial or condemned internationally (for example, interventions in places like Venezuela). Participation in such wars raises real moral questions about complicity in human rights abuses, “regime-change,” or other interventions that may lack democratic or legal legitimacy.

Domestic deployment and policing: Military obligations are increasingly stretching beyond foreign wars. Service members — even reservists — can be called in to deal with domestic “disputes,” civil unrest, or internal security operations. This raises ethical concerns about policing one’s own communities, and potential coercion or suppression of civil and political rights.

Long-term oversight and limited freedom: The investigation of Senator Kelly shows that veterans and officers remain under DoD jurisdiction even after service ends. That oversight can restrict free speech, dissent, or political engagement. Those seeking to escape economic hardship or limited opportunities may overlook how binding and enduring those obligations can be — even decades later.

Psychological and bodily danger: Military service often involves exposure to combat, trauma, physical injury — not to mention risks such as sexual assault, racism, sexism, and institutional abuse. Mental health consequences like PTSD are common, and the support systems for dealing with them are widely criticized as inadequate.

Institutional racism, sexism, and inequality: The military is an institution with historic and ongoing patterns of discrimination — which can exacerbate systemic injustices rather than alleviate them. For individuals coming from marginalized communities, the promise of “a way out” can come with new forms of structural violence, exploitation, or marginalization.

Career precarity and institutional control: Even after completing education or training, the reality of “limited choices” looms large. Military obligations — contractual, legal, social — can bind individuals long-term, affecting not just their mobility but their agency, conscience, and ability to critique the system.

Why Economic Incentives Often Mask the Real Costs

For many, the draw of ROTC is economic: scholarships, stable income, a way out of challenging socioeconomic circumstances, or a ticket out of a hometown with limited opportunity. These incentives are real. But as the recent case with Mark Kelly makes clear, the costs — legal, moral, social — can be far greater and more enduring than advertised. What looks like an escape route can become a lifetime of obligations, constraints, and potential complicity in questionable policies.

A Call for Caution, Conscience, and Awareness

Prospective enlistees deserve full transparency. The decision to join ROTC or the military should not be sold merely as an educational contract or a job opportunity — it is an entrance into a deeply entrenched institution, one with power, obligations, and potential for harm. The new controversy around Mark Kelly ought to serve as a wake-up call: if even a decorated former officer and sitting U.S. senator can be threatened decades after service, young people should consider carefully what they may be signing up for.

If you — or someone you care about — is thinking of joining, ask: What kind of wars might I be asked to fight? What does “service” really cost — and who pays?

Sources:

Higher Education Inquirer. Trump Sends West Virginia National Guard to D.C. Without Consulting Mayor Bowser." August 16, 2025. Higher Education Inquirer : Trump Sends West Virginia National Guard to D.C. Without Consulting Mayor Bowser

AP News. “Pentagon says it's investigating Sen. Mark Kelly over video urging troops to defy 'illegal orders'.” November 24, 2025. https://apnews.com/article/4882f76b05dcdfa3060c284c2c84dd12

The Guardian. “Mark Kelly: call for troops to disobey illegal orders is 'non-controversial'.” November 25, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/25/mark-kelly-troops-disobey-illegal-orders-comments

Reuters. “Pentagon threatens to prosecute Senator Mark Kelly by recalling him to Navy service.” November 24, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagon-threatens-prosecute-senator-mark-kelly-by-recalling-him-navy-service-2025-11-24/

RAND Corporation. “Mental Health and Military Service.” 2022.

Amnesty International. Human Rights Violations in Venezuela. 2023.

U.S. Department of Defense. Reports on Sexual Assault in the Military. 2024.

Washington, H. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Human Experimentation in the United States.

Rosenthal, E. An American Sickness.

American Christmas 2025

Mass surveillance is no longer a marginal concern in American life. It is the silent architecture of a society managed from above and distrusted from below. The cameras aimed at students, workers, and the precarious class reflect a deeper spiritual, political, and moral crisis among the elites who designed the systems now monitoring the rest of us.

