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

Medugrift and the price makers in higher education

In the United States, the cost of higher education is not a natural phenomenon. It is deliberately constructed by a network of institutional actors who function as price makers: university presidents, chief financial officers, boards of trustees, governors, and state legislators. They determine what students pay, how institutions are structured, and whose interests higher education ultimately serves. Their decisions shape tuition, labor conditions, program priorities, and the balance between education and the expanding world of medugrift—the hybrid system where medicine, education, debt, and corporate extraction intersect.

For decades, the American public has been told that tuition rises because education is inherently expensive. But as Richard Wolff argues in his critiques of the “War on the Working Class,” the economic decisions shaping tuition, labor costs, athletics, administrative growth, and capital projects reflect class priorities. The price makers choose which costs are fundamental and which are negotiable. They choose what gets built, who gets hired, and how much debt institutions take on. They choose who pays.

University presidents now act more like corporate executives than academic leaders. They negotiate seven-figure salaries, travel globally for fundraising, and preside over campuses where luxury construction often outruns academic needs. They approve budgets that elevate branding and athletics while pressuring academic departments to justify their existence through profit metrics. Tuition increases rarely slow presidential compensation; instead, they are framed as regrettable necessities dictated by “the market” or “competitive realities.”

CFOs enforce a financial logic that prioritizes credit ratings, cash reserves, and debt-financed expansion. They present budgets as neutral, but each line reflects a hierarchy of value. Instruction is cast as a cost center. Staff health care, faculty benefits, and student services become “inefficiencies.” Meanwhile, massive expenditures on consultants, real estate, information systems, and administration are justified as essential to “modernization.” The result is predictable: the people who teach and learn bear the burden while those who administer expand.

Trustees represent another layer of price making. Often drawn from banking, private equity, real estate, biotech, and corporate medicine, trustees bring a worldview shaped by capital accumulation rather than public service. They authorize tuition hikes, approve investment strategies, and greenlight partnerships that blend public education with private profit. Many trustees sit simultaneously on hospital boards or medical investment firms, allowing medugrift to flourish in the shadows of institutional legitimacy. Their decisions shape which programs expand, which shrink, and which students are offered genuine opportunity.

State governors and legislators are external architects of scarcity. Since the 1980s, state governments have systematically defunded public higher education while channeling resources to mass incarceration, gambling revenue schemes, corporate tax breaks, and subsidies to companies like Amazon. These choices undermine the ability of public institutions to remain affordable and force them to operate increasingly like private universities. The shift from public funding to tuition revenue is not inevitable; it is a political strategy. HBCUs and tribal colleges have lived with this manufactured scarcity for generations. Their chronic underfunding—documented in numerous state audits and federal investigations—illustrates what happens when government treats education for marginalized communities as optional.

The emergence of medugrift reveals a deeper structural problem. At the intersection of higher education and corporate medicine sits an engine of extraction. University medical systems leverage public funding, student tuition, and philanthropic contributions to build financial empires that often serve administrators first and communities last. Medical schools charge extreme tuition while placing students into debt-heavy paths. University hospitals consolidate regional health systems, increasing costs while reducing access. Research produced through public dollars is routinely captured by private pharmaceutical or biotech companies. Meanwhile, residents and faculty in these health systems often endure poor working conditions and stagnant pay. Medugrift conceals itself behind the prestige of medicine, but its logic mirrors that of predatory education: privatize gains, socialize losses, and extract from those with the least bargaining power.

Who determines the costs to students? The answer lies in the aggregated decisions of these actors. When a university raises tuition to protect its bond rating, that is a decision. When trustees invest in athletics while cutting humanities programs, that is a decision. When governors choose prisons over scholarships, that is a decision. When state legislatures allow gambling revenue to substitute for stable taxation, that is a decision. Each choice shifts the financial burden downward while consolidating power upward.

This is not simply mismanagement; it is a class project. The people who determine prices do not feel them. Students, families, adjunct instructors, and underfunded communities do. For working-class students, particularly those from historically excluded backgrounds, the price makers have built a system defined by debt, precarity, and limited mobility.

Nothing about this system is inevitable. There was a time when public universities were affordable, when trustees included community members and labor leaders, when presidents were educators, and when medical centers served the public rather than corporate conglomerates. If the price makers can build this system, a more democratic and humane system can be built to replace it.

The question for the coming decade is not whether higher education is too expensive. The public has already reached its verdict. The question is whether students, workers, and communities will continue to let the price makers—and the medugrift machinery attached to them—define who gets educated, who gets indebted, and who gets left behind.

Sources
Richard D. Wolff, Understanding Socialism; Capitalism Hits the Fan
Elisabeth Rosenthal, An American Sickness
Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid
Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul
State Higher Education Finance (SHEF) Reports
U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, HBCU Funding Analyses

The New Cold War in the Americas: Power, Proxy, and the People Caught in Between

The Western Hemisphere is entering a new and dangerous phase of global rivalry—one shaped by old imperial habits, new economic pressures, and resurgent great-power maneuvering. From Washington to Beijing to Caracas, political leaders are escalating tensions over Venezuela’s future, reviving a familiar script in which Latin America becomes the proving ground for foreign powers and a pressure cooker for working-class people who have no say in the geopolitical games unfolding above them.

What looks like a confrontation over oil, governance, or regional security is better understood as a collision of neoliberal extraction, colonial legacies, and competing empires, each claiming moral authority while pursuing strategic advantage. In this moment, it is essential to remember what history shows again and again: ordinary people—soldiers, students, workers—pay the highest price for elite ambitions.

