Higher Education and Disaster Capitalism in The Age of Covid19

PALGRAVE CRITICAL UNIVERSITY STUDIES
Higher Education and

Disaster Capitalism in the
Age of COVID-19
Marina Vujnovic · Johanna E. Foster
Palgrave Critical University Studies
Series Editor
John Smyth
University of Huddersfield
Huddersfield, UK
Aims of the Palgrave Critical University Studies Series
Universities everywhere are experiencing unprecedented changes and
most of the changes being inflicted upon universities are being imposed by
political and policy elites without any debate or discussion, and little
understanding of what is being lost, jettisoned, damaged or destroyed.
The over-arching intent of this series is to foster, encourage, and publish
scholarship relating to academia that is troubled by the direction of these
reforms occurring around the world. The series provides a much-needed
forum for the intensive and extensive discussion of the consequences of
ill-conceived and inappropriate university reforms and will do this with
particular emphasis on those perspectives and groups whose views have
hitherto been ignored, disparaged or silenced. The series explores these
changes across a number of domains including: the deleterious effects on
academic work, the impact on student learning, the distortion of academic
leadership and institutional politics, and the perversion of institutional
politics. Above all, the series encourages critically informed debate, where
this is being expunged or closed down in universities.
Marina Vujnovic • Johanna E. Foster
Higher Education
and Disaster
Capitalism in the Age
of COVID-19
Marina Vujnovic Johanna E. Foster
Department of Communication Political Science and Sociology
Monmouth University Monmouth University
West Long Branch, NJ, USA West Long Branch, NJ, USA
ISSN 2662-7329 ISSN 2662-7337 (electronic)

Palgrave Critical University Studies
ISBN 978-3-031-12369-6 ISBN 978-3-031-12370-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12370-2
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To all those lost to COVID-19 and to disaster capitalism.
Foreword
When the WHO first declared COVID-19 to be a global pandemic on

March 11th, 2020 (they had labeled it a “public health emergency of
international concern” as of January 30th, 2020), the world was already in
the midst of other global catastrophes—devastating effects of climate
change, technology advancing faster than ethical understandings of it,
ongoing military occupations and conflicts, and a litany of social and eco-
nomic problems wrought by some two centuries of global industrial capi-
talism. The ongoing pandemic has done as much to bring attention to
these social problems as it has done to exacerbate them. And, as Marina
Vujnovic and Johanna Foster argue in Higher Education and Disaster
Capitalism in the Age of COVID-19, it has also presented elites with an
opportunity to exploit them.
Vujnovic and Foster critically examine higher education in the context
of a capitalist economic system, especially “disaster capitalism.” Academia
is no exception to the use of a disaster-like COVID-19 to enhance capital-
ist interests. This is the case because capitalism and business interests have
increasingly shaped the academic world. Academia in the USA (and else-
where) is increasingly part of the global education system that, in turn, is
shaped by capitalism. In many ways, academia has become just another
industry controlled by capitalism and that operates with its business model.
It is a system for the mass production of ideas and students, both of which
exist, in the main, to buttress a capitalist economic system devoted to mass
production and mass consumption.
vii
viii FOREWORD
The academic world now has many characteristics that are in line with
those in the business world including an orientation toward expansionism,
outsourcing, the retailing of knowledge, among other factors. More spe-
cifically, during the pandemic, academia has become more oriented to
undercutting unions, reducing academic employment, freezing hiring,
threatening tenure, closing and downsizing many departments, increasing
tuition and reducing costly in-person education and replacing it with
online education (and related systems). In these and other ways, business’
stranglehold on academia has tightened. While most of those in the aca-
demic system have been victimized by such actions, those at the top of the
academic world, such as college presidents and athletic coaches have argu-
ably had their positions strengthened.
As the world moves toward “living with COVID-19,” it is imperative
that we take steps to better understand the impact the pandemic has had,
and will continue to have, on our world. As the pandemic has accelerated
assaults on learning, it has become more crucial than ever to understand,
and to protect the realm of education, especially its emphasis on “facts”
and science. This volume is a critical step in that process. It not only helps
us to understand the negative impacts of the pandemic on higher educa-
tion, it also recognizes the ways in which they have presented opportuni-
ties for improving it. We stand now at the crossroads in higher education.
The pandemic has helped to illuminate the grievances associated with the
path we have been on as well as the opportunities of the road less traveled.
Vujnovic and Foster have lit a torch on the latter and it would do us all
well to follow their light.
Paris, France J. Michael Ryan

Sarasota, FL, USA George Ritzer
May 2022
Preface
(Foster)
Just weeks after winning the election as president of our faculty union, I
was greeted by an infestation of rats inside the living space of what I had
thought was at least a rat-free house, if not free of other infestations. Beside
myself with the sight and sound of rats literally coming out of the woodwork
over the course of a half-year campaign to batten the hatches, I had the gnaw-
ing thought that the unexpected rodent raid was also symbolic. A few months
into my new leadership role, I had already begun to feel as if my term as
union president was bringing all sorts of new and troubling visitations into
my professional space that would be equally impossible to accept. Three years of
faculty union organizing and a pandemic later, I realized my concerns were
just the tip of an iceberg. At times, my co-author and faculty council chair
would wonder if, in our roles at the helm of faculty leadership as the crisis
unfolded, we had been cast in The Truman Show. With each new challenge on
our own campus, and with political struggles on campuses all across the coun-
try resonating immediately with both of us as faculty leaders, we began to see
more clearly the contours of a global education industry spiderweb that had
been spun well before the pandemic, and was expanding right before our eyes.
It would also occur to us that many good colleagues on the academic side of
the house have been contributing to shared governance work on campuses
amidst these fateful entanglements in ways that continue to leave us unknow-
ingly outmatched in this expansion, and not so much that we “come with a
knife to a gunfight” but rather we come to the gunfight with a hacky sack—or
maybe a fish. In other words, we have been without a sense of the game we are
ix
x PREFACE
all now playing as we go about our lives as faculty and staff. We have been
unaware of what’s behind the woodwork in our own home. Equally devastat-
ing, we began to understand even more acutely the ways in which adminis-
trators, faculty and staff alike have been shills for what has been “laid bare”
for us during the pandemic, namely a global education industry takeover of
the relations of research, teaching and learning.
This book emerged out of the trenches in which we found ourselves
in our roles as president of our faculty union and chair of our faculty
council, shortly after the initial shock of images of people in hazmat
suits circulating around our campus in early March of 2020 had died
down and we were pressured to face the COVID-19 realities head on.
It was immediately clear to us that COVID-19 was presenting itself to
higher education top leadership as an opportunity to expand on disas-
ter discourse and austerity policies that have become so commonplace
in higher education, especially since the 2008 economic crisis. While
some things we have experienced in the last two years were predictable.
What we did not predict is the sheer extent to which neoliberal capital-
ism has come to be predatory in a way that it not only profits off peo-
ple’s misery, particularly people of color and women, but that human
life itself is seen worthy only as much as it can be made into a commod-
ity. It also became painfully clear that the institution of higher educa-
tion, the place we call home, has been, almost from its inception, on
the path of this very predation, allowing private interests to squeeze
out any remaining capacities within our institutions, particularly our
public higher education institutions, to be in the service of society and
democracy at large.
Hence, in this book, we begin from the position that despite the perva-
sive American myth of higher education as a set of institutions uniquely
situated in the spaces between the market and the state, colleges and uni-
versities in the United States have always been tied, more or less, to the
interests of capital (Geiger, 2016). In fact, if there is anything unique
about the role of higher education in the United States, it is precisely this
founding and ever-present entanglement with private interests compared
to colleges and universities around the world. Further, we take the stance
that the major role of colleges and universities in the U.S. past and pres-
ent, whether private or public, has been to serve as the ideological appara-
tus for the system of capitalism, and not, as is so often described, as
institutional locations of market-free, or even market-countervailing
PREFACE xi
forces. To put it another way, we assert that higher education, like K-12
schooling, primarily works to reproduce unequal class, race, and gender
structures in the economy, and in society more generally. These processes
of social reproduction, as sociologists call it in one important usage of the
term, include the mediation of class, race, and gender conflict such that
class boundaries and ranks are continually sorted and resorted in shifting
and variable ways to protect elites as the economic, political, and social
landscapes change. While we recognize and appreciate that colleges and
universities have been critical sites of resistance and struggle in the United
States from their inception until today—sites that must be protected if we
intend to preserve democracies—we also take as axiomatic that U.S. higher
education is of and for the capitalist project, and continues to advance the
economic and political elite in at least three major ways: (1) in training
most students primarily for employment as semi-skilled, skilled, and also
obedient corporatized workers in a knowledge-based global economy; (2)
by preparing most students other than the elite to accept, through a largely
vocationalized, technocratic, and rationalized culture of skills training,
similar conditions of labor as future low to middle-earning workers in late
stage global capitalism; and (3) by inculcating the norms, values, beliefs
and practices of the elite classes that normalize the capitalist project,
including its particular expression in neoliberalism and neo-conservatism.
On top of this, although our own commitments as progressive scholars
and teachers lead us to wish it were otherwise, we are aligned with Clyde
Barrow (1990) in arguing that, by design, the notion of higher education
as organized by meritocracy with the goal of social equality and demo-
cratic citizenship has been a political construction—a kind of political
accommodation, Barrow claimed, to reconcile the contradictions, or pro-
vide an ideological cover, for institutional arrangements that fundamen-
tally have serve, and we will allege, continue to serve the corporate class.
A central part of this accommodation strategy is the co-optation of intel-
lectuals to the side of capital, and the acquisition of false consciousness
among the professoriate about the nature and conditions of their labor,
and their own class positions in the larger political economy.
Through our examination of the impact of COVID-19 on higher
education as an appendage of what is now postmodern transnational
capitalism, we have worked from the premise that capitalism itself neces-
sitates exploitation, opportunism, and crises in the ever-expanding prac-
tices of wealth accumulation. We are of the school of thought that
xii PREFACE
whether it is called “predatory capitalism,” “bandit capitalism,” “crony

capitalism,” “vulture capitalism,” all refer fundamentally to the same set
of systemic features, namely the brutal exploitation of human and ani-
mal labor; the unconscionable extraction of natural resources, the con-
sequences of which we have started to feel dramatically in 2021 as the
global pandemic continues to expand and the effects of climate change
are felt across the nations; and the calculated and opportunistic seizing
of public and social goods for private gain, often with the aid of ideolo-
gies of crisis, real or manufactured. In this book, we expand on previous
scholars’ study of capitalism and higher education and argue that
whether we refer to it as “the entrepreneurial university” (Etzkowitz
et al., 2000), “corporatized higher education” (Clay, 2008), “the neo-
liberal university” (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2009), “the gig academy”
(Kezar et al., 2019), “the imperial university” (Chatterjee & Maira,
2014), or “academic capitalism” (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997), here again,
all refer fundamentally to a new version of a very old beast, namely the
complicated intersections and overlaps between the capitalist class, state
actors, intellectuals, and a professional-managerial class of technocratic
functionaries of varying numbers and power, all implicated in the busi-
ness of social reproduction. We have seen clearly how the “apparatus of
justifications,” as Giridharadas (2018, p. 268), borrowing from Piketty’s
critique of capitalism, has argued, allowed a new elite class of higher
education administrators to make decisions that dehumanize workers,
and sometimes even those who foot the bill, that is, students and their
parents, using disaster opportunities shrouded in the veil of humanitari-
anism and social change to advance neoliberal visions of society in which
“winners take all.” As such, it is in this larger context and history that
we will contend that the crisis of COVID-19 has laid bare the old and
new realities of U.S. higher education as a political construction to
accommodate the shifting needs of private interests, and to do so
through the exploitation of disaster, and the increasing reliance on con-
tinuous and constructed narratives of crisis.
Central to the book is our contention that higher education administra-
tors in the U.S. and other Western democracies have seized on the
COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to further advance a corporate
higher education agenda consistent with the principles, policies, and prac-
tices of what Naomi Klein has famously termed “disaster capitalism”
(Klein, 2007). More specifically, as our chapters unfold, we will show how
the “old beast” of the academic capitalist project is being reconfigured in
PREFACE xiii
modes both similar to and distinct from previous periods in the history of
higher education in the U.S. In this case, we will show how attempts to
further align or realign higher education with the economic and political
goals of elites under the cover of COVID-19 are reflective of a particular
set of systemic features that have yet to be fully articulated by critical
scholars of higher education and also by scholars of contemporary
capitalism.
Particularly, the pandemic has exposed not just a familiar looting of the
“knowledge commons” by the capitalist class, but a new fusing of neolib-
eral and neoconservative philosophies and practices with widespread
populist politics that rely on, and are supported by, an expanded profes-
sional-technocratic class of higher education middle managers. In this
collision of structural and cultural forces, we argue, emerges a toxic nexus
with key features that is its own disaster. In the hyper privatization of
public colleges and universities; the transformation of non-profit privates
into what amounts to for-profits by another name; the de-legitimization
of the liberal arts and criminalization of critical analyses of power; and the
growth of a bloated professional class of higher education bureaucrats
who play an increasingly central role in “capturing the academic state” on
behalf of elites and themselves, we are able to see a particular set of rela-
tionships between capital, the state, and non-profit sectors at this latest
crisis point in the history of higher education—a crisis point that, even
prior to COVID-19, has had grave consequences for students, faculty,
and for the university itself. Most consequentially, it has meant a blow to
the political accommodation of social equality and democratic citizenship
as the realignment of capital through increased corporatization and ratio-
nalization of higher education pre-COVID-19 has served as a powerful
backlash against the path to social mobility and class power for working
and middle-class Americans. Balthaser and Mullen (2020, para. 10)
remind us of the rise of “liberal multiculturalism” as the postwar logic of
academia to manage the “movements for Black liberation and revolution-
ary socialism” by “advancing policies of desegregation and multicultural-
ism and promoting a Black and brown professional-managerial class,
[whereby] liberal antiracism became the official language of the US impe-
rial state.” They argue that while that discourse has been explicit, it “qui-
etly implies… the necropolitical liberal management of racial violence,”
including the “administration” of COVID-19 and the management of
death by COVID-19.
xiv PREFACE
Further, in this book, we extend Klein’s and others’ analysis and call on
an intersectional feminist political economy of disaster opportunism. More
specifically, we situate the current crisis in higher education more squarely
within a larger context of advanced global capitalism that is fueled by a
complicated web of variable and historically and socially situated racial
structures and also heteropatriarchies that sacrifice women, gender non-
conforming people, and individuals who identify as Black, Brown, and
Indigenous people of color. Using a frame of racialized disaster patriarchal
capitalism (see Foster & Foster-Palmer, forthcoming 2022; Luft, 2016),
we examine multiple opportunistic processes and practices of both reengi-
neering and retrenchment that are playing out in academic contexts that
Watermyer et al. (2021, in the title) have called “pandemia.” As we shall
see, along with the sedimentation of a racialized labor force and the deci-
mation of the middle classes, we also focus on the re-establishment of
gendered and unequal divisions of productive and social reproductive
labor. In doing so, we draw on the second important sociological meaning
of social reproduction, namely the social relations of labor, or the “care-
taking” and “life-making” work (Bhattacharya, 2020) that produces and
reproduces people, communities, and the very social bonds that undergird
societies (see also Arruzza et al., 2019; Welch, 2020). Both, social repro-
duction in the form of the sedimentation of the class structure and social
reproduction in the form of care work are implicated in this story, and will
bring into focus the related and elevated extraction of income and wealth
from women, gender non-binary people, and individuals who identify as
Black, Brown, Indigenous, people of color. It is also a lens that will allow
us to highlight the recycling and repurposing of often contradictory racial-
ized and also patriarchal capitalist ideologies of accumulation and auster-
ity, competition and control, personal liberty and collective sacrifice.
Simply put, it is in this set of systemic features of “academic capitalism”
(Slaughter & Rhoades, 2009) as the capitalist class meets the “opportu-
nity” of the COVID-19 pandemic to consolidate class, racial, and gender
power for elites and their aspirants that we see the most recent operation
of higher education as an ideological apparatus.
While the American university has never existed outside of the interests
of capital (Geiger, 2016), resistance to the dominance of the market, and
a commitment to the pursuit of truth, creativity, innovation, and core
democratic principles are all also deeply rooted in the American academic
tradition and the latter are arguably threatened in the COVID-19 era like
PREFACE xv
never before in our history. To fail to understand this threat and to protect
against it, also portends a failure of our democratic institutions themselves.
In taking this macro view, we also align ourselves with Barrow (1990) in
his own acknowledgment that his book, like ours too, is in the tradition of
Thorstein Veblen who described the failings of higher education in his
1918 book The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the
Conduct of Universities by Business Men. In that analysis, part of a so-called
professor’s literature of protest (Teichgraeber III, in Veblen, 2015 [1918],
p. 7) now over a century old, Veblen sounded the alarm on the further
transplanting of the cultural logics of a business model into the university
during the First Gilded Age. The legacy of this early genre of professor
protest literature can be seen in the waves of books since then that have
emerged in clusters periodically over the course of the last 100 years.
Notably, these clusters of professor protest literature have coincided with
crises of capitalism and attendant class conflicts that manifest themselves
decisively in attempts to restructure higher education as a mechanism to
reengineer class relations, and to resort working class people, people of
color, women, and other non-elites into subordinate class positions. Our
book aims to contribute to that long history of professor protest literature
as yet another wave of analyses of higher education amidst a crisis of capi-
talism begins to form.
While there is already important commentary emerging on the impact
of COVID-19 on higher education, and surely more to come, this book is
written by people who remember a wholly different university than the
one that has been besieged by COVID-19, and those memories, if you
will, deeply shape our work. Both of us have benefited personally, profes-
sionally, and as members of a social class, from the massive expansion of
access to higher education in the U.S. for working and middle class stu-
dents, for immigrants, for people of color, and for women. Both of us
entered academia fully believing in our genuine entitlement to a cultural
and economic space once reserved largely for male children of white elites.
However unaware of it, we also entered as the promises of the mass demo-
cratic movement were under grave assault, and who watched, often not
knowing what we were seeing—or at least not fully aware of the magni-
tude, nature, and totality of it—the collapse of one of the most central and
beloved institutions in Western democracies just as, and arguably because
of, the very promise it was beginning to deliver on in the United States—
and to us. We have also come up alongside academics who have been
complicit, like ourselves, unintentionally or otherwise, in our failures to
xvi PREFACE
fully recognize and resist the people some of our professional leaders,
neighbors, and colleagues of the elite and not-so-elite have become: peo-
ple who had opened the door to thieves; who would hand out the robes,
literally, to plunderers intent on destroying the sanctuary; who would boil
us like frogs, as they say; who would wear other kinds of masks; who
would collude with old and new guards to relock the opening doors; who
would let us have our smaller and smaller corners of the playground until
the landscape had been transformed in their interests and there was noth-
ing left that resembled the place we had called our professional homes. We
write as academics, and for academics, who would wake up one day before
COVID-19 had befallen us, or maybe will now, and realize that the idea
of the university was one that has existed only, or at least only partially, in
our imaginations, and that if we looked closely and honestly, we would
have to admit that the university we inhabit today bears little resemblance
to the university that inspired us to choose a life of the mind.
This is not to be nostalgic, naïve, or uneducated about the history of
the university in American society and around the world. History, as we
will review in our first chapter, shows how, unlike early European universi-
ties, the American university, as Veblen (1918) would so passionately cri-
tique, has never been fully independent of business, or the interests of the
state, nor did he argue that such a relationship was possible or perhaps
even desirable. In the U.S., universities were, in fact, the first chartered
corporations (Eaton, 2021). Likewise, a voluminous body of sociological
theory and research has long taught both of us that schooling in capitalist
societies, no matter at what level, is fundamentally schooling that repro-
duces not only capitalism but the racial and gender order on which indus-
trial and now global capitalism thrives, as pioneers of this work in recent
decades, Bowles and Gintis (1977), outlined in their influential book,
Schooling in Capitalist America. Yet, the scholarly record will also show
that well before the horrors of COVID-19, there have also been distinc-
tive, profound, and wholesale shifts in the very cultural and structural
arrangements of higher education in the U.S. and their relationship to the
state and the market over the last half-century that have fundamentally
and devastatingly reconstituted the institution in ways that have further
compromised, if not mortally wounded, the core values and practices of
the traditional American university with consequences that are far-
reaching, and also consistent with changes in the academy worldwide. As
Henry Giroux (1980, p. 329, as quoted in Pucci, 2015, p. 4) explains, the
PREFACE xvii
traditional mission of the university has roots in classical Greece with a

purpose that was then, and for centuries:
[i]intrinsically political, designed to educate the citizen for intelligent and

active participation in the civic community. Moreover, intelligence was
viewed as an extension of ethics, a manifestation and demonstration of the
doctrine of the good and just life. Thus, in this perspective, education was
not meant to train. Its purpose was to cultivate the formation of virtuous
character in the ongoing quest for freedom. Therefore, freedom was always
something to be created, and the dynamic that informed the relationship
between the individual and the society was based on a continuing struggle
of a more just and decent political community.
As scholars and teachers committed to this centuries-old mission of col-

lege and university education as the unfettered practice of free inquiry,
invention, creativity, and critique as a deeply relational, humanizing,
democratizing, and even sacred endeavor, however nuanced and variably
manifested concretely, we have come to see a range of COVID-era policy
changes and shifting institutional practices in higher education as the latest
front in a 40-year bloodless war. This bloodless war has been waged in
order to dismantle a democratic socialist notion of the knowledge com-
mons, and the joyous pursuit of truth for its own sake, and with the goal
to replace it with the mass production and commodification of ideas in a
wholly consumer-oriented knowledge economy.
A View from Within
Throughout the book, we do, at times, set up Monmouth University, our
home institution, and our own pandemic experiences there, as the kalei-
doscope through which we view our analysis. We recognize that our expe-
riences, while perhaps similar to those found at other institutions of higher
education, cannot be completely generalized, nor is it our purpose to treat
our home institution as an ethnographic site. Rather, it is our intention to
offer readers a concrete path toward a better understanding of how the
mechanisms of opportunistic privatization of higher education under the
guise of catastrophe responses can manifest. We not only employ the ana-
lytical tools of critical sociology and a feminist political economy of higher
education, but do so as members of faculty leadership at a midsize,
regional, private university in the midst of the pandemic who are also
xviii PREFACE
concerned with structural changes, as well as the actors that propel those
changes in the context of higher education in the United States and
echoed in other Western democracies. We examine the ways in which
institutions of higher education have been shaped by more than forty years
of neoliberalism at this particular moment of acceleration of market-driven
thinking, a juncture where higher education met COVID-19, through a
systematic analysis of multiple categories of pre-existing, publicly available,
primary and secondary data on the state of higher education policy and
practice since the onset of the pandemic. We do not write as historians or
educational policy scholars, although we draw on their work extensively,
but as critical social scientists for those in academia and general critical
audiences who, like us, have believed in the promise of the university. Our
data sources included online reporting from the three major higher educa-
tion news sources in the United States, namely, The Chronicle of Higher
Education; Academe; and Inside Higher Education, from which we ana-
lyzed over 100 articles from March 2020 to March 2022 using the follow-
ing title keyword searches: academic freedom; austerity; budget cuts;
COVID; financial crisis; lay-offs; neoliberalism; protests; resistance; shared
governance; unions, among others. We also included the reporting on
higher education in the major American and European newspapers for
approximately the same period, including The New York Times; The
Washington Post; The Guardian, and independent critical journalism such
as The Huffington Post, and The Atlantic, among others. In addition to
pandemic era journalism within and outside of the industry, we relied on
publicly available data and published reports from U.S. academic labor
movement actors, and their observers, most notably the online repository
of the AAUP, and the National Center for the Study of Collective
Bargaining in Higher Education at Hunter College, City University of
New York, as well as data published by number of U.S. and global non-
governmental and nonprofit organizations. Further, we included the texts
of U.S. state and federal higher education policy introduced or passed
during the first two years of the pandemic, as identified by searches of
U.S. state legislature and U.S. congressional website search engines. We
also reviewed publicly available governmental statistical data from govern-
ment sources such as the U.S. Department of Education, the United
States Census Bureau, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In addi-
tion, we drew on data from intergovernmental bodies such as the United
Nations, United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),
PREFACE xix
the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, the World Bank, the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
among others. Finally, we also considered marketing and recruiting mate-
rials from select educational corporations as sources of data, materials we
received directly as academics targeted for promotional outreach as poten-
tial customers, and/or after we purposely signed up to receive marketing
materials, including information related to the content of commercial
webinars and trainings from proprietary agents.
In the reading of the documentation, particularly from the secondary
sources, we analyzed the authors’ interpretation of the empirical evidence
alongside conducting our own analysis of the original data used, whenever
possible, to guide our own interpretation. We fully recognize that no data
source is free of potential errors and biases. Certainly, our heavy reliance
on pre-existing reporting and secondary data means that our focus has
been set by observers before us, and in ways that we have foreclosed an
opportunity for a fuller or, at least, different, angle on the field in ways we
cannot know. Similarly, in no instances have our data sources been selected
randomly, nor are they representative of a universe of even secondary
sources. We also recognize that while this book includes global examples,
it is largely U.S. centric. We regret that the one year timeframe for this
project was largely insufficient for us to provide a more robust global over-
view. Additionally, given the timeliness and urgency of our analysis, it was
not possible to design our exploration around a comparative case study of
theoretically relevant institutions, as would be useful and provide a richer
exploration of the crises in more situated contexts. Instead, we have cho-
sen to take a first look at the patterns of the crisis from the 30,000 foot
view in this book in the hopes that cutting a broad swath will stimulate
opportunities for our colleagues to do deeper dives into the themes we
have identified, and using different methods to do so. Even with our lim-
ited scope, the story that emerged is one of a growing global education
industry, including a global “edu-political apparatus,” Ideland et al. (2020,
p. 2) overtaking institutions of higher education like spider webs that
overtake structures in ruin.
Our critical analysis did not only apply to the content we have read but
also to the methodology of the data we have analyzed. The historical
methodology we have used in this book allowed us to situate the current
moment in which higher education finds itself within the larger U.S. his-
torical context. Similarly, to Geiger (2019, p. x) we take a broad view of
xx PREFACE
the university as the social institution that is “embedded in society,” and

“affected by the political, social, and intellectual currents that formed the
history of the United States,” as well as the changing culture in the cur-
rent moment that Giroux (2019) has argued is marked by the rise of neo-
liberal fascism. The work of critical political economists Scott Lash and
Celia Lury (2007) on the global culture industry helped us understand the
underlying economic approach that exposes the profit motive behind the
financialized-economic logic that drives the higher- education industry
today. We also recognize that with the spread of the global capitalist sys-
tem and with that, the dominance of the neoliberal view of higher educa-
tion, the institutions of higher education globally are being shaped by
both national social, cultural, political, and economic conditions, as well as
by the global neoliberal currents, as some of our examples will show. In
this book, we have also deeply engaged with an examination of the exist-
ing critical scholarship on higher education which served in part as the
theoretical foundation for our analysis. Aside from the scholars we have
raised up in these opening pages here, our analysis in the pages to follow
are informed by the work on commodification of knowledge in higher
education (Jacob, 2003) and the immaterial labor (Hardt & Negri, 2004)
that translates into a variety of unpaid labor practices and has helped us
understand underlying causes to a “diseased” higher education today.
Lastly, our analysis has been informed by our experiences as faculty
leaders drawn to resist disaster capitalism in higher education out of deep
concern for what might come of institutions like our own, and many oth-
ers, as a result of pandemic politics. That concern motivated us to consider
a broader, systematic investigation of the forces at work that are funda-
mentally reshaping our own lived experiences, and those of our colleagues
and students at similarly situated institutions. Monmouth University was
initially founded as an “Emergency Junior College” in the midst of the
Great Depression in 1933 as one of the first federally funded junior col-
leges in New Jersey whose goal was to employ unemployed teachers to
instruct high-school students who were unemployable (Lynch, 1970,
p. 10). When federal funding ended in 1936, the Board of Trustees
decided to continue Monmouth Junior College as an independent, non-
sectarian, co-educational college with the promise of small grants-in-aid
from the Monmouth County Board of Chosen Freeholders and a modest
tuition charge. In the 1960s, the New Jersey State legislature allowed for
the privatization of New Jersey colleges and universities and laid the
PREFACE xxi
groundwork for the marketization of higher education. In our view, our

own institutions, like many others, have become, as Welch (2015, para.
28) might say, in-between and unsettled place[s],” institutions where “the
expansion of higher education across advanced capitalist countries” [has
helped bring about] the formation of a new social group of students whose
class position and prospects are not so clearly determined.” As is the case
for so many faculty teaching in the U.S., “most of [our] students were not
[and still are not] being groomed to exercise or serve as administrators of
power. They were instead [and still are] on track to ‘become some form of
work,’ their social location as students ‘transitional’” (Welch, 2015, para.
28). We share our institutional positionality here as backdrop for the read-
ers to better understand the experiential ground on which we examine the
wide range of archival materials, and the ways in which our analyses of
materials that profile a diverse set of institutions in the U.S. and across
select Western democracies such as Canada, the UK, Germany, and
Australia, for example, suggests larger patterns at work.
Finally, this book is a kind of real-time repository of unfinished analysis
that can set a framework for future documentation, analysis and interpre-
tation of what happened in this age of COVID-19, a historical moment
for disaster opportunism more broadly. Indeed, as we go to press, the
Russian war against Ukraine still rages, the U.S. Supreme Court over-
turned Roe v. Wade in a historic decision resulting in decimation of nearly
a half century of abortion rights, and Elon Musk has engaged in legal
battle over his 44 billion purchase of Twitter, initially pledging to create a
more “democratic” communication platform by easing limits on speech.
While this book is written by academics, and clearly for academics who are
also committed teachers and researchers, this book is also, and in no way
less so, for students and their families who find themselves victimized by a
system of higher education corporatization that is not disconnected from
these monumental moments of the pandemic era, among others, to the
extent that they are manifestations of a larger set of global relationships
implicated in racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism. Additionally, this
book is for staff and other essential low wage workers in higher education
that are important links to many other communities that find themselves
impoverished and victimized by the neoliberal response of higher educa-
tion leadership to COVID-19. In the end we find, much like journalism
before, that much has been “hollowed out” and transformed across a
range of sectors of society to serve private rather than public interests, with
xxii PREFACE
consequences that are hard to fathom. In the case of higher education, as

in the case of journalism gutted by the private equity and corporatization,
the ultimate victim of the grand project (Letizia, 2016), as this book
chronicles in the first two years of the pandemic, is democratic society and
democratic principles themselves. The hope remains, as we argue in our
closing remarks, that change is still possible through collective action
aimed at building, perhaps truly for the first time, universities for the peo-
ple as pillars of democratic life. We hope you’ll join us.
West Long Branch, NJ, USA Johanna E. Foster

May 2022 Marina Vujnovic
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank all the friends and colleagues who offered
their expertise, insight, and solidarity over the course of the two years it
took us to conceptualize and complete this book. We are especially
indebted to our colleagues in FAMCO, our faculty union, and our Faculty
Council with whom we have had the honor of working, before and during
the pandemic, to protect and advance the ideals of a university in a demo-
cratic society. Our gratitude to J. Michael Ryan and George Ritzer for
graciously providing the Foreword, and to Stephanie Hall, Elizabeth
Tandy Sherman, and Nancy Welch, whose work we particularly rely on
throughout the book. We thank Ken Mitchell for setting us on the path to
Thorstein Veblen in the initial stages of our research, and to Nichole Smith
for her invaluable research assistance throughout. Our thanks also go to
our editors at Palgrave for seeing the value of the project, and for their
guidance and generosity along the way. Our deepest appreciation for our
families who, in a time when so many of us turned to those most dear in
the face of unthinkable challenges, made room for us to find our way
through, in part, by working on this project. Finally, we thank one another
for the encouragement, sisterhood, and camaraderie that set us on the
path of writing this book, a path that led to personal and scholarly discov-
eries that have been among the most eye opening of our lives. The journey
brought us closer together as scholars and friends, and made us more
determined than ever not to accept the status quo, but to fight for change
in our academic home and local communities in the hope that, shoulder
to shoulder, and joined with other kindred souls, we can make our small
contribution towards achieving a better society for all.
xxv
Contents
1 Introduction:
Disaster Capitalism Comes to Higher
Education 1
2 A
Newer Version of an Old Beast: The Higher
Education Disaster Before COVID 29
3 Bringing the F.U.D to Thin the Ranks 57
4 “Cut
to Grow” and the Spider Web of the New Global
TEMPS105
5 Laundering
Coercion: Restart Planning, “Pandemic
Task Forces,” and the Dismantling of Shared
Governance145
6 Campuses
Respond to COVID: “Pandemia”
Not Making the Science Grades155
7 Online
Instruction and the “Hyflex Teaching ‘Shock
Doctrine’”167
xxvii
xxviii Contents
8 Ghosts
of Intended Consequences: How OPMs’ Stealth
Business Model is Redefining Higher Education181
9 Aspiring Diploma Mills Don’t Stop for Pandemics203
10 Tuition
Increases Also Don’t Stop for Pandemics:
Student Debt Realities in the Age of COVID-19219
11 Sacrificial Lambs233
12 Resisting the Spider Web of Pandemic Opportunism265
13 After Shock: Our Stories, Our Future287
References319
Index371
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Disaster Capitalism Comes

to Higher Education
The Eye of the Storm

As we write, not only have we weathered the most devastating global
storm in a century, but there seems to be no end in sight. As the virus has
plowed through populations across the planet, activists and scholars alike
have banged the drumbeat of analysis of the ways in which the pandemic,
in its disproportionate and deadly impact on Black and Brown people, on
working class and economically marginalized people, and undocumented
people, has laid bare the systemic inequalities that have long organized
American society, and now a global society. A combination of overrepre-
sentation as essential workers; the lack of access to healthcare and the
relationship to underlying health conditions; environmental racism and
workplace health hazards and the impact on exposure; the psychological
and emotional experiences of racism and classism and impact on health
that turns into pre-existing conditions; environmental racism and residen-
tial segregation as related to population density; the risk of exposure living
in multigenerational households; along with other persistent manifesta-
tions of racialized income and wealth inequality have devastated commu-
nities of color in the United States, and around the world. As we go to
press, inequality is playing out in real time with global disparities in access
to the COVID vaccine. While many people in the West are getting booster
shots, the vast majority of people of color in Africa, Asia and elsewhere do
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
M. Vujnovic, J. E. Foster, Higher Education and Disaster
Capitalism in the Age of COVID-19, Palgrave Critical University
Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12370-2_1
2 M. VUJNOVIC AND J. E. FOSTER
not have access to the life-saving vaccine, and The World Health
Organization (WHO) has called the crisis a “two-track” pandemic (UN
News, 2021, para. 5). Tedros Adhanom, WHO Director General, said,
“The biggest barrier to ending the pandemic remains sharing: of doses, of
resources, of technology” (UN News, 2021, para. 16).
Among the COVID-19 survivors, financial insecurity looms, and mil-
lions have faced crushing economic blows. According to the U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics (2020), the U.S. economy lost 22 million jobs from
February to April 2020, and the loss was greatest for low-wage workers
and among Black and Latinx populations, as well as among those who
were not born in the United States (also Handwerker et al., 2020; Center
on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2021). While some jobs have been
regained since, tens of millions of people have lost employment during
the two years of the pandemic, whether temporarily or permanently
according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (2021). The
report also found that the situation would have been much worse if fed-
eral, state, and local governments had not stepped in to ease the hard-
ship. Clear credit went to the American Rescue Plan Act enacted on
March 11, 2021 that especially helped people in low-income households
feel less housing and food insecure. Globally, according to the
International Labor Organization and reported by the United Nations,
the pandemic pushed global unemployment over 200 million (United
Nations, 2021).
Of all the people who have lost their jobs during the COVID-19 crisis,
women workers experienced a decidedly disproportionate loss in the
crosshairs of a global feminized service economy and the continuing
assignment of women to unpaid and otherwise devalued social reproduc-
tive labor. According to a report from Oxfam International published in
April 2021, women lost 64 million jobs, a whopping 5% of all jobs held by
women globally, compared to 3.9% held by men (Thériault & Sakakeeny,
2021). These data do not cover job alterations and changes for women in
jobs in the so-called informal economy such as domestic workers. In a
sobering study, The National Women’s Law Center found that 2.3 million
women in the United States left the workforce between February 2020
and February 2021 altogether so that they could perform unpaid care
work for their children, the elderly, and other family members during the
pandemic National Women’s Law Center (2021). The magnitude of the
impact of COVID-19 on women is, indeed, global. For instance, the
1 INTRODUCTION: DISASTER CAPITALISM COMES TO HIGHER EDUCATION 3
Center for Sustainable Employment at the Azim Premji University in

India published a report titled State of Working India 2021 shows that
during the first lockdown in 2020, 47% of women were pushed out of
employment compared to 7% of men. The impact was also felt most
among the poor as rural women in informal jobs accounted for nearly 80%
of all job losses (Azim Premji University, 2021; UN Women, 2021). On
top of the hardships of unemployment and underemployment, millions
have been forced out of their homes through evictions, unable to make
the rent despite pandemic relief funding and rent freezes (Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities, 2021). The impact on economic security,
and social and personal stability and growth, is also evident in the millions
of school children in the U.S and around the world sequestered in remote
learning, an educational and also gendered social reproductive labor crisis
that continues to make headline news (Goldstein & Parlapiano, 2021).
The educational sector has been impacted in varied ways. For instance,
at the college level, the pandemic resulted in a drop-off in college enroll-
ment. This fact speaks to a significantly different and all-encompassing
impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it is typical in economic down-
turns for many to choose to return to school. For instance, the United
States Census Bureau reported that enrollment in postsecondary educa-
tion during the 2008 Great Recession actually grew (United States Census
Bureau, 2018). At the postsecondary education level in the U.S. alone, 16
million college students reported that they had to, or chose to, defer col-
lege in the fall of 2020 for financial or health reasons, or both (United
States Census Bureau, 2020). The United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimated that more than 600 mil-
lion children were affected by school closures and the lack of technology
to access remote options even when available during 2020 (UNESCO,
2020). A more devastating report of the pandemic effects on education
was released in December of 2021 titled, The State of the Global Education
Crisis: A Path to Recovery jointly prepared by UNESCO, UNICEF, and
the World Bank. The report argued that the COVID-19 pandemic caused
global disruption in education that is unparalleled, affecting 1.6 billion
learners. In addition, the World Economic Forum (2022, para. 1), citing
this report argues, “this generation of students now risks losing $17 tril-
lion in lifetime earnings in present value, or about 14 percent of today’s
global GDP, because of COVID-19-related school closures and economic
shocks,” a number that is almost double the previous estimates.
As data on health effects and economic consequences of the pandemic

on individuals and families are still being gathered, it would not be unrea-
sonable to predict that the impact on opportunities for social mobility and
wealth accumulation for ordinary people will continue to be foreclosed in
ways that may have lifelong and negative effects that reverberate for gen-
erations. Yet, while the U.S and global 99% are facing extraordinary risks
of downward mobility, and millions facing economic tragedy as a result of
COVID-19, we have seen the global 1% increase their wealth by a magni-
tude that is difficult to fathom intellectually and even more difficult to
digest morally. In perhaps one of the most explicit examples of disaster
opportunism in world history, the contemporary robber barons of global
capitalism’s Second Gilded Age, in their positions as captains of global
technology conglomerates, pharmaceutical giants, and here in the United
States, gun manufacturers, or gig economy moguls, for example, have
profited from the pandemic at the same time, and literally at the expense
of the majority of people suffering. Indeed, Forbes (2021) reported that
while 22 million Americans lost their jobs, 650 billionaires saw their net
worth increase by 1.2 trillion dollars, from 3.4 trillion at the beginning of
2020 to 4.6 trillion in April of 2021. A great irony of our daily existence
in the age of neoliberalism has come in the form of global titan spaceship
races from two of the biggest gainers out of the top 20. Jeff Bezos, the first
person in history to be worth more than 200 billion dollars, according to
Forbes’ estimates, and the top pandemic gainer, Elon Musk, the Tesla and
SpaceX chief, who in April of 2022 acquired Twitter for 44 billion dollars
promising more free speech, competed successfully for airwaves with their
space tourism joyrides designed just for the wealthy against the backdrop
of what was by then nearly one million people killed by COVID-19 at
home, and more than 6.23 million worldwide, according to data from the
World Health Organization. All the while the carnage of the Russian inva-
sion of Ukraine, arguably the largest war in Europe since World War II,
has allowed the rich to get richer from both war and pandemic profiteer-
ing that has brought death and misery to so many.
As the extraordinary gap between the astronomically wealthy and the
rest of us widened in the throes of the pandemic, more and more people
in the United States came to focus on the entrenched structural inequali-
ties that have long been right in front of our eyes. In the United States, a
nation in pandemic lockdown re-awakened to the ever-present realities of
white supremacy, also plainly evident, but continually unnoticed or unac-
knowledged by many American white people. Building on decades of
post-Civil Rights era social movement work around police brutality, racial-
ized mass incarceration, and immigrant detention, a movement for racial
justice reignited in the United States summer of 2020 after the murder of
George Floyd by white police officers in Minneapolis.
In the midst of that, another movement, an anti-vaccine movement
loomed large and promised to define another anti-truth, anti-science
movement in American history, along with recently re-awakened anti-
abortion movement reaching all the way to the United States Supreme
Court. Almost a year and a half after the COVID-19 vaccine first became
available in the United States at the end of April 2022, only 66.6% of the
population nationally, and 65.8% globally, were vaccinated according to
Ritchie et al. (2022) and we remain embroiled in a stunning national and
global debate over vaccine and mask mandates, with some U.S. states like
Florida and Texas going so far as to ban both at the time of writing. For
many critical analysts like ourselves, the discourse that undergirds the mass
refusals to be vaccinated or masked emerged as proxies for a commitment
to a kind of racist, nationalist masculinist libertarianism that in arguably
assuming no such thing as a social contract, poisons the foundations of
our democratic institutions, and threatens the very notion of a common
good like none the nation has seen outside of the context of overt civil war.
While there has been a good deal of analysis of the “twin pandemics” of
COVID and white supremacy (McCoy & Lee, 2021) in recent public
discourse, as well as their relationship to each other, the extent to which
these intertwined pandemics have enriched the already shamefully and
unimaginably wealthy robber barons, and the brutal logics of global capi-
talism at the bedrock of the latest chapter of their serial looting, has been
less so. Nonetheless, it would be difficult to point to a set of major insti-
tutional arrangements in the United States, or in other Western democra-
cies, that have not been significantly altered, at least temporarily if not
permanently, by the pandemic and the relations of predatory global capi-
talism that provided both the staging grounds and the battlefields for
opportunistic disaster response campaigns that are simultaneously racial-
ized and gendered, including the structural and cultural arrangements of
higher education. Indeed, in the same way that the global pandemic has
made it no longer possible for many in the U.S. to uphold the fantasy that
they live in a healthy post-Civil Rights era equal opportunity multiracial
democracy, the range of predatory and otherwise morally suspect
COVID-19 policy decisions executed by a consolidated class of higher
education administrators (Welch, 2015, para. 11) and allied state actors in
what we might call an “academic Hurricane Katrina,” have exposed long-

standing structures and cultures of inequality in the academy that made it
difficult to maintain a related fantasy: the existence of such a thing as the
liberal arts university (Volk & Benedix, 2020), protected enough from the
intrusions of the market and also the state, governed by faculty, and with
the primary mission to promote the search for truth for its own sake as a
duty to the common good.
For example, and as we will explore at greater length in the chapters to
come, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP, 2021b)
has documented, among other deeply disturbing consequences for higher
education, the profound impact of purported COVID-related policy
changes on faculty compensation and benefits in the United States.
Findings from an analysis of The Annual Report on the Economic Status of
the Profession, 2019–2020, which included data from over 990 U.S. col-
leges and universities, showed that 55% of institutions had implemented
salary freezes or salary reductions since the pandemic began; 28% had
eliminated or reduced some kind of fringe benefits, and nearly 20% had
terminated appointments or denied contract renewals to at least some of
their full-time non-tenure-track faculty. Almost 5% had terminated the
appointments of at least some tenure-track faculty.
The realities of COVID-era salary freezes and reductions, furloughs,
and layoffs in the United States are not limited to faculty. Indeed, non-
faculty employees across the country have also been hit hard. According to
The Washington Post analysis of federal labor data, office and administrative
staff in the U.S. that work in higher education and those with annual earn-
ings near $40,000 were the ones impacted the most by the pandemic
furloughs and cuts (Douglas-Gabriel & Fowers, 2020). Here, again, often
framed as pandemic-induced policy change necessities, these cuts have
occurred alongside other so-called austerity measure responses that have
made headlines, both inside and outside of higher education. The evi-
dence will show that the richest colleges and universities didn’t need to cut
budgets but they nevertheless did at the expense of their least paid employ-
ees (Svirnovskiy, 2021).
As we will also find, the AAUP has documented the impact on shared
governance, and the distorted bloom of opportunity the epidemic has
ostensibly brought forth to “right-size” faculty via downsizing, mergers
and acquisitions, or other institutional restructuring mechanisms that have
resulted in the firing of tenured faculty, the elimination of traditional lib-
eral arts programs not easily commodified, and even the shuttering of the
institution’s doors altogether with little regard for the impact on students.
In their May 2021 report, the AAUP documented the shocking number
of assaults on shared governance, the keystone tenet distinguishing the
culture of academia from both the culture of the market and the state, in
just the first year of the pandemic alone. The report cited the troubling
number of cases in the United States where university administrators used
the pretext of the COVID-19 crisis to initiate or accelerate academic pro-
gram closures, mergers, and consolidations, and the termination of faculty
without the input and shared decision-making from faculty leadership
demanded by the long-standing central principles and practices of shared
governance. These practices as a set of normative standards, not coinci-
dentally, were established by the AAUP as part of its very founding in
1915 in response to increasing attacks on academic freedom that came on
the heels of the growing corporatization of the American Academy in the
wake of the First Gilded Age (Washburn, 2005). The Association acknowl-
edges that in many of the reported cases, their concern was not that the
economic realities underpinning the COVID-era policy changes were not
real, but rather that the established culture of shared governance had been
dispensed with in what has amounted to grave breaches of professional
ethics and established practice. In fact, in their disturbing review, they are
clear to assert that the COVID-19 wave of attacks on shared governance
in the United States is one that the AAUP has witnessed only two other
times in U.S. history, namely during the McCarthy Era, and then again in
the catastrophe of Katrina and the sickening disaster opportunism that
plagued New Orleans, including the disaster profiteering that would
engulf colleges and universities in the aftermath.
Also not coincidentally, as we will explore further, and in a frightening
echo of the McCarthy Era repression, these recent attacks on shared gov-
ernance have paralleled national and global assaults on academia and on
academic freedom. Most alarmingly, in the context of the rise of national-
ist white supremacist attacks on higher education, have been the attacks
on what is becoming popularly known as “critical race theory,” under-
stood across academic disciplines as short-hand for a wide-ranging and
long-standing set of critical social theories that have their roots squarely in
the nineteenth and early twentieth century sociological theories of racial-
ized and gendered capitalism (DuBois, 1903, 1940, 1945a, b; Gilman,
1898; Cooper, 1892; Wells-Barnett, 1892; Martineau, 1837), paradigm-
shifting ideas that would then sprout the powerhouse social and political
traditions of contemporary racial formation theories, as well as
intersectional feminist and queer theory. While these attacks, including

actions on the part of U.S. state legislators to ban the teaching of bodies
of knowledge that describe, explain and/or critique the power relations of
racialized and gendered capitalism, past or present, are not altogether new,
in chapters to come, we will explore them further and their connection to
seemingly unrelated COVID-19 responses in the academy.
On top of a wave of attacks on faculty job security, shared governance,
and academic freedom, U.S. colleges, and university executives, either as
accomplices to, or with their accomplices in, the political elite, have
responded to the deadly public health crisis in other ways that expose a
moral bankruptcy within many of our institutions of higher learning in
advanced stage global capitalism. Rather than moving swiftly to remote
learning, for example, or clear out dorms and athletic facilities as the virus
was detected, hundreds of colleges across the United States made Faustian
bargains, gambling with the lives of students, faculty, and staff by mandat-
ing or encouraging in-person instruction, promoting on-campus dorm-
ing, and continuing athletic competition in the throes of a worldwide
deadly outbreak. Simultaneously, and to the shock and outrage of many,
hundreds of colleges and universities refused to conduct mandatory
COVID-19 testing. Nadworny and McMinn (2020, para. 2) analyzed the
data from The College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College, and con-
cluded that “2 out of 3 colleges with in-person classes either have no clear
testing plan or are testing only students who are at risk.” In addition,
widespread inefficiencies in contact tracing systems prevailed on college
campuses and in the United States at large (Clark et al., 2021). Balthaser
and Mullen, in their fall 2020 article in Academe found that by mid-
September 2020, the number of people on campuses reportedly infected
with COVID amounted to roughly the population of two large state uni-
versities, or five mid-size universities, or thirty small liberal arts colleges.
According to The New York Times interactive “Tracking Coronavirus
Cases at U.S. Colleges and Universities,” by May 26, 2021, 700,000 stu-
dents tested positive for COVID-19, 260,000 more cases since January 1,
which was a 64% increase since the end of 2020. In addition, The New York
Times identified 100 deaths on campuses in the United States that had
occurred primarily in 2020 and primarily among employees (NYT, 2021a,
para. 6). These numbers are surely undercounts given the anemic and
politically charged testing and tracing protocols which began disappearing
as many institutions of higher education dispensed with COVID
monitoring, tracing, testing, and masking as we approached the end of the

spring 2022 semester.
Moreover, in what many considered an additional stomach-turning
attack, this time on the financial health of students and their families, the
COVID-19 crisis coincided with, increases in student tuition, and was even
cited as the reason why these increases were needed. Even if 2020–2021
tuition increases were historically low, those increases nonetheless came at a
time when 18 million adults in America, or 1 in 9, were reporting not hav-
ing enough food to eat (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2021; Kerr
& Wood, 2021). Along with students and their families, faculty, university
staff, and the families of academic workers across the nation have also not
been spared the structural violence set in motion by these widespread, ethi-
cally suspect, and hotly contested, disaster capitalist policy decisions.
In the rest of this introduction, we revisit the tenets of disaster capital-
ism as outlined by Klein (2007), and others that followed her work. We
also set the stage for a more detailed analysis within the context of the
existing scholarship of neoliberalism and disaster capitalism in higher edu-
cation, expanding the conceptual framing of that work toward a feminist
intersectional political economy. We will also outline some key ways in
which racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism has played out in higher
education just prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, and we end with a
short preview of the book’s remaining chapters that dive more deeply into
what has unfolded in higher education since those fateful days in
March 2020.
Disaster Capitalism: A Primer

In their chapter from Kenneth J. Saltman’s 2007 volume, Schooling and
the Politics of Disaster, Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon decon-
struct the Greek and Latin meanings of “disaster” and argue that “disas-
ter” refers to an event that was preceded by a warning that was not heeded,
particularly a prior warning from the planets or stars. Essentially, “disas-
ter” is the result of ignoring the signs. They also deconstruct the early
Greek and Latin meanings of “monster” as a figure that comes as a warn-
ing, or “monster” as another kind of sign, while further reminding us of
the roots of the meaning of “crisis” to be in “choice.” Nearly two decades
ago, in her path-breaking book, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism, Naomi Klein (2007, p. 6) defined disaster capitalism as
“orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events,
combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportuni-

ties.” Enacted by capitalist elites and their apologists, “disaster capitalism”
is a particular manifestation of neoliberalism, or free-market fundamental-
ism, that, says Klein, has at its core the practice of the “policy trinity” of
deregulation, privatization, and cuts to social spending of the cruelest kind
under the cover of a collective crisis. The fuel for the policy trinity flame is
the use or creation of fear and chaos during times of disaster to coerce a
population to agree to what would otherwise be politically unacceptable
and morally unimaginable in times of stability. Whether it is a natural
disaster, an economic crisis, political unrest, or a pandemic outbreak, for
example, the goal of disaster profiteering is to capitalize, literally, on the
crisis by imposing “emergency measures” that are explicitly intended to
create what Klein (2007, p. 175) calls “democracy free zones” in the ser-
vice of essentially capitalist takeovers that Klein also wryly dubs “capitalist
makeovers” (Klein, 2007, p. 199). In her analysis of over 15 cases of disas-
ter capitalism at work all over the globe from the early 1970s to the mil-
lennium, Klein demonstrates the eerily similar ways in which capitalist,
political and intellectual elites have sought to deliberately destroy the eco-
nomic and political infrastructures of communities, and, indeed, entire
nations, in order to establish, through painful and often by brutal means,
“clean canvasses” for capitalist reconstructions that not only rely on the
state to do the bidding of corporate elites but, even more fundamentally,
to privatize governance itself.
More specifically, as Klein (2007) concluded, this deliberate ransacking,
or calculated taking of the commons of all kinds under the guise of “aus-
terity” or “structural adjustments” or, in the United States, for example,
the “War on Drugs” or the “War on Terror,” has unfolded in various ways
over the past 50 years, but with three main steps in a similar process. The
first step involves the occurrence of a disaster, the scale of which could vary
so long as there is enough fear, chaos, and break from the normal routine
of social life that an opening presents itself to prey on people’s confusion,
exhaustion, and understandable anxiety. It is sometimes enough to simply
have people hyper-focused on the crisis to be distracted from, or pragmati-
cally disinterested in, the mundane, technical, bureaucratic, overly ratio-
nalized, non-transparent, and, frankly, less “exciting” business of state
functions to commandeer governance and raid the public coffers while
Rome burns. The second step is the imposition of what Milton Friedman
termed “shock therapy,” or ruthless, “pure capitalist” economic policies,
and what Naomi Klein (2007, p. 8) termed “shock doctrine,” to raid the
state of its public goods, and partially or fully privatize state functions and
thus governance overall. In effect, the second step, while billed as “recon-
struction,” is better understood as a capturing of the commons (Klein,
2007, p. 10). The most obvious, sinister, and “shocking” example of this
process, said Klein at the time of her writing, had been the outsourcing of
the U.S. military since 9/11 and the shift to constant privatized war. The
third step is to use the state apparatus, or a newly privatizing state appara-
tus, to deliver corporate-statist forms of torture to ensure the population
submits to the “shock therapy” of what is, in effect, state-sanctioned loot-
ing. These torture regimes, enacted by militaries, police and secret police,
and death squads against one’s own people, are often precipitated by the
suspension of civil liberties as a “crisis accommodation” that legitimizes
mass surveillance of the population, round-ups, detentions, and mass
incarceration of dissenters and “surplus” populations, as well as targeted,
and often extensive, killings of pro-democracy and anti-corporate sover-
eignty resisters.
In Klein’s (2007) formulation, disaster capitalism as a set of morally
bankrupt economic and political practices is the enactment of market fun-
damentalism animated by the opportunity of a crisis. In short, disaster
capitalism is neoliberalism in a slightly different outfit. Described by Pierre
Bourdieu (1998) as the most dominant discourse of the twentieth cen-
tury, as powerful and totalizing as the discourse of Christianity in another
age, sociologist Lawrence Busch (2014) argues that neoliberalism itself
has been alternatively and simultaneously understood as an ideology, an
economic philosophy, a plan of action, and a social movement. As an “ide-
ological crusade,” argued Klein, it is a “shape-shifter, forever changing its
name and switching identities” (p. 17). Yet, underscoring all is a belief in
the primacy of markets over all other forms of social relations in promot-
ing human freedom and individual liberty, and the related belief that free-
dom is dependent on liberty defined as freedom from state imposition on
individual choice, as well as from state regulation of markets. In fact, the
faith in the power of a “free” market as the path to not only unbridled
wealth accumulation but personal liberty and a stable social order—to the
extent that neoliberalists believe there is such a thing as the “social”—is
both so strong and so void of the need of empirical evidence from their
adherents that numerous social theorists understand this ideological posi-
tion to be akin to a kind of religious fundamentalism. Hence the phrase
market fundamentalism.
Certainly, critical analyses of the centrality of what would become the

individualistic god-less worship of wealth accumulation and the sanctifica-
tion of the wealthy in American society are nothing new, among the most
famous of those early treatises coming from classical sociologist and politi-
cal economist, Max Weber, in his enormously influential study of early
American Calvinism, industrialization and increasing rationalization in The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). Unlike the proponents
of the values and beliefs of the nineteenth and early twentieth century clas-
sical liberalism that Weber, along with, of course, Marx and Engels
(1845–1896) would also trounce, proponents of a more modern neoliberal
fundamentalism do not just eschew state intervention into the workings of
markets, or traffic in anorexic conceptualizations of “the social body,” but
also aim to apply market logics to the state itself, understanding governance
to be fair game to commodify. In this sense, neoliberalism, also called neo-
conservatism or Reaganomics in the U.S., and Thatcherism in the UK,
aims to “liberate world markets,” or “free corporations” from the state by
privatizing, or capturing the state itself. Pucci (2015, p. 9), following
Barber (1998), also argues that neoliberalism “amounts to the dismantling
of various national civic societies that are replaced by private enterprise.” In
other words, the state should not simply be hands-off but should be an
active engine of privatization, and ultimately outsourced as well.
Along with overvaluing profit over people, faith in competition, and
the principles of rationalization, neoliberalism also posits an essential irre-
futable logic that can overcome human knowledge, which neoliberalists
find to be always limited and inferior to “market order reasoning” (Busch,
2014). Pucci (2015) cites Bourdieu’s 1998 definition of neoliberalism
from Le Monde Diplomatique, and argues that
“it is clear from the outset that neoliberalism works as an all-encompassing

belief system. The claims that neoliberalism makes cannot be proven in a
traditional scientific sense, but it does inspire in its adherents a sense of sci-
entific precision in the claims of truth. Bourdieu (1998) stresses that beyond
the policies and rhetoric of neoliberalism, there is a near-spiritual commit-
ment to the principles of the private market that drives the neoliberal dis-
course and that the logic of the market is irresistible” (Pucci, 2015, pp. 6–7).
As a plan of action, neoliberalism thus demands that social institutions

be reshaped to fit a “logical” market model and that selves are to be recon-
structed as isolated and entrepreneurial. In both cases, those goals are met
by intervening institutionally to change laws, policies, administrations,
and technologies (Busch, 2014). In this way, we can understand David
Harvey’s (2005) influential argument that neoliberalism is, in fact, a kind

of governance. Equally important here is Calhoun’s (2006) work on mar-
ket fundamentalism and the ways it promotes the privatization of risk with
brutal, and even life and death, consequences for ordinary people to whom
political and economic elites transfer, or offload, or externalize the costs of
their frontier speculations.
In addition, we find value in Bader’s (2020) commentary on the execu-
tion of neoliberal values and practices in the context of the pandemic. We
can also understand how market fundamentalism, as a social movement,
combined with ideologies and practices of white supremacy and Christian
fundamentalisms in the global crisis of capitalism, might evolve into a kind
of racist, evangelical, libertarian reordering of the empire, with “freedom
to profit” as its unifying cry. Short of that, there is no question that for
neoliberal true believers, “social justice as both a concept and a set of poli-
cies is rejected as a mirage” (Busch, 2014, p. 18) as the only freedom to
champion is the freedom to accumulate. There is no room to imagine a
cause for freedom “from,” say, hunger, poverty, unemployment, exploita-
tion, housing insecurity, wage theft; price gouging; educational malprac-
tice and inequality; reckless exposure to disease, or looting of one’s
precious resources, for example.
As we investigate how these tactics have been trained on institutions in
higher education in the United States and other Western nations during
the COVID-19 pandemic, it will be further troubling to learn that the
neoliberal ideas and values that undergird disaster capitalist attacks, includ-
ing the ones we argue are currently underway in higher education, were
birthed, in large part, by intellectuals themselves in the 1930s, gaining
traction in the 1950s postwar period. According to Busch (2014), the
origins of market fundamentalist programs can be traced to the inter-war
era in the United States. Those origins were a result of a combination of
concerns by the elites, including concerns about increasing state power in
relation to world authoritarianism, but also a crisis of capitalism brought
out by the compression of economic inequalities made possible by the
New Deal. Convening in Paris 1938, and again in 1947 in the form of the
Mont Pelerin Society in Switzerland, leading philosophers and econo-
mists, including University of Chicago economics professors, Milton
Friedman and his mentor Friedrich Hayek, fleshed out the vision of an
economic philosophy that, taken-for-granted today as gospel among
legions, was for many years considered too cruel and extremist to make for
legitimate economic policy (Klein, 2007).
Historian Nancy MacClean (2017) offers a somewhat different account

of the rise of market fundamentalism in the U.S., situating it in a radical
libertarian goal of “freeing” capitalism from democracy. It’s a goal that, as
MacLean so deftly tells, has been shaped by the truly extremist anti-dem-
ocratic and plutocratic ideas of University of Virginia economics professor,
James McGill Buchanan, who, in the 1950s, set sail to defend what he felt
was an increasingly tyrannical turn by the federal government away from
what he believed to be the unalienable right of the individual to be free
of the state’s imposition on the right to accumulate. It was a threat that
Buchanan foresaw as the State of Virginia was compelled by the
U.S. Supreme Court’s second Brown v Board of Education decision in
1955 to desegregate its public schools. Buchanan, MacClean takes care to
point out, espoused a philosophy of political economy not wholly mapped
on to Milton Friedman’s own extreme market fundamentalism so often
credited for policy changes that she argues are more closely traced to
Buchanan. More accurately, as she maps out, Buchanan, whose vision we
will later see has since been further transformed by the likes of the Koch
brothers, was an ideological descendent of James C. Calhoun, the early
nineteenth century political scientist, U.S. senator from South Carolina,
and later U.S. Vice President whom historian Richard Hofstadter called
“the Marx of the master class” (MacLean, 2017, p. 1). As MacLean’s
analysis of the rise of the radical libertarian right in the United States
makes evident, for a philosophical moment, radical libertarianism parts
ways with neoliberal market fundamentalism in its assertion that the power
of people to collectively organize against the unfettered wealth accumula-
tion of an oligarchy is the primary threat to social order. This point of
divergence will be crucial to understanding the tributaries of billionaire
power that would feed into command and control of the global educa-
tional market spider web during the pandemic.
In any case, the key tenets of radical libertarianism and neoliberalism,
which have now converged in the space of COVID disaster opportunism,
were eventually popularized by intellectual elites. For the Mont Pelerin
masterminds, it would take 30 years from their founding gathering for
ideas once assessed as brutal and crackpot to have their day in 1980 to
become the dominating political and economic philosophy on the globe.
But once they did, and with the concomitant rise of the Buchanan tribu-
tary of radical anti-democratic libertarianism, it would mean four more
decades of some of the most utterly reprehensible campaigns by corporate
elites, in partnership with state actors, to capture the public trusts of
nations and peoples around the world in ways that have led to the massive
expansion of global inequalities, including a preventable plague of impov-
erishment, starvation, disease; harrowing political and social unrest; persis-
tent violence and war; and a worldwide climate crisis that adds the risk of
needless suffering and death to all that lives in our ecosystems on top of
the needless human suffering it has generated. But while they waited for
their faith in free-market fundamentalism to be embraced by a growing
number of political elites positioned to execute the looting of the com-
mons closer to home, the Friedman wing turned to the 1970s economic
disasters unfolding in Latin America to test out the neoliberal “capitalist
makeover” in the Southern Cone.
What is particularly disturbing for academics such as ourselves is to
learn that the core architects of these makeovers in Latin America, and for
decades to come around the world, were neoliberal economists from, or
affiliated with, the University of Chicago, now notoriously known around
the world as “The Chicago Boys,” and later neoliberal economists from
the University of California at Berkeley, to be known as the Berkeley
Mafia. The extraordinary half-century influence of this small group of aca-
demic elites, and their protégées worldwide, and their direct ties to both
the state and industry in engineering U.S.-led corporate campaigns to
privatize and loot nation-states in crises or that could be brought to crisis,
cannot be overstated. In her analysis of the deployment of “shock doc-
trine” in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, Klein describes how the
Chicago Boys were able to “junta-hop their way through the seventies,”
noting that “[a]lmost everywhere that right-wing dictatorships were in
power, the University of Chicago presence could be felt” (2007, p. 166).
Further, linking the practices of these first “successful” acts of disaster
practices to the larger playbook of neoliberalism Klein (2007) concludes:
In much of the Southern Hemisphere, neoliberalism is frequently spoken of

as ‘the second colonial pillage’: in the first pillage, the riches were seized from
the land, and in the second they were stripped from the state. After every one
of these profit frenzies come the promises: next time, there will be firm laws
in place before a country’s assets are sold off, and the entire process will be
watched over by eagle-eyed regulators and investigators with unimpeachable
ethics. Next time there will be ‘institution building’ before privatizations (to
use the post-Russia parlance). But calling for law and order after the profits
have all been moved offshore is really just a way of legalizing the theft ex post
facto, much as the European colonizers locked in their land grabs with trea-
ties. Lawlessness on the frontier, as Adam Smith understood, is not the prob-
lem but the point, as much a part of the game as the contrite hand-wringing
and the pledge to do better next time. (Klein, 2007, pp. 308–309)
Sadly, the Chicago Boys and Berkeley Mafia continued to prescribe

their “shock therapy” all across Europe in the early 1980s, including in
Bolivia, Poland, and China, and by the early 1990s, disaster struck South
Africa and Russia, and the U.S.-backed team of the capitalist makeover
and takeover economists were ready. Soon after, as we entered a new mil-
lennium, the events of September 11 would set the stage for the extreme
capitalist makeovers in Iraq and the United States’ longest war in
Afghanistan to do the same. In the midst of these takeovers framed as
political disasters only, Chicago-style “makeovers” would get underway
following the tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004, and in what is now the well-
documented case of disaster plundering in New Orleans in 2005 after
Hurricane Katrina.
Following Klein (2007), investigative journalist, Anthony Lowenstein
(2015, p. 9), has extended the empirical analysis to focus not only on
“environmental catastrophe, war, and the hidden costs of foreign aid but
also what happens when the resources sector and detention centers are
also privatized.” Lowenstein examines, among other cases, the 2011
earthquake and tsunami response in Japan, mining in Papa New Guinea
since the early 1980s, the full privatization of Australia’s detention centers
by 2014, and the estimated 4 trillion dollar price tag of the war on terror,
including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which, as others have also
shown, has gone largely to private contractors and is described by
Lowenstein as “one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history
and yet [one that] has gone largely unnoticed” (2015, p. 11). Lowenstein
(2015, p. 9) goes on to argue that his “definition of ‘disaster’ has deep-
ened to include companies that entrench a crisis and then sell themselves
as the only ones who can resolve it. […] Whether we call this disaster capi-
talism or just a product of the unavoidable excesses and inequalities of
capitalism itself, the end result is still a world ruled by unaccountable mar-
kets.” We find this argument equally as important for our framing of the
patterns of corporate higher education’s COVID-19 responses.
Klein (2007) asserts that while it is tempting to characterize these cases
as simply examples of corruption, “gangster capitalism,” or “casino capi-
talism,” it is more accurate to understand these phenomena as indicative
of the very features of corporatism, or a kind of statist capitalism, and akin

to new frontier capitalism. In the same way that Marx and Engels argued
that crisis is not anomalous to capitalism but embedded in it as inevitable
and necessary, Klein (2007, pp. 302–303) lands here, too, in part, in her
critique of narratives of “cultures of corruption” to explain away depraved
systemic logics of neoliberalism. We saw the same argument after the 2008
financial collapse where the blame was put on “a few bad actors,” and in
the claims that the collapse was preventable as corrupt capitalists were let
loose unchecked in a particular historical moment, rather than also a col-
lapse embedded in the very mechanisms of capitalism.
In her examples of how extreme neoliberal values and practices mani-
fested in the Chicago Boys and later Berkeley Mafia economic policy-
backed coups, Klein (2007) makes the core point that disaster capitalists
have been successful in distracting resisters from the link between political
struggles and economic struggle such that pro-democracy activists and
international human rights activists have allowed themselves to sever a
class fight against global neoliberal corporate elites from a political fight
against state violence and tyranny and repression. The pro-democracy left
has often been unable or unwilling to answer the question of why corpo-
ratist elites are using state violence to terrorize, imprison, torture, and kill
their own people. Even further, the failure to connect the assaults on
human rights and civil liberties to the fundamentalist agenda to “free cor-
porations” and capitalist elites to accumulate unfettered power has been a
deadly misunderstanding of power on the part of the pro-democracy left
for nearly a half-century.
Moreover, as its raison d’être is to plunder, disaster capitalist agendas,
like neoliberalism itself from which it is borne, is inherently violent, says
Klein (2007, p. 157; see also Harvey, 2020), though physical violence
need not always be unleashed in the course of disaster capitalist raiding.
Indeed, in some cases, as we will discuss below, the passive refusal to assist
during a catastrophe, to sit back and watch the chaos unfold, to fan the
flames of a crisis using sophistry to dismantle institutions, or to actively
engineer destabilization (real or imagined) to engage in mass theft and a
reorganization of the very normative foundations of institutions can hap-
pen without explicit interpersonal violence or warfare. In these cases,
disaster capitalist raids can be understood as “civilian coup d’états” (Klein,
2007, p. 193). To say that the hijacking of the commons through disaster
opportunism need not involve warfare or physical torture is not to suggest
there is no structural and institutional violence that injures people
physically, emotionally, economically, and spiritually. Nor is it to say that

these “capitalist makeovers” accomplished without warfare do not also
kill people.
As we previewed in the preface, and extending Klein, as capitalism is
racialized, heterosexualized, and gendered, such “capitalist makeovers”
must also be understood in the context of complicated, global, and inter-
secting systems of race, sexuality and gender, ones that are historically
constructed by, and simultaneously inform, ideologies, interactions and
institutional arrangements that continually sacrifice women, LGBTQ indi-
viduals, gender nonconforming people, and individuals who identify as
Black, Brown, and Indigenous, people of color. Adjusting the analytical
frame to one of racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism (see Foster &
Foster-Palmer, forthcoming; Luft, 2016), we can begin to see the multiple
opportunistic processes and practices of not only what Klein would call the
process of destruction for a “clean capitalist canvas,” but also processes
and practices of retrenchment that re-establish repressive social orders
through crisis (Luft, 2016, emphasis added). For example, as we shall see,
along with the reproduction of a racialized labor force and the further gut-
ting of the middle classes, the pandemic’s impact on education globally
has also meant a re-establishment of gendered and unequal divisions of
productive and social reproductive labor, and the related intensified extrac-
tion of income and wealth from women and people of color. With this
exacerbation of racialized and gendered economic inequality has come the
deployment of neoliberal and radical libertarian narratives of accumula-
tion, austerity, competition, personal liberty, freedom and the very mean-
ings of “individual” and “society” that cannot be understood outside of
Western notions of racialized hetero-patriarchy that co-construct them.
Explains Nancy Welch (2020, para. 14–15) on her academic union col-
league’s assessment that they are at war with their institution’s administra-
tors over the university’s pandemic response:
I understand the larger war to be over social reproduction. [The social rela-
tions of caring for people and communities] on which capitalism depends—
no labor power, no profit—but is also loathe to provide. Especially under
the terms of do-it-yourself, you’re on your own neoliberalism, capitalist accu-
mulation is assisted by commodifying education, childcare, eldercare, trans-
portation, and the like […] and offloading the bulk of these needs onto
families and women in particular within them […] driven to overcome per-
sistent and worsening economic crises by any means—including exhausting
labor power while also destroying the institutions and supports needed to
replenish workers’ capacities and capabilities. “Destroying its own condi-
tions,” writes Nancy Fraser […], capitalism “effectively eats its own tail.”
As we shall see, wars of social reproduction to consolidate racialized and

gendered economic power for elites and their aspirants through the ideo-
logical apparatus of the university predate the COVID-19 crisis. They are,
in fact, the through line of the history of higher education in the U.S., and
set the stage for the pandemic that became a disaster.
Critiquing Neoliberalism in the Context

of Higher Education
As we will argue throughout this book, just as the seeds of neoliberalism

are in the promoters of nineteenth century laissez-faire and statist liberal-
ism, so are its critics. Today’s resistors of the corporate university draw on
a set of counter ideas that are as old as classical sociological theory itself.
At the turn of the twentieth century, sociologist, Thorstein Veblen, and
others writing in the genre of early “professor protest literature,” such as
John Dewey and his progressive educational philosophy (1916), were
sounding the alarm about the seizure of the university by “men of busi-
ness” (Veblen, 1918). These warnings came as economists, philosophers,
and early sociologists were turning their focus to the crisis of industrial
capitalism, the growth in numbers and power of the corporation, and
increasing rationalization as tied to the nature of modernity. Indeed, it is
fair to say that the origins of the discipline of sociology, and the core con-
cerns of what we understand to be classical sociological theory, are rooted
in large part in these cautionary analyses that include critical examinations
of the rise of racialized monopoly capitalism and emergent U.S. imperial-
ism; the persistence of patriarchy; and the rise of bureaucracies as the dom-
inant form of legitimate rational authority. In the mid-twentieth century,
sociological theory, more generally, would revisit its roots in a new wave
of critique of corporate ascendency in the United States. C. W. Mills
would articulate the concept of the power elite (1958), and also the con-
tours of a “new class” of professionals in the American middle classes of
capitalism (1951), and William Domhoff (1967) would map out the fea-
tures of the U.S. ruling class in ways that put a critique of capitalism at the
center of sociological analyses again. A decade later, Rosabeth Moss Kanter
(1977) would gender the analysis of corporate capitalism in her
groundbreaking study, Men and Women of the Corporation. Following the