Universities, corporations, city governments, and federal agencies increasingly rely on surveillance tools to manage populations whose economic security has been gutted by the same leaders who now demand behavioral compliance. Cameras proliferate, keystrokes are tracked, movement is logged, and predictive algorithms follow people across campuses, workplaces, and public spaces. Yet those responsible for creating the conditions that justify surveillance—politicians, corporate boards, university trustees, executive donors, and policy consultants—operate in near total opacity. Their meetings take place behind closed doors, their decisions shielded from public scrutiny, their influence networks essentially invisible.

This is not a coincidence. It is the logical extension of a neoliberal elite culture that elevates market logic above moral obligation. As the Higher Education Inquirer documented in “How Educated Neoliberals Built the Homelessness Crisis,” the architects of modern austerity—professionalized, credentialed, and trained in elite universities—constructed social systems that demand accountability from the poor while providing impunity for the powerful. Their policy models treat human beings as units to be managed, scored, nudged, and surveilled. Surveillance fits seamlessly into this worldview. It is the managerial substitute for solidarity.

The moral void of this elite class is perhaps most visible in the realm of healthcare. The Affordable Care Act, whatever its limitations, represented a modest attempt to affirm that healthcare is a public good and that access should not depend entirely on wealth. But the undermining of Obamacare under Donald Trump laid bare how deeply the nation’s policy culture had descended into nihilism. Trump’s efforts to gut the ACA were not about ideology or fiscal prudence; they were an expression of power for its own sake. Funding for enrollment outreach was slashed. Navigator programs were dismantled. Work requirements for Medicaid were encouraged, despite overwhelming evidence that they punished the sick and disabled. The administration promoted junk insurance plans that offered no real protection, while lawsuits were advanced to overturn the ACA entirely, even if doing so meant millions would lose coverage.

This assault revealed the moral collapse of a political and economic elite that had grown comfortable with cruelty. It was cruelty performed as policy, sanctioned by corporate donors, embraced by right-wing media, and tolerated by the broader professional class that rarely speaks out unless its own interests are threatened. Even many of the centrist neoliberal policymakers who originally shaped the ACA’s cost-sharing structure responded with timidity, reluctant to confront the underlying truth: that the American healthcare system had become an arena where profit mattered more than survival, and where surveillance of the poor replaced accountability for the rich.

As traditional moral frameworks lose their authority—whether organized religion, civic duty, or shared ethical narratives—many Americans have drifted into agnosticism or atheism not enriched by humanist values, but hollowed out by a sense of futility. Without a shared moral anchor, people retreat into private meaning or abandon meaning altogether. In this void, conspiracy theories flourish. People know they are lied to. They sense power operating behind closed doors. They see elite institutions fail repeatedly without consequence. When institutions offer no transparency, alternatives emerge in the shadows.

The elite response is predictable: condemn conspiracies, scold the public for irrationality, invoke the language of “misinformation.” But this reaction deepens the divide. The same elites who created opaque systems—financial, academic, political, and technological—now fault ordinary people for trying to make sense of the opacity. In a society where truth is managed, measured, branded, and optimized, conspiracy becomes a form of folk epistemology. It is not always correct, but it is often understandable.

Mass surveillance is therefore not the root of the crisis but its mirror. It reflects a ruling class that no longer commands moral authority and a public that no longer trusts the institutions governing it. It reflects a society that treats the vulnerable as suspects and the powerful as untouchable. It reflects a political order in which the dismantling of healthcare protections is permissible while the monitoring of poor people’s bodies, behaviors, and spending is normalized.

If the United States is to escape this downward spiral, the cameras must eventually be turned upward. Transparency must apply not only to individuals but to corporations, boards, agencies, foundations, and the political donors who shape public life. Higher education must cease functioning as a credentialing arm of elite impunity and reclaim its role as a defender of democratic inquiry and human dignity. Public institutions must anchor themselves in ethical commitments that do not depend on religious dogma but arise from the basic principle that every human being deserves respect, security, and care.

Until that reconstruction begins, the nation will remain trapped. The elites will continue to rule through metrics and surveillance rather than legitimacy. The public will continue to oscillate between nihilism and suspicion. And the moral void at the center of American life will continue to widen, one camera at a time.