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A Long Shadow: U.S. Intervention in Latin America Since the 1890s

The U.S. role in Latin America cannot be separated from its imperial foundations. Over more than a century, Washington has repeatedly intervened—militarily, covertly, and financially—to shape political outcomes in the region:

• 1898–1934: The “Banana Wars.” U.S. Marines were deployed throughout the Caribbean and Central America to secure plantations, protect U.S. investors, and maintain favorable governments in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Honduras.

• 1954: Guatemala. The CIA overthrew democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz after he challenged United Fruit Company landholdings.

• 1961: Bay of Pigs Invasion. A failed U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.

• 1973: Chile. U.S. support for the coup against Salvador Allende ushered in the Pinochet dictatorship and a laboratory for neoliberal economics.

• 1980s: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala. Funding death squads, supporting Contra rebels, and fueling civil wars that killed hundreds of thousands.

• 1989: Panama. A full-scale U.S. invasion to remove Manuel Noriega, with civilian casualties in the thousands.

• 2002: Venezuela. U.S. officials supported the brief coup against Hugo Chávez.

• 2020s: Economic warfare continues. Sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and support for factions opposing Nicolás Maduro all sustain a long-running pressure campaign.

This is not ancient history. It is the operating system of U.S. hemispheric influence.

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China’s Expanding Soft Power and Strategic Positioning

While the U.S. escalates military signaling toward Venezuela, China is expanding soft power, economic influence, and political relationships throughout Latin America—including with Venezuela. Beijing’s strategy is centered not on direct military confrontation but on long-term infrastructure, trade, and diplomatic partnerships designed to reduce U.S. dominance.

Recent statements from Beijing underscore this shift. Chinese President Xi Jinping publicly backed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, describing China and Venezuela as “intimate friends” as the U.S. intensifies military pressure in the region. China’s role extends beyond rhetoric: loans, technology transfers, energy investments, and political support form a web of influence that counters U.S. objectives.

This is the new terrain: the U.S. leaning on sanctions and military posture, China leveraging soft power and strategic alliances.

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Russia as a Third Power in the Hemisphere

Any honest assessment of the current geopolitical climate must include Russia, which has expanded its presence in Latin America as part of its broader campaign to counter U.S. power globally. Moscow has supplied Venezuela with military equipment, intelligence support, cybersecurity assistance, and diplomatic cover at the United Nations. It has strengthened ties with Nicaragua, Cuba, and other governments willing to challenge U.S. regional dominance.

Russia’s involvement is not ideological; it is strategic. It seeks to weaken Washington’s influence, create leverage in distant theaters, and embed itself in the Western Hemisphere without deploying large-scale military forces. Where China builds infrastructure and invests billions, Russia plays the spoiler: complicating U.S. policy, reinforcing embattled leaders when convenient, and offering an alternative to nations seeking to escape U.S. hegemony.

The result is a crowded geopolitical arena in which Venezuela becomes not just a domestic crisis but a theater for multipolar contention, shaped by three major powers with very different tools and interests.

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Neoliberalism, Colonialism, and the Repeating Pattern

Viewed in historical context, today’s crisis is simply the newest iteration of a long-standing pattern:

1. Colonial logics justify intervention. The idea that Washington must “manage” or “stabilize” Latin America recycles the paternalism of earlier eras.

2. Neoliberal extraction drives policy. Control over energy resources, access to markets, and geopolitical leverage matter more than democracy or human well-being.

3. Foreign powers treat the region as a chessboard. The U.S., China, and Russia approach Latin America not as sovereign equals but as terrain for influence.

4. People—not governments—bear the cost. Sanctions devastate civilians. Military escalations breed proxy conflicts. Migration pressures rise. And working-class youth are recruited to fight battles that are not theirs.

This is why today’s developments must be understood as part of a wider global system that treats nations in the Global South as resources to exploit and battlegrounds to dominate.

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A Warning for Those Considering Enlistment or ROTC

In moments like this, the pressure on young people—especially working-class youth—to join the military increases. Recruiters frame conflict as opportunity: tuition money, job training, patriotism, adventure, or stability. But the truth is starker and more political.

Muhammad Ali’s stance during the Vietnam War remains profoundly relevant today. He refused the draft, famously stating that the Vietnamese “never called me [a slur]” and declaring that he would not fight a war of conquest against people who had done him no harm.

The same logic applies to today’s geopolitical brinkmanship. Young Americans are asked to risk their lives in conflicts that protect corporate interests, reinforce imperial ambitions, and escalate global tensions. Venezuelan workers, Chinese workers, Russian workers, and U.S. workers are not enemies. They are casualties-in-waiting of decisions made by governments and corporations insulated from the consequences of their actions.

Before enlisting—or joining ROTC—young people deserve to understand the historical cycle they may be pulled into. Wars in Latin America, proxy or direct, have never served the interests of everyday people. They serve empires.

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Sources

• Firstpost. “Xi Backs Maduro, Calls China and Venezuela ‘Intimate Friends’ as Trump Steps Up Military Pressure.”

• Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

• Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine

• Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change

• U.S. Congressional Research Service reports on U.S. policy in Venezuela and China-Latin America relations

• UN Human Rights Council documentation on sanctions and civilian impact

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.

The Mis-education of Global Elites

For generations, global elites have been positioned—socially, politically, financially—as the people best equipped to shape a better world. They have had the resources to eliminate poverty, curb climate catastrophe, restrain war, expand healthcare, reform universities, and make democratic participation meaningful. Instead, the world they have built is defined by widening inequality, ecological collapse, and a global crisis of legitimacy. Their failure is not accidental. It is the product of a profound mis-education: a system that trains elites not in stewardship or solidarity, but in domination, extraction, and self-preservation.