Frankfurt School line of critique, Michel Foucault would further lay the
track for the analysis of academic capitalism in his paradigm-shifting work
on decentralized power and the surveiling and thus disciplining appara-
tuses of power in the form of discourses of knowledge, including science,
law and medicine (Foucault, 1963, 1977, 1980). Later, George Ritzer, in
McDonaldization of Society (1993), would apply Weber’s formative analy-
sis of instrumental reason and a deep concern for the “irrationality of
rationality,” which he applied, in part, to the reorganization of the
university, as did Dennis Hayes and Robyn Wynyard in their edited collec-
tion, The McDonaldization of Higher Education (2002), in Hayes’ Beyond
McDonaldization: Visions of Higher Education (2017), and further
articulated in Ritzer et al. (2018), The Velvet Cage of Educational Con(pro)
sumption. Charles Derber (2013), in a sweeping condemnation of
American society, would later write about postmodernity and the turn
toward sociopathy in the United States as a systemic condition and out-
growth of contemporary global capitalism in the American context that, in
its qualities of brutality, market primacy, and hyper-individualism, sounds
like Klein’s (2007) description of the ruthless, fundamentalist, anti-social,
profit-at-all-costs values of neoliberal philosophies.
When it comes to understanding the 40-year impact of neoliberal phi-
losophies and practices in the context of higher education more squarely,
Peters and Jandrić (2018) have argued that there are two major schools of
critique of neoliberalism in higher education, both of which owe a debt to
these nineteenth and early twentieth century classical social theories, and
to Marx and Engels and Max Weber in particular. The first extends from
Weber (1946), and includes Nietzche, Heidegger, Jaspers, Lyotard, and
Bourdieu in a tradition of critiquing the primacy of instrumental rational-
ity or technical reason in the university. A second line of critique, also
indebted to Weber and reasserted by the Frankfurt School, focuses on the
problems of administrative reason, and the imposition of bureaucratic
authority. Others have called squarely on David Harvey’s theory of “accu-
mulation by dispossession” (2003) and Sheila Slaughter and Larry
L. Leslie’s theory of “academic capitalism” (1997). For scholars aligned
with Harvey’s position, including Henry Giroux and his conceptualiza-
tion of “casino capitalism” (2011), contemporary global capitalism
depends on processes of “enclosing, privatizing, and stripping education
for parts” in the same way “early capitalism’s primitive accumulation
depended on seizing the feudal commons” (Welch, 2015, para. 4–5).
Here, the central engines of capitalists’ drive for profit and accumulation
are financial speculation and swindling through plunder and looting.
Analysts who subscribe to a conceptual framework of academic capitalism
focus not solely on economic elites’ short-term, high risk gambling with,
and looting of, the assets and livelihoods of everyday people, but on the
neoliberal academic project as a wholesale reengineering of education for
the purpose of further and fully commodifying teaching and research in a
knowledge economy that depends not only the global production of
goods and services, but ideas. Additionally, academic capitalism requires
the transformation of the very notions of citizenship and the state to
accommodate the transnational power elite’s notion of a globalized neo-
liberal citizenry (e.g. Mitchell, 2003; Chatterjee & Maira, 2014; Pucci,
2015). For example, Katharyne Mitchell (2003, p. 388 as cited in Pucci,
2015, p. 17) asserts that in order to do so, educational institutions must
normalize:
[g]lobal competitiveness, the reduction of the (publicly financed) costs of

education, and of social reproduction in general, the necessity for greater
market choice, and accountability and the imperative to create hierarchically
conditioned, globally oriented state subjects—i.e., individuals oriented to
excel in ever transforming situations of global competition, either as work-
ers, managers or entrepreneur.
In this configuration of global capitalism, where “freedom” and “choice”

are the signifiers for pure market fundamentalism, we are reminded of the
ways in which Bourdieu’s critique of the contemporary neoliberal eco-
nomic order maps onto higher education as “a reserve army of employees
[who are] rendered docile by these social processes that make their situations
precarious, [and where the] sign of freedom is in effect the structural vio-
lence of unemployment, the insecurity of job tenure, and the menace of
layoff that it implies” (Bourdieu, 1998, para. 9, emphasis in original, as
cited in Pucci, 2015, p. 16).
This shift above necessitates a shift in the social construction of the self
(Brown, 2006) that begs the question of how faculty, students and staff
are, we might say, “doing neoliberalism” in the context of their lives as
scholars and students. What kinds of social meanings are produced and
reproduced? What kinds of class relations? To these questions, we can turn
again to Welch (2015) who critiques both the accumulation by disposses-
sion school of thought and the academic capitalism tradition. Welch argues
that however accurate these two theoretical frames may be, including their
analyses of the rise of what amounts to a new “consolidated class of higher-
ed execs who are [enamored] with financial rituals that recast education as
a quantifiable, auditable commodity” (Welch, 2015, para. 7), they both
miss a mark, namely that “the imposition of lean social reproduction of
labor power… is what devastates the contemporary university both as a
place of employment and as a prime reproductive institution—one on
which capital has long relied” (Welch, 2015, para. 13). More specifically,
as a central institution of social reproduction that transmits not only
explicit knowledge and skills to members of societies to perform specific
tasks as workers under capitalism, but also implicit cultural capital in the
form of norms, values, beliefs, and practices of the ruling elites, educa-
tional institutions are the key arbiter in regenerating both the structure of
capitalism and class inequality, as well as the cultural legitimations that
serve to justify those relations of ruling in the consciousness of the work-
ing classes themselves.
In this theoretical context, Welch (2015) contends that the current
neoliberal project in higher education is meant, along with whatever else,
to reverse the great gains made during the post World War II era of a mas-
sive expansion of access to higher education for a multiracial working class
in the United States and other Western capitalist states that, in affording
access to curricula formerly reserved only for the white elite, and largely
cisgender men, also fundamentally disrupted the capitalist class’ hold on
economic, political and social power. In effect, “accumulation by dispos-
session” and “academic capitalism” emerge as a neoliberal backlash to the
gains of the 1950s and 1960s Black Freedom Struggle, Chicano/a
Movement, American Indian Movement, Third World Liberation strug-
gles, the War on Poverty, the New Left and student movements, and
Second and Third Wave feminist movement mobilizations in the 1970s
and into the 1980s. Speaking to the grief that we, ourselves, as authors feel
so deeply, and that motivated us to examine the impact of the COVID-19
crisis in the context of this larger market fundamentalist backlash against
higher education, Welch (2015, para. 16) says:
The university whose loss Giroux, Newfield, and other commentators

mourn never existed. What they mourn instead is the period following
World War II when [the massive expansion of higher education] aimed to
service the postwar economic and technological boom…also raised democ-
ratizing aspirations and struggle. Such aspirations are worth fighting for as
the neoliberal program has sought aggressively to restore higher education

to what its actual traditional role has been: education molded for ruling
interests, including a continued and intensifying interest in a working class
trained for its needs.
Welch’s analysis is at home in the long tradition in sociological theory

on schooling as social reproduction, one that goes as far back as
W.E.B. DuBois and his classic essays on the role of education in reproduc-
ing racialized capitalism (1974/2001), as well as the many critical social
scientists and historians who have followed suit, most notably the founda-
tional work of Bowles and Gintis (1977). As Welch (2015, para. 17)
points out:
Schooling works to reproduce society’s class, racial, and gender order not so
much through the content of any given class but through ‘the form,’ the
‘social relations of the educational encounter’ that ‘correspond closely to
the social relations of dominance, subordination, and motivation in the eco-
nomic sphere.’ The neoliberal project has both continued this tradition and,
via disaster opportunism and appropriated civil rights discourse, experi-
mented with even tighter integration of social reproduction with produc-
tion, particularly through curricular engineering and curtailment.
Welch continues to make the case that the rabid turn toward “austerity
measures,” as well as “audit and accountability measures,” is not inconsis-
tent with this larger program to restore a pre-civil rights era racial, class,
and we can add, gender, hierarchy in its goal to recreate a two-tiered sys-
tem of postsecondary education: One for the wealthy, replete with contin-
ued access to the traditional liberal arts model of university education; and
one for the rest of us, “stripped for parts” or “hollowed out” not only to
reproduce skilled laborers for a global economy but to instill the very val-
ues of austerity and disentitlement throughout the class hierarchy. This
includes those precarious middles for whom the post-World War II expan-
sion era has placed in an ambiguous class position of workers educated
enough to expect that their advanced schooling would rightfully entitle
them, and their children, to a decent, respected, comfortable place in an
ostensibly meritocratic, democratic, wealthy society. In short, the massive
post-World War II expansion re-sorted the U.S. class hierarchy at the
same time, we could argue, it created a new kind of class ambiguity or
classes in ambiguous locations in a globalizing economy. Welch (2015,
para. 28) argues that “with the expansion of higher education across
advanced capitalist countries” came institutions, not unlike our own, that
have become “in-between and unsettled place[s]” that:
[Helped bring about] the formation of a new social group of students whose
class position and prospects were not so clearly determined. Most of these
students were not [and still are not] being groomed to exercise or serve as
administrators of power. They were instead [and still are] on track to
“become some form of work,” their social location as students “transitional.”
In this way, the neoliberal project is primarily aimed at putting those

students back in their place, not so much through downsizing, per se, but
through a reassertion of elites’ goal to recommit postsecondary educa-
tional institutions to the production of a stratified labor force. In this proj-
ect, elite private, public Ivies and other flagship state universities still offer
a wide range of not easily commodified traditional liberal arts courses of
study, many critical of power relations such as women, gender, and sexual-
ity studies, or Africana Studies, that are being slashed in colleges and uni-
versities that educate and train the middles and working classes. We can
also argue, as in the case of our own institution where there has been
public concern from administration that we are under-enrolling men stu-
dents, many of these “in-between and unsettled” campus spaces are
becoming increasingly feminized. As a growing global service economy
becomes increasingly feminized, it would not be surprising if these “in-
between” colleges and university places would also be ones where women
students were disproportionately enrolled, nor would it be surprising to
see an occupational flipping of the professoriate, itself, from “men’s work”
to “women’s work,” or the attendant dismantling of tenure in favor of an
expanding feminized contingent faculty labor force as higher education,
overall, reestablishes a gendered and racialized economic order to coun-
terbalance threats to global capital. Ultimately, says Welch (2015, para.
24) this project to serve the needs of capital entails more “than the
mechanical production of just-in-time graduates to be slotted into partic-
ular jobs, [but also the reinforcement of] the ideas on which capitalist
social relations depend,” which means, and quoting Chatterjee and Maira
(2014, pp. 6–7), “legitimizing notions of Manifest Destiny and founda-
tional mythologies of settler colonialism and exceptional democracy,” as
well as rearticulating the “logics of racism, warfare, and nationalism” that
both are foundational for U.S. imperialism and serve as “the architecture
of the US academy.”
Racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism also emerges in the context of

cultures of fear that have intensified globally, particularly since 9/11, but
have emerged, nearly concurrently, with the rise of neoliberal ideologies
and policies. Linke and Smith (2009, p. 3) write that within the context of
the neoliberal order, a “global public discourse of fear…encourages proac-
tive military action, legitimizes war,” as well as both objective and struc-
tural violence against civil society. Nearly from the beginning of our
academic careers, and across institutions, we have witnessed a similar cul-
ture of fear creeping into higher education. As we have observed, the fear
present in our institutional leadership narratives, whether real or imag-
ined, serves as a way to thwart criticism, encourages a culture of silence,
and discourages resistance to policies that have moved our universities
starkly away from our founding principles. Such fear-mongering is ampli-
fied during times of crises but continuous nevertheless, creating an atmo-
sphere filled with a constant sense of impending doom, and as we shall see,
used to justify austerity measures and increase monitoring and control
over our labor and the curriculum. Efe Can Gürcan and Ömer Ersin
Kahraman (2020) established a “symbiotic relationship between disaster
capitalism, neoliberalism, and the culture of fear” that existed prior to the
outbreak, but has reemerged during the COVID-19 pandemic with the
goal of accelerating a neoliberal world order (p. 51). Tragically, as we go
to press, two more massacres targeting people of color have occurred in
one month’s time in the U.S., one in Buffalo, New York, and the other in
Ulveda, Texas. In the case of the mass shooting of largely Latinx elemen-
tary school children and their teachers in Ulveda, it is hard not to interpret
right-wing Republican opposition to bans on assault weapons, along with
other racist neoliberal agenda items it supports, as also a grisly way to
expedite divestment from public schools through shock doctrine-
like terror.
This kind of neoliberal world order, which, through narratives of ever-
pending disaster, fear and scarcity is made to seem as if it stands without
alternatives, could be understood through the lens of Chomsky and
Waterstone’s conceptualization of “late-stage industrial state capitalism”
(Chomsky & Waterstone, 2021, p. 19), and their assertion that the cur-
rent capitalist organization of life is seen as an inevitable condition—as
capitalism without alternatives. The current capitalist system stands on the
back of neoliberal philosophical thought, which not only explains how the
world works, but also “how it ought to work” (Chomsky & Waterstone,
2021, p. 204), and thus has practical implications, one of which is an
expansion of market logic through the privatization of every aspect of

social life (even natural life isn’t outside of its scope and reach). Particularly
compelling areas for privatization and marketization, they argue, are the
yet untapped public goods and resources that must be privatized willingly,
or if need be, by state force through laws or military actions. Clearly, that
makes higher education, and public higher education, in particular, quite
an appealing candidate. The reason, of course, is that the larger neoliberal
project seeks to embed neoliberal economic principles into the institutions
that actively participate, and are often primarily responsible for, the cre-
ation of knowledge with the ultimate goal of achieving a neoliberal soci-
ety: a form of total capitalism that is a way of life with no alternative
legitimized as common sense. Chomsky & Waterstone call it “capitalist
realism” (p. ix). When that happens, they argue, not only is capitalism
taken for granted as the only viable economic model worldwide, this com-
mon sense, as it were, precludes us from developing a vision of the world
or society that is organized differently.
In fact, we argue that the real tragedy of the neoliberal takeover of
institutions of higher education is that it shapes these institutions to
become partners in the larger neoliberal project, weakening their potential
to provide critical thought alternatives or become disruptors, even as,
undeniably, examples of resistance regularly emerge throughout history, a
topic which we will address later in this book. Chomsky & Waterstone’s
discussion helps us to see disaster capitalism in higher education as both
narrative and a policy push that emerges during times of crises with a goal
to accelerate the race toward a total neoliberal global order. It also helps
us further understand what might be at play in various points, such as the
current COVID-19 crisis, in the ongoing neoliberal project of late-stage
industrial state capitalism in higher education. The crisis cannot be over-
stated as the ultimate result of privatization is the corporatization of gov-
ernment, and consequently the failure of, or better said, the unwillingness
of the state to respond to increasingly fascist-style corporatist attacks
against democratic institutions, and against the people themselves. Lest
we forget that during World War II, Mussolini’s model of fascism was
corporatism, the radical right’s book-banning crusades, the attacks on
critical race theory, reproductive freedom, and the rights of LGBTQ peo-
ple should give us great pause.
These important contemporary theoretical framings notwithstanding,
it is fair to say that a rigorous and intersectional analysis of capitalism and
class inequality as the only alternative, the role of corporatization and
global capitalism, and its connection to threats to democracy and the rise
of fascism, have been anemic compared to our classical and mid-century
roots in sociology and contemporary critical theory, and only revived
recently. In the absence of this kind of critique within the academy, the
door propped open even wider for the gruesome playbooks of neoliberal
crusaders to make colleges and universities their new mark well before
COVID-19, thus preparing the soil for the current disaster. In other
words, eventually, the chickens of the once highly obscure and eschewed
economic philosophy that is neoliberalism that was set in motion by
Chicago School intellectuals and became the patriarch of the family of
disaster capitalist plundering, came home to roost, attacking higher educa-
tion itself. It is to that thrice-told, but unheeded, tale of higher education
corporatization that we now turn.
CHAPTER 2
A Newer Version of an Old Beast:

The Higher Education Disaster Before
COVID
In her insightful 2009 book, Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University,

sociologist Gaye Tuchman conducted an eye-opening ethnography of a
“middle status” American university as it became further devoured by the
forces of neoliberal values and practices at the turn of the twenty-first cen-
tury. She argued that previous scholars who had documented the macro
changes in higher education in the United States since the colonial era
share a common narrative, namely their insistence that “higher education
is one of the last revered Western institutions to be ‘de-churched’” (2009,
p. 41, emphasis in original); that is, it is one of the last to have its ideologi-
cal justification recast in terms of corporatization and commodification
and to become subject to serious state surveillance.” Tuchman goes on to
argue, as do scores of other historians, social scientists, and critical analysts
of higher education:
Universities are no longer to lead the minds of students to grasp the truth;
to grapple with intellectual possibilities; to appreciate the best in art, music,
and other forms of culture; and to work toward both enlightened politics
and public service. Rather they are now to prepare students for jobs.
And while it may be true that the Western university is the last among
revered institutions in democratic societies to be hijacked by corporate
elites for “capitalist makeovers,” and equally true that the neoliberal

Switzerland AG 2022
university is now the dominant university model all across the globe
(Peters & Jandrić, 2018), the taking of the intellectual commons in the
United States has very deep roots in American history.
Indeed, a long view of the re-engineering of the university as an arm of
business shows that the metamorphosis began as early as the nineteenth
century, and was part and parcel of the enormous growth in the number,
size, and consolidated power of the corporation in the First Gilded Age.
In fact, it is fair to argue that in its break from the European model of
university governance by clergy and faculty in an institutional space dis-
tinct from markets, the American university, with its founding model
eschewing clergy and faculty leadership for corporate leaders at its incep-
tion, is unique in embedding corporatization into the structure and cul-
ture of the academy from its birth. Certainly, even prior to the COVID-19
outbreak, the contours of the corporate university have been starkly evi-
dent. This is a story that has been told many times in the past 40 years, in
heartbreaking clarity and profundity. As the treatments of the soul-
crushing takeover of higher education by corporate elites, and assisted by
the sometimes self-interest, sometimes complicity, and more often than
not, lack of attention and analyses of faculty themselves, have been numer-
ous and also excellent, there is neither the need nor the space to recount
them here (Jacoby, 1982; Readings, 1996; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997;
Nelson, 1997; Aronowitz, 2000; Bok, 2003; Johnson et al., 2003; Nelson
& Watt, 2004; Washburn 2005; Newfield, 2008; Tuchman, 2009;
Schrecker, 2010; Clawson & Page, 2011; Ginsberg, 2011; Giroux 2014;
Busch, 2014; Gerber, 2014; Blumenstyk, 2015; Abendroth and Profilio,
2020). That said, to fully grasp the magnitude of what happened in the
COVID era, how it came to be possible, and why, a short reminder of this
long view, in broad strokes, is important.
Higher Education, Industry and Profit

from the American Colonial Era to the Gilded Age
According to journalist Jennifer Washburn’s comprehensive history in

University, Inc. (2005), medieval universities in Europe were religious
institutions that served as training grounds for clergy, a model that would
endure through to the European colonial era, including the colonial
period in what would eventually mark the founding of the United States.
In the U.S., the European model began to weaken in the late 1780s as
sectarian conflicts and early capitalist nation building campaigns
2 A NEWER VERSION OF AN OLD BEAST: THE HIGHER EDUCATION… 31
converged, and American colleges took on the organizational character of

the early entrepreneurial classes. Tuchman (2009) in reference to Strathern
(1997) notes that even prior to the reconfiguration of the European model
in colonial America in the industry-utilitarian model, the British university
system had already shifted toward rationalization and surveillance as
Cambridge University moved from oral exams to also require written
exams in 1792. Nonetheless, a more common point of departure for
scholars taking the long view on the corporatization of higher education is
the mid-nineteenth century and the “industrialization” of higher educa-
tion in tandem with the expansion of industrial capitalism (Tuchman,
2009). Tuchman (2009, p. 40), in her review of Barrow (1990), describes
the ways in which a formerly decentralized and faculty-controlled model
of professors offering courses on topics as they saw fit, and at days, times,
and durations determined at their discretion, was replaced by trustees and
administrators “without educational justification” by models of control,
surveillance and measurement that “introduced uniformity—so many
credits for so many hours of class, with meeting times and places to be
regulated by a central agency. Barrow claims that these men ‘industrial-
ized’ higher education” (Tuchman, 2009, p. 41).
Welch (2015) writes that as a precursor to this expansion, the racialized
1804 land grants extended the colonial project west of Appalachia and
with it came the expansion of U.S. public colleges envisioned to serve as
the appendage of American settler capitalism. In this antebellum period, a
cachet of new elite technical schools were founded, including MIT,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Harvard Tech, and a technical college at
Yale, making the case that a uniquely American pragmatism was reserved
not only for the students of the working classes, but also for students of
the wealthy. Yet, as historians have made clear, 1862 marked the first major
turning point in the growth of higher education in America when the first
of two Morrill Acts authorized land grants to universities to support
agricultural and mechanical schools. On the backs of land theft from
Indigenous people, the 1862 Morrill Act incentivized an educational mis-
sion that combined the liberal arts and practical training in support of the
labor interests of an emergent white industrial class. Emancipation brought
about an equally significant watershed as abolitionists continued the free-
dom struggle into the Reconstruction Era, including the fight for access
to education as the nation reckoned with the question of what form of
education was “best-suited” both for African Americans newly freed from
slavery and Indigenous people still caught in the throes of white elites’
“civilizing” projects. Embedded in the provisions of the second Morrill

Act in 1890 was the prohibition of federal higher education funding to
states that used race-based admissions unless there was at least one land-
grant college for African-American students. These hotly contested politi-
cal debates over the nature and extent of postsecondary education for
Black and Brown students in the United States have reverberated into the
twenty-first century. With one hand, the 1890 Morrill Act recognized the
insidiousness of racial segregation in higher education, and with the other,
legitimated the segregation of colleges and universities via the allocations
for what we now call historically Black colleges and universities (HCBUs).
Simultaneously, by Reconstruction, at the same time that the German
research/graduate university model would take root in the United States
with the founding of Johns Hopkins in 1876, the traditional curriculum
for the elites would soon expand to include business, engineering, law, and
medicine. Here again, this history reveals that the entanglement of indus-
try and the academy is a long-term relationship, and one that has envel-
oped the students of the elite as well, albeit in different and unequal ways.
Further, even before 1900, the historical record shows that corporations
like General Electric, Westinghouse, AT&T, and DuPont all had limited
partnerships with American universities, even if the firewall between the
academy and business was relatively strong, and certainly by today’s stan-
dards (Washburn, 2005). However, the historical record also shows a
cadre of wealthy defenders of a liberal curriculum, including Woodrow
Wilson and prominent elite educators, who were vocal in their concerns
about what they perceived to be an excess of utilitarianism in the missions
and practices of the nation’s colleges and universities also at the turn of the
twentieth century.
Perhaps surprising for academics to learn who are not historians of
higher education, by 1914, for example, Veblen (1918) was writing in
what was an already-established genre of criticism, later called “professor
protest literature,” that had emerged in the Progressive Era to sound the
alarm about the usurpation of the European model of education by busi-
ness elites and the subordination of that mission to the desires of capital.
For Veblen, this uniquely American acquisition of the academy by capital-
ist elites, however partial and perhaps unavoidable, was most evident and
also most disturbing in the increased ceding of the position of university
president, and seats on governing boards to “men of business.” The evi-
dence of this early trend toward vocationalization in the U.S. academy and
the tensions it created with elite defenders of a traditional liberal arts
notion of the knowledge commons, suggests, of course, that what has

long been defined as the knowledge “commons” in the United States has
never truly been for, or produced by, the “commons,” unless by “the
commons” we mean white men of the ruling elite - whether men of busi-
ness of not. Even so, it is also useful to recognize that this fervent wave of
anti-utilitarianism among wealthy higher education defenders, elite educa-
tors, and “protest professors” occurred at a time when Welch (2015)
argues that American Universities had not yet emerged as the powerful
institutional players in the U.S. or global economy in the ways they
are today.
While the history of the early ties between the academy and industry in
the U.S., have been well-told, what is often not addressed in these other-
wise rich and cogent treatments is the equally long history of proprietary,
or for-profit, schools in America dating back to the colonial era (Ruch,
2001). In an especially eye-opening set of passages from Richard Ruch’s
book, Higher Education, Inc: The Rise of the For-Profit University Ruch
(2001, p. 52), who is largely sympathetic to the for-profit university
model, explains that even before the American Revolution, it “was not
uncommon to run a school like a business.” Ruch claimed (2001, p. 54,
emphasis added):
America already had… a system of degree-granting academic institutions

that was larger and more comprehensive than that of Great Britain. This
system was extremely diverse, just as it is today, with schools of every size,
shape, and configuration, supported financially through a combination of
fees, subscriptions, taxes, endowments and private investments. What has
been largely unacknowledged is that this educational system developed pri-
marily as a result of private enterprise. The earliest formation and largest
segment (in terms of numbers of institutions) of organized education in the
United States was the independent proprietary school, run as a “genteel
business” in order to support a scholar’s family. Like their modern successors,
these schools were run on a proprietary basis and received no public finan-
cial support. These early proprietary schools, as well as those that are flour-
ishing today, represent a uniquely American phenomenon.
Mainly serving adult students, early proprietary schools were often run by
clergy who made a living as teachers and tutors, were unregulated and, say
educational historians, served the purpose of providing an alternative lane
for social and economic mobility for students who otherwise could not
access colleges or “public ‘free schools’” (Ruch, 2001, p. 52), or for
students searching for occupational skills that traditional colleges and uni-
versities defined as outside the bounds of their curricular mission. In fact,
Ruch argues that for most of their existence, for-profit colleges would live
in a space in between what elites might need in terms of labor that wasn’t
addressed by traditional colleges, as well as the traditional colleges’ classist,
racist and sexist barriers to entry.
As a result of what we might call the “mismatch” between the market’s
needs, the mission of traditional public and private colleges and universi-
ties, and the needs and desires of non-elites for both economic mobility
and fulfillment through knowledge, the for-profit college was born and
survived until the 1990s on the margins of respectability, if not outright
scandal. Eventually, as we will briefly discuss below and more extensively
later in the book, when the internet boom of the 1990s met the financial
deregulation of the early 2000s, for-profit colleges would become the new
darling of Wall Street and investors who seek to, essentially, close the gap
in the “mismatch” between market needs and the mission of traditional
colleges and universities. The result, we shall see, has been the almost
totalizing insertion of the for-profit model into the shell of the non-profit
model, either explicitly, such as the in the case of Purdue-Global, or “hid-
den in plain sight” (Carey, 2019, para. 6) in enumerable ways that we will
explore in later chapters. At the same time, corporations have usurped the
symbolic space of the university in others ways, branding corporate space
as “campuses,” such as the Google “campus” or the Facebook “campus,”
or McDonald’s very real Hamburger University, further blurring the
boundaries of the corporation and the university in a cultural appropria-
tion feedback loop of a different sort.
All this to argue that despite the relatively marginal position that insti-
tutions of higher education played in the larger national and global econ-
omy at the turn of the twentieth century, and a small and arguably
non-threatening carve-out of proprietary schools in the margins, there
was already significant resistance to the early corporatization of higher
education from college and university professors, and there would even be
dissent among select university presidents who would begin to apply the
brakes on the encroachment of industry. Notably, the very founding of the
AAUP in 1915 has been understood as a response to the serious threats to
academic freedom posed by the infusion of a business model into the acad-
emy, and the attacks against intellectuals who were critical of capitalism in
the midst of the First Gilded Age.
Eisenhower Thought to Add “Academic”

in “Military Industrial Complex”:
The Interwar Years
By 1920, demonstrate historians, corporate partnerships in higher educa-
tion were increasingly thought to be sketchy by university presidents who
took marked steps to curb them. In a similar spirit in the interwar years, in
1940 the Roosevelt administration moved to establish the National
Science Foundation (NSF), and did so with protections for academic free-
dom in the context of a growing criticism of what President Eisenhower
would later famously term the “military-industrial-complex.” What has
been largely lost to history, and enormously consequential for our analysis
here, President Eisenhower’s initial concept included his grave concerns
about the role of higher education in this nexus, which he originally
defined in an early draft of that much-referenced speech as “the military-
industrial-academic complex” (Giroux, 2007). In yet another monumen-
tal historical moment in the United States, where we can understand
higher education as a political accommodation in the midst of changing
economic interests of the elites, the post-World War II period would usher
in not only the massive expansion of higher education in the form of the
G.I. Bill and the establishment and proliferation of the “junior” commu-
nity college system, but also the deeply troubling capture of the academy
by the state in the service of the federal defense and surveillance apparatus.
By the 1950s, in the natural and social sciences, almost all federal grant
funding received was from the Pentagon, and the combined funding from
the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI for weapons and defense became the
primary focus of all federally funded academic research. With that turn, as
has been superbly documented elsewhere (e.g. Feagin & Vera, 1995), aca-
demic freedom eroded as McCarthyism swepts academia and at least 100
professors were subpoenaed and 30 fired in 1953 (Washburn 2005, p. 42).
When the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, igniting a national concern
for American competitiveness in the global space race, for a period, the
pendulum would swing away from corporate-state partnerships, including
defense industry research, toward a “golden era” of funding support for
basic science, and the seismic transformations in access to higher educa-
tion for whole classes of Americans once denied entrance. It would be a
swing that would ultimately ignite a crushing backlash against the demo-
cratic promise of the American liberal arts university - a backlash that
would become even more fervent in the pandemic era.
The Whole World (Was Not) Watching:

1960s–1980s
By 1963, Clark Kerr penned, The Uses of the University, and largely uncriti-
cally described the shift from the “university” to “multiversities” that were
increasingly called to serve a wider range of stakeholders beyond students,
faculty, and the public good. Nonetheless, Washburn (2005) says that
despite the mid-century concerns with both military and industry partner-
ships, universities acknowledged a fire wall of sorts between 1960 and
1980. Here again, there is no shortage of research dedicated to the tre-
mendous changes to American higher education in this period in U.S. his-
tory, changes made possible by the massive support for higher education
expansion in the form of the 1958 National Defense Education Act, the
creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National
Endowment for the Arts, both in 1965. The historic expansion was also
made possible by the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement by
the student Left, and anti-militarization mobilizations by activists on and
off-campus, including faculty like those at MIT who protested the univer-
sity’s military-funded science research program. These monumental shifts,
paralleling the earlier post-World War II expansion in the United States
made possible by the G.I. Bill and the growth of junior colleges, again
fundamentally altered who could access higher education in America, and
was both a reflection of, and contributed to, significant structural and
cultural shifts in the U.S. class system. Among other countervailing forces
to the emergent corporatization gambits of decades prior were the chal-
lenges of federal racial and economic justice remedies in the form of affir-
mative action policies; open admissions; support for the growth of the
community college system; and related access to higher education for
incarcerated students.
Despite these changes, and then again, perhaps because of them, the
“multiversity,” with its expanded function and stakeholders, would be a
stage set for a weakened defense against a neoliberalism takeover on the
horizon. Included in those implicated in leaving the university open to
stealth, and not-so-stealth, attacks from 1970s neoliberal elites, who in the
United States were, and still are, quite at home in both the Republican
and the Democratic Party alike, were the academic Left as unintended
enablers. In an era when “the whole world [was] watching” as progres-
sives and radicals took on repressive, racist, pro-capitalist regimes at home
and abroad, many of the mechanisms of the Chicago Boys’ style capitalist
takeovers underway on campuses would go unseen and unresisted. By the

arrival of the 1970s and the rise of neoliberalism and unchecked capital-
ism, the firewall between the academy and industry, only semi-permeable
up to then, was tumbling down, and it was not a giant leap for the Chicago
Boys and the Berkeley Mafia-inspired elites to begin to size up the univer-
sity as targets for their economic weapons of mass destruction.
By now, the Golden Age of federal funding for basic research with the
protections of academic freedom was over, and the path was clearing fur-
ther for the taking of the knowledge commons by private corporations,
such as in the case of Harvard Medical School’s partnership with Monsanto
(Washburn 2005, pp. 4–5). By 1970, the university had become a decen-
tralized “multiversity” (Washburn 2005, p. 97) that was being called on
to respond to desperate interest groups, and the stage was set for increas-
ing bureaucratization and bloat. Yet, arguably, what marks the 1970s more
than any other development in the story of the full-on seizure of higher
education by capital is the sinister privatization of public research that was
made possible in this decade and continues to fundamentally shape the
landscape today. Prior to the 1970s, there were very strict norms and poli-
cies against patents on biomedical knowledge. For example, as early as
1955 Jonas Salk (polio vaccine) publicly and adamantly resisted the pres-
sure to patent the polio vaccine, famously claiming that the vaccine belongs
“to the people” (Washburn 2005). By 1980, as we will see, it would be
legal to claim royalties on publicly funded research. In effect, for the first
time, royalties could be derived from a tax on so-called technology trans-
fers, ushering in a catastrophic privatization of public research set in
motion by research scientists at the University of California (UC) Berkeley
and UC San Francisco who perfected gene splicing techniques in what is
now an infamous history of university-industry partnerships: in this case,
the Genentech partnership that literally launched the biotech industry
(Washburn, 2005).
This tectonic shift in the very meaning of scientific knowledge as a pub-
lic good, and the extraction of the public’s tax dollars to boot, coincided,
though not coincidentally, with the hugely well-documented ravaging
divestment of public funding from higher education that would, as Klein
(2007) would say, provide the “clean slate” for a total destruction of the
public higher education infrastructure (and also impacting the privates)
and on its grave the erection of the monuments to the for-profit model—a
wildly pernicious “infrastructure project” if there ever was one. In the
decades to come, this “educational structural adjustment” as we would
call it (see also Mok & Welch, 2003), would be the precursor, perhaps
intended by the investor class all along, to what we have also come to
understand as a kind of institutional extortion of both public and private
institutions paid for by faculty, staff, students and their families as colleges
and universities eventually chose to stay afloat via Wall Street-backed
financialization schemes, not the least of which was the fateful turn to
explosive tuition hikes and predatory debt-financing to “protect” them
from the specter of campus closures (see also Geiger 2010, 2016). Here
again, there is no shortage of research on the eviscerating impact that this
extortion, made possible by the shock doctrine “policy trinity” of divest-
ment, privatization and deregulation (Klein, 2007, p. 18), would have on
the lives of low-wage campus workers, contingent faculty, working class
and economically marginalized students, and disproportionately students
of color (Baum, 2016; Collinge, 2010; Mitchell, 2021; Scott & Bloom,
2018). As if that blow were not enough, and in what surely can be under-
stood as ruthless in this context, “by 1976, student loan debt becomes
non-dischargeable” (Washburn, 2005, p. 57).
As the information economy grew in the 1970s, so did the fear that the
U.S. was dragging behind global competitors in innovations, once again- a
cultural anxiety that reemerges at the same moment of the 1971 founding
of the largest and oldest fully online university. Established by Christian
evangelist Jerry Falwell, and enrolling nearly 62,000 students by 2015
(Blumenstyk, 2015), it should not be surprising given the philosophical
affinities between neoliberalism and fundamentalism that the institution
was named Liberty University. By 1978, the National Science Foundation
had added the University-Industry Cooperative Research Projects Program,
which, in effect, enabled the laundering of federal grant handouts to indus-
try with university pass throughs via a “small business patent procedures
act,” or “corporate giveaways” at taxpayers’ expense. Taxpayers would now
pay twice: once to fund the research and again to pay for the product the
research helped develop. In light of developments such as these, Peters and
Jandrić (2018, p. 554) argue that this period marked a shift from the public
university to the neoliberal university in a way that was comprehensive, and
“irreversibly…defined in terms of consumer sovereignty.” Indeed, as Clark
Kerr, former UC Berkeley Chancellor would eventually admit in looking
back on this period, albeit in different words, money and status-seeking
faculty inside the academy joined in with profit-seeking corporate actors
outside of the academy, and the door opened even wider for the for-profit
model to take up residence in the non-profit house.
Fire Wall Erodes and Academics Fiddle While Rome

Burns: 1980s–1990s
Washburn (2005) argues the 1980s ushered in a wholesale culture shift in
higher education, describing “a foul wind [that] has blown over campuses
of our nation’s universities…[in the form of] the growing role that market
forces and commerce values have assumed in academic life” (p. ix). And
with that foul wind, we would argue came the now familiar discourse that
has aimed to legitimate the wholesale re-engineering with the market fun-
damentalist language of “competition,” “value-based propositions,” “effi-
ciency,” “flexibility,” “right-sizing,” “lean production,” “standardization,”
“quality assurance,” “competency-based assessment,” and so on. Arguably,
the watershed moment was the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act that permitted uni-
versities to patent research that was federally funded, and granted tax
breaks for corporations willing to invest in academic research. The Act also
required a revision of antitrust laws to allow universities, industries, and
the feds to pool their research capabilities and generated a slew of new
federal government programs to encourage industry-university partner-
ships (Washburn 2005, p. 69; see also Geiger 2010, 2016). That very
same year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Yeshiva decision that
faculty at private colleges and universities are “management” and thereby
not eligible to unionize under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.
The decision, in effect, halted the academic labor movement at private
institutions just as corporatization was getting a stronger foothold, and
kicked off a wave of academic union-busting that would have conse-
quences for decades to come. Shortly after, in 1983, U.S. News & World
Report published its first Best Colleges issue using an easily gamed and
internally unsound rankings system in a marketing gamble that would
eventually fundamentally alter the landscape of higher education (and to
later include U.S. K-12 schools in the unprincipled ratings game) in less
than a decade (O’Neill, 2016).
Further, and building on the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, the Federal
Technology Transfer Act of 1986 encouraged government labs to patent
and license academic research and to form cooperative research and devel-
opment agreements (CRADAs) with private industry. In 1989, the
National Competitiveness Technology Transfer Act extended the above to
all contractor-operated labs, and essentially served to increase the amount
of taxable research that universities could produce for a growing “knowl-
edge economy.” Geiger (2010) argues that these uses of public funds to
subsidize public colleges and universities as a research tool for the private
sector can be understood as a kind of corporate welfare. According to
Washburn (2005), this amounted to “the birth of a new paradigm in
American higher education variously described as “the second academic
revolution,” the “entrepreneurial university” or simply “academic capital-
ism”. Meanwhile, in the Global South the “sadistic economic adventures”
(Klein, 2007, p. 284) of disaster capitalists wreaked havoc on colleges and
universities in ways that would be a harbinger for higher education world-
wide by the turn of the twenty-first century: “Through the imposition of
‘Washington consensus’ style structural adjustment policies by the
International Monetary Fund, countries in the developing world during
the 1980s were forced to privatize universities, often with devastating
effects on access, educational opportunity and equality” (Peters & Jandrić,
2018, p. 558).
By the 1990s, the dominance of Reaganomics or Thatcherism or neo-
conservatism persisted and intensified with the end of the Cold War, the
fall of the Berlin Wall, and the proliferation of further roll-backs against
civil rights, feminist movement gains, and the legacy of the New Deal
and Great Society reforms that had previously reigned in massive and
growing wealth inequality. Klein (2007) argues that following the col-
lapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, fundamentalist capitalism in the
United States was not only full throttle but went largely unchecked until
the Battle of Seattle in 1999. Many are aware of the sweeping changes
brought about by the 1994 Omnibus Crime bill that accelerated,
through increased federal funding, the repressive turn to mass roundups
and mass incarceration of Black and Brown people under the guise of the
drug war; the 1995 neo-conservative takeover of the U.S. Congress; and
the 1996 gutting of welfare and the full pivot away from the commit-
ments of the Great Society and the New Deal. These were also important
watershed moments in this decade that would pave the way for a pure
free-market capitalist program to further implant itself in higher educa-
tion, moments that were themselves embedded in the larger context of
the internet technology revolution of the 1990s. It is in this decade, for
example, and in tandem with related changes that internet technology
brought to industry more generally, and with the rising tide of deregula-
tion, that for-profit colleges and universities took center stage. Using a
model of no faculty governance, no tenure, and faculty who are “facilita-
tors” paid by the course, the University of Phoenix hit the runway,
modeling what would eventually become the trendiest style in the neo-
liberal higher education non-profit closet as well.
At the same time, in 1992, eight years before Congress passed the
Commodities Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) that deregulated the
sale of derivatives, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) autho-
rized the trading of Student Loan Asset Back (SLAB) securities, com-
modifying student loan debt, significantly elevating the risk to students
and their families for predatory lending, and pumping poisonous air into
a student loan bubble that higher education executives would breathe in
and exhale into bloated administrative apparatuses, tuition hikes, and
diploma mills masked as online graduate programs. Simultaneously, the
Clinton Administration would eliminate Pell Grant funding for incarcer-
ated students via the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Elimination Act
despite the fact that less than one half of 1% of Pell Grant recipients were
in prison college programs (Zoukis, 2014).
Arguably one of the most important turn of events in the 1990s that
would be a flashpoint in the corporatization of higher education and the
routine “taking of the knowledge commons” would be the 1999 Berkeley-
Novartis deal that put the privatization of public research squarely on the
map when Novartis, a Swiss-based pharmaceutical corporation and
Berkeley teamed up to develop genetically engineered crops (Washburn,
2005). Despite the fact that investing in research privatization on the part
of colleges and universities only “helps” a handful of institutions, similar
to the investments in college athletics (Peterson-Horner & Eckstein,
2015), and instead turns out to be correlated with a subsequent under-
funding of teaching, the dismantling of tenure, and the downsizing and
devaluing of humanities and social science programs that serve the tradi-
tional mission of a liberal arts education worthy of the entitled, wide-
spread devotion to the relevance and effectiveness of privatization models
flourished in this period, and remain a key tenet of the faithful. In the lit-
any of unnerving indicators of an encroaching for-profit model into the
non-profit space were investments of endowments in risky startups
founded by professors; universities launching their own industrial parks,
venture capital funds, and for-profit companies in agriculture, biotech,
drugs, computers, weapons, and genetics, to name a few; and institutions
publishing newsletters encouraging faculty to commercialize their research
by going into business (Busch, 2014; Geiger 2010, 2016). We also start
to see shocking violations of academic freedom and research ethics as the
entrepreneurial model takes hold. For example, we learn of corporations
preventing graduate students from publishing on time as research was

held hostage by industry partners, the deleting of information from aca-
demic papers prior to publishing that threathened industry partners, and
the suppression of research studies that uncovered significant threats to
industry partners (Busch, 2014).
Ultimately, by the end of the decade, as bounty from “the first internet
boom, from 1998 to 2001, some fifty for-profit-college companies, along
with companies like Blackboard and WebCT, which develop ‘learning
management systems’ for web-based courses, caught the attention - and
more than $1 billion in capital—from venture capitalists and other inves-
tors” (Blumenstyk, 2015, p. 123). In part, their eye was caught by an
investment loophole made possible in 1998 when federal educational pol-
icy reform intended to facilitate distance learning converged with inves-
tors’ realization that some up-until-then small-time for-profit vocational
schools could obtain accreditation, and thus also federal funding. The
result was a whole new frontier of students hungry for economic and
social mobility who were now eligible for federal student loans to do
online degrees en masse, a new frontier that Kevin Carey (2019, para. 19)
called a “profiteers’ paradise,” and that would help spawn the contempt-
ible gold rush-style run on the establishment of “online program manage-
ment” corporations (OPMs) as a variation on the already loathsome
“educational management corporations” (EPMs) captained by new rob-
ber barons called “educational entrepreneurs,” or simply, “edupreneurs.”
Giving Up the Ghost at the Turn

of the Twenty-First Century
By the turn of the twenty-first century, faculty who were old enough to
know a traditional liberal arts university life in the 1970s and 1980s,
whether as teachers or as former students, would bear witness to the tra-
ditional university model gasping for breath, and, eventually, it would
seem, many of us consciously or not, would give up the ghost or at least
begin to feel unease, if not some unrecognized grief for the loss of a pro-
fessional and also personal way of being in the world. By the time Donald
Trump was elected U.S. president in 2017, a whole new generation of
both students and faculty would have no lived experience in universities
that were not disfigured, at best, and totally reconstituted at worst, by
corporatization and the commodification of knowledge. Key shifts in the
political economy of the early 2000s also served as watersheds. As the

world was gripped by the attack on 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
tsunamis and hurricanes, the apex of racialized mass incarceration, educa-
tion privatizers advanced the front in capturing the public goods with the
help of former President George W. Bush’s 2001 reauthorization of the
Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 (a result of another modifi-
cation to President Johnson’s 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education
Act—ESEA) in the form of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In that same
period, in 2000, California Governor, Gray Davis, launched the California
Institute of Science and Innovation (CISI) which the San Francisco Bay
Guardian called, “The Selling of the UC System” (Washburn, 2005,
p. 17). By 2002, explicit handbooks or/playbooks emerged on how to
design, manage and grow corporate universities, such as Mark Allen’s
edited collection, published by the American Management Association,
that draws on examples from Motorola, Schwab, and Toyota (Allen,
2002). By 2005, and like the misnamed No Child Left Behind the
Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act made school
loan debt almost impossible to discharge, carrying forward the cruel attack
on students put in motion in 1976, arguably as another weapon in the
backlash against the progressive gains of the 1960s.
It was during this same turn into the twenty-first century that the pre-
dation of for-profit colleges and universities began to be widely under-
stood in the U.S., in part because of federal investigations that revealed
their massive and shameless exploits of students, putting educational
investors on their heels and in search of a more “respectable” and less vis-
ible vehicle to extract profit from the “massification” (e.g. Hayes, 2017)
of higher education and the growing market of students. One ground-
shifting response by the for-profit sector was, essentially, to reverse the
direction of outsourcing of educational services and move for-profit oper-
ations right into the non-profit shell of colleges and universities them-
selves: a kind of “insourcing,” if you will. A somewhat imprecise but
perhaps generally useful way to describe this “insourcing” tactic might be
to call it a kind of legal money laundering through the college or univer-
sity storefront. Instead of a pizza shop or a shell company or bank account
in the Caymans, educational capitalists established educational program
management corporations (EPMs), including online program manage-
ment corporations (OPMs), or third-party, for-profit entities that manage
and/or own some, if not most, of the academic operations at both public
and private institutions, and funded by student tuition. First introduced
by the same for-profit profiteers that founded Kaplan, and later adopted
by the likes of the University of Phoenix set, corporations like 2U and
Udacity were granted the legal status to sell a range of educational services
to non-profit educational institutions without the burden of for-profit tax
obligations, services such as student recruiting, admissions, marketing,
online program delivery platforms, and “course content development”
and “facilitation” (read: teaching) itself. Due, in part, to lax federal
requirements for universities on the reporting around student lending for
graduate programs, the new cash cows for educational venture capitalists
would be online graduate programs, which would soon become a new
educational cottage industry. In exchange for these third-party “insourc-
ing” services, third-party private investors were green-lighted to take
home upwards of 60% of student tuition paid into online degree programs
as their cut of what now were, and are, profits “earned” in a “respectable”
non-profit shell (see Carey, 2019, para. 17).
This new form of student predation was, and continues to be, possible
as the result not only of pre-existing loopholes in federal regulations, but
new U.S. Department of Education rule changes in 2011. These changes,
lobbied for by OPMs owners in the wake of the disaster of the 2008 finan-
cial collapse that birthed the Great Recession, allowed for profit sharing
with colleges and universities (Carey, 2019), and amidst a larger predatory
shift toward the increasing number and power of private equity (PE) firms
more generally as the newest cadre of thinly regulated elite financiers in
the post-Great Recession looted economy. We will say more about the
Great Recession below, and much more about OPMs later in the book. As
an ominous bellwether, by 2017, the Indiana state legislature had granted
Purdue Global the unprecedented legal status of being both a non-profit
institution exempt from for-profit tax obligations, and a private institution
exempt from public records information requests.
In the midst of these investment opportunities for venture capitalists
and educational entrepreneurs, a parallel growth in administrative appara-
tus occurred during the first decade of the twenty-first century that has
been well-documented (Kezar et al., 2019; Busch, 2014; Ginsberg, 2011;
Tuchman, 2009). Along with the ranks of the faculty, students, and the
more traditional administrative ranks of chairs and deans, the latter also
expanding, colleges and universities now employ a cadre of workers in the
following areas: admissions and enrollment; athletics; business affairs and
operations; competency and assessment; development and alumni affairs;
diversity and inclusion; human resources; learning design and digital
learning; marketing and communications; strategic planning and institu-

tional research; student affairs; and technology, among others. Who they
are less likely to employ, and also under conditions less and less familiar as
prerogatives of the professions, are tenure stream faculty, in a process
widely recognized as one of deprofessionalization (e.g. Tuchman, 2009;
Rhoades, 1998) and “adjunctification” (Mintz, 2021).
The Great Recession as a Disaster Booster Shot

Historically, too, large natural and societal catastrophic events have been
used to further advance already existent private interests in American edu-
cation like a neoliberal booster shot, and perhaps no other moment
portends the current pandemic landscape in higher education than the
Great Recession. Selingo (2018) identified three outcomes of the Great
Recession for higher education: (1) a change in the financial underpin-
nings of higher education institutions; in order to lure in more students,
particularly those coming out of state, institutions applied steep discount
rates, in effect putting their tuition on sale, resulting in a discount rate
competition between public and private schools; (2) a rapid decline in
humanities enrollments in favor of more professional majors like business
or healthcare, as evidenced by data from Northwestern University that
showed that history majors declined a whopping 44% between 2008–2018,
and political science and sociology majors by 20% in the same time period;
(3) a sharp turnover of university presidents who move from job to job, or
are fired, and of university boards filled with trustees from the corporate
sector more interested in short-term gains than long-term goals and
sustainability.
Further, Geiger (2010) identified a sharp decline in state budgetary
support for colleges and universities as one of the most significant long-
term consequences of the Great Recession, adding to an already declining
trend in investment in education by the states in the decades before the
financial collapse. Such declines as a result of the collapse exacerbated the
growing divide between private and public colleges and between private
elite colleges and smaller private liberal arts colleges that depend heavily
on revenues generated by student tuition. As a result of these recession era
cuts in state spending on higher education and education in general, col-
leges and universities relied more heavily on increases in tuition, pushing
the financial burden onto students and families which ultimately resulted
in increases in student debt - a crisis that would foreshadow the COVID-19

tuition price-gouging we discuss later in the book. And, as will become a
point of debate when the pandemic hit, endowments suffered during the
prolonged market downturns of the Great Recession in ways that hastened
austerity responses from higher education executives that would resonate
again during COVID.
The Great Recession also highlighted other weaknesses that have been
plaguing American higher education, namely dropping enrollments and
bigger competition in postsecondary education globally (Geiger 2010).
With that said, American universities have remained attractive to the inter-
national student body, or at least that was true until the 2020 pandemic.
The international student body in the United States doubled between
2008–2016, resulting in a 104% increase, while overall college enroll-
ments grew only 3.4% (Ruiz & Radford, 2017). What followed across the
nation on many college and university campuses, and not surprisingly, was
the creation of new administrative offices for global education and study
abroad. The enrollment of international students mushroomed, as did the
large investments that many universities made in building campuses
abroad. Indeed, a growing body of international students helped bail out
state universities after the Great Recession (Fischer, 2019), a reality that
would become a harbinger for the sustainability of these investments and
corporate university business models in what would eventually become an
increasingly anti-immigrant, anti-foreign nationals climate in the U.S. In
short, during the pandemic, Trump-era international student policies
would limit the number of courses international students could take
online, and combined with a menu of choices for better-priced quality
higher education for international students at home, the result would be
notable declines in international student enrollment in the throes of
COVID-19 such that some estimate a loss of $700 million dollars for
American universities (NAFSA, 2020). Other countries that depend on
international student bodies have been similarly impacted. Peter Hurley
(2021, paras. 21 and 23), policy fellow at the Mitchell Institute, Victoria
University argues that a loss of international student dollars will result in
an estimated loss of $16 billion by 2023 in Australia alone.
While these estimated COVID era losses are real, it is clear that institu-
tions of higher education continued to expand by increasing their geo-
graphical footprints during the disaster of the Great Recession, growing
their administrative class and their pay, while at the same time using
austerity measures to cut faculty pay and benefits, fire faculty, eliminate
faculty lines, and increase tuition to fill budget holes. Indeed, one of the
most significant impacts of the Great Recession of 2008 on higher educa-
tion was precisely related to faculty employment. Turner (2014) argues
that during economic downturns college enrollments increase. That was
also true for the Great Recession. However, the loss of state dollars for
state schools and the increase of the share of budgets dependent on stu-
dent tuition for small private colleges and universities had a direct impact
on the faculty labor market (Turner, 2014, p. 176). Early in the Great
Recession crisis, shock doctrine austerity measures were enacted swiftly by
administrations in many colleges and universities in the U.S. to further
erode the investment in an institutional commitment to faculty via the
increase in the reliance on part-time and non-tenure-track lines. As Turner
(2014) points out, these decisions have had a long-term impact on higher
education outputs such as graduation rates and knowledge production. As
for the faculty hiring market, after the downsizing of faculty labor and the
freezing or cutting of faculty salaries enacted during the first months of the
Great Recession, neither fully rebounded.
As an indicator of the extent of the crisis and the related interest of capi-
talists in the post-Great Recession education market, Blumenstyk (2015)
argues that, prior to the 2000s, criticism of higher education was largely
an internal dialogue. Yet, with the acceleration of education privatization,
the calls for reform of higher education began to emerge from a diverse
range of parties outside of academia, including neoliberal think tanks and
education foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and
Lumina, and research and policy consulting enterprises with direct finan-
cial incentives, such as Bain Consulting and McKinsey and Company. By
the late aughts, Gates and Lumina, both largely new to the scene as educa-
tion privatizers, would play outsourced roles, no pun intended, pouring
almost $600 million into initiatives and organizations that aimed to com-
pletely restructure higher education between 2008 and 2013 (Blumenstyk,
2015, pp. 118–120). Among the controversial projects that Gates and
Lumina have funded, and this in the context of the increasing growth of
OPMs, include questionable changes to remedial education, reforms to
federal aid policy to allow for self-paced degree programs, and programs
to accelerate degree completion, all of which Gates and Lumina have
claimed are necessary to support access for low-income and first-generation
students. Also in this period, the Gates Foundation ventured into
financing educational startups, to the tune of millions, including funding

to for-profit enterprises for the purpose of building new low-cost online
colleges as an avenue to normalize private sector models. Overall, “from
2007–2013, investors poured more than $1.8 billion into some 164 com-
panies related to higher education. Nearly a quarter of that was invested in
2013” (Blumenstyk, 2015, p. 123).
All the while, public sector institutions, including public universities,
would continue to battle the infusion of “new public management”
(NPM) philosophies that had come onto the scene, and were deployed by
governments to reorganize and ostensibly modernize the public sector
based on market-oriented principles that presume risk-free increased effi-
ciency and cost-savings. Like others who have documented the rise of
audit culture, Peters and Jandrić (2018, p. 559) credit NPM in part for
“the constant measuring and regulating of academic performance and the
changing ethos of the ‘performing subject’ that undermines taken-for-
granted academic prerogatives, generating what seems like a continual
renegotiation of conditions of academic freedom.” Peters and Jandrić
(2018) further write:
Neoliberal infringements of academic autonomy now seem commonplace,

eroding tenure, conditions of research and study leave, circumscribing pro-
fessorial collegiality and decision making, aggrandizing departments of
finance and human relations at the expense of (sic) senate, and introducing
a hierarchy online-management that compromises the ethos of sharing, col-
laboration and collegiality. (p. 559)
Moreover, like the “scientific management” of Taylorism in the twentieth

century, “performance management” would ascend as the dominant orga-
nizational paradigm at the turn of the twenty-first century. Instead of
“highly centralized bureaucracies with rigid, top-down management styles
or perceived controlling, hierarchical and conformist organizational cul-
tures,” the focus, both in higher education and not, would now be on
“service-based, global oriented and electronically wired” processes that
are decentralized, with “flexible management styles” that seek to
“empower” rather than “control” and foreground “diversity, innovation
and intuition” (Peters & Jandrić, 2018, pp. 558–559).
The result would include the rise of a new class of academic middle
managers tasked with surveilling, quantifying, and disciplining “perfor-
mance” to improve the efficiency, productivity, and profitability of the
labor of both research and teaching. For example, by 2010, the Texas
A&M system, at least for a limited time, monitored and published data on
the web that calculated “each professor’s ‘bottom line,’ showing whether
they made or lost money for the university based on their salaries, number
of students taught, and value of their research grants” (Blumenstyk, 2015,
p. 110). Similarly, though Cathy O’Neill (2016) argues it was partially a
response to the “irrationality of rationality” (Ritzer, 1993, p. 1) of college
ranking algorithms, Blumenstyk (2015) reports that in 2015 more than
20 states in the U.S. had tied a portion of the already wildly depleted pub-
lic funding to the colleges’ performance rankings. At the time of writing,
there is now a range of “alternative education models” or “alt-ed” move-
ments that promote privatized, “individualized” and “customized” and
“self-paced” or “student-driven” models that “break the mode,” so to
speak, for purportedly pedagogically creative and inspired outcomes to
serve the diverse “needs” of a wide-range of students. Perhaps not surpris-
ing given our historical overview here, “many investors and reformers
advocating for such alternative models are themselves products of elite
institutions with MBAs from Harvard and Wharton” (Blumenstyk, 2015,
p. 140).
Finally, and chillingly, in the context of a 40-year tour of neoliberalism,
and in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, Blumenstyk (2015, p. 124) also
argued that most of the contemporary education investor interest has been:
…aimed at companies that claim they have a fix for the things that are ‘bro-
ken’ in higher education. The capital has gone to companies like
StraighterLine, with its low-cost alternatives to general-education courses,
and 2U […], as well as to ventures like Knewton, a company that uses
predictive-analytics technology to personalize the teaching of courses to fit
the ways individual students learn best and Copley Retention Systems,
which helps college advisors and professors keep students on track to gradu-
ate. Investors have also been drawn to companies like Coursera and Udacity,
which were both created by Stanford University professors and provide the
platforms for massive open learning courses, or MOOCs, and to a venture
called Minerva, which aims to create a new model of elite higher education
that moves its students from the city to city over four years. Investors have
also backed the company founded in 2012 that runs American Honors,
which helps two-year institutions develop the curriculum and related pro-
gramming for an “honors college” within the community college, and then
assist students in transferring to selective four-year colleges to complete
their baccalaureate degrees.
To be sure, critical analysts of American higher education are also clear

that the American university has been a unique asset responsible for
advances in U.S. society. Both Busch (2014) and Washburn (2005) point
out that the problem is not that university and industry collaborate, but
that the line between the two is disappearing, a critique that is consistent,
in fact, with Veblen’s own pragmatic analysis at the turn of the twentieth
century. Looking back a century from 2005, Washburn argued that since
the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, there has been a
“tug-of-war” between the utilitarian, liberal, and the German model.
What is different today, and shaping the academic terrain in the COVID
era, is that the university is now a central institution in the global capitalist
economy supercharged for empire, aiding and abetting through hyper-
neoliberalist models and radical libertarian models of “higher education”
in a tug-of-war game over the future of global democracy.
In the Thick of the Currents
As past is prologue, then, even prior to the COVID outbreak, the con-
tours of the neoliberal university, and at least some countervailing forces,
were starkly evident, with no shortage of commentators who, as Bessner
(2020, n.p.) would point out, would characterize the American university
as a “house of cards, built on exploitation, anti-intellectualism, and mass
debt, [and] doomed to collapse.” In a somewhat more optimistic or at
least less doomsday perspective on contemporary concerns about the
“costs, value and efficacy” of higher education in the United States,
Blumenstyk (2015, p. 3) says:
This is not an unprecedented phenomenon. Economic, political, demo-

graphic, religious, and technological forces have transformed higher educa-
tion before […]. Now higher education as an enterprise is once again at a
watershed. Or more accurately, it is in the thick of the currents.
What, exactly, then, are we facing now with a pandemic added to the thick
of these currents?
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, there have been
scholars who have started to analyze the crisis through the lens of Naomi
Klein’s “shock doctrine” (Acheson, 2020; Adams, 2020; Johansson,
2021; Ølgaard, 2020). Klein (2020a), herself, has argued that the
COVID-19 crisis, like other ones before, has served as an opportunity for
the wealthiest to reap the benefits of government aid while those on the
bottom of the economic ladder are left behind. Soon after the pandemic
hit, she shared her critique of the extent to which Big Tech had moved to
redefine how we live and work, like an invasive species overtaking every
inch of our private space, and the inevitable inequalities that it produces
between the haves and have-nots, particularly, she noted, in the shift to
online education and telehealth (Klein, 2020d). The impact of disaster
capitalism on education, and the impact of the COVID-19 disaster are still
limited. Overall, the role of disaster opportunism in capturing K-12 public
schooling has been more extensively documented than the impact on
higher education (Saltman, 2007a; Saltman, 2007b; Klein, 2007) as
Hurricane Katrina was used to drastically alter public education in America.
On the one hand, the extent of the literature on how large disruptions or
disasters have been used to alter higher education is thin, and the scholar-
ship with a focus on COVID-19 is only emerging as we write. On the
other hand, as this chapter has documented, the impact of neoliberalism
on higher education has been extensively studied and argued.
That said, there have been a handful of scholars and commentators who
have written about disaster capitalism in higher education (Letizia, 2016;
Nehring, 2021; Moore et al., 2021; Kornbluh, 2020), including the
AAUP, which documented the impact of Hurricane Katrina on universi-
ties in New Orleans in an in-depth special report (O’Neill et al., 2007).
Letizia (2016), for instance, focuses on studying performance-based fund-
ing policies in four U.S. states (Texas, Florida, Ohio, Louisiana) and the
influence that the for-profit sector exerts on the direction of higher educa-
tion policy through state legislatures outside of the context of a disaster.
More recently, Moore et al. (2021) studied the influence of EdTech com-
panies on higher education during the pandemic. Nehring (2021) identi-
fied two indicators that disaster capitalism is befalling higher education
during COVID-19: institutional restructuring and layoffs, and the remod-
eling of teaching by shifting classes online.
This work, along with what we have tracked as the broader catastrophic
trends in how neoliberalism has worked to transform higher education,
suggests persistent threats swirling in the “thick of the currents” that char-
acterize the pandemic era that can be summed up in the following broad
areas, which we recognize is likely not inclusive: (1) continued attacks on
faculty and shared governance and the emergence of an administrative class
as ultimate decision-makers; (2) attacks on faculty, graduate students, and
academic staff unionization; (3) attacks on academic freedom manifested
in various forms, such as administrative controls on course delivery; the

shift from in-person to online learning via courseware owned and managed
by online learning management companies; the subsequent challenges to
the definition of intellectual property; the rise of post-tenure reviews and
attacks on tenure in general; and the crisis in academic freedom to decide
which ideas are worthy of examination; (4) exponential tuition and student
fee hikes; (5) the rise of ratings and peer institution comparisons and the
related rise of institutional assessments that fail to measure actual learning;
(6) the growth in the number of professional-based degrees that are more
intensively governed by the guidelines of accrediting bodies and not fac-
ulty, and the related graduate program overproduction and up-credential-
ing; (7) the consequential weakening of liberal arts education and the
elimination of liberal arts programs; (8) the “right sizing” or downsizing of
the faculty body through adjunctification, and the lack of long-term invest-
ment in faculty through full-time, non-tenured faculty lines; (9) the persis-
tence of administrative bloat; (10) and the fundamental shift from education
as a public good to a private interest, turning universities into venture capi-
talist hubs that invite parallel trends, such as the increase in the fraud of
guest faculty, honorary authorships, predatory academic publishing prac-
tices, conflicts of interest in research, and more.
The Chapters Remaining

The chapters that follow describe and illustrate the ways in which higher
education administrators, often in partnership with state and corporate
actors, chose to continue these attacks in the midst of a global health crisis.
In some cases, these attacks have continued under the auspices of a
pandemic- necessitated response. In others, academic capitalists took
advantage of the larger fear, uncertainty and disorientation ushered in by
the crisis to introduce or further expand on initiatives not explicitly
pandemic-related, but pushed out while fires were burning elsewhere. We
had originally envisioned that each chapter would tell a separate but
related story about these kinds of either “Trojan horse” tactics or “sleight
of hand” tactics. Instead, the story that unfolded, namely the rapid expan-
sion of global privatized educational management syndicates, with the
capture of the academic mission of higher education as a central goal,
threads throughout, making all of the chapters interconnected. We intro-
duce our notion of global total education management privatization syn-
dicates (global TEMPS), and identify major threads of its spider web of
entanglements, including EdTech behemoths, global educational consul-

tancies, corporate class think tanks, and philanthro-capitalists across the
political spectrum.
From there, we show how an already severely weakened commitment
to academic shared governance, both in principle and in practice, has been
further undermined through the seemingly collaborative workings of
“pandemic task forces” established on campuses around the country, and,
like other ostensibly advisory bodies on campuses, often serve to launder
coercion for management agendas under the guise of “faculty consulta-
tion.” We examine a troubling set of illustrations of both the implicit and
also explicit allocation of COVID response team authority to campus
executives in student affairs and athletics, as opposed to faculty-supported
leaders in academic affairs. We explore the various manifestations of these
exercises in the manufacture of consent, including those that are entan-
gled with local and state officials in ways that suggest a pattern of complic-
ity. We discuss the consequences for faculty power, control over curriculum,
and the conditions of teaching and learning.
We also tackle the non-faculty academic labor cost and control strate-
gies that U.S. administrators have taken during COVID-19 that were pre-
sented as pandemic austerity measures, but have precipitating factors and
deeper roots in “workforce reduction plans.” We argue that such austerity
measures were displaced and exacerbate the crisis of administrative bloat.
We argue that the familiar management tactic of manufacturing fear,
uncertainty, and distrust (F.U.D.) to destabilize and undercut unions per-
sists and it has been repurposed during the COVID-19 crisis on college
campuses across the United States. In this discussion, our attention will be
on the ways in which higher education executives deployed narratives of
fiscal emergency to justify labor and program reductions, despite clear
budget justifications, and in many cases, while otherwise increasing
their wealth.
We then move on to describe the self-serving agenda shifting of college
and university administrations on the role of remote learning as a COVID
crisis management strategy, and what it teaches us about the educational
bankruptcy of the pre-pandemic takeover of traditional in-person models
of teaching and learning. We acknowledge that faculty and students have
made creative adaptations to the imposition of technological imperatives
in educational settings as important nodes of resistance to EdTech,
though we focus largely on the questions of whether or not such tech-
nologies are needed or desirable in the first place. At center stage is the
story of the catastrophic rise of OPMs, and how under the cover of the
pandemic, educational investors have continued to search for more politi-
cally palatable vehicles to extract profit from the increasing numbers of
students seeking access to higher education in the midst of shrinking via-
ble options for status and mobility. In particular, we show the ways in
which edupreneurs have pivoted their outsourcing of educational services
from for-profit operations toward public-private partnerships, undergoing
a pandemic rebranding as we write.
In that context, we look more closely at one of the most widely peddled
educational technology products “dusted off” during the COVID-19
pandemic, namely what is known as the “hyflex” or “blendflex” modality
of instruction. An instructional design product developed years before the
pandemic, hyflex teaching, not to be confused with hybrid teaching, is an
enrollment management and educational technology corporate strategy
that requires faculty to teach their courses in-person and online simultane-
ously. One of the most profound transformations of teaching in the remote
learning era, the hyflex modality crept into the higher education pandemic
restart plans of some state legislatures, and suggests a disturbing synergy
between educational technology firms, enrollment management firms,
online program management corporations, college and university presi-
dents, and state legislators.
We also document the demoralizing story of how enrollment manage-
ment executives, guided by perverse college ranking incentives, continue
to hijack faculty governance by capitalizing on pandemic upheavals and
uncertainty to add market-driven academic programs and by pushing for
other academic changes that weaken the power of faculty and distort the
values of the academy. Additionally, we shed light on the related and
unscrupulous steps to increase tuition and student debt during the first six
months of the pandemic in what can be described as a familiar kind of
disaster-inspired price-gouging of consumers. After reviewing the overall
landscape of tuition increases and student debt, particularly as connected
to “value proposition” market ideologies, we discuss some cases of uncon-
scionable tuition increases across the nation.
We also describe and explain key consequences of the constellation of
racialized and gendered disaster capitalist policies and practices for vulner-
able students and their families, for faculty and staff, and for the academic
mission itself. Along with the risks to health and safety, and the financial
blows of increased student debt, we document the mishandling of CARES
Act allocations intended for low-income students, the politics of priva-

tized campus housing in the pandemic context, and the exploitation of
student athletes during a global health crisis. We also take on the blatant
attacks on the liberal arts curriculum that target the very examination of
the power relations that, among other things, undergird the crisis in the
first place.
In the final chapters of the book, we concentrate on student, faculty,
and staff resistance to the pandemic shock doctrine in higher education.
We highlight student-led campaigns for safety, equity, and justice on
U.S. college and university campuses that have been launched in response
to pandemic disaster capitalism, labor victories for campus essential work-
ers, and the revitalization of faculty unions around the country as a fight
for the soul of higher education. Throughout, we emphasize the growing
solidarity movements between faculty and non-faculty workers, and stu-
dents, energized by the naked opportunism of corporate higher education
executives and “edupreneurs,” and how these campaigns might be situ-
ated in allied social movements. We close with specific recommendations
for on-going collective action against racialized disaster patriarchal capital-
ism and toward a different kind of pandemic opportunity, one where we
organize for a broader social justice unionism that can build not only new
colleges and universities for the people, but a new and fair economy for all.
CHAPTER 3
Bringing the F.U.D to Thin the Ranks
Shortly after the pandemic hit, Naomi Klein (2020a) posted a short
YouTube video called “Coronavirus Capitalism” where she reiterated
some of the key ideas of Shock Doctrine. She reminded viewers that at the
core of disaster capitalism is the seizing of the opportunity created by the
chaos, fear, uncertainty, and disorienting nature of a crisis to dust off, and
then put into play, predatory and often brutal economic policy ideas that
have been lying around but may have once seemed untenable prior to the
disaster. As a particularly devastating example, she cataloged how global
pharmaceutical corporations have price gouged individuals and health care
providers alike on the sale of life-saving medical equipment, including
hand sanitizers, PPE, ventilators and vaccines that have left millions around
the globe at risk of illness and death that otherwise could have been
avoided, and fueled an accelerated and gruesome spectacle of hoarding by
wealthy individuals and nations that is a hallmark of capitalism in any
moment, shocking times or not. Taking on the vulture-like mechanisms of
privatized healthcare in the U.S., Klein quipped that it “seems like the
whole pandemic is getting outsourced” (Klein, 2020a).
Following Klein, Astra Taylor (2020) remarked that disaster capitalism
can be “less direct and more obscured from the public” than price gouging,
as in the no-strings pandemic bailouts of the cruise line, airline, fracking
and hotel industries, or the corporate lobbyist move to suspend the payroll

Switzerland AG 2022
tax (see also Klein, 2020a). Ultimately, in the U.S., the feds pumped
$1.5 trillion into the financial markets as a pandemic relief measure, while
millions of workers remain unable to take time off of work even when ill,
and the U.S. Congress looks like unlikely to pass a complete Build Back
Better Act that includes essential economic provisions for workers that
would rebuild the social safety net ravaged by neoliberalism over the past
40 years. Instead, in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak, we wit-
nessed a familiar response reminiscent of the global financial collapse of
2008, not only in the script of the bailouts, but in the remorseless turn of
the global elite to tactics to regroup and shape-shift to meet the new crisis
with renewed energy, like the Greek Hydra whose head one can cut off
only to have it grow back. In the case of education, including higher edu-
cation, Klein’s Shock Doctrine characterization of elites as junkies with an
insatiable need to hustle for their next hoarding fix (2007, p. 106) rings
true in this historical moment as we witness educational entrepreneurs,
Hydra-like, or perhaps Phoenix-like, rising out of the ashes of yet another
disaster to profit off students and their families and the struggle for eco-
nomic security and mobility.
In an interview for The Nation in the early months of the pandemic, Klein
(2020d) repeated a central point that also shapes our analysis here, namely
that it is the very privatization of the disaster responses that is the engine of
crisis plundering. We can see the shades of a plundering orientation in cur-
rent higher education disaster responses, and the ideological apparatuses that
scaffold them. As corporate elites who have so thoroughly orchestrated the
public divestment in higher education leave it hollowed out and in need of
“rescue,” and with a simultaneous takeover of the state as the distributor of
funds, they create a vacuum of desperation and need so acute that it appears
that private investors are really the only saviors best equipped to step in and
resuscitate and rebuild higher education in the time of shock and crisis. As we
laid out in our Introduction, whether in the context of a natural disaster, an
economic crisis, political unrest, or a pandemic outbreak, the goal of disaster
profiteering is to capitalize, literally, on the crisis by imposing “emergency
measures” in order to establish, through painful and often brutal means,
“clean canvasses” for capitalist reconstructions. In this way, the market-based
Prince Charming rescuer also comes with a sidekick of corporate thuggery in
the form of narratives of threat and scarcity.
In his 1993 best-seller, Confessions of a Union Buster, Martin Jay Levitt
recounts his years as a professional thug, hired by corporations to enact
vicious and corrupt attacks on workers to weaken and destroy unions and
unionizing efforts. A billion dollar industry by the time Levitt decided to
3 BRINGING THE F.U.D TO THIN THE RANKS 59
come clean, Levitt and his co-author, Terry Conrow Toczynski, exposed
how the union busting business regularly relies on the deliberate manufac-
ture of what insiders call “F.U.D.,” namely the sowing of fear, uncertainty
and distrust among unionized workers to distract employees from resist-
ing and to undermine worker solidarity. As we have argued, disaster capi-
talism, itself, emerges in the context of cultures of fear that have intensified
globally, particularly since 9/11, but nearly concurrently with the rise of
neoliberal ideologies and policies. Even prior to COVID, a similar culture
of fear had seeped into higher education, with higher education executives
regularly deploying narratives of uncertainty coupled with grounds for
fear, and sowing distrust in any legitimate alternatives to crisis, whether
real or imagined, that did not align with market-based solutions. This fear-
mongering persists as part of the routines of academic capitalism, as it does
in capitalism systems more broadly, and it is amplified during times of
crises to accelerate the agendas of capitalist “transformation.”
In a word, we have been here before in the context of education, and
in more ways than one. As Katie Ferrari reminds us in her May 2020
Jacobin article,
“In 2005, [after Hurricane Katrina,] free-market economist Milton

Friedman framed the Hurricane as ‘an opportunity to radically reform the
educational system.’ Mike Pence and the Heritage Foundation set the gears
of privatization in motion, and a system of school vouchers and charters
washed away what the water hadn’t. Today, there is not a single public
school left in New Orleans. The city’s seven thousand public-school teachers
were fired, and the schools reopened as charters” (Ferrari, 2020,
para. 14–15).
However shocking, this Friedman-inspired capture of the New Orleans

public school system was not novel. In fact, it was in the 1950s, nearly half
a century before the hurricane, as fearful, panicked white southerners
railed against the “crisis” of school desegregation orders, that Milton
Friedman first proposed a privatization plan in the form of school vouch-
ers (MacLean, 2017). By the 2005 Katrina disaster and beyond, ideas
about raiding the public education commons for private gain were, as
Klein (2007) would say, ideas whose time had come.
Ferrari fast forwards from New Orleans to the current COVID disaster
to describe a secondary crisis that is, itself, among education privatizers’
primary goals: “[W]hile educators are overwhelmed with managing the
chaotic transition to distance learning and trying to meet the needs [of
students during the pandemic] that school buildings once did, states are
trying to solve the revenue crisis and lack of federal aid by drastically cut-
ting funding for public education [which could result in the loss of]
391,000 teaching positions[–a] loss greater than the loss in the wake of
the Great Recession (Ferrari, 2020, para. 2). And while Ferrari shines a
light on the repeat performance of disaster capitalism in K-12 institutions,
we have argued that a key tactic in an almost half-century hijacking of
higher education by entrepreneurial elites has been the deployment of,
among other narratives, a neoliberal ideology of “austerity” by higher
education administrators, and their allies on the faculty, in state houses
and corporations, who rely on austerity measures as proxies for wealth and
power grabs using non-profit colleges and universities as major vehicles,
and students and their families as the primary marks. These usurpations of
the non-profit educational sector, and the reliance on “austerity” as a cen-
tral ideological tool of reorganization, are not completely unlike the
house-flipping schemes during the 2009 financial collapse, or the tactics of
block-busting during the 1960s civil rights era in the U.S. In their busi-
ness model, a two-tiered system of post-secondary education is, not inci-
dentally, further sedimented: a traditional liberal arts experience for the
largely white elite, and a largely vocationalized training for everyone else,
now at elite school prices (Foster & Vujnovic, 2021).
The narrative of austerity, particularly those that call on “budget short-
falls” “enrollment emergencies,” and “financial challenges” is familiar to
many in higher education by now. As we have argued elsewhere (Foster &
Vujnovic, 2021), the sheer playbook-nature of neoliberal education policy
and practice would be comical if it were not so tragic in the extent to which
blatantly canned corporate sales pitches are shamelessly passed off to mem-
bers of academic communities as organic, in-house solutions meant to
meet the specific needs of particular institutions. As part of what Philip
Altbach (2012) identified as a process of “franchising” in higher education,
these narratives, and the institutional destruction they serve, are entangled
in academia in ways that mirror the similar dismantling of independent
media that began 30 years ago (Foster & Vujnovic, 2021). In both sectors,
we witness an initial phase of corporate acquisition and “saving” of local
institutions through franchising by parent companies, and a second phase
of hedge fund seizures, the decimation of labor, and “transformations” to
digital platforms for increased investment returns. Also, in both sectors, the
framing of the structural realignment and, indeed, total redefinition of the
mission of the vocation, is one of employee sacrifice in a sea of scarcity.
Hence, we argue that the familiar management tactic of manufacturing
fear, uncertainty and distrust to destabilize and undercut unions persists

more broadly and has been repurposed during the COVID-19 crisis on
college campuses across the United States not only to cut faculty labor
costs, but as we will suggest, to reduce the size and power of the professori-
ate, and most alarmingly, to redefine the very nature of the work for com-
mercial gain. Next, we turn our attention to the ways college and university
managements have messaged threats of financial emergencies, bypassing
the processes of declaring fiscal exigency that necessitate shared governance
responses, and the otherwise coercive use of austerity narratives by admin-
istrative elites to close academic programs and erode the tenure. We also
examine the ways these moves coalesce with racialized and gendered attacks
on academic freedom. In this, we spotlight gambits for increased outsourc-
ing of faculty labor, and the role that educational consulting firms, some of
which we will discuss in later chapters, play in serving the deployment of
austerity frames, despite the increasing evidence that shows that, in many
instances, financial crises have been largely, if not entirely, averted, and for
the wealthiest institutions, the pandemic has brought a windfall.
Cuts Cometh Before the Windfall

In a February 2021 headline chilling enough to match the weather of a
typical winter day in the U.S. Northeast, Inside Higher Education reported
that, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “650,000 Colleagues
Have Lost Their Jobs” (Kroger, 2021). The cuts were wide and deep in
academic labor during the first two years of the pandemic, and the bur-
dens were not borne equally by all sectors of the campus workforce. Data
from the U.S. Department of Education showed that in fall 2020 alone,
“the number of people employed by colleges and universities eligible to
award federal financial aid fell to 3.87 million […] down 3.9 percent from
4.02 million in fall 2009” (Lederman, 2021c, para. 2). Citing U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics, Gardner reported that between February 2020 and
December 2020, the total cumulative job losses at American public and
private colleges and universities combined was a startling 13% (Gardner,
2021, Figure 3). According to the College Crisis Initiative at Davidson
College, by the fall of 2020, nearly a quarter of the 1,442 public and pri-
vate institutions it surveyed had laid off employees since the start of the
outbreak, and nearly 450 schools had announced furloughs (Douglas-
Gabriel & Fowers, 2020). Similar losses were reported in Australia where
analysts found over 17,000 academic workers lost their jobs from the start
of the pandemic to February 2021, amounting to a total of 13% of

Australia’s university workforce (Zhou, 2021, para. 1–2).
Once again, not surprisingly, “the higher education employees most
likely to have lost their jobs [in fall 2020] were the most vulnerable among
them to begin with (Lederman, 2021c, para. 5). Reported Gardner,
“Most of those laid off [have been] staff members, particularly in food
services, maintenance, and other hourly wage jobs related to on-campus
operations that were interrupted when classes moved online in the spring
of 2020” (Gardner, 2021, para. 21). The overall pattern of risk to already
vulnerable workers has been present in faculty job loss numbers as well. In
the U.S., for example, “full-time faculty positions shrank by 1.3 percent,
and part-time instructor positions shrank 7.5 percent” (Lederman, 2021c,
para. 4). Similarly, the number of instructor layoffs at two-year public
institutions was three times as large as the overall number of instructor
layoffs across institutions (Lederman, 2021c, para. 6). In a separate analy-
sis conducted in 2021, the AAUP found:
The pandemic saw faculty layoffs and program closures throughout the past
year […]. Among respondents at institutions with a tenure system, 9.5 per-
cent reported that tenured or tenure-track faculty appointments had been
terminated or nonrenewed at their institution following the pandemic.
Among respondents across all institutions (with or without a tenure sys-
tem), 27.5 percent reported that faculty on contingent appointments had
been laid off. (Tiede, 2021, para. 6)
In June and July of 2020, while unemployment rates in the U.S. overall
improved, the unemployment rates for higher education employees
reached 11%, a rate that did not include employees who had already been
outsourced by colleges and universities (Douglas-Gabriel & Fowers, 2020).
When we look at non-faculty campus employees, the numbers are sober-
ing. An analysis of U.S. federal labor data by The Washington Post found
that by November 2020, office and administrative staff had sustained the
greatest and most enduring job losses (Douglas-Gabriel & Fowers, 2020).
By July 2020, the University of Arizona had fired over 250 campus work-
ers, staff and faculty alike, and announced plans for furloughs that would
impact nearly all of the 15,000 workers on campus (Oldham, 2020). The
staff at the University of Arizona were not the only ones to face the pros-
pects of sustained, devastating furloughs in the throes of the crisis. For
example, by fall 2020, at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, almost
1000 support staff had been furloughed indefinitely, workers that included
clerical assistants, groundskeepers, and dining services employees (Douglas-
Gabriel & Fowers, 2020). By December 2020, Marquette University in
Wisconsin had announced plans to cut more than 225 employees, includ-
ing staff by 2022 (Burke, 2020b). Similarly, Washington University in St.
Louis, Missouri furloughed nearly all of the university’s 1300 employees
for 90 days (Martinez & Nolen, 2020). Equally alarming, and in the cate-
gory of a crisis affording elites the opportunity to put into play “unpopular
ideas,” in early February 2020, Oberlin College announced its intention to
replace 108 unionized staff positions in custodial and dining services with
outsourced employees, a union-busting move that would effectively elimi-
nate nearly 70% of the employees represented by the United Auto Workers
(UAW) Local (Avery & Kinsella-Walsh, 2020). Similar moves to outsource
essential staff employees en masse under the cover of the pandemic have
occurred at other elite institutions, including those with multi-billion dol-
lar endowments, such as the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard (Avery
& Kinsella-Walsh, 2020).
These, of course, are just a sampling of the labor cuts across the coun-
try, the full extent of which is yet to be calculated as the crisis continues.
Yet, at the same time that faculty and staff employees are cut all across the
country, there is scant evidence that senior administrative staff have been
furloughed or terminated as a pandemic response strategy. In fact, in some
instances, colleges and universities have added new employees to the ranks
of the senior administration, calling into question what higher education
executives have meant when they announced “hiring freezes.” It would
seem that “freezes” applied almost exclusively to faculty and staff hiring.
As a kind of preview of sorts, not only did we find no trace of a massive
shrinking of the administrative apparatuses on U.S. campuses during the
period of our research, at least one college president, Donald P. Lofe of
Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, along with some senior admin-
istrators in university health and technology, had recently been reclassified
as “Chief Transformation Officers,” borrowing the title from the corpo-
rate sector, and also the for-profit college sector (Whitford, 2021c). These
kinds of titles continued to emerge during the pandemic as part of the
commonsense world of contemporary market-based management dis-
course. They remind us of the strangely named position of “Chief People
Officer” at George Washington University (GW Today, 2019) and the
creeping into absurdity, at the level of trafficking in the pseudo-relational,
while enacting policy decisions that further wreak devastation on people

and institutions.
As further illustration of the strategy to “cut in order to grow,” in June
2021, Inside Higher Ed surveyed college and university chief business offi-
cers about their pandemic plans to make “transformative changes in its
core structure and operations to better position itself for long-term sus-
tainability” (Lederman, 2021b, para. 24, emphasis added). Consistent
with our argument, a jaw-dropping 47%, or nearly half, of the respondents
(n = 127) reported that they would strive to do so, with 26% responding
that they envisioned a return to normal (Lederman, 2021b). As such, it is
not surprising that in 2021, after their analysis found that 40.5% of the
institutions that closed programs during the pandemic (17% total) also
reported layoffs of tenured or tenure-track faculty, compared to only 3.3%
of institutions where programs had not been shuttered, the AAUP con-
cluded that “the apparent purpose of program eliminations” that had
documented “is often to terminate the appointments of tenured faculty”
(Tiede, 2021, para. 7). Equally relevant, as we discuss further below, the
AAUP “has viewed with particular alarm recent instances in which admin-
istrations or governing boards declared faculty handbooks, other institu-
tional regulations, or parts of collective bargaining agreements as no
longer in force, at times due to an invocation of ‘force majeure’ or ‘act of
God’” (Tiede, 2021, para. 9). Across the United States, in just the first
year of the pandemic, 9% of institutions surveyed by the AAUP reported
that management had declared some type of institutional regulation no
longer in force—a deeply disturbing percentage, as we see it. As was the
AAUP’s conclusion upon investigating pandemic program closures, “It is
apparent that declarations that regulations are no longer in force are com-
monly used to effect program eliminations and terminations or non-
renewals of tenured or tenure-track faculty appointments” (Tiede, 2021,
para. 9).
In our own state of New Jersey, where there is a range of types of insti-
tutions, these labor-leveling scenarios are playing out as we write, and in
ways that we would argue can serve as a microcosm of what is happening
nationwide. In June 2020, after already laying off nearly 1000 part-time
instructors and food-service employees, Rutgers University, the state uni-
versity of New Jersey, cited COVID-19 revenue losses to declare a “fiscal
emergency” that triggered negotiations over wage freezes and increased
layoffs (Makin, 2020a, para 3). William Paterson University, a public
four-year institution also in New Jersey, had fired 13 tenure-track faculty

in the first year of the pandemic, including an outspoken union leader, and
by December 2021, had announced plans to fire another 150 professors,
or 40% of the full-time faculty, over the next three years, citing an ongoing
“enrollment crisis,” that predates the pandemic as per Stuart Goldstein,
university spokesperson (Flaherty, 2021h, para. 24). After the American
Federation of Teachers-affiliated faculty union leadership agreed to con-
cessions, that number had been reduced at the time of this writing to 100
faculty members. Also in our state, and also citing “declining enrollment,”
The County College of Morris terminated seven tenure-track faculty
members during the pandemic, all active members of the faculty union,
including the union president and two committee chairs (Weissman, 2021,
para. 3). For six of the seven, their firing came just days after the faculty
voted no confidence in the college president (Weissman, 2021). At Seton
Hall University, a private university in New Jersey where the faculty is not
unionized, the Board of Regents approved an “accelerated review” pro-
cess for reappointment, tenure, and promotion that, in effect, permits
the institution to hasten faculty dismissals. In another part of the state,
Bloomfield College, a small private college founded in 1868 that today
serves predominantly first generation students of color and adult learners,
announced in December 2021 that it may be forced to close entirely after
what it described as a decades-long decline in enrollments that the col-
lege’s president said, brought about “financial challenges [that have] been
exacerbated by the pandemic” (Dickler, 2021, para. 7), but Montclair
State University, stepped in to “save” it (Heyboer, 2022).
Yet, in the midst of these various and ostensibly austerity-inspired
attacks on the labor of the faculty in New Jersey, including the firing of
faculty union activists and leaders, the state’s only elite institution,
Princeton, apparently escaped the labor strangling grips of the pandemic.
To date we can report no public evidence of pandemic-necessitated
“restructuring” or “rethinking” or “re-prioritizing” or “right-sizing” or
calls to be “nimble” and “flexible,” or any other faux austerity garb to
cover refueled corporatization agendas. In fact, all of the reporting sug-
gests the likelihood that the Princeton brand has only gotten more valu-
able, not less, during the pandemic. Jessica Dickler in her coverage of the
ominous future for Bloomfield College writes:
This year, a small group of universities, including many in the Ivy League,
experienced a record-breaking increase in applications and net revenue
gains. These schools also reported record-breaking gains for endowments

largely due to investments in private equity or venture capital […] Some
endowments grew more than 50%. (Dickler, 2021, para, 11–12)
That said, and as we will discuss below, even with the “record-breaking”
gains for endowments at many of the nation’s elite private institutions,
those did not prevent some of the very same institutions from cloaking
opportunistic wealth grabs in austerity claims. Arguably, the most high-
profile example was the case of Johns Hopkins University (JHU) which, in
April 2020, made aggressive cuts to faculty benefits that included sus-
pending retirement contributions, claiming a projected pandemic-related
$475 million revenue shortfall. Outraged by what reeked of shock doc-
trine style opportunism, Hopkins faculty commissioned a forensic audit
that revealed a wildly different financial reality, namely that JHU’s posi-
tion was not only stable, but also quite strong. Indeed, the audit uncov-
ered that the institution had ended the fiscal year with a $75 million
surplus and almost $2 billion in reserves (Furstenberg, 2021). Reporting
on what we would comfortably call scandalous, JHU professor François
Furstenberg said of the Hopkins case, “The university’s leadership had
been very publicly caught with its hand in the cookie jar” (Furstenberg,
2021, para. 9), and noted that “the episode […] highlights the ways a
‘shock doctrine’ mentality—in which genuine economic challenges are
taken as opportunities for structural reform—has quietly migrated from
corporate boardrooms and Wall Street trading floors to the university
C-suite” (para. 5).
Similarly, in the fall of 2021 Harvard University resisted settling a strike
with its graduate student workers who were demanding a fair wage increase
on austerity grounds, citing that the wage increases would cost the institu-
tion $3.5 million annually despite its reported $283 million surplus in
2021 and a substantial growth in the Harvard endowment (Flaherty,
2021f). Although Harvard eventually settled with the strikers, it was not
before a shameful invocation of faux austerity claims-making that speaks of
a “new normal” of comfort among senior management executives in
higher education in adopting vulture capitalist tactics in a non-profit space.
Moreover, as we will discuss further below, only a year after the pandemic
began, many of the nation’s most elite institutions would go on to report
windfall revenue increases, such as the $200 million surplus at Yale.
Additionally, reports would soon surface that institutions, wealthy and
not, that had emergency funds supported by endowments, chose not to
dip into them in the months in which they were simultaneously predicting
unprecedented threats to their institutions’ futures (Svirnovskiy, 2021). A
Board of Trustees member Michael V. O’Brien (The University of
Massachusetts) was quoted as saying that the rainy day funds were ones
only to be used in “‘a completely unforeseen cataclysm,’ or an ‘asteroid
strike,’” (Svirnovskiy, 2021, para. 26). In these cases, either senior man-
agement officials knew they were overstating the economic threat and
therefore chose not to use emergency funds when they could to save jobs
and compensation, or they truly believed that the threat was as large as it
was and chose to prioritize growing endowments over protecting employ-
ees. Either way, the behavior is revealing, and foregrounds managements’
priorities.
Ultimately, at the time of this writing, it has not only been wealthy
institutions that have made substantial amounts of money off of the pan-
demic as stock market increases fueled endowments in unpredicted ways.
By February 2022, according to a study conducted by the National
Association of College and University Business Officers and the Teachers
Insurance and Annuity Association of America, 2021 saw college and uni-
versity endowments “of all sizes growing by at least 20 percent […] The
average college endowment value increased by 35 percent, to $1.1 billion,
and the median endowment size swelled to $200 million” (Whitford,
2022b). Thanks to a combination of investment earnings and federal
funding, Monash University, Australia’s largest university, “set a revenue
record for the Australian sector, earning more than A$3 billion (₤1.7 bil-
lion) for the first time despite a year of pandemic privations,” with most
other comprehensive universities in Victoria also posting an uptick in earn-
ings (Ross, A., 2022, para. 1). This was after firing 277 workers in 2020
(Bolton, 2020). In the U.S., in a 2021 Inside Higher Ed survey of American
college presidents from a range of institutions, the respondents reported a
level of confidence in the long term financial stability of their institutions
that exceeded levels prior to the pandemic. Specifically, analysts found an
eye-popping 80% of U.S. college presidents reported feeling confident
that their institution will be financially stable over the next decade com-
pared to only 57% of presidents reporting such confidence before the pan-
demic hit (Lederman, 2021b, para. 3). Certainly a stunning windfall for
select institutions, and a head-spinning twist of fate for others, though in
any case, as we shall see in the section below, it is a shift toward good for-
tune for many colleges and universities that is hard to reconcile with the
wave of F.U.D. that has been messaged in tandem by presidents and
members of their executive teams. Messaging, furthermore, that we’ll

show is sometimes cued up by educational privatizers themselves.
Not Quite Exigent but Close Enough to RIF

Unlike in other sectors in the U.S. economy, academic employers are not
only often legally bound by contractual obligations in decisions to fire
employees, but all are morally bound by normative principles of shared
governance in any decisions to terminate tenured faculty, close academic
programs, or shutter the institution entirely. Where the principles of
shared governance come into play most urgently is when a college or uni-
versity finds itself in such a dire financial position that its very existence is
in verified eminent danger and therefore makes a “declaration of fiscal
exigency” as grounds for policy decisions that directly or indirectly result
in “reductions in force” (RIF), including the elimination of tenured fac-
ulty positions. Simply put, tenure guarantees lifetime employment so long
as the institution is in existence, and so long as the faculty member is not
found to have violated disciplinary codes of conduct as outlined by a col-
lective bargaining agreement or a faculty handbook. To fire tenured fac-
ulty directly, or by the proxy of program elimination, without a formal
declaration of fiscal exigency, and more importantly the subsequent due
process that such a declaration calls forth under shared governance prin-
ciples, would amount to a grave and flagrant disregard for a long-standing
and key dimension of the culture of academic professionalism. That said,
across the country in the first year of the pandemic alone, such flagrant
disregard has not been uncommon (see Lincoln University, PA for an
exception). Indeed, what the record shows is a pattern of institutions com-
ing just short of formal declarations of exigency that would, of course, not
only signal a possible institutional death spiral and a torrent of political
and reputational fallout if declared as pure tactic, but would also signal the
need to abide by shared principles that call on an orderly and, measured
process of verifications, assessments of program elimination priorities, and
reassignments of, or compensation for, impacted faculty—a process that
would also include faculty leadership at all stages. While very few institu-
tions during the pandemic declared exigency, and also almost none that
we found called on contract language specifically allowing for unilateral
decision-making in the form of “force majeure” (“act of God”) escape
clauses (see the University of Akron, Ohio, and Medaille College in
Buffalo, New York for important exceptions here), institutions from coast
to coast have relied on claims that come right up to the line of exigency,
but stop short.
According to the AAUP and their 2021 Special Report: Covid-19 and
Academic Governance that outlines eight cases where the principles of
shared governance were blatantly violated in ways they deemed “deplor-
able,” they found:
At most of the institutions under investigation, restoring or maintaining

financial health was the board and administration’s rationale for abandoning
institutional regulations, disregarding fundamental principles and practices
of academic governance, discontinuing academic programs, and terminating
tenured appointments—yet financial exigency was not declared at any of the
eight. (AAUP, 2021a, p. 38)
Instead, what unfolded was a tidal wave of urgent claims of “financial

uncertainty,” financial hardship,” “budget crises,” or “enrollment emer-
gency.” Right away, within the first weeks of the pandemic, word of col-
leges and universities facing a combination of furloughs, salary freezes or
cuts, and program closures surfaced. In the early days of the outbreak, for
example, Mark Schlissel, President of the University of Michigan, sent a
message to the university community that led with a recognition of the
“fear and uncertainty” that the pandemic had brought to everyone in the
university community. In a one line paragraph set apart, he stated, “The
pandemic has also threatened the financial stability and future strength of
our university” (Schlissel, 2022). Following a short expression of grati-
tude to the university community for their quick adjustments to new
demands, he pivoted back to the focus on uncertainty:
I’ve previously mentioned the uncertainties we face from the pandemic.

