Financial Logic and the Limits of Educational Governance: David R. Barker and the Marketization of Postsecondary Policy (Glen McGhee)

 “Barker’s background does not prepare him to navigate this tension. It predisposes him to resolve it in favor of the market—and to treat the casualties as acceptable losses.”

Dr. David R. Barker is an economist, wealthy real estate investor, and long-time Iowa Republican activist who currently serves as Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education under President Donald Trump. A sixth-generation Iowan and former member of the Iowa Board of Regents, Barker previously worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, taught economics and real estate at the University of Iowa and the University of Chicago, and now runs a real estate and finance firm that owns thousands of apartments and commercial properties across the Midwest.

In 2025, Barker was nominated and confirmed to oversee federal postsecondary policy, with a portfolio focused on “outcomes and accountability,” accreditation reform, student aid policy, and aligning federal grants with the administration’s ideological and fiscal priorities. His academic background—most notably his 1991 dissertation, Real Estate, Real Estate Investment Trust, and Closed End Fund Valuation—reveals a conceptual toolkit grounded in financial economics, asset valuation, property markets, and quantitative modeling. That training, reinforced by decades as a real estate investor and governance actor, shapes a distinctively market-oriented understanding of higher education—one that privileges measurable returns, financial discipline, and transactional accountability.

While these perspectives can contribute to cost control and fiscal stewardship, they also generate predictable and consequential blind spots when applied to institutions whose core purposes are epistemic, developmental, and democratic rather than market-optimizing.

Barker’s intellectual formation rests firmly within a positivist epistemological framework that treats value as something discoverable through quantification, comparability, and replicability. Real estate valuation depends on observable data—comparable sales, capitalization rates, discounted cash flows—to arrive at ostensibly objective measures of worth. Higher education, by contrast, encompasses vast domains of inquiry that resist quantification. The humanities and interpretive social sciences generate knowledge through close reading, archival reconstruction, ethnography, phenomenology, and critical theory—methods that foreground context, reflexivity, and meaning rather than numerical outputs.

An institutional ethnographer, for example, does not aim to optimize organizational efficiency but to understand how power, texts, and routines structure everyday academic life, often from the standpoint of marginalized actors. Such work deliberately rejects managerial abstraction in favor of situated understanding. From an asset-valuation perspective, this kind of scholarship appears unproductive, inefficient, or indulgent. Barker’s training offers little conceptual grounding for why a historian’s decade-long archival project on subaltern voices or a philosopher’s engagement with moral reasoning might be intrinsically valuable despite producing no immediate marketable deliverables.

This epistemological mismatch extends directly into student learning. Decades of higher education research conceptualize college as a developmental process encompassing cognitive complexity, identity formation, ethical reasoning, and critical consciousness. Theories such as Chickering’s vectors of identity development, Perry’s scheme of intellectual and ethical growth, and transformative learning theory emphasize qualitative shifts in how students interpret the world and their place within it.

Barker’s emphasis on return on investment and labor-market outcomes aligns instead with a human capital model that treats education as an economic input yielding wage premiums. This transactional framework struggles to accommodate the intrinsic, non-instrumental aims of liberal education—the cultivation of judgment, curiosity, civic responsibility, and reflective self-understanding. When learning is operationalized primarily through employment metrics, the deeper question of how students think, reason, and deliberate disappears from view.

Nowhere is the mismatch more consequential than in faculty governance and academic freedom. American higher education rests on shared governance, articulated in the AAUP’s 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, which recognizes faculty as the primary stewards of curriculum, academic standards, and knowledge production.

Barker’s professional background emphasizes hierarchical authority, executive control, and fiduciary accountability—an orientation that mirrors corporate governance rather than collegial self-rule. His rhetoric echoes the managerial logic of the Jarratt Report era, which reimagined universities as corporate enterprises with academic units treated as cost centers. Barker has publicly described “battling a liberal university establishment,” mapping faculty political affiliations through voter registration data, closing departments, and curbing what he calls “indoctrination sessions.” These remarks reveal a view of faculty not as epistemic authorities but as politically suspect employees requiring surveillance and correction.

Applying asset-management logic to academic departments—judging their worth by enrollment figures or ideological balance rather than disciplinary contribution—misunderstands the distributed authority and intellectual autonomy on which academic quality depends.

Equally alien to financial logic are the tacit and relational dimensions of learning. Liberal education unfolds through mentorship, dialogue, sustained engagement with complexity, and the slow formation of intellectual dispositions. Its most profound effects often emerge years after graduation and cannot be pre-specified as metrics. Barker’s preference for standardizable outcomes and compliance-based accountability—reinforced by the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence—privileges what can be measured over what can be meaningfully understood.

The consequences are especially severe for community colleges and HBCUs. These institutions serve disproportionate numbers of low-income, first-generation, and historically marginalized students. Research consistently shows that equity gaps reflect structural inequalities in K–12 education, funding, and social stratification, not institutional inefficiency or lack of merit. Market-efficiency frameworks misread these realities, interpreting low completion rates as failure rather than as evidence of unmet structural obligations.

Saint Augustine’s University captured this tension in its response to Barker regarding the Compact for Academic Excellence, noting that restrictions on race-conscious policies conflict directly with HBCUs’ statutory mission under Title III of the Higher Education Act. Institutions designed to expand access cannot be evaluated using the same market metrics as selective research universities.

