The game is up, people. Pack away your research, close the seminar rooms, forget your marking, cancel all your meetings – the higher education scam has been blown wide open.
Just one man has done what generations of revolutionaries have failed at – through the simple power of speaking his lived experience he has named and thus destroyed the secrets and lies that have underpinned higher education’s decades-long conspiracy to take over the world.
As Matt Goodwin puts it in his introduction to Bad Education:
There’s a sort of secret code of silence among professors and academics on campus – what the Mafia call omertà. No matter how bad things get, no matter how glaringly obvious the crisis becomes, no matter how visibly these once great institutions are failing our young people, you just never, ever tell people on the outside.
Well, to hell with that. I’m going to tell you everything. I’m going to pull back the curtain, lift the lid, and show you why our universities are falling apart, and how this crisis is now trickling out of the universities to weaken our wider society – our politics, culture, institutions and ways of life.
It’s quite the arresting premise – and for anyone familiar with UK higher education (the book is ostensibly about UK higher education, even though most of the over-familiar examples and references are from the US) it prompts the reader to consider the roots of the polycrisis the sector currently faces: is it a poor underpinning funding settlement that privileges meeting market needs over socio-economic needs, a failure to deal with the legacy of an elite system of prestige in an era of mass higher education, an overreliance on the journal article as a measure of academic esteem, or the long-lasting impact of the 2017 decision to allow universities unfettered access to the financial markets?
Tears in rain
Alas, no. The problem, as diagnosed by a newly-minted visiting professor at the University of Buckingham’s Centre for Heterodox Social Sciences, is diversity initiatives.
In one glorious passage in the first chapter, we are treated to a range of “I’ve watched…” statements that serve as a thesis for the entire (short) book. He’s seen things you people wouldn’t believe:
I’ve watched this divisive, dogmatic and dangerous ideology not only infect every facet of university life but deliver, fundamentally, a bad education to our students… I’ve watched its most hardened and committed followers draw on obscure academic theories to crudely declare that all Western nations are ‘institutionally racist’… I’ve watched its followers ‘decolonize’ reading lists… I’ve watched universities betray their students, families and taxpayers by encouraging the next generation to view highly complex, multi-ethnic societies in crude, simplistic and divisive ways… I’ve watched them capture and politicize the large and expanding university bureaucracy… I’ve watched them dumb down intellectual standards on campus… I’ve watched them impose this dark and dystopian worldview on our students… And And I’ve watched this movement sacrifice free speech and academic freedom on the altar of what its followers call ‘social justice’, or ‘diversity, equality and inclusion’ (DEI).
If you were taken aback by some of the Americanisms in that short excerpt I must reassure you that – somewhat surprisingly for a book about the UK – they appear to be a deliberate stylistic choice. We’ve seen the beginnings of attacks like these before – not least from an actual minister of state (Michelle Donelan) on diversity initiatives (or things that look like diversity initiatives from a distance) at UKRI, Advance HE, and – somehow – the QAA. In those cases, the charges felt disproportionate and somehow removed from the life of UK higher education. Almost as if there was a global playbook. And, gosh, doesn’t that stuff about DEI and dogma hit differently the month that NASA was forced by the US government to remove positive language about women and minorities from its website as a “drop everything” request?
To be clear, Goodwin isn’t against diversity initiatives in all forms – he is very keen, for example on political diversity where it results in the protection of the ability of academics to promote views he (and a few high profile fellow travellers: Goodhart, Kaufmann, Stokes, Stock…) agrees with. He applauds, seemingly without irony, the establishment of the usual list of places (the University of Austin Texas, Ralston College, the Peterson Academy, the Centre for Heterodox Social Sciences at Buckingham) that openly profess only the new orthodoxy he cleaves to.
Grift to the mill
Because the sadness in all this is that he isn’t saying anything new. You can hardly open a newspaper without seeing some newly “free” academic (or opportunistic politician) claim you literally can’t speak your mind on campus any more, that students and their opinions are mollycoddled, and that there are too many administrators. It must be comforting for him to see such views widely and confidently shared, and to see politicians speak and governments legislate in response to those views, but it does rather damage his self-image as a John Galt-esque lone figure speaking truth to power.
As an expression of this particular transatlantic groupthink, Bad Education is far from the worst. He makes some (selective) use of evidence, though as anyone familiar with his “polling” will note his use of statistics isn’t great and there are some telling misreads of the data: no Matt, one in three UK academics is not on an “unstable fixed-term and zero-hours” contract in 2024, the correct figure is 0.8 per cent although you can get close to your 80,000 if you look at all (FT or PT) fixed term contracts. But the vagary suits the point he is making. He’s happy to cite thinkpieces and substacks, less keen – despite a promise to – cite data and evidence. Many of the journal articles and books he reaches for are over-familiar, and closer to journalism than research.