Like everyone across our nation, we don’t know how long it will last, nor
can we precisely predict what the short- and long-term financial effects will
be although recent indications are of grave concern. These uncertainties
continue to impose a set of very real challenges on the university. Virtually
all sources of revenue the university relies on for daily operations are in ques-
tion. (Schlissel, 2022)
Those on the front lines of “restart planning” with university adminis-

trators during the pandemic may be familiar with this kind of reasoning,
namely that because we are uncertain about the future and don’t know
what it will bring, that necessarily means we should move to “austerity”
management, or rather, to make policy that rebalances the power of the

faculty and shifts the economic resources from faculty and staff and toward
senior management. Using the mantra of “everything is in question” and
its narrative cousin, “everything is on the table” as rhetorical cover for
“everything is fair game for a take-over or make-over,” senior administra-
tors could now frontload discussions of major transformations with
COVID as pretext. Ellen Schrecker (2010) found an identical narrative
deployment but university administrators during the Great Recession who
“usually acted unilaterally, sometimes by implementing long-sought stra-
tegic plans without consulting their faculties” (p. 225), and a perspec-
tive that:
The crisis offered “a unique opportunity to get costs under control, and to
make the kind of change [in employment policies] you can only dream
about in flush times.” Others urged their hearers to “seize the day,” to
expand facilities while cutting back on unwanted programs and depart-
ments. At least, they explained, academic institutions would be able “to use
a systemic approach to change.” What that change implied was clear: “We’ve
got to improve productivity.” (p. 227, emphasis in original)
At the University of Michigan, the president projected losses from

$400 million to one billion dollars in the early weeks of the outbreak, and
moved with speed to, among other changes, institute a hiring freeze and a
salary freeze for non-unionized employees, and cease merit pay increases
(Schlissel, 2022). Though select senior administrators at the university
took a 5–10% voluntary pay cut for seven months, the total compensation
earned by management was never revealed as part of the narrative of aus-
terity. Rather, as we’ll see is another pattern in the messaging, the dooms-
day predictions of estimated financial losses in staggering numbers were
often accompanied in the early weeks and months with not-so-veiled
warnings that if the first wave of cuts didn’t feel bad enough, the commu-
nity should not rest easy: more were certain to follow, however “heavy the
hearts” were that shared the news. For example, near the close of his April
20, 2020 announcement, President Schlissel, who would eventually be
removed by the Board of Regents in 2022 for inappropriate interactions
with a subordinate, reminded the community:
We’re constantly evaluating the conditions and doing our best to perform
the complex analysis of all the factors we must consider. [….T]he evolving
COVID-19 situation for U-M continues to call for more change. The cur-
rent estimated anticipated losses of $400 to $1 billion for the rest of the
calendar year may change as well. (Schlissel, 2022)
Just a few days prior, University of Arizona president, Robert Robbins,

announced furloughs and pay cuts set to be in place for over a year for
nearly all employees, citing a $66 million loss in just the first month of the
pandemic, though without explanation of the source of that loss, and
braced the community for an “‘extreme’ economic fallout” in the form of
a bone-chilling projection of $250 million in total losses, and perhaps as
much as $500 million in losses if it turned out students could not come
back to campus, presumably that spring (Sayers, 2020, para. 2). Then, only
a few days later, on April 24, 2020, Dwight McBride, President of The
New School, released a similar letter to the university community outlin-
ing, among other measures, faculty layoffs and temporary salary reduc-
tions, though not before thanking the university community for their
“flexibility, resilience, and care for one another” (McBride, 2020, para. 1).
Without further details, McBride stated what is meant to be self-evident,
namely that COVID “has created an economic crisis that we are all feeling
acutely. […] As is the case at nearly every other college and university in the
United States, the consequences from The New School’s finances can
expect a cumulative loss from the pandemic of approximately $130 million
between now and the end of fiscal year 2021” (McBride, 2020, para. 3).
Yet again, in the midst of no transparency around how management calcu-
lated the estimated losses; McBride unveiled the decision to halt retirement
fund contributions, and temporary tiered salary cuts for many at as much
as 3%- 6%, the furloughing of others, and with a broad rationale that stu-
dents were likely to need more financial aid, donors less likely to be in the
position to give, and drops in the stock market that would impede the
growth of their endowment. To be fair, McBride also announced a 12% pay
cut for the university’s leadership team, a 15% cut for the provost and the
president, and a halt to their retirement fund contributions. The New
School also froze student tuition for the year. More common in the throes
of the pandemic have been claims of care and concern for students and the
core academic mission, coupled with increases in student tuition amidst the
crisis, as was the case at our own institution where tuition was hiked twice
in the first 18 months of the disaster.
That said, McBride took steps in the closing of his early communication
to the university community to warn against the expectation that the
endowment will be used as an emergency fund, noting that the purpose of
the endowment was:
to provide a steady source of income to support The New School’s mission

and programs in perpetuity. It is not intended- nor is it legally allowed- to
be used as an emergency reserve fund. While the Trustees intend to access
significant funds from the endowment to help address needs created by the
pandemic, they cannot do so without limits and will not do so in a way that
jeopardizes the long-term interests and needs of the university. (McBride,
2020, para. 23)
McBride’s closing also included a familiar refrain that despite the steps
they have outlined, they “still expect a shortfall … for this fiscal year and
next, and cannot yet fully anticipate the impact of challenges that may be
developing [and] it is likely we will need to consider additional measures”
(McBride, 2020, para. 22).
A familiar set of sentiments appeared in the letter to the faculty and staff
of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri from University Chancellor
Andrew Martin the same week: “Please know that we are concerned about
your well-being, and that we remain exceptionally grateful to all of you for
the sacrifices you are making for the common good” (Martinez & Nolen,
2020, para 7). He goes on to share that, like the University of Arizona,
they had also lost upwards of $60 million in revenue in just the first month
of the pandemic, though without explanation as to where those losses
originated and why they would need to balance those apparent losses on
the backs of faculty and staff:
Unfortunately, we must now face painful realities as we continue to navigate

this evolving situation. Even for an institution like ours, with a strong finan-
cial foundation, this crisis is taking a huge toll, primarily due to sweeping
changes on the Medical Campus, which has completely shifted its opera-
tions to respond to COVID-19 patient care (Martinez & Nolen,
2020, para 9)
Subsequently, while the top three administrators at Washington University

took a 15%–20% pay cut for 2020–2021, they also furloughed nearly all of
the university’s 1300 employees, instituted reductions in compensation,
froze merit salary increases, among other measures. Additionally, the
chancellor established a university-wide working group to “closely review
opportunities for cost savings, in areas such as travel expenses, member-
ships and sponsorships, the use of outside consultants,” and the notably
nebulous “other significant budget expenditures” (Martinez & Nolen,
2020, para. 12). More pointedly, the letter included the straight-forward
announcement, “We will implement a workforce reduction policy to

include reduced schedules, furloughs, and layoffs” (Martinez & Nolen,
2020, para 14).
Additional program closures and layoffs of non-tenured and tenured
faculty in the context of budget claims occurred around the country, as
reported by the aforementioned AAUP Special Report: COVID-19 and
Academic Governance (May 2021), including at Canisius University in
Buffalo, New York, Illinois Wesleyan University in Normal, Illinois, Keuka
University, NY, National University in San Diego California, and
Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, just to name some of the insti-
tutions under AAUP investigation for their shared governance violations.
At each of these institutions, within the first year of the pandemic, there
were distressing and flagrant violations of principles of shared governance
that resulted in layoffs of full-time faculty members, including tenured
faculty members, some of them massive terminations, and program clo-
sures, or both, and ones that led the AAUP to conclude:
Some institutional leaders seem to have taken the COVID-19 crisis as an

opportunity to turbocharge the corporate model, allowing them to close
programs and lay off faculty members as expeditiously as if colleges and
universities were businesses whose CEOs suddenly decided to make widgets
or shut down the steelworks. (AAUP, 2021a, p. 3)
In many of these cases, senior administrators publicly justified not only the
layoffs and program closures themselves, but the explicit sidestepping, and
even dismantling of, shared governance structures that should have guided
those decisions using narratives that pop right out of the disaster capital-
ism playbook.
For example, at Wittenberg University in Ohio, the AAUP was able to
document publicly-announced plans to cut one-fifth of the full-time fac-
ulty in August 2019, months before the pandemic began. In addition, in
late fall 2019, the senior administration presented a list of proposed pro-
gram closures to faculty leadership, some of which the faculty approved.
Yet, in early February 2020, the university’s governing board took the first
of three drastic steps to leapfrog over faculty to establish a shadow struc-
ture for program closures, all before anyone had a clue that in a month’s
time, COVID-19 would upend life as we knew it. Despite the clear pre-
COVID context of the plans for faculty and program cuts, and the pre-
COVID hijacking of shared governance to do more, the chair of the
Wittenberg governing board, Reverend Jonathan Eilert, reportedly wrote

to faculty in mid-May 2020, “‘Wittenberg is at a point in its history where
its very survival is threatened [and because] the pandemic brings uncer-
tainty and a heightened sense of urgency’ the letter continued, the board
is ‘compelled … to act now’ in order to ‘adjust … usual processes’ that
obstruct ‘creative approaches’ needed to ‘overcome’ and ‘survive’ the cri-
sis.’” The AAUP’s investigation also found that, like many other colleges
and universities, Wittenberg was legitimately faced with economic chal-
lenges that were exacerbated by COVID, “but they never rose to the level
of exigency.” Nonetheless, the Wittenberg governing board approved a
resolution in early May “suspending any faculty manual provisions that
might delay actions needed to achieve financial sustainability” which,
apparently, included a 20% “reduction in force” and a swift elimination of
academic programs (AAUP, 2021a, pp. 30–31).
Similarly, at Marion University in Wisconsin, the president, Michelle
Majewski, declared an “enrollment emergency” that, according to the fac-
ulty handbook, was a “sudden or unplanned decline in student enrollment
without a program, the detrimental effects of which are too great or rapid
to be offset by normal procedures outlined in the Handbook” (AAUP,
2021a, p. 18), which the administration used to authorize the shuttering
of nine programs and the termination and nonrenewal of nine faculty,
tenured and non-tenured. This was despite the fact that the university had
experienced budget shortfalls for years preceding the pandemic. In a case
at Keuka College in New York in early July 2020, in separate emails from
the president of the college, Amy Storey, and another from a current and
former board chair, the academic community was informed of manage-
ment’s unilateral decision to suspend the faculty handbook, terminate fac-
ulty (some of whom were tenured), and close select academic programs
(AAUP, 2021a). In the message from the president, she stated, “For some
of these programs, because of the looming revenue shortfall that threatens
the College’s viability, the Board has exercised its authority to do so with-
out the typical recommendation of the faculty as a whole” (AAUP, 2021a,
p. 15). As for the board chairs in their message, they, too, cited the
decision:
to improve the College’s long-term viability. Next year’s projected $7-million

budget shortfall caused by the COVID-19 pandemic requires us to take
bold, unprecedented action. […] Ultimately, the College cannot financially
afford to follow the processes outlined for faculty separation. To do so
would be risking the educational futures for more than 2500 students across
the world, the livelihoods of more than 300 employees, and the pride of
more than 13,000 alumni. (AAUP, 2021a, p. 14–15)
The co-optation of the real risks at play here, as well as the recasting of the
administration as the protectors of livelihoods and keepers of the moral
compass folds right into the playbook of externalizing risk, and dressing
perpetrators up as the actual rescuers that is so central to neoliberal
ideology.
To grasp the sheer enormity of the “takedowns” and “takeovers” and
the speed with which the soil has been tilled for future academic reorgani-
zation by profiteers, consider the following few additional cases. In
October 2020, Ithaca University also in New York, announced a plan to
fire nearly a quarter of its faculty, with the provost claiming that the pan-
demic was an “accelerant” for the terminations that were necessitated by a
decade-long decline in enrollment. In line with sweeping logics of audit
culture in higher education, the college “created a dashboard to analyze
which departments are bringing the fewest students to the college”
(AAUP, 2021a, p. 34). And while faculty organized to resist these cuts, by
February 2021, the administration had accepted recommendations from
an ad hoc “Academic Prioritization Process Implementation Committee”
to fire 20% of all full-time equivalent faculty and close 26 departments,
programs, and majors (AAUP, 2021a, p. 35). At Indiana University of
Pennsylvania, an all-too-familiar scenario was evolving with shrinking
enrollments, starting in 2011, already leading to a loss of approxi-
mately 150 faculty “mostly through attrition—retirements or not filling
vacant positions” (Gardner, 2021, para. 1). The pandemic just added to
the ongoing bleed. Gardner writes:
Last fall, Indiana rapidly settled on a strategy to emphasize five core aca-
demic areas, which were chosen based on student and employer demand,
whether they were institutional strengths, and their potential for financial
sustainability. Indiana also plans to lay off 53 tenured professors—15 per-
cent of the university’s tenured faculty- and to eliminate 47 additional fac-
ulty jobs through retirements or laying off nontenured professors. The final
number and type of faculty jobs to be lost are still in flux, but along with
layoffs among administrative personnel, the university will lose about 20
percent of its pre-pandemic workforce. (Gardner, 2021, para. 4)
One state over at Concordia University Chicago (Gardner, 2021), the

university announced in December 2020 that it “would be laying off 51
faculty and staff members, about 7 percent of its work force (sic), and
shuttering 15 academic programs after a two-year ‘prioritization’ pro-
cess” (Gardner, 2021, para. 5). That same month, the College of Saint
Rose in New York announced that “it would be discontinuing twenty-
five undergraduate, graduate, and certificate programs, resulting in the
elimination of more than one-fifth of the institution’s tenured and ten-
ure-track faculty by December 2021” (AAUP, 2021a, p. 34). The col-
lege’s rationale, as per AAUP 2021 Academic Governance report, was
expressed in their press release as follows: “‘Many of the programs have
declining or historically low enrollment. Other degree or certificate pro-
grams were eliminated because the cost to maintain them was higher
than the revenue generated by enrollment,’” and they go on to reveal
that what the press release does not share is that the Saint Rose adminis-
tration had “implemented a program-prioritization process just six years
ago to address a structural deficit. Although it resulted in the elimination
of twenty-three tenured and tenure-track faculty positions and landed
the college on the AAUP censure list in 2016, where it remains, the pri-
oritization process obviously did not have the intended result of financial
stabilization.” (AAUP, 2021a, p. 34)
Finally, in a case that struck a chord with members of our own union
who were working to better understand the accurate financial position of
our institution when the news hit, in December 2020, Marquette
University in Wisconsin announced plans to cut more than 225 faculty
and staff by 2022 to manage what they claimed was a projected $45 mil-
lion budget deficit, despite evidence that the budget included a $12.1 mil-
lion surplus. University documents posted by Wisconsin public radio, and
reported by AAUP (2021a), noted that not only was there a budget sur-
plus, but university officials had noted it was a surplus that “will provide
room for investing in projects of strategic priority” (Marquette University
Board of Trustees, 2022). By late January 2021, they had already fired 39
employees, and by mid-February 2021, the provost had announced that
“substantial numbers” of non-tenure stream faculty would not be renewed
(AAUP, 2021a, p. 35). The faculty in the Marquette AAUP chapter orga-
nized to conduct an independent financial audit and in a nationally circu-
lated report found that with $52 million in positive cash flows in FY 2020,
and nearly $119 million in unrestricted reserves, not to mention the

$15.3 million in discretionary CARES funding, Marquette was “not close
to being in any type of financial trouble or distress” (Marquette AAUP,
2021, p. 4). Similar to the case at Johns Hopkins, claims were made about
projected budget shortfalls that did not match up to the realities of the
institution’s financial position after faculty organized an audit. At
Marquette, the independent financial analysis found that where there was,
in fact, cause for concern, it was in previous decisions that the Marquette
management had made pre-pandemic, such as consistently overstating the
tuition discount rate to faculty; an underperforming endowment; exces-
sive spending on non-academic activities that outpaced their peers by
nearly 53%; and unjustified spending on non-instructional employees,
including the allocation of a 10.7% salary increase for Marquette senior
management between 2017 and 2020 compared to just a 3.0% salary
increase for faculty during the same period (Marquette AAUP, 2021, p. 4).
Ultimately, according to AAUP’s investigations of many of these insti-
tutions where shared governance principles were grossly superseded to
ram through faculty layoffs, salary cuts and program eliminations, it
appeared to them
that boards and administrations at institutions that endured years of finan-

cial trouble before the onset of the pandemic may simply have failed to fulfill
these obligations [to shepherd the endowment and raise needed capital to
operate the institution]. Corrective action taken during those years, if taken
at all, was obviously ineffective- and then the pandemic struck. […] [T]rust-
ees and presidents, most of whom suddenly began operating in a state of
panic after years of fiscal mismanagement, seized upon the pandemic to
assert the need to ‘right-size,’ ‘be nimble,’ ‘realign,’ ‘innovate,’ ‘be decisive’
and ‘take bold action’ by unilaterally altering their institutions’ governance
structure, curriculum, and labor force, thus creating an acute crisis in aca-
demic governance. The baneful results have included the loss of faculty
members’ careers and livelihoods, the cheapening of students’ educations,
and the transformation of institutions’ identities. (AAUP, 2021a, pp. 36–37)
One idea for bold action that has been lying in wait for some time that
fundamentally realigns the structure and culture of academia is the free
market fundamentalist idea to eliminate tenure.
Grabbing Tenure While They’re At It

Among the institutions that the AAUP investigated for violations of shared
governance during the first year of the pandemic were Medaille College
and the Kansas State University System, both of which, among other
opportunistic grabs, took steps to weaken tenure since the outbreak
began. The Kansas State University System Board of Regents made unilat-
eral policy changes that borrowed from the disaster capitalism bag of tricks
to suspend processes in the faculty handbooks in six schools in the system
to allow temporary “emergency tenure stripping” (AAUP, 2021a). In and
around the same time, in April 2020, Kenneth Macur, president of
Medaille College, obtained permission from the Medaille governing board
to suspend the faculty handbook, citing a provision in the handbook that
permitted suspension in response to “natural disasters, acts of God,
declared states of emergency or other emergency situations” (AAUP,
2021a, p. 20). The provision, however, requires consultation with the
Faculty Council, which the president preempted, and further, moved
beyond the provision’s parameters to propose extensive revisions of the
handbook itself. Claiming that: “he now ‘believed that this [was] an
opportunity to do more than just tinker around the edges,’” he proposed
revisions to eliminate tenure and modify the grievance process to remove
applicability to issues of hiring and firing (p. 20). Lest anyone think the
president felt remorse about the “need” to consider the future of tenure
at Medaille, the AAUP reports his proposal included the telling passage:
“Let me talk about the ‘big rock’- tenure … There is an old saying that
good faculty don’t need it and bad faculty don’t deserve it” (AAUP,
2021a, p. 20).
Perhaps the most illustrative case of administrators blatantly staking
claim to corporate reorganization while defenses were down came from
the University of Colorado-Boulder in December 2020. Then, James
White, the Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences announced
his intention to replace 50 tenure and tenure-track faculty with 25 full-
time non-tenured stream faculty, citing his goal to “build more flexibility
into the college’s post-COVID-19 budget” (Flaherty, 2020b, para. 1). In
a follow-up remark he would later apologize for making, he said, “Never
waste a good pandemic” (para. 3). In a report on this case and others
several months later, the AAUP said of the comment, “[T]o many faculty
members the gaffe seemed to exemplify what in political circles is called
saying the quiet part out loud” (AAUP, 2021a, p. 2). In the same
interview where White “said the quiet part out loud,” he was asked about
faculty concerns that his plan erodes tenure, to which he replied, “That
horse left the barn a long time ago. We weren’t the ones who did that”
(Flaherty, 2020b, para. 20). This comment, however, came with no apol-
ogy, and belies some administrators’ naked commitment to total recon-
figuration, catching themselves only when it is suggested outright that
their actions are perhaps coming too close to the line—and then, as we will
see below, some shed even the flimsiest of pretense. For sure, White’s mes-
saging relies on some oft-repeated buzz phrases about how the College of
Arts and Sciences “should be nimbler- fiscally and programmatically—bet-
ter able to withstand the inevitable economic downturns and better able
to invest in great new ideas” (Flaherty, 2020b, para. 15), but his discus-
sion of his plan to unilaterally and methodically replace tenured faculty
with non-tenured faculty came with additional flagrant tips of the restruc-
turing hand when he said, “Cutting is hard but growing back intelligently
can be even harder” (para. 3).
Whatever else it is, White’s messaging was reminiscent of Gardner’s
February 2021 article on “the Great Contraction,” for The Chronicle. In
it, Gardner writes about the hollowing out of the professoriate and shares
insights from Robert Atkins, chief executive of Gray Associates, a consult-
ing firm among a set that are perhaps better conceptualized as corporate
middlemen selling both services and what we could call the “non-profit-
washing” of those services in their roles as “educational consultants.”
Gardner says:
When college leaders contemplate big changes, they often focus on trying
to minimize blowback. The college leaders Atkins works with typically see
that as one of “their biggest challenges.” […] “And if you come [to profes-
sors] with a bad argument, they’re not going to be very receptive.” It’s
important for leaders to make it part of their message that the contracting
university will, eventually, grow. That will mean new hires, new programs,
and, hopefully, new students, new revenues, and a new tailwind for other
projects and plans. “Being willing to talk about growth and cuts in the same
breath, I think, is terribly important in this environment,” says Atkins. “It
gives people hope.” (Gardner, 2021, para. 27–28, emphasis added)
Needless to say, this feels disingenuous, as employers do not shrink

their workforce only to hire again, unless they are swapping out labor for
cheaper workers down the line or intending to grow their market for
customers (students) by providing new services (programs) without

retaining or growing labor. As such, it leaves out the total obvious goal of
replacing full-time, tenured faculty, with part-time faculty, and equally
likely, replacing full-time and part-time instructors with non-instructors,
such as course designers and the like. In this way, the pandemic helps
facilitate a remaking of the educational institutions in the image of the
education privatizers, and colleges and universities move even closer to
becoming expanded corporate training grounds for a globalized twenty-
first century knowledge economy. Indeed, far from “giving people hope,”
and making what privatizers would affirm as one of those “bold” and
“decisive” moves, the Board of Regents of the University System of
Georgia took an unabashedly “decisive” step toward “realignment,” in
October 2021, with the unprecedented vote to adopt modifications to its
post-tenure review policy, making it permissible to fire tenured faculty
members without a hearing (AAUP, 2021c).
However shocking these cases may sound, they are not isolated ones.
Not only have higher education executives at individual institutions taken
steps during the pandemic toward eroding tenure, but at the time of this
writing, legislators in several states have also taken the moment of crisis as
a time to dust off conservative ideas that have been lying in wait to elimi-
nate tenure entirely in their state university systems. In November 2021,
25 Republicans state representatives in the South Carolina General
Assembly introduced the Cancelling Professor Tenure Act (House Bill
4522) which prohibits public institutions of higher learning from award-
ing tenure or entering employment contracts of more than five years dura-
tion with employees hired after December 31, 2022. The Act also calls for
the termination of existing tenure programs when no covered employees
remain employed by the institution. The bill also mandates faculty teach-
ing loads (Drozdowski, 2021). In Iowa in January of 2021, Republican
assemblyperson, Steven Holt, introduced a bill to ban tenure at all of
Iowa’s state colleges and universities (HF49). The bill failed to move out
of committee, but as Mark Drozdowski (2021) reported for BestColleges.
com, Holt has been quoted as saying, “I wonder if the assault on free
speech by some university professors is not related to the belief that they’re
Teflon-coated and indestructible […] Therefore, maybe we need to look
at getting rid of tenure,” and shared concern about “the growing number
of cases in which professors who know better threaten and intimidate stu-
dents with differing viewpoints” (para. 23–24).
Again, the impetus to decimate tenure and further deprofessionalize

faculty predates the pandemic. As early as 2011, for instance, the Florida
state legislature made a move to eliminate tenure for professors in the
community college system, based on a model deployed for teachers in
their K-12 system as well (Jaschik, 2011). In 2015, in the throes of
Republican Governor Scott Walker’s vicious fundamentalist capitalist leg-
islative assaults on working people in Wisconsin, the Wisconsin state legis-
lature removed tenure language from state law, shifting the authority to
determine tenure policy to the UW Board of Regents. Arguably, this level
of tenure protection prior to 2015 was uncommon, as in most other states,
the board of regents has the authority to establish tenure policy.
Nonetheless, the legislative change effectively removed a layer of pro-
tection for faculty in the UW system, even if tenure has been preserved.
Two years later, Republicans in two additional states moved to ban tenure,
namely Missouri, which introduced legislation to ban tenure for new hires,
and Iowa, which introduced legislation to ban tenure for all faculty, newly
hired or not (Flaherty, 2017). Both bills failed in committee. Just weeks
before this book went to press, the Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL)
Board of Trustees quietly approved that they will no longer approve ten-
ure for the eight public universities in the system, leaving that final deci-
sion to university presidents (Minta, 2022). The new policy, which was
enacted by the IHL without faculty input, now permits presidents to “take
into account a faculty member’s ‘effectiveness, accuracy and integrity in
communications’ as well as their ‘collegiality,’” and well as “contumacious
conduct [insubordination],” the latter a factor that had only been a part
of the IHL’s tenure dismissal policy (Minta, 2022, para. 3). In the mean-
time, the Hydra-like shape-shifting that Klein (2007) found so character-
istic of “shock therapy,” would continue as new iterations of attacks on
faculty expertise, autonomy, and academic freedom would also find foot-
ing in the form of the rise of commercial contracting to “teach” faculty
how to teach, particularly, but notably not limited to, online courses.
Never Miss a Chance to “Train Up” Faculty

As Astra Taylor (2020) pointed out in her reminder that disaster capital-
ism can also come in the form of less direct and obscured guises to raid the
coffers of the commons, additional opportunistic attacks on the labor of
faculty have come in the form of moves to “retrain” or “certify” faculty. As
the Omicron variant became the dominant strand in the nation,
educational privatizers continued to peddle a range of outsourcing ser-

vices, including faculty “certification” that profiteers claim are advanta-
geous for students who need specialized training in “competencies” that
colleges and universities are yet to be able to provide. Such “competen-
cies” are used to market “badges” that students can acquire to pad their
resumes and also to assist prospective employers relying more regularly on
artificial intelligence to pre-screen applicants using such badges, as well as
particular names of certifications, that the one and the same industry part-
ners can sell to college and universities in the form of faculty “retraining.”
Here, corporations are called on as the experts to train the professoriate in
the craft of the vocation, and in this way brings into sharp focus a tactic of
privatizers: namely to take over the job of teaching itself so that the
“obstacle” of faculty resisting the commodification of education and the
predation on students can be hurdled by removing faculty altogether.
One step on the way to that is to capture the very mechanisms of cre-
dentialing faculty in the first place. A path that has been paved further for
educational privatization to gain entre under the cover of the crisis with
the narrative that faculty may be “experts of content” but we are not
experts on the “classroom experience” and thus need to be trained by
outside vendors. As we found in our research, a major player in the faculty
training arena is the private firm, American College and University
Educators (ACUE). According to their webpage:
In partnership with institutions of higher education, ACUE prepares, cre-

dentials, and provides on-going support to faculty in the use of evidence-
based teaching practices that promote student engagement, persistence to
graduation, career readiness, and deeper levels of learning. Faculty who sat-
isfy the requirements of ACUE’s courses through institutional partnerships
or open enrollment courses earn certificates in effective college instruction
endorsed by the American Council on Education. Through ACUE’s
Community of Professional Practice, ACUE’s members enjoy ongoing sup-
port to refine their teaching, stay current on research, and advance the
national conversation. Through efficacy studies with partner colleges and
universities nationwide, we’re demonstrating that our faculty members can
make the greatest difference. (ACUE, Mission, 2022b)
As for their origin story, at the time of our writing in early January 2022,
their history tab, since removed, directs the browser to the following:
We formed Wiley Education Services after acquiring Deltak, a leading online

program management (OPM) company. We then expanded beyond the tra-
ditional online program management model, offering a choice of flexible
partnership models to meet our partners’ needs, from full strategic support
to project-based Fee-for-Service initiatives. (Wiley University Services, 2022a)
Some would like us to believe that online program management compa-

nies are few and far between and distinct from other educational privatiz-
ers. Yet, the shape-shifting in the private educational market, which we will
return to later in the book, clearly shows links in a corporate portfolio of
services, but also, and more importantly, links to human capital. Only a
perfunctory search of the ACUE’s webpage, the ACUE team, showed
that Aaron Bolton, a partnership director at ACUE, joined ACUE by leav-
ing the position of partnership director at Wiley Education Services, a
third-party OPM that, since early 2022, has been rebranded as Wiley
University Services. As they state on their website, “This New Year our
focus is clearer,” and as they seek to rebrand from the predatory track
record, they argue, “Looking forward, the term ‘OPM’ will likely be a
relic, but the idea of strategic partnerships will persist” (Wiley University
Services, 2022a, para. 5). In addition, Michael Purcell, the Chief Growth
Officer at ACUE joined ACUE after he “served for five years as the
Executive Vice President of Business Development and International
Chief Operating Officer of Keypath Education, an Illinois-based online
program management company” (ACUE, 2020a).
Bringing the F.U.D. to Union Bust

One fee-for-service arrangement that colleges and universities have made
with firms over the course of the pandemic that extend business-as-usual
are contracts with law firms that specialize in union busting. In our own
state, the Rutgers University administration retained the law firm of
Jackson-Lewis, a firm with a national reputation for its work with manage-
ment to weaken unions, and among the firms now regularly offering
“downsizing” services to higher education clients. In the case of Rutgers,
the firm represented the administration in, among whatever else, an on-
going gender equity class action lawsuit filed against the university by indi-
vidual faculty petitioners and also the faculty union. Also, in our state, we
are reminded of William Paterson University, mentioned previously, where
13 tenure-track faculty were fired in the first year of the pandemic,
including an outspoken union activist, and the case of The County College
of Morris, also in New Jersey, were seven tenure-track faculty members
were terminated during the pandemic, all active members of the faculty
union, including the union president and two committee chairs
(Weissman, 2021).
At Marian University in Indianapolis, the administration terminated
the Department of Political Science in December 2021 and laid off the last
tenured political science professor, citing program quality issues and
enrollment declines, despite evidence that the department had as many
declared majors as most of the other liberal arts programs at the university
(Flaherty, 2021g). Suggestive of the possibility that administrators at
Marian may have seized upon handy narratives of enrollment decline to
clear the way past political adversaries, the tenured faculty member fired,
Johnny Goldfinger, had also, coincidentally, organized the university’s
first chapter of the American Association of University Professors in 2019.
While not a bargaining chapter, an organized advocacy chapter nonethe-
less. Curiously, the son of the university president, a political science alum
and current chair of the Marion County Republican Party went on the
record defending his father’s decision saying, “I definitely got a sense
when I got … my first campaign job in 2012 that a lot of what I studied
day to day had nothing to do with what I was doing professionally- and I
have never met a colleague who was also a political science major”
(Flaherty, 2021g, para. 12). Additionally, that Goldfinger was the only
tenured faculty member on campus with expertise in U.S. politics and
government is a statement in and of itself that we will return to below, but
as Klein (2007, p. 399) argued “the alliance between a small corporate
elite and a right-wing government has been written off as some sort of
aberration—mafia capitalism, oligarchy capitalism … But it’s not an aber-
ration; it is where the entire Chicago School crusade—with its triple obses-
sion- privatization, deregulation, and union-busting- has been leading.”
Whether or not there is a substantiated connection to union busting in
the Marian case, there is no doubt of such at Saint Leo University in
Florida where the administration used the pretext of the pandemic to
“unrecognize” the faculty union (Flaherty, 2020a). In November 2020,
the governing board not only voted to no longer recognize the union but:
Announced it was moving forward with a new governance structure for the
institution. The board chair claimed that by “creating a new shared gover-
nance structure’ the governing board was enabling “faculty members [to]
work closely with the administration to quickly adapt and meet the needs of
[their] students.” (AAUP, 2021a, p. 35)
Corporate Consultants Behind the COVID

Panic Curtain
A key set of institutional players in union busting, and in the larger cam-
paign to privatize higher education more broadly, and increasingly behind
the veneer of “student success strategies,” and the “diversity, equity and
inclusion” (DEI) products that Nancy Leong (2021) might include in her
analysis of “identity capitalism” and “identity entrepreneurs,” are a cadre
of educational consultants that have formed a cottage industry. As the real
drivers of educational policy and practice in late-stage global capitalism,
these kinds of investors have not lost the opportunity to advise college and
university administrators on how to capitalize on the pandemic, including
how to circumvent and weaken the power of unions using austerity frames.
Take for example, EAB/Business Affairs Forum, an educational consult-
ing firm that offers just about anything higher education administrators
might want to buy to position themselves better in the higher education
market. Among the “free samples” that EAB/ Business Affairs Forum
offered potential higher education clients on their webpage during the
pandemic was the tutorial, “5 tips for communicating new cost contain-
ment policies to campus” (Berglund, 2020). In their marketing materials,
they explain:
The COVID-19 outbreak has wreaked havoc on higher education institu-

tions, including their financial plans. Across industry segments, institu-
tions are recording significant emergency expenditures and projecting
material revenue losses across the months ahead. In response, nearly every
cabinet is considering enacting cost containment strategies to combat
financial losses. Knowing that these pressures are on the horizon, leaders
need to prepare the most effective and considerate way to communicate
cost-cutting measures. Many cost containment strategies will impose hard-
ships, and therefore thoughtful and clear communication is crucial.
(Berglund, 2020, para. 1)
The tips EAB/Business Affairs Forum offers are, in part, common

sense and immediately strike us as patronizing to any professional who has
advanced to the ranks of senior management in any institution, let alone
to the helm of a college or university. At the same time, in their advice to

wrap a faux spirit of gratitude around a tap of fear and uncertainty, they are
disappointingly consistent with the public communications from presi-
dents, provosts, and deans we have reviewed above. EAB’s first tip is to
“communicate cost containment policy decisions in a direct letter to the
campus community,” followed by the additional reminder to “[i]nclude a
message of appreciation for stakeholders’ work, collaboration, and under-
standing during the coronavirus crisis … before jumping into the business
of cuts.” They go on to advise that leaders “[p]rovide context for the cost
containment policies to help stakeholders understand the urgency behind
these decisions,” and “[i]f possible, share projections for future revenue
losses to be incurred.” They recommend“[r]eassur[ing] your audience of
the institution’s commitment to its core values” and to close the commu-
nication by “[r]eiterat[ing] thanks and [to] promise future communica-
tion.” Importantly, they conclude, “You may want to preview that
leadership may need to make more difficult decisions in the months ahead
as the crisis unfolds” (Berglund, 2020, para. 3–7).
As late as December 2021, the EAB/Business Affairs website also
included free sample examples of “exemplar cost containment policy deci-
sion communications” during the pandemic from seven universities
(Brown; Connecticut College; Cornell; George Washington University;
La Trobe University; University of Missouri System; University of
Wisconsin Milwaukee). It is unclear from the website if these seven univer-
sities/systems were clients of EAB, but in any event, the language of their
communications, and the policy changes they convey, jump out at us as
textbook disaster capitalism moves. For instance, EAB points its potential
clients to the communications from the leadership of George Washington
University (GW), an institution that had made national headlines before
the pandemic after faculty, staff and students called for the resignation of
President Thomas LeBlanc, citing, among other concerns, the university’s
strategic plan that many felt undermined the goals for racial, ethnic and
economic diversity at the institution; for the institution’s fossil fuel invest-
ment portfolio and LeBlanc’s racist remarks in defense; for the leader-
ship’s decision to hire Disney consultants that hosted conferences in
Florida for employees; “culture training” for faculty and staff; and an
employee survey that, alone, allegedly cost GW $300,000 (Schonfeld,
2020). Additionally, the University hired Heather Swain, a former
employee of Michigan State where she had allegedly been involved in the
mishandling of the case of convicted rapist, Larry Nassar. But nonetheless,
EAB’s webpage sends us to a communication form Dana Bradley, GWs’

Chief People Officer, who shares that, as a result of the pandemic, “All
central and school-based administrative units have been asked to identify
opportunities to restructure and streamline […] Regarding layoffs, leaders
of administrative units, including vice presidents and deans, were asked to
evaluate their organizations and determine how they could operate more
efficiently and effectively given our evolving needs and needs for the fore-
seeable future. Layoffs are a part of this streamlining […] and the overall
impact is likely to be in the hundreds” (Bradley, 2020, para. 3, emphasis
added). She went on to explain that “[w]hile there are many unknowns
about the pandemic, and we can’t preclude the need for further action in
the future, the administrative units are expected to complete their restruc-
turing efforts by the end of August [2020] … [but] wanted the commu-
nity to [k]now that care for our affected employees is at the heart of how
we are helping those affected […] as we emerge from this difficult time
and prepare for what will be an intense fall supporting our students and
faculty in achieving our core academic mission” (Bradley, 2020, para. 2).
Yet, a month earlier, the GW faculty union released their own statement
with their stance against the layoffs, stating, “we have yet to see evidence
that layoffs are a necessary response to pandemic-related shortfalls impact-
ing GW. The lack of budget transparency, the insistence that the endow-
ment is off limits, the refusal to widely publicize our $300 million line of
credit, the refusal to consider the Faculty Senate’s proposed budget with
its cost-cutting and revenue-generating recommendation […] On top of
this, GW has continued to hire senior administrators after announcing a
hiring freeze, and they have now fired employees who were part of the
reopening team” (GWUFA, 2020, para. 2).
At Brown University, Richard Locke and Barbara Chernow, provost
and vice president for finance and administration, respectively, announced
changes to hiring and performance evaluation timelines that recognized
“the power and importance of joining together to promote the health,
safety and security of our students, staff and faculty, while positioning the
university to take action and make essential adjustments to address the
significant economic losses that we have incurred as a result of the novel
coronavirus pandemic” (Locke & Chernow, 2020, para. 1). While there is
no further detail on those losses in the letter, the university moved “effec-
tive immediately and until further notice, [to] suspend any new hiring for
the current year and for the fiscal year beginning July 1 [with exception]
for searches that are already well underway […] and for a very few critically
strategic hires in the years ahead” (Locke & Chernow, 2020, para. 2). We
have already mentioned the politics of hiring “freezes” that, in effect, were
not freezes for administrative positions, but suffice it to say that in calling
on generalized language of “the financial consequences resulting from the
increased expenditures and the dramatic reductions in revenue provoked
by the current pandemic,” Brown’s communication lines up with the
F.U.D. narrative. To be fair, Brown also extended the timeline for perfor-
mance evaluations for faculty and staff in the same announcement, which
concluded with the acknowledgment, “the strength of Brown is the peo-
ple who dedicate themselves to their work every day. We continue to be
inspired and impressed by the resilience, creativity and commitment of our
community” (Locke & Chernow, 2020, para. 6).
Similarly, in a letter sent from the president to the staff of Connecticut
College, and also sent to the faculty, President of the College, Katherine
Bergeron opened with her thanks for “your support and goodwill in these
challenges times” and “marvel[s] at all you have done to help our stu-
dents, our faculty, and fellow staff,” and “[s]till, the coronavirus
(COVID-19) is demanding unprecedented patience, flexibility, and
strength” (EAB/Business Affairs Forum, 2020a). From there, the letter,
in effect, communicates a work reduction plan and the notice that the
institution cannot commit to maintaining a “continuation of pay” at cur-
rent rates. Instead, embedded in between “marveling” at the good works,
asserting that “[y]our health and safety are always are highest priority, and
a closing thank you for employees’ “dedication” and “compassion for each
other,” is the notice that “[w]e will continue to pay staff at current rates
for as long as there is work to do … however, [staff] may need to be
decreased … [W]here possible, we will try to reassess work at the staff
member’s existing rate of pay” (EAB/Business Affairs Forum, 2020a).
EAB also directs us to COVID response communications disseminated
by Joanne DeStefano, Cornell’s vice president and chief financial officer
who assured the academic community on March 30, 2020 that they
“understand the stress that the current health crisis is creating for all of
you, and we so appreciate how everyone is working together to live our
values by supporting our entire community to the best of our abilities”
(EAB/Business Affairs Forum, 2020a). That said, she also said, “we only
have to look at the nation’s rising unemployment figures to know that
there are also significant financial impacts of the virus. […] But until we
can better understand the full impact of COVID-19 on the economy,
financial markets and the university, these steps [which included hiring and
salary freezes] are essential to our being able to sustain our commitment
to our employees and our students and to ensuring that Cornell has the
funds necessary to continue to be a world-class university” (EAB/Business
Affairs Forum, 2020a). Notably, DeStefano reminded the Cornell com-
munity that “no institution, including Cornell, can predict today the
impact of this crisis on its future budget,” yet, of course, Cornell, and
many other institutions, in effect, did precisely that. Also on EAB’s list of
star students is the University of Missouri System where four of the sys-
tem’s chancellors crafted a joint-letter with “Important Financial Guidance
for University Leaders” that opened with recognition that “[t]he severity
of the economic challenge and duration of the public crisis is not fully
known at this time,” but the “University remains focused on the financial
priorities below,” including “[e]nsuring our students receive a high-quality
education” and “[s]upporting activities that grow revenues for the
University” (EAB/Business Affairs Forum, 2020a). Among other guid-
ance, the chancellors froze hiring and merit increases, while also noting
that the universities in the system will “take steps to maintain or grow our
student enrollment as much as possible” (EAB/Business Affairs Forum,
2020a, emphasis added).
In many of these letters, and others like them, references to “high-
quality education” or “core academic mission,” and similar nods, are a
black box, as they generally were in the pre-pandemic corporatized pack-
aging. In any case, as we will see later in the book, as college and university
leadership messaged care for employees and students, across the nation we
simultaneously saw colleges and universities also displace dorming stu-
dents into tents after privatized housing corporations refused to provide
quality housing accommodationsrs (Etienne, 2021). In the scope of the
argument, consider also campuses where administrators changed housing
policy during a pandemic, or recommended changes, to mandate not one,
but two years of on-campus housing for all students, such as at our own
university. Or, institutions that refused to shut down dorms during the
pandemic even as the institutions were seeing large increases in positive
cases such as University of Alabama System (Murakami, 2020a) or who
brought student athletes back to campus rather than cancel athletic sea-
sons, even as we learned in 2022, that more aggressive COVID-19 mitiga-
tion strategies that campuses developed for student athletes as the pandemic
developed, resulted in, generally, lower COVID positivity rates among
student athletes than non-athletes (O’Neal et al., 2022). And then there
were the campuses that, at least initially, refused to institute mandatory
testing or even to develop sound metrics for determining the need for
campus closures (Nadworny & McMinn, 2020).
Finally, also profiled on EAB’s list of exemplars is La Trobe University
in Melbourne, Australia, and the nugget of shock that the firm recom-
mends to leaders as an illustration of important information to message:
“The University faces a very significant loss of revenue in 2020, currently
estimated to be in the range of $120-$150M,” though no further details
are included on how the La Trobe’s administration arrived at that projec-
tion. And as we shall see in the data to follow, within months, these wildly
high projections of devastating loss turned out, in many cases, to be wildly
overstated. In fact, overall, by the fall of 2021, the higher education indus-
try in the United States had not only made a full “recovery,” but at the
same time many of the wealthiest institutions made out even better than
they had prior to the outbreak, and we aren’t just talking growing endow-
ments (Eaton, 2021): a majority 36 out of the 50 wealthiest colleges in
the country had also increased tuition during the pandemic, with some
raising these increases several times (Tucker, 2020).
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing Sometimes Cry Wolf:

COVID Losses Not as Predicted
A year after Inside Higher Ed’s and Gallup’s 2020 survey of chief business
officers’ (CBOs) plans to recommend major transformative changes to the
core structure and operations of their institutions, 44% of the respondents
indicated they would do so in 2021, only slightly less than the 47% in
2020 (Jaschik & Lederman, 2020). Over a year after the outbreak, the
momentum carried in some sectors of higher education for large-
scale structural and operational changes while the pandemic window
remained open. The momentum coupled with additional data from the
same survey give us further pause: 46% of the CBOs agreed that the finan-
cial impact of COVID on their institution was better than they expected,
with two-thirds estimating that by June 2021, their institutions had
incurred less than $5 million in unanticipated budget expenses (Jaschik &
Lederman, 2020). Needless to say, this is a far cry from the shocking
$150 million, $400 million, and possible $1 billion, numbers that we
would read in public announcements from presidents, provosts, and
CFOs. Other nations also experienced better than expected financial
outcomes in 2020. For instance, in Australia, analysts found that the pan-
demic’s financial impact on higher education was “significant but not cata-
strophic” with total revenues falling 5%, but rebounding in August 2021
to a 2% overall national surplus (Marshman & Larkins, 2021, para. 12).
Similarly, they found variation among institutions, with some reporting
the same or increased total income in 2020 as in 2019, while others expe-
riencing high to moderate losses.
However, we should acknowledge that the financial outlook as pointed
out by Marshman and Larkins (2021) might be greater going forward as
Australia “struggles to bring [international] students back” as “interna-
tional students look elsewhere to study despite reopened borders”
(Neubauer, 2022). Nevertheless, as reporting and our analysis have shown,
there are clear winners and clear losers in the higher education landscape
today. Here in the United States, the clear winners have been a small
minority of elite colleges and universities. While most colleges will not
experience catastrophic outcomes and the grimmest scenarios such as the
one predicted in Forbes, some mergers have allowed struggling colleges to
survive. There will be some clear losers, with the particularly vulnerable
being “nonselective private colleges with modest endowments, usually
with liberal arts emphasis; the bottom and the middle tier state schools
especially in states, mostly in the East and Midwest, with stagnant popula-
tion growth and the community colleges” (Vedder, 2020). Unfortunately,
among the losers are precisely the schools that provide access to education
to students of color, women, and low income students. What better evi-
dence than this to show how higher education is an intrinsic part of the
larger social, political, and economic system of inequality? While college
graduates still earn more, the value has shifted significantly as student debt
soared. As Guilford (2022, para. 4) writes, “Students may have decided
that, if they can’t get in at the most prestigious schools that promise the
most earning power, college isn’t worth it.” We are also reminded time
and time again, as with America’s newspaper industry, the biggest winners
in the times of crises, real or imagined, are hedge funds, like Alden Capital,
and other corporations who are “making a killing” feasting on dying local
newspapers (Coppins, 2021). As we will turn to in later chapters, in higher
education, for example, the feasting is also done by the private housing
companies, such as Corvias or American Campus Communities Inc.
“which saw shares rise around 30% over 2021” (Guilford, 2022, para. 5),
and by other aforementioned “edupreneurs.”
Heroes of Their Own Recovery Stories

In the United States, CBOs surveyed attributed their miraculous turn-
around to the infusion of funds from the American Rescue Plan, to their
own cost-cutting measures, and to steady enrollments in areas where they
had projected steep declines (Lederman, 2021b). No doubt these factors
have played a role, but what doesn’t add up are the extraordinary surpluses
that wealthy institutions have accrued just months after claiming they had
no coins between the couch cushions to spare. By October 2020, Johns
Hopkins, which had initially projected a $50 million loss, swung favorably
by $126 million to land with a $75 surplus. In January 2021, Northwestern
announced an $83.4 million surplus, and just two months earlier, in
November 2020, Yale announced its $203 million surplus (Savransky,
2021). In the wake of this fortuitous turnaround in the state of higher
education, some industry leaders repurposed their austerity narratives into
narratives of “exemplary financial stewardship,” recasting themselves and
their financial officers as the heroes of their own recovery stories. Explaining
their lightning speed “recoveries” from the brink of fiscal disaster just
months prior, some senior management officials could be found crediting
members of their teams who were only recently playing starring roles as
town criers. For instance, in an early October 2020 letter to the faculty
and staff at Washington University, chancellor Andrew Martin and chief
financial officer Amy Kweskin provided the following financial update:
While we anticipated significant revenue loss and costs associated with the
pandemic, we actually have ended the [2019–2020] fiscal year very close to
the previous year’s results. Key factors leading to this solid performance
were a quicker than anticipated return to patient care and stronger than
expected research funding. […] In addition, the university’s managed
endowment pool has performed far better than expected, showing a return
of 9.9% during the 2019–2020 fiscal year. This figure, which exceeds our
projection by a wide margin, is one of the strongest in higher education, and
a testament to the strong leadership of the talented Washington University
Investment Management Company team, to whom we are exceptionally
grateful. (Martin & Kweskin, 2020)
A similar sentiment was shared by academic leaders at other institu-

tions, even when independent analyses of the financial positions of these
institutions at the onset of the pandemic showed that financial manage-
ment teams had made decisions that lead to underperforming investments,
as at Marquette (Marquette AAUP, 2021), risky investments, as at Johns

Hopkins (Furstenberg, 2021), or a range of other pre-COVID failures of
management (per the AAUP’s 2021 Special Report). Even at our own
institution, where it was clear from an independent financial audit that our
university was in solid shape, which told a different story from the predic-
tions we had been hearing at the beginning of the crisis, senior leadership
made a pointed effort in discussion with the faculty union to frame that
apparent mismatch not as evidence of any misread of the institution’s
financial position, but rather as evidence of responsible stewardship on the
part of management.
“It Is and It Isn’t the Pandemic”: Speaking out of Two Sides

of Administrative Mouths
By June 2021, The Nation had reported on the perplexing pattern of con-
tinued terminations of faculty and programs at public colleges and univer-
sities despite millions in COVID relief funding, noting Public Higher
Education Workers facilitator Barbara Madeloni’s assessment that the per-
sistence of cuts can be attributed to “a much longer-term project of trans-
forming higher education into an industry run on contingent faculty and
student debt, rather than a public good funded by taxes” (Dilawar, 2021,
para. 5). She argues, “This was an issue before the pandemic hit, and the
crisis of the pandemic has been a place where there are universities that are
stepping in and trying to take advantage of that, and, in doing so, change
the nature of what it means to be a public university [to become] a sort of
market- and commodity-based system […] rather than […] a public good
[…] essential to democracy” (para. 6). Yet, in the same reporting, The
Nation found that “some administrators are even admitting to having
longer-term ambitions of transforming their schools and denying their
own previous arguments about Covid-19’s necessitating cuts” (para. 7).
Take, for example, National University in California where faculty senate
officers reported that the university held more than $650 million in reserve,
$4.5 million from the CARES Act, and another $350 million in private
donations, yet the institution still planned to accelerate the termination of
50 full-time faculty and continue ongoing program eliminations. The presi-
dent, David Andrews, characterized the cuts in ways that simultaneously
referenced the pandemic as pretext and not. As the AAUP Special Report:
COVID-19 and Academic Governance (2021) argued, Andrews announced
in early April 2020 that some “recent decisions had been ‘considered prior
to the COVID-19 outbreak but were accelerated by the crisis’ [and] others
were ‘on the very of being announced and unfortunately coincide with the
crisis’” (p. 24). Likewise, at Marquette’s where a late January 2021 shed-
ding of 39 employees and plans to shed more than 225 by 2022 were
announced to manage what they projected was a $45 million budget deficit,
“[m]any of those cuts were the result of ongoing program evaluations
meant to meet longstanding [sic] financial challenges, but their urgency was
hastened by the pandemic” (Gardner, 2021, February 15, para. 5). Similarly,
at Salem State University, administrators who had once justified faculty fur-
loughs as necessary to manage unexpected pandemic-related budget short-
falls later redefined them as “part of a long-term plan for restructuring”
(para. 9). In a blatant change of tune, the University of Vermont (UVM)
reported layoffs of tenured faculty and planned cuts to 12 majors, 11 minors,
and 4 graduate programs, all in the College of Arts and Sciences. The dean
of the CAS had stated that the cuts addressed a “long term structural defi-
cit” (AAUP, 2021, p. 36). The dean admitted in an interview that he did
not consult the faculty on these closures, which were estimated to save
between $600,000 to $800,000 even though journalists from Inside Higher
Education found the university simultaneously “reported an increase of
$24 million in its net position [in 2020], primarily due to an increase in the
value of its $562-million endowment” (Flaherty 2020, as cited in AAUP
2021, p. 36). Additionally, and belying the myth that massive reorganizing
was an urgent and necessary response to a COVID-19 generated economic
crisis, Lee Gardner, writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, reported
that while the cutbacks are taking place during the pandemic in overwhelm-
ingly liberal arts programs, UVM president Suresh V. Garimella said they
would have needed to happen eventually anyway “as students are voting
with their feet and walking away’ from those areas of study” (Gardner,
2021, para. 11). Indeed, by June 2021, UVM’s director of news and infor-
mation, Enrique Corredera, outright stated, “There were no pandemic-
related staff or faculty cuts […] The proposed plan to phase out
low-enrollment majors and minors […] is part of a university-wide initiative
that is not connected to the pandemic […] and has not resulted in faculty
reductions” (Dilawar, 2021, para. 8). In some ways, we are reminded of the
observation of Bob Muehlenkamp, former organizing director for both
the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Teamsters,
made in reflecting on Martin Jay Levitt’s union busting confessions in the
Foreword for the 2021 edition of Levitt and Toczynksi’s best-selling expose,
nearly 30 years after its original release:
As this new edition […] goes to print, we have watched Amazon, the second
largest employer in the country, owned by the richest person in the world,
publicly run a union-busting campaign against its 5800 workers in Bessemer,
Alabama. Nothing hidden, no apologies. Levitt’s war is still dirty, but no
longer secret; it’s now the norm for corporate America. (Muehlenkamp, in
Levitt and Toczynski 2021/1993, p. xiii)
Turns Out the Campus Rich Still Got Richer: Top

Hats for Presidents and Coaches
On the face of it, perhaps these surprising twists of good fortune and
astronomical windfalls are just as they seem—genuinely unexpected,
uncalculated, or calculated, but in the course of the institutional actors’
pre-COVID ethical duty to proper fiscal management. For sure, by March
2021, bucking the austerity trend, at least two universities, Ohio State and
Syracuse, had announced plans to hire more than a total of 400 new
tenure-track faculty in the years ahead (Flaherty, 2022d). But that doesn’t
explain how it is that in the course of the most devastating health crisis in
a century, we have come to find that a select group of college and univer-
sity presidents has secured lucrative compensation packages at the same
time their institutions are facing reported budget deficits in the form of
top-hat deferred-compensation plans. It would seem that even these sur-
prising pandemic windfalls would also “not go to waste.” In brief, such
plans involve the institution agreeing to set aside money annually into a
plan for a particular employee who cannot access those funds until a nego-
tiated vesting date. If the employee is terminated, or leaves the institution
before the negotiated date, they forfeit the accumulated compensation
(Bauman, 2021). While U.S. colleges and universities can offer deferred-
compensation packages to any employee without them necessarily being
disclosed to the public, the U.S. Department of Labor requires private
institutions to report the plans they offer to employees who meet certain
high compensation thresholds within 120 days of their establishment.
According to The Chronicle, as the academic labor force was being leveled
in 2020 and academic programs eliminated, 14 private institutions estab-
lished deferred compensation plans with over 100 nonpresidential man-
agement employees, and at a total of 17 institutions, those plans were top
hat, including Ithaca College in New York, the University of Pennsylvania
and Davidson College in North Carolina. At three, the plans were estab-
lished for the president (Assumption College in Massachusetts; Rollins
College in Florida; and Northwood University in Michigan)

(Bauman, 2021).
The failure to put the brakes on the issuance of these deals in the worst
months of the pandemic are stunning no matter how you look at it, but
certainly in the context of the already enormous gaps between administra-
tive and faculty salaries, gaps that are far narrower than gaps between
senior administrators and staff. As critical scholars of higher education
have been documenting for quite some time, the gaps between adminis-
trative and faculty pay are a result of the spectacular growth in administra-
tive compensation compared to the virtual standstill in faculty compensation
since the 1970s. To exemplify, according to Campos (2021), the mean
salary for college presidents in 1983 was $160,640 (in 2018 dollars) while
the median compensation of private college and university presidents in
2018 was $668,000, and the median compensation of public college and
university presidents in 2019 was $495,808. Just how excessive some of
senior administrator salaries are is evident in the data published in The
Chronicle (Bauman et al., 2021). The highest-paid president in 2021 was
Kenneth W. Starr of Baylor University with $4, 946, 996 in annual com-
pensation, while the next 60 out of a total of 559 chief executives also
made millionaire salaries (Bauman et al., 2021). In the prior year, the
highest-paid president in 2020 was Ronald K. Machtley of Bryant
University, who made $6,283,616 in 2017 before stepping down in 2021.
According to (Akhtar & Borden, 2020) he made 50 times what the aver-
age professor earned at the university at the time. Also, in comparison, per
Campos (2021), the faculty pay virtually stayed the same for full-time
faculty members (1970–1971: $81,798 to 2018–2019: $88,703, num-
bers adjusted for inflation). Campos (2021) further shows that per instruc-
tor salary costs have plunged over the past half-century even though the
revenue per student in American higher education has literally doubled. In
addition, according to Hamermesh (2018) and the National Bureau of
Economic Research, professors earn 15% less than others with advanced
degrees and salaries stayed flat during the pandemic, according to the
AAUP 2020 Faculty Compensation Survey (American Association of
University Professors, 2021b).
The optics of establishing such deferred-compensation plans for senior
management at the same time that faculty and staff are increasingly treated
as dispensable are terrible, and further make plain how deeply entrenched
a corporate model has become in higher education. Perhaps nowhere is
the business model more apparent than in the world of college athletics
where coaches, too, have been further enriched at the very same time that
faculty, staff, and also students were paying steep costs, both figuratively
and literally, in the wake of management decisions. In a separate chapter,
we will pay closer attention to the impact on students, including students
who are also athletes, but for now, let it be enough to say that, for exam-
ple, as Michigan State University weathered the pandemic, in November
2020 they announced a 10-year, $95 million deal with its head football
coach, Mel Tucker. A month later, the University of Notre Dame also
announced a similar deal: $9.5 million annually for ten years for head foot-
ball coach, Brian Kelly. According to The Chronicle, which covered these
recent hires and in context of previous contracts, such as the $9 million
per year for recently departed Louisiana State University (LSU) football
coach, Edward Orgeron, salaries like these could pay for 111 assistant
professors annually at LSU for the next ten years (Gluckman, 2021).
Likewise, it turns out the annual $4.5 million that Rutgers University paid
head football coach, Greg Schiano, in the midst of the pandemic when
they could not find their way to deploy their rainy day fund to offset the
layoffs of 1000 employees is roughly the same amount it would have cost
to retain all of the RU part-time faculty who were fired (Svirnovskiy, 2021).
Importantly, it is not simply the failure to “right-size” administrations,
or include senior administrators or coaches in the “reduction in force”
plans during the pandemic while making massive cuts to faculty and staff,
that is concerning. And it is not only the audacious steps taken to create
new in-house administrative positions during the crisis that added to the
ranks of an already bloated administration. It is also the “right-sizing” of
the non-profit education sector itself to make room for massive growth in
the kinds of services that can be marketed, and the expansion of the student
consumer base so that more and more people come to see themselves as
customers in a diversified and transformed higher education market. More
specifically, in the midst of all this head-spinning combination of part cha-
otic repositioning and part looting that has led to massive cuts for thou-
sands of workers, and lucrative deals cut by global TEMPS to offer new
“innovative” and “transformative” services, are the seemingly paradoxical
narratives of austerity and windfalls. It is a paradoxical narrative we hear at
our own institution where there is a regular pandemic script that reminds
us that our institution is on solid financial footing, that we can afford new
and exciting programs, new capital projects, new contracts for outsourced
“faculty development opportunities,” yet at the same time faculty and staff
lines remain vacant despite repeated stated needs. It’s a message that is not
unique to our institution, and distilled into a cheeky headline, this thinly
veiled crisis-brings-market opportunity messaging to faculty and staff might
read something like, “Outlook Great for University; Bad for You.”
We Have Been Here Before Redux

Taken together, this select inventory of COVID-19 era seizures of admin-
istrative, and at times private consultant-boosted, control to cut faculty
labor, close programs, and erode tenure using questionable austerity
claims is distressing on their own. Yet, it also speaks to an even more omi-
nous pattern when they are understood in the context of previous and
current opportunistic grabs by capitalist elites to reengineer the non-profit
higher education space through related purges of anti-capitalist counter-
vailing forces in the form of pandemic-era neoconservative, neo-fascist
political movements against “wokeness.” Indeed, the AAUP itself notes
that their COVID-19 report on threats to shared governance comes as
only the third special report in their history where they have sounded the
alarms at such volumes on the assaults on the foundational principles and
practices of higher education (AAUP, 2021a).
The first was the AAUP 1956 report on Academic Freedom and Tenure
in the Quest for National Security in response to the nationwide wave of
McCarthyism and the mandate on the part of U.S. state legislatures and
individual institutions for faculty to sign loyalty oaths or to waive their
Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination or else face termination.
As they note, “Over the course of the postwar Red Scare, hundreds of
faculty members were dismissed without due process, and academic free-
dom and the institution of tenure were severely eroded” (AAUP, 2021a,
p. 4). The second cause for the AAUP to issue a special report on the state
of shared governance came almost 50 years later in 2005 with the disaster
of Hurricane Katrina. Comparing the Katrina crisis to the COVID crisis,
the AAUP found:
Then, as now, administrations insisted that unforeseeable, catastrophic

events warranted unprecedented emergency measures, including suspension
of crucial institutional regulations and mass terminations of tenured faculty
appointments; then, as now, the Association held that its policies and
procedures, especially those concerning financial exigency [which outline
orderly, measured processes with faculty as central players], are designed to
respond to crisis the nature of which no one can predict. (AAUP, 2021a, p. 4)
If were are to widen the lens to include the ongoing attacks on academic
freedom that have come in the form of the current nationwide McCarthy-
style efforts to criminalize teaching and scholarship around critical race
theory (CRT), one important but by no means only school of thought in
the history of the social sciences and humanities that documents and theo-
rizes structural racism, then the AAUP’s (2021a, p. 3) assertion that “[i]n
certain respects we have been here before” is even more evident.
We are not alone in framing the repressive attacks on CRT, and the
targeting of scholars and teachers of structural racism as the “new com-
munists” as a revised McCarthyism. Take for example the case of Idaho’s
Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin’s Education Task Force that lays
claims “‘of indoctrination in Idaho schools,” and “vows to root out ‘the
scourge of critical race theory, socialism, communism, and Marxism’”
(Savransky, 2021, para. 3). It is difficult not to define this as another illus-
tration of a task force used to “stoke fear,” the same kind of fear apparatus,
if you will, targeted towards prosecuting intellectuals so characteristic of
the McCarthy era (Savransky, 2021). In fact, Idaho teachers say this per-
secution brings “a very McCarthyism feel” (Savransky, 2021, para. 4). As
was the case during the McCarthy era when the Red Scare purges were
directly related to the crackdown on labor and anti-capitalist organizing, it
should not surprise us to see a tidal wave of repression unleashed in the
face of millions of people literally taking to the streets in the summer of
2020 in a global, multiracial, cross-class, cross-sector movement to con-
front white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 1984). Jason Stanley,
author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, stated for The
Bucks County Courier Times (Levittown, PA), emphasizing important
racial undercurrents in the attacks on CRT: “‘It’s a very similar structure
to the McCarthyite Red Scare of the 1950s. It intermingles with Ku Klux
Klan ideology to be frank. I hate to say it but it does’” (Mychalejko,
2021). A more detailed discussion of the alt-right campaigns against criti-
cal race theory is for another chapter, but the point here is that the tactics
of deploying fear, uncertainty and distrust to undergird labor and program
cuts are not inseparable from the racist, fundamentalist, libertarian attacks
against the curriculum. These attacks are tied together and amount to a
frontal assault on women workers and workers of color in K-12 schools
and the academy, as well as students of color, their families, and entire
communities. They entail not just a “right-sizing” and “realignment” of
the size and power of teacher, faculty, and staff labor, but also a “right-
sizing” and “realignment” of the curriculum as the ideological armature.
In other words, academic capitalism requires the transformation of the

very notions of citizenship and the state to accommodate the transnational
power elite’s notion of a globalized neoliberal citizenry (e.g. Mitchell,
2003; Chatterjee & Maira, 2014; Pucci, 2015).
We raise this reminder here to spotlight Klein’s (2007) core point that
disaster capitalists have, nonetheless, been very successful in distracting
resistors from the link between political struggles, in this case battles over
the curriculum, and economic struggles, in our case battles over labor
cuts. Citing pro-democracy campaigns and the international human
rights movement that have severed class fights against global neoliberal
corporate elites from political fights against state violence, tyranny and
repression, she contends that the pro-democracy left has often been
unable or unwilling to answer the question of why corporatist elites use
state violence to terrorize, imprison, torture, and kill their own people.
As we noted in the Introduction, the failure to connect the assaults on
human rights and civil liberties to the fundamentalist agenda to “free
corporations” and capitalist elites to accumulate unfettered has been a
deadly misunderstanding of power on the part of the pro-democracy left
for nearly a half-century, says Klein, and one we would not want to see
repeated here by failing to connect austerity claims and neo-fascist, “anti-
woke” clamp downs on academic freedom.
A Wicked Web They Weave