Barker’s antipathy toward critical pedagogy further reveals the limits of his framework. Educational traditions rooted in Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Henry Giroux understand education as inherently political and aimed at developing critical consciousness and democratic agency. Barker’s efforts to eliminate diversity-related accreditation standards and suppress justice-oriented curricula position him in direct opposition to these traditions.

At stake are fundamentally different answers to the question of what education is for. Market logic prioritizes efficiency, credential exchange, and wage outcomes. Critical and liberal traditions prioritize human development, democratic participation, and knowledge for its own sake. Barker’s training provides no framework for adjudicating between these visions beyond market discipline.

The predictable consequences are already visible: epistemological narrowing, erosion of faculty autonomy, commodification of credentials, punitive accountability for equity-serving institutions, and deregulated accreditation that invites predatory actors. History shows that weakened oversight benefits for-profit extractive models, not students or the public good.

David R. Barker’s expertise equips him to manage balance sheets and assess asset performance. It does not equip him to steward institutions whose central purposes—knowledge creation, human development, and democratic citizenship—cannot be reduced to financial return. The conflict articulated by Saint Augustine’s University between equity mission and market mandate will define the next phase of federal postsecondary policy. Barker’s background does not prepare him to navigate that tension. It predisposes him to resolve it in favor of the market—and to treat the casualties as acceptable losses.

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Sources

American Association of University Professors. Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. 1966.

American Association of University Professors. 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, with 1970 Interpretive Comments.

Barker, David R. Real Estate, Real Estate Investment Trust, and Closed End Fund Valuation. Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1991.

Chickering, Arthur W., and Linda Reisser. Education and Identity. Second edition. Jossey-Bass, 1993.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 1970.

Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2014.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

Jarratt, Alex. Report of the Steering Committee for Efficiency Studies in Universities. Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, 1985.

Nelson, Cary. No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom. New York University Press, 2010.

Perry, William G. Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.

Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Trow, Martin. “Problems in the Transition from Elite to Mass Higher Education.” OECD conference paper, 1973.

U.S. Department of Education. Compact for Academic Excellence. Trump administration policy framework, 2025.

U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education. Accreditation and State Authorization Regulations. Federal rulemakings and guidance, various years.

Yosso, Tara J. “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth.” Race Ethnicity and Education, 2005.

The University of Austin’s Ideological Overreach: A Critical Look at the “Higher Education” Alternative

The University of Austin (UATX) markets itself as the cure for the alleged decay of American universities—a “fearless pursuit of truth” dedicated to restoring rigor, patriotism, and civic virtue. In a recent fundraising appeal, UATX’s president Carlos Carvalho argued that America’s youth have been “miseducated, unwise, and confused” by elite institutions and that only UATX’s model can reverse these trends.

But beneath the rhetoric lies a deeply ideological project that raises serious questions about educational substance, inclusivity, and the influence of wealthy backers. Rather than addressing the structural challenges facing higher education, UATX simplifies complex societal shifts into a moral blame game, offering solutions grounded in a narrow set of political and cultural assumptions.

A Narrow Diagnosis for a Complex Problem

UATX highlights surveys showing declining patriotism among young Americans and growing interest in alternative economic systems such as socialism. The university concludes that mainstream universities are to blame for this generational malaise—a claim both simplistic and selective. Attitudes toward identity, governance, and civic life are shaped by economics, media, community, and lived experience, not solely by seminar-room pedagogy. Reducing broad societal trends to grading policies or curriculum choices obscures complexity and risks promoting moral panic over reasoned analysis.

UATX’s Prescriptions: Tradition Over Inquiry

The university champions meritocratic admissions emphasizing test scores, small seminars, and strict grading as antidotes to the so-called “gutting of academic standards.” While rigorous study has value, these proposals reflect a particular vision of education: one centered on classical Western texts, narrow definitions of excellence, and pedagogical models that prioritize conformity over intellectual exploration. Rather than fostering openness, this approach risks reinforcing orthodoxy.

Donors, Ideology, and Influence

UATX rejects tuition and government support in favor of private philanthropy, a choice that amplifies questions of ideological influence. The university’s early and major backers are heavily aligned with conservative and libertarian priorities, raising doubts about whether the institution can serve as a genuinely neutral forum for intellectual inquiry. Notable supporters include Jeff Yass, billionaire co-founder of Susquehanna International Group and major Republican donor, who pledged $100 million to UATX, launching a $300 million campaign; Harlan Crow, real estate developer and GOP donor, reported as an early backer; Len Blavatnik, investor whose family foundation has donated to UATX; and Bill Ackman, hedge fund manager supporting UATX’s free-speech mission.

Founders and trustees include Bari Weiss, journalist and co-founder who remains a trustee, framing UATX as a response to “censoriousness” in higher education; Joe Lonsdale, venture capitalist and founding trustee linked to UATX’s fiscal sponsor; and Niall Ferguson, Pano Kanelos, and others who played founding leadership roles. The concentration of wealth and ideological alignment among donors raises pressing questions: can a university built on such a foundation truly function as a neutral intellectual space?

Alarmism, Ideology, and Academic Freedom

UATX portrays mainstream universities as ideologically monolithic and hostile to free speech. Critics note that such framing conflates disagreement with censorship, overlooking the robust debates already occurring on campuses nationwide. Moreover, by marketing itself as an alternative to “woke indoctrination,” UATX signals a particular cultural orientation rather than offering a neutral platform for diverse perspectives.

Ideological Branding—not Educational Transformation

UATX presents itself as an education revolution. Yet its model appears more rooted in ideological branding than in addressing real structural and pedagogical challenges: affordability, accessibility, genuine academic freedom, and engagement with both classical and contemporary ideas. True reform demands more than a privately funded bubble of aligned donors and like-minded students; it requires grappling with complexity rather than caricaturing crisis.