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Sources

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
David Lyon, Surveillance Studies
Higher Education Inquirer, How Educated Neoliberals Built the Homelessness Crisis
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos
Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites
Sarah Brayne, Predict and Surveil
Elisabeth Rosenthal, An American Sickness

The Secret and Tragic World of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a man whose name carries the weight of one of America’s most storied political dynasties. Environmentalist, activist, author, and political figure, he has long cultivated a public image of intelligence, idealism, and reform-minded zeal. Yet behind this public persona lies a deeply troubled personal history marked by tragedy, accusations of sexual misconduct, and disturbing claims of animal cruelty. With his rise to the position of Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2025, the stakes of this hidden history have grown far beyond family drama—they now intersect with public health, national science policy, and the higher education ecosystem.

Personal Tragedy and Allegations

Mary Richardson Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s second wife, died by suicide in May 2012. She was found with antidepressants in her system but no alcohol. At the time, the couple was separated, embroiled in a bitter divorce. Later-revealed documents suggest that Mary Richardson described her husband as a “sexual deviant,” alleging prescription-drug abuse and psychological manipulation, including gaslighting. She claimed he secretly recorded more than 60 phone conversations and maintained diaries documenting extramarital relationships. What may have seemed private marital discord became serious allegations of betrayal, manipulation, and emotional trauma.

In 2024, Eliza Cooney, a former live-in babysitter for the Kennedy children, publicly accused Kennedy of sexually assaulting her in the late 1990s. She described multiple incidents, including groping in a pantry, appearing shirtless in her bedroom, and being asked to rub lotion on his back. Kennedy sent Cooney a text apologizing if he had made her feel uncomfortable, claiming he had no memory of the events. Publicly, he called the allegations “a lot of garbage,” framing them as part of a “rambunctious youth” while refusing to categorically deny the events. These allegations, alongside Mary Richardson’s claims, paint a portrait of private behavior in stark contrast to the public image Kennedy has long projected.

Claims of animal cruelty have also surfaced. A 2010 photograph published in media outlets shows Kennedy with what appears to be a charred animal carcass. While Kennedy claims it was a goat from a Patagonia camping trip, a veterinarian quoted in the press suggested it could be a dog. Fact-checkers cannot conclusively identify the animal, yet the image, whether misinterpreted or not, is troubling in the context of someone who has publicly championed environmental and public health causes.

Ascension to HHS and Early Decisions

In February 2025, Kennedy was sworn in as Secretary of HHS, instantly gaining authority over national health policy, agency staffing, and public health programs. His tenure has been marked by swift, controversial moves. Kennedy launched the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) commission, aiming to address chronic disease and childhood illness, with a focus on prevention and environmental health. He has emphasized removing conflicts of interest from advisory committees, arguing that existing members often have ties to pharmaceutical companies.

Kennedy’s tenure has also included a sweeping reorganization of HHS, consolidating its 28 divisions into 15, centralizing administrative functions, and cutting staff from roughly 82,000 to 62,000 in pursuit of $1.8 billion in annual savings. He has defended these changes as necessary to streamline operations and focus on environmental toxicity, clean water, and healthy food, while critics warn they could weaken public health infrastructure and reduce oversight. Perhaps most controversially, Kennedy has moved to eliminate the long-standing practice of public comment on many HHS decisions. Other early actions have included removing expert members from CDC vaccine advisory committees and revising CDC guidance on autism and vaccines in ways aligned with Kennedy’s previously expressed views.

Higher Education and Kennedy’s Influence

Kennedy’s connection to higher education is both personal and institutional. He attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in American history and literature, and went on to earn a Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1982. While he has no formal scientific or medical degree, his public role as HHS Secretary gives him authority over federal research funding, grants, and university partnerships.

Since taking office, Kennedy has influenced HHS grants to universities, particularly those focused on public health, environmental research, and childhood disease prevention. Reports indicate he has prioritized funding for schools conducting research aligned with his personal priorities, such as environmental toxicity, vaccine alternatives, and holistic health programs. Critics argue this approach risks politicizing federal funding, favoring institutions that align with his beliefs while disadvantaging traditional biomedical research programs. Some universities have reportedly altered research agendas to secure or maintain grants under Kennedy’s administration, raising concerns about academic independence.