In his (February 15, 2021) article on “the Great Contraction” in The
Chronicle, Lee Gardner predicted:
[S]lashing budgets alone, experts agree, isn’t enough to survive. Struggling

colleges must cut strategically and adapt to a new way of operating, in order
to find a way to eventually grow and thrive. When the chaos of the pan-
demic eventually subsides and the dust settles, American higher education
as a whole may look very different: Wealthy institutions will remain rela-
tively unchanged, but a stratum of even leaner public universities and
smaller private colleges are likely to have moved further away from the clas-
sic spectrum of a university education. Their academic offerings, taught by
faculty whose jobs are less secure, will be focused more tightly on job out-
comes. And in the aftermath of a crisis that has disproportionately affected
the most vulnerable students, they may employ fewer student-support spe-
cialists and may call on faculty and staff members more often to fill those
shoes. Such shifts don’t have to mean that colleges become trade schools,
or that the liberal arts are dead. But Covid-19 has narrowed the options for
leaders, shortened the timeline for any changes, and raised the stakes for the
outcomes. Colleges may succeed in positioning themselves for a future in
which they can grow, but that depends on the strategic decisions they make
today. (para. 6–8)
We do not share Garnder’s cautious optimism, or the premise that options

have narrowed and “growth” is always a legitimate goal, particularly when
we take the long view. Even before COVID, of course, the hollowing out
had begun. In their 2020 book released just as the pandemic hit, Kezar
et al. (2019, pp. 20–35), describe seven contours of what they call the
“gig academy” most of which we have traversed here in our limited over-
view of faculty labor, that include: “[the rise of] the academic micro-
entrepreneur” (i.e. the increase in contingent faculty); “[a shift of]
economic risk onto workers” (i.e. externalizing the costs of the pandemic
on to faculty and staff); and “[the use of] technological means of reducing
labor cost” (i.e. advancing the reliance on education technologies). They
also describe the “unbundling [of] roles to deprofessionalize and atomize
workers” (i.e. deskilling), the “[f]issur[ing] of workers through outsourc-
ing and misclassification,” and “structural discrimination.”
Indeed, all of these processes continued to happen in the COVID con-
text, draped in narratives of economic crisis and urgency, or with a gloss of
“well, maybe it isn’t just the pandemic, but while we’re at it.” Moreover,
the spinning of a shadow web of privatization is increasingly bipartisan,
and global. As Katie Ferrari, the journalist who, at the opening of this
chapter, reminded us of the privatization grabs in New Orleans, shared
that both the Democratic governor of New York and California had pub-
licly made opportunistic moves in 2020 to promote a “fundamental
rethink of the classroom” in business partnerships with education privatiz-
ers (Ferrari, 2020, para. 14). She quotes New York Governor Andrew
Cuomo at a May 5, 2020 press conference saying, “The old model of
everybody goes and sits in a classroom, and the teacher is in front of that
classroom and teaches that class, and you do that all across the city, all
across the state, all these buildings, all these physical classrooms—why,
with all the technology you have?” (para. 14). The same month, on the
other side of the country, California’s Democratic Governor Gavin
Newsom was “choosing to partner with billionaires to ‘save’ the public
sector by dismantling and privatizing it, instead of taxing them to fund it”
(Ferrari, 2020, paras. 16–17) with his Economic Recovery Task Force
“co-chaired by charter-friendly Ann O’Leary and billionaire Tom Steyer
[and] includ[ing] privatizers like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and
Netflix, and thirty-seven CEOs.” While both governors called for increases
in federal funding for public education in their states, Ferrari took aim at
Newsom who “has made no moves to raise taxes on the state’s 165 bil-
lionaires, who have a combined net worth of $723.7 billion” in favor of
proposing pandemic-era education cuts amounting to $18 billion, and the
potential firing of nearly 14% of California’s educators (Ferrari, 2020,
paras. 16–17). As a harbinger of the global reach of disaster profiteering in
the non-profit higher education context, national and international watch-
dogs have issued notices, including a December 2021 statement from
Manos Antoninis, Director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization’s Global Education Monitoring (GEM), after
the organization released a report that was covered by Inside Higher Ed
and Times Higher Education: “[S]ocieties have to be ‘very, very careful’
that a growing emphasis on learning as a personal investment for financial
return does not lead to a ‘degrading’ of the ‘concept of education’”
(Baker, 2021). A similar warning against the for-profit predation on devel-
oping nations by global education corporations feeding on “structural
adjustments” was put out in a press release from the United Nations
Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner in 2014 when, at the
time, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to education,
Kishore Singh, concerned with the exponential growth of private educa-
tion institutions in developing nations, said, “The exponential growth of
private education must be regulated by Governments to safeguard educa-
tion as a public good” and “[t]he costs associated with private schools are
exacerbating inequality in societies as poor and marginalized groups are
often excluded from going to them” (UNHR, 2014).
Lest that UN red flag read as unwarranted, consider that the same week
in December 2021, as Omicron became the dominant strand in the United
States and yet another winter holidays approached in pandemic mode,
The National Association of Systems Heads (NASH) and more than 100
higher education leaders convened to “launch a national education
initiative called “The Power of Systems” (Whitford, 2021f). The initiative,

underwritten by, among others, the Carnegie Corporation of New York,
the Lumina Foundation, and Strada Education Network for at least the
next ten years “calls on a network of public university systems [in the U.S.]
to address several pressing issues in higher education” (Whitford, 2021f,
para. 1). Though NASH has been in existence for over 40 years, this
pandemic-era initiative promotes a “shared services model” in higher edu-
cation focused on the five issue areas of “learning, talent, equity, invest-
ment and ‘systemness—or the practice of fostering cohesion over
competition among different systems’” (Whitford, 2021f, para. 2).
Whitford reports that Nancy Zimpher, senior fellow at NASH and co-
coordinator of the initiative, had few public details to share about their
investment goals, but explained, “[f]irst, systems [read: colleges and uni-
versity trustees and senior administrators] across the country need to buy
in to the plan. ‘We would like to know, for starters, “Is this an idea that
you think it’s time for?”’” (Whitford, 2021f, para. 3–4). For us, this ques-
tion sounds eerily like a Friedman-esque tactic of calling on ideas that have
been lying around in wait and seizing a crisis to implement. Although
Miguel Cardona, the U.S. Secretary of Education, could not attend the
launch, Whitford reports that he released a statement in December 2021,
just as hospitals were filling up again as Omicron surged, with his support
for the NASH initiative, saying: “I am heartened that the transformation
of public higher education systems across the country is underway. This is
a very important moment for the country, for the future of higher educa-
tion, and for the public will to improve the condition of our lives for gen-
erations to come” (Whitford, 2021f, para. 12). Who needs Trump’s Betsy
DeVos enemies when you have Biden-appointed friends like these?
We can’t help but think that national and global developments like the
ones above, in the midst of a worldwide catastrophe, speak to the growing
web of increasingly powerful companies that have been shape-shifters even
prior to the pandemic and are now advancing their fronts, includ-
ing monopolies like Facebook, Google, and Netflix. Advances that began
as naked for-profit “education” companies, moved into non-profit educa-
tional spaces, both public and private schools, and have expanded beyond
dining and custodial services and bookstores to a whole range of other
operations- indeed, to as many college and university operations as resis-
tance will allow. Our essential work as faculty members committed to a
non-commercialized model education gets in the way of that. It also
comes as no surprise, then, that administrators have continued to try to

control academic labor, and to devalue and exploit it, as is the case of labor
under capitalism more generally. Further, like labor under capitalism more
generally, what is happening now under the cover of the pandemic is also
more than that: Educational privatizers aim to put teachers out of busi-
ness, to “hollow out” the profession itself, and to take over the vocation
of teaching writ large, from K-12 all the way through to the professoriate.
In a word, it is not just to control our labor and devalue it, but to take all
that we do and turn it into something else. That is a different, but related
goal, to which we turn to next.
CHAPTER 4
“Cut to Grow” and the Spider Web

of the New Global TEMPS
Perhaps no component of the COVID crisis has been more evident in

higher education than the ways in which executives have attempted to
“right-size” academic labor, whether the labor of faculty or staff, under
the guise of pandemic austerity. To date, nearly 650,000 academic workers
have been fired since the outbreak began, with each week bringing new
headlines of further layoffs. As is the case of labor more generally in late-
stage capitalism, administrative classes have seized on the crisis to control,
devalue and exploit the essential work that faculty and staff do in higher
education, including the labor of people who are not teachers or scholars
but who nonetheless engage in the important work of faculty and student
support in the broad sense. They have also seized the opportunity to
“right-size” or “transform” the very nature of the social relations of teach-
ing and learning, and to further create, capture and grow an increasingly
global education market for retailing all things “school” to a global stu-
dent body that can consume “educational” products and services from
private vendors beginning as early as pre-K until old age. As such, the
pandemic has also “laid bare” one of the basic contradictions of capitalism,
namely the paradoxical strategy of “cutting in order to grow.” This drive
for expansion is not limited to higher education, nor just the machinations
in the U.S., despite the focus of our illustrations. Instead, what we are
witnessing is the expansion, in pandemic form, of what we will call global
and total educational management privatization syndicates (TEMPS), and

Switzerland AG 2022
ones that we have uncovered cast a complicated spider web of predatory

entanglements across both the higher education and K-12 sectors.
As a massive web of billionaires, profiteers, true-believers, and con artists,
global total educational management privatization syndicates, or what some
education scholars would refer to more simply as the global education
industry (GEI), global TEMPS had already been well-established before the
pandemic, and are an outgrowth of the same long history of corporatization
of higher education in the U.S., and in Europe. According to Fortune
Business Insights (2021, para. 4), a global corporate consulting firm based
in India, prior to the pandemic, in 2019, the global higher education mar-
ket was worth 1090.87 billion in U.S. dollars. The North American pre-
pandemic share alone was $368.21 billion dollars, with the U.S. dominating
the market (Fortune Business Insights, 2021, para. 4). By 2021, Fortune
Business Insights projected that the global higher education market is
expected to grow over 10% in the COVID era to a staggering 2367.51 bil-
lion by 2027 (Fortune Business Insights, 2021). By comparison, the global
pharmaceutical market is estimated to be worth $1587.05 billion in 2022
(ReportLinker, 2022). In the first half of 2021 alone, reported The New
York Times, investment in EdTech had already exploded from $1.7 billion
in the fall of 2019 to $3.2 billion (Goldstein, 2022). This was in the context
of U.S. federal funding for pandemic relief for educational institutions,
including higher education. In March 2021, as part of the American Rescue
Plan, of the $170 billion in federal funds allocated for education, nearly
$40 billion was earmarked for colleges and universities, and another
$198 million was released ten months later in January 2022 (Heavey,
2022). For these new global higher education industry “growers,” we could
call them, Fortune Business Insights says, “The enormous opportunities
presented by the higher education industry are prompting key players to
engage in partnerships and collaborations to expand their presence and
position in this market. In response, companies are pooling their resources
to create innovative solutions to make advanced degrees more accessible to
students” (Fortune Business Insights, 2021, para 6).
Key players in these syndicates are familiar. At the center are not just
global educational corporations like 2U, Wiley, Pearson, Blackboard, and
the like, but also Dell, Verizon, Oracle, Xerox, and powerful global consult-
ing firms like Bain & Company and Deloitte. More than that, the world’s
billionaire titans and their own behemoth global corporations are, within
just a few years, now squarely invested in education markets as well, as we
have already noted, including the tech giants, Bill Gates and Microsoft,
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, Reed Hastings and Netflix, along with
4 “CUT TO GROW” AND THE SPIDER WEB OF THE NEW GLOBAL TEMPS 107
the radical libertarian Koch brothers (David Koch died in August 2019)
and their network of companies, foundations, and think tanks. A bipartisan
gold rush, for sure, these players have as a top priority the investment in
global education markets along a continuum from partial to total transfor-
mation of public education sectors globally, as well as the private non-profit
education markets. They profit from the exporting of U.S., and Western
notions of governance, and also the values of free-market fundamentalism
in the retailing of a total set of educational services, whether instructional,
curricular, administration, management, technologies, financial, marketing,
accountability structures, human resources, or data capture. They also
profit from product placements for a lifetime, in the crudest sense of the
term, in their retailing of EdTech from pre-K to “stackables” to whatever
“lifelong educational needs” await. Subsequently, in the selling of expertise
and private knowledge, and essentially governance, itself, through an
increasingly entangled web of private and public-private ventures, they set
themselves up to undermine, intentionally or not, the notion and purpose
of both education and the state in the service of capital all across the globe.
As a visual representation of what we have come to understand as the busi-
ness of global TEMPS at the local level of any one college or university, the
image below depicts the kinds of possible manifestations of for-profit enter-
prises, and in the form of a spider web of predatory entanglements designed,
at its core, to capitalize on student tuition dollars. We might also think of
this web in the context of K-12 schools where the threads of privatization
may be slightly different, and the coffers of public school funding more
brightly underscored, but the overall conceptual design encompasses the
education sector broadly, and also globally, as our story below will reveal.
Remember the GEI Titans: From Chicago Boys

to Davos Men
In previous chapters, we discussed the prominent role that free market fun-
damentalists like James Buchanan and Milton Friedman have played as lead-
ers of a neoliberal social, economic, and political movement that is truly
global in scope. As we will see in this chapter and others, both the radical
libertarian wing of the billionaire class and the neoliberals trying to pass as
Keynesians have mastered the art of stealth in their strategic plans to expand
and acquire as much of the worldwide education markets as possible, and
now with COVID as an accelerant. Also sharing this global stage as GEI
titans is yet another wing of the stealth campaigners that the New York Times
global economics correspondent, Peter Goodman, recently investigated in
his 2022 exposé, Davos Man. According to Goodman, these are the billion-
aire titans who, among those who gather annually for the World Economic
Forum in Davos, Switzerland, cloak their anti- democratic gluttony for
wealth and power not in trying to pass as traditional conservatives, but in
flat-out peddling the very opposite vision of political economy that they
practice. To be a “Davos Man,” a name first coined by political scientist
Samuel Huntington in 2004, was to be among “those so enriched by glo-
balization and so native to its workings that they were effectively stateless
(Goodman, 2022, p. 5). Their disguise is to fashion themselves and their
economic and political programs as engines of global prosperity for all, a
trickle down global human rights frame, or in a newer version that extreme
privatization is the best foot soldier for diversity, equity and inclusion.
Contrary to their disguise, Goodman succinctly describes the prototypical
member of the global billionaire class as “a rare and dangerous predator
who attacks without restraint—expanding his territory and seizing the
nourishment of others—while he deftly assumes the guise of empathy and
generosity, lulling his prey into submission” (Goodman, 2022, front book
flap). While the Chicago Boys and the Davos Men have visions that expand
beyond global TEMPS, the terrain of global education, including global
higher education as a field of extraction and also governance, is a key frontier.
More specifically, as sociologist of education, Stephen Ball (2009,
p. 96), has argued in his work on the various manifestations of a plurality
of education privatizations in the UK and their relationships to the chang-
ing nature of the state from one of democratic governance to a “competi-
tion state” where the state functions largely as a processor or launderer of
private contracts, privatizations overall are diverse, complex, multi-faceted,
and inter-related, including educational privatizations. Focused on the
corporate logics of “partnerships” aimed at expansion, diversification,

integration, and profit, the education businesses, like other privatizations,
are perennially searching for new market opportunities for private provid-
ers of educational services that Ball argues come through “advice, consul-
tation, evaluation, philanthropy, partnerships, representation, programme
delivery and other outsourcing.” The results are changes in both the
structures of state governance, and the very subjectivities of the people
that participate in these shifting institutional relationships as tasks are real-
located and entire normative and morally healthy bureaucratic arrange-
ments are “rearticulated” (Ball, 2009, p. 96).
These layers include the restructuring of institutions of governance
through the retailing of “improvement” services, such as in the retailing
of continual professional development (CPD) services around teacher
training, coaching and mentoring, “turnaround services,” and “improve-
ment” policy “ideas, like ‘personalised learning’” (Ball, 2009, p. 85). Even
prior to the pandemic, these “change management” products have
been marketed via texts that:
convey a sense of urgency and speed, they work ‘swiftly and efficiently’ […]
they deliver ‘streamlining’ and ‘manageability’ […] and articulate a form of
‘scaremongering’ […] a savior discourse that promises to save schools, lead-
ers and teachers and students from failure, from the terrors of uncertainty
and from the confusions of policy and from themselves—their own weak-
nesses. (Ball, 2009, p. 87)
Of course, at the same time, these global products can all be “customized”
and “tailored” to the needs of institutions and students. The layers also
include the acquisition of control over the infrastructures of policy-making
itself via private contracts and consultancies, including the exporting of
privatized government contracts to global markets in developing countries
in what some critics have called a kind of “intellectual dumping” (see
Mihyo, 2004), and in ways that remind Ball of Foucault’s analysis in
Discipline and Punish of the insidiousness of devouring privatizations that
have the quality of being “apparently innocent, but profoundly suspi-
cious” (Foucault, 1979, p. 139 as quoted in Ball, 2009, p. 93). Analysts
like Ball argue that in many cases, privatization for its own sake is not the
end game, but a path to a form of governance in the fact that the very
notion of expert knowledge and the authority of governance is trans-
formed. In other words, privatization brings about a “re-drawing” of the
very lines between the public and private sector that is not only about
looting, but also about capturing the rule-making apparatus and becom-
ing the state. In this way, the privatization of education policy, Ball says, is
of a different magnitude than other public sector outsourcing.
To elaborate here, private corporations prior to COVID have held gov-
ernment contracts that can be exported all across the globe, and in the
exporting of Western educational policy that has been privatized to the
Global South. These enactments of the “edu-political apparatus,” as Ideland,
Jobér & Axellson (2020, p. 2) call it, become a new kind of colonialism.
And when we add the veneer of the Davos Man in their new-found obses-
sion with global education, including higher education, and their roles as
the emperors of the education for new global “enlightened” corporate citi-
zenry committed to “global prosperity for all,” we can begin to get a glimpse
of the sheer magnitude of the crisis that both predates COVID and is accel-
erated by it. In case we think claims like these are overstated, as we write,
and as Jeff Bezos makes his trip to the space on his Blue Origin spaceship,
and Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, wins a bid awarded by NASA
over Bezos’ Blue Origin to run astronauts to the Moon (Kim, 2021), a
recent Omicron-era headline in Inside Higher Education leaped out, “An
Online ‘Moon Shot’ for the Developing World” about the Thunderbird
School of Global Management at Arizona State University (ASU). The aptly
named Thunderbird School, rising from the ashes of the industry’s latest
virtual learning escapades with online program management corporations
(OPMs), which we will chronicle later, plans to launch a new global online
certificate program in global management and entrepreneurship intended
to reach 100 million learners by 2030. With 70% of the prospective students
women, and with an eye on refugees and others in the developing world
(Smalley, 2022b), the program includes a plan to offer five free online busi-
ness courses (free for now) in 40 languages. While ASU faculty will help
design and teach the courses, which will result in a “badge” for each course
taken that would convert into college credit,” the new global certificate
program “will include supplemental professors from various regions in the
world for ‘cameos’ to ensure the courses are culturally appropriate” (Smalley,
2022b). The “shooting for the moon” metaphor that editors of IHE use
here seems hardly metaphorical in the context of neocolonial expansion and
the privatization of space. The dean of the Thunderbird School made it
clear that this program has been rising from the neoliberalism reconstruc-
tion ashes prior to COVID when he says, “We’ve been working on these
things for a long time […] We already have thought through a lot of how
to use AI, how to use mobile technology, how to get internet access to stu-
dents all over the world, including Africa” (Smalley, 2022b, para. 5).
As we have noted already, this work of targeting a global student market

has been well underway prior to the pandemic. As a form of neocolonial-
ism, even before COVID, the global education industry brings together
“strange bedfellows” (Strauss, 2019) in that Trump folks who call on a
racist, nationalist pro-capitalist, anti-elitist, populist agenda can find a home
in the total retailing of K-postsecondary education (K-PSE) as it fits the
white supremacist, free-market, but anti-globalization, position that public
schools and private non-profits, and liberal arts “indoctrinate” students
with leftist ideas and peddle socialism, feminism and notions about the
immorality of structural racism. At the same time, it also fits the Koch
brothers’ brand of libertarian fundamentalism. For them, all value is defined
solely by the market, and the dismantling of the commonwealths, includ-
ing public schools, is necessary to protect social order, one that ultimately
can only thrive, in their view, on private competition and the requirement
that all that would be good and desirable must be acquired through sale.
While the construction of this “edu-political apparatus,” (Ideland,
Jobér & Axellson 2020, p. 2) as a field of governance has been under con-
struction for some time, we enter at a time when both education scholars
and global industry leaders alike remark that the speed with which the
industry is changing, and the impact of the global pandemic on the agen-
das and configurations of an industry that is global, though also, not sur-
prisingly, highly complex, multi-layered, and widely variable across social,
political and geographical space. Over the span of two years, a truly mas-
sive global web of institutions, and corporate and professional actors have
seized the moment, and in ways that even industry leaders would charac-
terize both in promising terms like “gold rush” and “land grabs,” and also
in cautionary terms like “chaotic” and “unstable” to run a global cam-
paign to further commercialize education, but to also re-engineer the very
nature of the educational products they have sold, or aspire to sell, as
COVID-inspired or at least COVID-accelerated. In doing so, as they
retail, or product develop, a dizzyingly cornucopia of “new educational
products, services, and expert knowledges,” they also “educate” students
and teachers alike for the expectations, routines, and values of labor force
participation in late-stage global capitalism. In it, there has also been a
continuation of the almost junkie-like focus on “transformation” and
“growth” in what appears as an addiction to retailing as much of the
human social relations of teaching and learning as possible. Much about
these COVID-era developments are not new in mission or philosophy, or
in the nature of many of the products and services sold. That said, there is
enough of a nexus of social, political and economic upheaval in the
pandemic period that scholars, global capitalists and pro-industry analysts

alike seem to agree that they, themselves, are not yet sure what to call the
shape-shifted and shape-shifting set of major infrastructure vehicles that
currently organizes, and will come to organize, the massive global privati-
zations campaigns available to them now. In a word, in trying to strategize
how to not let a good pandemic go to waste, it would seem they don’t
know whether the Trojan Horse of opportunism needs to be rebranded as
a Trojan Elephant, or maybe it is a whole fleet of Trojan Animals that can
be suited up in the pandemic-endemic world.
Given this, and acknowledging that we, ourselves, are writing about a
global transformation as it is unfolding in real time, we have come to think
of the COVID-era global education industry, and the COVID gambits
industry actors are making at this particular stage in the outbreak, as global
total education market privatization syndicates, or new global TEMPS, for
these important reasons. Most notably, as we continue to peel away the
layers, it is clear to us that in this historical moment, there is no longer a
singular business model, as in the straight forward, for-profit DeVry
University model of the 1990s. Nor do the syndicates now seem poised to
maintain the familiar outsourcing or subcontracting model of, say, campus
food services, or the relatively new but now highly politicized and recently
exposed model of online program management corporations (OPMs).
They also are not confining themselves to the narrow retailing of, say, pri-
vate search firm services for senior administrators, including college presi-
dents, or the contracting by EdTech corporations for the use of learning
management systems. Instead, “everything is on the table” for the retail-
ing of all of these products and services that can be identified, or created
in an increasingly much more diversified set of markets. Moreover, in the
pandemic-inspired opportunity to consider a massive pivot to supersized
diversification, there is an attendant insider call to be circumspect and
camouflaged in what is arguably a blatant total redefinition and usurpation
of all of the operations of the public and non-profit educational sectors
globally.
As we will continue to hammer home, and return to in the conclusion,
the blueprints for both this overall global educational colonization, and the
acceleration and diversification of products and services design and delivery
during COVID, are not unique to the global education industry, but are
blueprints for the redefinition and usurpation of the global public sectors
more broadly. Returning to the COVID paradox of “cut to grow,” the
expansion of new global TEMPS and the push for growth and
transformation is embedded in at least three features of the global education

industry, which are themselves central tools of the ruling global class, and
those are the power of “philantro-capitalism,” the extraordinary influence of
corporate-funded think tanks, and the ascendency of “consultacracy.” A dis-
cussion below on each of these before we explore their footprints in the
current field of COVID disaster opportunities on campuses.
The Philanthro-Capitalists Go Back to School

Nearly five years before all but the billionaire class would be brought to its
knees by COVID-19, the global captains of industry had already turned
their machinery of philanthro-capitalism to the job of re-engineering pub-
lic education in the U.S. As The New York Times reporter, Natasha Singer,
put it in 2017 in her spotlight on the tech titans:
Some tech moguls are taking a hands-on role in nearly every step of the
education supply chain by financing campaigns to alter policy, building
learning apps to advance their aims and subsidizing teacher training [exert-
ing an] end-to-end influence that represents … almost [a monopoly] in
their approach to the education reform market. (Singer, 2017, para. 19)
In the span of just a few relatively short years, the tech giants had already
made progress on their plans to remake, as Singer argues (2017, para. 4):
the very nature of schooling on a vast scale, using some of the same tech-
niques that have made their companies linchpins of the American economy.
Through their philanthropy, they are influencing the subjects that schools
teach, the classroom tools that teachers choose and fundamental approaches
to learning.
Additionally, though bringing different products and services to the edu-

cational markets, or taking somewhat different approaches to the market,
including the actual creation of education markets themselves, these titans
of global industry, wearing their philanthro-capitalists hats, have mar-
shaled their extraordinary wealth in a largely unregulated market to change
educational policy and practice, but without accountability. As a combina-
tion of artificial intelligence and software apparatus has paved the way for
hyper automation across industries, these new robber barons have co-
opted the audit culture language and philosophy of “data-driven innova-
tion” to sell “transformation” products and services that are backed by no
data demonstrating their effectiveness for students. In fact, as Jessie

Woolley-Wilson, chief executive of DreamBox, an algorithm-centered
EdTech start-up funded, indirectly, by Netflix CEO donor, Reed Hastings,
herself admitted in Singer’s reporting: [M]any other education start-ups
lacked research to prove even the most basic assumption: that their apps
did not harm students’ educational results,” a threshold she said “sounds
like a low bar … [b]ut with the history of education technology … is not”
(Singer, 2017, paras. 60–61). Yet, the lack of a solid body of research to
suggest that educational technologies improve student learning, let alone
data to ensure teachers, parents and students that the marketplace of
EdTech wares does no harm, has not stopped philanthro-capitalists like
Hastings, Marc Benioff from Salesforce.org, or Mark Zuckerberg and his
wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, from expanding their global enterprises deeper
into the education markets in the form of “charitable giving.”
A full description of the global landscape of philanthro-capitalism in the
context of educational markets is not possible to detail here (see Baltodano,
2016 for an excellent treatment of the topic), but suffice it to say that even
before the pandemic, Zuckerberg, for example, had already piloted free
software that operationalized his ultimate global vision to put children “in
charge of their own learning” and render teachers as “facilitators and men-
tors” in over 100 schools in the U.S. (Singer, 2017, para. 3). Along with
remaking the social relations of teaching and learning such that students
are responsible for “teaching” themselves, Zuckerberg’s software mani-
festly is used to track student work and ostensibly identify and manage
educational interventions. Of course, like the access to personal data that
customers cede when they use Facebook, or Google, or a laptop or a
smartphone, “free” educational software, and artificial intelligence as its
beating heart, provides the tech titans and their massive web of plutocratic
partners with the same. In a variation of the theme, Richard Hastings,
CEO of Netflix, donated nearly $11 million to a non-profit charter school
to fund a private partnership with DreamBox Learning that, among other
things, tracks students’ engagements with the program (Singer, 2017).
Importantly for our focus here on the holy grail of “transformation”
and “growth,” Marc Benioff, who is not so coincidentally one of the five
“Davos Man” billionaires in the class of billionaires (along with Jeff Bezos,
Jamie Dimon, Larry Fink, and Stephen Schwarzman) that Peter Goodman
(2022, in the title) has argued have “devoured the world,” explicitly urged
state actors, public education administrators, and teachers, themselves, to
“think bigger,” even before the outbreak. Benioff is the CEO of Salesforce.
org, which dominates the market in cloud-based customer-relationship

management software. For Davos men like Benioff, “thinking bigger” in
the context of education markets has meant commitments, for instance, to
donate over $100 million directly to San Francisco public schools in a
venture-capitalist like program that allocates grants for school administra-
tor “wish lists” for additional staff and tech resources, but also manage-
ment solutions (Singer, 2017). Singer reports that the Chan Zuckerberg
Initiative, which is an organization set up pre-pandemic to manage their
global education industry agenda, including Facebook’s goal to fully
develop personalized learning software for all of the world’s learners by
the end of 2017, was being guided by “big plans” that Zuckerberg shared
in a 2017 speech he made in Peru where he noted that “there were only
about 25,000 public secondary schools in the United States,” and though
charity may begin at home, as they say: “Our hope over the next decade is
to help upgrade a majority of these schools to personalized learning and
then start working globally as well […] Giving a billion students a person-
alized education is a great thing to do” (Singer, 2017, para 84–85). It
shouldn’t surprise us, then, that U.S. college and university students
would be included as potential beneficiaries of this new global, Davos-
man-like, largesse.
Thinking Bigger with Think Tanks

Making their early family fortunes not from technology, but from oil and
later chemicals and energy, and also wielding staggering “end-to-end
influence” have been Charles Koch and David Koch. Through Koch
Industries and a slew of foundations, the Koch brothers’ network has
endeavored to transform public and private non-profit educational spaces
as part of a much more fundamental radical libertarian goal of “freeing”
capitalism from democracy. As we shared earlier, that goal, shaped by
Buchanan’s extremist anti-democratic and plutocratic ideas influenced by
Calhoun, is to defend the belief in the unalienable right of the individual
to be free of the state’s imposition on the right to accumulate wealth, and
the corollary belief that the primary threat to social order is the power of
people to collectively organize against oligarchy. As such, for radical liber-
tarians in the Buchanan school, the will of the majority, and the very
mechanisms and rules of governance which provide for the people to exer-
cise their power in a democracy, must be transformed to foreclose this
perceived threat to the freedom of individuals and numerical minority
groups. As education, and not simply schooling, is a primary set of social

relationships that foster the democratic process and politicize the majori-
ties to act in their own self-interests in ways that resist tyranny, oligarchy
and plutocracy, those institutions must also be occupied, infiltrated and
eventually fully owned by plutocrats. There is so much more to be said
about Buchanan and Calhoun, and MacLean’s 2017 award-winning his-
tory is a place to start, but for now, the point is that one central source of
fuel that ignited the wildfire of Buchanan’s cum Calhoun’s radical liber-
tarianism that has spread to all parts of our governance system, and ubiq-
uitous now in the education sector, has been the extraordinary funding
from the Koch brothers who, as early as the 1970s, found in Buchanan a
kindred thinker.
Since then, a key strategy in the Koch brothers playbook has been to
develop and disseminate radical libertarian philosophies throughout as
many public and civil society sectors as possible, most importantly the
rule-making apparatuses and institutions of governance. But that is not
the only strategy. Critically, the playbook includes the strategy to enlist
educational institutions in the socialization of a citizenry into their vision
of political economy. More specifically, the core thinking that radicals like
the Koch brothers have worked to propagate for the better part of 30 years
in their own corporate university management curricula and foundation
agendas has been that deeply held belief in the fundamental “flaw” in
democratic system that allows for, and guarantees the constitutional rights
of, individuals to act collectively to demand that their representative gov-
ernment act in the interests of an organized people. One major way that
the Koch brothers, and their now legions of foot soldiers, have gone to
war against democracy is in the form of think tanks they lavishly fund, and
that do the “thinking” of how to inject this radical anti-democratic phi-
losophy, and attendant policy changes to dismantle democracy to make
room for unfettered wealth accumulation.
For instance, at least since the late 1990s, when Charles Koch invested
millions in Buchanan’s Center for the Study of Public Choice, which still
exists today at George Mason University (GMU), the Koch brothers have
not only been funding efforts to train new cohorts of intellectual warriors
in a battle over ideas about political economy and social order, but, as
MacLean (2017) argues, to train:
operatives to staff the far-flung and purportedly separate, yet intricately con-
nected, institutions funded by the Koch brothers and their large network of
fellow wealthy donors […] Others were being hired and trained to trans-
form legal understanding and practice on matters from health policy to gun
rights to public sector employment. Still others were taking what they
learned here to advise leading Republicans and their staffs [including] presi-
dential candidates. (pp. xxi–xxii)
Also at GMU today is the Mercatus Center, billed on Wikipedia as a “lib-

ertarian non-profit free-market-oriented research, education, and out-
reach think tank” founded by Koch Industry executives, that plays a
significant role in setting Congressional legislative policy (Simpkins,
2018). Reportedly, the Kochs have donated at least $30 million to the
Center over the years, and over $95 million total to GMU since 2005
(Simpkins, 2018). Formerly known as the Center for the Study of Market
Processes, the Mercatus Center (“mercatus” is Latin for “market”) is a
leader in setting a libertarian agenda that, in its twin central premises that
anything of value must have a price yet taxation is theft, has eroded a large
swath of the very democratic infrastructure necessary to protect a people
from a pandemic itself, and to organize a full-scale effective response once
one did hit.
Ironically, according to Christopher Leonard, author of the best-selling
exposé on Koch Industries (2019) in an interview with Jennifer Berkshire
and Jack Schneider, it is tax-payer funded institutions like public health,
and also public schools that, in Koch’s think tank thinking, are the source
of social disorder for the total privatizers. Leonard explains, “[w]hen gov-
ernment intervenes in the system to try to give something away for free in
their view, all it does is distort the price and it distorts the market system
and […] creates more problems than it solves” (Strauss, 2019). Lest we
think that the Koch brothers embarked on a mission to rethink U.S. pub-
lic schools before COVID struck as purely a massive profit-making ven-
ture, perhaps as it the case with some of the Davos Men from Big Tech
and elsewhere, the Koch brothers’ entrenched objections to public schools
are also rooted in political ideology, and most notably, the belief that their
money should not pay for it.
It is for these reasons, though, that the Koch brothers have been all
over public education, including public colleges and universities, though
not without pushback, which we will explore in the final portion of the
book. Their infiltration of public schooling has gone well beyond their ties
to George Mason University, which, as we described above, has served to
support what sounds like, essentially, an intellectual Quantico for
libertarian operatives. Like Gates, Zuckerberg, Benioff, and also the

Walton family of billionaires, the Kochs have found themselves in the K-12
mix, most notably in their long-standing support for the “school choice”
movement (as has the Walton family). Alongside their stewardship in that
national campaign, the Kochs have inserted themselves into K-12 schools
in the U.S., through their Youth Entrepreneurs (YE) Program in U.S. high
schools, launched in 2009 to educate students to become “liberty advanc-
ing agents” through the study of free-market fundamentalism—a program
that was in at least 13 states as of 2018. More recently, Charles Koch
funded another high school program called EDvantage, an online curricu-
lum for high school teachers that promotes the ills of taxation, social safety
nets, minimum wage guarantees, and environmental regulations (Simpkins,
2018). And while the Koch network has publicly disavowed state bans on
the teaching of critical race theory and other proposals to ban books from
school libraries with equity, inclusion, and anti-oppression themes on the
grounds that such regulation is at odds with their principles of liberty
(Beaumont, 2021), organizations that the network funds directly, or indi-
rectly, such as Parents Defending Education, have been on the front lines
of the McCarthy-like repressive attacks (Gabbatt, 2022).
Koch foundations have also made headlines as early as 2008 for their
infiltration of higher education. In 2011, faculty and students at Florida
State University alleged that a 2008 Koch brothers donation had influ-
enced faculty hiring. By 2014, in a nationwide campaign called “UnKoch
My Campus,” students on nearly 30 campuses across the U.S., including
Florida State University, GMU, and Michigan State University demanded
transparency around the millions in Koch foundation donations received
by public colleges and universities that have allegedly influenced faculty
hires, transformed the curriculum to promote the principles of free-market
fundamentalism, and permitted corporate access to student records
(Mulhere, 2014; Levinthal & Center for Public Integrity, 2015). Reporting
found that, for decades, the Kochs have been donating millions to literally
hundreds of colleges and universities across the United States, including
163 schools in 2012, 210 schools in 2013, and 216 schools in 2014
(Levinthal & Center for Public Integrity, 2015). Often, that funding has
targeted economics departments and law programs, such as two Koch-
backed “economic freedom” schools at Arizona State University and the
University of Arizona (Simpkins, 2018).
By 2018, documented Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian in their
sweeping and jaw-dropping accounts of contemporary privatization in The
Privatization of Everything (2021), Charles Koch had not only boasted at

a meeting of education philanthro-capitalists that “[w]e can change the
trajectory of the country,” the Charles Koch Institute had, in just that one
year, donated $100 million to colleges and universities (p. 245). Then, on
the eve of the COVID outbreak, in June of 2019, the Kochs’ network of
influence had announced further and massive investments in the K-12
markets, in the form of two education initiatives, one of those with the
Walton Foundation, a $15 million project that, according to a statement
from the foundations, will support “600 education entrepreneurs in incu-
bating, testing and launching innovative approaches to education”
(Strauss, 2019). It wouldn’t be long before the Koch and Walton network
of “end-to-end influencers” would have a truly extraordinary opportunity
to ratchet up the kind of radical social experimentation in, or “creative
destruction” of, the educational commons that has been such a central
aspirational artery in the heart of their radical right political economy.
Consultocracy and a Millennial Army of Zuckerbergers

While it is perhaps a grabbing of a kind of low hanging fruit to spotlight
Charles Koch and Mercatus given the sheer pace and breadth of the
advancement of their radical libertarian agenda, and their ability to bank-
roll it, there are, in reality, an army of other institutional actors in the
service of the billionaire class, not all of whom, of course, are so commit-
tedly anti-democratic in philosophy, even if they are in practice. One key
set of organizational players in global total education privatization market
syndicates are consultants. Indeed, so ubiquitous and powerful have out-
side consultants become in late stage capitalism, higher education or not,
in 1991, Hood and Jackson coined the term “consultacracy” to describe
the extent of the global reliance on consultants in government and public
sector institutions, and its corrosive effects. Further, what strikes us as we
travel through the virtual world of higher education consultancy is the
sheer number of highly educated young professionals, trained at gold-
standard liberal arts colleges and universities, arguably beneficiaries of the
very kind of education that is, in effect, slated for obsolescence by Big
Tech and, what we might name, Big Liberty. In later chapters, we will
return to this irony and what it suggests about the relationship between
liberal arts program closures, attacks on critical curricula, and the rise of a
professional class of lieutenants for “edupreneurs.” For now, what also
strikes us are the parallels between what critical scholars of consultancies

have identified as the pre-COVID anti-democratic impacts of privatizing
expert knowledge in public sector administration and similar impacts in
the public and non-profit educational sectors before and during COVID.
If one were to innocently set out to learn what educational consultants
do, and who the major firms are in the educational consulting space today,
one promoter you could easily find to help you get acquainted is,
Management Consulted, which uncritically defines these players as firms
that “offer services to improve operational processes for educational insti-
tutions or companies that serve them […] to help ensure maximum cost
efficiency, improve student outcomes, streamline governance, and drive
fundraising. In addition, institutions often pull on the expertise of educa-
tional consulting firms to help plan for long-term shifts in the industry”
(Management Consulted, 2022, para. 2). According to Management
Consulted, there are two kinds of educational consulting firms, namely
those that only focus solely on educational consulting, and management
consulting firms that have significant areas of their business devoted to the
education market. At the top of the global market for management con-
sulting firms retailing their services to colleges and universities are
McKinsey & Company; Bain & Company; Boston Consulting Group,
which partners with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton
Foundation, for example; and KPMG, who recently joined the UNESCO
Global Education Coalition established in March 2020 (UNESCO Global
Education Coalition).
In their 2019 study of consultocracy in the public sector in Finland,
Ylönen and Kuusela created a typology of problematic impacts of out-
sourcing expertise that rang true for us as paralleling the dangerous
dynamics in higher education, ones that are now at work shaping the
disaster terrain as well. Those impacts included the monopolization of
knowledge; the privatization of knowledge; unhealthy knowledge depen-
dencies; the erosion of tacit knowledge; the weakening of accountability;
and the strengthening of instrumental rationality. While there is much to
be said about each of these in their application to the current crises on
campuses in the U.S., and around the globe, particular themes in their
work stand out to us as characteristic of new global TEMPS as much as
they are features of the apparatuses of New Public Management regimes
more broadly.
For instance, Ylönen and Kuusela report on previous studies that dem-
onstrate a correlation between the increase in the use of consultants and
the decline in salaried workers as more of the labor is contracted and
employees become “billable knowledge actors” (Gunter et al., 2015,
p. 518 as quoted in Ylönen & Kuusela, 2019, p. 243). Related, like
Naomi Klein, Ylönen and Kuusela call on scholars who have used the
language of addiction to grasp the kind of dependencies generated by the
privatization of knowledge. As consultants have gained increasing access
to insider knowledge “consultants are seen as a group that has gained
insidious power, unaccountable and unseen, and all the more mysterious
because managers seem to remain addicted despite disastrous failures
associated with some consultancy assignments” (Fincham, 1999, p. 336
as quoted in Ylönen & Kuusela, 2019, p. 250). Further, the privatization
of expert knowledge moves it out of the public or collective domain and
thus out of public or collective scrutiny, and can also become property of
management and considered legitimately confidential or commercial
secrets. Even when it is made public for consideration, the work of con-
sultants in public administration, say critical scholars, is also generally
atheoretical, with assumptions built in rather than explicitly articulated or
tested, as in the way we do in the empirical tradition as scholars. The reli-
ance on consultants also furthers the audit culture’s worship of quantifi-
cation and the conflation of “quantifiable outcomes” with “political
neutrality.” In effect, the culture of instrumental rationality, in its weap-
onized form, would like us to believe that “quantification” and “assign-
ing values” are distinct lanes of social practice. In fact, as the whole
critique of algorithms makes abundantly clear, quantification of social
relations is, by definition, the enactment of values by proxy, as well as a
value statement in and of itself in the choice to use them (see, for exam-
ple, O’Neil, 2016).
For us, as we have come to understand how consultocracy works in
higher education, we might say it is a field of practice at risk of trading
on faux social science, providing a veneer of empiricism. Ylönen and
Kuusela (2019) suggest this as well in their findings in the public sector
where often surface, decontextualized descriptives rule the day, provid-
ing audit culture ammunition without management having to justify
their value decisions, or make a real empirical case for the “necessity” of
their value decisions in the first place. This coupled with the fact that
while consultants are usually hired to solve or address specific
institutional problems, we know that capitalism, by design, generates

new “needs” continually, and more to the point, produces “needs” that
clients did not realize it had (Gunter et al., 2015, p. 534 as cited in
Ylönen & Kuusela, 2019, p. 251).
As the dominant narrative, suggest Ylönen and Kuusela (2019,
p. 253), consultancies rely on the “vocabulary of markets, revenues, pro-
ductivity, and efficiency” and thus have, in a seemingly politically neutral
way, helped to infuse the public sectors with neoliberal entrepreneurial
ethos of governance by markets, and has made public actors, and we can
add college and university leaders, more and more unable to even use the
language of citizenship and community—not even in our lexicon—not in
how we talk to one another anymore, not really, and in that way slips
further and further out of our collective consciousness as citizens. We
literally cannot even think about community (Nabatchi, 2009).
Ultimately, consultancies run the risk of “reducing the meaning and
practice of public deliberation, and potentially depoliticizing public
deliberation” (Ylönen & Kuusela, 2019, p. 254). This, of course, is a
disaster for those of us charged with sustaining a democracy, and educat-
ing generations of people to be able to recognize democracy, participate
in democracy, and defend democracies. It can be a welcomed, and even
orchestrated, opportunity for others.
Indeed, Ylönen and Kuusela also found in their research that “major
organizational overhauls were often motivated by the desire to restructure
existing organizational structures. Constant change was desirable precisely
because it helped to shatter old ways of working” (Ylönen & Kuusela,
2019, p. 250). In other words, chaos is good if you want to shrink your
workforce and rebuild it in your new TEMPS image. In some cases, they
uncovered, the agendas of managements to bring in consultants have been
quite explicit, and “major bibles of management consultancy are surpris-
ingly straightforward about the need for Machiavellian tactics such as the
guidebook Blue Ocean Strategy, which was popular in the early 2000s”
(Ylönen & Kuusela, 2019, pp. 250–251). In one particularly chilling out-
come that echoes so much of the narrative of the global TEMPS even
before COVID, Ylönen and Kuusela found that a certain Finnish govern-
ment consultant had explicitly called for “‘revolutionary development
paths’ that promote societal uncertainty and collective stress, which over-
come ‘societal rigidities’” (Wiio, 2006, p. 65 as cited by Ylönen & Kuusela,
2019, p. 251).
COVID “Growth Opportunities”

for Higher Education
All three of these mechanisms, philanthro-capitalism, corporate class think

tanks, and ascendant consultocracy, are entangled in complex ways in the
global education industry, and those entanglements, along with other
forces we do not examine in this chapter, have continued in the pandemic
period. In this section, we spotlight how these mechanisms have risen to
the surface through industry marketing channels, including the corporate
underwriting of the very reporting on the crises in higher education that
we, as authors, have relied on for our own analyses, such as research brief-
ings released by The Chronicle of Higher Education partially funded by
private educational consulting firms, or national campus COVID response
data provided by the data dashboard at The College Crisis Initiative at
Davidson College. Knowing that these examples are just a tip of the global
education industry iceberg, we first share some illustrations of the pro-
cesses singularly. From there, we discuss a brief case that illustrates the
interconnections of players and “key plays” that have further coalesced
into what George Simmel (1955, in the title) might have called a “web of
group affiliations,” and one we also call truly frightening.
ReKoching in COVID
Despite nearly a decade of campus activism to “UnKoch My Campus,”
the Koch Foundation did not hesitate to launch new “innovations” in the
higher education market in the midst of the pandemic. In fact, the Charles
Koch Foundation website makes no bones about it in their December
2020 “Impact Stories” review of 2020 “innovations in postsecondary
education” when they report, “the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated
the search for short-and long-term innovations. In 2020, we saw partner
after partner pursue solutions—finding better ways to leverage time-tested
approaches and creating completely new alternatives. Our partners have
not given up on our shared vision: quality opportunities for every learner
to unleash their unique potential” (Charles Koch Foundation, 2020,
paras. 1 and 2). The page reiterates a sentiment from the Foundation’s
Executive Director, Ryan Stowers, that they believe is widely shared
among their partners, namely that “the future of education has never been
more uncertain, and the need to act never more pressing.”
Among the pandemic-era innovations that the partners of the Charles

Koch Foundation pursued in the first eight months of the crisis that they
wanted to “celebrate” as models of doggedness and creativity in uncertain
times were the efforts of the American Council on Education (ACE) to
identify “best practices and emerging strategies” for improving the process
of awarding transfer credit, including the development of new student
support services, technologies to assist in credit transfers, and notably,
“credit for prior learning” which we take to mean the long-standing strat-
egy in the for-profit educational sector of defining “life experiences” and
non-academic employment experience as eligible for college credit as a
recruitment and degree acceleration tactic, particularly targeting vulnera-
ble student populations (American Council on Education, 2020, para. 2).
Other celebrated projects on the 2020 Impact Stories list included a high-
light from their partners OpenStax and the Association of College and
University Educators (ACUE), both private companies that trade on
sounding non-profit (like many others), who developed and retailed an
online learning teaching “toolkit” and an attendant #ResilientFaculty
showcasing faculty members who utilized their technologies (ACUE,
2020), reminiscent of the tactics of Big Tech in K-12 to strategically make
use of teachers, themselves, to hawk their wares—like a Mary Kay
Cosmetics venture or Amway.
The Koch network also makes it clear they are partners in mergers and
acquisitions, which we will discuss more below, touting the good work of
“longtime innovators [who] stepped up to share knowledge and brain-
storm solutions,” such as WGU Labs, Inc., an affiliate of Western
Governors University, a shared services consortium, that “announced
development of the College Innovation Network, which will unite educa-
tion thought leaders, EdTech Innovators, and institutions that are focused
on serving students who face great economic challenges” (Charles Koch
Foundation, 2020, para. 6). Among the founding partners are Rio Salado
College in Arizona, Loyola University in New Orleans, Central Ohio
Technical College, Piedmont Community College in North Carolina, and
the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. It is not lost on us
that, also in the first year of the pandemic as these “innovations” were
underway, the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education moved to
fire more than 100 tenured and tenure-track faculty members by the end
of 2020–2021 academic year, and, as we will see below, have been man-
dated to consolidate per the Pennsylvania State Legislature (Burke, 2020a;
Lyons & Davidson, 2021).
The Koch brothers have supported Arizona State University long

before COVID, as we have noted, and they remain an interested partner
in ASU’s new initiative in fall 2020 to expand ASU EdPlus, a program
with a goal to fast-track the development of a stackable credential system
that the foundation says makes “it easier for students at ASU and other
universities to design customized learning journeys according to their own
interests, near and long-term career needs, and timelines” (Charles Koch
Foundation, 2020, para. 8). The massive push for “stackables,” which, as
we explore in chapters to come, is a labor management tactic that origi-
nates in a corporate management reconfiguration of old-school
Taylorism—a new “performance management” sorting and control tactic
that has been exported to higher education to both control faculty labor
and increase student revenue (so handy!). It is related to the latest passion
for “up-credentialing” and “upskilling” that we will discuss further in our
chapter on pandemic diploma-milling. But for now, the Charles Koch
Foundation, in a surprisingly Davos Man kind of way, profiled their work
to make “upskilling opportunities” more accessible through the founding
of a new coalition called “Skill Up.” Deploying the familiar and wholly
disingenuous narrative of access and with a nod to social movement lan-
guage of “coalitions,” they share how the coalition was formed to “sup-
port displaced workers who earn less than $40,000 a year,” reminding us
that “millions of Americans are out of work and need access to immediate
training to help find new jobs,” and SkillUp “exists to address that need
through connecting training and education professionals, employers, and
technology and nonprofit stakeholders to offer re-skilling and re-
employment opportunities” (Charles Koch Foundation, 2020, para. 9).
In a chilling tip of the hand on the agenda of “creative destruction,” they
cite Michael Horn of Guild Education who praised the coalition with
these words, “Rather than just bank on existing college and universities
and sources of debt-driven funding to disrupt themselves, the future of
higher education will also rely on novel programs and arrangements, like
SkillUP” (Charles Koch Foundation, 2020, para. 9, emphasis added).
It must feel a little precious for readers who work in corporations (not
just in ones that pretend not to be), or for faculty in schools of business,
to hear such products and labor management tools described by the likes
of the “edupreneurs,” and us, as “new” or “innovative.” It must feel
something like listening to people who, 30 years after the total transfor-
mation from cash transactions to automated transactions, want to sound
the alarm about the rise of this new thing called a “debit card” (not to
mention, say, Venmo). That said, this all-star team of COVID “innova-
tions” that the Charles Koch Foundation praises puts front and center
many of the “key plays” that the new global TEMPS, Koch network or
not, are banking on for massive transformations and growth. What is also
worth noting is that these plans for the game that we have shared here are
simply the front-facing, public relations advertisements meant entirely for
outsiders to consume. Surely, what is circulated internally to partners in its
depths of precision and candor, we can only imagine. So it should give us
great pause to know that even the shiny packaging of innovation makes
quite clear the broad strokes of a plan to further commodify higher educa-
tion, and to more deeply reorganize postsecondary education toward the
needs of capital, whether labor needs for instruction and knowledge pro-
duction, or revenue demands.
In arguably one of the most blatant examples of COVID era grabs to
transform the very nature of postsecondary education to fit the entrepre-
neurial, anti-collectivist, pro-growth, pro-efficiency model of neoliberal
political economy, and with an “identity capitalist” flare that we have come
to expect, particularly in the pandemic context, is the Charles Koch
Foundation’s excitement about the Rivet School project and “its vision of
an accelerated, low cost college program for working adults.” The project
is billed as a “pioneering hybrid college” that “pairs a job-focused online
degree with a personal coach, coworking space, and more to help students
graduate in two to three years, for less than $10,000” (Charles Koch
Foundation, 2020, para. 10). Apparently, as a COVID relief measure,
Rivet will “allow students to enroll and pay no tuition during the course
of their studies. Graduates pay back their tuition once they earn at least
$40,000 annually” (Charles Koch Foundation, 2020, para. 10). The short
blurb doesn’t go into more details about what happens if students don’t
graduate, or if they don’t make it to $40,000 annually, or if they do, if they
must pay back the tuition with interest, or how much.
Consultocracy and COVID Labor Management Educational consul-
tocracy appears to have taken no serious blows with its new-found added
mission to assist colleges and universities in responding to the challenges
of the pandemic. For instance, among the global management consulting
firms that have substantial education clientele, the PA Consulting Group
“focuses on education reform and transformation” and offers “projects
including how higher education can thrive post-pandemic” (Management
Consulted, 2022, para. 11). Nous Group is working on “cost saving strat-
egies for universities, better workload management at schools, and insights
on what the global crisis taught universities about higher education”

(Management Consulted, 2022, para. 12). Among the currently adver-
tised objectives for Bain & Company include, “redesigning the university
model to make higher education more accessible to students, improving
school operations and organizations, and rationalizing traditionally com-
plex organizational structures” (Management Consulted, 2022, para. 6).
L.E.K. Consulting’s Global Education Practice (GEP), named among the
top 10 global firms by Management Consulted, specializes in “corporate
growth strategy, mergers and acquisitions, marketing and student recruit-
ment, and organization and performance” (Management Consulted,
2022, para. 9). Among other COVID transformation opportunities
encoded in the branding of these global firms are the opportunities to
further control and eliminate academic labor.
Recently, at our own institution, consultants retailing faculty training
were invited to meet with deans during finals week of the fall 2021 semes-
ter. One of those firms was the Association of Colleges and University
Educators (ACUE). Over winter break, ACUE had pitched their expertise
to our department chairs, and less than a week later, faculty were invited
to enroll in their expert training for online instruction. The coordination
of the “professional development opportunity” is being undertaken by
our in-house Director of our Center for Excellence in Teaching and
Learning, who was hired as an expert administrator in the area of excel-
lence in teaching and learning. In this, we are reminded of the ways in
which consultocracy further undermines academic labor, and in this case,
faculty labor, as faculty are told they cannot conduct professional develop-
ment opportunities for their peers, and even more insulting, that they
need such training at all given what their credentialing as scholars already
signifies. When applied to faculty, these kinds of COVID accelerated “pro-
fessional development” inroads are like canaries in the coal mine for both
a kind of post-tenure review expansion, as well as a gambit to prepare the
soil for a massive redefinition of the enterprise of teaching and learning in
a digital, fully privatized space.
In our case, what is additionally a significant concern is that as “private
knowledge experts” consults are in direct competition with the labor we
do as academics. Here again is another way that we see the deeply flawed
logic of neoliberalism and hypercapitalism as the answer to, in this case,
our COVID austerity prayers. Such contracts not only create unnecessary
redundancies, inefficient parallel structures, but also engage in flagrant
disrespect of the very professionals essential to the mission of the academic
institution. On top of this, as the knowledge that private experts produce

becomes “assets” that are owned by private entities, and that ownership
sets up the dynamics of dependency, then less and less of that knowledge
is in the commonwealth. The less there is to draw on in the knowledge
commonwealth, the more excuses global TEMPS have to insert them-
selves on campuses as the expert saviors, including as experts to justify
labor “right-sizing,” and the land is further cleared for the growth of
privatized knowledge monopolies. In a dystopian future, the goals of
which are being, no pun intended, owned up to more and more blatantly
by Big Tech and Big Liberty alike, those of us who are now the producers
of that knowledge in the public and non-profit sector, might go by the
way of civil servants in the public sectors: simply managers of (in this case,
curriculum content) contracts.
For another example of the inroads consultocracy is poised to advance
in the pandemic era, take the case of educational consultants, EAB/
Business Affairs Forum. Even prior to the pandemic, EAB/Business
Affairs Forum showcased a compendium of management tactics on their
website aimed at cutting academic labor costs. Entitled, “100 Tactics for
Immediate Labor Savings,” the inventory, last dated 2020 and accessible
at the time of this writing in January 2022, advises administrators on how
to spend less money on employees in nine major categories, with over a
third of the tactics for cost-costing falling into the first category: health
benefits (Workman, 2020). Certainly, during a pandemic, and amidst
repeated refrains from administrators that our health and safety and well-
being are of utmost importance, that reality that management would seek
out and perhaps hire consultants to advise them on cutting employee
healthcare benefits is, shall we say, disheartening, to say the least. The
other major expenditures they recommend slashing: fringe benefits; ben-
efits vendor management; employee headcount; compensation; outsourc-
ing; service hours; employee stipends and perks; and overtime. Specifically,
among these 100 tactics for “finding principled and sustainable ways to
reduce costs” are freeze hiring (#57); enact targeted layoffs (#59); con-
solidate management layers within departments (#60); expand manage-
ment oversight to like departments (#61); outsource units or departments
(#75); outsource processes or functions (#76); charge employees for
parking (#93); limit entertainment/food budgets (#95); and in a real
show of community spirit and a reminder that “we are all in this together,”
EAB advises administrators to “combine holiday celebrations” (#96)
(Workman, 2020).
While this “expert” advice is offered in the mix of other tutorials on

diversity, equity and inclusion (“DEI”), student success, budgeting, and
the like, the 100 tactics are conveniently assessed along three dimensions,
namely their “savings potential,” “employee tolerance,” and “outside
CBA.” The latter codes are, of course, coy ways of indicating how much
organized labor resistance to expect if attempted and whether or not the
institution will be running afoul of the collective bargaining agreement
(CBA) and labor law if they pull that particular cost cutting trigger. We
cannot overstate the importance of understanding that these labor cutting
attacks are not aimed at any particular employee group on campuses, but
a much larger attack against all campus workers, and ultimately against
students despite claims to be otherwise, as it is students who literally pay
the price not just for the consulting services, but ultimately the cost of the
largely unnecessary outsourced services that corporate vendors provide. In
other words, the services that consulting firms like EAB sell higher educa-
tion administrators are not simply to manage faculty labor costs, as even a
cursory examination of their websites make evident, but to control, com-
modify, and redefine all academic labor, as well as the entire operations of
academic institutions. In fact, on EAB’s website, their chatbot advertises
that “EAB has research to support every function of campus … can I help
you find what you’re looking for?”
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, educational privatizing consultants
like EAB have stepped up their game to meet the window of opportunity
opened up by COVID and publicly offered tips to higher education exec-
utives on how to communicate their decisions to use any of the 100 tactics
above. As what follows is, again, simply a consultant “free sample” avail-
able on the website without membership or further contracting, we should
be curious what additional advice EAB offers individual or institutional
clients who hire them for labor management advice during COVID. Along
with the written tips and exemplars on how to perform a communication
tasks that one would think senior administrator should surely be skilled
enough to figure out without a consultant if they were truly fit for the job,
EAB/Business Affairs forum also posted a short video tutorial in the
throes of the pandemic on how senior administrator might message out
the decision to furlough staff employees (EAB/Business Affairs Forum,
2020b). Additionally, as an indicator that firms like EAB/ Business Affairs
Forum are not singularly trained on extraction from the non-profit higher
education market, but the K-12 “market” as well, a related “free sample”
available is, “Efficient and effective communication strategies for schools

and districts to connect with families during COVID-19” (EAB/Business
Affairs Forum, 2020a).
Getting Mega: Managing and Mandating COVID Mergers

and Acquisitions
While there has been news of bankruptcies and pending closures as col-
leges and universities face an inability to weather out the COVID storm,
such as Bloomfield College, that was unexpectedly subsidized and saved,
for now, by Montclair State University in what Heyboer (2022, para. 3)
calls a “highly-unusual affiliation between a private college and a public
university” in our state, or the high profile closure of Concordia University
in Portland, Oregon that we will examine further later in the book, there
has also been heightened attention in the industry news to mergers and
acquisitions. News broke in July 2020 that Delaware State University
would acquire Wesley College (Whitford, 2020). Less than a year later, in
March 2021, Clark University absorbed neighboring Becker College and
turned it into Becker School of Design & Technology (Cote, 2021) and
shortly after, in May 2021, Goodwin University and Paier College would
absorb the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut (Bamberger, 2021).
Indeed, in the first two years of COVID, one of the important issues that
educational consulting firms set their eyes on, and put before their educa-
tional clients as strategic paths to consider, were the pandemic opportuni-
ties for growth and transformation in the form of campus consolidations,
and in related strategies of “shared services consortiums.” Prior to the
outbreak, consultants had long been at the table on the issue of higher
education mergers. In fact, Ylönen and Kuusela (2019) give a particularly
close-to-home example of a powerful Finnish consultant in the 2000s
who, though not elected by the Finnish people nor required to be held
accountable by any of the democratic institutions of Finnish society, none-
theless single handedly led major restructurings of the Finnish public sec-
tor, including the creation of the University of Arts Helsinki, a merger of
three smaller Finnish universities. Additionally, while “mega-universities”
have been on the rise pre-COVID, a related discussion for another book,
and mergers too, the latter are not common, though there has been an
uptick during COVID.
As a cautionary background tale, just in the last decade or so, a number
of non-profit “mega-universities,” like megachurches, have captured a
portion of the education market with enrollments approaching 100,000

students, largely enrolled in online programs. In 2019, Southern New
Hampshire University enrolled 92,000 undergraduate students, for
instance, and Western Governors University enrolled another 88,585.
Together with Grand Canyon University, and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty
University, and a few other non-profit colleges, these mega-universities
now serve more than the top 14 universities in annual U.S. News & World
Report rankings combined (Gardner, 2019). Prior to COVID, the busi-
ness model of the mega-universities had been to target working adults,
and especially the 30 million Americans with some college credit who
never graduated, and to massively market “‘the higher-education value
proposition’ […] around the most inexpensive education and certification
that will get me a job,” according to the non-profit advocacy organization
Educause Vice President, Susan Grajek (Gardner, 2019, para. 9). In the
next chapter, we will discuss further the myth that online education is less
expensive for students than in person education as, in fact, it turns out to
be the opposite. For now, the mega-university business model sounds to
us like another predatory model that targets students to profit a second
time from a mess the industry created in the first place. In going after
adult students who never completed degrees, and repurposing postsec-
ondary education as “lifelong learning for career advancement” in a glob-
ally precarious economy, there is a bottomless well of customers. Michael
Crow, president of Arizona State University, which enrolled more than
95,000 undergraduates in 2017, about 28,000 online, said as much: “The
shortage of students is a fallacy” as the sheer number of non-traditional
age Americans who have some college credit but never earned their
degrees is “an unbelievable market” (Gardner, 2019, para 8).
Lee Gardner, writing about the rise of mega-universities for The
Chronicle a year before the first case of COVID was detected in the U.S.,
argued that while the most optimal time for non-profit colleges and uni-
versities to start a mega online operation has likely passed given the extent
to which schools like Grand Canyon and Southern New Hampshire have
become national brands,
[t]raditional institutions can certainly learn from these disruptors. And the
more they do, for better or for worse, the more these mega-universities may
change the shape and purpose of higher education, [and with] no end to
their expansion in sight, they could one day lay claim to a significant share
of the nation’s college students. Much as Amazon and Walmart now stand
as the templates for the retail business, mega-universities in many ways

reflect a shift in what Americans seek in a college degree: something practi-
cal, convenient, and inexpensive. (Gardner, 2019, para. 6, emphasis added)
We will leave aside whether or not it is true that Americans are primar-
ily seeking practicality and convenience from a college education, and if
they are, the extent to which the global education industry has manufac-
tured that “need,” and more fundamentally, whether it is morally accept-
able for educators to allow “consumer demand” to shape curricula,
pedagogy and the very mission of the institution. Regardless, Garnder
reports on college presidents, like Paul LeBlanc of Southern New
Hampshire, who explained that the mega-university model “required
rethinking, and changing, almost every aspect of traditional university
operations” (Gardner, 2019 para. 16).
Some of those changes include retailing not only new online programs,
particularly graduate programs, but new “competency based” programs
and degrees, largely online as well, and designed specifically for adult
learners, such as those being launched at the University of Maryland’s
University College, Purdue, and Arizona State in recent years with COVID
on the unknown horizon. Reporting on what sounds a bit like a “fear of
missing out,” Gardner warns in the 2019 The Chronicle article that “col-
leges that ignore the potential for online education for adult learners could
lose out [as students] interested in college have more educational paths to
choose from than ever before” (2019, para. 27). Indeed, the cauldron of
competition felt so hot for so many higher education executives in the run
up to the pandemic that one of Gardner’s conclusions was that, in the
years ahead, “[d]emographic pressures and changes in the nature of work
may necessitate a strategy that includes serving adult learners for all but
elite colleges” (2019 para. 24). To be fair, Gardner also notes the concerns
of scholars and teachers like us, including Johann Neem, professor of his-
tory at Western Washington University who writes critically about the
competency-based programs. Lee shares Neem’s position that, “Academic
institutions […] conduct research, contribute to scholarship, and bring
students into daily contact with professors, inside and outside of class.
Since mega-university online programs don’t do any of those things, ‘at
their heart they’re not academic institutions’” (Gardner, 2019, para. 32).
Critics like Neem have not impeded the zeal of higher education execu-
tives from launching ambitious online programs in the midst of the crisis,
and using COVID relief funding to do it. Take, for example, the University
of North Carolina system that announced in early December 2021 that it

would allocate $97 million in pandemic recovery funds to a sweeping new,
in-house, self-described “OPM-like nonprofit” that would centralize and
expand a system of online degree programs (Smalley, 2021, para. 25).
Named Project Kitty Hawk, the EdTech start-up has the stated goal of
attracting adult learners, including half of the state’s workers who UNC
has indicated are eligible for employer education benefits. In a bid to “cap-
ture” those lifelong learners, and to “win back adult online learners” from
some of what UNC system president, Peter Hans, called “bad actors” who
are high-cost, out-of-state providers, Project Kitty Hawk plans to use pan-
demic recovery funds to retail 120 new online programs, and a cadre of
“student success coaches,” to net 24,000 new students over the next four
years (Smalley, 2021, para. 21–22).
As we will explore more in subsequent chapters, Peter Hans, like other
college and university and industry leaders, have attempted to distance
themselves from the growing opposition to third party online program
management vendors as predatory. In the reporting on the Project Kitty
Hawk launch, Hans positions UNC as the “good guys” in their efforts to
“take back” massive online learning expansion from profiteers and restor-
ing the “nonprofit” actors to the scene to be sure students are not swin-
dled. For example, says Hans, “‘I think about those adults and the chance
for them to get ahead for their jobs, or perhaps start a new career, [and]
what a difference we can make toward hitting our state’s ambitious educa-
tion attainment goals [including to educate] adult learners to “the extent
I think that we could and should be’” (Smalley, 2021, para. 22–23). A
thin veneer of virtue it would seem to us, but characteristic of the shifting
strategies of stakeholders in turf battles to occupy the non-profit space and
capture state and federal student dollars. UNC is not alone in this, and a
theme we come back to again and again, as Purdue, University of Arizona,
University of Arkansas, and the University of Massachusetts, for example,
all partnered with private OPMs prior to Project Kitty Hawk’s non-profit
launch, and all of these schools also laid off workers when the pandemic hit.
Similarly, since the pandemic began, the University of Missouri System
consolidated its online programs across its four campuses into the Missouri
Online System that launched with 260 online degree and certificate pro-
grams, and a promise of 22 new online degree programs in 2022 (Smalley,
2021). Yet the thin veneer of virtue gets even thinner when we consider
how poorly online degree programs serve students in their quest for
degree completion, and at what cost to students and the institutions alike.
For instance, in the same Inside Higher Education piece reporting on the
launch of Project Kitty Hawk, we also learn, as we will also argue later in
this book, that even some of the new “nonprofit” online degree program
models have retention rates that are appalling. The California Community
College’s Calbright initiative is one such failure—an online-only institu-
tion that has graduated fewer than 2% of its students in its inaugural year
after receiving $175 million in state funding guaranteed until June 2025
(Smalley, 2021). All the while, as the UNC system announced its decision
to use federal pandemic recovery money, and state tax-payer money, to
fund what amounts to online mega-universities in the making, complete
with “student success coaches,” Oklahoma City University would make
public two months later that it had cut two teacher education programs,
citing low enrollment of students in their childhood and elementary edu-
cation teacher preparation programs, joining the University of South
Florida that shuttered all of its undergraduate education programs in
2020 as COVID raged on (Flaherty, 2022a).
Later in the book we talk more about what can only be described as a
frenzy to expand online course offerings, degree programs, if not entirely
online institutions. Enmeshed in that speculators’ Mad Max frontier has
been an uptick in the interest in mergers and acquisitions for global
TEMPS, even when the same level of excitement for growth has not been
matched by college and university leadership. In some states, that uptick
in consultocracy attention has coincided with legislative mandates for
COVID era mergers. In a report underwritten by Workday, a finance,
human resources and planning systems corporation, The Chronicle of
Higher Education analyzed data from a 2021 study assessing responses
from over 280 college leaders’ attitudes toward mergers and other part-
nerships, leaders that included responses from institutions’ finance profes-
sionals (Anft, 2021). While more than half (54%) of the respondents
reported that the pandemic had not made them more likely to consider
mergers, 25% reported that their institution might consider a merger in
the future, and about 12% thought their institution should merge with
another (Anft, 2021). About 18% reported that their college was more
likely to consider a merger now than before the emergence of COVID,
and 7% reported that they were in discussions about mergers, as did about
the same percentage reporting discussions about acquiring another cam-
pus (Anft, 2021). Nearly half (44%) said that COVID had made them
more likely to consider academic partnerships.
In what reads to us not so much like a research report, but like a market
analysis and promotional piece for merger and shared services consultants,
The Chronicle report cites John MacIntosh, an advocate for mergers and a
managing partner at SeaChange Capital Partners, which, along with ECMC
Foundation and other philanthropies, provides grants to institutions to
explore mergers. MacIntosh said, “The higher education ‘system’ is a
decentralized and fragmented set of public and private institutions”
(Whitford, 2021e, para. 26). Further, Anft (2021, p. 9) also cites MacIntosh
as saying, “If you assume there are 4000 degree-granting institutions out
there and seven percent are looking into mergers, that’s a lot of campuses—
nearly 300.” Anft’s report’s introduction provides a picture of the current
educational terrain for readers that characterizes this historical moment as
one of crisis and instability, and uncritically ripe for mergers, acquisitions
and, most attractive, it would seem, the pursuit of non-merger partner-
ships. As the narrative is rich with questionable logics of austerity and a
shadow endorsement of pandemic-inspired growth gambits, we quote it at
length here as an exemplar:
Covid-19 has accelerated the pace of change at colleges in the United States.
The rapid metamorphosis many institutions have experienced—turning
from mostly in-person centers of higher learning to ones that can now reli-
ably deliver remote education—has been hailed as an example of how resil-
ient higher education can be.
Yet, faced with longstanding dilemmas […]colleges have been loath to
consider new management structures that might help struggling institutions
get through tough times and plan a more secure future, experts say. Colleges
have been traditionally slow to combine their forces through mergers and
other types of collaborative arrangements, despite a host of storm clouds
either on the horizon or directly overhead. […] Institutions face a looming
downturn in the number of available high-school graduates, a Covid-era loss
of one in eight faculty, or staff members, and excess capacity [such that the]
nation’s 4,000 degree-granting institutions simply do not and will not have
enough students to go around. Some will struggle to find enough of them
to continue paying their bills. […]
[L]eaders must deal with escalating costs that strain budgets, some of
which have yet to fully recover from the Great Recession. Parents and stu-
dents demand more from their education. Meanwhile, colleges are also
under pressure to offer education in more ways, including online, in-person,
or a combination, and to increase the levels and ranges of student services
[…] And ranking systems put together by media outlets and others have
helped make larger institutions with higher rankings even larger … In recent
years, at least one business guru has said that as many as half of all higher-ed
institutions will be forced into bankruptcy in the coming decades.
Many would benefit, experts believe, from more partnerships that span a
spectrum of possibilities—everything from, say, sharing library services on
one end to full-blown merger on the other […] to overcome declines in
enrollment, or to expand their geographical reach. (Anft, 2021, p. 4)
Anft’s set-up takes as axiomatic a demographic cliff, ignores the debates

over bloated senior administrations, leaves alone any critique of online
expansion, or even expansion itself. Instead, the piece reads as a welcome
mat for the consultancy wing of the TEMPS to further insert themselves in
the name of consolidated power, and expanded market reach, geographi-
cally and otherwise. Consultants and “business gurus” are called upon as
self-evident “experts,” without an ounce of reflection that these parties
have vested interests, and are not “experts” in education, but “experts” in
hypercapitalism, if even that. All of this, on top of the rest, points to the
larger phenomenon in journalism itself where the line between indepen-
dent reporting and “news” as product placement and corporate promo-
tions has blurred, and the related phenomena of packaging sales pitches in
news reporting or “evidence-based” consulting reports. Of course, this is
just one example, and The Chronicle is not alone in the higher education
media industry which, as we have said, has both reported on the story of
pandemic opportunism at the same time it has been its promoter. Inside
Higher Ed also reported on John MacIntosh’s role in the Northwestern-
Mills merger deal that was struck during the pandemic, one that met with
considerable resistance from Mills students, faculty and alum, and was
funded by MacIntosh’s SeaChange Capital Partners (Whitford, 2021e).
At the same time, Inside Higher Ed published an opinion piece MacIntosh
authored a year into the pandemic calling for federal investment in higher
education mergers.
MacIntosh’s firm, SeaChange, is not the only consultant firm or foun-
dation cited throughout The Chronicle report on the potential benefits of
merger and non-merger partnerships. Christine Smith, a managing direc-
tor at Baker Tilly, a consulting firm, is quoted as saying, “As colleges con-
tinue to look for ways to differentiate themselves and offer more to
students, these kinds of collaborations become more attractive” (Anft,
2021, p. 16). Similarly, the advice of Rick Staisloff, founder and senior
partner of rpk Group, a finance and strategy consulting firm, is given a
prominent textbox emphasis in the report with the advice, “When prob-
lems emerge, college leaders should look seriously at the opportunities
that collaborations offer,” a quote that appears again in the body of the
report as the very last words. In short, not only are consultants setting a
tone and pace for growth and thus expanding their market for consulting
services, but The Chronicle report, underwritten by the same industry
players, appears to be doing shadow shilling for them. Added into the
snake-pit of opportunism, and contrary to the narrative that austerity con-
cerns undergird the interest in mergers, The Chronicle’s own survey data
show that the ability to offer “complimentary academic programs” (80%),
the interest in “increasing the scale of academic offerings” (79%), and the
interest in “future growth” (65%) were the top three reasons for consider-
ing mergers, as opposed to 50% interested in mergers for “cost savings”
reasons (Anft, 2021, p. 10).
In any event, in the first two years of the pandemic, such industry-
driven surveys of college and university executives appear to us to also
signal a kind of external pressure, and also subtle frustration, from consul-
tants and industry investors that perhaps some higher education execu-
tives are not moving quite fast enough for global TEMPS in their
“innovative” plans to “cut in order to grow.” As rpk Group consultant
Rick Staisloff remarked of The Chronicle survey responses that found that
over half of the college leadership surveyed was not considering a merger,
“I was hopeful that the pandemic would make institutions more open to
the benefits, though it doesn’t look like it’s happening […] Too often,
they think they can handle things on their own” (Anft, 2021, p. 17). This
frustration is evident among consultants and other industry investors even
as talk of consolidations, stackables, upskilling, badges, blended learning,
right-sizing, and whatever else, has been wholly appetizing to many senior
administrators, trustees, and state legislators all across the country in the
frenzied response to COVID’s impact or potential impact. In short, it
would seem that for at least some players in global TEMPS, there is grow-
ing concern that a good crisis may still go to waste.
As another illustration, in July 2021, over a year into the pandemic,
Inside Higher Education surveyed college and university business officers
and found that 39% felt that their institutions should use the pandemic
period to try and transform the institution, a drop from 47% the year
before, and 31% aimed to return to normal (pre-pandemic) operations, an
increase from only 25% who felt a return to normal was possible in July
2020 (Lederman, 2021b). For some “experts on college finances”
(Lederman, 2021b) who reviewed the results for IHE, these findings were
troubling. Lederman cites Susan Whealler Johnston, president and CEO
of the National Association of College and University Business Officers
(NACUBO) who “expressed concern” that nearly a third of the business
officers surveyed could imagine a return to normal, and noting that for
those aiming for larger structural changes, “collaboration and innovation
will have to be the name of the game” (Lederman, 2021b, para. 27–28).
The article also calls on business strategy professor, Paul Friga, from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, coincidentally the system
slated for Project Kitty Hawk, who characterized the responses of the col-
lege business officers as “overconfident for the wrong reasons.” And in
again came Staisloff to comment on the IHE education survey as he did
on The Chronicle survey, sharing his disappointment that though the
results “indicate the need for transformation [college business officers]
aren’t supporting the actions that would be needed to achieve transforma-
tion, like streamlining academic portfolios and supporting flexible learn-
ing and work models” (Lederman, 2021b para. 32). This, despite the fact
that IHE also reported data from the same survey showing that 53% the
respondents had eliminated administrative positions, 51% had eliminated
part-time faculty; 42% had eliminated academic programs; 20% had cut
the pay of faculty and staff, and nearly a quarter had cut employee retire-
ment benefits during the pandemic (Lederman, 2021b, para. 31). Further,
in the same article Staisloff also found it “a bit scary [that high] percent-
ages of senior leaders indicate that they do not have the data they need to
inform their decision making, [and so] the move to a data-informed cul-
ture will be essential if higher education is going to achieve a sustainable
future” (Lederman, 2021b, para. 44).
While industry investors, consultants, and perhaps business school
insiders, may be perplexed, in part, by what they interpret as hesitancy on
the part of some institutions to take the leap through the COVID era
windows that may be opening for new ways of doing business, they likely
applaud the recent efforts of several state legislatures that took the oppor-
tunity during COVID to mandate consolidations of their state university
systems. In the shock doctrine style of putting into motion “unpopular
ideas that have been lying around,” state legislatures in Georgia, New
Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Texas, all required merger or consolidation
deals during the pandemic, though not without resistance from faculty,
staff and members of the larger campus communities. Austerity narratives
of cost control permeated the rationales, even as little evidence has
emerged to suggest that support for non-commodified academic pro-

gramming or student services are significant beneficiaries of the cuts. “In
Georgia, nine mergers between state colleges reduced the number of state
institutions from 35 to 26. The moves have led to increased investment in
academic support and administrative cost savings, though so far they have
been relatively small” (Anft, 2021, p. 11).
Instead, again, we see the paradox of “cut to grow.” In Pennsylvania,
one of the consolidation plans “would offer a range of fully online pro-
grams that would integrate existing programs, including fully online
undergraduate degree and degree-completion programs” (Whitford,
2021d, para. 7). The plan also telegraphs possible faculty terminations,
and is explicit that staffing levels will likely “change.” And while the con-
solidation plans include a goal to reduce the total cost of degree attain-
ment (but not through a reduction in tuition, to be clear), they also
include maintaining the system’s participation in Division I and Division
II athletics. In a model different from some of the mega-universities, at
least for now, that target adult learners who left college, the Pennsylvania
merger plan intends to also expand its student market in the other direc-
tion, namely by expanding high school dual enrollments, and plans to
target the institutions in the system in the rural parts of the state, poten-
tially shifting the transformation to online learning most notably for
already excluded and vulnerable student populations.
Growth of Entanglements: A Snapshot of C2i

Finally, as we have argued, these select mechanisms for industry expansion
have risen to the surface through industry marketing channels, including
the corporate underwriting of the very reporting on the crises in higher
education that we, as authors, have relied on for our own analyses. Such
reporting includes The Chronicle research brief on college leaders’ atti-
tudes toward mergers and partnership reviewed in the preceding discus-
sion, which was underwritten by Workday Enterprise Management Cloud
(Anft, 2021). Workday retails, among whatever else, finance, HR and
planning systems “built to provide real-time data, actionable insights, and
what if scenario modeling,” knowing that to “thrive in a continuously
changing world, your business must quickly adapt” (Anft, 2021, cover
page 2). We could also turn to the many analyses we have pieced together
from Inside Higher Ed, an industry journal whose industry reports are
regularly supported, in part, by EdTech and educational consulting firms
such as D2L, Salesforce, Kaplan, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
and the Lumina Foundation, for example. Or, to the fact that over the
course of the pandemic year that we wrote this book, Inside Higher Ed,
itself, was acquired by Times Higher Education (THE) (Inside Higher Ed
2022, January 10). For us, one national campus COVID response
data source we have relied on was provided by the data dashboard at The
College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College (C2i), which is funded in
part by the ECMC Foundation, and Ad Astra, that brands itself as a higher
education “partner in managing academic enterprise” (Ad Astra, 2022),
and with the organizing principle that “crisis breeds innovation” (The
College Crisis Initiative, 2022). For a small window into a vast network of
institutional players and individual actors among a professional class of
global TEMPS, as well as the ways in which various privatization initiatives
and agendas overlap and have been accelerated in the COVID context,
we take a look at the case of Davidson’s C2i more closely.
For faculty like us who came into the professoriate from the ranks of
quality traditional liberal arts undergraduate and graduate institutions,
and with the goal of contributing to the furthering of that mission as fac-
ulty, the name Davidson College calls up in us the image, however ideal-
ized, of the very kind of academic institution that we are drawn to defend
as more and more of the higher education terrain is usurped by Big Tech
and Big Liberty. So it is with our own frustration and disappointment that
we came upon Davidson’s entanglements with philanthro-capitalism, pri-
vate interest think tanks, and consultacracy in their The College Crisis
Initiative (C2i). We are under no illusions that Davidson’s initiative stands
alone by any means in partnering academics, policy advocates, think tanks,
and educational entrepreneurs, as our broad strokes history in the previ-
ous chapters makes clear that these infiltrations of the academy—and with
the direct aid of faculty themselves—are long-standing, if not as shock-
ingly pervasive and influential as they are today. As Davidson’s initiative is
expressly intended to “provide up-to-date information on how postsec-
ondary institutions are responding to the pandemic,” we have been that
much more attuned to how the pre-COVID mechanisms of the global
edu-political apparatus are so clearly illustrated in the C2i project, and
publicly so. As has been our point throughout, we can imagine what a
more thorough investigation of the linkages between institutional players
across the educational industry sector more broadly might uncover
post-crisis.
For now, without having to dig too deeply, C2i bills itself as an initiative
with the mission of “collecting data on higher education institution
responses to crisis situations to help researchers, policymakers, students,
and their families” (The College Crisis Initiative, 2022, landing page).
The initiative’s data dashboard is funded by the ECMC Foundation, the
same foundation that partners with SeaChange Capital to fund mergers
and consolidations nationwide. The dashboard also caught the interest of
Ad Astra, a company that “helps colleges build course schedules,” leading
to a new partnership with the project (Pfeifer, 2020, para. 13). ECMC and
Ad Astra are joined in the efforts by a team of Davidson faculty and stu-
dents who are “working around the clock to get the most up-to-date
information,” also assisted by at least 28 research affiliates (The College
Crisis Initiative, 2022, landing page). Among those, according to the C2i
website, are 18 full-time academics from other institutions, including fac-
ulty from Arizona State, Colby College, Duke, Miami University St.
John’s, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Vanderbilt. In
almost all of the cases, the faculty affiliates are in the fields of global educa-
tion, education policy, economics, business, law, or health studies. The
team of affiliates also includes researchers from at least four think tanks,
namely The Heritage Foundation, The Hamilton Project (Brookings
Institute), the Third Way Foundation, and the New America Foundation.
Notably, at least three of these four have been funded by the Koch broth-
ers, although the Koch network is certainly not the only billionaire donor
network in the mix for these foundations.
Aside from the research expertise from a compilation of faculty across
highly reputable public and private colleges and universities, and the
research expertise from non-academic think tanks and foundations, the
C2i Initiative also partners faculty and think tank affiliates with Tyton
Partners, and Huron, two educational consulting firms. Interestingly,
Tyton received an “honorable mention” from Management Consulted as
among the most influential global consulting firms, “unique” in that they
are a “combination of investment bankers and strategy consultants”
(Management Consulted, 2022, landing page). As for who else the
Davidson faculty, staff and students are working around the clock to pro-
vide COVID response data to, Huron is a global professional services firm
that, in December 2021, acquired Whiteboard Higher Education, “a lead-
ing student enrollment advisory firm that helps colleges and university
with recruitment initiatives and financial aid strategies” (Whiteboard

Higher Education, 2022, landing page). In a press release from Business
wire (2021, para. 1), Huron pitches the acquisitions as a wholesale
package:
With the addition of Whiteboard, Huron expands its ability to help institu-
tions engage and attract students while competing in a rapidly changing
environment. Together, Huron and Whiteboard will provide a full suite of
capabilities, including strategy, student search, pricing, recruitment and
retention solutions.
It is a difficult pill to swallow to see an institution so emblematic of the

venerated high-quality liberal arts tradition so deeply ensnared, and appar-
ently quite willingly, in the belly of the beast of global TEMPS. This chap-
ter, however, has illustrated the “Mad-Maxing” of the higher education
landscape and the drive to advance a global campaign amidst a global cri-
sis, one that further commodifies education, re-engineers the nature of the
educational products brought to market, and expands the global educa-
tional market itself. In the chapters ahead, we will look more closely at
some of the original products in the global TEMPS that have shape-shifted
in the pandemic, and the devastating consequences that can await students
as growth-addicted higher education executives and their financiers “shoot
for the moon.”
Ultimately, the COVID-inspired “unique opportunities” the global
TEMPS are considering that we have outlined here are, if nothing else,
certainly not democratic. If these initial years of COVID-19 have given us
any indication, by accelerating the export of U.S. and Western policies and
practices through the increasingly global education industry aimed at
privatizing education for a world of lifetime learners of extreme free-
market philosophies and job training, all designed and delivered by
EdTech, the descendants of the Chicago Boys and the radical libertarians
alike have met up with the Davos men for a COVID-era neocolonialist
project whose disaster-possibilities are yet to be fully known. As we move
to the next chapter and a discussion of shared governance, we are reminded
of MacLean’s historical analysis when she teaches us that not only did the
radical libertarian network in the U.S. have more political operatives by
2017 than the Republican Party, they had gained their startlingly large
foothold through stealth. Admittedly infiltrating the state by deploying
rhetoric in alignment with mainstream conservatism, despite in fact being
radicals, extreme libertarians used their billions to slowly but intentionally

capture the rule-making in Congress and in state houses, unleashing a
covert campaign to launder consent that only in the last decade or so have
been pieced together more widely by analysts and activists alike in the
language and action of a broader resistance movement. What’s more,
leading strategists, like Buchanan and later Charles Koch, understood that
the decades-long underground movement was necessary precisely because
their vision of political economy was not, and is not, the vision that the
majority of Americans would support.
CHAPTER 5
Laundering Coercion: Restart Planning,

“Pandemic Task Forces,”
and the Dismantling of Shared Governance
Shared Governance Revisited: The Fritz Doctrine

The name William J. Fritz might be forever associated with the failed
attempt to undermine and redesign governance at the College of Staten
Island at the tail end of the second pandemic year, and was indicative of a
kind of blatant attack on shared governance by the administrative class
that emerged during COVID-19 and documented by the AAUP in their
2021 Special Report: COVID-19 and Academic Governance. Fritz’s shared
governance doctrine involved eliminating the Faculty Senate, the top rep-
resentative faculty governing body, as well as the College Council that
served to include staff voices in the governance process. Not surprisingly,
his dissatisfaction with governance came after a vote of no confidence he
and the Provost received in December 2020, and his attempt at redesign
included eliminating the very governance body that issued the no-
confidence vote, namely the Faculty Senate (Zahneis, 2021a). Shortly
thereafter, as a result of the strong pushback from faculty, Fritz announced
he would resign (Zahneis, 2021b). The story is illustrative of the ways in
which presidents and university managers, as well as governing boards,
came to view the faculty role in governance as one in need of erasure, both
before and then, with renewed opportunity, during the pandemic.
As in the case of academic labor cuts, attacks on shared governance in
the months after the great shutdown in March 2020 received considerable

Switzerland AG 2022
attention. The COVID-19 crisis has been a “watershed moment” for

shared governance according to the AAUP 2021 investigation into the
state of shared governance at American colleges and universities. What
immediately became evident at the onset of the crisis was that higher edu-
cation governing boards and other management executives would be keen
to further chip away at the principles of shared governance as outlined in
the AAUP’s 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities,
originally co-signed by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities
and Colleges, and the American Council of Education, and commonly
understood as the sharing of the institutional governing responsibilities
such that the faculty governs in matters of the academic mission, and the
board has “ultimate authority for the institution” (Pierce, 2014, p. 1).
On June 29, 2020, as faculty complaints and concerns about unilateral
decisions made by governing boards and managements of many institu-
tions of higher education to suspend established practices of shared gover-
nance across the country began to surface, The AAUP’s Committee on
College and University Governance issued a new statement of Principles of
Academic Governance during the COVID-19 Pandemic, renewing the
commitment to the principles outlined in the original 1966 statement.
Absent, however, was a similar commitment from the Association of
Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges which, according to
Gerber (2014), had been backtracking on their commitment to shared
governance, slowly but surely, since the mid-1990s. Even prior to the pan-
demic, Gerber writes that this backtracking was “an indication of the
breakdown of the consensus that had earlier developed about the proper
role for faculty in institutional governance” (p. 11).
Becoming increasingly evident during the crisis that the consensus had,
indeed, been broken, the AAUP’s Committee on College and University
Governance (2020, para. 2) worked to remind higher education leader-
ship about the basic principles of shared governance outlined in the origi-
nal 1966 Statement. They wrote:
The Statement on Government famously recommends “adequate commu-

nication” and “joint planning and effort” (commonly referred to as “shared
governance”) among governing boards, administration, faculty, and stu-
dents. A key principle articulated in the Statement on Government is that,
within the context of shared governance, the faculty has “primary responsi-
bility” for decisions related to academic matters, including “curriculum,
subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and
5 LAUNDERING COERCION: RESTART PLANNING, “PANDEMIC TASK… 147
those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process.”