Sources 

Green, Erica L. At the U. of Austin, a Raft of Departures Leaves More Questions Than Answers. Chronicle of Higher Education.
Zaleski, Olivia. Austin’s Anti‑Woke University Is Living in Dreamland. The New Republic.
Smith, Helen. Is the University of Austin Betraying Its Founding Principles? Quillette.
CBS News. UATX Launches, Touting Ideological Openness and Debate.
Austin Monthly. How the So‑Called University of Austin Is Faring Nearly Two Years After Conception.
Chron.com. University of Austin Staff Exodus.
Reformaustin.org. GOP Donors Pour Millions Into Anti‑Woke University in Texas.
Salon.com. Bari Weiss’ Field of Right‑Wing Dreams: Will the University of Austin Ever Actually Exist?

The Four Envelopes: A Cautionary Tale for Higher Education

When a new university president arrives on campus, they inherit more than a title and a set of obligations. They inherit a political ecosystem, a financial tangle, an entrenched culture of silence, and a long list of unresolved failures handed down like family heirlooms. Academic folklore captures this reality in the famous story of the three envelopes, a darkly humorous parable that has circulated for decades. But the contemporary landscape of higher education—with its billionaire trustees, private-equity logic, political interference, and donor-driven governance—demands an updated version. In 2025, the story no longer ends with three envelopes.

It begins the usual way. On the new president’s first day, they find a note from their predecessor and three envelopes in the top drawer. A few months later, enrollment stumbles, faculty grow restless, and trustees begin asking pointed questions. The president opens the first envelope. It reads: “Blame your predecessor.” And so they do, invoking inherited deficits, outdated practices, and “a period of transition.” Everyone relaxes. Nothing changes.

The second crisis comes with even less warning. Budget gaps widen. Donors back away. A scandal simmers. Morale erodes. The president remembers the drawer and opens the second envelope. It says: “Reorganize.” Suddenly the campus is flooded with restructuring proposals, new committees, new vice provosts, and flowcharts that signal movement rather than direction. The sense of activity buys time, which is all the president really needed.

Eventually comes the kind of crisis that neither blame nor reshuffling can contain: a revolt among faculty, a public scandal, a collapse in confidence from every constituency that actually keeps the university functioning. The president reaches for the third envelope. It contains the classic message: “Prepare three envelopes.” Leadership in higher education is cyclical, and presidents come and go with the expensive inevitability of presidential searches and golden-parachute departures.

But that is where the old story ends, and where the modern one begins.

In the updated version, the president sees one more envelope in the drawer. This one is heavier, embossed, and unmistakably official. When they open it, they find a severance agreement and a check already drafted. The fourth envelope is a parting gift from megadonor and trustee Marc Rowan.

The symbolism is blunt. In an era when billionaire donors treat universities like portfolio companies and ideological battlegrounds, presidential tenures can end not because of institutional failure but because the wrong donor was displeased. Rowan, the financier who helped drive leadership changes at the University of Pennsylvania, represents a broader shift in American higher education: presidents are increasingly accountable not to faculty, staff, students, or the public, but to wealthy benefactors whose money exerts gravitational pull over governance itself. When those benefactors want a president removed, the departure is not a matter of process or principle but of power.

The fourth envelope reveals the new architecture of control. It tells incoming presidents that their exit was negotiated before their first decision, that donor influence can override shared governance, and that golden severance packages can help smooth over conflicts between public mission and private interest. It is a warning to campus communities that transparency is not a value but an obstacle, and that leadership stability is fragile when tied to the preferences of a handful of financiers.

The revised story ends not with resignation but with a question: what happens to the public mission of a university when private wealth dictates its leadership? And how long will faculty, students, and staff tolerate a structure in which the highest office is subject not to democratic accountability but to donor impatience?

The four envelopes are no longer folklore. They are a mirror.

Sources
Chronicle of Higher Education reporting on donor-driven leadership pressure at Penn
Inside Higher Ed coverage on presidential turnover and governance conflicts
Public reporting on Marc Rowan’s influence in university decision-making
Research literature on billionaire philanthropy and power in higher education

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)

A Century of American Exploitation: Oil, Crypto, and the Struggle for Latin America’s Universities

Latin America—a region of thirty-three countries stretching from Mexico through Central and South America and across the Caribbean—has spent more than a century fighting against foreign exploitation. Its universities, which should anchor local prosperity, cultural autonomy, and democratic life, have instead been repeatedly reshaped by foreign corporations, U.S. government interests, global lenders, and now crypto speculators. Yet the region’s history is also defined by persistent, courageous resistance, led overwhelmingly by students, faculty, and Indigenous communities.

Understanding today’s educational crisis in Latin America requires tracing this long arc of exploitation—and the struggle to build systems rooted in equity rather than extraction.

1900s–1930s: Bananas, Oil, and the Rise of the “Banana Republics”

Early in the 20th century, American corporations established vast profit-making empires in Latin America. United Fruit Company—today’s Chiquita Banana—dominated land, labor, and politics across Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica. Standard Oil and Texaco secured petroleum concessions in Venezuela and Ecuador, laying foundations for decades of foreign control that extracted immense wealth while leaving behind environmental devastation, as seen in Texaco’s toxic legacy in the Ecuadorian Amazon between 1964 and 1992.