Kennedy’s educational background, combined with his control over grants and research priorities, illustrates how personal ideology and public policy intersect with higher education. It underscores the stakes for universities, faculty, and students: research funding decisions now operate in a landscape influenced by a leader whose private life is controversial and whose professional philosophy challenges established scientific norms.

The Interplay of History, Power, and Trust

The combination of Kennedy’s personal controversies, his public health authority, and his influence on higher education presents a complex portrait of power, legacy, and trust. Allegations from Mary Richardson Kennedy and Eliza Cooney, along with the animal cruelty claims, raise questions about judgment, ethics, and personal responsibility. Now, those questions carry weight far beyond private circles—they intersect with national public health, scientific research, and the education of future professionals.

The public often sees only the polished exterior: speeches, causes, charisma. In Kennedy’s case, the hidden world includes tragic suicide, allegations of sexual misconduct, and disturbing claims regarding animals. These shadows, now coupled with sweeping policy authority and influence over universities, underscore the importance of scrutinizing both character and action. Leadership in public health and science funding is not solely about vision or ambition—it requires judgment, transparency, and accountability.

What Kennedy does next will not just define his legacy; it will shape the health, safety, and education of the country he now serves. For advocates of transparency, survivors of abuse, academic researchers, and public health professionals, watching closely is not optional—it is a civic imperative.

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Sources

Vanity Fair. “RFK Jr.’s Family Doesn’t Want Him to Run. Even They May Not Know His Darkest Secrets.” 2024. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/robert-kennedy-jr-shocking-history

New York Post. “Mary Kennedy Accuses Ex-Husband RFK Jr. of Being 'Sexual Deviant' and 'Gaslighting' from Beyond the Grave.” 2025. https://nypost.com/2025/01/29/us-news/rfk-jrs-late-wife-accused-him-of-being-sexual-deviant-addict/

Reuters. “Woman Who Accused RFK Jr. of Sexual Assault Says He Apologized by Text.” 2024. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/woman-who-accused-rfk-jr-sexual-assault-says-he-apologized-by-text-2024-07-12/

Forbes. “RFK Jr. Calls Report Alleging He Sexually Assaulted His Children’s Nanny and Ate a Dog ‘A Lot of Garbage.’” 2024. https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2024/07/03/rfk-jr-calls-report-alleging-he-sexually-assaulted-his-childrens-nanny-and-ate-a-dog-a-lot-of-garbage/

WRAL. “RFK Jr. Denies Eating a Dog While Sidestepping Sexual Assault Allegations in Vanity Fair Article.” 2024. https://www.wral.com/story/rfk-jr-denies-eating-a-dog-while-sidestepping-sexual-assault-allegations-in-vanity-fair-article/21508133/

AP News. “RFK Jr. Made Promises About Vaccines. Here's What He's Done as Health Secretary.” 2025. https://apnews.com/article/d1ad570053583d953f15ec3e566e426f

Reuters. “Kennedy Proposes Ending Public Comment on HHS Decisions.” 2025. https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/kennedy-proposes-ending-public-comment-hhs-decisions-2025-02-28/

Time. “What to Know About RFK Jr. Removing All Experts From CDC Vaccine Advisory Committee.” 2025. https://time.com/7292553/rfk-jr-removes-cdc-vaccine-committee-experts/

HHS.gov. “Make America Healthy Again Commission Launch.” 2025. https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/eo-maha.html

Higher Education and Its Complicity in U.S. Empire

For more than a century, U.S. higher education has been intertwined with American empire. Universities have served as ideological partners, intelligence hubs, policy workshops, and training grounds for the managers of U.S. global power. When Washington supports authoritarian allies, fuels regional conflicts, or looks away during humanitarian disasters, the academy rarely stands apart. Instead, it aligns itself—through silence, research partnerships, and selective outrage—with the priorities of the federal government and the corporations that profit from U.S. foreign policy.