Across the United States, the U.K., Europe, and increasingly the Gulf States and East Asia, elite education has become a finishing school for rulers rather than a training ground for genuine public servants. These institutions—rich in endowment, selective in admission, steeped in prestige—construct worldviews that normalize inequity as efficiency, privatization as innovation, and austerity as necessity. Instead of interrogating the historical and structural forces that produce suffering, elite curricula often neutralize them, reducing political economy to management science and social justice to branding.

This mis-education manifests in global leadership failures. The same graduates who enter parliaments, presidential cabinets, central banks, multinational boards, and international NGOs routinely oversee policies that accelerate inequality and erode the public sphere. Many come from universities with unparalleled research capacity and moral rhetoric, yet preside over housing crises, medical debt catastrophes, and planetary degradation. They authorize wars but rarely experience them. They tout meritocracy while gatekeeping opportunity. They celebrate entrepreneurship while dismantling public goods. Their philanthropic initiatives—often built from profits derived through tax avoidance, monopolization, and labor exploitation—give the appearance of benevolence without altering the underlying systems of harm.

Carter G. Woodson’s warning in The Mis-education of the Negro echoes eerily here: “When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.” Global elites, educated into a narrow ideology that glorifies markets and hierarchy, do not need to be coerced into maintaining destructive systems—they do so voluntarily, believing themselves enlightened.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the corporate education complex itself. Elite universities produce the analysts who rationalize austerity, the managers who coordinate privatization, the consultants who reengineer public institutions to mimic corporations, and the financiers who define the metrics of success. They also cultivate the ideological insulation that shields elites from accountability. When their policies trigger chaos, the explanation is never structural, only technical: markets corrected, externalities emerged, populists disrupted stability. The mis-education of elites ensures they cannot see failure as their own.

Global institutions—from the IMF and World Bank to the UN and WTO—have mirrored this mindset. Their leaders, mostly trained in the same corridors of prestige, have promoted development models that prioritize capital mobility over community well-being, and foreign investment over local sovereignty. Even when faced with overwhelming evidence that structural adjustment, privatized healthcare, or financialization intensify human suffering, the elite worldview persists. The inability—or unwillingness—to imagine alternative systems is not an intellectual deficiency but the logical outcome of an education designed to reproduce power, not challenge it.

Meanwhile, those most affected by global crises—workers, migrants, debtors, students, the poor—are told to adapt, innovate, or sacrifice. They are bombarded with entrepreneurial rhetoric and resilience talk while their material conditions worsen. Political leaders lament social fragmentation but continue to funnel wealth upward. University administrators speak of inclusion while expanding administrative hierarchies and outsourcing labor. Energy executives promise transitions while drilling new pipelines. Tech CEOs warn about misinformation while building the infrastructure that spreads it.

The result is a world where the legitimacy of elites is evaporating. From Santiago to Paris, Lagos to Minneapolis, Delhi to London, mass movements are demanding accountability from institutions that have proven incapable of self-reform. The global backlash against inequality, authoritarianism, and corporate hegemony is not a misunderstanding—it is a recognition that the systems run by elites have failed.

If there is to be a better world, the mis-education of elites must be confronted directly. That means transforming the mission of universities from prestige accumulation to public purpose; replacing managerialism with democratic governance; centering histories of resistance rather than merely histories of empire; teaching economic justice instead of market worship; and training leaders who measure success not by shareholder value or rankings but by human flourishing.

Elites have long claimed exclusive expertise in solving the world’s problems. They have had centuries—and trillions—to prove it. They have failed miserably. A new generation of thinkers, activists, workers, and communities is already building the alternatives. Whether global elites choose to learn from them—or continue along their well-worn path of extraction and denial—will determine the next century.

For now, the record is clear: the institutions that shaped the world’s most powerful people were never designed to create justice. And they haven’t.

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Academic Sources

Baldwin, Davarian L. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. Bold Type Books, 2021.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Stanford University Press, 1996.
Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2014.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Khan, Shamus Rahman. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, 1956.
Mkandawire, Thandika. “Institutional Monocropping and Monotasking in Africa.” UNRISD, 2007.
Piketty, Thomas. Capital and Ideology. Harvard University Press, 2020.
Saul, John Ralston. Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. Free Press, 1992.
Sklair, Leslie. The Transnational Capitalist Class. Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.
Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited. W.W. Norton, 2017.
Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-education of the Negro. Associated Publishers, 1933.

How U.S. Higher Education Helped Create Nick Fuentes

In the aftermath of each new outrage involving Nick Fuentes, pundits scramble to explain how a 20-something suburban Catholic kid became one of the most influential white supremacists in America. Many insist Fuentes is an anomaly, a glitch, a fringe figure who somehow slipped through the cracks of democracy and decency. But this narrative is both comforting and false.

Fuentes is not an anomaly. He is the logical product of the systems that shaped him—especially American higher education.

While institutions obsess over rankings, fundraising, and branding campaigns, they have quietly abandoned entire generations of young people to debt, alienation, status anxiety, and a digital culture that preys on male insecurity. In this vacuum, extremist networks thrive, incubating figures like Fuentes long before the public notices.