Universities were bent toward these foreign interests. Agricultural programs were geared toward serving plantation economies, not local farmers. Engineering and geological research aligned with extractive industries, not community development.

Resistance did emerge. Student groups in Guatemala and Costa Rica formed part of early anti-oligarchic movements, linking national sovereignty to university reform. Their demands echoed global currents of democratization. Evidence of these early student-led struggles appears in archival materials and Latin American scholarship on university reform, and culminates in the influential 1918 Córdoba Manifesto in Argentina—a radical declaration that attacked oligarchic, colonial universities and demanded autonomy, co-governance, and public responsibility.

1940s–1980s: Coups, Cold War Interventions, and the Deepening of U.S. Oil Interests

During the Cold War, exploitation intensified. In Guatemala, the CIA-backed overthrow of democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 protected United Fruit’s land holdings. Universities were purged or militarized, and critical scholars were exiled or killed.

In Chile, the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende—supported by American corporate giants such as ITT and Anaconda Copper—ushered in a brutal dictatorship. Under Augusto Pinochet, thousands were murdered, tortured, or disappeared, while the Chicago Boys imported radical neoliberal reforms that privatized everything, including the higher education system.

Throughout the region, oil deals disproportionately favored American companies. Mexico and Venezuela saw petroleum wealth siphoned off through arrangements that benefited foreign investors while leaving universities underfunded and politically surveilled. Scholarship critical of foreign intervention was marginalized, while programs feeding engineers and economists to multinational firms were expanded.

Student resistance reached historic proportions. Chilean students and faculty formed the core of the anti-dictatorship movement. Mexico’s students rose in 1968, demanding democracy and university autonomy before being massacred in Tlatelolco. CIA declassified documents reveal that student uprisings across Latin America in the early 1970s were so widespread that U.S. intelligence considered them a regional threat.

1990s–2000s: Neoliberalism, Privatization, and the Americanization of Higher Education

In the 1990s, neoliberalism swept the region under pressure from Washington, the IMF, and the World Bank. After NAFTA, Mexico’s universities became increasingly aligned with corporate labor pipelines. In Brazil, Petrobras’ partnerships with American firms helped reshape engineering curricula. Private universities and for-profit models proliferated across the region, echoing U.S. higher ed corporatization.

Hugo Chávez captured the broader sentiment of resistance when he declared that public services—including education—cannot be privatized without violating fundamental rights.

Students fought back across Latin America. In Argentina and Brazil they contested tuition hikes and privatization. In Venezuela, the debate shifted toward whether oil revenue should fund tuition-free universities.

Indigenous Exclusion, Racism, and the Colonial Foundations of Inequality

One of the greatest challenges in understanding Latin American education is acknowledging the deep racial and ethnic stratification that predates U.S. exploitation but has been exacerbated by it. Countries like Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, and Guatemala have large Indigenous populations that, to this day, receive the worst education—much like Native American communities relegated to underfunded reservation schools in the United States.

Racism remains powerful. Whiter populations enjoy greater economic and educational access. University admission is shaped by class and color. These divisions are not accidental; they are a machinery of control.

There have been important exceptions. Under President Rafael Correa, Ecuador built hundreds of new schools, including Siglo XXI and Millennium Schools, and expanded public education access. In Mexico, the 2019 constitutional reform strengthened Indigenous rights, including commitments to culturally relevant education. Bolivia—whose population is majority Indigenous—has promoted Indigenous languages, judicial systems, and education structures.

But progress is fragile. Austerity, IMF conditionalities, and elite resistance have led to cutbacks, school closures, and renewed privatization across the region. The study you provided on Ecuador documents Indigenous ambivalence, even hostility, toward Correa’s universal education plan—revealing how colonial wounds, cultural erasure, and distrust of state power complicate reform and provide openings for divide-and-conquer strategies long exploited by ruling classes.

These contradictions deepen when Indigenous movements—rightfully demanding no mining, no oil extraction, and protection of ancestral lands—collide with leftist governments reliant on resource extraction to fund public services. This tension is especially acute in Ecuador and Bolivia.

2010s–Present: Crypto Colonialism and a New Frontier of Exploitation

Cryptocurrency has opened a new chapter in Latin America’s long history of foreign-driven experimentation. El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin in 2021, promoted by President Nayib Bukele, transformed the country into a speculative test lab. Bukele has now spent more than $660 million in U.S. dollars on crypto, according to investigative reporting from InSight Crime. Universities rushed to create blockchain programs that primarily serve international investors rather than Salvadoran students.

In Venezuela, crypto became a survival tool amid hyperinflation and economic collapse. Yet foreign speculators profited while universities starved. Student groups warned that crypto research was being weaponized to normalize economic chaos and distract from public-sector deterioration.

Resistance has grown. Salvadoran students have protested the Bitcoin law, demanding that public resources focus on infrastructure, health, and education. Venezuelan students call for rebuilding social programs rather than chasing speculative financial technologies.

Contemporary Student Resistance: 2010s–2020s

Across the region, student movements remain powerful. The Chilean Winter of 2011–2013 demanded free, quality public education and challenged Pinochet’s neoliberal legacy. The movement culminated in the 2019 uprising, where education reform was central.

Mexico’s UNAM students continue to resist corruption, tuition hikes, gender violence, and the encroachment of corporate and foreign interests. The 1999–2000 UNAM strike remains one of the longest in modern higher education.

Colombian students have forced governments to negotiate and invest billions in public universities, framing their struggle as resistance to neoliberal austerity shaped by U.S. policy.