Recent U.S. actions in Venezuela, Ukraine, Yemen, South Sudan, and Palestine reveal how deeply embedded this pattern has become.

In Venezuela, the United States pursued years of sanctions, covert pressure, and diplomatic isolation as part of a regime-change strategy. Throughout this period, universities repeated a narrow range of policy narratives promoted by the State Department and U.S.-aligned think tanks. Panels and conferences elevated experts connected to defense contractors, oil interests, and government-funded NGOs, while the humanitarian consequences of sanctions and the legality of U.S. interference were often ignored. The atmosphere of academic neutrality masked a clear alignment with Washington’s objectives.

Universities also showed a troubling degree of complicity during Russia’s assault on Ukraine, a war marked by the systematic killing of civilians, mass displacement, and the kidnapping and forced transfer of Ukrainian children into Russia. Even after international human rights organizations and war-crimes investigators documented atrocities, some U.S. institutions maintained partnerships with Russian universities aligned with the Kremlin, accepted visiting scholars linked to state propaganda outlets, or avoided direct condemnation of Putin’s actions for fear of disrupting scientific or financial relationships. In certain cases, academic centers framed the invasion as a “complex geopolitical dispute” rather than a brutal, unilateral attack on a sovereign population, allowing Russian narratives about NATO, Western “provocation,” or Ukrainian illegitimacy to seep into public programming. While some campuses cut ties, others hesitated, revealing how financial incentives, research networks, and institutional caution can blunt moral clarity even in the face of internationally verified crimes against civilians and children.

Higher education’s relationship with the Gulf states adds another dimension to this complicity. As Saudi Arabia waged a catastrophic war in Yemen—with U.S. weapons, logistical support, and diplomatic protection—American universities deepened their financial partnerships with Saudi and Emirati institutions. Engineering programs, medical schools, cybersecurity labs, and energy research centers accepted major gifts and expanded joint research agreements. Few leaders questioned these ties, even as human rights groups documented atrocities in Yemen or as the UAE’s role in proxy conflicts, including episodes in South Sudan, came into sharper focus. Protecting revenue streams took precedence over confronting abuses committed by powerful allies.

Nowhere is the failure of higher education more visible than in its response to Israel’s assault on Gaza. As civilian deaths soared and international human rights organizations sounded alarms about the scale and intent of the military campaign, most universities responded with repression rather than reflection. Administrators disciplined student protesters, sanctioned faculty for political speech, and issued public statements carefully aligned with prevailing U.S. political positions. Research partnerships with Israeli institutions linked to defense industries persisted without scrutiny. Universities that once examined apartheid with clarity struggled to acknowledge parallels when the subject was Palestine. Donor sensitivities, political pressures, and fear of congressional retaliation overwhelmed any commitment to moral consistency or academic freedom.

The same institutional behavior is likely if U.S. policy shifts in East Asia. Should Washington move toward accommodating the People’s Republic of China’s ambitions regarding Taiwan—whether through diplomatic recalibration or reduced willingness to intervene—universities will likely adapt quickly. The history of U.S.-China normalization in the 1970s showed how fast higher education can reorient itself when geopolitical winds change. Partnerships, narratives, and research agendas would shift to align with new federal signals, demonstrating again that universities follow the imperatives of state power more readily than they challenge them.

The deeper issue is structural. U.S. higher education relies on federal research funding, defense and intelligence partnerships, corporate relationships, overseas investment programs, and philanthropic networks shaped by geopolitical interests. Endowments are tied to global markets that profit from conflict. Study-abroad and academic exchange programs depend on diplomatic priorities. Administrators understand that openly challenging U.S. foreign policy—from Venezuela to Ukraine, from Yemen to Gaza—can threaten institutional stability and funding. Silence or selective engagement becomes the safest administrative posture.

If the academy hopes to reclaim its integrity, it must learn to confront rather than replicate state power. That requires transparency about foreign funding and defense contracts, protection for dissenting scholars and students, genuine engagement with global South perspectives, and ethical evaluation of partnerships with authoritarian governments. Universities cannot prevent wars, but they can refuse to serve as intellectual and financial enablers of violence.