Although the statement acknowledges that governing boards have final
decision-making authority (and may have delegated this power in certain
areas to the president), it asserts that that authority “should be exercised
adversely only in exceptional circumstances, and for reasons communicated
to the faculty.” Under the Statement on Government, decisions to revise
(even if only temporarily) tenure and promotion procedures and standards,
to elect a preferred method of delivering courses, or to replace letter grades
with pass-fail or incomplete designations fall within the faculty’s area of pri-
mary responsibility. Even in areas in which the faculty does not exercise
primary authority—such as whether and how to reopen campus, budgetary
matters, and long-range planning—the faculty still has the right, under
widely observed principles of academic governance, to participate meaning-
fully. No important institutional decision should be made unilaterally by
administrations or governing boards.
The rollback of faculty’s authority in institutional decision-making, not

accidentally, coincided with the parallel process of the neoliberal takeover
of higher education that we outlined in the opening chapters, and has
been steadily getting worse even before COVID-19 appeared on the stage.
In 2007, for instance, the post-Hurricane Katrina AAUP special report
(p. 119) that investigated institutions of higher education that terminated
faculty appointments without invoking financial exigency, the overall
observation was that “however cumbersome faculty consultation may at
times be, the importance and value of such participation become even
greater in exigent than in more tranquil times.” The consultations, the
report emphasized, must be meaningful, and, it should be noted, is the
minimum requirement for shared governance to exist. In other words,
merely being “consulted” or “informed” is not synonymous with decision-
making. The question of how much actual decision-making power faculty
have in intramural governing as opposed to what is largely illusory was a
question hard for many faculty to ignore as the pandemic gripped cam-
puses. How did we get here?
Warren, D. (2020) writes that the practice of shared governance varies
widely among institutions of higher education in the United States and
the main driver in the lack of collaborative decision-making is the lack of
trust and communication. Ultimately, governing boards are driven by cor-
porate agendas that see faculty as an inflexible nuisance, an obstacle in
achieving institutional strategic goals. Gerber (2014) offers an important
historical view into the trajectory of shared governance in the United
States that is worth revisiting here, briefly, as we attempt to assess the

strength of shared governance at the moment it met the COVID-19 pan-
demic. Shared governance is a relatively new development in the history of
the U.S. system of higher education. Gerber argues that there is a strong
correlation between the professionalization of the faculty, their increasing
role in institutional governance, and the growth of the reputation and
quality of American universities since the 1960s. According to Gerber,
starting with Harvard in 1636, faculty exercised little or no influence over
any sort of decision-making that was primarily in the hands of board mem-
bers who had ties to private enterprise and with presidents who were
largely clergy. Faculty were not a recognized professional group with their
own areas of expertise, universities didn’t do much research, critical think-
ing was not required of students, and teaching was based not so much on
the pursuit of knowledge as on inculcating good Christian values. American
universities, as such, had poor reputations globally, certainly in compari-
son, for example, to German universities, which did quite the opposite,
and in many cases still do today. It was with the growth of universities in
the latter part of the nineteenth century and during the twentieth century
that higher education in the U.S. was able to offer specializations and the
development of professional faculty that led to claims that faculty should
have an important role in institutional governing.
Gerber (2014) further argues that the road to shared governance was
“slow and uneven,” and while faculty gained an important role in shared
governance after the aforementioned 1966 AAUP Statement, “at no time
did American faculty members come to enjoy anything close to full con-
trol of the institutions in which they taught and did research” (p. 5). It
would seem that as faculty gained influence in decision-making primarily
related to the matters of academic mission (curriculum, course design,
research, tenure and promotion) that the voices of backlash against these
gains emerged immediately—similar to the almost immediate backlash
against the movements for racial and gender justice that increased access
for students of color and women- to challenge the need for faculty involve-
ment in institutional governing. Those challenges came from both outside
and inside of the university systems.
From the inside, some faculty, themselves, questioned their role in
institutional governance, and our own experience at our home institution
tells us that this has been one of the obstacles to strong faculty gover-
nance. Questions related to which faculty should be eligible to participate
were also a part of the larger discourse surrounding shared governance
within the university systems from the start. The belief that senior faculty
with tenure that participate in research should be those who should have
a voice in governance has been the standard, but the fervent corporatiza-
tion of higher education, and the increasing number of contingent faculty
that now make up the majority of the faculty labor force in higher educa-
tion globally, have made for numerous challenges to these assumptions.
McGuire (2019) writes that the sheer number of contingent faculty that
teach at American universities today impacts shared governance because,
in many instances, they are completely left out of it. The AAUP recently
called to include contingent faculty in governance structures, and in our
own state of New Jersey, state legislators passed a Contingent Faculty Bill
of Rights in January 2020 that urged institutions of higher education to
ensure the rights of contingent faculty in areas of (among others): equal
pay for equal work; academic freedom; professional development; as well
as participation in governance with full voting rights. The broadening of
access to faculty governance is a double edged sword, as on one hand, the
participation of contingent faculty in shared governance signals recogni-
tion of their important role as teachers and expands democratic participa-
tion. On the other hand, it signals to management that tenure is no longer
a prerequisite for participation in governance, and therefore, in many
ways, diminishes the need for tenure-track lines. Further, and as we have
written elsewhere (Foster & Vujnovic, 2021), the waning of shared gover-
nance from the inside is a structural issue that demands better coordina-
tion between faculty councils and senates with faculty unions (where
existent) to resist further corporate takeover of the university.
However, as Gerber (2014) reminds us, while these internal issues are
certainly at play, “the greatest threat to the practice of shared governance
has come from those administrators, governing board members, and pub-
lic officials who seek to corporatize American higher education” (p. 8). At
the core of it, as Gerber points out, is the deprofessionalization of the
professoriate. These trends, and within the larger context of anti-
intellectualism in the U.S. today, beg the question: What does professional
authority look like in the political context in which the legitimacy of expert
knowledge is challenged on a daily basis? As we will discuss in chapters to
follow, during the pandemic, we personally witnessed the ways in which
faculty expertise on our own campus was challenged by management
when faculty who were public health experts were repeatedly rendered
invisible as administrators called on the “expertise” of stakeholders outside
of the university community. On other matters, as we discussed in the
previous chapter, consultants are regularly brought in on contracts with

steep fees to “educate” the faculty with “outsider expert knowledge.”
Gerber poignantly writes that these efforts to deprofessionalize the faculty
and to undermine them as experts are directly related to a more funda-
mental agenda aimed at “restructuring of academic governance” (p. 9). If
the role of the faculty in institutional decision-making is derived from their
professional status and expertise, then any claims to this role effectively
cease to exist once faculty is rid of that professional expert status. The
strategy of stripping faculty of their particular and central role as experts as
a way to restructure shared governance was particularly evident in the
design and function of what, on many campuses, came to be called “pan-
demic task forces.”
The Role of Pandemic Task Forces on Campuses:

Things Are Not What they Seem
While threats to shared governance existed prior to the pandemic, and
have been exacerbated by the pandemic, as the AAUP 2021 Shared
Governance Survey (July, 2021) concluded, a particularly significant mech-
anism that has weakened faculty’s role in institutional decision-making is
the so-called task force, or committees seemingly designed to foster col-
laborative decision-making on campuses nationwide, but often fail to do
anything of the sort. Here we turn to a brief analysis of the role of so-
called pandemic task forces that in our analysis directly served to launder
coercion for management agendas under the guise of “faculty consulta-
tion” and to circumvent the established academic governance processes.
The size, composition, and the inclusiveness of pandemic task forces
that were established at American colleges and universities at the onset of
the crisis varied widely. For instance, based on information on their web
pages, Fordham University’s Fordham Forward Task Force consisted of
more than 160 faculty administration and staff that made up 13 working
groups that studied various aspects of reopening from dining to welcom-
ing campus guests. In addition, Fordham formed a 21-member Academic
Review Team that focused on academic aspects of planning. Pace
University’s Return to Campus Task Force consisted of 35 members with
two subgroups, the COVID-19 Task Force and the Fall Reopening
Community Group. At our own university, the pandemic task force was
smaller in comparison and was composed of vice presidents, including the
vice president for athletics, enrollment management staff, faculty council

representatives, and a union representative. Task forces, generally, have
become an increasingly go-to tool for management when various issues
arise within the university system. Quarless and Barrett (2017) argue that
task forces can be useful tools, especially for issues that lie outside of the
scope of what is usually covered by the existing governance structures. It
could be argued that, for sure, the pandemic put issues on the table that
regular governance structures do not typically handle. However, in our
research, these bodies have in practice, dealt precisely with the very issues
that should be deliberated through the regularly shared governance pro-
cesses, particularly when it comes to academic decisions such as course
delivery, modes of instruction, and labor-related issues that were front and
center during the crisis. Critically, in instances where there is a faculty
union, many of these same issues are mandatory subjects of bargaining. In
other words, pandemic task forces have presented a “parallel governance
structure” (Quarless & Barrett, 2017, p. 132) and by doing so, regardless
of their potential usefulness, have served to undermine existing gover-
nance structures. Hartley (2003) examines both the promises and the per-
ils of so-called change task forces, and cautioned that task forces can easily
“devolve into shadow governance structures” (p. 1). He poignantly asks,
“[D]o these change task forces constitute a ‘shadow’ government, the
academic equivalent of the smoke-filled room where the real deals are
made before they are brought forth to the larger community as a fait
accompli?” (p. 3). Our answer is, “yes.” Indeed, through our analysis and
through our own experiences, these kinds of task forces provide only the
pretense of legitimacy, more like “smoke screens,” or committees of dis-
traction and chaos-making, rather than the collaborative decision-making
places that they purport to be.
Take, for example, The Safe Campus Task Force (also known as Protect
Purdue Implementation Team) appointed by Purdue University’s
President Mitch Daniels that made national headlines precisely for its
shadow government role in ignoring and dismissing faculty and staff views
as they related to the fall reopening in 2020. In May 2020, the Purdue
AAUP chapter published a public statement that took Daniels and the task
force to task (no pun unintended) after Daniels gave interview to CNN’s
Erin Burnett in which he characterized one faculty member’s concerns as
“a ‘very tiny minority view’ and attacked her expertise by adding that the
comment comes not from the most scientifically credible corner of our
very STEM-based campus” (AAUP Purdue Public Statement, 2020,
para.1). The statement not only speaks to Gerber’s (2014) deprofession-

alization argument, but also the ways in which notions of expertise and
credibility are highly gendered, both inside and outside of academia. As
Purdue’s AAUP chapter’s open letter pointed out, the comments Daniels
rejected were made by a female tenured professor and established scholar
and scientist, suggesting, as has recent research (Collier et al., 2021),
politics, much more than science or voices of experts in academia, influ-
enced campus decision-making and fall reopening plans for the 2020
and beyond.
Restart Planning and Invisible Hands: State

and Local Limits and Opportunities
Across the country, pandemic task forces quickly became a location for the
battle between the science of COVID-19 and county, local, state, and
even national politics surrounding campus reopening for the fall 2020. As
we will explore further in the following chapter, across the country, faculty
voiced their concerns around reopening plans that seemed to disregard
public health considerations, and the science of COVID-19, as the pri-
mary guide in reopening decision-making. Our early experiential assess-
ment was that both budgetary concerns, as well as county, local, and state
politics, were driving the restart decision-making by a far greater margin
than any public health concerns. Recent studies (Collier et al., 2020;
Felson & Adamczyk, 2021) on these very issues also confirm our own
institutional experience as a larger pattern, including the fact that univer-
sity presidents across the U.S. explicitly stated that financial considerations
were one of the main driving forces behind the push for in-person instruc-
tion, fearing drops in enrollment if instruction moved completely online
(Diep, 2020). It is undeniable that college and university leaderships were
caught in an extraordinarily difficult position in those days, weeks, and
months after the pandemic hit, but it was also quite sobering to realize
that, like actors in the capitalist class in other sectors, higher education
management was willing to put profits and politics over people. Whether
they did so as either a result of overt pressure or based on perceptions of
the likely consequences of not going along with the political plan is per-
haps less relevant than the disturbing suggestions of collusion between
managerial classes in higher education and the state.
Indeed, as with many other colleges across the country, university man-
agers in our state had direct input into the county, local, and state reopen-
ing plans guidelines through formal (seats on advisory boards) as well as
informal channels. For example, it was curious to learn that the little
known type of instruction, the so-called hyflex or blendflex model, one
born out of the desire for simultaneous in-person and distance-education
for primarily graduate adult learners at the Instructional Technologies
(ITEC) graduate program at San Francisco State University, came to
dominate the discourse on many college campuses in New Jersey and else-
where in the United States. As an instructional modality that requires fac-
ulty to teach in in-person and online simultaneously, the “out of the blue”
enthusiasm for hyflex was even more head-scratching to us when it
appeared in writing in the New Jersey Secretary of Education (OSHE)
restart plan as a suggested mode of instruction just as management in
many colleges, as well as public schools around the nation started to intro-
duce it into the larger conversation and push for its implementation.
Data from the College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College indicated as
early as September of 2020 (St. Amour, 2020) that politics rather than
other considerations, such as the science behind COVID-19 or students’
and parents’ desire to return in person, played a much more significant
role in college reopening plans for both private and public institutions. A
more recent and comprehensive study provided further insight into just
how much politics played a role in reopening plans. Collier et al. (2021)
suggested that county political preferences had the strongest association
with in-person instruction. In their earlier study, Collier et al. (2020) also
found that red states, particularly those with Republican governors, were
more likely to push for in-person instruction. Similarly, Whatley and
Castiello-Gutiérrez (2021) found that national politics during the Trump
administration coupled with threats to withhold funding for public
schools, threats of dropping enrollment, and the fear of enrolling fewer
international students affected decisions to continue in-person instruction
against the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Collier et al. (2021), as well as Whatley et al. (2021), found that private
four-year non-profits dependent on tuition dollars were particularly more
likely to be impacted by politics in their reopening plans, as well as by
enrollment/budgetary considerations, and pushed for in-person instruc-
tion regardless of whether they were in red or blue states. Judging by
developments at the University of Florida (UF), where, as we write, con-
troversy swirls around the initial, and now overturned, ban on the UF
professors of political science seeking to provide expert testimony in a
voting-rights lawsuit against the state (Wines, 2021), the invisible hand of
the state and local politics continued to drive decision-making on America’s
college campuses during the pandemic.
All in all, as the larger story we tell is unveiled as our chapters unfold,
shared governance further collapsed under the weight of a COVID-19
political economy. The 1966 AAUP Statement on Shared Governance that
is the contract that stipulates faculty’s role in decisions around modes of
instruction, academic programs, and tenure and promotion was among
the pandemic casualties as political pressure, whether overt or covert, to
undermine shared and faculty governance reached its pinnacle moment
during this time. As both an example, and a preview to our discussions
ahead, was more news from the University of Florida, also as we write:
Apropos the relationship between faculty governance, academic freedom,
and state politics, UF management, out of fear of the ultra-Republican
authoritarian state leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis, signaled that it
would not approve the concentration of study that had both race and criti-
cal in its name, “Critical Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture in
Education,” prompting the UF chapter of the United Faculty of Florida
to file an academic freedom grievance against the university in December
2021 (Adelson, 2021). At the same time, discussion and concrete propos-
als introduced in the South Carolina, Iowa, and Georgia state legislatures,
for example, to overturn the tenure system, supported by similar calls
from college and university boards, further signaled continued attempts to
undermine academic freedom and eliminate faculty from the governance
of colleges and universities. In The Last Professors, Donoghue (2018)
believed that attempts such as these would be bound to fail because they
are, as he said, “culturally motivated,” and those who push for them “mis-
understand the staffing situation of most universities” whereby upwards of
70% of teachers at American colleges and universities are adjuncts (p. xi).
However, these attempts, increasingly supported and enacted during the
pandemic, suggest that the time is ripe for a final neoliberal restructuring
of the American university that could see the future without the profes-
soriate as we know it, and without any role for faculty in the governance
of the institutions of higher education.
CHAPTER 6
Campuses Respond to COVID: “Pandemia”

Not Making the Science Grades
A few years back, our university was working on improving the “climate”
on our campus by tasking academic departments to create committees
that would come up with a caring statement for each of their own aca-
demic units. We recall those meetings as an opportunity to think about all
of us at the university as a community joined by a common mission to
educate our students, and ultimately care for their well-being and their
futures. We also recall crafting those caring statements that focused on
creating professional, compassionate, supportive, collaborative, and trans-
parent environments, among other related aspirations. But like many proj-
ects at the university, we soon lost track of what happened to the work that
we contributed to this important initiative, and where the statements
ended up living in the apparatus of the institution. The sole need to engage
in such an exercise is, in and of itself we suppose, a signal that there is an
absence of a genuine ethic of care permeating our academic communities,
and not surprisingly given, as we have written already, the dominant mas-
culinist neoliberal campus narrative today that eschews the value of social
reproductive labor. Still, we talked about care, nevertheless, and made
attempts to address why we have so little of it. In our naïveté, we didn’t
think we would, a few years down the road to COVID-19, get a true les-
son about what American campuses devoid of a commitment to an ethic
of care would look like.

Switzerland AG 2022
We’ve addressed reopening task forces and various reopening commit-

tees in the context of the waning of shared governance. In this chapter, we
turn our gaze to campus reopening plans and the COVID mitigation
strategies, and in some instances lack thereof, enacted by universities in the
early months of the pandemic, drawing on the experiences in the U.S. and
abroad. In our research, particularly during the first days of the pandemic,
we found that universities’ overwhelming response to the COVID-19
pandemic was driven primarily by concerns for their bottom line, expressed
largely in fears of losing enrollment, rather than the concern for the well-
being of their students, their employees, and the community at large.
Absent a few outliers, at the start of the pandemic, universities did not opt
to be a part of a public health solution. Rather, they opted to be part of
the problem as many campuses, or campus-adjacent activities, would
become super-spreaders of COVID-19 that adversely affected the college
and university, as well as the surrounding, local communities (Gayewski,
2021). It is now well-documented that universities’ opening plans and the
push for in-person instruction were “strongly” influenced by state and
local politics, with “county sociopolitical factors play[ing] into decision
making at private four-year colleges and two-year public colleges”
(Whitford, 2021b, para. 1). Notably, the pivot to embracing COVID mit-
igation strategies, such as testing and vaccinations, often followed only
after university administrators realized that without these good science
measures, they would be facing a hit to their budgets, as virtual learning
was not favored by tuition-paying students and parents. Ultimately, both
concerns for the bottom line and the influence of state and local politics
on decision-making prevailed over science. In the midst of this, many of us
on college campuses, as the abundance of emerging research shows,
immediately resorted to trying to understand the underlying reasons for
this shocking truth and its consequences.
Specifically, emerging research (Watermeyer et al., 2021, p. 665) is
beginning to show that what most of us felt on the ground, the so-called
disaster managerialism that lead to the campus reopening process, was
riddled with “hypocrisy, duplicity and disingenuity” on the part of the
university management that promote universities “as compassionate
employers and fair-weather commitment to social justice and inclusivity”
and in the face of COVID showed just how fair-weather that commitment
was. Watermeyer et al. (2021, p. 660) write about this across-the-board
corporate response that prioritized financial solvency over the welfare of
6 CAMPUSES RESPOND TO COVID: “PANDEMIA” NOT MAKING… 157
people on the part of universities in the UK, Australia, and the U.S. Their
research included testimonies from over 1000 UK academics, many of
whom “spoke of their concerns regarding the reopening of university
campuses as a direct threat to both their own health and well-being and
that of their students.” Watermeyer et al. (2021, p. 655) also discuss the
turn from academic managerialism to disaster managerialism as an out-
come of the years of what we have described as the neoliberal transforma-
tion of college campuses through corporatization and marketization,
which culminates in what they call the “condition of pandemia,” one that
“provides legitimacy to economic opportunism and the surrendering of
the ethic of care in universities.” They further define pandemia “as the
culmination of governance reforms within universities, reforms that we
propose are advantageous to commercial exploitation from crisis condi-
tions” (Watermeyer et al., p. 653).
During the pandemic, universities failed to re-set their neoliberal poli-
cies that have, for a long while now, prioritized economic gains, and are
often also characterized by “the culture of anti-intellectualism” or a “gen-
eralized distrust of experts and intellectuals” (Merkley & Loewen, 2021,
p. 706; Watermeyer et al., 2021, p. 660) that is now seemingly fully
embraced by the university managerial classes itself. Rather than take the
opportunity to transform neoliberalism toward an ethic of care in their
pandemic response strategies, the university managerial classes instead
accelerated the neoliberal transformation of universities under the condi-
tions of crisis, and this transformation was evident most clearly in the
“executive decisions to physically reopen campuses” (Watermeyer et al.,
2021, p. 652).
Here again, this is not so surprising as it fits neatly within the defining
features of disaster capitalism, though admittedly many of us are still reel-
ing from the shock of the experience of learning the extent to which pro-
ducers of positional goods (Watermeyer et al., 2021, p. 652), namely the
academics, staff, students, and the larger community we are all connected
to, have been disposed of as sacrificial lambs, a topic we will examine in
more detail later. Once the gavel landed on the decision to reopen cam-
puses for partial or full in-person learning, questions of what this new
normal would look like shifted from whether or not we would reopen, to
what sorts of COVID mitigation strategies, i.e., masking and testing pro-
tocols, air filtration, physical distancing, etc., we would employ to protect
the lives of students, faculty, staff, administrators and the community at
large. The disaster managerial response was equally shocking to many.

While universal masking and physical distancing were more common, the
now well-documented politicization of COVID led to widely disparate
and varied mitigation responses on college campuses.
To Test or Not to Test: That Is the Question

What almost uniquely characterized universities across the board in the
early days of the pandemic, at least here in the United States, was the lack
of consistent testing strategies. In some cases, institutions took the initial
position that testing wasn’t recommended by state and local health offi-
cials, and as such, testing would only be implemented for student-athletes
returning to practice during the late summer months. In other instances,
colleges and universities implemented entry testing and weekly testing for
monitoring COVID outbreaks. Even when institutions made the right
decision over the course of the pandemic to implement testing strategies
to keep the number of reported infections relatively low, the sheer fight
that many higher education managers put up against implementing testing
or physical distancing on many college campuses across the country was
undeniable. Arguably, the resistance came, in part, because of the per-
ceived economic impact on the bottom line—in this case, the cost of tests,
the cost of classrooms not being filled to capacity, and the cost of fewer
students living and dorming on campuses. For instance, returning to the
National Public Radio (NPR) analysis from early October 2020 that
reported on data collected by the College Crisis Initiative at Davidson
College of 1400 colleges, 2 out of 3 colleges that had opened for in-
person classes either didn’t have clear testing protocols or are testing only
symptomatic students (Nadworny & McMinn, 2020). The NPR analysis
points to the cost of testing as one of the reasons that university manage-
ments were deterred from pursuing it. We, too, acknowledge that the
costs of testing were a true hardship for many universities in financial
terms as many have reported spending more than expected on COVID
mitigation by the spring 2021 (Whitford, 2021a). That said, we should
also note that many universities failed to investigate ways in which endow-
ments, donations, and working with local, state, federal governments
could have served as a foundation upon which to build a safer return to
campus learning even before the CARES money arrived, and even more
so, envision how they might position universities, themselves, as leaders in
mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Rather, the choice, now too clear,
was to gamble with the health and lives of people to save the bottom line
and to embrace a cultural rhetoric of anti-intellectualism.
Merkley and Loewen (2021) remind us that the overall culture of anti-
intellectualism and populism was growing steadily pre-COVID-19 and it
was in full force during the COVID-19 crisis. It is, indeed, easy to con-
clude that neoliberal policies and the politics of neoliberalism are simulta-
neously the politics of anti-intellectualism and a campaign in the
deprofessionalization of faculty (Gerber, 2010), as we’ve remarked in ear-
lier chapters as well. What is particularly heartbreaking to us is then to
finally acknowledge that managerial classes at universities have fully and
publicly betrayed the core mission of the university as they embrace the
same distaste for expert voices and intellectual enterprise that they are
otherwise purporting to employ and fund. In tragic terms, the unfortu-
nate parallel rise of populism, autocracy, and in some cases new types of
fascism in the United States and abroad that coincide with the rise of neo-
liberalism now permeating long-trusted institutions for science-based
knowledge like the CDC, have been implicated in decisions university
managers made around reopening plans and COVID mitigation proto-
cols. As an example, in the U.S., it was not uncommon for institutions to
take the position that their pandemic response followed CDC guidelines,
as well as local, and state official health recommendations. At the same
time, while mitigation strategies such as testing were highly regarded by
the CDC as the best science to curb COVID transmission as most super-
spreaders are typically asymptomatic individuals, the muddled CDC
guidelines failed to recommend universal testing and allowed universities
to opt from no-testing to various other options, such as focusing on spe-
cific groups deemed “high risk,” including testing only students that
showed symptoms (Redden, 2020, para 5). In moments like these, it was
difficult not to see the institution of the university joined by the CDC in a
competitive race to the bottom of the credibility ladder. Both are institu-
tions of a democratic society supposedly predicated on the support of sci-
ence that allowed themselves to be governed by an anti-science elite and
led by economically and politically driven concerns in their decision-
making processes.
In the first weeks of the fall 2020 semester, universities typically adopted
masking strategies (that also varied depending on the local and state politi-
cal leanings), distributed hand sanitizers, implemented sanitizing commu-
nal spaces, used thermometers to take the temperature at campus entry
points, implemented 6 feet social distancing in the classrooms (or tried to
anyway), opted for mostly hybrid learning, and decided on how to isolate
and quarantine for students that test positive, as well as how to trace
COVID positive cases (Anderson, 2020a; Harmon Courage, 2020). While
this list describes what most colleges did, a few, however, adopted testing
strategies early. As we’ve mentioned, those varied greatly, from testing
select students once a week, as in George Mason University, or testing
everyone upon arrival, as did the University of Maryland, or testing twice
weekly, as in the case of the University of Illinois in their fall reopening
planning (Anderson, 2020a). But none of these measures resulted in curb-
ing the spread of COVID, as the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill quickly realized when it had to pivot to online learning after COVID
spread among students during the first week of classes (Anderson, 2020b).
In mid-August of 2020, a group of researchers from the California
Institute of Technology tracked re-opening plans they had collected from
500 colleges and universities in the United States (Booeshagh et al., 2020,
p. 1; Anderson, 2020b, para. 7) and concluded:
Examining the reopening plans of over 500 schools, we found, as of August

7, 2020, highly variable strategies all over the country, covering the full
spectrum from available and regular testing for students, staff and faculty, to
no testing at all. Our findings reveal that 54% of universities are performing
or facilitating some form of COVID-19 testing. Only 27% of colleges are
performing initial re-entry testing at least for undergraduates, while an even
smaller percentage, 20%, plan to test their communities regularly to
some extent.
In other words, most colleges did not test at the time when universal test-
ing strategies were precisely needed to keep the campuses open. The pivot
toward testing emerged only after a sobering realization that online cam-
puses weren’t a long-term solution to COVID, and also in part to man-
agement fears of further loss of revenue generated both by dorming and
tuition as students and their parents threatened to sit out a year if in-
person instruction was not restored. That these fears were justified are
clearly reflected in now widely reported data gathered by The National
Student Clearinghouse Research Center which showed a significant loss of
enrollment for all colleges, but particularly for community colleges.
Schwartz (2021b, para. 2) writes:
[Of the] 2.6 million students that started college for the first time in the fall
of 2019, only 73.9% of them returned the next year. That rate is two per-
centage points lower than the prior year (75.9%), marking the single largest
drop in first-year persistence since the Clearinghouse began tracking such
data with the 2009 student cohort.
The decline that NPR reporter, Elissa Nadworny (2022, para. 1 and para.
7), calls “historic” continues as more than half a million fewer students
enrolled in college in 2021, totaling more than a million fewer students
than prior to the pandemic. The downward trend has been steady since
2012 but the pandemic “turbocharged the declines on the undergradu-
ate level.”
Moreover, according to Lilah Burke (Burke, 2021b), both the CDC’s
failure and the failure of the American College Health Association to rec-
ommend testing, rather than just acknowledge that colleges might benefit
from entry testing to curb COVID spread, led to ambiguity about which
COVID mitigating strategies to implement. Some colleges implemented
entry testing, such as Auburn, in the fall 2020, but did away with it in
spring 2021 (Burke, 2021b) as management didn’t believe it really
worked. However, more colleges in 2021 opted for testing protocols as
those who implemented them in 2020 learned that this was the only way
to keep in-person classes going. In fact, as Burke (2021c, para. 9) writes:
“Many colleges are testing more of their students more frequently this
semester.” Some colleges also realized that the community surrounding
the campus upon which they depend didn’t have a favorable opinion
about their policy decisions after super spreader parties resulted in com-
munity spread that spilled outside of the proverbial and real campus walls.
In general, the outbreaks on college campuses increased as the community
spread increased, and in many instances, outbreaks on college campuses
had an impact on the rise of community spread (Burke, 2021a), once
again exposing the hollowness of managerial class narratives of ethics
of care.
For instance, Lu et al. (2021) in their analysis of 30 colleges showed
that colleges, in many instances, have, no doubt, been super spreaders in
that an on-campus outbreak resulted in an increase in infections in sur-
rounding communities. In fact, the counties that had colleges typically
had a higher number of infections than the state itself, a pattern that the
CDC and previous studies also found to be true (Curley, 2020; Gayewski,
2021). Such analyses strongly support the assertion that “universities and
colleges are not islands unto themselves, and they exist in their communi-
ties,” a statement attributed to Crystal Watson, public health risk expert at
the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security by Harmon Courage of
Vox (Harmon Courage, 2020, para. 8). With all the implemented strate-
gies, the general trend on-campus colleges in the first two years of the
pandemic, however, was for college and university managements to keep
their eyes on easing protocols and restrictions, particularly where the local
politics dictated the same. This has been particularly true in 2022. At the
time of writing, even as we struggle with increasing infection rates due to
the new Omicron variant known as B2.A that is more contagious than the
original Omicron variant, and headlines warn of another mutation, XE,
that is even more transmissible, we see movements toward a loosening of
the COVID protocols and a policy shift from “containment to manage-
ment” (Saul & Hartocollis, 2022, para 1). In many cases, this has meant
ditching masking and forgoing tracing and testing altogether.
What does the story of COVID reopening plans and muddled testing
policies or lack thereof ultimately tell us? We believe that the story being
written is a story of a university that has failed to lead with science during
the COVID-19 and has left its employees, students, and the communities
they belong to at risk. Out of the fear that the loss of revenue could be
devastating to continue the kind of corporate university that has been
decades in the making prior to the pandemic, college administrators sup-
ported by political elites, including political public health appointees, shut
down expert voices and calculated that the potential damage to people’s
health on their campuses, and even death, was a price they were willing to
pay to maintain the status quo, and proved to be yet another example of
the edu-political apparatus we have exposed in previous chapters.
A Game of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Who Wins

in a Fight for What’s Right?
Faustian bargains notwithstanding, we also owe it to readers to tell the

story of those universities that did, despite the majority, choose very early
in the pandemic that they wanted to be a part of the solution. These
examples give us a glimmer of hope that not all is lost. Undeniably, there
were universities that led from the very start of the outbreak in the areas
of testing, and later with vaccinations, and connecting to communities in
need. On the testing front, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
received an FDA authorization for their saliva COVID test covidSHIELD
in March 2021, and consistently implemented testing on their college

campus since the initial outbreak. Arizona State University (ASU) started
testing in the community as early as April 2020, and subsequently “part-
nered with the state to provide COVID-19 testing sites for underserved
communities in high-need areas” (Moody, 2022, para. 13). In addition,
ASU also developed a saliva test, and their biology professor, Will
Fairbrother, is working on an alternative testing strategy he named, “The
Bubbler,” which focuses on breath samples. Similarly, in our own state of
New Jersey, Rutgers University pioneered the first saliva test, approved in
April 2020, and also consistently carried out COVID testing on their cam-
pus. By the time the Omicron surge of late winter of 2021 emerged, many
colleges across the country pivoted toward implementing testing on their
campuses, and others decided to become a part of the solution by creating
testing sites in their communities, particularly those with “historically
underserved populations” (Moody, J., 2022, para. 8), turning colleges
from laggards to leaders. Likewise, in other parts of the world, such as in
many countries on the African continent, universities have been central to
the COVID response and have often partnered with local and state gov-
ernments to curb COVID outbreaks (Oduola et al., 2021). For now, we
can only speculate that the reason why colleges and universities in some
regions outside of the United States have been quicker or more willing to
do so might lie in the fact that the privatization of higher education hasn’t
yet fully gripped universities in those regions as it has in the U.S., and
throughout Europe, though we recognize that the trends in this arena are
increasingly global, as we have discussed in previous chapters.
While some colleges decided to be part of the solution from the very
beginning, and act as “good neighbors” (Moody, J., 2022, para. 13) as
these few examples show, many others pivoted 180 degrees, as we have
argued, once they realized that not embracing the science of testing, and
subsequently vaccines, carried higher costs and brought bigger hits to the
colleges’ bottom lines. While bottom-line costs are, as we’ve repeatedly
shown, the primary concern for college managers, and while the true costs
of opening campuses during COVID are still being assessed, new studies
also suggest that the costs to the health of students are devastatingly high.
Walsh-Messinger et al. (2021, para. 2) found that contrary to the com-
mon belief that post-COVID effects and long COVID effects, affect pri-
marily the middle-aged population, “kids are not OK.” In the summary of
their preliminary findings available online, they write:
51% of COVID-19 positive participants were classified with post-COVID

syndrome. During acute illness, those with post-COVID syndrome
experienced more chest pain, fatigue, fever, olfactory impairment, head-
aches, and diarrhea compared to fully recovered participants. They also
reported more current exercise intolerance, dyspnea, chest pain, olfactory
impairment, lymphadenopathy, gustatory impairment, and appetite loss
than students who never contracted COVID-19.
Perhaps, these concerning findings shed some light on why students at

some campuses, such as those at the University of Texas at Austin and oth-
ers whom we will profile in later chapters, fought university management
on their decisions to return students to full in-person learning in spring
2022, contrary to what many reported happened at the beginning of the
pandemic where the push from students was to return to in-person learn-
ing. In this case, students pushed for more protections from COVID, such
as mask dispensers on campus and COVID tests for home use, in fear for
their health and safety (Jaschik, February 11, 2022). Similarly, in fall 2021,
students of the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill signed
an open letter to the administration in response to the University
COVID-19 policies requiring stricter testing and vaccination policies, cit-
ing similar fears for their health and safety. Many UNC faculty joined by
adding their support and signatures (Carrasco, 2021). The letter titled,
“Enough is Enough,” and dated September 2, 2021, finely summarizes
what we have understood from our own research to be a corporate-
inspired university response to the COVID-19 crisis. The letter states
(emphasis in original):
The sanctity of our University’s foremost priority continues to be dese-

crated, discounted, and disregarded: that of ensuring the safety, security, and
wellbeing of all Tar Heels—students, faculty, and staff alike.
The safety of our students—looking for an enriching, empowering, and
emboldening academic experience at one of the most densely populated
Universities in the state—is at risk.
The security of our faculty—charged with providing world-class thought,
perspective, and knowledge on a campus that threatens the livelihood of
their families, loved ones, and colleagues—is at risk.
The wellbeing of our employees and staff—those that propel this
University forward—marred by understaffing and inequitable pay—is at risk.
In response to the continued onslaught of COVID-19 cases and com-
munity spread on and off-campus, the value of the safety of the Carolina
community—our Carolina—has been used as a prop—as a negotiable—

for the self-serving purpose of heightening public-facing institutional
“reputation” and “integrity.”
What becomes clear, however, is that our community is not safe. It is not
secure. And it is not well.
This letter aptly summarizes the sentiments of many faculty in the

United States, as we know them well now, and also of many faculty in
countries around the world where neoliberal politics of the state, includ-
ing in the U.S., have led an already neo-liberally transformed university to
craft highly politicized reopening plans whose implementation shifted
with the perception of political appropriateness and not by a scientific
change in discovery and knowledge. In some instances, as in the case of
UNC Chapel Hill, students and faculty felt empowered to challenge uni-
versity administration and openly seek the protection of their health and
safety. Nevertheless, we can conclude that, on balance, administrative
responses to COVID-19 in the form of reopening plans and COVID miti-
gation strategies reminds us of a novella published, perhaps not coinciden-
tally, during the First Gilded Age by Robert Louis Stevenson entitled, The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In Stevenson’s famous novella,
the good Dr. Jekyll fights his evil side by creating a serum that eventually,
and most unfortunately, turns him into his evil counterpart, Mr. Hyde.
Over a century later, in yet another Gilded Age, we examine the dual
response of one of the oldest institutions in our society enthralled in a not-
so-fictional dualism. On the one side is the university ready to embrace
public health solutions and be the solutions, as we’ve seen in the example
of ASU, and the ultimate pivot by many universities to embrace testing
and vaccinations. On the other side is the university’s stubborn refusal to
heed science in favor of political conformity, even when that repudiation is
at odds with the best science, with the will of the faculty, and at the urging
of student leaders. This two-faced response is nonetheless wholly aligned
with the condition of “pandemia” as Watermeyer et al. (2021) asserted
where an ethic of care finds it cannot coexist with economic opportunism.
In the end, we must report that through our own investigation into the
university’s battle between good and evil, much like the ending of the
strange case of Dr. Jekyll’s story also goes, Dr. Jekyll (the university we
know) has lost the fight for good science grades and seems to have turned,
quite permanently, into its morally vacuous counterpart.
CHAPTER 7
Online Instruction and the “Hyflex Teaching

‘Shock Doctrine’”
Digital Transformations or the End of Higher

Education as We Know It
The relatively old, but quickly re-introduced, online education method of
teaching known as “hyflex,” stormed the higher education ecosystem
seemingly overnight at the start of the pandemic. Sometimes called
“blendflex,” the hyflex modality is an instructional design product devel-
oped years before COVID in 2005 by Dr. Brian Beatty, now an Associate
Professor of Instructional Technologies at San Francisco State University
in California. Different from a (now) more widely established “hybrid”
model where a course is delivered by alternating sessions that are entirely
in person and sessions that are entirely online, a hyflex modality requires
teachers to simultaneously deliver a course in person and remotely, in
effect, teaching in two distinct instructional modalities at the same time.
The COVID crisis ignited a spark for the hyflex product to spread like
wild-fire as a common management response to the instructional shift to
distance learning that affected K-12 and higher education institutions.
While it was clearly developed as a response to a need to educate graduate
students, and driven by both student, faculty, and institutional character-
istics (Beatty, 2019), during the pandemic, it quickly morphed into a
disaster capitalism opportunity driven by university administrators, includ-
ing enrollment management executives, and educational technology

Switzerland AG 2022
corporate entities that moved to capitalize on the emergent need for tech-
nology use in education.
One of the most profound transformations of teaching in the remote learn-
ing era, the hyflex modality also crept into higher education pandemic restart
plans, and even into some state restart recommendations for higher education,
such as in our own state of New Jersey, as we’ve mentioned already. This trend
suggests a disturbing synergy between university leadership, educational tech-
nology firms, such as OPMs, and state legislators whose motivations behind
this push deserve to be scrutinized. Laura Gogia (2020, para. 7) a senior ana-
lyst for Tambelini Group, writes, “ it is worth asking whether the pivot to
‘hyflex’ learning is motivated by evidence that it will inspire richer classroom
interactions or whether it is merely the closest option we have to normalcy.”
Or perhaps, to ask a slightly different question, is this push for “hyflex” teach-
ing, and expanded online instruction more generally, a result of yet another
crisis opportunity to bring “digital transformation” to higher education, and
further, to take any remaining control over teaching and course delivery away
from faculty?
Digital transformation initiatives have been touted by technology and
marketing business leaders for quite some time, as we’ve discussed, but the
sense of urgency, or we could say, the sense of opportunity, has signifi-
cantly increased during the pandemic. The framework is simple: use tech-
nology to streamline, automate user/customer experience to increase
customer satisfaction, and with that, revenue. This business model, as
we’ve documented at length, entered higher education through the global
education industry’s move into a market that investors perceive has been
stubbornly resistant to digital transformation, that is, higher education.
The pandemic was an unexpected opportunity to change that. Many uni-
versities across the U.S., and globally have added master’s degrees not just
online, but in the new field of digital transformation itself. In one such
recruitment ad for a similar degree that recently arrived in our mailbox,
it stated:
Now is the perfect time to pursue a career in digital transformation. The job
market was primed before the pandemic, and it’s only heating up as the
world moves organizations—new and existing, real and imagined, large and
small, public and private—online.
Faculty in higher education are certainly feeling the heat. And while in no
way do we deny that the world is changing, some of us see that change
7 ONLINE INSTRUCTION AND THE “HYFLEX TEACHING ‘SHOCK DOCTRINE’” 169
through a different lens. In fact, as we’ve described already, this reimagin-

ing of our world in the image of business, and the shaping of our students
into customers and nothing else, seems less like a “transformation” and
more like a destructive force ready to annihilate the value of education as
we know it. The resistance investors may detect to these changes, as we see
it, is justified, yet even some of us on the inside are opening the doors
without critical discussions of what these changes mean for higher educa-
tion and the role critical education plays in democracy. Nehring (2021)
associates the decline of liberal democracy directly with the impact of aca-
demic capitalism on higher education. Academic capitalism does not care
about education, per se. The goal is and has always been to build new
revenue streams by increasing the number of students (read: customers).
In other words, it is concerned with manufacturing bodies with degrees,
and not educated citizens. Scholars of digitalization such as Gupta et al.
(2021, p. ix, emphasis in the original), while paying lip service to critical
thinking skills and the need for face-to-face interaction on college cam-
puses, still clearly state the goal of education as merely instrumental and
transactional, largely the transfer of the correct tools and skills to repro-
duce the workforce, and not critical and interactional to nurture
citizenship:
The success of digitalization in higher education institutions is not just

adopting new technologies or upgrading to the latest tools. It is rather a
reflection of the process in creating a sustainable education model where
success accrues in different capability areas. It needs a curriculum overhaul
aimed at imparting the right tools and skills for preparing the “workforce of
the future.”
Writing during the pandemic, Gupta et al. state that their motivation was
their belief in the “need for higher education institutions to embrace digi-
talization aligning with Education 4.0” (p. x). As they usher in this new
transformative movement, they also clearly state that at the core of the
digitalization process in higher education is a complete overhaul of teach-
ing and learning practices. Gupta et al. (2021, p. ix) write:
The teaching and learning process is the pivot of educational transforma-

tion. It implies that higher education institutions across the world should
gear up for a major overhaul of their curricula, assessment, learning delivery
methods and learning outcomes.
And just like that, we are seeing this overhaul happen right in front of our
eyes with little discussion, or none whatsoever, of how this “fourth indus-
trial revolution” (Schwab, 2016, in the title) will impact one of the oldest
institutions of our society whose tools of deliberative, informed and criti-
cal examination of the written and spoken word, and other products of
our common culture, as simple as they may seem in, say, Zuckerberg’s
technological dystopia metaverse, have been tested and re-tested through
time-tools that withstood the test of industrial revolutions 1.0, 2.0, and
3.0. The question now is whether faculty and students, and parents who
may be footing tuition bills, are willing to let the machinery of the fourth
industrial revolution grind it all down to unrecognizable rubble. The pan-
demic has been and still is our real test.
For the Love of Online Learning: Online Learning

Before the Pandemic, Now, and After
Perhaps it is easier to understand, seen now through the “digital transfor-
mation initiatives” lens, how the transition to distance education, neces-
sitated by the pandemic, became a pivot for educational restructuring and
an accelerated road to overhaul teaching and learning by reinventing the
modes of course delivery and initiating the fight over their control. At the
core of the question for us here is not whether online learning shows bet-
ter or worse educational outcomes, although we know that the research
done during the pandemic, and the research pre-pandemic, have fairly
consistently shown that it, in general, online instruction produces worse
student outcomes than in-person learning and with widening access gaps
and worse outcomes for lower-income students (Riegg Celini & Grueso,
2021). Our concern here is with the way institutions of higher education
used and politicized both online learning and in-person learning as a car-
rot and stick out of a fear of losing revenue. At the same time that univer-
sity leaderships argued that we should return to in-person-learning because
students and parents prefer it over online learning, even as some faculty
with underlying health conditions feared that returning to in-person learn-
ing might kill them or members of their families, they were also preparing
the ground for digital transformation, escorting private interests through
a wide open door to capitalize on online delivery opportunities in post-
pandemic times. Schwartz (2021a, para. 8) reports on a survey that found
that the pandemic gave confidence to many universities to continue invest-
ing in online education as a more permanent way of generating revenue as
nearly 6 out of 10 institutions surveyed “said they would continue some

or all emergency remote learning offerings via distance education after the
health crisis ends.”
Indeed, the process of transformation from mostly in-person institu-
tions of higher education to mostly online institutions of higher education
was occurring at a slow but nevertheless consistent pace even prior to the
pandemic. According to the National Center for Education Statistics,
online education was experiencing an upward trend prior to a pandemic,
with 37.2% of students in U.S. colleges enrolled in at least one online
course in 2019 as opposed to 34% in 2018. Similar growth was seen in
students enrolling in online-only programs where nearly 18% of students
were enrolled in online-only programs, with a much larger share of gradu-
ate students, 32.6%, enrolled in online-only programs. For-profit private
institutions took 62.8% of the share, while private non-profit took 21.6%,
and public institutions 13.3%. These data show a “steady march in the
normalization of online learning” (Lederman, 2018, para. 4).
But then came the pandemic and the number of students enrolled com-
pletely online boomed. Lederman (2021c) reported that in 2020, 44.7%
of students were enrolled entirely online, compared to 17% in 2019.
Schwartz (2021a, in the title), citing an annual report from the National
Council for State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements, writes, the “pan-
demic fueled huge online-only enrollment growth.” As we’ve discussed
previously, these trends are closely associated with the rapid growth of the
global education and EdTech industry and can’t be seen separately. While
for-profit institutions of higher education have been at the forefront of the
revenue-generating online learning business model, public and private
non-profit institutions of higher education were also slowly shifting to
online learning prior to the pandemic. Some early research showed mixed
results in terms of outcomes for online and in-person learning (Atchley
et al., 2013), however, more recent research, and some done during the
pandemic, has indicated that completion rates and overall student out-
comes are significantly lower when compared to in-person learning, (see
Bates, 2021 for summative analysis of recent research). This is particularly
true when online learning is used as a revenue stream, such as in for-profit
institutions, rather than as a limited tool in specific circumstances with
well-articulated instructional purposes. Perhaps one of the most telling
examples of how EdTech believes they can transform higher education is
their nearly failed experiment with MOOCs (Mass Open Online Courses).
Reich and Ruipérez-Valiente (2019, p. 130) write that once heralded as
the innovation that will disrupt higher education, in the period since their
emergence in 2012 to 2019, MOOCs have been drawing on students
from the most affluent countries who also showed dismal completion rates
with most students not returning after their first year. Their business
model has also shifted.
Reich and Ruipérez-Valiente (2019, p. 130) write, “After promising a
reordering of higher education, we see the field instead coalescing around
a different, much older business model: helping universities outsource
their online master’s degrees for professionals.” The pandemic, however,
has brought new life to MOOCs and they boomed during 2020 (Lohr,
2020) due to a significant and larger shift to OPM models or merging
with an OPM, and in smaller part by reinventing its offerings to shorter
courses. Take, for example, the largest MOOC provider, Coursera, which
was founded in 2012 by two Stanford University professors, Andrew Ng
and Daphne Koller, who said their mission was “bringing quality online
education to the masses” (McKenzie, 2021). A year into the pandemic,
after experiencing financial losses, Coursera filed to become a publicly
traded company in March of 2021, one of the very few EdTech companies
to do so, as while it had experienced revenue growth in 2020, it was still
operating at a loss, but forged ahead nonetheless with a plan to monetize
the new shorter course offerings (McKenzie, 2021, para. 5). Is this a story
of success? Did it bring quality education to masses around the globe? No.
One thing is clear, the story of Coursera and EdTech in higher education
is certainly not one of educational success. If anything, it’s a story of edu-
cational failure and of business reinvention to move on in the plundering
of the commons when a disaster presents itself. In this case, it was the
opportunity to take yet another crack at capitalizing on underutilized rev-
enue streams of student tuition dollars supported by government loans.
We should be particularly cautioned by what Newton for Forbes maga-
zine (2020, in the title) called “depressing” and “disheartening” news
about MOOCs in his analysis of a more recent study (see Kizilcec et al.,
2020) that found that, not only MOOCs, but online learning as a whole
might not serve students’ educational needs, even if various interventions
to improve course completion rates are implemented. The study is signifi-
cant as it is one of the largest global experiments in higher education ever
conducted, with over 250,000 MOOC participants over the course of two
years. Newton (2020, para. 7) concludes that the findings might suggest
that “MOOCs may already be all they will be, mainly marketing tools and
revenue sources for ‘certificate sellers.’”
The real danger for online education as a whole is that this is precisely
the transformation we are seeing happening at private non-for-profit as
well as public universities small and large across the country: mainly for
profit-revenue seeking methods to churn out work-ready graduates
through quick, scalable, skill-driven degrees on mostly the graduate level.
But some scholars have warned us that online education cannot be a pana-
cea to a revenue problem that higher education has been facing for some
time, caught between dropping enrollments and the desire for growth,
and that is because online education is not designed to provide a critical
educational experience. As we’ve shown, online learning is more akin to
workforce training than to critical pedagogy, by its design. In fact, indus-
try, itself, decided to cut its investment costs in workforce training which
was standard prior to neoliberalism taking hold (Vujnovic & Kruckeberg,
2021). Workforce training was instead outsourced to higher education,
first in the form of internships for credit, and now, full steam ahead,
through online learning. In that, education must be neutral and the cur-
riculum strictly designed as a response to market needs. What is lost in this
transformation is an essential component of higher education, critical
learning, and critical pedagogy, also essential to democracy. In an inter-
view with João França on July 2, 2019 (in the headline), Henry Giroux,
one of the founders of critical pedagogy, said, “Those arguing that educa-
tion should be neutral are really arguing for a version of education in
which nobody is accountable.” This strikes a chord with us as it is precisely
the issue of lack of accountability for profit seeking individuals and enti-
ties, and accountability they, at the same time, demand of public servants,
such as teachers, that is the epitome of neoliberalism. In a word, online
education does not foster criticality. Moore, Jayme, & Black (2021, p. 12)
write, “Criticality is not simply an inadvertent loss of online learning it is
intentionally discouraged by design,” as the following discussion of the
push toward hyflex instruction will show.
The “Hyflex Shock Doctrine” and the True Cost

of Online Learning
One of the ways in which disaster capitalism played out in full display was
not necessarily with the emergency pivot to online learning overall, but
through a push for hybrid-flexible learning that appeared as the pandemic
education panacea on campuses across the United States. The reason? It is
a course design that includes learning in-person, online synchronous, and

online asynchronous simultaneously, with students choosing which modal-
ity they want to use from class to class, at the same time that it allows
schools to “sell” their educational offerings as continuing in-person, at
least to a certain extent. A hybrid modality allows colleges and universities
to also market “flexibility” to students, which translates into a set of con-
sumer expectations that faculty will deliver course content in increasingly
“customized” ways that, if not overtly, are implicitly driven by student
preferences for when and how they will “receive” instruction. A modality
such as this, and as deployed during the pandemic, would enable institu-
tions to retain the tuition dollars students paid for in-person instruction
and on-campus experiences even if that experience was substantially lim-
ited by the restrictions emerging out of the institution’s COVID response
and state guidelines.
And here again enters the shock doctrine. In our own experience in the
state of New Jersey, as we briefly mentioned before, the New Jersey Office
of the Secretary of Higher Education (OSHE, p. 9) updated the restart
plan for higher-education on August 31, 2020 and curiously included
Hyflex learning as an additional consideration in its recommendations:
Offer hybrid learning options such as HyFlex or converged learning

(“flipped classrooms”) to manage the classroom capacity and pedagogical
limitations imposed by social distancing (such as not being able to correct
student work in close contact, reduced ability to touch and interact with
student work products, etc.).
It would be an understatement to say that the faculty in our own institu-

tion were surprised to see hyflex appear as part of state recommendations
as we had experienced a significant push by our administration to shift to
a hyflex model as a pandemic solution. It was an initial hunch that hyflex
was not simply a new quick fix idea in a time of crisis that would be the
beginning of our unraveling of the much larger story that became this
book. The fact that hyflex would appear in New Jersey restart guidelines
suggested to us an intriguing synergy between state legislators, institu-
tions of higher education, and, as we’ve shown already, the EdTech indus-
try. In the state’s restart plan, we also noted the complete absence of
faculty voices in the matter. Indeed, we ourselves attempted to get in
touch with OSHE without much success. On the matter of our particular
concerns about hyflex, we received no response.
Suffice it to say that faculty at our institution did push back against the
imposition of hyflex through both our union and our faculty governing
body, the faculty council. The faculty argued that the model was not
designed for undergraduate teaching and wasn’t meant to be implemented
in emergency situations, and in any case, raised a host of issues around
faculty workload and other working conditions that are subject to negotia-
tion. It requires institutional investment in technology, teaching assistants,
and a pilot program with release time, for instance, for faculty to try out
and determine whether that kind of model works for them and their stu-
dents, as was the case at San Francisco State University. Subsequently, a
memorandum of agreement between our union and administration pur-
posely excluded hyflex as one of the modes of instruction at our university
unless mutually agreed upon through bargaining, and a distance learning
policy was initiated and drafted by our faculty council, in collaboration
with our union, and ultimately our administration, that articulated that
hyflex is not one of the accepted modalities of instruction at our university.
Nevertheless, this little-known pre-pandemic model has now swept
across higher education since the beginning of the pandemic. Gannon
(2020, para. 3) writes that when he Googled the term at the start of the
pandemic, roughly April 2020, “HyFlex returned results mostly pertain-
ing to a company making industrial pumps, mixers, and sprayers, with a
few pedagogical references scattered downpage.” Today (January, 2021)
Googling “hyflex” yields one million and 780 thousand results, most of
which refer to education and pedagogy. The debate surrounding hyflex is
energizing administrations, faculty, and students. While administrations
are overwhelmingly trying to seize on the moment to invest in this modal-
ity with its “online-not-online” model that allows them to continue to
market themselves as offering an in-person experience (should students
make the “individual choice” to take it), they are at the same time capital-
izing on the online learning momentum; for sure, some faculty are enthu-
siasts in embracing the novelty, while others, like us, have been on a local
forefront to resist it. In these struggles, many more faculty have seen the
deterioration of the model of shared governance as universities march for-
ward with lightning speed without input from faculty on the implementa-
tion of hyflex, and without larger discussion about pedagogical or workload
issues. Students, similarly to faculty, question the emergence of the blended
modality, even if some surveys show that there are students who like the
experience.
Let’s exemplify each of these points. In 2021, Unity College (2021)

announced that it would use $360 thousand granted by the U.S. Department
of Agriculture to support their hyflex classroom project, while Sacramento
State, as reported in their student newspaper, The State Hornet, invested
$8 million to support the hyflex model, and along with that, developed
seven-course modalities: Hybrid, HerkyFlex, HyFlex, blended, fully in-
person, online synchronous and online asynchronous. Some of these were
completely unknown to us until we researched the topic, including, for
instance, the HerkyFlex modality, which we learn from the Sacramento
State FAQ is modality they designed that “enables students to choose
between two modes of instruction, in-person, or synchronous online”
(Gomez Santos, 2021, para. 15). Judging by the elaborate FAQs devel-
oped for their student paper, with the proliferation of online learning com-
binations, we also have the proliferation of confusion. Finally, an example
that also resulted in faculty pushback is the CUNY Hyflex pilot program.
In spring 2021, the CUNY system announced that it would engage in a
Hyflex pilot across several campuses, and then the Board of Trustees passed
a resolution on June 7, 2021 approving the expenditure of nearly $6 mil-
lion for the purchase of Hyflex technology in a contract with Mason
Technologies Inc., for Lehman College. A portion of the money was com-
ing out of the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund II (“HEERF
II”), Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act,
2021 (“CRRSAA”). Yet, while the EdTech investments forged forward,
the faculty pushed back. In November 2021, the Professional Staff
Congress (PSC), the union that represents 30,000 faculty and staff at the
City University of New York (CUNY) and the CUNY Research Foundation,
issued a statement of concern entitled, “Teaching modality ‘shock doc-
trine,’” in direct response to the hustle for more Hyflex teaching.
PSC also invited faculty to provide input on these decisions, and share
their experiences with Hyflex teaching. The statement hits right at the
center of our own argument that the Hyflex model is a disaster capitalism
response to pandemic fears over loss of revenue and the opportunity to
bypass faculty voice in decisions that would transform teaching in the
higher education context. PSC (November 2021, p. 1) stated that:
Using the money this way and launching this program during the pandemic,
clearly indicates that CUNY links the expansion of HyFlex to its general
pandemic response, and sees this modality as a possible panacea while the
ongoing health crisis makes scheduling unpredictable.
Indeed, as we’ve seen elsewhere, CUNY also counts Hyflex courses toward
their in-person courses, while traditional hybrid courses are counted
toward their online offerings, lending support for the argument that col-
leges see hyflex as a way to profit off the claims that they are offering
widespread in-person instruction. The letter also states that the CUNY
Faculty Senate passed a resolution outlining “grave concerns” with
CUNY’s plans and registering their dissent that the pivot to Hyflex learn-
ing has “major implications for pedagogy, faculty governance of the cur-
riculum and workload” (p. 2). Here again, we find that investment in the
Hyfex model is advanced with disregard for the shared governance pro-
cess, using emergency circumstances as an excuse. CUNY PSC (November
2021, p. 3) concluded:
In short, the PSC believes to the extent the HyFlex modality is used at all,
it should be targeted and therefore rare; governed by faculty governance
bodies with clear stipulations about class size and the purpose for which it is
being used; supported with technical and teaching assistance; and voluntary
and compensated commensurate with its additional demands.
Similarly, early on in the pandemic, the faculty at the University of Nevada,

Reno pushed back against the university plan that classes would be taught
in a Hyflex modality. They stated that the plan had “limited pedagogical
evidence” and asserted that faculty are best suited to determine which
methods of instruction are most appropriate “for their courses consistent
with the health and safety of students and themselves” (Wootton-Greener,
2020, paras. 4 and 5).
We, ourselves, completely agree, as our own position was similar. The
question that persists is, why, if we clearly have not engaged in sound
pedagogical, governance, and workload discussions on an institutional
level, are administrations “bulldozing” through the accepted academic
processes? It is difficult to come to any other conclusion than a profit-
driven motivation. There is no data that show that the hyflex model is
somehow superior to in-person instruction that therefore necessitates an
investment of millions of dollars of government grant money to hire
EdTech companies to implement technologies to enable teaching modali-
ties strongly questioned by both students and faculty (Donnelly, 2022).
Gannon (2020, para. 8), after experimenting with hyflex instruction dur-
ing the first months of the pandemic, concluded that “HyFlex courses are
hard to build and even harder to teach.” He also argues, and we agree,
that the origin story of Hyflex teaching matters. It was designed for gradu-
ate courses and education technology students. That story is vastly differ-
ent from our pandemic story. He goes on to say that we also need to help
students learn in online environments. Indeed, and more, we need to rec-
ognize that the pandemic cast an even brighter light on vast digital access
and digital literacy barriers, and that students from marginalized and
excluded groups are more likely to both lack access and literacy (Wood,
2021). Accelerated pushes for hyflex teaching and learning will only exac-
erbate these existing problems, especially and precisely because decisions
about our academic futures aren’t democratically made. Even the highly
problematic, and often disingenuous, rationale that changes are necessary
to meet student demands doesn’t add up; students themselves ask why
hyflex is utilized when it doesn’t seem to work, and doesn’t provide the
college experience they are seeking. To the point, a graduate instructor
and student at the University of Florida, Maxine Donnelly (2022, paras. 3
and 9) voiced her opinion for the Independent Florida Alligator about
hyflex learning, calling it the “worst of both worlds” (referring to online
and in-person teaching and learning). She also described many faculty
experiences across the country:
HyFlex does not provide a ‘real college experience’ in pandemic times. For
one thing, most students are not truly ‘in-person’ with HyFlex as currently
implemented. Classrooms in some of the older buildings (like those I teach
in) are too small to permit large classes as per 6-foot social distancing guide-
lines, meaning many students are in small classes or even alone in a room
with their professors. For these in-person learners, this small group is not
enough to spark meaningful engagement with the class. And for the stu-
dents online, cut off from their professor and often barely able to hear
what’s going on in the classroom, calling these class sessions ‘the full UF
experience’ is a sick joke.
Yet, the context in which the hyflex roll-out is happening also feels like a
sick joke. Donnelly’s description of what was occurring at UF, and many
other campuses across the country, is a glimpse into the kind of disaster
capitalism opportunity administrators are seizing, and with that, undoing
decades of shared governance. She continued:
Instructors only received ‘guidance’ on HyFlex teaching policies the Friday

before classes began, telling them that “changing the scheduled modality of
instruction in the plan of the syllabus, either temporarily or permanently, is
a violation of UF policy.” Professors making such decisions could experience

censure or termination even if they determine the classroom environment is
unsafe, that the technology is unsuitable for discussion-based or experience-
based classes, or if none of their in-person students attend. All of this is on
top of the administration rejecting the majority of professor requests for
health accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, bullying
academic departments into raising classroom occupancy, and creating the
now-infamous ‘snitch’ function on the GatorSafe app to report professors
for not doing HyFlex the ‘right’ way. (Donnelly, 2022, para. 7)
Donnelly’s revealing testimonial summarizes not only what was happen-

ing in the state of Florida, but on campuses across the country where
eroding standards of shared governance and the silencing of faculty voices
is occurring alongside the emergence of surveillance systems of both stu-
dents and faculty. Not to be forgotten, the GatorSafe application is also
embedded in the context of the larger attack on education in the state of
Florida, reflective, for example, in the Stop Woke Act, and goes along with
the proposals for teachers to wear microphones so that they could be scru-
tinized and potentially sued by parents who would find the content they
are teaching “inappropriate” for their children. While these don’t apply to
higher education, GatorSafe does, and for its part, also encourages snitch-
ing culture. Each of these examples construct faculty as “managed profes-
sionals” (Codd, 2005, in the title; Rhoades, 1998, also in the title), and,
even more so, as obstacles—as we have argued in previous chapters. As
long time educator, Nancy Bailey (2020, para. 4), writes in regard to the
push for online learning during the pandemic:
The transitioning of technology into public schools, not simply as a supple-

mental tool for teachers to use at their discretion, but as a transformative
means to remove teachers from the equation, has been highlighted with
groups like Digital Promise and KnowledgeWorks. Both promote online
learning and it’s difficult to find teachers in the mix.
The need to overcome the “teacher problem,” so central to education

profiteers’ overall bulldozing, finds its way into the related pandemic-
fueled push for upskilling, with faculty already feeling “upskill fatigue”
(White, 2021, para. 3). For instance, Fresno State embarked on a new
Hyflex Teaching and Learning Program, offering $3000 dollars to faculty
“who want to increase flexibility for students” (Fresno State Hyflex
Teaching and Learning Program webpage, 2022, para. 3–4). At our own
university, although not strictly directed at online or Hyflex teaching, fac-

ulty were offered $500 to participate in a teaching certification program
offered by a private entity, ACUE, that requires participating faculty to
devote 2–3 hours weekly for 25 weeks on various online modules. All this
in the thick of the pandemic with Omicron cases rising, increased faculty
loads in answering to the needs, whether academic or emotional, of their
overwhelmed students.
We are still, collectively, not yet able to assess the true cost of the pivot
to online learning and its implications for teaching, learning, shared gov-
ernance, as well as the cost to students. In subsequent chapters, we will
discuss the devastating national landscape of student debt and the politics
of rising student tuition during the pandemic when even many students
would, tongue-in-cheek, self-identify as attending Zoom College. Suffice
it to say here that, nearly from the start of the pivot to online learning,
students and some parents objected to the narrative from their college or
university administrations that the tuition they were charging for an in-
person college experience should remain the same for online instruction.
As we’ll return to again briefly at the close of the book, a number of class-
action lawsuits emerged during the height of the outbreak with students
claiming they did not receive the in-person education they paid for in
tuition dollars when colleges and universities moved instruction online.
Although a number have been dismissed, such cases could have significant
implications for the real and perceived value of online learning. Some,
even as high up as presidents of institutions, are questioning whether
online learning presents the future of higher education as EdTech compa-
nies promise. Northwestern University chancellor Kenneth W. Henderson
sparked an outcry by a group of online learning administrators when he
publicly stated in an open letter posted on the university website that in-
person learning is the “gold standard.” It is suspected that the statement
comes at a time when students and parents demanded a return to in-
person instruction, especially where we see the high price attached to col-
lege attendance (Smalley, 2022a, para. 1). Regrettably, it is hard to consider
this statement as other than an opportunistic response rather than a true
conviction. We’ve seen institutions of higher education turn on dimes in
their rhetoric as quickly as they toggle between online and in-person learn-
ing depending on which one brings in more revenue. Thus, even as calls
for the “in-person gold standard” may match the moment monetarily, the
higher education online learning “gold rush” continues on a parallel track,
banking on the next pivot coming as less of a shock and more of a doctrine
with few, if any, voices dissenting.
CHAPTER 8
Ghosts of Intended Consequences: How

OPMs’ Stealth Business Model is Redefining
Higher Education
In the throes of the pandemic, as hundreds of thousands continued to suf-

fer from the real and socio-economic consequences of the pandemic
(Ryan, 2021), neoliberal actors sought to design new ways in which new
markets can be conquered and new profits made. In higher education,
online program management companies (OPMs), which we’ve introduced
earlier, have been a stealth and key institutional player in global TEMPS,
seizing on the opportunity to expand their already “creeping capitalist
takeover” (Carey, 2019, in the title) during the pandemic. Before we delve
deeper into this critical chapter of the pandemic-fueled privatization story,
we will return to our conceptualization of global TEMPS, or the notion of
a global web of total educational privatization management syndicates,
with a particular focus on the role of what scholars have called the “edu
political apparatus” (Ideland et al., 2020, p. 2) in propelling the OPM
expansion to this crisis. As we do, we are reminded that the web of expan-
sion is, indeed, wholly global; as the pandemic continues to capture the
world’s crisis energies, developing nations have become increasingly vul-
nerable targets as population growth attracts education industry privatiz-
ers to implement their profit-seeking strategies, most notably education
technologies—and with the help of global and local state actors.