Argentina continues to face massive austerity-driven cuts, sparking protests in 2024–2025 reminiscent of earlier waves of resistance. Uruguay’s Tupamaros movement—largely student-led—remains a historical touchstone.

Every country in Latin America has experienced student uprisings. They reflect a truth that Paulo Freire, exiled from Brazil for teaching critical pedagogy, understood deeply: education can either liberate or oppress. Authoritarians, privatizers, and foreign capital prefer the latter, and they act accordingly.

Today’s Regional Education Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed the system into further crisis. Children in Latin America and the Caribbean lost one out of every two in-person school days between 2020 and 2022. Learning poverty now exceeds 50 percent. Entire generations risk permanent economic loss and civic disenfranchisement.

Infrastructure is collapsing. Rural and Indigenous communities suffer the worst conditions. Public investment is chronically insufficient because governments are trapped in cycles of debt repayment to international lenders. Ecuador has not seen a major public-investment program in a decade, as austerity and IMF repayments dominate national budgets.

The result is a system starved of resources and increasingly vulnerable to privatization schemes—including U.S.-style online coursework, ideological “instruction kits,” and for-profit degree mills.

Latin American Universities as Battlegrounds for Sovereignty

Latin America’s universities are shaped by the same forces that have dominated the region’s history: oil extraction, agribusiness, foreign capital, neoliberalism, structural racism, debt, and now crypto speculation. Yet universities have also been homes to transformation, rebellion, cultural resurgence, and hope.

Across more than a century, students—Indigenous, Afro-descendant, mestizo, working-class—have been the region’s fiercest defenders of public education and national sovereignty. Their resistance continues today, from Quito to Buenos Aires, from Mexico City to Santiago.

For readers of the Higher Education Inquirer, the lesson is clear: the struggle for higher education in Latin America is inseparable from the struggle for democracy, racial justice, Indigenous autonomy, and freedom from foreign domination. The region’s ruling elites and international lenders understand that an educated public is dangerous, which is why they starve, privatize, and discipline public schools. Students understand the opposite: that education is power, and that power must be reclaimed.

The next chapter—especially in countries like Ecuador—will depend on whether students, teachers, and communities can defend public education against the dual forces that have undermined it for more than a century: privatizers and fascists.

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Sources (Selection)

National Security Archive, CIA Declassified Documents (1971)
InSight Crime reporting on El Salvador Bitcoin expenditures
Luciani, Laura. “Latin American Student Movements in the 1960s.” Historia y Memoria (2019)
The Córdoba Manifesto (1918)
UNESCO, World Bank data on learning poverty (2024)
Latin American studies on United Fruit, Standard Oil, Texaco/Chevron in Ecuador
LASA Forum: Analysis of Indigenous responses to Correa’s education reforms
Periodico UNAL: “The Student Rebellion: Córdoba and Latin America”
Multiple regional news sources on Argentina’s 2024–2025 education protests

He Helped Run Some of the Worst For-Profit Colleges. The Trump Team Just Picked Him to Oversee College Quality. (David Halperin)

On the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday, when most people are focused on travel plans and food preparation, the Trump administration released a list of its four nominees for open slots on the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI). That is the panel of outside experts that advises the U.S. Department of Education on whether to approve or reject the accrediting bodies that serve as gatekeepers for federal student financial aid. Amid five candidates picked by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon — representatives from conservative think tanks and universities, and a student member — one name stands out: Robert Eitel, a senior education department official in the first Trump administration, and before that — which the Department’s press release does not mention at all — a senior executive at two of the most deceptive and abusive companies in the history of U.S. for-profit higher education.

Eitel, who had served as the Department of Education’s deputy general counsel during the George W. Bush administration, joined Career Education Corporation (CEC) in 2013 as a vice president of regulatory operations. In 2015, Eitel left CEC to join Bridgepoint Education as vice president of regulatory legal services. He remained in that role through April 2017, the last three months on leave of absence while serving as an advisor to Trump Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Eitel then resigned from Bridgepoint and was senior counsel to DeVos through Trump’s first term.

The first of Eitel’s corporate employers, Career Education Corp., which changed its name in 2020 to Perdoceo, has faced multiple law enforcement investigations for predatory conduct.

In 2013, soon after Eitel joined CEC, the company agreed to a $10.25 million settlement with the New York state attorney general over charges that it had exaggerated job placement rates for graduates of its schools.

In 2019, after Eitel’s departure, the company entered into a $494 million settlement with 48 state attorneys general, plus the District of Columbia, over an investigation, launched in 2014, that for years it had engaged in widespread deceptive practices against students.

Later that same year, Perdoceo agreed to pay $30 million to settle charges brought by the Federal Trade Commission that its schools, at least since 2012, had recruited students through deceptive third-party lead generation operations.

In each case, the company did not admit guilt.

Misconduct at CEC/Perdoceo continued well past Eitel’s departure, suggesting the rot at the company’s core. In this decade, Perdoceo employees told media outlets USA Today and Capitol Forum, as well as Republic Report, that company recruiters have continued to feel pressure to make misleading sales pitches and to enroll low-income people into programs that aren’t strong enough to help them succeed. Some of those former employees also spoke with federal investigators. USA Today reported in 2022 that the U.S. Department of Education, in December 2021, requested information from Perdoceo; the Department also asked Perdoceo to retain records regarding student recruiting, marketing, financial aid practices, and more. Perdoceo confirmed the probe, while seeming to minimize its significance, in a February 2022 SEC filing. Perdoceo also acknowledged in May 2022 that it received a request for documents and information from the U.S. Justice Department.