Until such changes occur, higher education will remain entangled in the machinery of U.S. empire, complicit not through passivity but through the routine normalization of policies that inflict suffering around the world.

 
Sources

Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; U.S. Congressional Research Service; Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft; Brown University’s Costs of War Project; Washington Post and New York Times reporting on U.S. sanctions and foreign policy; Investigations by the Associated Press, Reuters, and Al Jazeera on Yemen, Gaza, Venezuela, and South Sudan; HEI archives and independent higher education researchers.

A Moral Imperative: Universities Should Release All Epstein-Related Files

Universities have a responsibility to act. Harvard, MIT, and other elite institutions that accepted donations from Jeffrey Epstein — even after his 2008 conviction — must release all files related to his gifts, internal reviews, communications, and institutional interactions. Transparency is not optional; it is the first step in holding powerful actors accountable and restoring public trust. By disclosing these materials, universities can confront the full extent of institutional complicity and set a precedent for ethical leadership.

The Epstein scandal revealed more than the crimes of a single man. It exposed networks of wealth, influence, and institutional failure that allowed abuse to flourish. Epstein’s financial power bought him credibility, and universities, in return, offered him prestige, office space, and public recognition. This relationship was not incidental; it reflected structural norms that protect the privileged and silence victims. By releasing their files, universities can transform secrecy into accountability, turning knowledge and transparency into a powerful nonviolent tool for justice.

Scholarship plays a critical role in this process. Academics documenting Epstein’s networks, the decisions of institutional leaders, and systemic failures provide the evidence necessary to guide meaningful reform. Higher Education Inquirer’s reporting connects Epstein to influential figures such as Alan Dershowitz and Larry Summers, showing how institutional authority was leveraged to shield elite actors. Knowledge, in this context, functions as a form of nonviolent power — a way to demand change grounded in facts rather than force.

Educational institutions can also shape culture through ethical education. By integrating discussions of institutional complicity, philanthropy, and moral responsibility into curricula, universities prepare future leaders to recognize abuses of power and resist systems that protect the privileged. This is not simply about preventing future abuse; it is about cultivating leaders attuned to ethics, justice, and accountability across all sectors of society.

Nonviolent pressure is amplified when students, faculty, and alumni mobilize to demand transparency. Public forums, petitions, and advocacy campaigns compel boards and administrators to act. Universities cannot ignore the moral and reputational stakes when their communities insist on disclosure. Truth-and-reconciliation initiatives, such as survivor-led review boards, offer an additional path. These bodies confront past abuses, acknowledge harm, and recommend systemic reforms, creating space for healing while promoting institutional integrity.

Public engagement strengthens these efforts further. Independent media outlets and academic reporting extend the university’s moral authority into society, informing public debate and influencing policy. By releasing all Epstein-related files, universities participate directly in this process, setting a standard for transparency, accountability, and ethical leadership.

The Epstein revelations, as framed by Higher Education Inquirer, offer a historic opportunity. By releasing all relevant files, supporting rigorous research, fostering ethical education, and empowering communities to hold institutions accountable, higher education can wield its moral authority as a nonviolent force for justice. Universities reclaim public trust, demonstrate integrity, and show that knowledge and transparency remain among the most powerful tools for transformative social change.

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Sources

• Higher Education Inquirer. “Elite Higher Education and the Epstein Files.” July 14, 2025. https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/07/elite-higher-education-and-epstein-files.html

• Higher Education Inquirer. “Release All the Epstein Files.” July 24, 2025. https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/07/release-all-epstein-files.html

• Higher Education Inquirer. “Epstein, Dershowitz, Summers, and the Long Arc of Elite Impunity.” Nov 16, 2025. https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/11/epstein-dershowitz-summers-and-long-arc.html

• Higher Education Inquirer. “The Dirty World of Billionaire Leon Black and Jeffrey Epstein: Profits Over People.” Aug 16, 2025. https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/08/the-dirty-world-of-billionaire-leon.html

• Higher Education Inquirer. “Are the Epstein Files the Watergate of Our Time?” July 23, 2025. https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/07/are-the-epstein-files-the-watergate-of-our-time.html