Switzerland AG 2022
EdTech Grows Thanks to an Edu-Political

Apparatus: And Vice Versa
As we have documented in previous chapters, the size of the global educa-
tion industry is enormous, and it promises to continue its rapid growth
well into the future with a projected expansion from an approximately two
trillion dollar market to a ten trillion dollar global market by 2030 (Honlon
IQ, 2018). Verger et al. (2016, p. 4) define the global education industry
“as an increasingly globalized economic sector in which a broad range of
educational services and goods are produced, exchanged, and consumed,
often on a for-profit basis.” The reader will recall that the growing indus-
try, and we have argued, shape-shifting industry, includes global multina-
tional corporations such as publishing giants Pearson and Wiley, as well as
education philanthro-capitalist foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates
foundation, but also an expanding army of smaller players that have come
to realize that profits can be made out of student tuition dollars. If we add
to the Big Tech, EdTech, and Big Liberty roster, the smaller more local-
ized players, the staggering picture of the size of educational profiteers
emerges, though one that has, unfortunately, mushroomed under the
radar of most of us employed in the educational sector. Cohen and
Mikaelian (2021, p. 236) write that corporations that make their buck by
turning knowledge into profit “and education into revenues” are lucrative
industries with profit margins exceeding those of oil companies or Big
Tech. How is this possible? For sure, the tactics that intentionally hide
what amount to takeover strategies are stealth maneuvers of the business
sector connected to a political apparatus, ones that has been deployed
ironically as Omicron, a stealth variant of COVID, was also spreading, and
in ways that have made those of us in the educational trenches, and the
public itself, largely blind to these trends.
We could argue that both the reason for the enormous financial returns
of educational corporations, both before and during the pandemic, and
the obfuscation of these seismic developments from everyday folks work-
ing inside and outside of the sector, are related. Explains Cohen and
Mikaelian (2021, p. 236), the key to the heist is in the privatization of
education itself, where public money “cover[s] much of their research,
development, and overhead,” and we would add, where the political and
moral cover of a non-profit vehicle makes it, precisely, difficult to detect
the operation. If we add to this Naomi Klein’s assertion at the onset of the
pandemic the current pandemic disaster’s shock doctrine belongs to global
8 GHOSTS OF INTENDED CONSEQUENCES: HOW OPMS’ STEALTH BUSINESS… 183
technology companies, a shock doctrine she termed a “Screen New Deal”

(2020b, para. 6), we can understand further how EdTech maneuvers can
fly under the radar as privatization grabs. In Klein’s view, COVID deliv-
ered a global push to privatize any remaining public institutions, and more
specifically to outsource many of their “core functions to private tech
companies” (Klein, 2020c, para. 15). Nowhere is that more intensified in
the COVID era than in the educational industry sector, the extent of
which might only be rivaled by the healthcare industry. Yet, at the heart of
this privatization process, before the pandemic and since, is the move to
strengthen and grow what Swedish scholars Ideland et al. (2020, p. 2) call
the “edu political apparatus,” a term we’ve also explored earlier in the
book that refers to the entanglement or “seamless integrations” (Klein,
2020c, para. 7) of government and the global education industry sector
that makes so-called edupreneurs, or education policy retailers (Ball, 2009,
2017; Ideland et al., 2020; Rönnberg, 2017).
For instance, Moore et al. (2021, p. 3) write about EdTech opportun-
ism in the advancement of online learning in Manitoba, Canada during
the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the enactment of the Emergency
Measures Act and its later addendum that “would give the Manitoba gov-
ernment increased ability to respond effectively during a state of emer-
gency and protect vulnerable Manitobans,” they argue, “the provincial
government is using the pandemic, and their increased powers, to advance
their austerity agenda.” To better understand the role of the edu-political
apparatus in the expansion of global TEMPS, we can look again to what
Cohen and Mikaelian (2021, pp. 4–5) describe as the various ways in
which privatization can take place, whether in the education sector or oth-
erwise. In all cases, they argued, privatization destroys what we consider
the public good. One way is to outsource public goods and services to a
private company which includes the “transfer of control over public goods
to private hands.” Another way, as the Manitoba case suggests, is through
austerity measures, such as those we’ve examined in our chapter on aca-
demic labor, which are based on “reducing public funding of a vital public
good and letting private options take over.” However, what makes the
growth of private profit-seeking entities so successful is not the workings
of the market and its functions, as they would like us to believe, but rather
the simultaneous privatization of the state apparatus that has been happen-
ing as a result of the enactments of a larger neoliberal vision of society.
Infusions of private interests in governments, now a global and ongoing
process, are entrenched in government operations and policy making, to a
point where the liberal state as we’ve traditionally construed it—opposite

from the market providing regulation and balance—is nearly obsolete.
While it may smack as an overstatement to those not following EdTech,
and as we have been suggesting throughout, the primary industry strategy
is to replace the traditional role of state education with private interests
using public dollars. Larry Kuehn (2017), Director of Research &
Technology for the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation, reminds us of
these arguments we set forth in previous chapters when he warned that:
Historically, the state has had the primary role in defining the purpose and
content of education. Edtech corporations are now pushing the state aside,
bringing corporate purposes directly into the classroom, an often invisible
shift in power. The aim of these technological forms of privatization is not
to create private schools. Rather, they seek profits by integrating into public
education. Those seeking to create dominant platforms take the longer view
on profits and hope to train students to continue to use their platform when
they move into life and work after school. Much of the attention to technol-
ogy in schools is about the tools. It is essential to pay attention to who really
benefits from the use of the tools, not just how to use them.
How we have used these tools and who benefits from the “rampant
EdTech opportunism” (Moore et al., 2021, in the title) that occurred as
soon as the pandemic hit is the point Klein (2020b) has also made, and
one we will turn to in a moment. But the additional emphasis we wish to
add here is that the privatization of the state isn’t only a result of private
interests pushing from the outside, but an inside job as well. In fact, Cohen
and Mikaelian (2021, p. 21) write, “understanding privatization means
understanding that it is first and foremost a political strategy.” They out-
line 40 years of policymaking that included both Republican and
Democratic presidents here in the U.S., who pushed for the transfer of
public goods into private hands, including the public good of education,
even as it was clear that the implications of privatization carry conse-
quences of widening racial and income-based inequalities. All this is made
possible by an edu-political apparatus where, here in the U.S., and across
the Western world, and also in developing nations, various state actors play
their role in the regulation, or lack thereof, and spending. In other words,
the global education industry, and with EdTech a primary player, “is not
simply an organic phenomenon in the economic sphere” but the result of
the entanglement of private interests and state actors, as Verger et al.
(2016, p. 40) explain. They remind us that the global education industry is:
…shaped and enabled by public policymaking. But that policy-making itself

is often influenced by the private interests in the GEI as they seek to set
policy agendas, frame policy problems, and refashion regulatory regimes to
their advantage.
Like the global education industry policy retailers (Ball, 2017), the global
Big Tech leaders are pushing for the same impact on policy as the advertis-
ing dollars from the privatization of education pours straight into their
own pockets. No area of public life is exempt. Klein (2020, para. 15)
asserts:
At the heart of this vision is the seamless integration of government with a

handful of Silicon Valley giants—with public schools, hospitals, doctor’s
offices, police, and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their
core functions to private tech companies.
The crisis of democracy, now lamented globally, is directly related to

such privatization and deregulation, enabled by economic globalization
that is turning citizens into consumers, and has led to the decentralization
of policies, the “emergence of an evidence based-paradigm,” as well as the
“intensification of the IT to learning relationship” (Verger et al. 2016,
p. 6). In other words, democracy is in peril because of an authoritarian
corporate system, including those in higher education, with no account-
ability to the public. Privatization leads us to surrender “power over our
own destiny, as individuals and as a nation, to unelected, unaccountable,
and inscrutable corporations and their executives” (Cohen & Mikaelian,
2021, p. 5). During the pandemic, where the curtains have fallen in higher
education, we have witnessed this same kind of attack by the administra-
tive capitalist class, as well as by governing boards and state actors in the
democratic process, with very few exceptions. Whether targeting what we
teach as faculty, or how we teach, or perhaps how we govern, our auton-
omy as professionals to make decisions in regards to our research and
teaching has been undermined in many institutions of higher education.
Shared governance that requires time to engage in public discourse about
the trajectory of our institutions and their educational missions, as we’ve
already argued, has been especially targeted.
Klein (2020, para. 40) identified the public engagement “in designing
critical institutions and public spaces” that is precisely at the core of all
democratic process, and democracy itself as a great inconvenience, and the
“single greatest obstacle” to Big Tech—and we would add small tech

alike—that must be bulldozed through the big pandemic doors on the
road to a final push for a private-for-profit takeover of our remaining pub-
lic institutions. She writes:
Now, in the midst of the carnage of this ongoing pandemic, and the fear and
uncertainty about the future it has brought, these companies clearly see
their moment to sweep out all that democratic engagement. To have the
same kind of power as their Chinese competitors, who have the luxury of
functioning without being hampered by intrusions of either labor or civil
rights. (Klein, 2020c, para. 41)
In the same way, Cohen and Mikaelian (2021) acknowledge the

U.S. private sector isn’t widely scrutinized because of their focus on inno-
vation. Granted, this innovation is enabled by public money. It is hard to
say, at this point, whether these private actors will be subject to the public
oversight and accountability democracy requires. In the opening months
of the pandemic, Klein (2020, para. 43) asked: “Will [this] technology be
subject to the disciplines of democracy and public oversight, or will it be
rolled out in state-of-exception frenzy, without asking critical questions
that will shape our lives for decades to come?” More pointedly for the
remainder of our chapter here and our focus on OPMs in this edu-political
apparatus, in the context of schools, Klein writes, the issue is not the
changes, themselves, but rather the absence of public debate about these
changes:
The issue is not whether schools must change in the face of a highly conta-
gious virus for which we have neither cure nor inoculation. Like every insti-
tution where humans gather in groups, they will change. The trouble, as
always in these moments of collective shock, is the absence of public debate
about what those changes should look like and whom they should benefit.
Private tech companies or students? (Klein, 2020c, para. 49)
While we want to stay optimistic, our experience on the ground tells us

that the machinery at play here, the private-state apparatus and the edu-
political apparatus, in particular, has invested billions in strategizing decid-
edly against allowing space for debate and public engagement. Profits are
made, they understand, on the opportunities provided in times of collec-
tive shock, even prolonged crises, that keep people focused on matters of
survival. After all, it is humans who refuse to disengage and turn into
consumers. Human labor is seen as a drain on resources unless humans are

consumers whose numbers can be translated into profit. After all, it seems
that humans, themselves, are the greatest threat to this new society with-
out accountability. It is in this larger nexus of the EdTech and edu-political
apparatus that we situate our next troubling conversation about the grow-
ing and stealth OPM industry making use of the “Screen New Deal”
opportunity to accumulate wealth while they can.
As we reviewed earlier OPMs make their big debut at the turn of the
twenty-first century when the predation of for-profit colleges and universi-
ties began to be widely understood in the U.S., in part because of federal
investigations that revealed their massive and shameless exploitation of
students, putting educational investors on their heels and in search of a
more “respectable” and less visible vehicle to extract profit from the “mas-
sification” (e.g. Hayes & Waynard, 2006) by reversing the direction of
outsourcing of educational services and moving for-profit operations right
into the non-profit shell of colleges and universities themselves. In
exchange for these third-party “insourcing” services, third-party private
investors have been able to pocket upwards of 60% of student tuition paid
into online degree programs, due, in part, to lax federal requirements for
universities on the reporting around student lending for graduate pro-
grams. Equally important to revisit for our discussion here, as a “key-
stone” example of the collusion between EdTech and the edu-political
apparatus, OPMs were first introduced by some of the same players from
the for-profit college industry who were granted the legal status to sell a
range of educational services to non-profit educational institutions with-
out the burden of for-profit tax obligations. In particular, this new form of
student predation was, and continues to be, possible as the result of
U.S. Department of Education rule changes in 2011, lobbied for by
OPMs owners that allowed for-profit sharing with colleges and universi-
ties (Carey, 2019). Once more, not unlike other cases of disaster capital-
ism where private investors profit a second time by selling products or
services to victims of an economic disaster they, themselves, helped to
create, OPMs entered the scene to “rescue” colleges and universities from
the blows of divestment, and with OPM contracts that, even some of their
earliest designers would eventually come to describe as kind of institu-
tional “payday loan” (Carey, 2019).
As an epilogue to this long preamble to the current state of OPM
shape-shifting, this watershed edu-political moment that paved the way
for OPMs to plunder the commons even prior to the pandemic is explained
by Carey (2019, para. 38–39) in his now well-known Huffington Post-

Highline exposé, The Creeping Capitalist Takeover of Higher Education.
Here, he summarizes how the CEO of 2U, one of the first and largest
OPMs (you will read about how they delivered on their promises not to
defraud students in a moment) came to lobby and win an exception from
the Department of Education for OPMs from the rule that universities
would share tuition with a third-party provider:
In 2010, 2U’s then-chief operating officer, Chip Paucek, met with Secretary
of Education Arne Duncan to lobby for an exception for OPMs. He brought
along a dean from the Georgetown nursing program to help argue the case.
According to four former Department of Education employees who were
involved with or had knowledge of the issue, career staff had serious misgiv-
ings. But they told themselves that the OPMs’ university partners wouldn’t
risk their reputations by offering shoddy degrees or defrauding students. In
March 2011, the department issued a final clarification: It was OK to share
tuition with a third-party firm, as long as the recruiting was part of a larger
package of “bundled services” that included marketing, support services,
the provision of technology and career assistance. 2U’s business model was
now enshrined in federal regulation. When the Department of Education
officially endorsed the 2U model, it essentially removed any incentives for
colleges to create cheaper online degrees.
By 2014, more than one-third of all non-profit colleges and universities

that had online programs had signed OPM contracts.
And the rest of the story goes like this.
“No, We Are Not an OPM”: On How Snake Oil Salesmen Came

to Plunder the Commons (Case 1)
“We had already learned the first rule of the OPM Club: Never acknowl-
edge that you use an OPM,” writes Erik Gilbert (2021a, para. 5), a profes-
sor of history at Arkansas State University for The Chronicle of Higher
Education. Or take, for example, the statement from the founder (most
likely refers to John Katzman, see below) of 2U, one of the very first
OPMs, “The more invisible we are, the better” (Carey, 2019, para. 7).
Carey (2019, para. 75) argued: “The next wave of for-profits are becom-
ing so entangled with well-known, trusted institutions that it will be
impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.” These statements
reveal just how shrouded the capitalist takeover of colleges and universities
by private for-profit entities really is, and as the pandemic unfolded, so did
the for-profit rebranding. As journalists such as Kevin Carey (2019), and
non-profit think-tanks such as The Century Foundation (2019), and in
some cases, legislators, work to uncover the full extent of this scheme
(more on that toward the end of this chapter), what is already evident is
that these companies are changing the educational and economic model
of higher learning.
OPMs have been in existence for roughly a decade, and their main busi-
ness model rests on partnering with universities who lack the “self-
confidence to start and manage their own online programs” (mostly
graduate on the masters level) in exchange for 50% or more—could be as
high as 75–80%—of student tuition dollars. Such companies also offer a
wide range of services beyond online instruction, including marketing and
recruiting (Gilbert, 2021a, para. 3). Along with a culture in which col-
leges who use OPMs must not admit to actually using them, there is an
emerging culture within OPMs, themselves, in a kind of uncanny Freudian
marketing strategy, to deny and disguise themselves as not OPMs, a larger
push within the industry to reinvent itself after some very bad publicity.
Take, for example, the HotChalk OPM, recently acquired by Noodle
OPM (founded by Katzman), that rebranded itself as “A New Kind of
Education Network,” a company that promises to charge less for the same
services while saving universities money (Noodle Partners, 2022, landing
page). Or, consider Wiley Education Services that in the thick of the pan-
demic rebranded itself to Wiley University Services, promising customers
a new model since, in the future, the “term OPM will likely be a relic”
(Wiley University Services, para. 7). Finally, most illustrative of all is an
example we came across by way of a promotional video (shared via per-
sonal communication) from an OPM that sums up the industry’s new
marketing strategy. One relatively new company whose primary portfolio
includes managing online programs for universities, along with other edu-
cational services, declares:
Hello. We are [name of the company] and we manage online programs for
partners like you. Now a lot of people refer to a company like ours as an
OPM but we really don’t identify with that term. We have a hard time identi-
fying with the words like “company” and “business.” Our working relation-
ships are more like family and we pride ourselves with that. But OPM, well
that encompasses a broad spectrum of services” [a slide reads—marketing,
research, training, instructor procurement, implementation, enrollment,
retention, support, instructional design), while the voiceover continues]

well it’s really about your interpretation of these terms, let’s talk about that.”
We agree. Let’s talk about that.

Our interpretation of this marketing campaign is informed by well-
earned growing public scrutiny and research (Hall & Dudley, 2019; The
Century Foundation, 2019) that shows the staggering impact of for-profit
entities on the non-profit educational sector even before the pandemic,
often resulting in disastrous outcomes for university partners, but particu-
larly for students. No rebranding can erase simple facts, and two case stud-
ies will help us unpack them.
Perhaps the story should start with the partnership between Concordia
University, a small private Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod university in
Portland, Oregon, and HotChalk (now part of Noodle Partners,
Lederman, November 20, 2020) that resulted in Concordia closing down
during the pandemic after a 115-year history. It took 10 years out of that
115-year history for an OPM to erase Concordia, leaving students with no
degrees in hand, and wondering what they will do with the debt they
incurred (Manning & Young, 2020). Maloney and Kim (2020, para. 1)
open up their analysis of this doomed and scandalous partnership for
Inside Higher Ed by stating, “After COVID-19, the biggest story in higher
ed today may be the closure of Concordia University Portland.” Indeed,
OPMs’ snake oil salesman scheme is the biggest story and the biggest
scandal in higher education to date.
The particular business model Concordia bought into was one that
required them to pay Hotchalk upwards of 75–80% of their revenue gen-
erated from the newly created online graduate programs, which, accord-
ing to sources used by Maloney and Kim (2020), amounted to $62 million
dollars a year and a total of $400 million over the course of the partner-
ship. Stunningly, the contract Concordia signed was for 20 years, and
judging by the lawsuit that HotChalk brought against Concordia’s parent
institution, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, in April 2020 in which it
alleges Concordia transferred assets to the parent institutions days before
closing, and therefore defrauded HotChalk, the deal with a “devil” isn’t
easily broken. HotChalk also claimed that Concordia could have survived
if it had cut expenses in other areas (Burke, 2020a). It doesn’t take much
imagination to deduce what areas Hotchalk would be particularly keen on
cutting, as universities themselves have instituted austerity measures that
generally target liberal arts education. In late 2020, HotChalk, which is a
U.S.-based company with the German media conglomerate, Bertelsmann,

investing $230 million for a minority stake in 2015 (Lederman, 2020,
para. 6), was acquired by the Noodle Partners Inc. Noodle describes itself
as an ever-evolving OPM in the global education industry. They outline
their history on their corporate web pages:
Noodle was founded by John Katzman, who created and ran The Princeton
Review and 2U before he finally got it right with Noodle. We have been
funded by the top education venture firms, including Owl Ventures,
ReThink Education, NewMarkets, Osage Ventures (sister to Osage
University Partners), The Spring Fund, and The Lumina Foundation. We
continue to invest in great technology and systems to help our schools build
world-class programs. Our staff is spread all over the US and Asia, but our
home office is in Union Square in New York City. We call it the Ed Tech
Factory because it was once Andy Warhol’s Factory.
The Ed Tech Factory, on the long and surprising road from Andy
Warhol to Noodle, houses the company that now, in the pandemic
moment, brands itself as “better than a traditional OPM” (Noodle, 2022,
corporate pages, n.p.), and promises to be “more transparent, more flexi-
ble and less expensive than conventional OPMs.” This is an intriguing
statement considering that “neither Noodle nor HotChalk would share
financial details” about their acquisition arrangement (Lederman,
November 20, 2020, para. 2). Carey (2019, para. 90) writes that Katzman
started this new OPM, in what sounds like a Davos Man outfit, to be
“more virtuous: by helping universities create online degrees without
charging them 60 percent of tuition forever.” And while it may be true
that the cost for universities might decrease, it is not at all clear whether
the cost of online education for students will decrease as well. As Stephanie
Hall wrote in testimony delivered to the New Jersey State Legislature on
February 25, 2020, “the real cost for online students is usually higher than
that of a student with the same financial profile but pursuing their degree
on-campus.” As we will see, universities often keep the tuition for in-
person learning and virtual learning the same. In reality, though, online
degrees, precisely because of middlemen like OPMs, end up costing stu-
dents more. This, perhaps, because of a jaw-dropping, stomach-churning
suspicion that universities don’t want to give up the surplus generated by
these degrees and give it back to students (Carey, 2019) as they view this
surplus as a lifeline.
All in all, the lack of transparency and rugged pursuit of profits is at the
core of the OPM business model (Hall, 2021b), and is also part of a typi-
cal OPM contract, which tends to be incredibly long, difficult to exit, and
subject to non-disclosure agreements (Hall, 2021b). Noodle credits their
success in the acquisition of their university partners to transparency.
Perhaps that’s why they openly claim on their corporate pages (Noodle
News, August 9, 2021, corporate pages, para. 8) that in the last couple of
years they have “launched about as many online degree programs with
elite US universities as have all of our competitors, combined.” For us,
and for critical scholars and policy-makers, this “transparency” feels more
like what Stephanie Hall, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation calls
“the invasion of the body snatchers” (Hall, 2021, in the title). Just how
staggering the portrait of privatization is that emerges is easily recogniz-
able in statistics provided by HolonIQ. Some 1000 OPM contracts exist
today in the U.S., with an increase of 79% in 2020, the first year of the
pandemic, from just a year before the outbreak, and many take upwards of
70% of the revenue (Honlon IQ, 2020). Typically, universities feel, at the
very start at least, that their bets with OPMs have paid off due to initial
increased enrollments that grow exponentially. For example, in the case of
the Concordia-HotChalk partnership, a school that enrolled 800 graduate
students in 2009 at the time that the contract was signed had an enroll-
ment of 5,400 students five years later (Young, 2016). But the chickens
come home to roost, and usually sooner than expected. In Concordia’s
case, the short burst in enrollments slowly started to drop, but the con-
tract and demand for dollar payments to HotChalk remained.
According to Burke’s analysis (April 20, 2020a), the Concordia-
Hotchalk partnership was forged out of the desire of Concordia’s leader-
ship to grow and an opportunity for that growth that HotChalk ostensibly
would provide. With little transparency behind such a contract, outsourc-
ing of Concordia’s operations began, and not all was well. Soon, the
arrangement drew the scrutiny of federal investigators concerned about
the violation of federal regulations that prohibit institutions of higher edu-
cation to outsource more than 50% of their operations (Young, 2016).
What did the two-year federal inquiry by the U.S. Education Department
conclude? According to Young (2016, para. 6) for the Oregonian (Oregon
Live), “A federal prosecutor said the arrangement appeared to violate laws
that keep colleges from paying incentives for recruitment, or from out-
sourcing more than half an educational program to an unaccredited party.”
The fine’s grand total was $1 million, but the partnership continued. This
partnership, like many of the OPM partnerships across the country, are
based on initial growth in enrollments, particularly in graduate programs
due, in part, to lax federal regulations and opaque admission standards in
the area of graduate education (Carey, 2019). As such, graduate education
offers a much larger source of revenue than undergraduate education.
Further, in terms of admission standards, there is no legal requirement in
the U.S. for universities to surrender their admissions data for graduate
programs, unlike for their undergraduate programs, making graduate
degrees a “black box” where universities “dramatically lower their admis-
sions standards and enroll thousands of highly profitable students without
sullying their brand” (Carey, 2019, para. 36).
We, ourselves, receive marketing materials in our mailboxes, almost
daily, for new online programs in our respective areas from well-known
universities who advertise openly that the programs are fast-tracked online
degrees taught exclusively or primarily by adjuncts. We are getting increas-
ingly concerned that these programs, set up in the way to be revenue
generators, are also turning colleges and universities (further) into degree
mills run by a no longer but discredited for-profit educational sector and
now by once reputable universities, themselves, banking on their brand
name, a topic we will return to in more detail later. However, the two
academic areas that have been particularly attractive for this kind of shape-
shifting OPM exploitation are masters programs in education and masters
programs in social work. Gilbert (2021a, para. 4) writes, “OPMs want
master’s degrees that provide a desirable credential in fields that lend
themselves to scalability. The archetype is the master of science in educa-
tion.” Similarly, Carey (2019) writes that 2U partnered with the University
of Southern California’s (USC) School of Education because of the large
market and the fact that a teacher with a graduate degree almost always
qualifies for a raise. Teachers also work full time, putting pressure on them
to seek online, rather than in-person, education.
We will return to the USC case later in the chapter, but these examples
unveil another scandal playing into graduate education degree mills and
that is the role of accrediting bodies and state legislative bodies in up-
credentialing requirements, a good example of the edu-political apparatus
at play. We will return to this discussion later in the book, but for the
purpose of illustrating this case, more specifically, accrediting bodies, often
influenced by university leaderships, set higher degree standards that tend
to increase the debt ratio for teachers, social workers, occupational thera-
pists, and more. At the same time, the benefits of acquiring additional
degrees aren’t clear for those who need their services, or for the degree
holders themselves. State legislators who are influenced in their policy-
making by for-profit entities, as well as university leaderships, either pre-
pare the ground or follow suit. In the case of Concordia, there seemed to
be enough demand for select online graduate degrees because of accredit-
ing requirements for up-credentialing. However, changes in state laws in
many states across the country that lifted requirements for masters’ degrees
as a prerequisite for teacher certification made a significant cut into what
officials thought was an “endless stream of students” (Manning & Young,
2020, para. 42). A similar change happened with occupational therapy
when the Accreditation Council of Occupational Therapy Education
(ACOTE) and the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA)
sparred over an announcement made by ACOTE in August of 2017 that
all occupational therapists would need a doctoral degree to practice occu-
pational therapy. OT practitioners fought that up-credentialing scheme
and won when ACOTE recognized AOTA’s authority over professional
standards and educational requirements and recognized dual-degree entry
(masters’ or doctoral degree) into occupational therapy practice in a joint
statement (AOTA, 2019).
On how the “virgin snow” melts “other people’s money” or What do

OPMs do 2U? (Case 2)
John Katzman, one of the founders of 2U, the OPM we’ve mentioned
already as one of the first players in the OPM market, acknowledged that
the industry carries an obscure name, like many of the OPMs, themselves,
including his new OPM company, Noodle Partners. In fact, according to
Carey (2019, para. 16), Katzman once joked that the OPM acronym also
stands for “other people’s money. The key insight was to take the systems
from for-profits that were actually good … married to the goodwill and
good quality of the best traditional schools,” he says. “That is virgin
snow.” This brings us to our second case, which was mentioned in Carey’s
(2019) piece, but recently exposed during the pandemic in more detail in
a Wall Street Journal article titled, “USC Pushed a $115,000 Online
Degree. Graduates Got Low Salaries, Huge Debts” (Bannon & Fuller,
2021), that places a rip-off of USC graduate students at the center of the
OPM scandal.
In brief, the relationship between 2U and USC began in 2008. It was
a time when the OPM industry was rising like a phoenix from the ashes of
the ruins left by the for-profit educational sector after they drew the scru-
tiny of U.S. federal investigators and the Department of Education in the
early 2000s. As we have noted, the new lineup of companies that emerged
ready to plunder the commons were, and are still, run by some of the same
people who ran the failed for-profit college schemes that came under fed-
eral fire, not to mention public outcry once exposed. Yet, others appar-
ently went on to make the rules for higher education as members of the
edu-political apparatus itself, or rather eliminate those rules, like Diane
Auer Jones, who served as the chief higher-ed architect for Trump’s
Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos (Green, 2019). Jones previously
resigned as an assistant secretary for postsecondary education in the
George W. Bush administration and moved to join Career Education
Corporation (CEC) in 2010 as the company’s Senior Vice President and
Chief External Affairs Officer. Career Education Corporation (CEC) is
the largest publicly traded for-profit with 83 campuses nationwide. The
company operates under at least 11 different brands that include some
known names such as Brooks Institute and Le Cordon Bleu, according to
a (2012 + 2015 update) summary of the United States Senate Health,
Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee: For-Profit Education:
The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success.
The report further outlines that under Jones’ leadership, 84% of CEC’s
revenue was derived from federal student aid or military and veteran edu-
cational benefits, at a total amount of $1.9 billion in 2010.
In addition, the report also states that, according to a 2014 Senate
HELP Committee Report, CEC, the same firm where Jones landed as a
senior vice president, was one of the top 10 recipients of revenue from
veterans using their Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits from 2009 through 2013,
receiving $283 million. The same investigation found that 48% of its pro-
gram would have failed or been at risk of failing the U.S. Education
Department’s new Gainful Employment regulations. Yet, all the while, the
company was aggressively recruiting students, making students sign arbi-
tration agreements, and inflating job placement data, knowing that their
student completion rates were dismal; the median student withdrew after
only four months (Summary of the HELP Committee Report, July 30,
2012 + 2015 update, n.p). The full report of the 2012 hearing concluded:
Career Education Corporation is one of the most diverse for-profit educa-

tion companies operating at least six different brands. Overall students
attending CEC brand colleges have withdrawal close to the average of all
companies examined with 51 percent of Bachelor’s and 61 percent of

Associate students withdrawing but given the size of the company that
translates to over 50,000 students leaving the company’s colleges with no
Certificate or degree. The company appears to offer little in the way of stu-
dent support services and has struggled to address allegations of misleading
and deceptive recruiting tactics as well as misrepresentations in its job place-
ment rates. Moreover, the company has a high rate of student loan default,
with 21.6 percent of students defaulting within 3 years. This likely reflects
an inability on the part of some students to find jobs that allow them to
repay the debt they incur. Taken together, these issues cast serious doubt on
the notion that CEC’s students are receiving an education that affords them
adequate value relative to the cost. It is unclear whether taxpayers or stu-
dents are obtaining value from the $1.9 billion investment that taxpayers
made in CEC in 2010.
The HELP Committee report directly links for-profit entities with the
problem of student debt, as well as loan default, for those who actually
make it to the degree completion stage, a topic we will return to later in
the book. And in the midst of this scandal, “no one paid much attention”
to the emerging OPM market and companies like 2U (Carey, 2019, para.
33). USC entered the deal with 2U in 2008 out of fear that it would get
outcompeted by the big players like Stanford and Harvard, and online
education seemed like a no-brainer. The deal also seemed like a no-brainer
for the now-indicted former dean of the School of Social Work, granted
on an unrelated matter involving awarding scholarship and a teaching
arrangement for a son of the local politician. Marilyn Flynn, then the dean
of the School of Social Work, thought outsourcing the costs of running
online programs was a win-win (Bannon & Fuller, 2021; Carey, 2019).
The first deal was for a masters’ of teaching and the online courses would
be staffed by adjuncts who are “much cheaper to employ” (Carey, 2019,
para. 38). According to The Hechinger Report, titled “More colleges and
universities outsource services to for-profit companies,” the first deal 2U
struck was with USC to provide Masters’ degree programs in social work
using USC’s brand. The deal involved managing USC’s online programs
in exchange for 60% of revenue. 2U drew at least $166 million from USC
(Marcus, 2021, in the title). The tuition dictated by USC would be the
same for online and in-person students, roughly $107 thousand (Carey,
2019). The timeline here is beside the point, but what is known is that the
deal between 2U and USC, besides providing tech infrastructure, also
involved course design and recruitment (Bannon & Fuller, 2021). Bannon
and Fuller’s findings and that of the Wall Street Journal are chilling. The
investigation found that “USC graduates collectively borrowed more than
half a billion dollars in federal student loans, more than any other graduate
program in the country” (para. 10). At the same time, USC was one of the
“20 wealthiest private schools in the country” with an endowment of 5.9
billion according to 2020 data (Bannon & Fuller, 2021, para. 11).
The access to federal loan dollars that USC received, and that 2U
received through USC, is what Marilyn Flynn called a “‘cash cow,’ and
[she] was clearly in the know when she said that she was, ‘aware that we
would have a dramatic increase in revenue from this’” (Carey, 2019, para.
41). While USC and 2U were banking on revenue, students were taking
out loans to attend USC’s online social work program not knowing that
they were probably recruited by 2U recruiters and that they’ve never even
talked to anyone from USC. They were willing to foot the bill because of
USC’s brand name (Bannon & Fuller, 2021). The Wall Street Journal
analysis of newly-released U.S. Education Department data found that
compared with other Masters’ degrees offered by the top-tier universities
in the U.S., “the USC social-work degree had one of the worst combina-
tions of debt and earnings” (Bannon & Fuller, 2021). As evidenced in the
report, students, themselves, would eventually start to speak out and
demand accountability, namely for falsely advertising that the cost of an
online degree is the same or even less than a traditional in-person degree.
The truth, however, is quite different. Hall (2021), in the results of
another investigation she and her colleagues at The Century Foundation
conducted, shows that online degrees run by OPMs generally cost more
than if a student attended in a traditional brick-and-mortar program.
Carey (2019) argues that there are two main reasons why online degrees
end up costing more. One is the cost of marketing that OPMs use to lure
in prospective students. Instead of cost-saving for students, close to a bil-
lion dollars goes “straight into the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry
Page, Sergey Brin, and their fellow shareholders every year. That doesn’t
include billions more paid by colleges that don’t use OPMs” (Carey, 2019,
para. 46). Additionally, once the system is put in place, the costs of run-
ning these programs decrease drastically, while tuition is not decreased (in
some cases tuition even goes up), resulting in large revenues harvested by
both the university and the OPM. Neither party is willing to give those
revenues up or invest in decreasing costs to students. While Kutzman
might have been able to jump the 2U ship to embark on another, the
social work degree contract between U2 and USC extends to 2030 and it
is not clear how much of the revenue 2U is getting at present after the
contract was amended a few years ago. According to Bannon and Fuller
(2021, para. 26), 2U rose from an obscure company with one client in
2009 to one of the largest players in the industry with a portfolio of 85
colleges, some of whom are “best-known universities in the U.S.”
In Search of Accountability
Stephanie Hall (2021b) used the analogy of the “invasion of body snatch-
ers” to refer to what the OPM industry came to do to universities. We can
appreciate her imagery, and after a digging deeply into an overwhelming
amount of evidence, we also find ourselves envisioning the “dead walk-
ers,” the zombie-like ghosts from the widely popular pre-pandemic HBO
series, “Game of Thrones,” who come quietly, barely visible, and trans-
form the living into the living-dead who can be forced in submission, but
still feasted on. Curiously, or perhaps not, but certainly uncanny, is the way
in which Katzman referred to people like himself as “ghosts of unintended
consequences,” someone whose central strategy is to exploit the ineffi-
ciencies that he sees at the core of the educational system with one goal:
to get “very, very rich” (Carey, 2019, para. 10).
Perhaps, nowhere is this insatiable thirst for profit more evident than in
the discouraging news that broke in November 2021, just as the Omicron
COVID cases began to spike in the U.S. Northeast, including in Boston,
that 2U’s acquisition of EdX that started in June 2021 was complete. EdX
was a non-profit response to OPMs by Harvard University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). EdX was birthed in 2012
specifically as a response to the for-profit massive open online course giant,
Coursera, with the intent to provide access without the pursuit of profit.
Harvard and MIT attracted partner universities across the U.S. to join the
consortium. EdX wanted to be “morally superior” (Lederman, 2021d,
para. 36) to the for-profit alternatives, and while it sustained itself for
nearly a decade, it succumbed to for-profit interests during the height of
the pandemic. That it happened in that historical moment, as we’ve seen,
is not coincidental. And while there has been much outcry from some
original founders and faculty on both sides (Harvard and MIT), on their
corporate pages, 2U lauds the acquisition as an “industry redefining com-
bination” where EdX is “the primary brand under which the combined
entity operates, with 2U moving into the background as the name of the
parent company” (Lederman, 2021d, para. 1). As such, the arrangement
is much like others in which OPMs takes over a non-profit entity to run a
for-profit scheme, but operates as an invisible hand—the wizard behind
the curtain under the guise of accessibility, affordability, and with a prom-
ise of high-quality education (see 2U corporate pages for more on prom-
ises). But we already know how this story ends for thousands of students
who might be lured in by the promise of quality education that will assure
their employability in an increasingly global and competitive job market.
As we’ve seen with other examples, the cost of the education they are
promising is high, and the outcomes tend to prioritize profit for compa-
nies and debt for students.
The EdX-2U merger is both a result of an industry that is already find-
ing itself in a crisis of identity (Hill, 2020) and a result of the seismic
response to the growing public scrutiny of their operations. An exponen-
tial growth of nearly 80% during the first year of the pandemic alone will
soon assure that no college in America exists “deprived” of OPMs’ ser-
vices. Although it’s hard to fully predict amidst the lack of transparency, or
put more bluntly, the secrecy that governs the OPM industry, some data
show that the expansion significantly intensified during the pandemic as
many OPMs used the opportunity to move into new partnerships and
expand their future business (Schwartz, 2020). While expanding, the
industry itself continues to be in a chaotic state as it consolidates and
searches for viable models for profit reaping. In a preview of topics we will
explore in later chapters, Hill (2019, para. 2) argues that July 30, 2019,
just a semester or so away from the initial outbreak, was “the day when the
OPM market changed,” as 2U’s stock dropped 25% drop, the traditional
model of revenue sharing has been diversified by what they call a full-
service approach that includes revenue shares, free-for-service, or a blended
approach. This also allowed them to diversify the offerings from online
programs only to also include certificates, a pandemic disaster opportunity
we will pick up again in later chapters. For now, Hill (2020, para. 25) calls
this a “Mad Max-style pursuit of college online program revenue.”
This Mad Max reality preceded COVID, but hit higher education
harder in the crisis of the pandemic as OPMs increasingly assumed a larger,
and dangerous, role in institutional decision making. To be sure, as Hall
(2021) writes, OPMs don’t just manage online programs, they increas-
ingly play a decision-making role at the universities they service and sub-
vert traditional faculty and shared governance, and in this way embody the
very goals of disaster capitalism. We must conclude that when universities
partner with for-profit entities by investing in that partnership, they
“divest” from long-standing shared governance partnerships with their

own faculty. And while this process is not new, as we have documented
here, what is new in the pandemic era is that they both are, and at the same
time are not, hiding it. In fact, many universities now have representatives
from for-profit partners holding seats on various decision-making com-
mittees, and no academic decision is made without running it first by the
for-profit partners.
However, for us, where there is optimism, it rests with the recent calls
for accountability from non-profit institutions such as The Century
Foundation, media covering higher education, as well as mainstream and
elite media who have started to scrutinize these highly questionable part-
nerships. More importantly, it seems that the calls for accountability are
now coming from the federal government as well as state senates, such as
our own New Jersey State Senate and its Higher Education Committee,
though it is also necessary to point out that the concern is still limited to
a handful of concerned progressive legislators. In early 2020, for example,
three bills were introduced by Democratic State Senator Sandra Bolden
Cunningham and co-sponsored by Democratic State Senator Vin Gopal
with a goal to bring about legislation that would increase both account-
ability and transparency surrounding OPM/university partnerships in
New Jersey. The bills (S3708, S3709, and S3710) were introduced in the
2020–2021 senate session, and were re-introduced in the current
2022–2023 session (S1112, S113, and S114). If considered and passed,
those bills would require institutions of higher to disclose publicly that
have agreements with online program managers; certain institutions of
higher education and degree-granting proprietary institutions to submit
certain documentation on online program managers to the New Jersey
Secretary of Higher Education; and require online program managers
providing marketing services for institutions of higher education or pro-
prietary institutions licensed to offer academic degrees to self-identify as
the third party to prospective students. While the final destiny of these
bills is still unknown, and as we continue to monitor the legislative pro-
cess, we conclude that these bills are a most welcome and significant push
for state oversight over OPMs and their business practices. Particularly
encouraging is the call for transparency for companies that have thrived,
and still do so in the shadows, and the right for students to know who is
behind the degree offering they are paying for.
On the national stage, as we write, on January 14, Vasquez (2022, p. 3)
reported for The Chronicle that the three American democratic senators,
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Senator Tina Smith of

Minnesota, and Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, directed a letter to eight
OPMs (among them some of the largest players in the field) to request an
update on the inquiry they made in January 2020 and requested “data
about the degree programs you manage, the students you serve, and the
outcomes of these programs, in order to inform effective policy toward
this growing sector of higher education.” The senators stressed their con-
cerns over the impact that OPM partnerships have on rising student debt,
particularly the ways in which these partnerships seem to disincentive cost
reduction, as well as the ways in which tuition-sharing models encourage
aggressive recruitment practices. In doing so, the senators outlined an
example of one publicly available contract that requires recruiters to call
potential recruits 13 times per day, for ten days in a row (Letter to OPMs,
pp. 3–4, Vasquez, January 14, 2022). The letter also recquired a compre-
hensive response on a variety of matters related to OPM business prac-
tices, their university partnerships, and importantly, information on just
how much of their revenue is based on access to federal tax dollars through
Title IV financial aid that includes Federal Supplemental Educational
Opportunity Grants, Pell Grants, Perkins loans as well as federal subsi-
dized and unsubsidized direct loans.
We hope that this kind of action is just the beginning of much-needed
federal oversight over the growth of the EdTech and OPM industry,
though we fear that, with the entrenchment of private interests running
deep and wide, in many instances it will be too late to undo the damage
done to many institutions of higher education and their students. In addi-
tion, with the “edu-political” apparatus at play, it is hard to see how wide-
spread and accepted this push for accountability is within our state and
federal governments. It often feels this is accountability pursued by only a
few while others keep the doors wide open. Kelly Otter, a dean of the
Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies, recently wrote a
response to Eric Gilbert and Kevin Carey (both cited earlier) proclaiming
that “OPMs aren’t the enemy” and “OPMs are here to stay.” We found
her response to both of them unconvincing as, too, did Gilbert (2021b, in
the title). Her apologism and skirting of larger issues remind us that
OPMs’ success has been, in large part, due to academic administrators’
own willingness to compromise the academic integrity of their institutions
in pursuit of new sources of revenue and born out of their insatiable desire
for growth. It is by invitation of a dean (Hall, S. 2021b), in fact, that the
first OPM contract was signed. The “takeover of colleges within,” as we’ve
shown, wasn’t an accidental and temporary suspension of a rational mind

by university administrators; it was based on the intentional and fraught
belief in neoliberal ideology by which we must pursue public-private part-
nership arrangements that promise benefits for all, but tend to deliver only
to the private side of the bargain (Cohen & Mikaelian, 2021). And for
that, if nothing else, we must hold them accountable.
CHAPTER 9
Aspiring Diploma Mills Don’t Stop

for Pandemics
“Degrees of Deception”
In the previous chapters, we have argued that the larger, decades-long, ongo-
ing transformation of American higher education by educational technology,
finance, and management corporations to establish and expand online
instruction is a key ingredient of the toxic soil in which the so-called pan-
demic necessary responses have taken root. We’ve described the self-serving
agenda shifting about the role of remote learning on the part of university
administrations as a COVID crisis management strategy, and showed what it
teaches us about the educational bankruptcy of the pre-pandemic take-over
of traditional in-person models of teaching and learning. In this chapter, we
argue that, driven by the threat of eroding enrollments and guided by per-
verse college ranking incentives, academic management executives continue
to challenge faculty governance by capitalizing on pandemic upheavals and
uncertainty by adding market-driven academic programs, namely masters’
degrees—although doctoral degrees including PhDs are on the rise and
pushed for other market-driven changes, such as microcredentialing, that
weaken the power of faculty and distort the values of the academy. In search
of new sources of revenue, supported both by industry and by government,
policies that call for the reemergence of vocationalism in the institutions of
higher education, non-profit universities themselves became predatory and
exploitative of students, similar to their for-profit college counterparts.

Switzerland AG 2022
In the context of the “neoliberal learning economy,” the booming

online masters’ degree market and “microcredentialing craze” (Ralston,
2021, pp. 83–85) is leading to a degree mill-like culture with an upskilling
and upcredentialing edge. With the proliferation of for-profit players in
higher education such as Udacity and Coursera, and traditional universi-
ties that act like for-profit players, for instance, CUNY’s EverUp Micro-
Credential Program, coupled with industry credentialing companies such
as LinkedIn Learning, and Credly, what we have understood as a degree
mill in the past is quickly being redefined. As traditional institutions of
higher education compete with the for-profit sector by offering their own
fast-tracked credentialing, and by putting pressure to lower academic stan-
dards and reduce the time needed to complete a degree or certificate, it is
increasingly more difficult for students to distinguish whether something
has merit, or if that something is another worthless and predatory pro-
gram that will lead to little real benefit and more debt. This trend is occur-
ring simultaneously with the growth of a global billion-dollar industry
that specializes in selling actual fake degrees, conventionally known as
degree mills, and one that continues to grow during the pandemic. It is
estimated that degree mills have sold over a million fake degrees globally.
The growth has been aided by the digitization process and online degree
offering has facilitated their business (Ezell & Bear, 2012). The BBC’s
2018 report calls these fake degrees, “degrees of deception,” (Clifton
et al., 2018, para. 42), and while we continue to be disturbed by the
growth of this industry, our focus here is on degree mill-like trends in
higher education at home and around the world. In this case, instead of
fake institutions, credible institutions of higher education, even elite insti-
tutions of higher education, are in the business of degree proliferation,
often done in collaboration with for-profit entities. Here, we want to turn
our eye to examining this concerning trend in more detail.
For us, as faculty, this trend is gut-wrenching as we see reputable
institutions of higher education buying into a model that carries decep-
tiveness in its own right, from lack of transparency surrounding for-profit
partnerships to in-house fast-tracking approval processes that strip down
academic quality in favor of generating faster and larger revenue margins.
Our outrage isn’t blind to the role that technology can play in access to
education, in certain circumstances, particularly if we look at it as a
response to the need for re-skilling of workers in the global economy.
That said, we can’t stay blind to what Soley (1995, p. 145) calls “a
covert transfer of resources from the public to the private sector,” with
9 ASPIRING DIPLOMA MILLS DON’T STOP FOR PANDEMICS 205
devastating consequences for academia, faculty, and particularly students.

Consequences are pronounced for economically disadvantaged students
with dreams of acquiring a college or advanced degree through one of
these new stackable course offerings.
However, we’ve been here before when in 2012, MOOCs, which we
mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, were touted as the paramount
way to achieve access in education globally. We’ve seen that the model
brought neither access nor education, as the numbers of course takers
have been primarily from affluent countries with courses and degree com-
pletions at dismal levels (Lederman, 2019). In a perverted twist of the
Robin Hood story, instead of drawing the revenue from the wealthy, we
have here a not-so-new corporate model used and reused in other seg-
ments of the economy, now applied to the educational sector. That famil-
iar model of plundering from the poor is manifested here through a
proliferated product menu of degrees, courses, certifications, and badges
with unproven value peddled to those who neither can afford them nor
are fully prepared to achieve success in college. In some instances, we see
the same predatory, aggressive recruitment strategies used by institutions
of higher education that were once a tactic used only by the for-profit
sector. In this context, it’s hard not to think back to Trump University’s
promise to offer real-estate credentialing in what Trump himself called an
“altruistic” and “charitable” move by “imparting lots of knowledge” to
those who signed up for his program (Boser et al., 2017, para. 1).
This early marriage between venture capitalism and education is a cau-
tionary tale. Soon after the hype of Trump University settled down, it was
becoming clear, as Boser, Schwaber & Johnson (2017, para. 2) write:
Trump University’s real estate seminars often didn’t provide that much educa-
tion; at some seminars, it seemed like the instructors aimed to do little more
than bilk money from people who dreamed of successful real estate careers.
In yet another uncanny twist of reality, Trump University, as well as the

Trump presidency, is over, but Trumpism seems to be strong and
unabashed and continues to offer a view into what happens when venture-
capitalism meets society-at-large. On their webpage, the U.S. Department
of Education defines diploma mills as “schools that are more interested in
taking your money than providing you with a quality education” and
warns, “you need to know how to protect yourself as a consumer”
(U.S. Department of Education, Laws & Guidance, Diploma Mills, n.p.).
By that definition, we can easily see how the current aggressive recruiting
strategies, accelerated credentialing, microcredentialing, and the rolling
back of academic quality within institutions of higher education, fits within
this definition of a degree mill.
So why did universities here in the U.S., and around the globe buy into
this predatory credentialing system, especially during the pandemic?
Ralston (2021, pp. 83–84) identifies two reasons, namely “administrative
urgency to unbundle higher education curricula and degree programs for
greater efficiency and profitability,” and “a renascent movement among
industry and higher education leaders to reorient the university curricu-
lum towards vocational training.” While we have identified some reasons
already throughout this book that pre-date the pandemic, i.e., the neolib-
eral context, privatization and outsourcing, fear of dropping enrollments
of both domestic and international students, we believe the primary rea-
son is the push by the private educational sector to take advantage of the
pandemic and move more aggressively into the market they felt was chang-
ing too slowly. In addition, university administrators have bought into this
new corporate model of higher education partly out of need as state fund-
ing was slowly withdrawn, and the scholarship award system was slowly
replaced by the student loan system, and simply because the new system of
higher education, regardless of its status (for-profit, non-profit, state) is
inherently profit-driven. This accelerated marketization of higher educa-
tion is a result of the so-called Triple Helix, which involves cooperation
between industry, higher education, and government to transform the sys-
tem of education into the image of neoliberalism with the promise of
efficiency, expediency, and profit (del Cerro Santamaría, 2020). We will
turn to this discussion next.
The Infrastructure of Deception: The Graduate

Degree Market
In the first year of the pandemic, US News & World Report reported how
the governors of various states were banding together to warn Americans
of the threat of degree mills, including useless certificate programs in the
for-profit college industry (Camera, 2020), programs likely leading to
greater debt and worthless credentials. The article also warned that crises
seem to be particularly fertile ground for exploitation. The infrastructure of
deception was steadily built for years. Using data from the National Center
for Education Statistics, the article showed that the for-profit sector
recorded a 22% increase in enrollment while overall enrollment in higher

education grew just 5% during the 2008 economic crisis (Camera, 2020,
para. 3). Prior to the pandemic, the lax federal regulations and online learn-
ing fueled the growth of for-profit colleges; according to Department of
Education data, enrollment in for-profit colleges in the United States
between 2006–2010 surged by 76% with 72% of all students enrolled in
that sector learning online, compared to only 12% of students enrolled in
four-year colleges (Riegg Cellini, 2020, paras. 3 and 8). During the pan-
demic, while everyone was fearing enrollment drops, the winners clearly
emerged. In the first year of the pandemic, for-profit colleges actually saw a
three percent increase in enrollment while public community colleges saw
a nine percent decline, according to National Student Clearinghouse data
(Riegg Cellini, 2020, para. 2). The for-profit colleges’ comeback and
growth of other edu-entrepreneurship have been, at least in part, due to the
Trump White House roll back of the Gainful Employment rule and the
weakening of the Borrower Defense Act put in place during Obama’s
administration to curb for-profit predatory practices in higher education.
And while the Obama administration added some data to the College
Scorecard, a Department of Education online tool that allows people to
compare costs of higher education by types of institutions, they eliminated
other data points “in ways that seem to favor for-profit institutions” (Riegg
Cellini, 2020, para. 7).
In addition, little has been done in the way of regulation to curb preda-
tory recruitment practices. As we’ve already discussed, partnerships with
private entities are encouraged rather than scrutinized. In fact, what we
clearly saw during the pandemic, and due to in large part increased com-
petition for students from the for-profit sector, non-profit private institu-
tions as well as state institutions, implemented aggressive recruitment
strategies, added online degree courses, programs, certificates, and badges
promising, stackable options, accelerated completion, and lower costs.
Furthermore, CARES Act funding that was distributed to institutions of
higher learning as a part of pandemic emergency relief funds could be used
for remote learning and digital technologies, and as we’ve already seen in
the previous chapter, many institutions are using it to implement new
online learning technologies and modalities, expanding everything from
hyflex to other more traditional online learning to use as standard tools
post-pandemic with the hope to increase their institutional marketability
and competitiveness. Here again we see the Triple Helix model in which
“the boundaries between industry, government, and higher education are
becoming increasingly blurred and intertwined.” (del Cerro Santamaría,

2020, p. 24).
In this model, private-public partnerships are encouraged and policy
obstacles for such partnerships are removed. Additionally, universities
must complete the transition to become entrepreneurial, must redefine
their priorities, and diversify their sources of income, basically acting as a
corporate for-profit entity. As such, students as customers, and industries
as employers drive the curriculum, affecting the role of faculty and campus
staff, and the quality of education at large (del Cerro Santamaría, 2020).
To exemplify this model, we could take a look at the EQUIP (Educational
Quality Through Innovative Partnerships) program, which was piloted
during the Obama administration in 2015, and continued during the
Trump administration. By 2018, three out of eight participating institu-
tions of higher education pulled out of the program. The program was
designed to create a partnership among eight institutions of higher educa-
tion and private higher education providers, such as MOOCs, with a goal
to help provide low-income students with “access to boot camps, massive
open online courses and other nondegree credentials, mostly from for-
profit alternative providers” (McKenzie, 2018, para. 2). The experiment
enabled the for-profit sector to tap into $120 billion of federal aid money
(Camera, 2020) to see if they could deliver “high standards of quality and
positive student outcomes” (McKenzie, 2018, paras. 2 and 18), virtually
erasing the Higher Education Act provision that does not allow universi-
ties and colleges to outsource more than 50% of their education programs
to non-accredited third-party providers. While the program ended pre-
pandemic, and while the Trump administration toyed with the idea to
allow similar arrangements by opening student loan aid to for-profit com-
panies that offer boot camps or certificates, at present, the for-profit sector
is pursuing outsourcing strategies, such as OPMs. The pilot program was
ridden by difficulties with neither clear evidence of high academic stan-
dards nor positive student outcomes. Moreover, even as it was short-lived,
its existence showed that those in charge of the neoliberal government and
its policies work in tandem with those in industry in a way that “dislocates
education by commodifying its intrinsic value and emphasizing directly
transferable skills and competencies” (Ralston, 2021, p. 83).
This neoliberal infrastructure built on the Triple Helix and supported
by the policy changes, even prior to the pandemic, was serving as a plat-
form for the transformation of colleges and universities beleaguered by the
fears of dropping enrollments, domestically due to fewer high-school
graduates, the so-called demographic cliff, and fewer international stu-

dents, for reasons we covered in the previous chapters. During the pan-
demic, the international student body further shrunk due to a combination
of public health policy, and, at least here in the United States, government
policies made it difficult for international students to enroll or stay enrolled
as they were put under the quota of how many distance learning courses
they could take. Higher education is one of America’s largest service
exports, bigger than agriculture like corn and soybeans, and during the
first year of the pandemic, we saw a 72% drop, that by 2021 leveled to
around 20%, with a ten billion dollar revenue loss (Fischer & Aslanian,
2021). But the U.S. is not alone. With a combination of strict lockdown
policies and the overall pandemic economy, no place has seen quite as big
of a ripple effect of this trend as Australia.
For example, staggering statistics show that in 2019, 51 thousand
international students decided to study in Australia, but by October of
2021 that number was cut by 99.7%, to just 130 students. This loss has
also resulted in a loss of 130,000 jobs (Hurley, 2021). With some rebound-
ing in 2021, in 2022, the loss of international students is hovering around
30% but the budget loss is close to 1.8 billion dollars (Kelly, 2022). The
situation is similar in New Zealand where the loss of international students
and foreign workers has had serious financial and safety repercussions for
the city of Auckland and its largest university, the University of Auckland
(Block & Gay, 2022). As real as these numbers are, even prior to the pan-
demic, the threat of eroding enrollments engulfed universities globally
and is particularly leading smaller tertiary institutions to become
degree mills.
In the Philippines, for instance, Senator Imee Marcos warned that, due
to the lack of monitoring from the Commission on Higher Education and
the switch to online learning, universities might become degree mills dur-
ing the pandemic (Politko North Luzon, 2020). But trends date back to
pre-pandemic years. The question that lingers, though, is whether the
fears of revenue loss are bigger than the actual threats, and whether the
rapid increase in majors, certificates, and other microcredentialing is a cure
to the perceived problem. In 2018, The Hechinger Report published an
article titled, “Panicked universities in search of students are adding thou-
sands of new majors.” The article analyzed federal figures and found that
“public and private higher education institutions have added 41,446
degree or certificate programs since 2012,” a 21% increase since the six-
year enrollment decline started due to a combination of falling birth rates
and the 2011 rebound of the post-2008 depression, “despite tight bud-
gets and high risks” (Marcus, 2018, para. 4). The panic reaction to this
decline was, and still is, adding majors and certificates that seem lucrative
or attractive to potential students/consumers, such as a BA in cybersecu-
rity launched at Western Nevada University, or a certificate in beer fermen-
tation launched at Central Michigan University. Certificate programs are
particularly lucrative, and according to data from the U.S. Department of
Education, at public universities the number of certificates since 2000 has
doubled, while private non-profit institutions have seen a 40% increase for
the same time period (Marcus, 2018, para. 18).
These trends are driven by fears rather than actual data, perceived inter-
ests of students, a more competitive market, and neoliberal economic rat-
ings, such as Moody’s, the bond-rating agency whose “grim projections
for higher education” changed to a credit positive development after the
“meteoric growth of certificate programs” (Marcus, 2018, para. 19). This
big story of the state of undergraduate education and the ways in which a
fears-driven managerial class, particularly coming out of enrollment man-
agement departments that are pushing often dubious degrees, and faculty
who feel pressured to approve them in fast-tracked fashion, is exposing the
erosion of academic standards and the academic integrity of their institu-
tions as a whole. The even bigger story seems to be what is happening on
the graduate level, particularly at the master’s degree level, although, as we
will see, no stone has been left unturned, as doctoral-level studies are
increasingly subject to predatory practices already firmly entrenched in
what Carey (2021, headline and subhead) calls, “the great Master’s-
Degree swindle,” the system in which “colleges are making a killing selling
dubious credentials to naïve students.” In 2017, PBS NewsHour featured
a story by Jon Marcus of The Hechinger Report that delved into how grad-
uate programs are becoming a “cash cow for struggling colleges” (Marcus,
2018, para. 5). In the story, they featured the master’s degree promotion
as a way to subsidize institutions’ undergraduate offerings, something
we’ve discussed earlier as well. He writes:
Cash-strapped private universities and colleges are relying on the money

they take in from their graduate programs to stabilize increasingly wobbly
budgets. Public institutions are using revenue from graduate offerings to
make up for state cuts and undergraduate tuition freezes ordered by gover-
nors and legislature.
Selling graduate degrees has become an industry in its own right as indus-
try is increasingly looking to hire graduates with advanced degrees evident
in data from the U.S. Department of Education that show that between
the 1970s and 2015 the number of graduates with masters degrees “has
more than tripled “(Marcus, 2017, para. 9). To meet that demand and fill
in revenue holes, universities jumped in with a “bandwagon” mentality,
often rushing uncritically into investments that sometimes do, but often
don’t pan out.
Even prior to the pandemic, many universities made strategic planning
decisions to pull back on growing undergraduate enrollment and focus
investments on growing graduate programs, with many in the ranks of
faculty concerned that such shifts seemed arbitrary and, in the case of lib-
eral arts institutions, not grounded in the institutions’ missions. At the
same time, across the country, we’ve seen austerity measures being
imposed on academic programs, particularly as they relate to hiring full-
time tenure-track faculty. Just like Carey (2021) outlines, much at the
same time, we started to receive numerous unsolicited marketing emails
from various universities seeking help in the recruitment of students to
their masters’ programs overwhelmingly taught solely online and over-
whelmingly taught solely by adjunct faculty.
The proliferation of masters’ degrees is reflected in the U.S. Department
of Education database that “lists more than 44,000 masters’ programs, a
testament to how graduate school has become a common way station for
many career paths—and how aggressively universities have moved into
the market, searching for profits,” (Carey, 2021, para. 11) enabled in
large part by the Grad PLUS program Congress passed in 2005, men-
tioned previously, that allowed students who wish to pursue graduate
degrees to take out an unlimited amount in federal student loans. While
PhDs are still, in most cases, controlled by the faculty, professional doc-
torates and masters’ degrees are controlled largely by lax government
policies and accrediting bodies (Carey, 2021, para. 17). Where the exploi-
tation of the opportunity lies right now is in lax federal laws through
which non-profit institutions can come up with masters’ degrees in just
about anything and “charge whatever they like, and be exempt from gov-
ernment rules that target for-profit colleges,” even as many professional
masters’ degrees must fulfill standards set by the labor markets and licen-
sure (Carey, 2021, para. 17). Doctoral education has also seen similar
trends on the eve of the pandemic. In the Forbes article based on a survey
sponsored by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics
(NCSES), the analysis outlined ten key changes in the doctoral degree
market over the last 20 years. The analysis showed that with an overall
increase in doctoral degrees there has also been an 11% increase in the
number of doctorate-granting institutions that jumped from 403 in 2000
to 449 in 2020. At the same time, the percentage of universities that are
classified by Carnegie as “very high research” that award doctoral degrees
has slightly decreased. Further, the number of those who become
employed in academia after they receive their doctoral degree is also
decreasing (Nietzel, 2021). These data support the trends we’ve outlined
here and throughout this book, namely that competition for advanced
degrees is slowly being subject to marketization forces. In addition, this
growth is leading to the accellerated overproduction of PhDs as a sys-
temic problem (Malloy et al., 2021) due, in part, to shrinking job oppor-
tunities for full employment in academia. But why are universities
resorting to the proliferation of graduate programs? Many universities,
besides the revenue incentives, add graduate programs to achieve higher
rankings that are believed to drive students’ choice in the increasingly
busy highway of tertiary education (del Cerro Santamaría, 2020).
Weissmann (2021, para 1) also points to a systemic problem in that
these trends increasingly blur the line “between for-profit and nonprofit
education.” During the pandemic, as we’ve argued previously, the picture
became even grimmer as the proliferation of graduate degrees met the
proliferation of online degree offerings. As the news kids on the block,
EdTech players joined the already existing race in the degree market
between for-profit colleges and non-profit public and private universities.
The result has been the explosion of traditional college credentialing and
reinvigorated microcredentialing systems. Many new graduate programs
added during the pandemic are online programs which further increased
their share in the market as we’ve seen their number more than triple
between 2008 and 2016. In fact, most of the loss from undergraduate
enrollments that stood at 4.5% was recuperated by a 4.3% increase in grad-
uate degree enrollments during the pandemic, according to the data from
the National Student Clearinghouse (Schwartz, 2022, para. 2; Dennon,
2021). The numbers during the pandemic grew particularly among stu-
dents of color (Redden, 2021), who are increasingly becoming victims of
the “great masters’ degree swindle,” drowning under the burden of stu-
dent debt lured in by the consistent promise of a lower cost of obtaining
such degrees online. Dennon (2021, para. 3) found that “despite the
lower institutional costs of online programs, master’s degrees continue to
rise in cost,” further aggravating the student loan debt crisis, and which is
receiving much earned public scrutiny in recent months (Korn & Fuller,
2021a). Much of the blame lies with elite universities that offer degrees
with very high price tags but little return on the investment for students.
The trend is increasingly being seen as a scam rather than a legitimate path
to education, and again the system as a whole is threatening the integrity
of higher education.
The “Microcredentialing Craze” Grows During

the Pandemic
Another area of concern is the business of microcredentialing through

certifications and badges. As the certification and need for re-skilling and
upskilling increased during the pandemic, traditional professional certifi-
cation bodies are also saw increased demand. Some recent assessments
show that demands are high for specialized certifications within an occu-
pation, and that certification bodies plan an increase of these types of cer-
tifications by nearly 70% in the coming years, indicating that much of the
trends evident in post-secondary education are also evident in the trends
affecting certification bodies (Cardenas-Navia, 2021). Specifically, employ-
ers saw microcredentialing as a quick way to upskill employees, and the
disruption in the job markets during the pandemic (Rose, 2021) created
opportunities for various companies in the for-profit sector to step into the
market typically by partnering with the institutions of higher education.
This “turn to learning” (Maloney & Kim, 2020) for many institutions is,
here again, driven by the desire to increase revenues, while for students,
it’s the need and demands of the market for ever-increasing credentials.
The market as such is ripe for scammers both traditional and new (Marcus,
December 26, 2021). There are over a million unique credentials in the
United States that include industry certificates, higher-ed certificates, pro-
fessional organization certificates, licenses, badges, and apprenticeships. A
non-profit organization, CredentialEngine, has stepped in to untangle the
“maze” of various credentials offered on the market to weed out scam-
mers (Marcus, December 26, 2021 para. 5). The craze over credentials is
pushing institutions of higher education into the market themselves with
global policymakers paving the way. As the pandemic was unfolding, for
instance, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD, 2021, p. 2) offered an education policy perspective on microcre-
dentialing and institutions of higher education, characterizing this trend
as “a race between innovation and public regulation.” They defined

microcredentialing as alternative learning programs and credentials to the
traditional higher education degree programs and include “academic cer-
tificates, industry certificates, and badges.” While there are various ways in
which microcredentials are defined, OECD (2021, p. 3) adopts the defini-
tion offered by Kato et al. (2020), and argues:
Most definitions of micro-credentials denote an organised learning activity

with an associated credential—the credential recognises a skill or compe-
tency that has been acquired through an organised learning process and vali-
dated through an assessment. Consequently, the term “micro-credential” is
commonly understood to refer to both the credential itself and the educa-
tion or training programme which leads to the credential award. The asso-
ciation of micro-credentials with a specific organised learning activity
distinguishes them from badges, which are intended to visually communi-
cate the achievement of a specific skill, knowledge or experience.
More importantly, the OECD report concludes that while microcreden-

tialing is still not in widespread use in higher education, the lack of gov-
ernment regulation is providing an opportunity to use them as another
source of revenue. In addition, policy infrastructure, just as we’ve seen
earlier, has been put in place all across the globe. For instance, in the midst
of the pandemic in September of 2020, European Union’s MICROBOL,
denoting microcredentials linked to the Bologna Key Commitments,
issued a document that outlined a two-year project co-funded by the
Erasmus + Programme of the European Union. The program aims to
engage in policy reforms to examine the ways in which microcredentialing
can provide access to continuous learning, to various people, regardless of
their “background, age, and experience” (p. 5), setting the stage for insti-
tutions of higher education, but also private companies, to enter and profit
off of education market. The document states:
The project focuses primarily on micro-credentials provided by higher edu-

cation institutions or in conjunction with them, but also touches upon those
entirely provided by companies or non-profit organisations, the system of
‘open badges’ and other bits of ‘micro’-learning, that might be recognised
by higher education institution.
Another large global player in education policy, the United Nations

Educational and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) also seems to be
promoting the business of microcredentialing in the pandemic era. In

September of 2020, UNESCO issued a paper that was commissioned by
UNESCO and written by Professor Beverly Oliver, titled “A Conversation
Starter: Towards a Common Definition of Micro-Credentials.” According
to Desmarchelier (2021, para. 11), the report describes microcredentials
as a “force for good” among ways to upskill workers and as a good way to
supplement traditional education. In Australia, the government invested
$4.3 million to create an online platform called “microcredentials market-
place” that allows users to compare short programs and courses
(Desmarchelier, 2021, paras. 1 and 20). The development of the platform
was won by Universities Admissions Centre (UAC), a non-for-profit com-
pany incorporated in 1995 that processes admissions for tertiary institu-
tions after they have successfully competed for a grant (Searson-Prakaash,
2021). In addition, 36 out of 42 universities in Australia were either
undergoing development of, or already had, a microcredentialing pro-
gram, and recently issued new guidance to improve the portability of
microcredentials across Australia (Desmarchelier, 2021).
A similar system was introduced in New Zealand in 2018 with a prom-
ise to bring government, business, and tertiary education together to cre-
ate opportunities for people with 5 to 40 credit opportunities to brush up
on their skills that aren’t offered in the existing post-secondary education
market (Hipkins, 2018). As governments are paving the way for post-
secondary institutions to embrace microcredentialing, additionally, and
more concerning for us, is the fact that online platforms are increasingly
fueling the microcredentialing opportunities, particularly during the pan-
demic, with the entry of for-profit entities and private interest into micro-
credentialing market. OECD report (2021, p. 1) states:
Online provision of micro-credentials is widespread. Digital learning plat-

forms are becoming an increasingly important channel for the delivery of
micro-credential programmes and the COVID-19 pandemic has further
strengthened their position. The past year has also seen a strengthening of
“own-brand” online learning ecosystems and environments provided by pri-
vate companies whose primary business is not education and/or training.
The microcredentialing system is supported by growing digital credential-

ing businesses that offer platforms and partnerships to industries, includ-
ing higher education. We’ve already mentioned Credly, which partners
with universities and other industries to help them issue credentials such
as digital badges. Another large player is Accredible which offers help with
software and digital platforms to assist partners with issuing microcreden-
tials. Another is Education Design Lab that also partners with Credly, and
boasts on their webpage, “We help learning providers and employers oper-
ationalize a micro-credential strategy to make learning more visible, por-
table, stackable, career-enhancing and, importantly, machine-readable.”
While microcredentialing is sold as an answer to everything from pro-
viding access while creating an “equitable, socially just, and thriving learn-
ing society for everyone” (Desmarchelier, 2021, para. 17) to helping
workers re-skill due to pandemic job losses or AI automation, we are dis-
tressed by the uncritical acceptance of another “bandwagon” mentality
like the one promoting graduate degrees as a revenue source. Desmarchelier
(2021, para. 20) summarizes some of the criticism that does exist in the
public sphere, mainly that credentials are created for the gig economy as
yet another way to privatize the educational sector and “transfer the cost
of training from the employer to the employee.” In that, this is not at all
new. Another criticism often mounted, and one with which we whole-
heartedly agree, is aimed at the internship craze that began decades ago.
This push for microcredentialing and vocationalization in higher educa-
tion is happening, precisely, because universities are seen as sites of critical
debates and scholarship, a threat to neoliberal elites who are finding new
ways to repurpose the mission of the university. As Ralston (2021, p. 94)
rightly points out:
The modern microcredentialing craze is an outgrowth of a renascent move-

ment to repurpose universities as sites (then place-based and now virtual) for
vocational training and workforce development.
The gravest concern, for certain, is related to the threat to the educational
mission and the articulation of objectives with little real learning happen-
ing, or as Ralston (2021, p. 96) explains, learning for skills is “learning to
earn” not “learning to learn.” If we are to judge by the past, these lofty
promises of microcredentialing seem a lot like promises made with other
“innovations” in post-secondary education, recall MOOCs, that ulti-
mately didn’t deliver on promises. The past provides some clues as to what
the post-pandemic future might bring in terms of outcomes, and more so
than not, as costs and benefits analyses are still being made, we can predict
with some degree of certainty that the outcomes are usually negative for
students when they are used as revenue streams.
In summary, for us, this story shows a kind of Triple Helix pandemic
shock doctrine, to borrow from Klein (2007), where institutions of higher
education and governments, and also intergovernmental bodies, have
come to depend on partnerships with the private sector for revenue
streams, and in that dependency, are transforming themselves by adopting
predatory market practices to lure students with often questionable offer-
ings with no clear benefits or outcomes. Indeed, as Ralston (2021) points
out, microcredentialing hasn’t been shown to improve worker conditions.
Ralston (2021) summarizes well the whole host of problems with micro-
credentialing, and the problem is indeed multifold. His list includes out-
comes such as reductivism (reduction of higher learning to a set of hard
skills and technical competencies), to which we would ironically add are
now increasingly being replaced by artificial intelligence; and the threat of
traditional degrees being replaced by microcredentialing systems. To this,
we would add that microcredentialing threatens, if not by replacement
then by the watering down of, the curriculum and accelerates the time to
degree completion so as to compete with stackable options. More impor-
tantly, Ralston (2021, pp. 95–96) points to microcredentialing as a “moral
hazard” as “administrators invested in microcredentialing as a revenue
generator will sometimes have to shirk their ethical duty to act in the best
interests of students in order to maximize profits.” Finally, and most
importantly, we see the potential for this to spiral out of control and seri-
ously damage the educational mission of institutions of higher education.
Ralston (2021, p. 95) makes a particularly eloquent point outlining the
concern with the loss of the educational mission and the future of the
university. He wrote:
Microcredentialing undermines the mission of higher education institutions.

It makes efficiency and profitability the guiding values of higher education
administration, not student learning and growth. Consequently, universities
and colleges increasingly imitate the structures and operations of businesses
and corporations, neglecting their traditional roles as institutions for knowl-
edge creation, sharing, and preservation. Unbundling, servitization, and
other strategic solutions enslave higher education to commercial ends—
eliminating inefficiencies, minimizing costs and maximizing profit—rather
than to goals aligned with the interest of students and society-at-large.
Maximizing profits is enabled on the back of the debt shock doctrine.