The Department of Education has provided CEC/Perdoceo schools — with current brand names including American Intercontinental University and Colorado Technical University and demised brands including Brooks Institute and Sanford-Brown College — with billions of dollars over the years. American Intercontinental University and Colorado Technical University have at times received as much as 97 percent of their revenue from taxpayer dollars in the form of federal student grants and loans.

But data released by the Department in 2023 showed that the Perdoceo schools deliver poor results for students, with low graduation rates and graduate incomes and high levels of student debt.

Meanwhile, the company Eitel left CEC to join, Bridgepoint Education, compiled its own record of predatory abuses. At a 2011 investigative hearing, then-Senate HELP committee chair Tom Harkin (D-IA) called Bridgepoint’s main school, Ashford University, “an absolute scam”; the hearing highlighted the company’s deceptive advertising, predatory recruiting, high prices, and weak educational offerings. Bridgepoint used false promises to purchase in 2005 a small college in Iowa and used that school’s accreditation to build a giant, mostly online school whose attendance peaked in 2012 at around 77,000 students and received billions from taxpayers.

Bridgepoint/Ashford deceived, crushed the dreams of, and buried in debt veterans, single moms, and others across the country, and put the company in jeopardy with law enforcement multiple times. In 2022, justice finally caught up with the company, which by that time had changed its name to Zovio. Following a trial where the California attorney general’s office presented extensive evidence of deceptive practices by the school, a state judge ruled that the company “violated the law by giving students false or misleading information about career outcomes, cost and financial aid, pace of degree programs, and transfer credits, in order to entice them to enroll at Ashford.” An appeals court subsequently upheld the verdict.

Zovio tried to launder its bad reputation by selling Ashford in 2020 to the public University of Arizona, while maintaining a lucrative service contract to run the school. After the California verdict, Zovio was pushed out of the deal, and the troubled school operation was folded into U. of Arizona, creating more controversy and turmoil at that school; the deceptive practices have continued.

After his revolving door journey through the Department of Education, two predatory college companies, and back to a Trump education department that repeatedly used its regulatory and enforcement powers to make it easier for predatory schools to prosper, Robert Eitel co-founded and became president of the Defense of Freedom Institute, a well-funded think tank dedicated at its outset to fighting the Biden administration’s education agenda through lawsuits and “vigorous oversight” of the regulatory process and advocating for public money for religious schools. It also has aggressively opposed the rights of transgender students.

In July, the Trump administration, in another effort to bulldoze laws and norms to get the personnel it wants, declared after the fact that the appointment earlier this year of Zakiya Smith Ellis, a Democratic appointee, as chair of NACIQI was “erroneous.” Accordingly, as far as the Trump administration is concerned, NACIQI currently has no chair. Don’t be surprised if, at the next NACIQI meeting, set for December 16, Trump officials maneuver to make Bob Eitel, a former top executive of some of the worst colleges in America, the head of the committee that is supposed to guard against college failures and abuses. Responsible NACIQI members should pick someone else as chair.

David Halperin
Attorney and Counselor
Washington, DC

[Editor's note: This article originally appeared on Republic Report.]

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

America Under Fire: Political Violence, Systemic Oppression, and the Role of Higher Education

The ambush shooting of two National Guardsmen near the White House on November 27, 2025, by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national, is the latest in a growing wave of politically motivated violence that has engulfed the United States since 2024. Lakanwal opened fire on uniformed service members stationed for heightened security, wounding both. Federal authorities are investigating whether ideological motives drove the attack, which comes against a backdrop of escalating domestic and international tensions. This ambush cannot be understood in isolation. It is part of a larger pattern of domestic political violence that has claimed lives across ideological lines. 

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University during a campus event in September 2025. Minnesota state representative Mary Carlson and her husband were murdered in their home by a man impersonating law enforcement, while a state senator and spouse were injured in the same spree. Governor Josh Shapiro survived an arson attack on his residence earlier this year. Even Donald Trump was the target of an assassination attempt in July 2024. Added to this grim tally are incidents such as the 2025 Manhattan mass shooting, in which young professionals, including two Jewish women, Julia Hyman and Wesley LePatner, were killed, and the Luigi Mangione case, in which a former student allegedly killed a corporate executive in New York. Together, these incidents reveal a nation in which lethal violence increasingly intersects with politics, identity, and ideology.

The domestic escalation of violence cannot be separated from broader structures of oppression. Migrants and asylum seekers face detention, family separation, and deportation under the authority of ICE, often in conditions described as inhumane, creating fear and vulnerability among refugee communities. Routine encounters with law enforcement disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other marginalized communities. Excessive force and lethal policing add to communal distrust, reinforcing perceptions that violence is a sanctioned tool of the state. Political rhetoric compounds the problem. President Trump and other political leaders have repeatedly framed immigrants, political opponents, and even students as threats to national security, implicitly legitimizing aggressive responses and providing fodder for extremist actors.

The domestic situation is further complicated by U.S. foreign policy, which has often contributed to global instability while modeling the use of violence as an instrument of governance. In Palestine, military aid to Israel coincides with attacks on civilians and infrastructure that human-rights organizations describe as ethnic cleansing or genocide. In Venezuela, U.S. sanctions, threats, and proxy operations have intensified humanitarian crises and political instability. Complicity with the governments of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Russia enables human-rights abuses abroad while emboldening domestic actors who mimic state-sanctioned violence. These global policies reverberate at home, influencing public discourse, shaping extremist narratives, and creating a climate in which political and ideological violence is increasingly normalized.

