Tag: bad

  • DOD continues to shield bad actor schools that prey upon military servicemembers

    DOD continues to shield bad actor schools that prey upon military servicemembers

    For more than seven years, we have been waiting to obtain information
    from the US Department of Defense (DOD) about schools that prey upon servicemembers using DOD Tuition Assistance to further their college aspirations. And we have done it at our peril, repeatedly taking flak from people in DC.  

    As the Higher Education Inquirer reported earlier,
    DOD and these schools have had questionable relationships with these
    schools going back to the 1980s, with the for-profit college takeover of CCME, the Council of College and Military Educators.  

    Those who follow the higher education business know the names of the bad actors, some that are still in business (like the University of Phoenix and Colorado Tech) and some that have closed (like ITT Tech and the Art Institutes). Others have morphed into arms of state universities (Kaplan University becoming Purdue University Global and Ashford University becoming University of Arizona Global). 

    Accountability was supposed to happen during the Obama administration (with Executive Order 13607) but those rules were not fully implemented. Under the first Trump administration, these safeguards were largely ignored, and bad actor schools faced no penalties.  

    Some of these scandals were reported in the
    media, and have been forgotten.

    On April 1, 2025 we were again supposed to receive information about these bad actor schools, and the DOD officials who were complicit.  It didn’t happen. That FOIA (22-1203) which was initiated in July 2022 is now scheduled for a reply on July 3, 2025, three years from the original submission. 

    Previous FOIAs from 2019 also came up with no information.  And requests for information in 2017 from DOD officials were met with harassment from other parties. 

    The only thing we can be grateful for is that DOD continues to communicate with us. 

     

    Related links:

    Trump’s DOD Failed to Protect Servicemembers from Bad Actor Colleges, But We Demand More Evidence 

    DoD review: 0% of schools following TA rules (Military Times, 2018)

    Schools are struggling to meet TA rules, but DoD isn’t punishing them. Here’s why. (Military Times, 2019)

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  • Are smart phones at schools all bad?

    Are smart phones at schools all bad?

    If Bill Schluter had his way, cellphones would be banned five days a week. Schluter is head of Tatnall Upper School, a private high school in the U.S. state of Delaware. He wants cellphones out of school. 

    As increasing numbers of young people seem tied to their phones, researchers have found correlations between cellphone use and cases of depression, anxiety, cyberbullying and decreasing attention span.

    A 2019 study by the nonprofit organization Common Sense found that 84% of teenagers in the United States already possess a cellphone.

    Psychologist Jean Twenge, in her 2017 book “iGen“, wrote that increased phone use by teenagers directly correlates to a recent increase in adolescent anxiety, depression and inability to focus.

    Teens themselves, though, think cellphones have a place in the classroom — if used responsibly and with permission. 

    “I noticed people use them a lot in math class when they forget their calculator,” said Tatnall student Camille Johnson. “If their math teacher allows them to pull out their phone just for the calculator portion, they use it for that as long as you know they’re not being silly and going on other apps. We had a physics lab the other day where we were needing to use it to record our lab.”

    Social media replaces human connections

    Research also suggests that a hybrid class model that integrates technology into classwork, such as Teach to One or Google Classroom, leads to successful test scores as it personalizes the learning journey. 

    Twenge found that phones hinder teenagers’ ability to socially engage with each other. Schulter agreed. “Your ability to talk to each other, hear each other and have productive conversations is lessened with cellphones,” he said. 

    Twenge also found that the recent rise of technological advancements of cellphones and the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged teenagers to shut themselves in and only engage with their devices, as social media has replaced other forms of entertainment such as magazines and books. This leads to a wired, smartphone-dominant society, causing a significant spike in teenage mental health problems.

    A June 2024 Pew Research Center survey shows that 72% of public school teachers report that phones are a major distraction in class and make learning less effective. And a March 2024 report from Thorn, a nonprofit organization that works to fight online sexual abuse of children and teens, emphasized a disturbing increase in the creation and distribution of AI-generated child pornography. 

    The report said that with its ease of use, almost anyone can generate intimate deepfake images of others, whether it be of someone they know or a stranger. Child predators or children interested in their peers can create these pictures with the click of a button. 

    These images are commonly used in “sextortion”, a form of extortion in which the creator or owner of the photos threatens to publicly release them if the victim refuses their demands. 

    Abuse of technology

    Schluter recalled a story about a local and reputable school in which a male student used AI to superimpose nude pictures of his female classmates from the shoulder up to distribute online, resulting in chaos among the school board. “Board members of the school have resigned and everybody’s at each other’s throats,” he said. 

    In recent years, schools have responded to the cell phone issue. In many states across the country, such as California, New York, Maine and Pennsylvania, school districts have been able to limit the usage of cell phones among students, whether that be a phone-free day or an outright ban. 

    My high school, The Tatnall School, has implemented phone-free Wednesdays into the school week, forbidding students from having a cellphone in sight anytime during the day. 