HEI warned about this trend years ago. Since 2016, the publication tracked the rise of Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, noting how TPUSA used campus culture wars to radicalize disaffected young men. HEI saw that for-profit-style marketing, donor-driven politics, and relentless culture-war agitation were creating an ecosystem where reactionaries could build both influence and profit. Fuentes did not arise outside that ecosystem—he evolved from it, even as he later turned on Kirk as insufficiently extreme.

What fuels this pipeline? A generation of young men raised on the promise of meritocracy but delivered a reality of spiraling costs, precarious futures, and institutional betrayal. Many arrive at college campuses burdened by debt, anxious about their place in an unforgiving economy, and deeply online. They bear the psychological bruises of a culture that has replaced community with competition and replaced meaning with metrics.

This is also the demographic most vulnerable to incel ideology, a misogynistic worldview built around grievance, rejection, humiliation, and resentment. Incel communities overlap heavily with the digital spaces where Fuentes built his early audience. The mix is combustible: sexually frustrated young men who feel mocked by mainstream culture, priced out of adulthood, and invisible to institutions that once guided them. The result is a fusion of white nationalism, male resentment, Christian nationalism, ironic fascism, and livestream entertainment—perfectly tailored to a generation raised on Twitch and YouTube.

And yet the higher-education establishment insisted for years that white supremacists were primarily rural “rednecks”—poor, uneducated, easily dismissed. This stereotype blinded journalists, academics, and administrators to the reality developing right in front of them. Higher Education Inquirer knew better because we corresponded for years with Peter Simi, one of the country’s leading scholars of extremism. Simi’s research demonstrated clearly that white supremacists were not confined to rural backwaters. They were suburban, middle-class, sometimes college-educated, often tech-savvy, and deeply embedded in mainstream institutions.

Simi’s work showed that white supremacist movements have always thrived among people with something to lose, people who feel their status slipping. They recruit in fraternities, gaming communities, campus political groups, military circles, and online spaces where young men spend their most lonely hours. They build identities around grievance and belonging—needs that universities once helped students navigate but now too often ignore.

This is the world that produced Nick Fuentes.

Fuentes entered higher education during a moment of fragmentation and distrust. Tuition was skyrocketing. Campuses were polarizing. Students were increasingly treated as revenue streams rather than whole human beings. Administrators were more focused on donor relations and culture-war optics than on the psychological welfare of their students. And universities outsourced so many vital functions—to police, to lobbyists, to tech platforms—that they ceded responsibility for the very students they claimed to educate.

Into that void stepped extremist influencers who offered simple answers to complex problems, validation for resentment, and a community that cared—if only in the performative, transactional sense of internet politics.

The tragedy is not simply that Fuentes emerged. The tragedy is that the conditions to generate many more like him remain firmly in place.

American higher education created the environment: hyper-competition, abandonment of the humanities, the collapse of community, the normalization of precarity, and a relentless emphasis on personal failure over systemic dysfunction. It created the audience: anxious, isolated, indebted young men looking for meaning. And it created the blind spot: a refusal to take extremism seriously until it reaches mainstream visibility.

Fuentes is not a glitch in the system. He is the system’s mirror held up to itself.

Unless universities confront their complicity in this radicalization pipeline—economically, culturally, and psychologically—the next Nick Fuentes is already in a dorm room somewhere, streaming at 2 a.m., finding thousands of followers who feel just as betrayed as he does.

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Sources

Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (2017).
Peter Simi & Robert Futrell, American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate (2010, updated 2015).
Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018).
Joan Donovan & danah boyd, “Stop the Presses? The Crisis of Misinformation” (Harvard Kennedy School).
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (2020).
Michael Kimmel, Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into—and Out of—Violent Extremism (2018).
Whitney Phillips, “The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists.”
Brian Hughes & Cynthia Miller-Idriss, “Youth Radicalization in Digital Spaces.”
David Futrelle, We Hunted the Mammoth archive on incel ideology.
Higher Education Inquirer (2016–2024 coverage of TPUSA, Charlie Kirk, and campus extremism).

How Educated Neoliberals Built the Homelessness Crisis—and Why HUD’s New Cuts Will Make It Worse

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development has quietly announced one of the most drastic federal rollbacks in homelessness policy in decades: a massive cut to permanent housing under the Continuum of Care (CoC) program, with more than half of its 2026 funding diverted to transitional housing and compliance-based services. HUD’s own internal estimates warn that up to 170,000 people could lose housing as a result of the shift. For millions of Americans, especially those on the margins, this is not a policy adjustment; it is the beginning of a humanitarian disaster.

To understand how we arrived here, it is not enough to point at the Trump administration, the ideological crusade against “Housing First,” or the White House Faith Office now shaping federal grantmaking. One must also examine the educated neoliberals who built and normalized the system that made this possible.

HUD’s policy change overturns decades of federal commitment to permanent supportive housing, an evidence-backed model that dramatically reduces chronic homelessness. The new Notice of Funding Opportunity caps permanent housing at just 30 percent of CoC dollars, down from 87 percent in prior years, while the remainder is funneled toward transitional housing, work or service requirements, mandatory treatment, and faith-based compliance programs. The total funding for 2026 is roughly $3.9 billion across 7,000 grants. That amount, spread across hundreds of thousands of people experiencing homelessness, is barely sufficient to provide minimal assistance, let alone stable housing or the comprehensive services this population needs. One-third of existing programs will run out of funds before the new awards are issued in May, leaving vulnerable individuals exposed to eviction during the harshest months of winter. Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness and a former HUD official, described the rollout as deeply irresponsible, warning that the administration is setting communities up for failure.