To give you one example, we’re given what feels like a stern rebuttal of the BBC’s “Reality Check” investigation that found only six occasions where campus speakers have been banned between 2010 and 2018. You are midway through the expected language on the chilling effect before you recall that statistics collected by the actual higher education regulator show similar numbers for later years – and while it is fair to say that free speech is a preoccupation of those who hold minority views, the fact that you have to fish very deep to find any evidence at all that anyone outside of the groupsicles perceives a problem with the way things currently are. Appeals to a silent majority – or the two people that email Matt Goodwin every time he is called out online – don’t really cut it, whatever murky underpinnings he may implore the reader to see.
Lived experience
So far – so much “silenced academic speaks out.” What is different is Matt Goodwin’s career trajectory. He started off his academic life as a researcher focusing on radical right-wing movements – his current era, which could be characterised as making him look more like an apologist for many of the same movements, has raised more than a few eyebrows among his colleagues and contemporaries. Has the noted chronicaller of radicalisation been radicalised?
Clearly academia did not turn out the way he expected:
“ can even remember imagining at the start of my academic career that my life as a university professor would look something like Russell Crowe’s character in A Beautiful Mind – the mathematician John Nash, who spent his days advancing the frontiers of knowledge while wandering around leafy campuses with books under his arm and students hanging on his every word (though, to be fair, Nash later went completely insane).
It’s his experience at the University of Kent (an institution he waspishly describes as “non-elite” and “teetering on the bridge of bankruptcy”) that seems to have done the damage – in particular his experience following the Brexit vote after putting forward a position he characterises as:
when a majority of my fellow citizens did vote to leave the EU I thought it important to respect their view, not least to safeguard representative democracy
Goodwin’s research shortly after the vote was focused primarily on the reasons people voted for Brexit – he’d argued before the vote that an “enthusiasm gap” (drawing on the passion of Brexit supporters being greater than the passion of Remain supporters for EU affiliation) would drive the outcome, and afterwards he worked with other researchers (in Brexit: Why Britain voted to leave the European Union) to identify immigration and identity as key drivers of the popular movement.
After a few articles along these lines in the national press, and some perhaps less measured thoughts on social media, he began to feel persecuted by fellow academics.
In the weeks, months and years that followed I experienced what I can now only describe as a sustained campaign of abuse, intimidation and harassment, equivalent to how a religious cult treats a heretic. I was accused of being an ‘apologist’ for the ‘far right’. I was denounced as a Tory stooge. I was called an extremist. Even my own head of school liked a tweet insulting me. I experienced coordinated social media ‘pile-ons’, ironically led by academics who proclaim themselves to be among the most ‘liberal’ of all.
Gatekeepers and dissent
It’s worth unpicking the pile-on narrative.
What happens is that one or two ‘gatekeepers’ let it be known to more junior academics that somebody has fallen out of favour, that somebody has violated the orthodoxy. The green light is then given for academics to pile in, usually on social media, and a coordinated campaign to try and assassinate somebody’s character and reputation begins
There is (or was, social media pile-ons feel like a moment of their time as much as social media now does) no planning involved. If you say something people believe to be unpleasant online, people will tell you that the thing you said is unpleasant, and in doing so spread your original thought to others who will also tell you that it is unpleasant. Such is the attention economics of the industry.
And early Matt wasn’t particularly unpleasant or even over-serious – this is a man who, lest we forget, ate his own (actually pretty good) Brexit book live on Sky News. An early draft of the “what happened to you?” chapter from Bad Education doesn’t even mention social media as he blames the “radicalisation of the elite class” for his growing disenchantment with scholarly life. While he’s made a conscious decision to move away from the mainstream opinions held by people with a similar set of life experiences, the early phases feel more like senior common room drama than the work of a shadowy cabal. He only really got into full scale pile ons when he published the similarly slight Values, Voice, and Virtue back in 2023.
That’s not to say that others (including some of those he approvingly cites) have had worse experiences online and offline. Clearly nobody should be receiving death threats or risks to their health as a result of their terrible opinions – though it is also clear that our right to describe opinions as “terrible” when we feel they are terrible is inalienable. But if your entire story is hung around the way you were ostracised and vilified just for speaking the truth it probably needs a bit more than just a few whines about how nobody wants to write academic papers with you any more since you gave up on any pretence of dispassionate academic rigour.
My interest in this phenomenon isn’t in the ostracisation itself (for further information on academics falling out with each other please see the entire history of academia from the School of Athens onwards) but in the way a “safe space” has emerged for former academics of a particular political stripe to band together and secure funding and media opportunities for ventures of a particular ideological bent. If Matt had left his career behind because his concern that universities weren’t doing enough for disadvantaged groups or were not active enough in bringing about social and economic changes went against a prevailing orthodoxy that we should just rub along with anyone that wants to fund us he would not be welcome in that particular gang. He wouldn’t get past the gatekeepers.
And a half-hour spent in the world he creates in his Substack, books, media appearances, and mainstream news commentary broadcast suggests that you don’t have to do much more to be in this group than to cry persecution and recirculate the same tired old tropes about liberal extremism. There’s very little sadder than a group of free-thinking iconoclasts that all say the same thing – and something as craven as Bad Education is a long way from what the old, research-focused, evidence-led Matt Goodwin once did.