Higher education sits at the nexus of these domestic and global pressures. Universities and colleges are not merely observers; they are active participants and, in some cases, victims. The assassination of Charlie Kirk on a campus underscores that institutions of learning are no longer insulated from lethal political conflict. Alumni, recent graduates, and professionals—such as the victims of the Manhattan shooting—are affected even after leaving school, revealing how closely academic networks intersect with broader societal risks. International and refugee students, particularly from Afghan and Middle Eastern communities, face heightened anxiety due to restrictive immigration policies, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the real threat of violence. Faculty teaching topics related to immigration, race, U.S. foreign policy, or genocide are increasingly targeted by harassment, threats, and institutional pressures that suppress academic freedom. The cumulative stress of political violence, systemic oppression, and global conflicts creates trauma that universities must address comprehensively, both for students and faculty.

Higher education cannot prevent every act of violence, nor can it resolve the nation’s deep political fractures. But it can model ethical and civic engagement, defending inquiry and speech without succumbing to fear or political pressure. It can extend support to vulnerable communities, promote critical thinking about the domestic roots of political violence and the consequences of U.S. foreign policy, and foster ethical reflection that counters the normalization of aggression. Silence or passivity risks complicity. Universities must recognize that the threats affecting campuses, alumni, and students are interconnected with broader systems of power and oppression, both domestic and global.

From the White House ambush to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, from the Minnesota legislators’ murders to the Manhattan mass shooting, from Luigi Mangione’s high-profile killing to systemic violence enforced through ICE and police overreach, and amid the influence of incendiary political rhetoric and U.S. complicity in violence abroad, the United States is experiencing an unprecedented convergence of domestic and international pressures. Higher education sits at the center of these converging forces, and how it responds will shape not only campus safety and academic freedom but also the broader civic health of the nation. The challenge is immense: to uphold democratic values, protect communities, and educate students in a society increasingly defined by fear, extremism, and violence.

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Sources

Reuters. “FBI probes gunman’s motives in ambush shooting of Guardsmen near White House.” The Guardian. Coverage on suspect identification and political reaction. AP News. Statements by national leaders following attacks. Washington Post. Analysis of domestic violent extremism and political violence trends. People Magazine. Reporting on Minnesota legislator assassination. NBC/AP. Statements by Gov. Josh Shapiro after Charlie Kirk’s killing. Utah Valley University and local ABC/Fox affiliates on the Kirk shooting. Jewish Journal, ABC7NY. Coverage of Manhattan mass shooting and Jewish victims. Reuters. Luigi Mangione case and court proceedings. Human Rights Watch / Amnesty International reports on Palestine, Venezuela, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Brookings Institute. Analysis of political violence and domestic extremism. CSIS. “Domestic Extremism and Political Violence in the United States.”

America’s Creepiest College Presidents

Across the United States, a quiet but unmistakable chill has settled over many college campuses. It isn’t the weather. It’s the behavior of a particular class of leaders—the college presidents whose decisions, priorities, and public personas have begun to feel, for lack of a better word, creepy. Not criminal, necessarily. Not always abusive in the legal sense. Just profoundly unsettling in ways that undermine trust, erode shared governance, and push higher education further into the shadows of authoritarianism and corporate capture.

This piece introduces criteria for what makes a college president “creepy,” highlights examples of the types of leaders who fit the mold, and invites reader feedback to build a more accountable public record.

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Criteria for a “Creepy” College President

“Creepy” here is not about personality quirks. It’s about behavior, power, and material consequences. Based on the reporting and analysis at HEI, we propose the following criteria:

1. First Amendment Hostility

Presidents who suppress speech, restrict student journalism, punish dissent, or hide behind overbroad “time, place, and manner” rules fall squarely into this category. The creepiness intensifies when universities hire outside PR firms or surveillance contractors to monitor campus critics, including students and faculty.

2. Student Rights Violations

Presidents who treat students as risks rather than people, who hide data on assaults, who enable over-policing by campus security, or who weaponize conduct codes to silence protest movements—from Palestine solidarity groups to climate activists—fit the profile.

3. Civil Rights Erosion

Administrators who undermine Title IX protections, retaliate against whistleblowers, protect abusive coaches, or ignore discrimination complaints are not just negligent—they’re institutionally creepy. Their public statements about “inclusion” often ring hollow when compared with their actions behind closed doors.

4. Worker Rights Suppression

Union busting. Outsourcing. Wage stagnation. Anti-transparency tactics. Presidents who preach community while crushing collective bargaining efforts, freezing staff pay, or firing outspoken employees through “restructuring” deserve a place on any such list.

5. Climate Denial or Delay

Presidents who sign glossy climate pledges yet continue fossil-fuel investments, partner with extractive corporations, or suppress environmental activism on campus epitomize a uniquely twenty-first-century creepiness: a willingness to sacrifice future generations to maintain donor relationships and boardroom comfort.

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Examples: The Multi-Modal Creep Typology

Rather than name only individuals—something readers can help expand—we outline several recognizable types. These composites reflect the emerging patterns seen across U.S. higher education.

The Surveillance Chancellor

Obsessed with “campus safety,” this president quietly expands the university’s security apparatus: license plate readers at entrances, contracts with predictive-policing vendors, facial recognition “pilots,” and backdoor relationships with state or federal agencies. Their speeches emphasize “community,” but their emails say “monitoring.”