    Schluter said that another local high school has banned smartphones five days a week.  

    “They started right off the school year with having a couple days in the school year, and then within a month, they had gone to a cellphone free policy at the school in its entirety, and it’s working great from all sources,” he said. 

    Resistance to phone bans

    Many students, and parents, aren’t entirely on board with banning phones, even one day a week.  “It just so happens that every single Wednesday, I’m like, oh my gosh, I need to do something really quick, and I can’t have my phone,” Johnson said. 

    She admitted that without a phone people learn to be more present in the moment. “But I don’t believe in completely banning them,” she said.

    Other students noted that the cellphone policy has caused some problems. Some use their phones as keys to their cars, for example, and having their phones confiscated makes that difficult. Some students have have seen teachers collecting phones from students even when they were simply outdoors during lunch. 

    Many parents are concerned that smartphone bans limit communication between them and their children, fearing they cannot contact them during an emergency. With a disturbing number of recent school shootings, this fear is understandable. To dampen parents’ worries, school faculty assure them that communication between parent and child will most likely be unnecessary if school safety precautions are followed.

    “If we’re cellphone free, the school would, if we do a good job of maintaining our safety precautions for the school, we would be a safe environment,” Schluter said.

    Finding a happy medium

    Naturally, parents still worry for their child’s safety and desire to keep constant contact, even if it’s a simple text that tells them that their child is safe. 

    While many educators and some parents believe that phones only impair learning and have no place in a productive academic environment, others argue that the correct classroom model can allow cellphones to enhance education. 

    Consider online programs such as Duolingo or Google Classroom. These apps prove that technology can be effectively integrated into lesson plans to teach new skills while indulging the attachment young people have to phones and capturing their attention, a precious resource. If teachers worry about students using their cellphones for non-academic purposes, they can employ programs to restrict access to certain websites or apps. 

    So what is the best best course of action to solve this problem? While the issues related to cellphones prove problematic, many believe that phones aren’t necessarily the root cause. The spike in cellphone usage may merely be an effect of the issues often associated with them.

    “Cellphones may be a symptom and not the cause of the shift, but the two are very interrelated,” Schluter said.

    Bans are only as effective as their enforcement and only encourage some teens to find ways around the bans. And despite teachers’ efforts to hold students responsible for their actions, this is also not a guaranteed fix. 

    Perhaps the best solution is a happy medium. Schools can allow teachers to create their own classroom phone policies and punish as they see fit. Or they can limit cell phone use while establishing specific areas or periods when people can be on their phones. 

    No matter which solution is most effective, technology is improving, and social media and smartphones are on track to become increasingly prevalent in our lives.

    “High school education has changed in huge ways in the past 30 or 40 years, and cellphones have been have been part of that,” Schluter said. “But I’m curious to know, not how we get back to the way things were in the 1990s necessarily, but to an atmosphere where students are more engaged.”

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. Why do many schools trying to ban students’ use of phones?

    2. In what ways can phones by used responsibly in a class?

    3. In what ways do you feel tied to your phone? 

     

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  • WEEKEND READING: Matt Goodwin’s ‘Bad Education’ isn’t good scholarship, but does that matter?

    WEEKEND READING: Matt Goodwin’s ‘Bad Education’ isn’t good scholarship, but does that matter?

    • Steven Jones is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Manchester and his latest book is Universities Under Fire (2022). This review of Bad Education by Matt Goodwin has been written in a personal capacity.
    • HEPI’s other review of the Matt Goodwin’s book can be accessed here.

    In Bad Education, Matt Goodwin makes the argument that Western universities have moved ‘sharply and radically to the left’ (p.51) over the last six decades, to the extent that diversity is now deemed more important than merit. According to Goodwin, a woke orthodoxy has gripped the sector: free speech is stifled; non-authorised viewpoints are unwanted; and social justice trumps the pursuit of truth. Some minorities flourish within this culture, but other ‘political’ minorities – like the one to which Goodwin claims membership – are structurally disadvantaged. 

    To stand this argument up, Goodwin needs the reader to accept two fundamental premises. The first is that the author’s sense of victimhood is real, while others are imaginary or exaggerated. Goodwin achieves this by attributing his every professional setback – from having journal articles and funding bids declined to being overlooked for invited talks (p.47) – to his whiteness, his maleness, or his political positions, such as his refusal to participate in ‘cult-like worship of the EU on campus’ (p.44). No other explanation is countenanced. 

    The second premise is that the real power in universities is cultural, not economic, and therefore held by diversity champions and other woke activists. The evidence Goodwin offers here is underwhelming. Where academic scholarship is cited, the sources are mostly US-based, and the author shows no curiosity about the think-tanks and lobby groups that funded the surveys in which he places his faith. Critical higher educational research is studiously avoided, though Goodwin does turn to Elon Musk for a quote about the ‘woke mind virus’ (p.104). In places, Bad Education reads as a checklist of debunked myths and personal memoirs (‘as I’ve seen first-hand’ is a familiar clause). Yet in the final chapter, Goodwin addresses the reader directly to assert: ‘I’ve bombarded you at times with statistics and research because I wanted you to read it for yourself and make up your own mind’ (p.198). 