For decades, U.S. policy has been shaped not just by conservatives but also by a sprawling class of highly educated managers: MBAs, MPPs, JDs, think-tank fellows, foundation executives, nonprofit administrators, and “innovation” consultants. They came from America’s elite universities, fluent in market logic, managerialism, and austerity politics. They preached efficiency, accountability, metrics, and self-sufficiency. Many also personally accumulated wealth, often owning multiple homes, benefiting from investment income, and exploiting loopholes to minimize or avoid taxes. Meanwhile, the programs they manage shrink support for the poor and vulnerable.

Through their influence, housing became a program, not a public good. Public housing construction largely disappeared, replaced by a grant-driven, nonprofit marketplace controlled by elite professionals. Even the funding allocated for CoC programs, though nominally in the billions, is deliberately minimal. This scarcity forces competition, instability, and suffering among poor people. Nonprofit executives, most of whom depend on federal contracts and foundation dollars, rarely challenge the economic and political structures that produce homelessness. Accountability rhetoric replaced structural change, reframing homelessness as an issue of individual behavior rather than a systemic failure. The academy normalized the idea that poor people should suffer, teaching a generation of managers to prioritize markets, metrics, and “innovation” over human need. This bipartisan, university-trained professional class laid the foundation for the HUD cuts now threatening hundreds of thousands of lives.

HUD argues that the new model “restores accountability” and reduces the purported waste of Housing First, but decades of research contradict that claim. Permanent supportive housing reduces chronic homelessness, lowers emergency and policing costs, stabilizes people with disabilities, and is cheaper than institutionalization or shelters. Transitional housing with mandatory compliance, on the other hand, repeatedly pushes people back to the streets, disproportionately harms people with disabilities, increases mortality, inflates administrative costs, and creates churn rather than stability. The policy is not a mistake; it reflects the calculated priorities of an elite managerial class whose worldview demands austerity for the poor while allowing them to flourish materially.

The response in Washington has been striking. Forty-two Senate Democrats warned HUD that the shift violates the McKinney-Vento Act, undermines local decision-making, and rejects decades of federally funded research. Even twenty House Republicans urged careful implementation to avoid destabilizing services for seniors and disabled people. Yet decades of neoliberal policymaking—funded and legitimized by universities, foundations, and think tanks—have already created a system in which poverty and suffering are baked into federal policy. This latest HUD action simply codifies that worldview.

The crisis unfolding now is not just the product of Trump’s ideological war on Housing First. It is the logical endpoint of decades of privatization, the erosion of public housing, elite consensus around austerity, credentialed managerialism, the nonprofit-industrial complex, the foundation-university revolving door, and the belief—deeply embedded in higher education—that markets and metrics should govern everything. Many of these policymakers and nonprofit executives own multiple homes, refuse to pay taxes, and structure federal policy to ensure the poor remain dependent, unstable, and suffering. The people most directly harmed are those with the least political power: disabled people, elderly tenants, veterans, people with serious mental illness, women fleeing violence, and families trying to survive an economy that no longer works for them. Behind them stands a class of educated neoliberals who built the systems that made this outcome possible, often congratulating themselves for “innovation” while allowing misery to proliferate. This is not failure. This is design.

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Sources:

• Politico, “HUD to Cut Permanent Housing Funding for Homeless Programs,” 2025.

• National Alliance to End Homelessness, internal HUD funding documents, 2025.

• Ann Oliva, National Alliance to End Homelessness, statements to POLITICO, 2025.

• McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, 1987.

• HUD Notice of Funding Opportunity, 2026 Continuum of Care Program.

• Executive Order: “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” White House, 2025.

Why People Under 35 Are Not Afraid of Democratic Socialism

For Americans under 35, the term “democratic socialism” triggers neither fear nor Cold War reflexes. It represents something far simpler: a demand for a functioning society. Younger generations have grown up in a world where basic pillars of American life—higher education, medicine, economic mobility, and even life expectancy—have deteriorated while inequality has soared. Democratic socialism, in their view, is not a fringe ideology but a practical response to systems that have ceased to serve the common good.

Nowhere is this clearer than in higher education. Millennials and Gen Z entered adulthood as universities became corporate enterprises, expanding administrative layers, pushing adjunct labor to the brink, and relying on debt-financed tuition increases to keep the machine running. Public investment collapsed, predatory for-profit chains proliferated, and nonprofit universities acted like hedge funds with classrooms attached. Students saw institutions with billion-dollar endowments operate as landlords and asset managers, all while passing costs onto working families. When Bernie Sanders called for tuition-free public college, young people did not hear utopianism—they heard a plan grounded in global reality, a model that exists in Germany, Sweden, Finland, and other social democracies that treat education as a public good rather than a revenue stream.

Healthcare tells an even harsher story. Americans under 35 watched their parents and grandparents navigate a system more focused on billing codes than care, one where an ambulance ride costs a week’s wages and a bout of illness can mean bankruptcy. They experienced the rise of corporatized university medical centers, private equity–owned emergency rooms, and insurance bureaucracies that ration access more cruelly than any state. They saw life-saving drugs priced like luxury goods and mental health services pushed out of reach. Compare this to nations with universal healthcare: longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, and far less medical debt. Again, Sanders’ Medicare for All resonated not because of ideology but because young people recognized it as a plausible path toward the kind of humane medical system described by scholars like Harriet Washington, Elisabeth Rosenthal, and Mahmud Mamdani, who all critique the structural violence embedded in systems of unequal care.