Indeed, when it comes to microcredentialing outcomes, the only clear
outcome that we can definitely point to is that it adds to student debt, the
topic of growing the private and the public concern to which we turn next
in the chapter that follows.
To end on a more uplifting note, however, we want to point out posi-
tive legislative developments in the United States that aim at curbing prof-
iteering in higher education. One relates to the re-introduction of the
Gainful Employment regulation into the Department of Education
agenda, a rule that was introduced in 2011 during the Obama administra-
tion but before it was fully implemented, it was removed by the Trump
administration. The regulation is meant to monitor the ability of gradu-
ates to pay off their student debt after three years of employment. Colleges
who graduated students that earn too little might lose their access to fed-
eral loan aid. For-profit colleges would be obligated to collect and report
that data, and private and public non-profit universities would have to
report data for their non-degree programs (Kelderman, 2022c). Another
positive development is legislation passed by the U.S. House of
Representatives on February 4, 2022 that expands Pell Grants to short-
term job training programs. While it is clear that the legislation supports
microcredentialing, it also sets limits and makes online programs ineligible
for expansion. The bill passed in the U.S. Senate in 2021, and in 2022, the
U.S. House added the limit to expansion language “allowing Pell Grants
to apply to any short-term program with at least 150 clock hours of
instruction time over a period of at least 8 weeks as long as it is not primar-
ily delivered online” (Smalley, 2022c). These developments are encourag-
ing, but the ultimate success will require more systemic changes in the
shape of de-corporatization of higher education, federal regulation, and
the role of government in the student loan debt crisis.
CHAPTER 10
Tuition Increases Also Don’t Stop

for Pandemics: Student Debt Realities
in the Age of COVID-19
In this chapter, we examine the relationship between tuition increases and

student debt that has become not only an American experience but a
growing global concern as students in the United Kingdom, Australia,
Japan, and increasingly in countries in Africa and Latin America (Musto,
2019) grapple with life-crushing student debt. It’s not surprising that stu-
dent debt has been one of the most publicly discussed topics during the
COVID-19 pandemic. The link between tuition increases and student
debt is undeniably straightforward and cannot be understood indepen-
dently from of decades of policy decisions that have led to a systemic fail-
ure of government, particularly here in the United States, to support the
institution of higher education, and education as a whole. This dangerous
calculation, as we witness today, is shattering the foundation of democracy
itself. In the midst of the fight against COVID, many administrators in the
U.S. decided to increase tuition for students and their families during the
pandemic, in many instances, several times over, in what can be described
as akin to other forms of price-gouging of vulnerable people and commu-
nities during disasters. While, in general, during the 2020–2021 academic
years, according to the College Board’s 2021 Trends in College Pricing
and Student Aid Report, tuition costs for students and their families grew
at the slowest rate during the first two years of the pandemic, in part due
to the CARES Act money, as we near the end of the spring 2022 semester,
we are witnessing tuition prices on the rise. Administrators blame inflation

Switzerland AG 2022
and budget shortfalls for the hike (Golembeski, 2022). During the pan-
demic years, some colleges increased tuition charges to students by a few
percentage points, such as our own university, packaging it as the lowest
increase in years, while other colleges decided to freeze tuition, which
resulted in the slowest tuition growth in two decades, and in some cases,
the decline in student tuition prices when adjusted for inflation (College
Board, 2021). However, that slow pace of increase has been truly
short-lived.
More specifically, both scholars and media have analyzed the growth of
tuition and fees at colleges nationally and found that between the aca-
demic years 1971–1972 and 2019–2020 the tuition increase more than
tripled. In the period between 1980 to 2019, college costs for students
and their families increased by 169% while earnings for workers between
the ages of 22 and 27 increased by just 19% (Carnevale et al., 2021; Hess,
2021; DePietro, 2020). Data from the Best College Rankings show steep
increases in tuition charges for ranked private and public colleges from
2002 to 2022, with average tuition and fees at private national universities
jumping 144 percent, while out-of-state tuition and fees at public univer-
sities jumping 171 percent, and in-state tuition and fees at public universi-
ties grew by 211 percent (Boyington et al., 2021). Regardless of the brief
slowdown in tuition increases during the first two years of the pandemic,
it is clear from a review of the landscape of tuition increases and student
debt overall, particularly as connected to “value proposition” market ide-
ologies, that we were witnessing the same tuition management tactics of
consistent increases year after year, even as we were still mired in the
uncertainty of the COVID-19.
The Context: How Did Student Loans Become

a Crisis?
Tuition hikes and student debt are intrinsically related. It’s enough to take
a look at the history of the higher education enterprise in the U.S., to see
how the relationship developed over time. While many have written fine
monograms devoted to an analysis of student debt, calling it “the student
loan scam” (Collinge, 2010), or “the student loan mess” (Best, 2014), we
are relying heavily here on the very recent work and phenomenal historical
analysis of “indentured students” provided by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
(2021, in the title), who has also written features on the same topic for The
Washington Post, Inside Higher Ed, The Hill and more. From her analysis,
10 TUITION INCREASES ALSO DON’T STOP FOR PANDEMICS: STUDENT… 221
it is readily apparent that the student loan system since Johnson’s 1965
Higher Education Act has been systematically designed to assure maxi-
mum profits for private lenders who lent government money to genera-
tions of Americans aspiring to better themselves by earning a college
degree, making this arrangement, perhaps, one of the longest outsourcing
projects in U.S. history. Neoliberalism in the years since Reagan’s presi-
dency, and going forward, continued a “decades-long push to turn more
government services fully over to the private sector” (Shermer, 2021,
p. 286).
Even prior to 1965 in the history of higher education and policy that
aimed at college affordability, private interests wanted to make a profit out
of public money. Catholic elites who objected to government support of
secular institutions, university professors who feared that government
money would impact academic freedom, and white supremacists who
feared that such “outlandish” ideas would undermine segregation, stood
in the way of creating a truly affordable and accessible college (Shermer,
2021). During the First Gilded Age at the turn of the nineteenth–twenti-
eth century, the economic system benefited financial industries while
growing income inequalities led to painful hardship and struggles to afford
college that culminated in the 1920s. The politics of race and wealth accu-
mulation embodied in the American capitalist system that prefers tax cred-
its over direct government support, and focuses on lending to individual
students rather than offering support to institutions of higher education,
even during the New Deal and 1930s reforms, led to a loan system in
which only some Americans enjoyed post-war prosperity (Shermer, 2021).
The 1943 end of the work-study program that many Americans benefited
from, and the G.I. Bill that followed, had serious consequences that paved
the way to the kind of student debt economy we are witnessing today.
Shermer (2021) writes:
The law’s (GI Bill) greatest legacy was its hastily arranged compromise to
support undergraduates not with “free ride” scholarships but with loans, a
form of student assistance that had not been seriously considered in the
1930s and 1940s. This provision opened a Pandora’s Box. (p. 11)
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s landmark Higher Education Act

created a system modeled on the New Deal’s mortgage assistance program
for private financiers to profit off of lending money to the government
through the Guaranteed Student Loan Program, later renamed, the
Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFEL). A number of regula-

tions in the post-New Deal world made banking more accountable, and
by some, less profitable and therefore more “boring” (Shermer, 2021,
p. 252). It wasn’t until the 1972 reauthorization of the 1965 Higher
Education Act that financiers fully embraced the system and lobbied to
make it a less boring but rather exciting profit-making scheme. Shermer
(2021) writes:
American financiers needed the government-backed financial products and

the secondary market to trade them in the 1970s and 1980s, when lawmak-
ers began to tear apart the rules and regulations that had made banking safe
for consumers and boring for bankers since the 1930s. Finance, insurance,
and real estate only became more lucrative in decades scholars have associ-
ated with the country’s financialization. The new student loan program
modeled on older federal mortgage assistance just offered financiers another
way to increase customers and profits at a time when they faced more com-
petition from across state lines and international borders as a new multipolar
global economic order emerged. (p. 252)
Sallie Mae, a financial institution established in 1973 to service student

loans, turned the business of postsecondary education into a lucrative
business, and with that, the “new era of education financing began” which
ultimately turned higher education “into a commodity for the financial
elite” (Shermer, 2021, p. 253).
With Reagan’s neoliberal visions of the 1980s that brought raids on
student borrowers, investigations, and austerity measures in higher educa-
tion “served a variety of conservative goals in the larger effort to roll back
liberal equal opportunity and social welfare guarantees” (Shermer, 2021
p. 251). We can see eerily similar methods used today, particularly during
the first two years of the pandemic where austerity measures, attacks on
faculty, attacks on critical race theory, and attacks on tenure are framed up
by the same old conservative playbook out of the Reagan years as nothing
more than a guarantee of parental rights. As Shermer (2021) writes,
“Parents, many family-values conservatives insisted [at the time], should
be the ones making decisions about their children’s educations” (p. 251).
The politicization of education and government policies in general, and
through the Department of Education in particular, as it was governed by
more political appointees than any other department in the U.S. govern-
ment (Shermer, 2021), meant that the student loan industry emerged as
the biggest beneficiary of the 1972 authorization, and the academy, along
with the students, the biggest losers. Then, like now, the loan industry
lobbied to benefit from disorganized, unfocused, and “piecemeal” policies
(Shermer, 2021, p. 245). As neoliberalism took hold, the system allowed
bankers to thrive, while wages, particularly for people of color, stagnated.
To keep the lucrative student lending business for financial elites going,
Congress continually reduced spending on education and offered limited
tuition assistance to students and their families, and colleges continued to
increase tuition on students and families instead to make up for losses
caused by the rising operating costs, and for the general retreat of govern-
ment support for education. The result was an unprecedented rise in
tuition. Shermer (2021, p. 246) writes:
Tuition rates rise far faster than consumer prices and average disposable
incomes after the 1972 reauthorization. For much of the twentieth century,
tuition had accounted for 20 percent to 25 percent of the academy’s reve-
nue. By 2000, enrollees and their families covered 28 percent of private
campuses’ operating costs and 19 percent of public institutions’ needs.
Average tuition rates rose by 47 percent at public universities and 42 at pri-
vate institutions between the 1993–1994 and 2003–2004 academic years.
In our analysis of the emerging scholarly literature, we can conclude

that the story of student indebtedness and growing tuition in higher edu-
cation is the story of a rampant capitalist takeover of higher education, a
takeover of a system already organized even prior to that historical move-
ment by processes that create and further racial and gender inequities.
While some of the more recent policy decisions have made those condi-
tions much worse for regular folk to afford a college education (see also
Scott III et al., 2022), as Shermer (2021, p. 6) writes, college was never
affordable: “[S]tudents and parents have struggled to pay for college since
the early days of the republic.” She also writes:
Students of color, particularly women, are most likely to find themselves

taking out more loans, struggling to repay them, and defaulting. African
American and Latinx families generally lack the inherited family wealth that
makes paying out of pocket for college possible. They spend more money
over time to earn the same degrees as their wealthier peers, which only wid-
ens the racial and wealth gap-a relatively new phase that speaks to systemic
inequalities far beyond the simple differences in pay that persist even among
Ivy League white and minority alumni. Gender-based salary differences have
also left women owing disproportionately more.
Shermer’s (2021, p. 7) historical analysis of the economic elite’s cre-

ation of a system that would, in effect, indenture millions of students, as
she herself states, “offers insights into the trajectory and fate of the entire
American democratic experiment” as “partisanship, faith and free enter-
prise, American federalism, misogyny, and white supremacy limited the
New Deal’s impact even decades before conservatives began to dismantle
banking, housing, pension, and other social welfare provisions.” Indeed,
the weakening of the social contract created during the New Deal is falling
apart before our eyes as conservatives use the COVID-19 pandemic to try
to finalize their anti-democratic economic and political vision of America.
Pandemic and Student Debt: Where Are

We Right Now?
According to The Hill (Ali & Barnes, 2022, para. 2), nearly 43 billion
U.S. students owed close to 1.6 trillion dollars at the end of 2021. Fast
forward to only a few months later, in April 2022, when total student loan
debt stood at $1.75 trillion, as reported by Forbes (Hahn & Tarver, 2022)
using data from the Federal Reserve, The Institute for College Access and
Success, College Board, and MeasureOne. Of that $1.75 million, federal
loans made up 92% of the debt carried by individuals and families. In addi-
tion, in the last 30 years, they write that “tuition costs at public four-year
colleges grew from $4160 to $10,740 and from $19,360 to $38,070 at
private nonprofit institutions (adjusted for inflation). As costs have risen,
so has the need for student loans and other forms of financial aid” (Hahn
& Tarver, 2022, para. 1). Evidently, the system of structural adjustment
and the debt economy that Klein (2007, p. 202) also refers to as the
“dictatorship of debt” has continued regardless of whether Republican or
Democratic presidents governed.
Retracing recent historical developments in order to explain further,
the rise of student indenture and the costs of tuition for students and their
families have “ballooned” since the Great Recession of 2007. According
to the Bipartisan Policy Center report (Ruddy et al., 2021, p. 1), the total
debt that students carried grew from $642 billion in 2007 to $1.566 tril-
lion in 2020, a 144% increase. The Great Recession’s unemployment
spike, as we’ve discussed in previous chapters, resulted in students return-
ing to colleges to earn degrees, which created a spike in federal loan appli-
cations. In just one year alone, from 2008 to 2009, federal loan applications
increased 10% according to the Bipartisan Policy Center report. However,
as the credit markets tightened, private lenders struggled to extend credit

to people and families, and “the number of FFEL lenders quickly dropped
by 65%” (Ruddy et al., 2021, p. 7). To assure that students had access to
federal loans, in 2010 the federal government shifted to issuing direct
loans using funds from the U.S. Treasury. Student borrowing and debt
surged between 2007 and 2015 and has continued to grow through the
pandemic. The Great Recession and 2008 reauthorization, as Shermer
(2021, pp. 283–286) writes, led to political fights to cut “bankers out of
the business of student lending”, but political interests, particularly on the
Republican side and the work of lobbyists, made sure that compromises
that were made to the 2010 Health Care and Education Reconciliation
Act would see to it that a “number of the largest lenders” survived “what
Democrats had hoped would be their death knell.”
One company that benefited from this political battle was Navient, a
company that was created in 2014 by Sallie Mae to take over student loan
lending and to free up Sallie Mae to focus on consumer lending. In the
years since, the company has grown to become a student lending behe-
moth. However, starting in 2017, a number of lawsuits poured into the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from various states (Cowley &
Silver-Greenberg, 2017, paras. 1–2) alleging that the nation’s largest loan
servicing company, servicing a total of “$300 billion in private and federal
loans for some 12 million people” […] “has for years misled borrowers
and made serious mistakes at nearly every step of the collections process,
illegally driving up loan repayment costs for millions of borrowers” (paras.
1 and 4). Fast forward to 2022, while still in the thick of the battle with
COVID, Navient reached a settlement with 39 states to wipe out $1.7 bil-
lion in private student loans for students who borrowed from predatory
for-profit universities, the same ones Navient steered students and their
families toward, for years. Hundreds of thousands of people borrowed,
but debt erasure only came to those who defaulted on their loans, even as
prosecutors concluded that Navient aggressively pushed risky loans for
students to study at predatory for-profit schools for worthless degrees
knowing full well that students would not be able to repay those loans
(Cowley, 2022, para. 1–3).
If this weren’t appalling enough, disaster capitalism at its best was in full
display as the pandemic reached its heights, particularly in its impact on
low income, people of color. In a press release on October 20, 2021,
Navient announced “that its proposal to transfer the loan servicing of
5.6 million Department of Education-owned student loan accounts to
Maximus has received all necessary approvals” (Navient News, 2021, para.
1). This move effectively replaced Navient as the contractor for the
Department of Education to Maximus Education LLC under the name
Aidvantage. Maximus has been in business since 1975 with a tagline that
says, “Helping Government Serve the People” (Business Wire, 2021b,
para. 5). It would all sound so wonderful if we weren’t so skeptical of the
track record that private middlemen have when it comes to managing
government money and servicing the people. What’s more, the Navient
press release announced that both the technology platform and the people
previously working for Navient would be moved directly to Maximus:
“The loans will remain on the same student loan servicing technology
platform, owned by Fiserv, and about 800 Navient employees who had
previously worked on the Department of Education loan servicing team
will transfer to Maximus” (Business Wire, 2021b, para. 2). As in the past,
these moves come not only as a result of illegal practices by private lenders
that have been widely documented, but also as a result of policy changes
that would occur as the pandemic consumed our global focus. Specifically,
the U.S. Department of Education, as a part of the NextGen Initiative,
announced changes to the federal loan system in 2020 that would now
have stricter government regulations. The government extended the offer
to 10 current loan servicers, which included Navient, but it was Navient,
“along with FedLoan and Granite State, [that] opted to end their partici-
pation in federal student loan servicing at the end of 2021” (Johnston &
Paez Bowman, 2022). Not even the predatory and illegal activities of
Navient were enough for private businesses to be denied an invitation to
the government-sponsored money dealing party. But not surprisingly,
some rejected the invitation, as the regulations were too much to bear for
corporate-sponsored greed accustomed to scamming and cheating as a
go-to method for increasing profit margins.
The field of loan scammers is large and filled with big and small players.
For instance, in late March 2022, the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau (CFPB) fined a small student-loan company, Edfinancial Services,
$1 million dollars for breaking the law by lying to students and families
about loan forgiveness, and specifically for not providing accurate “infor-
mation to borrowers of the privately held Federal Family Education Loan
(FFEL) program about their eligibility for the Public Service Loan
Forgiveness (PSLF) program—a program that forgives student debt for
public servants after ten years, and recently expanded its eligibility to
include FFEL borrowers through a temporary waiver” (Sheffey, 2022,
para. 3). The CFPB found that Edfinancial engaged in this behavior inten-
tionally to increase its own profit margins. All this was happening while the
political elite in Washington debated student loan forgiveness in the midst
of the outbreak. With progressives in the Democratic party pushing for
complete forgiveness, moderates, and the Republicans worry, as it is accus-
tomed to doing, about the “handouts to the majority” that allegedly gov-
ernment can’t afford while we witness, over and over again, government
funneling money into the pockets of private businesses, that, in return, do
everything in their power to increase their profit margins, even if it means
doing it illegally. Yet, while millions of Americans have their dreams of a
good life shattered, drowning under the weight of student debt, private
businesses shift shape their business strategies to assure money-making
schemes continue. A few regulations and policy changes have not funda-
mentally changed the system that is designed to produce “indentured stu-
dents” (Shermer, 2021, in the title) and the indentured citizenry at large.
In fact, the higher education system has arguably been the largest and the
longest system in American society, and perhaps the most hypocritical, in
its promise to assure access and close the inequality gaps. As Shermer
(2021, pp. 292–293) writes, an analysis of data from the Department of
Education and Internal Revenue Service exposes that “inequalities [have
been] built into and sustained by the American system of higher educa-
tion.” She writes:
Analysis exposed, for example, that education borrowing had in fact only
added to the wealth gaps between men and women and between white and
people of color. Other startling trends also became evident: growing num-
bers of Americans were borrowing far more than in decades past, owed
more than they took out for years after graduation, and were headed for
likely default, even if they graduated from reputable two-and four-year col-
leges. In 2020, a watchdog group even discovered a data-driven private
lender offering higher interest rates to debt holders who had attended
HBCUs or predominantly Latinix institutions.
Here again, it is hard not to see the American system of higher educa-
tion as a massive vehicle of the larger system of capitalism that places prof-
its over people, as our analysis in this book returns us to repeatedly. What’s
even more devastatingly evident from a closer look at the case of the fed-
eral student loan system, is that the American government, itself, heralded
as from the people and for the people, is more aptly understood as from
the business and for the business of profiting off the people, particularly
low-income people of color. Although student debt was one of the first
pandemic issues addressed when the Biden administration signed The
Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act into law in
March 2020, crushing student loan debt still weighs heavily on a large
number of Americans. The law allowed students to suspend payments on
federal student loans, automatically waived interest on those loans, and
suspended collection attempts, wage garnishments, and tax refund sei-
zures on defaulted federal student loans which saved students and their
families $200 billion dollars (Luthi, 2022, para. 3, and Vinopal, 2022),
many student loan borrowers hoped that Biden and the Democrats will
deliver on full student loan forgiveness legislation. And while the
U.S. Department of Education has, as we write, extended the pause on
student loan repayment for the fifth time in two years as a part of the
COVID-19 Emergency Relief and Federal Student Aid plan, and while
discussions of student debt forgiveness are still ongoing, it is becoming
more evident that students will face a resumption of student debt pay-
ments shortly into the future. As White House press secretary, Jen Psaki,
said in April 2022, students will likely have to pay up their debts sometime
during the Biden administration (Ward, 2022). The “breathing room” for
$1.7 trillion in student debt, in Psaki’s words, refers to the deferment of
student loans that the government created for the American people during
the pandemic (Ward, 2022, para. 2). Not so incidentally, the same
American political-economic system, in a non-accidental mathematical
alignment, also created an exactly $1.7 trillion dollars collective wealth
gain for 704 billionaires during the pandemic, enough to wipe out all
student debt (Kaplan & Sheffey, 2022).
Nonetheless, the conversations among the wealthy when it comes to
income sharing focus not on debt erasure, but on what even Milton
Friedman called a form of “partial slavery”, “a new version of indentured
servitude” (Shermer, 2021, pp. 294–295). The idea is to basically “treat
education like other forms of investment” by which the rich would invest
in students by betting on their future earnings’ success. If students end up
successful, then students would repay the investment in a percentage of
their earnings, also known as income-share agreements or ISA. Purdue
University piloted an income-share program in 2015 they named “Bet on
a Boiler” and it is currently known as “Back a Boiler,” which has already
come under sharp criticism (Kelderman, 2022c). Touted as a creative
alternative to conventional student loans, in some cases, these deals, such
as when a “Boiler” earns more than projected, students could be faced

with the requirement to pay the maximum 250% that is set in the disclo-
sure agreements as the payment cap. This payout ends up to be “far more
than would be owed for even a private loan” (Kelderman, 2022c, para.
18). For many participants, the system is not an alternative to avoid debt.
Far from it. As one Purdue graduate who participated in the program, and
cited in the Kelderman (2022c, para. 7) article for The Chronicle, stated,
“[T]he program feels like a form of ‘predatory lending,’ because it preys
on student fears of being deep in debt.” These reprehensible schemes, in
unprecedented times that challenge our moral standing, remind us that
our ideas of a Great Society have all but evaporated in the sea of the debt
economy. The image that comes closest to mind is that of the Titanic trag-
edy that occurred in 1912 during the First Gilded Age. The image of the
majority flailing their hands in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic,
gasping for air and calling for help, while a mostly wealthy minority in the
boats nearby pushed down under with ores those few who dared to climb
onboard, down under.
The American Dream Illusion: Student Debt

and Tuition Increase Consequences
In the public domain, there is no shortage of stories devoted to the stu-

dent debt crisis and college tuition increases, debates that stretch our
imagination of whether college is worth the kind of crushing debt that
many students end up incurring in the pursuit of a degree that is supposed
to deliver on a better life, and the American Dream. For many, however,
that dream is an illusion, and one that became increasingly so during the
pandemic. As the story of an art student struggling to pay her student loan
debt to attend a now-defunct art school shared in The New York Times
(Cowley, 2022) shows, many graduates now owe more than $100 thou-
sand dollars in student loan debt, a number that has significantly increased
during the pandemic, forcing them to delay major life decisions, like start-
ing a family or buying their first home (Hare, 2022). Among the highest
debt ratio increases are graduate students. And that is by design. According
to Ruddy, et al. (2021, p. 11) of the Bipartisan Policy Center, out of four
types of loans that the federal government offers today, borrowing for
graduate students has nearly doubled between 2014–2020. They write:
Direct Unsubsidized Loans accounted for the largest overall increase in out-
standing Federal student debt between 2014 and 2020, increasing by $137
billion in real terms. However, borrowing under two other loan types, Grad
PLUS and Parent PLUS Loans, grew at the fastest rates. Between 2014 and
2020, outstanding Grad PLUS Loan debt nearly doubled (from $45 billion
to $83 billion in real terms), while Parent PLUS Loan debt grew by almost
50% (from $71 billion to$101 billion in real terms).
The problem with graduate loans isn’t that graduate students are more
likely to borrow, but rather that graduate students are pressured to take on
more significant debt “because they are ineligible for most federal grant-
based aid, such as Pell Grants and Federal Supplemental Educational
Opportunity Grants, and because graduate programs tend to cost more”
(Ruddy et al., 2021, p. 11). GradPLUS loans also don’t have borrowing
limits and graduate students can borrow up to the cost of attendance.
This, coupled with the fact that graduate degrees cost more, as Ruddy
et al. (2021, p. 12) show: “[I]n 2016, the average borrower who received
a bachelor’s degree borrowed $28,900, compared to $63,700 for a mas-
ter’s degree and $181,400 for a professional doctorate.” Graduate stu-
dents who pursue graduate and professional degrees, like doctorates, now
make up 40% of the outstanding cumulative student debt, and each gradu-
ate student owes three times more, on average, than an undergraduate
student—and that was before the pandemic hit. As we will explore in the
next chapter, this system of high tuition/high borrowing in graduate edu-
cation has also exacerbated academic “degree milling.” Overall, a central
higher education “survival strategy” has been increasing tuition and grad-
uate student debt (Marcus, 2019, para 6). Consequently, regardless of the
“value proposition” rhetoric that promises undergraduate students that
their college investment will pay off, we see that this too is often an illu-
sion for many graduate students. A recent Wall Street Journal article docu-
ments that New York University has earned an “ignominious distinction”
in this regard as more and more graduates and their parents are drowning
under debt that paid for expensive degrees that bring low salaries (Korn &
Fuller, 2021b, para 4).
It is not surprising then that income inequality in the U.S. is surging, in
addition to student loan debt that is overwhelmingly held by women and
people of color (Shermer, 2021; Ruddy et al., 2021; Hess, 2022), and that
the very same income inequality drives decisions by elites to increase
tuition costs as universities are “incentivized to offer discounts to high

performing, low-income students” (Whitford, 2022a, para. 1). A recently
published study found that “increases in US income inequality can explain
more than half of the observed rise in average net tuition since 1990 and
that rising income inequality has also depressed college attendance” (Cai
& Heathcote, 2022, p. 81). In short, contrary to administrative promises,
American higher education is in service of furthering income inequality
rather than reducing it. Lower-income Americans are also much more
likely to default on student loans, a crisis which has been further exacer-
bated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, lower-income people who
borrow are five times more likely to default than those in higher income
brackets (Jabarri et al., 2020), and those who default are excluded from
loan deferment and eligibility for other benefits, such as the ability to
choose a repayment plan. Those who default are also excluded from eligi-
bility for additional federal student aid, the consequences of which are
clearly outlined on the U.S. Department of Education web page
(U.S. Department of Education, para. 9). It is also not surprising to see
that this devastating system of student loan debt leaves the student popu-
lation food and housing insecure. Repeated surveys by Temple University’s
Hope Center for College, Community and Justice, which studies basic
needs insecurity for college students, found that over 30% of students
reported being food insecure in the last 30 days. During COVID, the
crisis deepened, especially for those who got infected with COVID as they
were 1.7 times more likely to experience food insecurity than those that
didn’t get infected (Rowan, 2021). Food insecurity for students has also
been linked to lower graduation rates (John Hopkins Bloomberg School
of Public Health, 2021).
The consequences are clearly many and devastating for American stu-
dents, and their families, for the U.S. economy, and society at large. We
are seeing glimpses of hope in a plan to double the maximum Pell Grant,
a need-based grant that students don’t have to repay (that plan currently
covers only 29% of college costs, an increase that still would not cover the
total cost of attending college, or even the 79% of the total cost that it
covered in 1975 (Protopsaltis & Parrott, 2017; Long, 2022)), and in a
plan unveiled by Williams College that announced all grant financial aid
policy for their students (Hoover, 2022); Still, the hard truth is that our
system of political and economic governance is broken, and in the contin-
ued machinations of the student loan system during the pandemic, has all
but dealt a devastating and final blow to the idea of the American dream.
As Shermer (2021) concluded, and we wholeheartedly agree, education
is a basic necessity that must be treated not as a privilege for the few, but
as a right to all, a right “critical to forming a more perfect union” (p. 301).
If COVID-19 taught us anything, it is that we can’t stand on the sidelines
and wait for a change, rather as our resistance chapter argues, those of us
in higher education and outside, must band together to fight the system
that ultimately benefits no one. In these trying times, we’ve learned that
a free society founded on the ideals of democracy can’t exist alongside a
debt economy. To achieve the full benefits of a free and democratic soci-
ety we must achieve freedom from debt. We can start with student
debt first.
CHAPTER 11
Sacrificial Lambs
Throughout our analysis in this book, we have asserted that COVID-19

pandemic opportunism targets students and families in ways that are
deeply tied to the larger political economy of late-stage global capitalism
that has situated millions of working people, disproportionately women
and people of color in extreme precariousness as simultaneously “essen-
tial” and “disposable.” Academic capitalists in global TEMPs relied on the
labor of largely women and people of color as “essential workers” on the
frontlines of the pandemic to ensure students received “the college experi-
ence.” Academic capitalists also depended on students to be “essential
consumers” to sustain their goals for market expansion, even when that
consumerism would prolong the pandemic and endanger lives of students,
workers, and campus communities.
In the first year of the pandemic alone, The New York Times reported
more than 530,000 cases of COVID directly linked to American college
campuses, including 100 deaths of students and employees (NYT, 2021a),
though that number is likely a serious undercount given the lack of
national testing and tracking data, and the highly variable patchwork of
testing and tracking protocols in colleges and universities across the coun-
try. Leaving aside the behemoth of tuition hikes and student loan debt,
which we covered in the previous chapter, in this chapter, we focus more
squarely on related predatory mechanisms of racialized disaster patriarchal
capitalism in the pandemic higher education space. Promoting the

Switzerland AG 2022
narrative that students deserve “the college experience” as a way to justify

maintaining, and in some cases, increasing revenue streams, global TEMPS
and college and university leaders have flagrantly put students and their
families at risk in terms of their finances and their physical safety and men-
tal health. In perhaps the most chilling example, some U.S. college and
university presidents took the step to lobby the federal government for
liability protections against lawsuits for COVID-related illness and death
(Murakami, 2020a). While the consequences are numerous, profound,
and yet to be fully determined, we shed light on several additional exam-
ples that speak to the ways in which, what Klein (2007) might call, the
shape-shifting tactics of academic capitalists and state legislators impacted
students as pandemic marks through student housing policies, decisions
about college sports, CARES Act funding mechanisms, and attacks on the
curriculum. In the relentless push for profits and growth over the human-
ity of students and the social relations of caring, creativity, community, and
citizenship, the pandemic landscape of higher education was awash with
sacrificial lambs.
Heads in Beds: Students at the Mercy

of Housing Contracts
In the early weeks of the pandemic, as it became clear that higher educa-
tion would need a plan not only for spring 2020 semester but for summer
and fall as well, campus officials began the head-spinning work of deciding
how to best administer quality academic programming while also keeping
students safe. Would fully remote learning continue into the summer and
fall? Would they mandate hyflex modalities? Would they delay the restart
of terms? Would they cancel fall breaks? While a slew of ideas with more or
less viability would be generated in those nightmarish times, and under-
standably so given the uncharted waters, one proposal jumped out as truly
absurd to us as faculty leaders on the front lines of the negotiations: Bring
students back to campus housing to take their classes entirely online from
single-room occupancy dorms. This way, students could “still have the
college experience” despite the fact that students would not be permitted
to congregate on campus, engage in any student activities, have visitors to
their dorms or dorm rooms, or have access to campus dining other than,
perhaps, to pick up prepared meals. In those moments, these preposterous
plans percolating all across the country seemed like something off the
front page of the satirical paper, The Onion—laughable if it weren’t for the
11 SACRIFICIAL LAMBS 235
shamelessness of it all. For in fact, this model of bringing students back to

campus to sit in their dorms and take classes online is precisely what hap-
pened at many schools in the United States. As it happened, and despite
COVID protocols put in place in these scenarios, such as they were, stu-
dents would eventually contract the virus in extraordinary numbers.
Astonishingly, students who were brazenly sold “the college experi-
ence” in the midst of a pandemic, found themselves isolated in quarantine
dorms, awaiting food and medical care, including care packages from their
parents and loved ones who were unable to visit. In some cases, COVID
positive students were not permitted to stay on campus, shipped back
home to risk further infection of families and communities. But like the
not-so-innocent brainstorming around “creative” solutions to manage the
delivery of curriculum in the hyflex mode that we have discussed in previ-
ous chapters, it wouldn’t take long to recognize that these macabre plans
to bring students back to campus dorming during a pandemic betrayed
not only the outsized role of campus housing revenue in the larger land-
scape of corporatized higher education pre-pandemic, but also the par-
ticularly frightening reality of privatized campus housing.
To better understand how campus housing plans fit into the pandemic
“gold rush” run on colleges and universities, a minute of background on
the transformation of the public good of student housing into an asset
owned or controlled (wholly or in part) by private investors, at times via
the establishment of what are called public-private partnerships, or P3
contracts. In these instances, a private investor, sometimes taking out “off
balance sheet” loans to do so, invests cash up front at a college or univer-
sity in exchange for accessing or acquiring control of some part of the
educational asset, or some part of the education operations, of the college
or university over an extended period of time (Carpenter, 2021). These
investment deals can include the kinds of online program management
contracts we discussed in previous chapters, and are premised on business
models that analysts have shown build in cost-overruns and institutional-
ized price gouging of students.
In this case, instead of offering affordable housing publicly-owned and
run by the campus if a public school, or privately-owned and managed by
non-profit private schools, higher education administrators and public
officials have chosen to transfer commonly held assets to for-profit hous-
ing corporations. As Rick Seltzer (2020, para. 5), explained writing for
Inside Higher Education:
Often the deals are structured in a way that allows colleges and universities
to shed debt from their balance sheets, update their housing stock and
receive cash flow from student rents, all while offloading onto a third party
the difficulty of actually managing student housing. [Such deals] are struc-
tured so that the for-profit company is paid back over time with a share of
the rents and fees a project collects. Higher education partners often receive
a piece of the profits, too, although specific terms of the contract and bor-
rowing vary greatly. Who gets paid what, when, is different from contract to
contract. So too is who is on the hook should the projects not generate
enough money to pay back bondholders or meet lending agreements.
Consequently, at colleges and universities where student housing has been

privatized, for-profit housing companies, which found their way into
U.S. military housing construction, ownership, and management decades
ago, essentially set campus housing prices. Based on the familiar and
equally outrageous privatized model of campus food services, not only do
students and their families find themselves on the receiving end of cost
overruns for campus housing, which can turn out to be substandard, but
they are often charged renovation fees for renovations that may or may
not happen in any timely way. When COVID hit, and decisions about
bringing students back to campus were matters of life and death, the reali-
ties of housing revenues also meant a simultaneous threat to profits for
campus housing corporations. It also meant that colleges, universities and
private companies, together, were entangled in an unscrupulous hotbed of
housing decisions, some of which made national news at the same time
headlines circulated that nearly half of all college students in the U.S.,
experienced housing insecurity during the pandemic, and 1 in 7 students
were homeless (Asmelash, 2022).
Take Corvias, a private housing corporation that contracts with cam-
puses and the U.S. military. Corvias counts over 100,000 beds and 48
million square feet in its portfolio of 30 properties nationwide, manages
over a dozen campus housing projects in DC, the U.S. South and Midwest
(Seltzer, 2020). The University of Georgia System (UGS) signed a 65-year
contract with Corvias, valuing an estimated $517 million (Hayes T.,
2021), swapping Corvias investment in renovation for student fees. In
2017, Corvias and Wayne State came to a deal worth $1.4 billion (United
Campus Workers of Georgia, 2021). At Howard University, the institu-
tion’s leaders signed a similar 40-year contract with Corvias valued at $2
billion to build and manage dorms. In the summer of 2020, as college
leaders were making decisions about whether to keep campuses open or

not, Corvias came under national fire for allegedly pressuring universities
to bring students back to campus in a deadly outbreak. Corvias was
reported to have pressured the University of Georgia System (UGS) and
Wayne State University in similar letters to their Board of Regents to keep
dorms filled, and with language in the letters that articulated the compa-
ny’s difference of opinion with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
(CDC) recommendations on health and safety protocols in the dorms. As
an aside, and as an example of the kinds of dangerous entanglements
between capital, the state, and higher education leadership, the current
chancellor of the University of Georgia System is Sonny Perdue, the for-
mer U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under the Trump administration. In
another case of protecting corporations over the health and safety of peo-
ple, and animals, Perdue held the post when, according to the findings of
a 2022 report by congressional investigators, the meatpacking industry’s
lobbying:
aided extensively by Trump’s USDA and White House officials, led to poli-
cies, guidance, and an executive order that, individually and altogether,
forced meatpacking workers to continue working despite health risks and
allowed companies to avoid taking precautions to protect workers from the
coronavirus. (Grabell, 2022, para. 21)
As for Corvias, in a subsequent press release from U.S. Senators Elizabeth

Warren and Rasheeda Tlaib, the senators found that “[d]espite the fact
that Corvias indicates that its agreements with colleges and universities
allow institutions ‘control of strategic decisions’ and ‘flexibility to change
as campus evolves,’ the company appeared to push for specific decisions
and limited flexibility, potentially posing a risk to public health” (Warren,
E., 2020, para. 3).
Part of the dispute between UGS and Corvias was that the company
said the UGS Board of Regents did not have the unilateral right to prevent
students from coming back to campus or discouraging them from doing
so. At Wayne State University, their campus restart committee included
five members from Corvias (Seltzer, 2020). Corvias had also paid out
scholarship funds to students at its contracting schools, and documents
made publicly available during the scandal showed Corvias attempting to
propose that UGS stay open for housing in exchange for “cash infusion”
in what faculty leaders described as a blatant effort to generate revenue to
keep Corvias’ own creditors off the company’s back. Other universities
contracting with Corvias included the Alabama College of Osteopathic
Medicine, North Carolina Central University, and the University of Notre
Dame (Seltzer, 2020), though none of these schools had claimed that
Corvias had influenced their fall 2020 campus reopening plans.
Equally important, Corvias also refused to refund housing fees when
campuses shut down during COVID. Apparently, UGS had to provide
over $13 million in rent refunds to students, which depleted the system’s
reserves after Corvias failed to cover or share in the refund responsibility
(Warren, E., 2020). In other instances, students in Corvias campus hous-
ing found themselves living in squalid conditions, and during a pandemic,
as in the case of Howard University students who, shockingly, moved into
tents on campus instead of remaining in Corvias managed dorm condi-
tions that included mold, crumbling ceilings, dirty water, and the presence
of rodents. As late as October 2021, Howard University students had
occupied a campus building in protest (Blackburn Takeover Team Housing
Justice Working Group, 2021). Yet, pandemic era protests are not the first
for Corvias, who has been in the business of privatizing public housing
since the mid-1990s, with a pattern of unethical behavior, claim advocates.
Corvias has been under investigation for substandard housing project con-
tracts with the U.S. military, and military families from Fort Meade in
Maryland have filed suit alleging gross negligence and fraud (Seltzer,
2020), as have families at Fort Bragg (Hayes, 2021). In 2019, Senator
Warren had previously demanded information on their military contracts
(Warren, E., 2019).
While Corvias is a company embroiled in a high-profile scandal, they
are certainly not the only private campus housing corporation, and invest-
ment in campus housing continues to be of significant interest to global
financiers. Just weeks before going to press, Blackstone, the largest private
equity firm in the world, and betting on the likelihood that young people
and their parents will remain in the market to purchase “a classic college
experience,” acquired American Campus Communities, the “largest
developer, owner and manager of student housing in the U.S.,” for nearly
$13 billion (Hughes, 2022, para. 1–2). Nor are the alleged pandemic
money grab tactics of Corvias the only ones of concern. For sure, another
tactic to monitor is the pandemic era decisions on the part of college and
university executives to stealthy change policy to require on-campus hous-
ing, or to extend previous on-campus housing requirements beyond the
first year to include first and second year students in the revenue-generating
net. It would be consistent with the larger web of predation for institu-
tions to deploy narratives that justify on-campus residency via privatized
housing contracts in the Davos Man guise of “building back the campus
community after COVID” and providing students with the much-missed
“real college experience” that was “sacrificed” during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the UGS had to use $15 million in CARES Act money to pay
themselves back for housing refunds that Corvias refused to issue (United
Campus Workers of Georgia, 2021). In this case, taxpayer monies that
were already disproportionately allocated to private and for-profit institu-
tions, as we will note later in the chapter, were further diverted back to
private corporations to pay for P3 privatized housing contracts.
The Games Continue: Student-Athletes

Take the Hit
Like other pandemic issues we raise up in this book that connect to much
larger bodies of academic literature and public controversy, the role of
athletics in higher education and the treatment of students who are ath-
letes is a voluminous and important field of scholarship that we cannot
fully engage here (see Eckstein & Peterson-Horner, 2014; King-White,
2018). That said, in talking about the ethics of the U.S. College Football
Playoff organization, a private enterprise separate from the National
Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), former U.S. Secretary of
Education, Arne Duncan, and former National Football League (NFL)
player and Director of Football Affairs for the Los Angeles Rams, Jacques
McClendon, argued in the second year of the pandemic that, “The College
Football Playoff’s unwillingness to take responsibility for athlete well-
being remains one of the great unreported stories in all of college sports”
(2022, para. 6). Surely, the decisions that college athletic directors, college
presidents, and state officials made with respect to college sports during a
global pandemic, while not unreported, are among the stories that should
be told in context of disaster opportunism in higher education. In the
U.S., we witnessed college and university leaders and athletic conference
officials playing their own games of establishing rule changes that allowed
for increasing money and power grabs for some institutions in ways that
have suggested to some that the pandemic has been used as pretext. In
other cases, these same institutional actors failed to modify existing rules
when given the opportunity to recognize the pandemic sacrifices of
student-athletes, or to simply keep them safe.
Undoubtedly, the decision many campus leaders made to continue col-

lege football in the fall of 2020 was the decision most scrutinized, and for
good reason. By December 2020, over 6600 athletes, coaches and staff in
the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Football Bowl
Subdivision, U.S. college football’s premier league, had tested positive for
COVID-19 (Blinder et al., 2020). Even this distressing positivity rate was
reported to be a serious undercount given the lack of a national reporting
system on the part of the NCAA, and the lack of transparency in COVID
case reporting for some of the schools in the league (Blinder et al., 2020).
More specifically, the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) comprises
130 institutions, with only 78 of those releasing complete data to The New
York Times in their 2020 campus tracking survey—data which, even then,
were recognized as undercounts given the patchwork of testing and trac-
ing policies on campuses (Blinder et al., 2020). Of the remaining 52
schools in the FBS, 19 released no data to The New York Times when
requested. While some big football schools did release positivity data with
the express purpose of being transparent (e.g. Clemson and Notre Dame),
Times reporters noted the necessity to rely on freedom of information law
requests to obtain positivity rates data. Indeed, some schools that had
initially released positivity rates refused to do so as limited athletic seasons
got underway in the fall, citing student privacy concerns (Blinder et al.,
2020). In November 2020, sport scholars Lisa Kearns, Kathleen Bachynski
and Arthur L. Caplan had also cited hundreds of college football players
who had contracted the virus by then, noting the long-term impact on
some players, including Clemson defensive end Xavier Thomas who had
trouble breathing for months (Kearns et al., 2020), and the tragic story of
Jamain Stephens, Jr., defensive lineman for California University of
Pennsylvania, who died from a blood clot in his heart after testing positive.
Sadly, it can go without saying these days that U.S. college athletics is a
multibillion dollar industry, as American college football, in particular, has
a “greater reach and broader audience than most professional sports
enjoy” (Gregory, 2020, p. 35). Athletic departments had recorded 6, 629
COVID cases by December of 2020 (Blinder et al., 2020, in the title),
however, “plenty of stakeholders had an interest in keeping games on TV
every week, even as the number of coronavirus cases surged through ath-
letic departments all over the country” (Gregory, 2020, p. 35). One can-
celed college football season for some institutions can bring losses that
exceed $4 billion (Gregory, 2020). Division I institutions saw a $375 mil-
lion dollar cut when the March Madness men’s basketball tournament was
canceled in 2020 (Anderson, G., 2020a). Also not news, college football
and basketball coaches in big conference schools in the United States now
make CEO salaries, and in many cases, that excessive pay is not limited to
head coaches. While some coaches took some pay cuts during the height
of COVID-19, such as the University of Michigan head football coach,
Jim Harbaugh, who took a 10% cut to bring his $7.5 million a year salary
down to $6.75 million, there is no evidence that colleges and universities
took any hard look at excessive coaching salaries as a pandemic opportu-
nity. As we addressed earlier “[t]hree Power 5 schools recently escalated
coaching salaries, paying their head football coaches roughly 495 million
over 10 years, or $9.5 million a year” (Duncan & McClendon, 2022, para.
16). In this context, it comes as little shock to many that the national pan-
demic response by U.S. collegiate athletics was a frustrating and often
terrifying mixed bag when it came to COVID-19 health and safety
protocols.
For instance, not only were there variations in whether or not schools
canceled seasons, institutions made different decisions on whether or not
to limit spectators and how, whether or not to initiate or enforce fines for
breaking protocols, and whether or not to postpone games. Even though
some football seasons proceeded in major sports organizations around the
country, seasons were truncated and athletes were subject to a precarious
schedule and a roller-coaster of uncertainties and disruptions, surely not
ones that were beneficial to their academic health, let alone their physical
and emotional health. According to The New York Times reporter, Bruce
Schoenfeld (2021, p. 34):
Some weeks, nearly a quarter of the games in the five major conferences
were postponed or canceled (and in one week, almost half the games did not
get played). One Saturday, November 13, three of the top five teams
couldn’t play. Outbreaks altered schedules only hours before games.
In just one November weekend in 2020, for example, at least 16 college

games were canceled or postponed because of outbreaks (Blinder et al.,
2020). Moreover, and as we suggested above, there was a patchwork of
testing and tracing policies that varied by athletic conference, including
decisions on whether athletes should come back to campus to train when
non-athletes had been told to go home, or decisions on how players could
return after testing positive, among other policies and procedures. At
some schools, such as Indiana University, Ohio State, and the University
of Missouri, student-athletes were required to sign a waiver or a related

risk awareness form.
Despite the variability, what seems clear to analysts is that the institu-
tions that did not rely on sports as revenue generators could afford to
protect their students by canceling seasons early on, did so, such as schools
in the Ivy League and Division 3 schools (McGovern, personal communi-
cation, May 18, 2022). As Matt Traub, managing editor for Sports Travel
Magazine, reminded readers in a recap of the pandemic timeline, it was
not “until the Ivy League announced its decision—preceded two days
before by the canceling of the ATP and WTA Tour stop in Indian Wells,
California, one of the biggest tennis tournaments in the world—[that]
COVID moved firmly into the discussion of how sports were going to be
held” (Traub, 2022, para. 4). Importantly, not only was there a highly
variable national patchwork of pandemic response policies and practices
with respect to college sports, those policies and practices were not neces-
sarily consistent with the patchwork of COVID response policies and
practices that institutions applied to the non-athlete populations on their
own campuses. In particular, college football players, disproportionately
Black and Brown students, were treated differently than other students on
campus in the first year of the pandemic (Kelderman, 2020). In some
cases, college football players were given access to more regular and more
robust and reliable COVID-testing. Yet, at the same time, college football
players were often among the only groups of students brought back to
campuses that were otherwise closed to students and to the public in order
to train. University officials would be quick to remind us that these prac-
tice regimens were voluntary and that testing, tracing, isolation, and quar-
antine protocols were followed, including suspending training when
outbreaks hit. Nonetheless, student athletes, who are not paid, let alone
unionized, had no protected way to negotiate the risks they were assum-
ing, creating the obvious scenario of an enormous cauldron of social, eco-
nomic, political, and psychological pressure to assume risks. Thus, on top
of the actual health and safety risks students faced as college athletes in a
pandemic, many faced additional psychological, emotional and economic
burdens of deliberation that would be hard for anybody to navigate, let
alone a young person perhaps just out of high school or not too far from
it in the big scheme of things.
Let’s be clear, there was not a consensus among students or parents
about whether or not to cancel seasons, particularly when it came to col-
lege football. Many athletes wanted to play. Many others experienced
mental health distress, including depression, loneliness, and lack of focus

and motivation, from being unable to participate in their sports (Nanni,
2021). Others worried not only about their health and safety but also
about whether or not participating in their sport would hurt them finan-
cially if scholarships were revoked or reduced (Gregory, 2020). There was
plenty of national controversy, especially in the big college football and
basketball states, about letting the games proceed. Most notably, former
President Donald Trump made a direct call to Big Ten Conference
Commissioner, Kevin Warren, to urge him to reconsider the decision to
cancel the fall 2020 season (even though the decision was not Warren’s to
make but the decision of college presidents). At that point, Trump was
campaigning for his second term. In a debate with President Biden he
said, “I brought back Big Ten football,” making it apparent that resuming
Big Ten football in fall 2020 would be a critical political win in regions of
the country vital for his campaign (Schoenfeld, 2021, para. 31).
And so it was that “[b]y accident of geography, and some questionable
decisions by state officials, the Upper Midwest became the flash point for
the coronavirus in late October 2020, right around when Big Ten football
finally started” (Schoenfeld, 2021, para. 33). At that time, mayors of 11 of
the 14 Big Ten cities urged the conference to consider their concerns that
the games would encourage people to congregate and further put people
and communities at risk as, since the first game of the resumed season,
cases had exploded. Two days after the first game in Ohio, 9750 new cases
were reported, breaking the previous record of 1500, provoking Ohio
Governor, Mike DeWine, to say the virus had become a “runaway freight
train” (Schonfeld, 2020, para. 40). While he urged people to limit their
Thanksgiving holiday plans, the governor was not willing to urge people
to curb their weekly Ohio State football gatherings in bars, parties, and
other spaces where large groups and crowds had resumed congregating,
often with no masks.
At the same time that college football players were in the spotlight for
the complicated pressures to assume health and safety risks that few other
students were expected to assume, thousands of other college athletes, like
vulnerable faculty and campus employees, saw their athletic programs ter-
minated in the midst of stated budget concerns. By November 2020,
reported Aishwarya Kumar (2020, para. 17):
[352] “non-revenue generating” NCAA sports programs had been termi-

nated, often without warning. At Stanford University alone, 11 programs
were eliminated. In some cases, critics have suggested that the pandemic was
merely a pretext for program cuts that had been planned prior, as when now
former William & Mary gymnast, Katie Waldman, “said she’d heard that the
athletic director had been considering the cuts for a while, and that
COVID-19 was the last straw. But that didn’t make sense to her—it almost
felt like a cop-out.”
Alongside concerns that some colleges and universities have used the
pandemic as an excuse to terminate “non-revenue generating” athletic
programs in the same way “non-revenue generating” academic programs
have been cut to redistribute funds to management priorities perceived to
be more commercially viable, advocates have argued that the NCAA
should be taking other kinds of “pandemic opportunities” to hasten the
implementation of policies they have long been fighting for to support
college athletes, particularly given their elevated urgency in the context of
the risks posed by COVID-19. For example, the National College Players
Association (NCPA) in the United States, both prior to and during the
pandemic, had been organizing around the key campaigns of stronger
health and safety protocols for student athletes, the right to professional
representation and compensation, as well as enforcement of Title IX pro-
tections. On the latter, the pandemic exposed the exhausting persistence
of sexism in college sports as men athletes in some contexts were afforded
more regular and more rigorous testing regimens than women athletes
were. According to analyst Lindsay Gibbs (2021), during the March
Madness basketball tournaments in 2021, women’s teams were screened
using the rapid, cheaper, less accurate antigen tests while men’s teams
were screened using the standard PCR coronavirus test, a pattern even
more egregious she notes given Dan Solomon of Texas Monthly’s point
that San Antonio, where the women’s tournament was being held, had
built a lab precisely to process PCR tests quickly and inexpensively. This,
amidst the much-publicized display of Title IX violations evident in the
pandemic training facilities made available to men’s teams during the same
tournament compared to the training facilities afforded to women’s teams.
Gone viral were images of an indoor stadium full of state-of-the-art equip-
ment for men and literally a rack of dumbbells and a few yoga mats
for women.
Featured most centrally in the U.S. pandemic context, however, have
been the college athlete labor movement’s battles over transfer freedoms
for student athletes, fair compensation, the rights to be represented pro-
fessionally, and the rights to stipends in exchange for the use of a
student-athletes name, image and likeness (NIL). In 2019, several states

passed NIL laws that have allowed student athletes to profit off of player
endorsements. Though not without controversy, these legislative changes
have been welcomed as long overdue, or at the very least, accepted as
inevitable given the inarguable commercialization of college sports and
the flagrant inequities between the labor protections afforded to profes-
sional athletes and those withheld from college athletes. In October 2019,
in response to this legislative movement, the “NCAA’s Board of Governors
voted unanimously to ‘permit students participating in athletics the oppor-
tunity to benefit from the use of their name, image and likeness in a man-
ner consistent with the collegiate model’” (Pickman, 2019, para. 1). The
NIL rule changes have made headlines during the pandemic, but there
have been other, more in the weeds, policy changes that have gone largely
unnoticed by people outside of the world of college and university athlet-
ics, and ones that have exacerbated pre-pandemic money and power grabs
in the realm of college sports.
One of those rule changes pours fuel on the controversy around stu-
dent athlete transfer policies that permit players to complete a fifth year of
eligibility at a different institution where they wish to pursue a graduate
degree. The policy change, which lifted transfer restrictions in a way that
was celebrated when passed in 2006, was initiated with good intentions to
support the academic goals of players. However, despite the important
academic benefits the change brought to students, the lifted transfer
restrictions have since been implicated in practices that, while permitted,
have amounted to a pattern of institutionalized poaching. Said William &
Mary coach, Tony Shaver, about the graduate transfer eligibility rule
change even before the pandemic, “It’s just another example of the rich
getting richer […] The rules are set up to protect the Power Five [power-
ful sports conference] people, and this is another example” (Auerbach,
2017, para. 24). When COVID hit in the spring of 2020, the NCAA
added an extra year of competition for all players to make up for the season
that was lost or cut short due to the virus. This decision ran the risk of
making a different pre-pandemic problem even worse, namely the prob-
lem of institutions using both undergraduate and graduate degree pro-
grams as fronts for eligibility, sacrificing student-athletes’ educational
opportunities, and, in this case, incentivizing the proliferation of non-
sense, cash cow graduate program diploma mills. According to sociologist
of sport, Jen McGovern, the ability for students to have an additional year
of eligibility has the possibility of contributing to the proliferation of
one-year graduate certificate programs as an “unpopular idea” lying

around campuses that may gain traction in the pandemic context
(McGovern, personal communication, May 18, 2022).
Yet nowhere is there a better example of an “unpopular idea” lying
around campuses than the continuation of the indefensible practice of
paying college and university football and basketball coaches CEO salaries,
and in some cases, increasing their earnings, while hundreds and thou-
sands of people around the country were laid off, and millions of people
faced illness and death-among them student athletes. Looking at these
select examples through the lens of racialized disaster patriarchal capital-
ism, we get a glimpse of the nuances of how a particular gendered and
racialized neoliberal university order gets retrenched as the sports pro-
grams that reinforce and glorify hegemonic masculinities were maintained
and even infused with greater resources during COVID-19, while wom-
en’s sports, and sports that men play that are less valued in the gendered
pecking order are discarded in the name of budget reductions. As colleges
and universities were commended for their support of student-athlete pro-
tests for racial justice, those same institutions would take other steps to
sacrifice the health and risk the lives of unpaid and unprotected Black and
Brown student athletes as the pandemic raged on (Gregory, 2020). This,
of course, is part of the same story of sacrifice and disposability of vulner-
able faculty and staff that we have documented in previous chapters, and
also entangled in the story of sacrificial curricula below. In this instance,
the pairing of the failure to act to prevent illness and injury with decisions
to proactively seize on pandemic opportunities to advance a neoliberal
agenda makes for a cumulative toll on student-athletes, their families, and
entire communities heedlessly subjected to infection that is yet to be fully
known. In his final analysis of whether it was worth the risk to the larger
society to bring back college football in fall 2020 for what amounted to
countless super spreader events, Bruce Schonfeld (2020, p. 35) soberly
concluded that “the cost for that will never be tallied.”
CARES to Grab: Siphoning Relief from Public

Higher Education
One of the most disturbing consequences of pandemic disaster capitalism
in the higher education context was the further fleecing of economically
marginalized students under the guise of COVID relief. By February
2022, $77 billion had been awarded to colleges and universities in the
U.S., in three separate relief bills. First, in March 2020, the Coronavirus
Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) established the
Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF I) and allocated $14
billion to higher education needs, of which approximately $6.3 billion had
to go to direct student aid. In December 2020, Congress passed the
Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act
(CRRSAA Act) which established HEERF II and another $23 billion to
post-secondary educational institutions, again with student direct aid
requirements. Less than three months later, in March 2021, the American
Rescue Plan Act (ARPA Act) established HEERF III, allocating $40 bil-
lion more, with 50% of the funds earmarked for direct student aid. In each
wave, colleges and universities could choose to spend 100% of the funding
on direct student aid.
Additionally, for the portion of CARES Act funding that need not be
allocated directly to students, regulations prohibited colleges and universi-
ties from spending relief dollars on capital projects, marketing, recruit-
ment, administrator salaries, as well as online learning initiatives that
started prior to the pandemic, among other restrictions. Institutions were
permitted, and in some cases encouraged, to allocate funding to educa-
tional technology, faculty training, and select student activities that could
be attributed to pandemic related needs. That said, while the “law requires
that at least half of the [relief funds] go directly to students, [the law]
makes few stipulations for the rest of those funds. In a letter, the former
U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said institutions have “‘significant
discretion’ on how to award the assistance to students” (Turner, 2020,
para. 33). Moreover, while it is true that the pandemic relief money not
restricted to direct student aid fell “into wide categories to make up for
the lost revenue to colleges from sources like parking and food sales, and
to buy personal protective equipment, cleaning supplies, lab equipment
and to train professors to teach online” (Peele, 2021), there have been few
strings attached otherwise.
Particularly concerning, in the first wave of relief, with a funding for-
mula developed during the Trump administration, a series of problematic
outcomes immediately came to light: (1) private colleges and universities
received a disproportionate share of relief funds relative to public colleges
and universities, including community colleges; (2) for-profit colleges also
received a disproportionately larger slice of the relief pie; (3) the use of
Pell Grant proxies had missed the mark in supporting students in need; (4)
undocumented and international students had been deemed ineligible for
relief; (5) and federal directions and accountability mechanisms had been
so poorly designed that institutions were able to spend relief funds in ways
that were windfalls, not for students or public institutions in crisis, but for
the institutional players in the spider web of global TEMPS.
For example, in the weeks following the first allocation of CARES relief
funds, headlines circulated with the news that for-profit institutions, some
with pending lawsuits, had received more money than local community
colleges. Overall, “community colleges received a lower share of funds
than one might expect. Public colleges of two years or less educate almost
40 percent of students, yet these institutions received about 27 percent of
the funds” (Miller, 2020, p. 6). The Paul Mitchell Schools, for-profit hair
and cosmetology schools, for instance, received $30.5 million in CARES
Act money, more than Houston Community College (HCC), despite the
fact that HCC serves approximately 60,000 students and the Paul Mitchell
Schools serves 20,000 (Seville & Lehren, 2020). Some of the reason for
this was because 64% of community college students attend part-time, yet
the federal formula for relief was based on full-time student enrollment
(FTEs). Yet, if the federal formula had relied on student headcount rather
than FTEs, public colleges would have received nearly $1.5 billion more
in funding (Miller, 2020).
Similarly, because the funding formula was based on students receiving
federal student aid, community college students were additionally
excluded, as they are less likely than students at for-profit institutions to
rely on federal student aid given lower tuition costs. At Universal Technical
Institute, Inc., a publicly traded for-profit school for mechanics where a
significant majority of their 11,000 students are Pell Grant recipients,
three of their schools together topped the for-profit list of CARES Act
beneficiaries when they received $33 million in relief funds as compared to
the University of Florida, a public university with 35,000 undergraduates
that received $2 million less (Seville & Lehren, 2020). Florida Career
College (FCC), another for-profit vocational school received $17.3 mil-
lion despite the fact that the Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory
Lending filed a class action lawsuit against the school claiming that only
one of the school’s 17 programs met the threshold for post-graduate earn-
ings that cover the cost of school loans plus basic needs. At FCC, 85% of
students enrolled are students of color, and 86% of their revenue already
came from federal financial aid, such as Pell Grants and student loans,
prior to the CARES Act allocation (Turner, 2020). Yet, according to the
court filing, after graduation, “students [who are] able to find jobs in the
area they studied [only] earn between $9000 and $33,000” (Seville &
Lehren, 2020, para. 36).
Overall, in the first wave of funding, in a devastating handout to for-
profit colleges who were permitted to access the pot of relief money for
more than just emergency aid, $1.7 billion that could have gone to public
colleges of two years or less was siphoned off to for-profit colleges (Miller,
2020). It’s worth a reminder that in the United States, 75% of students
who pursue post-secondary education enroll in public colleges or universi-
ties (Miller, 2020). The diversion of CARES Act funding away from pub-
lic institutions comes at a time when divestment from public higher
education had already siphoned $7 billion from public colleges and uni-
versities between 2008 to 2018 (Miller, 2020). Even more troubling is the
precedent that it set, argued Ben Miller (2020, p. 10):
The CARES Act set a new, distressing precedent: direct operating support
to private for-profit colleges. These schools received $1.1 billion in total
support from the CARES Act, including more than half a billion dollars for
operating help. This is a new step in the relationship between the federal
government and these institutions.
Importantly, continued Miller (2020, p. 10), the extended reach of pro-

prietary institutions into federal coffers during the pandemic was a par-
ticularly troubling turn. He argued:
[The] premise of private for profit colleges is that they can rely on the mar-
ket to determine if they are viable. And unlike private businesses in other
industries, they can already receive up to 90 percent of their revenue from
the Education Department’s federal financial aid programs. Most for-profit
colleges can also rely on other company-related provisions contained in the
stimulus legislation.
Fortunately, in the subsequent iterations of relief funding passed during

the Biden administration, for-profit institutions were required to use 100%
of their allocations for direct student aid. An even bolder step toward pro-
tecting public higher education in the United States and the non-elite
students they serve, would have been to exclude proprietary institutions
altogether, argued the Center for American Progress. If the U.S. Congress
had done that during the first wave of relief, the funding for public col-
leges would have increased by ten percentage points (Miller, 2020).
The siphoning of relief funding away from public institutions and into
the coffers of for-profits was not the only deeply disturbing design flaw of
the first CARES Act. The initial wave of funding excluded students who
defaulted on student loans, students with minor drug convictions, as well
as international students, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
students, and students who were undocumented. After protest, the DeVos
regime dropped the first two restrictions, but the latter remained until
President Biden rescinded the ban on undocumented students in subse-
quent waves (Douglas-Gabriel, 2021). The first CARES Act also set aside
2.5% of funds for institutions most affected by the pandemic, though did
little to offer guidance in allocating those funding streams aside from not-
ing that priority should be given to colleges that received less than
$500,000 from other sources of relief, including funds for minority-
serving institutions. This, in turn, had the effect of diverting funds to col-
leges with small enrollments, resulting in allocation amounts that were, in
some cases, “larger than the total revenue [the colleges] take in during a
normal year” (Miller, 2020, p. 9). Instead of using other more valid mea-
sures of need, such as infection rates or access to high speed internet at
home, the Trump administration’s relief formula amounted to a “windfall
for small [private] colleges” (Miller, 2020, p. 7).
Other congressional decisions that allowed for the siphoning of the
public education coffers included not just the reliance on FTEs and the
number of students receiving Pell Grant (not the number eligible to
receive) as measures for number of students in need, but the decision to
include graduate student enrollments in the non-Pell student allocation
formula. As a result, four year private nonprofits benefited unequally from
this formula, in part, due to the portion of the formula for non-Pell stu-
dents “driven by graduate school enrollment and higher shares of students
who attend full time. These institutions received only 17 percent of the
dollars allocated for Pell enrollment, but they received 23 percent of funds
awarded for non-Pell enrollment” (Miller, 2020, p. 6). Columbia
University, for instance, received $12.8 million in first wave CARES Act
relief. If graduate students had been removed from the funding formula,
Columbia would have received 5.8% less.
In the midst of these funding parameters, decisions about how to actu-
ally allocate grants to students have been left up to the institutions with
little guidance from the feds. This vacuum of guidance, combined with
weak accountability mechanisms, has left room for colleges and
universities to operationalize students in need in a patchwork of ways that

has also caused concern. At our own institution, for instance, students
protested the university’s formula for calculating which students were eli-
gible for the first wave of relief. Students argued that the university’s inter-
nal funding formula missed the neediest students by focusing only on
financial aid status and not measures of true economic need, excluding
approximately 272 Pell-eligible students with high financial need. At
Monmouth, unlike at other schools in the state, overall financial need was
initially the determinant for relief as opposed to a student’s financial aid
status. Monmouth also added into their initial formula for relief any family
contributions to their ability to cover costs, further narrowing the window
of eligibility. Additionally, unlike other colleges in the state where students
were invited to apply for relief, Monmouth did not permit students to do
so, but rather allocated funds on the narrow formula. Students organized
against the administration’s spending decisions with a petition that stated:
During this unprecedented global pandemic, low income families—espe-

cially those of color, have suffered the brunt of financial hardship […]
Monmouth University’s low-income students have lost their federal work
study jobs, [did] not receive aid through the federal stimulus bill and have
families that have suffered loss of work with very little to no savings to sup-
port them through loss of income. Some of Monmouth’s low [income]
students cannot even afford to buy groceries and have been surviving off of
food pantries. (Strupp, 2020, para. 5)
After the petition was signed by over 1000 people, the university recalcu-
lated its eligibility formula (Strupp, 2020). It is worth noting that some
elite private schools declined CARES Act relief funding altogether, such as
the University of Pennsylvania (declined $9.9), Harvard (declined $8.7),
Northwestern (declined $8.5), and Stanford (declined $7.4) (Nietzel,
2020). Other elite private schools did not, such as Columbia (accepted
$12.8 million), Johns Hopkins (accepted $6.3); and Georgetown
(accepted $6.1) (Nietzel, 2020). Despite the infusion of $77 billion into
the higher education sector, some colleges and universities that otherwise
did not claim financial hardship nonetheless raised tuition. Both Columbia
University and New York University (Dolby, 2021) increased tuition dur-
ing the throes of the pandemic, as did our own institution, which raised
tuition twice during COVID, after raising it 4.5% the year before the pan-
demic struck.
Additionally, amidst the hand-wringing among higher education indus-

try folks about how to properly allocate funds given the paradoxical com-
bination of limitations and lack of clear guidance otherwise, nowhere do
we see any major clarion calls among administrators to use CARES Act
funding to hire more tenure track faculty to shore up the academic mis-
sion, to lessen the unconscionable reliance on part-time instructors, or to
pay adjuncts a comparable salary to full-timers. Instead, according to Peele
(2021), colleges and universities flocked to the open retail market, includ-
ing Amazon, to procure equipment. “Colleges were ‘buying stuff on
Amazon and wherever you could find it and shipping it,’ said Kristen
Soares, President of the Association of Independent Colleges and
Universities” (2021, para. 32). California colleges reported spending just
over $800,000 in relief money in 2020 alone on computers, tablets and
associated hardware for students (Peele, 2021).
Further, in an analysis of the ways in which CARES Act monies had
been disproportionately allocated to small colleges in North Carolina in
ways that were not equitable, Nate Morabito of WCNC-TV Charlotte
shared a statement from South Piedmont Community College President,
Maria Pharr, that suggested the ways in which EdTech has been poised
to walk away from the waves of relief with their pockets stuffed: “[W]e
were able to use COVID relief to [establish] a slate of online short-term
workforce programs in key fields[…] a virtual Associate’s degree in a
Year [sic] [and implement] Hy-Flex courses… [In doing so] we hope
our fall semester is reflective of pre-pandemic levels of in-person atten-
dance with the added value of the innovative improvements inspired or
hastened by the pandemic” (Morabito, 2021, para. 22). Indeed, in pre-
vious chapters, we discussed additional cases of colleges and universities
that have used CARES Act funding to establish entirely new online
degree programs.
On top of all of this, the web of EdTech and consulting firms we dis-
cussed in previous chapters entered the market to assist colleges and uni-
versities in accessing grants, and spending it. For instance, according to
Kaitlin Mulhere, reporting for Money, “Southern New Hampshire
University has outsourced much of that process [of deciding which stu-
dents could receive aid] to a third party called Edquity, a technology com-
pany that created an app to help colleges manage quick emergency grant
decision-making” (Mulhere, 2021, para. 12). These predictions from a
2021 survey of teachers, principals and K-12 school district leaders by the
EdWeek Research Center shouldn’t surprise us, and are likely similar in
the college and university context. Among those surveyed, nearly three-
quarters said that teachers would be expected to integrate the use of
devices more into learning. Over half (52%) said they will now emphasize
technology skills more deeply in their curriculum, and over half said they
will offer more virtual learning options (51%). Forty-four percent said
they would expand the use of personalized learning in the classrooms
(Herold, 2021). Also in the K-12 context, districts have reported that
upwards of 90% of their COVID relief funds have been spent on technol-
ogy (Herold, 2021). One school district in poor rural Louisiana used
COVID money to buy not one, but two, Chromebooks for each of its
1400 students (Herold, 2021). While funds have been poorly tracked, a
“February survey by the Association of School Business Officers
International estimated that 72 percent of districts invested ESSER
[Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief Fund] I funds in technol-
ogy” (Herold, 2021, para. 12).
As the “gold rush” fervor unfolded, we saw EdTech vendors such as
Promethean make claims like, “changing lesson delivery methods [in the
post-pandemic era] is inevitable,” as part of their pitch to sell lesson deliv-
ery software with the purchase of their product, ActivPanel. If we were to
write copy captions for their marketing, they might have read, “Buy now!
Thanks to the CARES Act, you can now afford it! Let us show you how!”
In fact, their materials explicitly read, “Maximize CARES Act funds by
investing in edtech,” and also claim:
School leaders have the opportunity to invest in educational technology and

professional development services to stabilize the current decrease in stu-
dent engagement and support a mix of in-person and remote learning.
Funds to local districts can be used for coronavirus-response activities, such
as purchasing educational technology to support online learning for all stu-
dents, and additional activities authorized by federal elementary and sec-
ondary education laws. (Promethean, 2020, para. 2)
Suitable, another example of an education technology company poised

to cash in, also promoted a guide to higher education relief funds and
marketing guidance on how to use them. Their web materials educate
university administrators on the details of the pandemic relief legislation,
and the exact language of eligibility. The company website also directs
potential customers to a template of the required justification letter that
schools can submit to procure “student engagement activities” that will

help students “beat Zoom fatigue” (Visco, 2022). The “student engage-
ment activities” market was expanded by the CARES Act through funding
support for transitioning to virtual learning or events; support for other
virtual learning methods qualified and authorized under pandemic provi-
sions; as well as funds that can be used by colleges and universities for
select pre-pandemic programs that help prepare students for college readi-
ness so long as they address pandemic-related needs (Visco, 2022).
Calling Off the Search for Truth and Meaning:

Sacrificing the Curriculum
While student-athletes were asked to come back and play another season
during an outbreak, and many others encouraged to move back to their
isolation dorms and Zoom into classes at full tuition and housing costs for
“the college experience,” the liberal arts curriculum that is the hallmark of
“the college experience” was on the chopping block all across the country.
As we write, with over one million dead from COVID-19 in the United
States alone, a new law in Texas was passed that requires teachers to frame
slavery as a deviation from the founding principles of the nation, and limits
the teaching of “The 1619 Project,” The New Times Magazine block-
buster project that examined the legacy of slavery in the United States and
documented the contributions that Black people have made to American
society (Fortin & Heyward, 2022). In Oklahoma, the law now prohibits
teachers from educating students that individuals are responsible for
“actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex”
and bans speech or curricula that tells students that “anyone should feel
‘discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress’
because of their race or sex” (Fortin & Heyward, 2022, p. 14). Tennessee
became the latest state to introduce a bill banning “divisive concepts”
targeting the state’s public colleges. The list of 16 concepts includes the
notion that individuals are “inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppres-
sive because of their sex,” and that Tennessee or the United States is “fun-
damentally or irredeemably racist or sexist” (Ross, A., 2022, para. 2).
According to Sumi Cho, a retired DePaul University professor of law,
in 2021, six states in the U.S. had introduced bills to ban the teaching of
critical race theory, specifically, a number that jumped to 25 in 2022
(Flaherty, 2022b). By 2022, PEN America said it was tracking 113 bills
that they described as “educational gag orders,” 40 of which they said

would impact higher education (Anderson & Svrluga, 2022). Also, as we
write, 23 states are considering 49 “divisive concepts” bills that would
impact colleges and universities, suggesting that radical right think tanks
have been successful in circulating “divisive concepts” model legislation
throughout state legislatures. In many cases, those bills come with penal-
ties, including private lawsuits that Cho called “private cause-of-action
‘vigilantism’” inspired by the 2021 Texas anti-abortion law that opened
the door for private litigation for violations (Flaherty, 2022b, para. 9).
Defunding schools as coercion has also been a tactic that the radical
right has used to further eviscerate public schools and academic programs
during the pandemic. In the case of a South Carolina bill stating that no
state entity, including colleges and universities, may “‘subject’ anyone to
defined divisive concepts about race, gender, religion or sex, or compel
any individual to accept or adopt the following: the existence of genders
other than male and female and gender fluidity; nonbinary pronouns;
honorifics or relation speech; unconscious our implicit bias; or that race
and sex are social constructs,’ among other prohibitions” (Flaherty,
2022b, para. 12). Violations of the proposed law can be “reported to a
state hotline, lead to a loss of state funding, tax-exempt status and ‘any
other state-provided accommodation or privilege’” (Flaherty, 2022b,
para. 12). In Wyoming in March 2022, Republican lawmakers in the state
senate targeted the Women and Gender Studies Program at the University
of Wyoming, voting to pass a budget amendment that would prevent the
university from allocating any state funds for its Women and Gender
Studies program or courses. The amendment died in the House, but not
without grave concern about the precedent-setting move. Particularly, the
language of the amendment, like other legislation introduced in other
states, was vague and broad enough to raise constitutional questions about
what safeguards might prevent legislators from banning just about any
subject they do not accept (Long & Ross, 2022).
It is surely no coincidence to us that the half century attack on progres-
sive educators’ success in decentering white supremacist capitalist patriar-
chal canons, whether in the form of Ethnic Studies, African American
Studies, Chicana/o Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Disability
Studies, LGBGTQ studies, a movement to decolonize the curriculum that
had its roots in the demands of Black, Brown and Indigenous students of
color in the 1960s, has come to such a repressive head of steam during the
pandemic. The misinterpretation of “critical race theory” as
“indoctrination” into “divisive concepts” that blame members of domi-

nant groups for being “inherently” racist or sexist, or for generating their
“discomfort and guilt,” and for teaching that white people today are
“responsible” for slavery and segregation is willful ignorance. The direc-
tive that we must teach the nation’s central history of institutional and
interpersonal discrimination and violence as “departures” from an other-
wise principled fabric of American history and society rests not only on a
willful ignorance of critical race theory, feminist studies, sociology, history
and social sciences broadly, but a mandate that teachers lie.
Here again we are witnessing students being treated as disposable: if
not their health and safety and economic security sacrificed for profitable
housing contracts and athletics revenue, it is the very lived experiences,
histories and collective memories of excluded and marginalized people
and communities as represented and co-constructed by decades of critical
studies that are also being sacrificed in these battles. Even further, not only
are students, themselves, erased, as was the case in the curricula prior to
the paradigm shifting movements of the 1960s and 1970s, but the pan-
demic era has moved the needle from “erased” to “criminalized.” This
criminalization is happening alongside other profound backlashes against
the same progressive currents in the same context of crisis as the criminal-
ization of abortion and the criminalization of transgender youth.
The willful ignorance and misrepresentations of history and critical
social science, the concomitant mandates for educators to lie, and what
amounts to the criminalization of knowledge by and about people and
communities of color, women, and LGBTQ individuals emerge arm-in-
arm with the hyper-capitalist, extreme libertarianism and gold rush-like
fervor to digitize education K-PSE for profit. Among whatever else we can
say of these assaults, in the context of our argument in this book, we
understand the attacks to be a core component of the pandemic shock
doctrine being unleashed against teachers as part of the larger ongoing
campaign by elites to destroy and reorganize public education, including
higher education. In doing so, and like other shock doctrines, these legis-
lative attacks are a kind of brutality and violence against public education,
generally, its role in the preservation of a democratic society, and on the
notion of the social contract. The panic and disruption these ultra-
repressive legislative assaults have produced while millions are sick and
dying—and sick and dying precisely because of the very institutional
inequalities that critical studies make plain—is calculated panic and disrup-
tion that is part and parcel of a hyper-capitalist, radical libertarian, and
white supremacist take down. The “anti-wokeness” legislative campaigns

are about destabilizing and using violence as a kind of psychic terror to
clean out dissent, and to further instill an ideological platform that does
not speak to systems or social contracts or raise up lenses of critique. They
are campaigns to disable generations of critical thinkers, economic and
political competitors, potential resisters, and to further inculcate free mar-
ket right wing notions of liberty.
While commentators have rightfully pointed out the hypocrisy of radi-
cal libertarians enacting or supporting state intervention to regulate cur-
ricula, and the academic freedom of educators, particularly in higher
education, the aligning of these interests unmasks the hollowness of much
contemporary libertarianism in that it would appear that what is really at
work is a philosophy that aims to protect the right to accumulate and dis-
criminate in doing so. Indeed, as we have seen so often, if the state can be
used to assist in accumulation through protecting deregulation, or through
the maintenance of just enough regulation and infrastructure to assist
capital, then by all means. The attack against critical curricula is consistent
with this aim. It is a kind of policing and surveillance of consciousness in
the same way radical libertarians are not opposed to other kinds of police
states in order to protect the boundaries of their enterprises.
In other words, these ideological attacks on the free mind are also the
grease for material grabs, and the pretext to control and eliminate educa-
tional labor. Further, they are not separate from, but rather, inform and
embolden, austerity campaigns. Privatizing campus housing, exploiting
student-athlete labor, siphoning CARES Act monies, and attacking critical
race theory are all of a piece. The latter is a tactic, in part, that helps clear
the ideological path for the direct grabs of the former. For example, says
Dustin Avent-Holt, an associate professor of sociology at Augusta
University, quoted by Colleen Flaherty for Inside Higher Ed, “while DEI
[diversity, equity and inclusion] is being framed in part as a budgetary
issue, ‘we’ve been experiencing budget cuts over the last 20 to 30 years in
Georgia. And so [the state legislature] is kind of cutting us off, if you will,
creating a kind of financial crisis and then using that as a pretext for getting
rid of things that they don’t want to have at the university’” (Flaherty,
2022b, para. 20, emphasis added). Arguably, the clearest example of the
link between the sacrificing of critical studies and the capitalist reorganiza-
tion of higher education, particularly public higher education, was the
February 2022 announcement by Texas Lieutenant Governor, Dan
Patrick, who said that he would move to make the teaching of critical race
theory grounds for the revocation of tenure.
In offering this, we are not implying that the repressive politics of cur-
ricula are merely a sleight of hand distraction with the radical right setting
pandemic-era “divisive concepts” fires over here so that, say, their campus
housing allies can continue to privatize public goods over there, although,
of course, that is what’s happening. Indeed, these curricula heists are sac-
rificial attacks of substance in their repression of the countervailing ideas
of feminism, racial justice, and socialism, among other radical ideas, that
have posed tremendous and successful threats to capital. Yet, there are
additional dimensions of the current repression launched during the pan-
demic that are also in play that are worth highlighting more directly.
Specifically, as we suggested earlier, these assaults on critical curricula
are also not-so-veiled attacks on women and people of color as educa-
tors, both in higher education and in K-12. In the United States and glob-
ally, not only is teaching a feminized occupation, the very disciplines under
bombardment are the increasingly feminized disciplines of social sciences,
as well as the academic fields where scholars and teachers from excluded
groups have found disciplinary homes. In higher education management,
in particular, the demographic realities are such that white men from elite
classes hold a disproportionate control of the reins of power, yet, again,
the disciplines slated for downsizing, and now for criminalization, are fem-
inized fields-ones already grossly underpaid using faulty market logic argu-
ments in the first place. While there have been heartening stories of K-12
educators reporting that the legislative attacks have radicalized them to
defend the curriculum, and their profession as teachers, from white
supremacist and anti-feminist offensives, we have also heard stories of
teachers who admit they are changing their teaching practices out of fear
of losing their jobs, or worse. These are teachers, many of them also par-
ents with children of their own, who have spent the last two years of a
pandemic working in grueling and emotionally devastating conditions in
the service of their students, and all under a national and often unforgiving
microscope. Already exhausted, unmoored, and at times fearful for one’s
health and economic future, teachers then faced the aftershock of a blitz
on their professionalism, one that has come with the hammer of potential
legal penalties. Would it shock us that many teachers would call it quits?
For a global TEMPS industry that finds teachers, whether K-12 or in
higher education, to be obstacles in the way of a fully digitized and per-

sonalized educational market, the fear, exhaustion, and mass exodus of
actual educators is a boon. And if that “great resignation” in the feminized
field of education happens to also weaken one of the strongest sectors of
the U.S. labor movement, as in the case of U.S. teachers’ unions, then that
is icing on the cake. In higher education, as we have learned, one out of
every two faculty members surveyed by Forbes in 2021 had considered
leaving higher education or retiring early (Nietzel, 2021).
What we must not forget, as well, is that some of the same elites advo-
cating for the erasure and criminalization of the humanity of Black, Brown,
women and LGBTQ students through raids on critical liberal arts curri-
cula are also preying on those very same students as cash cows in an
expanding global education market. By both deploying and following in
the wake of domestic and global austerity campaigns as the structural
adjustment “rescuers,” academic capitalists, as we have seen, are “shooting
for the moon” in their pandemic era “democratization” of remote online
credentialing “for a lifetime” for what we know are predominantly adult
women of color learners and their children all across the globe. Teaching
our children about the feminization and racialization of global poverty
and the connections to slavery, colonialism and empire that have made,
and continue to make, millions of students and their families vulnerable to
such predation is likely not a pedagogical practice that aligns with the
global TEMPS’ gold rush plan.
The seemingly paradoxical erasure and criminalization of the humanity
of Black and Brown students, of women students, of LGBTQ students
and the simultaneous preying on the very same students as consumers is
reprehensible, but not inconsistent with racialized and gendered capital-
ism. Further, defining people, communities, their histories and their expe-
riences and the collective memory as, literally, disposable, but yet
capitalizing on that sacrifice comes not just from what we have been call-
ing Big Liberty but also from the Davos Man sectors as well who have
seized on what labor lawyer, Thomas Geoghegan, calls the terrain of “Big
College” (2014, p. 112). A disturbing overlay onto all of this is that one
seemingly counterweight to the repressive attacks on curricula is the
“diversity, equity and inclusion” or “DEI” initiatives on campuses that are
administrator-driven, and are increasingly taking the form of hiring out-
side consultants to train faculty in “DEI” pedagogies, or to consult with
faculty on changes to curriculum that are “DEI” but on the payroll of

global TEMPS. While many individual actors in the “DEI” sector are
surely good people committed to progressive social change, in the institu-
tional roles as employees of global TEMPS, they play the part of “the
rescuers” in the very industries that have undergone a sinister shape-
shifting to rebrand the front stages of their consultancies in the Trojan
Horse guise of “DEI.” They are the “good apples” who will teach and
train us about “DEI” with one hand while with the other hand of privati-
zation, they take away.
To add insult to injury, the “DEI” sector claims expertise to train the
very educators whose labor as critical scholars and teachers they have co-
opted. It is akin to Big Pharma sending sales reps to “train” doctors on a
pseudoscience version of the very medical science of pharmacology they
developed in order to help them take better care of their patients. Rather
than advocate in legislatures for academic freedom, or for reinvestment in
public education, or for tenure protections or for parity for part-time
labors, or a free college or for a part-timers bill of rights, or to protect
unionization for private and public employees alike, they swoop in as the
“identity capitalists” who will sell us their DEI wares so they can cash in
on the repression the industry itself brings into the fold. In a word, some
of the higher education management corporations that will advise college
executives on how to union-bust in the pandemic are also ready to sell
them, and us, their “DEI” consulting services at the same time.
Taken together, these crushing dynamics are part of a pandemic shock
doctrine-style campaign to give new life to “unpopular ideas that have been
lying around.” Ideas about limiting the academic freedom of educators to
teach about race, gender and sexuality would be too politically dangerous
to enact in other eras, but can now make their way (back) into educational
sectors as capital seeks to do all sorts of other “creative disruptions” while
the pandemic irons are hot. Ultimately, these are not just muggings of
academic freedom, but a pounce on the very notion of education as a
vehicle for social mobility, for an informed citizenry, for a democracy. They
are lock-step with the sieges on the expansion of public higher education,
and a betrayal of the bargain of “political accommodation” that capitalist
elites made in the twentieth century to balance their continued need for
higher education to serve capital with progressive movements’ demands to
democratize higher education for social and economic mobility. It would
seem that in the latest attacks on the liberal arts curriculum, the radical
right has found a pandemic opening to further renege on that deal.
From Silence of the Lambs to Lions at the Gate

Throughout the book, we have called out senior administrators, middle
management administrators, and faculty alike for their failure to push back
against corporatization over the long haul of its encroachment, and in
many cases in their alignment with and active promotion of the commer-
cialization and privatization of education. In the next chapter, we will
discuss countervailing forces that have also been at play in resisting this
transformation. Yet, while we will profile student, faculty and staff activism
on campus in these initial pandemic years, we have also been deeply aware
and profoundly saddened by the ways in which the pre-conditions of cor-
poratization and the current nexus of racialized disaster patriarchal capital-
ism have perpetuated a painful silence in the face of such massive
transformation, as we have yet to see mass mobilizations of students, or
faculty, responding to disaster capitalism in the higher education space,
writ large, despite growing evidence that students and faculty alike have
extremely mixed feelings about online learning, and a wave of labor move-
ment organizing has swelled across the nation in recent years.
A full picture of student perceptions and experiences of higher educa-
tion during the pandemic, in particular, is for another book, and one that
would contribute to what is already an established field of inquiry around
student attitudes and perceptions. That said, how might we begin to
account for a general lack of “wokeness” among students, not to mention
faculty and staff, about the triumph of academic capitalism during the
pandemic compared to the many other turns to “wokeness” called forth
by the crisis? For sure, a mantra of the times—one that is a core argument
in this very book—has been the expression of the sentiment that the virus
has “laid bare society’s inequalities” making them “impossible to ignore
any longer.” Though when it comes to the rabid corporatization of educa-
tion, even when students disagree or want to resist, many remain largely
unorganized, and without a class consciousness or analysis that reflects the
systemic realities of privatized and commercialized education, including
higher education.
Surely, there is much to be said, and has been said, about a generation,
or two, of students whose education has been almost entirely “mediated
by screens”-students who have come up through the very conditions of
privatized and commercialized education that we aim to resist such that
they have no reference point for what, if anything, they must guard at the
gate. Even prior to COVID, in our nearly 50 combined years of teaching
undergraduate students, the decades-long neoliberal infusion of educational

technologies has not made our students any smarter. We see no change in
their level of critical thinking skills, or in their ability to comprehend,
write, engage, compute, interpret, synthesize, critique, offer counter argu-
ment, debate, deliberate. If anything, we struggle to keep the bar high
year after year without washing out more and more students who are
increasingly less prepared, or not prepared at all, to engage in the core
practices of college-level learning. Since the pandemic arrived, we have
been mournfully startled by students who have shared with us that they
need help interacting with their peers in class. For the first time in a nearly
three decades long practice of teaching without permitting laptops in the
classroom, students asked one of us whether we would be providing them
with paper if they couldn’t have devices, unsure how we expected them to
take notes without them. In a fully in-person course taught during the
outbreak, another student was unsure how they would receive assign-
ments if we were not posting them on a learning management system. In
another class where the pedagogy is an “old school” combination of in-
person lecture and Socratic discussion, followed by in-class essay exams,
students taking the course during the pandemic shared compliments on
the “genius nature” of the teaching style and the “surprising” positive
impact on their learning, as if it were a pedagogical unicorn.
To be fair, as we have watched EdTech and corporate audit cultures
creep onto campus from all corners, we also don’t see any appreciable
positive change among our colleagues’ abilities to be engaging and
challenging teachers either. And as more and more of our colleagues come
up through the ranks of a shredded K-12 and higher education system
with a clear turn toward vocationalized postgraduate credentialing, we
worry about the preparedness of the faculty, absent a commitment to
confront neoliberalism, to guard the gates as well. Like our students, many
of our colleagues have experienced partially or wholly “digitally trans-
formed” educations that are largely without even the vestiges of a non-
commercialized, relational, rigorous grappling with ideas. In this way,
even some faculty, themselves, may not even know what has been sacrificed.
It also occurs to us that one reason for what often feels like a stifling
silence has been the stealth nature of education privatization even before
the pandemic, which we have explored at some length earlier. In describ-
ing the devastating transformation of education from a public good into a
consumer good, Newfield (2008, p. 28) explained:
Privatization begins with the presence of private influence in public func-

tions. In the privatization of public universities, property does not move
from public to private hands[…] Instead, control shifts from public officials
to private interests… Privatization enables market relations to eclipse col-
laboration for common benefit.
Yet, Newfield continues with a particularly astute point that we would

argue is applicable beyond public institutions and can help explain the
relative acquiescence not just among students, but faculty, staff, and even
middle-management administrators at a range of institutions who might
otherwise be moved to defend the academic mission: “Privatization [of]
universities is a complicated pastiche of mixed modes, which is why many
people can plausibly deny that it is happening” (Newfield, 2008, p. 28,
emphasis added).
In the heady and also heartbreaking period of working on the academic
front lines as faculty leaders endeavoring to protect the academic mission,
our students, and the professoriate in the face of what feels like a non-stop
feeding frenzy on whatever soul of higher education was left before the
pandemic “put everything on the table,” we could see the effectiveness of
deploying a range of methods that leave room for “plausible deniability.”
We have watched good, smart faculty want to hold on to their beliefs in
their administrative colleagues’ best intentions, or students who cannot
begin to bear the reality that they have been victimized by a predatory
scheme that may alter their paths for mobility and their dreams for the
future. We’ve watched students and colleagues shut down emotionally by
the thought that what they had always believed to be true about higher
education, or the people they trusted as its stewards, may, in fact, be as
mythical as a unicorn. For sure, the “pastiche of mixed modes,” (Newfield,
2008, p. 28) combined with the shape-shifting and Davos Man political
covers, make for a set of monstrous mechanisms that can be hidden in
plain sight for folks too busy trying to do their jobs or homework to be
really looking, and tenderizes us all—even when we are paying attention—
to accept narratives of deniability that seem plausible.
Acquiescence to narratives of plausible deniability is even easier when
students, staff, and faculty are exhausted, grieving, and afraid, and particu-
larly easy if we have internalized the legitimacy of corporate higher educa-
tion, whether we are beneficiaries of corporatization or not. Here, we
could call on Marx’s famous “divisive concept” of false consciousness to
explain students who prefer the convenience of McDonaldization in
higher education, or to the scores of faculty and mid-level administrators

who have embraced the culture of assessment and audit, or have happily
given away the farm to online course designers and graduate program
diploma mills. The story is more complicated than that, of course. As
higher education is a primary vehicle for class mobility and the consolida-
tion of class power both for students and faculty, that has meant a different
kind of pastiche is also afoot, namely a pastiche of class tensions, accom-
modations, and betrayals that are playing themselves out on campuses as
different groups of students and faculty make claims to, or try to hold on
to, their professional and managerial identifies, aspirations, and material
livelihoods. But if we are to resist being sacrificial lambs, and further join
the ranks of the lions at the gates, we will need both faculty and students
to be class traitors, perhaps in various ways, but traitors to the fantasies of
higher education nonetheless, a discussion we will turn to in our next and
final chapters. There, we will find some good news that in the midst of
pandemic shape-shifting, opportunism, exhaustion, sacrifice, and loss,
there are those who refuse to accept that academic capitalism’s deniability
is plausible, or even tolerable, any longer.
CHAPTER 12
Resisting the Spider Web of Pandemic