The Union-Busting Visionary

This leader talks the language of innovation and social mobility while hiring anti-union law firms to intimidate graduate workers and dining staff. Their glossy strategic plans promise “belonging,” but their HR memos rewrite job classifications to avoid paying benefits.

The Donor-Driven Speech Regulator

Terrified of upsetting trustees, corporate sponsors, or wealthy alumni, this president cracks down on student protests, bans certain speakers, or manipulates disciplinary procedures to neutralize campus activism. They invoke “civility” while undermining the First Amendment.

The DEI-Washing Chief Executive

This president loves diversity statements—for marketing. Meanwhile, they ignore racial harassment complaints, target outspoken faculty of color, or cut ethnic studies under the guise of “realignment.” Their commitment to equity is perfectly proportional to the next accreditation review.

The Climate Hypocrite

At Earth Day, they pose with solar panels. In the boardroom, they argue that divesting from fossil fuels is “unrealistic.” Student climate groups often face administrative smothering, and sustainability staffers are rotated out when they ask uncomfortable questions.

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Why “Creepiness” Matters

Creepy leaders normalize:

• an erosion of democratic rights on campus,

• the quiet expansion of surveillance,

• the targeting of vulnerable students and workers, and

• a form of managerial governance that undermines the public purpose of higher education.

Higher education is supposed to be a refuge for inquiry, dissent, creativity, and collective imagination. Presidents who govern through fear—whether subtle or overt—pose a deeper threat than those who merely mismanage budgets. They hollow out the civic core of academic life.

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A Call for Reader Feedback

HEI is building a more comprehensive and accountable registry of America’s Creepiest College Presidents, and we want your help.

• Who on your campus fits these criteria?

• Which presidents (past or present) deserve examination?

• What specific stories, patterns, or documents should be highlighted?

• What additional criteria should be added for future reporting?

Send your confidential tips, analyses, and suggestions. Together, we can shine light into administrative corners that have remained dark for far too long.

Higher Education Inquirer welcomes further input and encourages readers to share this article with colleagues, student groups, labor organizers, and university newspapers.

Same Predators, New Logo: PXED — A $22 Billion Student‑Debt Gamble Investors Should Beware

Warning to Investors: Phoenix Education Partners (PXED) may present itself as a cutting‑edge solution in career-focused higher education, but it’s built on the same extractive infrastructure that powered the University of Phoenix. With nearly a million students still owing an estimated $22 billion in federal loans, backing PXED isn’t just a financial bet — it’s a moral and reputational risk.

PXED’s leadership includes powerful private-equity players: Martin H. Nesbitt (Co‑CEO of Vistria, PXED trustee, and friend of Barak Obama), Adnan Nisar (Vistria), and Theodore Kwon and Itai Wallach (Apollo Global Management). Also in the mix is Chris Lynne, PXED’s president and a former Phoenix CFO intimately familiar with UOP’s controversial enrollment and marketing strategies. These are not educational reformers — they are dealmakers aiming to extract value from a student-debt pipeline.

[Image: Power Player Marty Nesbitt]

Higher Education Inquirer’s College Meltdown Index highlights how PXED fits into a broader financialization of higher education. Rather than reforming the University of Phoenix, its backers have resurrected it under a new brand — one that continues to enroll vulnerable adult learners, harvest federal aid, and operate with considerably less public oversight. 

Whistleblowers previously documented that Phoenix pressured recruitment staff to falsify student credentials, enrolling people who wouldn’t otherwise qualify for federal aid. Courses were allegedly kept deliberately easy — not to teach, but to keep students “active” enough to trigger aid disbursements. Internal marketing also exaggerated job prospects and corporate partnerships (e.g., with Microsoft and AT&T) to entice students. 

PXED may lean on a three‑year default rate (often cited around 12–13%), but that number is deeply misleading. Many UOP students stay stuck in deferment, forbearance, or income-driven repayment, masking the real long-term risk of non-payment. This is not just a short-term liability — it’s a potentially massive, multiyear financial exposure for PXED’s backers.

There was a significant FTC settlement that canceled $141 million in student debt and refunded $50 million to some students. But the scale of harm far exceeds that payout. Untold numbers of borrowers still have unresolved Borrower Defense claims, and the reputational risk remains profound.

Beyond financial concerns, there’s a major ethical dimension. HEI’s Divestment from Predatory Education argument makes a compelling case that investing in companies like PXED — or in loan servicers that profit from student debt — is not just risky, but morally indefensible. According to HEI, institutional investors (including university endowments, pension funds, and foundations) are complicit in a system that monetizes students’ aspirations and perpetuates financial harm. 

For investors, the message is clear: Phoenix is not merely an education play — it’s a high-stakes, ethically fraught extraction machine built on a legacy of indebtedness and regulatory vulnerability.

Unless PXED commits to real transparency, independent reporting on student outcomes, and accountability mechanisms — including reparations or debt relief — it should be approached not as a social-growth story, but as a dangerous gamble.

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Sources

• HEI. “Divestment from Predatory Education Stocks: A Moral Imperative.” Higher Education Inquirer

• HEI. “The College Meltdown Index: Profiting from the Wreckage of American Higher Education.” Higher Education Inquirer

• HEI. “What Do the University of Phoenix and Risepoint Have in Common? The Answer Is a Compelling Story of Greed and Politics.” Higher Education Inquirer

• HEI. “University of Phoenix Uses ‘Sandwich Moms’ to Sell a Debt Trap.” Higher Education Inquirer

• HEI. “New Data Show Nearly a Million University of Phoenix Debtors Owe $21.6 Billion.” Higher Education