Life expectancy itself has become a generational indictment. For the first time in modern U.S. history, it has fallen, driven by overdose deaths, suicide, preventable illness, and worsening inequities. Younger Americans know that friends and peers have died far earlier than their counterparts abroad. They see that countries with strong public services—childcare, unemployment insurance, housing supports, universal healthcare—live longer, healthier lives. They also see how austerity and privatization have hollowed out public health infrastructure in the United States, leaving communities vulnerable to crises large and small. The message is clear: societies that invest in people live longer; societies that treat health as a commodity do not.

Quality of Life (QOL) ties all of this together. People under 35 face rent burdens unimaginable to previous generations, debts that prevent them from forming families, stagnant wages, and a labor market defined by precarity. They face the erosion of public space, public transit, libraries, and social supports—what Mamdani would describe as the slow unraveling of the civic realm under neoliberalism. When they look abroad, they see countries with social democratic frameworks offering guaranteed parental leave, subsidized childcare, free or nearly free college, universal healthcare, and robust worker protections. These are not distant fantasies; they are functioning models that produce higher happiness levels, stronger social trust, and more stable democracies.

Older generations often accuse young people of radicalism, but the reality is the reverse. Millennials and Gen Z are pragmatic. They have lived through the failures of unfettered capitalism: historic inequality, monopolistic industries, soaring costs of living, and a political class unresponsive to their material conditions. They have read Sanders’ critiques of oligarchy and Mamdani’s analyses of state power and structural violence, and they see themselves reflected in those diagnoses. Democratic socialism appeals because it is rooted in material improvements to daily life rather than in abstract political theory. It promises a society where income does not determine survival, where education does not require lifelong debt, where parents can afford to raise children, and where basic health is not a luxury good.

People under 35 are not afraid of democratic socialism because they have already seen what the absence of a social democratic framework produces. They are not seeking revolution for its own sake. They are seeking a livable future. And increasingly, they view democratic socialism not as a radical break but as the only realistic path toward rebuilding public institutions, revitalizing democracy, and ensuring that future generations inherit a country worth living in.

Sources
Sanders, Bernie. Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In.
Sanders, Bernie. Where We Go from Here: Two Years in the Resistance.
Mamdani, Mahmood. Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity.
Mamdani, Mahmood. Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities.
Washington, Harriet. Medical Apartheid.
Rosenthal, Elisabeth. An American Sickness.
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Baldwin, Davarian. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower.
Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works.

Epstein, Dershowitz, Summers, and the Long Arc of Elite Impunity

For many observers, Jeffrey Epstein, Alan Dershowitz, and Larry Summers appear as separate figures orbiting the world of elite academia, finance, and politics. But together—and through the long lens of history—they represent something far more revealing: the modern expression of a centuries-old system in which elite institutions protect powerful men while sacrificing the vulnerable.

The Epstein-Dershowitz-Summers triangle is not a scandal of individuals gone astray. It is the predictable result of structures that make such abuses almost inevitable.

The Modern Version of an Old System

Jeffrey Epstein built his influence not through scholarship or scientific discovery—he had no advanced degrees—but by inserting himself into the financial bloodstream of the Ivy League. Harvard and MIT accepted his money, his introductions, and his promises of access to ultra-wealthy networks. Epstein did not need credibility; he purchased it.

Larry Summers, as president of Harvard from 2001 to 2006, continued to engage with Epstein after the financier’s first arrest and plea deal. Summers’ administration accepted substantial Epstein donations, including funds channeled into the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Summers and his wife dined at Epstein’s Manhattan home. After leaving Harvard, Summers stayed in touch with Epstein even as the financier’s abuses became increasingly public. Summers used the same revolving door that has long connected elite universities, Wall Street, and presidential administrations—moving freely and comfortably across all three.

Alan Dershowitz, former Harvard Law Professor and Epstein’s close associate and legal strategist, exemplifies another pillar of this system: elite legal protection. Dershowitz defended Epstein vigorously, attacked survivors publicly, and remains embroiled in litigation connected to the case. Whether one believes Dershowitz’s claims of innocence is secondary to the structural fact: elite institutions reliably shield their own.

Together, Epstein offered money and connections; Summers offered institutional prestige and political access; Dershowitz offered legal insulation. Harvard, meanwhile, offered a platform through which all three profited.

Knowledge as a Shield—Not a Light

For centuries, elite universities have served as both engines of knowledge and fortresses of power. They are not neutral institutions.

They defended slavery and eugenics, supplying “scientific” justification for racial hierarchies.
They exploited labor—from enslaved workers who built campuses to adjuncts living in poverty today.
They marginalized survivors of sexual violence while protecting benefactors and faculty.
They accepted fortunes derived from war profiteering, colonial extraction, hedge-fund predation, and private-equity devastation.

Epstein did not invent the model of the toxic patron. He merely perfected it in the neoliberal era.

A Four-Step Pattern of Elite Impunity

The scandal surrounding Epstein, Dershowitz, and Summers follows a trajectory that dates back centuries:

1. Wealth accumulation through exploitation
   From slave plantations to private equity, concentrated wealth is generated through systems that harm the many to benefit the few.

2. The purchase of academic legitimacy
   Endowed chairs, laboratories, fellowships, and advisory roles allow dubious benefactors to launder reputations through universities.

3. Legal and cultural shielding
   Elite lawyers, confidential settlements, non-disclosure agreements, and institutional silence create protective armor.

4. Silencing of survivors and critics
   Reputational attacks, threats of litigation, and internal pressure discourage transparency and accountability.

Epstein operated within this system. Dershowitz defended it. Summers benefited from it. Harvard reinforced it.