    I tried hard to make up my own mind, but it’s difficult to be persuaded by Goodwin’s case against universities when the bulk of empirical data point in an opposite direction. If recruitment practices are so diversity conscious, why were there only 25 Black British female professors in the UK as recently as 2019? If ‘reverse racism’ is such a problem, why did the awarding gap between White and Black students achieving high degrees stand at 18.4% in 2021? In my experience, and according to my research, minority groups are far from over-represented in senior levels of university management and governance, and board cultures tend to be driven by corporate principles, not woke ideologies. As for no-platforming, fewer than 0.8 per cent of university events or speaker invitations were cancelled in 2021-22. In other words, the truths that Goodwin is so boldly willing to speak may be his truths, but they are not universal.

    Among the fellow marginalised white men willing to support Goodwin is the University of Buckingham’s Eric Kaufmann, who is quoted extensively, and whose back-cover endorsement describes Bad Education as ‘deeply personal and impeccably researched.’ It’s certainly deeply personal. Take Goodwin’s indignation towards a lecturer who unfriended some Conservative voters on Facebook after the 2015 UK general election (p.89). The reader is not told what this incident is supposed to signify, let alone why Goodwin’s cherished free speech principles appear not to extend to academics’ private social media accounts.

    That’s not to say that the sector is always operating to the highest ethical standards. Goodwin is on firmest ground when highlighting human rights violations in China (p.90), and calling out universities for turning a blind eye. But rather than take this argument to its logical conclusion – by critiquing a fee model that leaves sectors reliant on income from overseas students – Goodwin pivots back into anger and anecdote, rebuking universities for being defensive about their historic links with the slave trade (p.91) and sharing stories about junior colleagues too scared to disclose their pro-Brexit leanings (p.94).

    Despite Goodwin’s stated aim to ‘push back against authoritarianism’ (p.208), there are echoes of Donald Trump’s playbook throughout Bad Education. The author’s anti-diversity bombast recalls the President’s recent claim that a fatal air crash near Washington DC was connected to DEI programmes in federal government. It’s not entirely clear to which level of institutional bureaucracy Goodwin is referring when he imagines a ‘hyper-political and highly activist managerial blob’ (p.157), but the language is redolent of that being deployed in the US to justify a purge of federal bureaucrats. According to Goodwin, this ‘managerial blob’ is defined by an insistence on rainbow lanyards and flags on campus, among other things. This is not a characterisation of senior leaders that most university staff would recognise. Could it be that the author is so distracted by empty performative gestures that he fails to see where power is really located?

    Goodwin has now left academia, a story he tells in most chapters, steadily elevating it to the level of Shakespearean tragedy: ‘my professorship – everything I had ever wanted, everything I had worked for – was over’ (p.195). At a time when 10,000 jobs are on the line at UK universities, such self-indulgence is unfortunate. Goodwin’s contrast between the ‘luxury beliefs’ of academics and the ‘real world’ he claims to inhabit (p.78) encapsulates what makes Bad Education read like a ‘prolonged gripe,’ as another reviewer put it. Paradoxically, Goodwin now enjoys a range of high-profile platforms from which to air his grievances about being no-platformed, regularly appearing on television to blame wokeism for various social ills. Why is it that only ‘cancelled’ academics seem to have media agents?

    Bad Education builds towards what Goodwin calls a ‘manifesto’ for universities (pp.217-19) that want to have ‘good, not bad, education’ (p.217). It’s a simplistic way to wrap up any book, comprising a bullet-pointed list of the same few complaints expressed in slightly different terms. Those of us in higher education will quickly recognise Bad Education’s distortions: universities haven’t lurched radically left and there’s no woke coup. But does that matter? Are we the target readership? Or is the book speaking to external audiences? What if a review like this merely confirms what Goodwin and his fellow academic outcasts have been saying all along?

    Since accepting the terms of the market, English universities have struggled to articulate their role in society. Academic expertise has been devalued and the status of higher education as a public good compromised, with universities increasingly embroiled in unwinnable culture wars. These are perfect conditions for someone like Goodwin to ‘blow up’ his own career (p.4), break the ‘secret code of silence’ (p.3) and position himself as the fearless ‘rogue professor’ (p.16). In such ways, important debates become framed by individuals with the shallowest insights but the deepest grudges. Bad Education does a passable job of confirming suspicions about what really goes on inside a secretive and often aloof sector, guiding its readers further down an anti-university, anti-expert rabbit hole. If we continue to leave vacuums in the discourse, then diversity-blaming narratives like Goodwin’s will continue to fill them.

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  • Predictably bad education | Wonkhe

    Predictably bad education | Wonkhe

    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.

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