Larry Summers: An Anatomy of Power

Summers’ career illuminates the deeper structure behind the scandal. His trajectory—Harvard president, U.S. Treasury Secretary, World Bank chief economist, adviser to hedge funds, consultant to Big Tech—mirrors the seamless circulation of elite power between universities, finance, and government.

During his presidency, Harvard publicly embraced Epstein’s donations. After Epstein’s first sex-offense conviction, Summers continued to meet with him socially and professionally. Summers leveraged networks that Epstein also sought to cultivate. And even after the Epstein scandal fully broke open, Summers faced no meaningful institutional repercussions.

The message was clear: individual wrongdoing matters less than maintaining elite continuity.

Higher Education’s Structural Complicity

Elite universities were not “duped.” They were beneficiaries.

Harvard returned only a fraction of Epstein’s donations, and only after the press exposed the relationship. MIT hid Epstein’s gifts behind false donor names. Faculty traveled to his island and penthouse without demanding transparency.

Meanwhile:

Adjuncts qualify for food assistance
Students carry life-crippling debt
Administrators earn CEO-level pay
Donors dictate priorities behind closed doors

This is not hypocrisy—it is hierarchy. A system built to serve wealth does exactly that.

A Timeline Much Longer Than Epstein

To understand the present, we must zoom out:

Oxford and Cambridge accepted slave-trade wealth as institutional lifeblood.
Gilded Age robber barons endowed libraries while crushing labor movements.
Cold War intelligence agencies quietly funded research centers.
Today’s oligarchs, tech billionaires, and private-equity titans buy influence through endowments and think tanks.

The tools change. The pattern does not.

Universities help legitimate the powerful—even when those powerful figures harm the public.

Why This Still Matters

The Epstein scandal is not resolved. Court documents continue to emerge. Survivors continue to speak. Elite institutions continue to stall and deflect. Harvard still resists meaningful transparency, even as its endowment approaches national GDP levels.

The danger is not simply that another Epstein will emerge. It is that elite universities will continue to provide the conditions that make another Epstein inevitable.

What Breaking the Pattern Requires

Ending this system demands more than symbolic gestures or public-relations apologies. Real reform requires:

Radical donor transparency—with all gifts, advisory roles, and meetings disclosed
Worker and student representation on governing boards
Strong whistleblower protections and the abolition of secret NDAs
Robust public funding to reduce reliance on elite philanthropy
Independent journalism committed to exposing institutional power

Ida B. Wells, Jessica Mitford, Upton Sinclair, and other muckrakers understood what universities still deny: scandals are symptoms. The disease is structural.

Epstein was not an anomaly.
Dershowitz is not an anomaly.
Summers is not an anomaly.

They are products of a system in which universities serve power first—and truth, only if convenient.

If higher education wants to reclaim public trust, it must finally decide which side of history it is on.

Entangled Frontiers: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the UAE, South Sudan, and the Israel-Palestine Arena — Implications for Higher Education, Censorship, and Global Governance

The global higher education landscape is increasingly shaped by conflicts, diplomacy, and shifting regional alliances. The relationships among Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), South Sudan, and the Israel-Palestine conflict highlight the interconnections between geopolitics, humanitarian crises, and the responsibilities of universities as institutions of knowledge, ethics, and justice. These contexts influence not only student mobility and research collaboration but also institutional priorities, funding flows, and academic freedom. Understanding the intersection of geopolitics and higher education is essential for institutions seeking to engage globally with integrity, equity, and impact.

For scholars and administrators, these regions exemplify the challenge of balancing opportunity and risk. Research and student engagement opportunities abound in humanitarian crises, fragile states, and post-conflict zones, yet these are embedded in complex political and ethical landscapes. Additionally, the growing pressures on American universities to navigate internal censorship, legislative constraints, and donor-influenced agendas have profound implications for their global credibility and ability to engage abroad. This article explores each of these regions in depth, examines the cross-cutting implications for higher education, and discusses the domestic pressures in U.S. higher education that shape international engagement.

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Saudi Arabia and Yemen

The war in Yemen has devastated the nation, creating one of the most severe humanitarian crises in recent history. Civilian infrastructure has been destroyed, millions of people have been displaced, and famine and disease threaten vast swathes of the population. Saudi Arabia, as the leading actor in the coalition intervening in Yemen, has faced both international criticism and pressure to negotiate. Recent diplomatic initiatives have suggested that Riyadh may be seeking to recalibrate its involvement, including attempts to engage Houthi representatives in peace talks. For higher education institutions, these shifts have important implications for student mobility, research opportunities, and refugee education programs. Yemen's crisis represents not only a humanitarian emergency but also a research frontier in global health, humanitarian logistics, and post-conflict educational reconstruction.

Saudi Arabia’s position on Israel adds another layer of complexity for global academic partnerships. The Kingdom continues to insist that it will not normalize relations with Israel without the establishment of a Palestinian state. This position affects regional alliances, funding priorities, and the willingness of other states to engage in collaborative academic initiatives. For universities, this reality translates into both opportunities and constraints. Scholarship programs, research funding, and institutional partnerships linked to Saudi Arabia may be influenced by the Kingdom’s foreign policy priorities. Institutions engaging with Yemen must navigate a humanitarian context that is deeply intertwined with the diplomatic posturing of a regional superpower.

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The United Arab Emirates

The UAE has emerged as a significant regional actor, leveraging economic strength to expand its influence across Africa, the Red Sea corridor, and the Middle East. Its normalisation with Israel through the Abraham Accords marked a historic diplomatic shift in Arab-Israeli relations, yet the UAE has simultaneously articulated clear objections to unilateral Israeli annexation plans in the West Bank. In Africa, the UAE has deepened ties with South Sudan and other fragile states through financial agreements, including banking cooperation and long-term oil-backed loans. These interventions exemplify how foreign investment, diplomacy, and regional security concerns intersect in ways that directly affect higher education.

For universities, the UAE represents both opportunity and caution. Institutions can engage with new funding streams, branch campuses, and international partnerships facilitated by Gulf state investment. At the same time, ethical considerations are paramount. Funding sources tied to conflict zones, extractive economic deals, or contested geopolitical agendas require careful institutional scrutiny. Universities must develop frameworks that incorporate conflict sensitivity, ethical risk assessment, and transparency. The UAE’s dual role as a facilitator of academic mobility and a participant in contested geopolitical spaces underscores the complexity of engagement in regions influenced by external power.

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South Sudan

South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation, has struggled to stabilize since its independence in 2011. Recurring conflict, economic dependence on oil, and weak governance structures have hindered the development of higher education infrastructure. Agreements with the UAE, including long-term oil-backed loans and financial cooperation, highlight the influence of foreign investment on the state’s trajectory and, by extension, its educational system.

For higher education, South Sudan presents both a critical research site and an urgent development need. Universities can contribute to capacity-building, curriculum development, and scholarship programs for displaced or return diaspora students. Research in post-conflict governance, peace studies, and resource management can inform broader academic understanding of fragile states. Yet these opportunities come with ethical and practical complexities. Partnerships with South Sudanese institutions must navigate the implications of resource-linked foreign investment, the risk of perpetuating inequality, and the fragility of governance structures. Universities engaging in South Sudan must balance their commitment to education with a nuanced understanding of political and economic realities.

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Israel and Palestine

The Israel-Palestine conflict continues to shape the global higher education discourse, affecting student mobility, refugee education, research collaborations, and institutional partnerships. Saudi Arabia’s insistence that normalization with Israel is contingent upon Palestinian statehood and East Jerusalem as its capital remains a critical point of leverage in regional diplomacy. The UAE, despite having normalized with Israel, continues to assert that Israeli annexation of the West Bank represents a “red line” that could destabilize the region.

For universities, this context presents both opportunities and ethical challenges. Engaging with Palestinian students, hosting refugee scholars, and conducting research on human rights and humanitarian crises are vital areas of academic intervention. At the same time, institutions must navigate funding sources, regional political sensitivities, and reputational risks. Academic freedom in research on Israel and Palestine is often contested, both abroad and domestically in the United States, where political and donor pressures shape what research is feasible, safe, or fundable.

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Censorship and Academic Freedom in U.S. Higher Education

Recent developments in American higher education highlight the fragility of academic freedom, which directly affects international engagement. Surveys indicate that over one-third of U.S. faculty perceive a decline in academic freedom, and approximately 70% report self-censorship on topics such as the Israel-Palestine conflict. Legislation in several states, framed under terms like “viewpoint diversity” or “campus neutrality,” imposes constraints on curriculum, speech, faculty tenure, and university governance. These pressures are compounded by donor influence, administrative oversight, and the politicization of higher education.

Censorship and self-censorship are not abstract concerns; they have tangible impacts on research agendas, global partnerships, and the capacity of universities to host refugee or international scholars. Institutions with programs in global health, humanitarian response, Middle East studies, or post-conflict development must contend with domestic pressures that may limit the scope of inquiry or public engagement. The erosion of academic freedom in the United States thus has a direct effect on the credibility and effectiveness of universities abroad, as it mirrors, in some respects, the constraints faced by institutions in fragile or authoritarian states.

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Cross-Cutting Themes

Several themes cut across these regional and domestic contexts. First, conflict and displacement in Yemen, South Sudan, and Palestine create urgent educational needs for refugees and internally displaced scholars. Universities must develop programs that provide access, mentorship, and flexible pathways to education. Second, foreign investment and resource-linked funding—from the UAE in South Sudan to Saudi-backed initiatives in Yemen—underscore the ethical complexities of international partnerships. Transparency, due diligence, and conflict-sensitive frameworks are essential. Third, diplomatic realignments, including the Abraham Accords and evolving Saudi-Israel relations, create new corridors for collaboration but also introduce geopolitical risk. Fourth, domestic censorship and political pressures in the U.S. affect research capacity, ethical engagement, and the freedom to examine contentious topics, directly influencing global credibility.

Finally, structural inequality and systemic injustice are central concerns. Funding flows, research agendas, and student access are all mediated by power structures that can perpetuate inequities. Universities must be conscious of whose voices are amplified, whose perspectives are sidelined, and how partnerships with conflict-affected states influence the production of knowledge. Ethical global engagement requires institutions to address these imbalances proactively.

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References & Sources

1. PEN America, “New Report Unveils Alarming Tactics in Censorship of Higher Education,” pen.org

2. Times of India, “Is Academic Freedom on the Decline? 35% of US College Professors Say Yes,” timesofindia.indiatimes.com

3. Times of Israel, “Faculty Survey Reveals Fear, Self-Censorship at US Universities,” timesofisrael.com

4. Associated Press, “Under Threat from Trump, Columbia University Agrees to Policy Changes,” apnews.com

5. The Guardian, “US Universities’ Faculty Unite to Defend Academic Freedom After Trump’s Attacks,” theguardian.com

6. Le Monde, “UC Berkeley, the US Capital of Free Speech, Stands Firm Against Trump,” lemonde.fr