Opportunism
While it is true that the silence of the lambs is real, it is also true that there
are increasingly lions at the gate that have refused the plausible deniability
narratives spun by power elite stakeholders in the spider web of higher
education corporatization schemes. As the pandemic unfolded, faculty,
staff, and students at both public and private colleges and universities all
across the country got organized. Each week, it seemed, we read about yet
another inspiring case of pandemic-era organizing in the U.S., though
such activism was certainly not limited to American campuses. In this
chapter, we discuss the ways in which COVID-19 created a different kind
of pandemic opportunity for faculty, students, and staff to resist the expan-
sion of neoliberal policies and practices in higher education. We highlight
student actions across the nation; labor actions by campus essential work-
ers; and the increasing unionization and mobilization of graduate stu-
dents, faculty, and campus staff responding to risky management decisions
in the COVID context on top of pre-pandemic attacks on workers’ dig-
nity, autonomy, and wages. Whether in the form of resisting the failure of
academic administrators to institute COVID health and safety protocols
that protect lives, organizing around campus policing, or against attacks
on critical race theory, tuition hikes or budget cuts that have resulted in,
or threatened to result in, the layoffs of campus staff and faculty, we argue
these emergent waves of collective action can be understood as resistance

Switzerland AG 2022
to racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism, and part of the larger fight for
the soul of higher education against the opportunism, austerity, sacrifice,
and disposability politics that aim to put profit before people. We pay par-
ticular attention to the growing solidarity movements between faculty,
staff, and students in campaigning for the common good in the aftermath
of the outbreak. In doing so, we spotlight these instances of COVID-era
resistance in ways that are not intended to be a comprehensive inventory,
and knowing that they are each tied to institutional, local, and political
contexts, and in many cases, still in progress.
Students Demand Justice

For members of higher education communities, a paradox amidst the first
two years of the pandemic has been the simultaneous landscapes of stu-
dent isolation, fear, disorientation, and paralysis alongside landscapes,
including virtual ones, of student collective action, resistance, and solidar-
ity. Energized by their analyses of what has felt like naked opportunism by
their campus administrations, students have campaigned for safety, equity,
and justice on U.S. college and university campuses. With the increasingly
powerful mobilizations of the Movement for Black Lives pre-pandemic as
prologue, and with the stage set by the Summer of Unrest that followed
the murder of George Floyd, in some cases, students have situated those
demands explicitly at the intersection of a larger political narrative that
directly connected the “plural pandemics” of COVID-19, climate crisis,
wealth inequality, and white supremacy. More specifically, students have
organized mutual aid efforts and campaigns for tuition, housing, and meal
plan discounts, and protested against unsafe campus housing conditions.
They also organized around CARES relief funding transparency and other
budget allocation priorities, demanded better campus health and safety
protocols, and mobilized a push back against remote learning surveillance
technologies. The crisis also sparked campaigns to increase the wages for
student workers, and a renewed energy around health and labor protec-
tions for student athletes. Buoyed by the successes of the Movement for
Black Lives, students also mobilized to end campus policing as a racial
justice issue, and have worked to build common ground with campus
essential workers and with campus community members in broader racial
and economic justice campaigns.
12 RESISTING THE SPIDER WEB OF PANDEMIC OPPORTUNISM 267
Campaigning for COVID Relief

As we shared in previous chapters, and in ways that have hit us as truly
unconscionable have been the increases in tuition levied on students as the
pandemic wreaked havoc on the financial and personal health of students
and their families all across the world. While some institutions chose to
freeze or even reduce tuition, other colleges and universities either main-
tained tuition rates, despite massive shifts online, or raised tuition—at
times more than once. In response, students around the United States,
and also in the UK, staged tuition strikes, or threats to strike, and in some
cases were able to win temporary tuition reductions or freezes.
For example, students at the University of Chicago organized as
UChicago for Fair Tuition as early as Spring 2020, demanding a 50% cut
in tuition during the pandemic and the ability to review the school budget
or else they would withhold spring 2020 tuition. By April 2020, a reported
1,800 students had signed a petition demanding the university negotiate
tuition, and over 200 students withheld tuition payments until the univer-
sity eventually agreed to a tuition freeze for the undergraduate college and
one graduate school program (McMenamin, 2020). Almost a year later,
over 1000 students at Columbia University withheld tuition in an action
organized by the campus chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists to
demand a 10% reduction in tuition, at minimum, and an increase in finan-
cial aid (Kesslen, 2021). Pandemic tuition hikes prompted protests by
undergraduates at Juilliard, a campus that had rarely seen much student
activism in its history until the pandemic hit (Whitford, 2021e, June 18).
Students at Columbia reported taking their own tuition strike cues
from students in the United Kingdom who had organized rent strikes for
campus housing refunds, some of which resulted in universities conceding
to rent rebates or discounts for eligible students, though some student
organizers, such as those with the Bangor Rent Strike campaign and the
Cardiff Rent Strike campaign, found those rebates did not go far enough
(Morgan, 2021). In England, 17 student unions formed a coalition to
propose that the government fund a 30% tuition fee rebate for students in
exchange for higher interest rates on student loans (Hall, R., 2021a).
Coordinated by student unions from the London School of Economics
and the University of Sheffield, the proposal was signed by University
College London, King’s College, and Queen Mary in London, Queen’s
University in Belfast, and ten other universities in England. In a show of
solidarity, students in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland also signed
on (Hall, R., 2021a). A range of other colleges and universities in the

U.S. also took on the strategy of organizing for a tuition strike, including
Rice University, the University of Massachusetts Boston, Duke University,
and at the three public universities in Iowa, namely the University of Iowa,
Iowa State University, and the University of Northern Iowa
(McMenamin, 2020).
Using the tactic of class action lawsuits, students in the United States
took their colleges or universities to court for alleged breach of contract in
charging students in-person tuition and fees during periods of remote
instruction. By some reports, by March 2022, there were hundreds of
lawsuits filed across the United States by students seeking refunded tuition
and fees, and more than 70 institutions were facing class action lawsuits by
April 2022 (Cappellino, 2022). Many of these lawsuits have been dis-
missed, and others have resulted in relatively small settlements, such as the
$12.5 million settlement with Columbia University in 2021 (Moody,
H., 2022), and the $5 million settlement with Rutgers University in 2022
that would return $50 to $70 in tuition and fees to each student for the
switch to remote instruction (Deak, 2022).
At The New School, students organized a class and registration boycott
during the first semester of the pandemic, demanding budget transpar-
ency, a universal grading system, a tuition freeze, as well as tuition, meal
plan and housing reimbursements (Nguyen, 2020). As we shared in the
last chapter, undergraduate students at Howard University staged
headline-making protests against the university for squalid campus hous-
ing conditions managed by Corvias, and the refusal of Corvias to issue
housing refunds to students after dorms were closed. Students occupied a
campus building and slept outside in tents in protest. And, as we write,
members of Congress have continued to question Corvias about their
practices. At Stanford University, hundreds of residence hall assistants
went on strike indefinitely in 2021 until the university met its demands for
higher wages, modified drug and alcohol policies, and instituted better
COVID-19 health and safety protections in the dorms (Ehsan, 2021). It
is also worth noting that college student organizing for pandemic health
and safety occurred alongside a wave of walkouts by high school students
all across the country, including in Chicago, Oakland, Denver and St.
Paul, demanding changes to their districts’ pandemic response plans
(Cattel, 2022).
College Athlete Labor Movement Accelerates

Perhaps less widely followed than the student tuition strikes and tent cities
on campus quads for those who are not college sports fans has been the
head of steam that the college athlete labor movement has gained over the
course of the controversy around whether or not to cancel sports seasons,
and if so, when, and for whom. While the 2021 decision by the NCAA
Board of Governors to allow players to be recognized and compensated
for their name, image and likeness (NIL) was heralded as a good move by
many, the National College Players’ Association (NCPA), in the context of
the likelihood of additional legal battles for the NCAA, was successful in
pressuring the NCAA to implement concrete changes as a result of their
ruling without considerable delay. Speaking for NCPA in a press release,
the organization’s president, Ramoji Huma, had said of advocates’ demand
for the NCAA to resist any further wait for student athletes’ labor to be
compensated through the new NIL policy, “If the NCAA and its confer-
ences have the power to cancel March Madness and spring sports,” Huma
said, “they can implement these actions just as quickly” (Pickman, 2020,
para. 12). In addition to pushing for immediate implementation of the
new rule changes, which they won, student-athletes and their advocates
continue to mobilize pressure on the NCAA to allow third party entities
to fund necessary student-athlete expenses, such as food, rent, utilities,
and out-of-pocket medical costs, and to do so post haste. Huma also said
that, “If ever NCAA sports is going to treat players like people rather than
property, it should absolutely be during this crisis” (Pickman, 2020, para.
10.), situating the debate over the exploitation of student athletes in the
larger context of racialized labor and its relationship to, among other
things, the structural racism embedded in institutions of higher education.
Arguably even more impactful was the October 2021 memorandum by
the National Labor Relations Board General Counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo,
on the statutory rights of college athletes which suggested that certain
college athletes in the U.S. might now be defined as “employees” under
federal law. Of particular potential consequence was a footnote that allows
the NCAA or a college sports athletic conference to be a “joint employer”
with a college or university. In doing so, Aburzzo’s ruling has meant the
possibility that “a door would open for the establishment of true multi-
player collective bargaining in college sports” (Edelman, 2021, para. 4),
an opportunity “that marks undeniable progress for the college athlete
labor movement” (Edelman, 2021, para. 6). By February 2022, U.S.
members of Congress had filed more than a half a dozen bills to address
compensation issues, health and safety issues, and academic issues for stu-
dent athletes (Kelderman, 2022b). Arguably, these bills reflected the mea-
sure of success the college athlete labor movement had during the
pandemic in seizing the opportunity to call out the hypocrisy of the multi-
million dollar academic-athletic industrial complex in their flagrant use of
amateur players who are vulnerable on several fronts, including in their
own desires to participate in their sport, to contribute unpaid labor during
the most dangerous of times.
Students Broaden the Platform

Along with the mixed victories in student campaigns to hold institutions
accountable for pandemic budgeting decisions and related pandemic
health and safety protocols, student campaigns surfaced during the pan-
demic that broadened the resistance platform in ways that implicitly if not
explicitly recognized the intersectionality mechanisms of racialized disaster
patriarchal capitalism. For example, as part of their 2021 tuition strike,
Columbia University students also demanded that the university defund
campus police, bargain in good faith with campus unions, and cease its
plans to further expand into the surrounding neighborhood of West
Harlem (Kesslen, 2021), the latter a campaign that long predates the
COVID-19 crisis. Similarly, the United Student Front (USF) was founded
at American University (AU) in 2020 with an expansive social justice
vision. The group’s founder, Miranda Dotson, who had recently witnessed
the surge of social movement activism in Paris, including student striking
in solidarity with professors over President Emmanuel Macron’s proposed
pension reform plan, modeled a multi-issue platform with her peers in
USF to take advantage of the moment to link critical campus issues that
students had been battling for years at AU, namely issues around racism
and sexual assault, with the pandemic crisis, leading to the idea to mobilize
around a tuition strike as a tactic. From there, the USF networked with
campus activists around the U.S., deploying the tuition strike not only as
a tactic to win tuition refunds and pandemic discounts, but to pressure
administrations to adopt abolitionist stances on university investing, for
example, to defund campus police and reinvest in students and the com-
munity, to divest from fossil fuels, and to reckon with the “clear connec-
tion between the movement for racial justice and the fight against student
debt and college costs” (McMenamin, 2020, para. 7).
In a separate but related strike action, almost half of the student tour
guides at the University of Texas Austin went on strike in May 2021 to
push the university to create a more welcoming, anti-racist campus for
prospective and current students. The striking tour guides demanded that
university remove a plaque from the Admissions Welcome Center com-
memorating the lyrics of the school’s alma mater, “The Eyes of Texas,” a
song derived from a student minstrel show performance, likely performed
by students in blackface, and at time when Black students were barred
from enrolling. Students also struck to force the university to overturn its
ruling that requires the school marching band to play the alma mater. At
our own university, a coalition of student groups under the banner of
Students for Systemic Change organized a platform of racial justice
demands in the midst of the outbreak, including demands for increased
COVID relief for the most economically marginal students on campus,
demands for greater budget allocations for anti-racist initiatives, removal
of the name of Woodrow Wilson from the university’s historic Wilson
Hall, and a significant increase in the number of faculty of color, among
other demands. On all but the diversification of the faculty, which the
faculty union took up in solidarity and is currently negotiating as part of a
larger proposed agreement for equity and anti-racism in hiring and pro-
motion, the students were victorious.
One area of pandemic opportunism that we did not cover in the book
but which is worth exploring in further research is the introduction and
expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for proctoring exams,
and particularly, the entrance of cheating-detection companies into the
educational marketplace. Online proctoring companies like ProctorU,
Respondus, and Honorlock made millions during the outbreak, including
from public funding, after selling schools hi-tech webcam software that
watches workers and eye-tracking software designed to catch students
cheating on tests. In a parallel with the recent exposés of Amazon workers
unable to leave their posts for bathroom breaks, students have reported
the extraordinary stress of being surveilled during high stakes tests, so
much so, that students have reported weeping at their desks in anxiety or
urinating on themselves for fear of leaving their seats (Harwell, 2020). In
April 2022, in the coverage of Christian Smalls’ phenomenal David-like
unionizing drive victory over the Goliath of Amazon to form the Amazon
Labor Union on Staten Island, New York, Smalls recounts how he had
witnessed a co-worker also urinate on themselves for fear of being fired if
they stopped working to use the bathroom (Kantor & Weise, 2022). Like
Smalls, students staged protests nationwide to demand that college admin-

istrators discontinue such deals (Harwell, 2020). Students launched social
media campaigns, letter writing campaigns, and some took to doing their
own analyses of how the companies used student data (Harwell, 2020).
Academic Workers Demand Justice

Like students, faculty, including graduate student faculty, and staff have
made headlines in their unwillingness to deny the enormity of the trans-
formations underfoot in higher education as a result of the structural and
cultural forces that have made for pandemic disaster and the institutional
feeding frenzies that ensued. Our immediate analysis of the higher land-
scape in the U.S., as suggested by our review of industry news, collective
action trackers, and popular media coverage, is that campus workers, aca-
demic and non-academic alike, have been just as engaged as undergradu-
ate students, and arguably even more engaged, in collective efforts to
confront the spider web of racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism in the
pandemic. One measure, although not the only one, has been the increase
in unionization and union actions in U.S. higher education during the first
two years of the pandemic, as well as other documented collective
resistance.
An Academic Labor Reawakening

For those looking for a strong dose of optimism in the long arc of strug-
gles toward justice, the high profile and inspiring news of workers union-
izing at Amazon and Starbucks, in news rooms and art museums, in the
halls of Congress, and the nearly year-long and ongoing strike of Alabama
minors, have led commentators and analysts to credit these first years of
the pandemic for reawakening the spirit of, and support for, unionism in
the U.S. The increase in support for unions in the U.S. has occurred even
as the overall proportion of unionized workers appears to have remained
considerably low, and particularly so relative to rates preceding the onset
of the Second Gilded Age (Johnston, 2022). In the U.S. today, roughly
10% of all U.S. workers are unionized, 34% of public sector workers are
unionized, and approximately 6% in the private sector (Bureau of Labor
Statistics, 2022a). In 2017, two years before the outbreak, nearly 16% of
all workers at colleges and universities were covered by a collective bar-
gaining agreement, compared to roughly only 12% of all U.S. workers
(Kezar et al., 2019). Academic workers, whether staff or faculty, have a

fairly long history of unionization in the U.S., and a variable record of
labor actions, including strikes. Indeed, faculty engaged in strikes prior to
the establishment of faculty unions on campuses, the firsts of which were
nearly 100 years ago (Herbert & Apkarian, 2020). While the historical
pattern of engagement may be uneven, it is fair to say that we have entered
into a new chapter of activity for organized campus labor resistance.
For instance, William A. Herbert and Jacob Apkarian (2020) docu-
mented the history of faculty strikes in higher education in the United
States and found that 172 faculty strikes occurred in the U.S. between
1966 and 1994, 162 of those documented by the National Center for
Collective Bargaining in Higher Education (2020) and an additional 10
documented by Herbert and Apkarian’s supplemental research. Over the
course of those nearly three decades, the peak of those strikes was in the
1970s with the greatest number in 1977, and declining in the 1980s and
1990s (2020). Between 2006 and 2012, the number of faculty in collec-
tive bargaining units, in particular, increased 14%, and by 2012, 390,000
faculty were in collective bargaining units in the U.S. (Kezar et al., 2019).
Herbert and Apkarian (2020) also study the period immediately pre-
ceding the pandemic and found that 14 faculty strikes and one lock out
occurred between 2012 and 2018, suggesting a pattern of strike activity
similar to the 1980s and 1990s where the rate ranged from one to four
strikes each year. In the same period, another 21 strike actions were taken
by non-academic campus workers, and seven strike actions by graduate
student workers. In the aughts, U.S. campus workers protested at least
100 times for wage increases (Kezar et al., 2019). Scholars of the academic
labor movement have also tracked the marked increase in graduate student
unionization since 2016 when the NLRB issued its landmark decision
against Columbia University that reestablished the legal right of contin-
gent faculty, including graduate students, to collectively bargain as univer-
sity employees (Kezar et al., 2019). By 2019, on the eve of the pandemic,
at least 40 graduate student unions had been legally recognized, with at
least another 20 unrecognized but active (Kezar et al., 2019). The increase
in graduate student unionization had been such that scholars and activists
alike attribute current broader faculty and campus worker organizing suc-
cesses not only to the larger climate of social unrest and movement orga-
nizing, including non-academic labor movement organizing, but also to
the leadership and strategy of graduate student unionization drives and
subsequent contract and issue campaigns.
Even prior to the pandemic, Kezar et al. (2019, p. 120) found that:
[g]iven the declining working conditions brought on by massive structural

changes in higher education employment, it is perhaps not surprising that
unionization is on the rise. In addition to the profound sense of despair
among contingent faculty, staff, graduate students and postdocs, there have
also been forces pushing these groups toward unionization. [Recent changes
in policy from the [NLRB] have allowed unionization [by contingent work-
ers and] even some who have rarely unionized in the past, such as residence
hall directors.
Currently, Kezar et al. (2019) also estimate that approximately 28% of
non-academic campus workers are unionized in the United States, with a
pre-pandemic track record of labor actions that have outpaced faculty
labor actions. By comparison, in just the first year of the pandemic, AAUP
advocacy chapters nearly doubled. In 2019 there were 36 advocacy chap-
ters, and by 2020, there were 69 (Flaherty, 2022c). According to the
Cornell Institute of Labor Relations (ILR), between January 2021 and
April 2022, there were 254 strikes or other labor protests in U.S. educa-
tion reported to their labor tracker website, with 123 of those actions occur-
ring in higher education. Of those, at least 16 were strikes. The Cornell
ILR labor tracker data include actions from undergraduate and graduate
student unions, faculty and staff unions, and unions that represent a com-
bination of workers, whether bargaining units or not. Of these actions
reported in that period, which did not include the first year of the pan-
demic, campus staff actions were the most frequent, though graduate and
undergraduate student workers were more likely to have engaged in strikes
than staff or faculty. In at least seven of those cases, workers took action to
demand union recognition.
Equally important, the likelihood that these data are undercounts of
the number and extent of U.S. campus worker action is high. The Cornell
IRL data are not a comprehensive picture of campus resistance, and even
in its focus on labor actions does not purport to be a complete inventory
of labor actions in the pandemic context or prior, as we will see in our own
spotlighting of cases not inventoried by Cornell IRL. The difficulty of
fully capturing the state of organizing is understandable given the lack of
a central data collection repository, the fact that the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics does not record labor strikes of fewer than 1000 workers, nor
does it record actions of groups not recognized as unions. The reality is
that many labor actions draw their strength precisely from the organiza-
tion of credible threats of work stoppages or other demonstrations of
worker power that go unreported because the pressure of escalation suc-
ceeded in winning demands or concessions. That said, the 14 months of
actions the IRL labor tracker documented that spanned the second year of
the pandemic and into the beginning of the third, and our own tracking
of collective action since the outbreak began, can be mapped onto trends
in campus actions that previous scholars have documented.
First and foremost, we have witnessed campaigns for the health, safety,
and dignity of campus staff igniting in the context of COVID-19. For
example, in the fall of 2020, the AFSCME campus staff union at the
University of Maryland-College Park (UMCP), representing roughly
3400 employees, waged a successful campaign to protect worker health
and safety after the UMCP management imposed COVID-19 protocols
without union input (Katzenberg & Holden, 2020). They were also able
to enter in discussions over a cost containment plan that would protect
over 99% of the membership from furloughs or salary reductions
(Katzenberg & Holden, 2020). At Arizona State University and Arizona
University, campus staff staged a “funeral” protest in October 2020 to
demand, among other changes, mask and vaccine mandates, testing dur-
ing work hours and at on-campus sites, flexible work options, and hazard
pay for essential workers. A year later, at Northwestern University in
October 2021, UNITE-HERE Local 1, representing campus dining and
hospitality staff, staged a die-in for better health and safety protections,
quarantine pay, and health insurance for laid off workers, among other
demands.
Likewise, graduate student workers, emboldened by the 2016 Columbia
decision, took action to resist disaster capitalism, including the wildcat
strikes of graduate student workers at UC Santa Cruz (Bader, 2020). Not
only did Columbia University students stage tuition strikes, but Columbia
graduate student workers also went on strike for ten weeks in 2022 to suc-
cessfully win a new four year contract with a 6% wage increase for workers
with an annual contract, and an increase from $15 to $21 for hourly wage
workers (Wong, 2022). Among other wins, Columbia graduate student
workers also secured access to a third party arbitration process for cases of
alleged harassment and discrimination (Wong, 2022). Prior to that, grad-
uate student workers at New York University settled a historic contract
after striking in 2021. Even earlier in the pandemic, in 2020, graduate
research and teaching assistants at Georgetown University won a three
year contract with pay and benefit increases (Communication Workers of

America, 2022). At Harvard University, the United Auto Workers (UAW)
local staged a three day strike by student workers that successfully ended
in late October 2021, and a second strike was narrowly avoided the fol-
lowing month (Wong, 2022) after roughly 2000 UAW student workers
authorized a strike over pay increases, rights to form a closed shop, and
contractual protections against harassment and discrimination (Flaherty,
2021b). At the University of Chicago, graduate students took the oppor-
tunity of the pandemic to organize for paid sick leave, for access to tele-
therapy sessions, and permission for international students to remain in
campus housing if COVID-19 travel restrictions kept them from return-
ing home (Bader, 2020).
If graduate student workers have been leading the way in pandemic
unionization, and in strike actions since the outbreak, faculty across the
U.S. have followed suit, whether as unionized faculty or not, particularly
around issues of worker health and safety. As has been the case among
some undergraduate and graduate student campaigns we have profiled
above, at times, organized faculty resistance has also connected COVID
health and safety to the larger politics of racialized and gendered capital-
ism, as we will discuss more below. Resisting disposability politics was
the Faculty Council of Spelman College who organized to teach remotely
in fall 2021, garnering national news coverage (Pettit, 2021). During
the same period, in late August 2021, Clemson University faculty staged
a walk-out turned teach-in to protest the campus pandemic plan. Also,
that summer, on the other side of the country, Santa Barbara City
College’s Academic Senate voted no confidence in members of their
Board of Trustees that opposed a vaccine mandate. They have not been
alone: Oklahoma University’s AAUP chapter issued a report card on
COVID mitigation with their administration earning an “F” (Wilson,
2021). The faculty union at the University of Iowa invoked state law as
grounds to protect their right to exert authority over their classrooms to
institute a mask mandate. The University of Northern Iowa faculty
union filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor (US
DOL) for Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)
violations.
In Georgia in early September, 2021, at least 16 colleges planned
week-long demonstrations to institute mask and/or vaccine mandates,
including work by the University of Georgia AAUP chapter (Schnell,
2021) and University of Georgia—United Campus Workers of GA who
organized faculty to take mask mandates into their own hands and
require them in their classrooms. Northern Illinois University faculty
were successful at negotiating an agreement for a trigger to switching to
remote instruction when the campus positivity rate for COVID-19
reached 8% percent, the cautionary threshold set by the Illinois
Department of Public Health. The Hunter College local of the
Professional Staff Congress (PSC) of the City University of New York
(CUNY) and the CUNY Research Foundation, which represents 30,000
CUNY faculty and staff at CUNY, and 2800 at Hunter, staged protests
in August 2021 to demand better health and safety protocols, flexible
schedules that allowed for remote work, including remote instruction,
and more transparency about job losses and COVID relief spending
(PSC, CUNY, 2021).
As we discussed in previous chapters, faculty and staff also registered
their collective resistance to layoffs, furloughs, and academic program
cuts, and academic unions across the country continued to negotiate suc-
cessor contracts, or bargain first contracts. For instance, after the pan-
demic hit in our own state, the Council of New Jersey College Locals won
the largest wage increases ever for adjuncts for nine of the New Jersey
public colleges, organizing over 5000 academic workers, and with strike
authorization votes that had not happened for over two decades. Elsewhere
in the U.S., in October 2021, the faculty at St. Petersburg College voted
to unionize (Smith, 2019), as did the graduate student workers in the
College of Arts and Sciences at Fordham University, joining the
Communication Workers of America (CWA, 2022). The newly formed
AAUP-AFT chapter of the University of New Mexico negotiated its first
contract in 2021 (American Federation of Teachers, 2021b). On top of
the seven new unions tracked by the Cornell IRL, in October 2020, the
faculty at the University of Pittsburgh voted to unionize, joining the
United Steelworkers Association. With a 3355 member bargaining unit,
the union became one of the largest new unions to form in 2021 in any
employment sector (Flaherty, October 21, 2021e).
Alongside these unionization drives and important contract wins were
faculty mobilizations to protect academic freedom in the throes of the
radical right’s escalated gambit to seize curricula. As the racist and sexist
attacks on academic freedom and the right to teach about the history of
inequalities, and the realities of race, gender and sexuality proliferated,
faculty across the U.S. took action to pass resolutions denouncing the
wave of legislation targeting “divisive concepts,” such as the Faculty
Council at the University of Texas at Austin and the University Senate of

Ohio State University, or by reasserting the tenets of academic freedom, as
in Faculty Senate at the University of Alabama and Penn State (Anderson
& Svrluga, 2022). Actions like these occupied the same larger organizing
spaces with the resistance aimed at workload issues that disproportionately
impact faculty of color, signaling the relationships between academic free-
dom, faculty labor issues, and student access issues. For example, explained
McIver and Griffey (2021, para. 8), about the interconnectedness before
the pandemic hit:
At the very same time that the share of Black and Hispanic students in
higher education has been rising, the employment standards for their teach-
ers have been falling, and those best positioned to serve these students have
been undermined. We suspect that the low pay provided to temporary col-
lege faculty has stunted the ability of colleges to hire a diverse faculty work-
force that more closely reflects the demographics of their students and
surrounding communities. The slowly increasing racial diversity of faculty
members over the last couple of generations has been accompanied by the
rapid decline of the profession itself.
As we will see below, analyses like these that connect the interests of fac-
ulty, staff, and students have characterized important new waves of soli-
darity and strategy in the first two years of the outbreak.
Coalitions, Solidarities, and Organizing

for the Common Good
From our monitoring of the higher education industry news, popular

press, and from our own experiences in faculty leadership, we can identify
some of the ways in which faculty, staff, and students in the United States
have also formed coalitions within their campuses, and across campuses
within university systems. Most promising, we have also witnessed the
emergence of national coalitions of faculty, staff and students that are tak-
ing their own kind of advantage of pandemic opportunities, and ones that
have also been informed by a critical shift toward organizing for the com-
mon good.
Campus Coalitions
In the first two years of the outbreak, coalitions formed across worker and
student groups on campuses, and across different campuses within univer-
sity systems. For example, the Faculty Senate at Penn State voted no con-
fidence in the university’s COVID plan, 270 faculty protested via remote
teaching “zoom in,” and their AAUP chapter launched a #WeGotYourBacks
solidarity campaign for workers across the system (Swift, 2021). At Oberlin
College, the UAW chapter engaged in an intentional strategy of solidarity
organizing when the college announced that it was considering contract-
ing with outside vendors to replace over 100 unionized dining and custo-
dial workers. Protests involving 800 students, 4500 petition signatures
from students, alumni and community members demanding a reversal,
2600 pledges from alumni to withhold donations if the outsourcing at
Oberlin continued, and also statements of solidarity from elected officials,
candidates for office, and major unions and advocacy groups including the
SEIU, Chicago Teachers Union, Make the Road, as well as a statement
from the Working Families Party (at the time of the article, Oberlin had
not withdrawn its proposal) (Avery & Kinsella-Walsh, 2020). In the first
year of the pandemic, The New School Labor Coalition in solidarity with
the New School Chapter of the AAUP (AAUP-TNS) formed with the
goals of “holding our leadership accountable for the labor policies they are
enacting; building increased solidarity across all sectors and categories of
workers across the institution; and transforming The New School into the
workplace and the university we all need and deserve” (AAUP-TNS,
2020, para. 3). The coalition, which includes UAW, SENS-UAW,
Teamsters, and AFM locals, represents roughly 3700 workers and a major-
ity of The New School’s employees (AAUP-TNS, 2020), and expressly
demanded that core staff and faculty be included in The New School
restructuring process.
At the University of Southern California (USC), a coalition of faculty,
staff, and students issued a United Statement of Grave Concerns to the
USC administration demanding transparency in university-wide decisions,
authentic leadership, and the ability of employees to make health and
service-based decisions without fear of termination (USC United, 2021).
This was in the wake of requirements that employees that were students or
community facing return to on-campus work in early August 2021. At the
University of North Carolina (UNC), the AAUP faculty union and the
United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) union
representing staff and graduate students, formed a coalition against UNC’s

fall 2020 reopening plans (Marris, 2020). In a campaign against austerity
that preceded the pandemic, faculty, staff, students and alumni at George
Washington University continued to organize, and in a similarly explicit
attack on narratives of scarcity and sacrifice, The Jesuit Higher Education
Labor Coalition, a coalition of seven institutions, was founded to explicitly
denounce austerity measures as inconsistent with Catholic Social Teaching
(Canavan et al., 2021).
In our own state, 19 unions across three campuses of the Rutgers
University system organized as early as the summer of 2020 to protest the
university’s declaration of fiscal emergency. Representing approximately
20,000 workers, the coalition of unions did not believe the University was
experiencing a true fiscal emergency, and demanded, among other things,
that the administration adopt the coalition’s COVID-19 response recom-
mendations for preventing layoffs and wage freezes, including a work-
sharing furlough program (Makin, 2020b). The coalition also pressured
the university to rescind orders that had, in effect, laid off up to 25% of
part-time faculty, to increase the pay of Rutgers front-line healthcare
workers, and to establish a one-year funding extension for teaching and
graduate assistants (Makin, 2020b). The coalition also organized for the
allocation of hardship funds for students who could not access fed-
eral relief.
On our own campus, where we have an AAUP bargaining chapter and
also a faculty council, faculty, staff, and students organized separately, but
also in coalition, around a range of issues in the austerity politics context.
On the cusp of the outbreak, our AAUP bargaining chapter and our fac-
ulty council had taken deliberate steps to address the structural gaps
between the two faculty governance bodies. Once the pandemic hit, our
AAUP chapter partnered with our faculty council leadership to protect
shared governance in the university’s COVID response and return to cam-
pus planning. Most notably, together, the faculty leadership resisted the
imposition of a “hyflex” or “blendflex” teaching modalities as a purported
pandemic-necessitated response, and collaborated to win new strong intel-
lectual property language in the collective bargaining agreement in a time
of extraordinary power grabs for control of the fruits of faculty labor across
the country. With the solidarity support of our faculty council, our union
also secured faculty choice to teach remotely for the 2020–2021 academic
year, as well as temporary modifications to the collective bargaining agree-
ment to protect faculty job security in matters of evaluation, tenure and
promotion. The faculty worked in coalition with our Black and Diaspora
Forum United and Students for Systemic Change and a multipoint agenda
to address systemic racism on campus, and supported student organizers
campaigning to ensure that CARES Act funding was being distributed
fairly. Subsequently, we were able to successfully push for vaccine and mask
mandates prior to the Delta variant, knowing even that there were hun-
dreds of colleges and universities where management was still unwilling to
protect lives at that stage of the outbreak. In all this, the work was shaped
by union-faculty council solidarity, our formal structural realignment, our
outreach to unionized staff and student groups on campus; our reliance on
our union allies across the state, and the deliberate public framing of issues
in the context of anti-austerity. These elements, together, set the stage for
increased faculty power on campus in the pandemic setting, and for a con-
tract campaign victory that belied the narrative of fiscal crisis.
National Coalitions
Prior to COVID-19, national coalitions of faculty and also students in the
U.S. had formed to challenge elements of the spider web of corporatiza-
tion, including UnKoch My Campus, The New Faculty Majority, and
Tenure for the Common Good. The pandemic has brought new opportu-
nities for the growth of national coalitions working to push for federal
policy changes, such as free college, student debt forgiveness, the expan-
sion of Pell Grants, federal legislation to protect tenure lines, and federal
policy to establish unemployment insurance for part-time faculty, among
other pieces of armor against further privatization, vocationalization, and
financialization of higher education.
For example, in March 2021, the AAUP and the American Federation
of Teachers (AFT) launched a joint campaign for a New Deal for Higher
Education (NDHE), based on the work of Scholars for a New Deal for
Higher Education (SFNDHE), to demand federal intervention for a res-
toration of higher education as a public good, centering the values of
social, racial and economic justice, and the strengthening of democracy
and civil society. A year later, in March 2022, the AAUP and the American
Federation of Teachers (AFT) announced a tentative agreement to expand
their decade-long affiliation to merge their union organizing activities,
which was ratified by both organizations in subsequent months. As a
result, all collective bargaining units of both organizations have become
joint AAUP-AFT locals. Representing nearly 300,000 faculty, the alliance
is now the largest faculty union in the United States (see Flaherty, 2022c).

The NDHE includes specific legislative changes around federal reinvest-
ment in higher education; ending the systemic use of part-time faculty
labor; protecting academic freedom around the teaching of history and
inequalities; student debt relief; and college access and affordability
(Flaherty, 2022c). According to press releases from the AAUP (McIver &
Griffey, 2021) and the AFT (American Federation of Teachers, 2021a) on
the priorities of the NDHE platform, the campaign goals are to seek
national policy changes that would require faculty salary equity across
ranks, pointing to the legislation introduced in New Hampshire to require
75% parity in public colleges and universities in New Hampshire and
another piece of legislation for 100% parity in Illinois; promoting collec-
tive bargaining that is regional as opposed to by institution; unemploy-
ment insurance eligibility for part-time faculty; and universal faculty
representation in shared governance (McIver & Griffey, 2021). The
NDHE addresses “tuition costs, institutional funding and student debt
relief [and also] spotlights reforms related to racial injustice and inequities,
[…] federal research funding, technical and vocational education, and a
host of other challenges that have diminished our national capacity to
educate our communities” (American Federation of Teachers, 2021a,
para. 5). Additionally, the NDHE prioritizes the investment in faculty
recruitment and hiring excellence, expanded shared governance where
contingent faculty can participate in decision making in meaningful ways,
and the expansion of academic workers’ bargaining power overall through
a universal right to organize.
In the summer of 2021, the United University Professors of the State
University of New York system, comprising 75 locals and representing
more than 300,000 academic workers, convened the Higher Education
Labor Summit to transform U.S. higher education, launching Higher
Education Labor United (HELU) with a core team of leaders from the
Rutgers University AAUP-AFT Local, The California Faculty Association
(AAUP-SEIU), and the University of California Student Workers Union,
United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2865. According to coalition leaders,
the organization emerged “from concerted efforts of campus workers
across the United States,” including those from “Scholars for a New Deal
for Higher Ed (SFNDHE), along with other allies, [who] coordinated the
summit with 50 union locals to plan a national strategy,” representing “fac-
ulty, staff, and students working on all types of campuses” to develop a
shared vision. Members of the newly formed HELU included
representatives from AAUP, AFSCME, AFT, CWA, NEA, SEIU, the

Teamsters, UAW, and UE, and independent locals totaling over “110
unions and allied organizations, representing over 550,000 workers at
community colleges, professional schools, and major research institutions
across twenty-eight states in the U.S.” (HELU Vision Platform, 2022).
HELU began organizing around four major issue areas, namely (1) free
public two and four year college; (2) ensuring paths to tenure for all faculty;
(3) ending student debt; (4) and guaranteeing a living wage for all aca-
demic employees. Along with the establishment of HELU policy and poli-
tics tables, the new coalition envisions a move toward coordinated
bargaining across the sector. For many of the unions in the coalition, they
would be negotiating contracts in the same year, and in many cases, with a
fundamental shift toward what labor movement leaders would call a model
of bargaining for the common good that is “ organizing people and empow-
ering them to join in even larger struggles” (HELU Vision Platform, 2022).
Organizing for the Common Good

Prior to COVID, the academic labor movement had made an important
philosophical shift toward “organizing for common good,” or what others
would call social justice unionism. According to Kezar et al. (2019) in
their recent pre-pandemic study of the transformation of higher education
into a “gig academy” and its attendant characteristics, “some of the con-
text that distinguishes today’s academic labor movement from its mid-
twentieth century predecessor [is] the increasing focus on social justice
unionism, largely due to the leadership of graduate organizers, which goes
beyond narrow issues like wages and benefits to include critical feminist
and antiracist priorities, and a focus on broad-based organizing strategies
and direct action that brings multiple university constituencies together”
(pp. 120–121), as well as constituencies in surrounding communities. In
this framework, not only do organizers reject traditional business union
models of unionism that focus largely on the “bread and butter” issues of
salaries and benefits only, they also work to transform what are often
highly bureaucratic structures of union authority where union officers
engage in closed-door dealings with management absent much participa-
tion from “rank and file” members. In many cases, business or trade union
models operate as a kind of “fee for service” model where the primary
activity of individual members is to pay dues in exchange for representa-
tion to bargain contracts on their behalf, or grieve contract violations.
Here members are often not encouraged to see themselves as active par-
ticipants in collective decision making, power building, or power showing
actions intended to build democratic organizations or institutions both
within and outside of the union. By comparison, organizing or bargaining
for the common good means “going beyond traditional contract demands
to bring everything that affects workers and their communities to the
table” (Smith, 2019, para. 3), and through an organizational or institu-
tional structure that prioritizes regular and wide-reaching member partici-
pation to increase power for all workers, and for democracy itself. This
organizing work could mean campaigning on issues of racial and gender
justice that extend beyond salaries and benefits, on issues related to local
community health and safety, for prison abolition, environmental justice,
or immigrant rights.
For example, even before their pandemic response organizing, Rutgers
AAUP-AFT had worked for several years to shift their philosophy of
unionism toward bargaining for the common good, explained former
AAUP-AFT president, Deepa Kumar. For them, that meant when deter-
mining what would be their bargaining priorities as they built capacity for
their contract fight, they “would look at everything that was wrong with
the corporate university and lay out a vision of what we want to change”
(Smith, 2019, para. 34). In this way, right out of the contract battle gate,
Rutgers targeted the corporate university itself, and moved to expand the
parameters of the fight, going on the offensive with a broad vision for
transformation as opposed to a narrow defensive strategy around “bread
and butter” issues only. As a result, they won a historic contract victory
that included provisions for women and faculty of color to obtain pay
equity with men faculty and white faculty through contract procedures
that permit faculty to apply for a review of salaries in relation to bench-
marked data on salary levels (Carrera, 2019). They expanded job security
for contingent faculty, and built alliances with staff unions for proposals to
stem pandemic layoffs. Beyond that, they successfully fought against the
further privatization of the academic mission in a campaign against Pearson
and the Rutgers learning management system, and more recently cam-
paigned as allies with local teachers and community members fighting
against local public school privatizations and closures.
Using a similar model, the graduate student union at the University of
Michigan launched an abolitionist strike with a slate of demands larger
than just support for their members. Their platform included demands
around the universal right to work, robust campus testing, disarming and
defunding campus police, and departing from the city police. Lead orga-
nizer, Kathleen Brown, explained that the graduate student strike inspired
two other worker actions on campus and the formation of a Fall Campus
Labor Council (Brown, 2020). That same fall semester, campus RA’s went
on strike, concerned about campus health and safety during the pandemic,
and campus student dining workers staged a walk-out and a work slow-
down around similar demands (Brown, 2020). At the University of
California Davis in 2020, organizers launched Strike University, which
held teach-ins on topics such as police surveillance, environmental justice,
HIV/AIDs, bringing in visionary speakers like Cornel West and Tithi
Bhattacharya, and with plans for a 2020 summer “camp” that would focus
on prison abolition (Bader, 2020).
The national coalitions launched during the pandemic were also
informed by an organizing for the common good philosophy. The New
Deal for Higher Education campaign announced by the AAUP-AFT in
March 2021 was explicitly undergirded by the following values: “1.
Building prosperity from the bottom up; 2. Advancing social, racial and
economic justice; 3. Strengthening democracy and civil society; [and] 4.
Fostering knowledge and innovation” (AFT, 2021a). Quoted in AFT’s
press release on the campaign launch, Irene Mulvey, President of AAUP,
said, in a word, “It’s time to go big” (AFT, 2021, para. 6). In March
2022, and guided by the same overall philosophy, Higher Education
Labor United described its vision of U.S. higher education as a:
system that works for and is led by workers, students, and the communities
it serves. We envision a system that secures our nation’s democratic future
and serves as a vehicle for addressing inequities. […] We envision public and
nonprofit private institutions of higher education that prioritize people and
the common good over profit and prestige. We envision institutions that
redress systemic oppression and pursue equity along lines of race, gender,
class, sexuality, nationality, indigeneity, age, (dis)ability, and immigration
status for students and higher ed workers across all job categories. We envi-
sion institutions that honor the right of all workers to organize a union and
collectively bargain, and commit to the fair working conditions crucial to
achieving our educational mission. […] We envision a higher education
labor movement that connects workers across job categories, ranks, systems,
states, and sectors. We envision a movement that forms coalitions of and
builds democratic power for all workers. (HELU Vision Platform, 2022)
We will explore our own recommendations for a way forward out of the
pandemic, but suffice it to say here that this vision of organizing for the
common good has marked a significant shift in academic labor organizing
that has taken greater shape in the context of the crisis.
In this chapter, our major aim has been to recognize some of the impor-
tant ways that students, faculty, and staff have made use of a different kind
of pandemic opportunity to collectively resist various threads of the spider
web of higher education corporatization in the U.S., many of which have
been strengthened in a COVID-19 fabric of fear, exhaustion, disorienta-
tion, panic, and greed. An inventory of the full range of resistance strate-
gies at play, or that could be at play, and a comprehensive analysis of the
impact of such resistance, is outside the scope of the book, if only because
the movements to defend against racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism
as it is manifesting in higher education are unfolding in real time. As we
write, the World Health Organization is poised to officially release updated
figures that put the global death toll from COVID-19 at 15 million (Nolen
& Deep Singh, 2022), and in the United States, state and local officials
continue to debate the need to reestablish masking protocols. On our own
campus, faculty leadership are responding to our university’s proposal to
not only lift the campus mask mandate beginning in summer 2022, but to
make vaccines optional as well, a vaccine policy proposal that many find
shockingly premature, and was eventually withdrawn in discussions with
the faculty union. In our partial snapshot of student organizing campaigns
across the nation, and the increasing unionization, mobilization, and soli-
darity work among graduate students, faculty, and campus workers, we are
not without lions at the gates of higher education in the United States.
Equally important, we have also been able to see pockets of resistance in a
larger fight for the soul of higher education, one that started well before
COVID, against the politics of opportunism, austerity, sacrifice, and dis-
posability that put profit before people. In our concluding chapter, we
move from a charting of key points of in-progress resistance to a roadmap
for a future for higher education beyond pandemic profiteering.
CHAPTER 13
After Shock: Our Stories, Our Future
At the start of this book, we called on Gordon and Gordon’s deconstruc-

tion of the Greek and Latin meanings of “disaster” as a warning from the
planets or the stars gone unheeded. We, ourselves, are guilty of ignoring
over a century of warnings from academics and intellectuals, warnings that
have gone as far back as Thorstein Veblen in 1918 who argued that corpo-
ratization was part and parcel of the university enterprise. In our own
review of the history of higher education, and the current manifestations
of racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism, we can see how neoliberalism,
corporatization, and financialization have been ever-present in academic
institutions, even if not to the extraordinary extent that they have been
since the 1980s. For sure, the apocalypse-like warnings from our col-
leagues preceding the pandemic have been voluminous in the Second
Gilded Age. In those treatises, they have sounded the alarm for the likely
possibility of precisely the kind of thorough capture of the college and
university commons that we have documented in these chapters, and
which now proceed nakedly and unapologetically in much the same way
we have seen a return of overt racist and sexist attacks in and outside of the
academy. Indeed, as we have argued throughout this book, these blatant,
unveiled, shameless seizures are intertwined.
Despite what we now know is a century of “professor protest litera-
ture,” including the relatively newly articulated field of Critical University
Studies (CUS) (Newfield, 2021), it was only until we were advanced to

Switzerland AG 2022
the front lines of faculty leadership guarding the gates in the midst of pan-
demic response organizing that we began to fully comprehend the magni-
tude of what has been before us. It is clear to us two years into the
pandemic that many of our colleagues and students have also not fully
understood, or if they have, have not fought back hard enough against,
the decades of rabid neoliberalism that has decimated our institutions in
the U.S., and elsewhere. We count ourselves among those progressive
scholars and activists who found comfort in higher education as a refuge
from neoliberal capitalism, and not always as active resistors to it (see
Kazin, 2012), and in doing so have left both our places of refuge and key
social spaces of counterforces, vulnerable for the taking. We have been
paying the price for this failure to collectively resist for some time, and it
would seem the pandemic toll might leave us bankrupt.
While we have had moments of deep clarity writing this book, moments
that have come with their own rewards of intellectual and moral satisfac-
tion, the process has left us even more terrified than when we began.
Terrified for ourselves, for our profession, but more importantly, for our
students and the very state of democracy and civil society. In our terror,
and however late to the game, we have endeavored through this book to
join the ranks of the next wave of academic town criers. In this role, one
of the loudest cries is that the pandemic-inspired academic disasters are a
moment, however enormous, in a very long history of academic capitalism
that has been profoundly expanded in the context of COVID-19, and one
that has already brought about dire consequences. At the core, we have
found that racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism has put into stark relief
the grave and existential disconnects in the very social meanings of teach-
ing and learning in colleges and universities that are unlikely to be trans-
formed without deliberate, massive, and sustained social movements.
In fact, over the course of the pandemic year that it took us to concep-
tualize and write this book, we have also had to simultaneously lead spe-
cific campaigns against the very patterns we were uncovering. As we were
writing, we were also organizing a campaign to push back against the
imposition of hyflex modalities, followed by another campaign to win fac-
ulty choice to teach remotely for the first two semesters of the outbreak.
After those battles, we organized a campaign to ensure a mask and vaccine
mandate was in place. As we delved deeper into the analysis of the book,
we had to re-up the collective fight to keep the mask mandate in place in
classrooms as masking restrictions began to relax, and then again to secure
the vaccine mandate in place after U.S. District Court Judge Kathryn
13 AFTER SHOCK: OUR STORIES, OUR FUTURE 289
Kimball Mizelle vacated the federal masking requirement on planes, trains,

and other forms of public transportation nationwide. On top of all this, we
engaged in these fraught negotiations before and after fighting a larger
successor contract campaign where austerity narratives were central. In a
world where our institutions of higher education were the bedrocks of
intellectual rigor, reason, humanism, democracy and the public good,
battles like these during a global pandemic would be, no pun intended,
unthinkable.
With news of the heretofore unimaginable reality of 15 million dead
from COVID-19 worldwide and 1 million at home, it has been emotion-
ally and psychologically devastating to try and answer the question of just
what the global elites are, in fact, thinking when they have engaged in
their shock doctrine tactics in the context of higher education, and educa-
tion more broadly. Nonetheless, throughout the book, we have identified
a set of racialized and gendered disaster opportunities that the titans of the
global elite, and their national, regional, and local foot soldiers in the
“public-private partnerships” takeover regime, have fast-tracked while
millions of people got sick, died, or at the very least, worried about their
economic futures, and the futures of their families in the midst of massive
state, institutional, and for most people, total market failures. These mani-
festations we have explored are neither exhaustive nor comprehensive, but
serve as initial lessons and our own offering of warning in what may be the
eleventh hour for higher education.
The University of Ruin: What the COVID-19

Disaster Has Taught Us
In December 2021, this jaw-dropping and telling image went viral:
U.S. public school teachers on their hands and knees on a rug laid out in
the middle of an ice rink in between periods during a junior league hockey
game in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, competing with each other in a scram-
ble to stuff their pockets with as many of the 5000 $1 bills that had been
tossed at them as they could (Vigdor, 2021). This, they said, was a school
fundraiser. We say this is an educational system that is not simply in ruins,
but of ruin. Through our analysis in this book, we have come to the con-
clusion that those who focus solely on the university as a central institution
in shambles partially side-track our gaze away from understanding the role
that the university of late-stage capitalism plays in actually creating ruin, of
ruining the lives of the very people that the university has claimed, and still
claims, to enrich and advance. This, we offer, is the central and sobering
finding of our book. The university “in ruins” has been a boon for the
global elite, both before and during the pandemic. The elite, and elite
universities, have emerged from the pandemic wealthier than ever. At the
same time, students across the full range of schools, from elite institutions
to local community colleges are drowning in debt. In fact, it is precisely
their debt that is financing the windfall.
In many ways, this story is just another version of the pyrrhic defeat that
Jeffrey Reiman (1979) so brilliantly set forth in his now classic work, The
Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison. Reiman turned the military term,
pyrrhic victory, on its head to argue that the U.S. criminal justice system,
in failing miserably to meet its stated goals of reducing crime, was, in
effect, not a defeat at all. As a result of a set of systemic arrangements pro-
moted and maintained by elites, the colossal failure to win the battles to
keep poor people out of prison was, on second look, a phenomenal win for
the wealthy in a class war for both economic power and status honor.
Michelle Alexander extended this analysis in her movement-inspiring
book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
(2010), where she argues that the U.S. War on Drugs was, in essence, a
manufactured racialized disaster seized on by neoliberal political elites
across the political spectrum to reconstitute racial caste once the apartheid
system of racial segregation was legally dismantled.
In this book, we have brought together classical and contemporary
sociological theory, education policy research, the work of historians, and
other critical scholars to argue that the pandemic has exacerbated a similar
kind of pyrrhic defeat in higher education. In sociology, in particular, we
have called on classic ideas in political economy from Veblen, Marx and
Engels, Weber, and DuBois, as well as the ways in which these classic ideas
have been extended by the contemporary sociological analyses of political
economy by Mills, Domhoff, Harvey, and Ritzer, among others. Our
thinking is especially informed, in innumerable ways, by an entire genera-
tion of contemporary feminist intersectionality scholars in the social sci-
ences and humanities, including hooks, Collins, and Davis, and most
recently by Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser, Chatterjee and Maira,
Welch, and Luft to articulate the prism of racialized disaster patriarchal
capitalism through which to understand the pandemic moment in what
we know is a multi-layered, multi-pronged system of higher education.
Through this prism, we have been able to document that the system writ
large is the system of private interests. While we confirm that the pandemic
has “laid bare” persistent structural inequalities in the U.S. and globally,
and that global elites have staged wars of opportunism, it has also been our
position that racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism is not a particularly
unique or distinct mode of capitalism.
Specifically, the “public private partnerships” devouring the educational
landscape are not new, nor is the hyper rationalization, automation, and
deprofessionalization of teaching and learning. The long view of history
shows us this, and shows us who wins in those kinds of partnerships, and
that score has persisted into the pandemic period. The long view also
shows us that real crises and manufactured crises are both used by elites,
and both can do great harm. In the former, the real disaster is that when
crises do happen, and they inflict real hardship on people, the typical
response from our academic leaders and elites is to inflict more austerity.
It is not only a knee-jerk reaction that impacts the vulnerable, it is an
impulse that comes from immersion in the well-prepared stockpile of neo-
liberal weapons aimed at transforming public institutions and grabbing
the commons. In the latter, there is just plain greed. In both, there is the
constant threat of future disasters as ideological cover for what is endemic
to the system.
Ultimately, our book has pulled back the veil on the ways in which
education itself, with higher education as a core component, has become
one of the largest sectors in the global economy, and is still growing. We
have uncovered just how connected and entrenched that expanding web
of increasingly powerful private interests is in higher education. Along
with providing a window into the staggering size of the web of educa-
tional profiteers in which we are ensnared, our work has suggested the
pernicious ways in which elites have used the pandemic to advance their
profit-making interests by digging more deeply than ever into the curricu-
lum and the academic mission, by chipping away at the institutions of
academic freedom and shared governance, and by effectively redefining
academic labor. Further, our analysis suggests that, as is true in other sec-
tors in late-stage capitalism, those targeted in real and manufactured crises
by the “entrepreneurial university” continue to be primarily women stu-
dents, students of color, and working class students not just in the United
States and Europe, but all across the world. The same is true for academic
workers, who are increasingly women and people of color in all sectors of
the academic labor force. As we have discussed, the feminization and
racialization of the student population is linked to the feminization and
racialization of the occupation of “college professor.” These both, in turn,
are implicated in the increasing divestment from public higher education,

the increasing financialization of higher education and student debt, the
devastating and unprecedented linking of high-skilled work with precari-
ous wages (Newfield, 2021), and the rise of “a new university-educated
proletariat” (Wright & Greenwood, 2017, p. 50). We might go so far as
to say that what we are witnessing now is the rise of a new university-
educated “precariat” (Orleck, 2018).
Specifically, we documented ways in which higher education executives
have attempted to “right-size” academic labor, whether the labor of fac-
ulty or staff, under the guise of pandemic austerity. As we argued, as is also
the case of labor more generally in late-stage capitalism, administrative
classes have seized on the crisis to control, devalue and exploit the essential
work that faculty and staff do in higher education, including the labor of
people who are not teachers or scholars but who nonetheless engage in the
important work of faculty and student support in the broad sense. They
have also seized the opportunity to “transform” the very nature of the
social relations of teaching and learning, to put teachers—and democracy
itself—out of business. In other words, global TEMPS further create, cap-
ture, and grow an increasingly global education market for retailing all
things “school” to a global student body that can consume “educational”
products and services from private vendors beginning as early as pre-K
until old age. The almost junkie-like focus on “transformation” and
“growth,” while certainly a late-stage capitalism-inspired addiction to
retailing as much of the human social relations of teaching and learning as
possible, is also ideological and political in that these “transformed” rela-
tions of schooling inculcate the values of hyper-individualism, profit before
people, and a libertarian devotion to extreme deregulation. In cleavages,
these pandemic “reimagined” relations of schooling also inculcate a devo-
tion to market fundamentalism that is deeply entangled with a racist,
nationalist, homophobic/transphobic anti-collectivism. Giroux (2021)
has called the elevation of hypercapitalism, extreme isolation, rising
authoritarianism, and fortified racism as indicative of a new kind of “pan-
demic pedagogy”—one that is not confined to the classrooms but an
increasingly fascist-prone way of engaging in public life.
We have shown how academic capitalists have also depended on stu-
dents to be “essential consumers” to sustain their goals for market expan-
sion, even when that consumerism would prolong the pandemic and
endanger lives of students, workers, and campus communities. Promoting
the narrative that students deserve “the college experience” as a way to
justify maintaining, and in some cases, increasing revenue streams, global

TEMPS and college and university leaders have flagrantly put students and
their families at risk in terms of their finances and their physical safety and
mental health, whether through student housing policies, decisions about
college sports, CARES Act funding mechanisms, and attacks on curricula.
We have examined the relationship between tuition increases and student
debt as many administrators in the U.S. have taken unscrupulous steps to
increase tuition during the first six months of the pandemic in what we’ve
described as akin to other forms of price-gouging of consumers during
disasters. We have witnessed the dual response of one of the oldest institu-
tions in our society, ready on one hand to embrace solutions of testing and
vaccinations, and on the other hand, a stubborn refusal of science in favor
of political conformity, even when at odds with the best science, faculty,
and student leaders—a condition that Watermeyer et al. (2021) calls char-
acteristic of “pandemia” where an ethic of care collides with economic
opportunism.
We have argued that the larger, decades-long, ongoing transformation
of American higher education by educational technology, finance, and
management corporations to establish and expand online instruction is a
key ingredient of the toxic soil in which the so-called “pandemic necessary
responses” have taken root. We have described the self-serving and shape-
shifting agenda of college and university administrations on the role of
remote learning as a COVID crisis management strategy. We have also
argued that driven by the real or manufactured threats of eroding enroll-
ments and guided by perverse college ranking incentives, academic man-
agement executives continue to challenge faculty governance by
capitalizing on pandemic upheavals and uncertainty to add market-driven
academic programs, namely masters’ degrees, although professional doc-
torates, and even PhDs, are on the rise. Executives are also pushing other
market-driven changes, such as microcredentialing and upskilling, that
weaken the power of faculty and distort the values of the academy. Few
other aspects of higher education have gained more attention among fac-
ulty than the concept of shared governance in the months after the great
shutdown in March 2020. The COVID-19 crisis has been a “watershed
moment” for shared governance according to the AAUP 2021 investiga-
tion into the state of shared governance at American colleges and universi-
ties. In the search for new sources of revenue, supported both by industry
and government policies that call for the reemergence of vocationalism in
the institutions of higher education, non-profit colleges and universities,
themselves, became increasingly predatory and exploitative of students,

similar to their for-profit college counterparts, and with little regard for
whether any real learning happens. Taken together, what emerged was a
picture of higher education governing boards and higher education execu-
tives making use of the crisis to further chip away at the principles of
shared governance, hijacking the power of intellectuals and students to set
forth and protect the mission of education in a democratic society.
Additionally, we put forth the foundational argument that COVID-19
pandemic opportunism targeted students and families in ways that have
been deeply tied to the larger political economy of late-stage global capi-
talism that continues to situate millions of working people, disproportion-
ately women and people of color in extreme precariousness as
simultaneously “essential” and “disposable,” and with the result of dis-
abling higher education as a vehicle for class mobility for a majority of
students. Indeed, we conclude that, perhaps not just the effect, but the
goal itself has been to create a further stratified system of higher education
for a further stratified society, and the expansion of the proletarianization
of everyone but a small global elite, with global women of color the pri-
mary prey. Evident throughout the pandemic has been the drive to
advance a global campaign amidst a global crisis, to further commodify
education, re-engineer the nature of the educational products brought to
market, and expand the global educational market itself. The drive has
accelerated the export of U.S. and Western policies and practices through
the increasingly global education industry aimed at privatizing education
for a world of lifetime learners of extreme free-market philosophies and
job training, all designed and delivered by EdTech for a COVID-era neo-
colonialist project, and whose disaster possibilities are yet to be fully
known. Developing nations have been ensnared further in the spider web
of predation during the pandemic as global TEMPS target markets where
population growth draws industries to implement their profit-seeking
strategies and technologies.
In a sinister turn in the Global North, not only is the middle class disap-
pearing, but one of the primary markers of the middle class—a college
education—no longer guarantees or signifies “middle-classness.” In fact,
it is increasingly a guarantor of stalled and even downward class mobility.
As we come to the close of our book, and with this sleight of hand so
clearly at the center of the heist, it is difficult to assign words to describe
the sheer depth of this kind of fraud that has been perpetrated against our
people in the name of “access” and “mobility” and “global prosperity.”
Importantly, we have also found that a consequential component of the
ideological strategy has been the “soft brutality” of the “disaster talk” of
the Davos Man-style elites who deploy a benevolent savior performance
cloaked in “woke washed” rhetoric of social responsibility and social
change (Foster & Foster-Palmer, forthcoming 2022). Our work here has
also lent the weight of evidence to previous critical assessments of the
political and ideological ties between the perhaps no-longer-strange bed-
fellows of radical libertarians, white supremacist religious fundamentalists,
and the networks of socially liberal corporate titans. For sure, the COVID
crisis has made it increasingly difficult to ignore how all parties have been
dressing up anti-democratic gluttony for wealth and power in quasi-new
costumes for the pandemic moment. Further, despite being awash with
the false narrative that disasters are imminent and that we must prepare for
these at all times, it has also been impossible to ignore the reality of how
stunningly unprepared these actors, and the institutional arrangements
they have promoted and defended, have been to meet the disaster.
An important aim in our book has also been to recognize some of the
emergent ways that students, faculty, and staff have begun to make use of
a different kind of pandemic opportunity to collectively resist various
threads of the spider web of higher education corporatization by including
an admittedly partial inventory of campaigns, some of which are ongoing,
to defend against racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism as it is manifest-
ing in higher education. We have paid particular attention to the contours
of what many have described as a reawakening in the U.S. academic labor
movement, accelerated by the pandemic, and the growing solidarity move-
ments between faculty, staff, and students in campaigning for the common
good in the aftermath of the outbreak. Whether in the form of resisting
the failure of academic administrators to institute COVID health and
safety protocols that protect lives, mobilizing around campus policing, or
against attacks on critical race theory, tuition hikes or budget cuts that
have resulted in, or threatened to result in, the layoffs of campus staff and
faculty, we argue this wave of collective action can be understood as pock-
ets of resistance to racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism, and while not
always articulated fully as such, part of what has the promise to be a larger,
more coordinated fight for the soul of higher education against the
opportunism, austerity, sacrifice, and disposability politics that aim to put

profit before people.
Ultimately, our analysis suggests that as a set of institutions that serve
to reproduce class, gender, and racial structures in the interests of domi-
nant groups, higher education is not in ruins. It is working just fine for the
global elite. What is clearly in ruins is the myth that our institutions of
higher education, and particularly public higher education, exist in the
service of the people. It is that myth that we must face head on, in the
same way that the pandemic has taught us—if we didn’t know already—
that we must face head on the myth that we have a functioning democracy.
That said, just because we know that neither of those dreams are realities,
it does not mean the ideals are not worth fighting for, and working to
make real. We need to decouple the myths that our particular project of
higher education, and also our particular project of democracy, has been
working from the reality that they could work if they were built differently.
We also must recognize the reality that building democratic educational
institutions is not possible without also working to build a new economy
organized by democratic principles and practices. This is what has to
come next.
A Different Kind of Disaster Opportunity

At the close of Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein (2007) argued for a way for-
ward that recognized the total devastation wrecked by disaster capitalists
in their efforts to demolish the commons in order to establish a “clean
canvas” on which to reconstruct a political economy that frees corpora-
tions from the “tyranny” of limits on private wealth creation by any means
available. Klein did not shy away from the reality that the global ruling
elites have been victorious in their extractive brutality, leaving scraps of
collapsed institutions, communities, and entire societies in their wake. It is
from these scraps, and with these scraps, that she says we must rebuild, and
in this case, in ways that seizes the narrative of disaster opportunity to put
into play both old and new sets of progressive ideas “lying around” that
may not have been politically viable in the past, but can, and should be,
called on (again) in this era of crisis. As Klein herself has asked us to con-
sider in the early days of the pandemic: What is the pandemic opportunity
for progressives now? Or, as Chomsky & Waterstone (2021) might ask,
how can we move beyond “capitalist realism,” that numbs us into thinking
there is no alternative? In this case, do we want to rebuild colleges
and universities on the landscape just prior to the outbreak? Do we want

to go back to some Halcyon days long ago? To both of these questions,
we say no. Again, history teaches us the story of how private interests have
been in U.S. higher education from the very beginning, and we know who
has won. Knowing the winners have been the elites, however, does not
mean we cannot now build anew, and from the premise that higher educa-
tion is a right, not a privilege—one that should be organized by and for
the people. Indeed, if any institutions should be for the people, it should
be our institutions of education. Where are we to begin?
Call Things by Their Right Names

In his discipline-defining book, The Sociological Imagination, where he
called for a systemic analysis of inequality and a stronger participatory
democracy, the legendary sociologist, C.W. Mills famously described the
sentiments of his times when said that everyday people increasingly feel
like “their private lives are a series of traps” (1959, p. 3). Writing in a
world before cell phones, the internet, or even personal computers, Mills
was insistent that people do not simply need more information. Of that,
we had plenty. Instead, what we needed to change our circumstances
was, first and foremost, an understanding of the relationships between
what he famously called our “personal troubles” and our “public issues,”
as the “series of traps” are not fundamentally individual, but embedded
in the arrangements of social systems as they exit in historical moments.
In her analysis of the rise of corporatization in higher education, nearly
20 years ago, sociologist Gaye Tuchman (2009) acknowledges Mills in
precisely this same way in her epitaph. Similarly, this book has attempted
to do this very kind of work by providing a lens through which faculty,
staff, and students in higher education can begin to reimagine what feels
like our own personal series of traps to the larger shape-shifting terrain
of global TEMPS, both before and during these first two years of the
pandemic.
As no one yet has a completely clear handle on how the playbooks of
global TEMPS will continue to be revised in the post-pandemic era,
though surely they will be, we must continue to be vigilant in this effort
to call things by their right names. We must look not only through an
intersectional prism of one historical moment of racialized disaster patriar-
chal capitalism, but to also see capitalism itself as gendered and racialized,
to have a grasp on the long arm of corporatization and financialization in
U.S. higher education, and to see American higher education as a racial-

ized and gendered capitalist accommodation from the start. We will have
to call this what it is: a kind of theft, even if what we possessed in the form
of an expanded democratic access to liberal education was only momen-
tary in the longer arc of U.S. history. We will need to use our sociological
imaginations and get the power analysis right. We will need to recognize
and admit that many of our senior administrators are captains of a pirate
ship. We will have to see through the “neoliberal thoughtfulness” (Love,
personal communication, March 31, 2022) before us and have the cour-
age to confront the growing anti-intellectualism and autocratic logics that
amount to a kind of academic populism of the academic managerial class.
We have already witnessed hundreds of collective actions against the spider
web of academic capitalism in the pandemic context, though in many of
those cases, faculty, students, and staff do not frame their resistance pub-
licly in ways that connects their individual campaigns to one another, nor
is there yet a mass mobilization across higher education that publicly con-
nects personal troubles to the public issues of corporatization, authoritari-
anism, and the fundamental threat to democracy on and off
campuses—though one is growing as we have explored. With important
exceptions that we have discussed, the analysis of the political economy of
racialized and gendered capitalism that we offer here seems largely missing
in collective action, if not from political commentary. The time is now to
reshape the narratives of resistance into ones that directly take on the ide-
ologies and practices of “austerity,” and make plain that there is and should
be “one resistance” to the corporate university as a tool of extractive capi-
talism, whether it is a pandemic or not.
Be Traitors to the Myth, Keepers of the Dream: Identifying

as Workers
To do this, and to continue in the work of calling things by their right
names, faculty, students and staff alike will need to identify as workers.
More than that, we will need to identify as members of the working class,
and to admit that in late-stage capitalism, a bifurcation between the own-
ing class and everybody else, including highly trained, highly skilled pro-
fessionals in the ranks of what is empirically the working class, have become
further solidified. As such, our work suggests that the path ahead entails
not only a rethinking of what it means to be working class in late stage
capitalism, but the role that higher education will play in shaping or
impeding the development of class consciousness in defense against anti-

democratic, capitalist, authoritarianism. As scores of analyses of the shape
of class structures in late-stage capitalism continue to expose, both the
meaning and the very existence of “the middle class” are in question in the
U.S., and beyond. Even workers with median income levels are without
sustained purchasing power to avoid precarity, and the hallmarks of mid-
dle class stability in the forms of decent salaries, job security, quality
healthcare, home ownership, and college educations for kids are beyond
reach for all but a small portion of the population. It is a fundamental shift
in the structure and culture of the contemporary class system that both
college students and professors alike are now working class people with
what was once a middle-class asset. Neither can claim that their laboring
in the academy, albeit in different positions, makes them middle class, if by
middle class we mean access to purchasing power that allows us to secure
decent homes, healthcare, childcare education, and retirement funds with-
out crushing debt, and to enjoy a life of meaning, to start and support
families if we wish, and to have some relative assurance of economic
stability.
Yet, for many faculty, the grim reality of these shared foreclosed path-
ways to the middle class are yet to be fully acknowledged. As Welch (2015)
has argued elsewhere in her call for academic labor movements to align
more squarely with the broader labor movement, many faculty do not see
themselves as workers. They identify (and some are) as members of the
upper middles and even as elites who, as professionals, are “beneath” the
need to organize, and resist the alignment with working class and eco-
nomically marginalized people and communities. This, despite the fact
that upwards of 70% of those in the professoriate are among the highest
trained workers in the economy earning what amounts to minimum wage,
no access to healthcare, no job security, and with a chaser dose of disre-
spect from some of their own colleagues. This also despite the fact that
even when faculty are engaged in their profession in the Weberian sense of
a calling, or a vocation, labor that also should be protected from extrac-
tion, that this “way of life as a professional” has been more in spite of the
institutional arrangements than because of them.
In any event, the stakes are high for academics across ranks to fail to
acknowledge the realities of their own class positions, their alignments
with working class and precariat class students and staff, and working class
people outside of the academy—all of whom are increasingly blocked from
social mobility, whether highly educated or not. Making the point that
higher education, itself, has led the way in eviscerating the economic and
political power of the middle classes more broadly, Christopher Newfield
explains, in a word: “If off-shoring broke the wage-productivity bargain
for blue-collar workers, higher education helped break it for white collar
workers” (2021, p. 84). Yet if we are to resist austerity politics, as we have
noted in part already, we will need faculty and students alike to develop a
class, race, and gender consciousness, and for many, to be class, race, and
gender traitors, albeit in various ways. For faculty and students who come
up from the working and precariat classes, particularly women and people
of color for whom higher education has been a path to mobility, there are
complicated dynamics in “betraying the opportunity” in the resistance to
the corporate university, but the way forward will mean adopting a new
kind of position as a “traitor” to the dream.
Education or Horse-racing?: Choose Your Side

In April 2022, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor, Tom Wolf, along
with Democratic state legislators, attempted for the third time to pass an
in-state student scholarship package that would amount to 200 million in
aid to undergraduates in the state higher education system. For the third
time, they faced considerable blowback from stakeholders in the
Pennsylvania horse-racing industry, partially funded by casino revenues,
who stood to lose 88 million in reallocated funds to the state’s current and
aspiring college students. Said Wayne Fontana, Democratic state senator,
on the need for the Pennsylvania public to weigh on this decision, “If the
public says, ‘We want that money to go to education and not to the
horses,’ that would really give it some sting” (Steele, 2022, para. 31).
Wondering how it could come to the point where we are asked to choose
between funding horse racing at the local track or sending our kids to col-
lege, we could answer with some cheek and say that perhaps they both
seem like gambling enterprises right now. But this, like so many other
stories in this book, also speaks to another seemingly cheeky feeling we
have had in our work as academics, before and during COVID. At times,
it can feel a bit like we are nerds on a playground as jocks and bullies steal
our lunch money while we stand mum in our unwillingness to stake our
claim to our school space in the face of ridiculous displays of buffoonery—
afraid to be the smart kids who will say that we like and will defend school.
We share these analogies as they speak to what also must be done in the
days ahead, namely a courageous reassertion of the value of teaching and
learning as social relations of connectedness between faculty and students

who are members of communities tied together in the pursuit of under-
standing, as people engaged in endeavors that are worthy both in their
means and also ends. We must not be afraid to say that we have a calling
to be teachers and scholars, that we deeply value, honor, and even love the
work of our vocation—work that cannot, nor should not, be quantified or
commercialized. To us, this requires us to be courageous in our articula-
tion of teaching and learning as human relations of social reproduction
that, when genuine, defy rationalization (e.g. Ritzer, 1993). We must be
proud to be immeasurable. We must develop increased fortitude to resist
the ideologies and practices of senseless calculability, and to be fearless in
our public positions that education, as opposed to job training, cannot be
reduced to instrumentalism or transactionalism. We must decide we will
publicly defend the freedom to learn, to teach, to speak, to think. We also
must not yield to the masculinist predation that suggests that subscribing
to and fighting to protect academic integrity, academic freedom, public
deliberation, and civic virtues and duties are somehow quaint or precious,
or frankly, “feminine,” in the face of the “real demands” of casino capital-
ism as defined by grown-up schoolyard bullies. In a word, we must not let
the feminization of schooling itself lead to our sexist internalization and
self-shaming that the relational life of teaching and learning, of genuine
intellectualism, is just really a soft skills game for girls.
In that same way, we must be proud of our desire to be a part of a com-
munity of people doing the “women’s work” of learning how to solve the
problems of being human, of being amidst a world of living creatures, in
an ecosystem, and learning now to tap the potential of all of us to create,
enjoy, thrive and live peacefully among great mysteries. It means the cour-
age to resist the iron cage of disenchantment, and to be strident in one’s
fidelity as students, teachers, and scholars to the magic and sacredness of
what goes on in actual, physical classrooms and laboratories and studios
where students and faculty meet each other, and relate to each other, and
commit to being responsible to one another in shared projects with people
who have complex lives and interests and personalities and social positions
and gather in specific social, historical, and geographical moments. As fac-
ulty, we must retake our own capacity to act as highly-trained, self-directed
teachers and scholars with the gift of a chance of creating solidarities in our
classrooms, our laboratories, our studios, even in fraught ways, for at least
some temporary moment in time as we do the work of inquiry, explora-
tion, creativity or critique together with our students and colleagues. It
means collectively defending humanism itself, and resisting the ubiquitous

drumbeat that machines can teach better than people, and that most stu-
dents are not good enough for the time, energy, respect, and promise of
meaningful challenging, social interaction that calls on them to be think-
ers, to strive for and value a free mind, and a just and equitable society.
When we do this, we affirm the beauty of creativity, the spark of a shifted
consciousness, and the deep self-recognition that can come from the
unpredictable, jazz-like, improvisational, live performances of the social
relations we call education. When we do this, we recognize and affirm the
humanity of our students and ourselves. If we are not truthfully called to
the work of teaching and research in this way, then perhaps we should
consider horse racing.
Stop the Bleeding
In the short term, as capitalism remains the current context for the fore-
seeable future, there are additional immediate steps we should take to
staunch the bleeding in the post-pandemic period ahead, some of which
Kezar et al. (2019) have aptly called “harm reduction” tactics. We must
continue to demand a total infusion of public monies back into public
institutions. We must push for the continued expansion of Pell Grants,
including Pell Grant expansion for incarcerated students, both of which
the Biden administration had done by the end of 2020. We must continue
to call not only for debt-free college, as does the New Deal for Higher
Education campaign, but tuition-free public higher education, as called
for by Higher Education Labor United. On the former, during the pan-
demic, as we noted, Williams College, and also Grinnell College, joined a
list of at least 15 national universities and national liberal arts colleges in
the United States that charge tuition that reported meeting full financial
need with no loans policy for student eligible for federal loans (Powell
et al., 2021). In many of these cases, the institutions framed their decisions
as ways to reduce student debt, to better position students to choose
careers based on interest as opposed to financial need, and to support eco-
nomic and racial diversity at their schools. To be sure, these are not tuition-
free programs, but rather decisions not to include loans as part of the
financial aid packages offered to students to meet the difference between
total costs of attendance and estimated family contribution. As such, we
must continue to press for student debt cancelation, a national campaign
mobilized by forces such as the Debt Collective, formerly Strike Debt. A
resistance movement that predated the pandemic, the campaign has its
roots in Occupy over a decade ago, and has grown into a national move-
ment with bipartisan support. As we go to press, the movement to cancel
student debt is literally front page news in the U.S. with activists mobi-
lizing mass public pressure on President Biden to issue an Executive
Order that would further wipe out debt for hundreds of thousands of
students.
As a further urgent step to end predation, we must advance the front
against the total restructuring of academic labor through the exploitation
of part-time and non-tenure track faculty. Also in the short term, we must
demand faculty parity such that part-time faculty salaries and access to
healthcare benefits are in proportion to the salaries and benefits of full-
time faculty, and consider the models of portable benefits and shared hir-
ing practices (Kezar et al., 2019). For example, in the spirit of the “Fight
for 15,” we can support a basic minimum salary per course, such as in the
“Fight for 15,000.” We can continue to press for states to pass a Contingent
Faculty Bill of Rights, as has been the case in New Jersey, as we noted, to
urge institutions to take action to establish and protect the rights of part-
time faculty and full-time non-tenure track faculty. Simultaneously, we
must pressure Boards of Trustees and Regents, and in some cases state
legislators, to cap the percentage of contingent faculty overall.
Although Nelson and Watt quipped in 2004 that “[t]o say…that top
university administrators are acting like greedy CEOs is no longer news”
(2004, p. 8), we must still, almost two decades later, reassert the need for
a tourniquet on excessive salaries of college and university presidents,
senior administrators, and head coaches. There is no reason why the step
to cap executive pay cannot be taken immediately. While we are at it, there
is also no reason why the salaries of non-unionized campus staff cannot be
elevated immediately to avoid precarity, and for unionized staff, why man-
agement cannot agree to negotiated salaries that promote and sustain
middle-class standards of living. For both faculty and staff workers, man-
agement can cease union busts and the intentionally corrosive tactic of
deskilling and misclassification of workers that erodes professional mobil-
ity. In the case of faculty, this means not only surrendering the strategy of
raiding vacated tenure-track and tenured faculty lines and converting
them to contingent lines, but also reclassifying program directors, pro-
gram coordinators or chair positions, traditionally held by faculty, as low-
level, at-will administrative posts.
Finally, of real urgency as well is the need to regulate private interests in
both the for-profit and the non-profit education space, including the
regulation of educational technologies and worker automation (see also

Kezar et al., 2019). As we have discussed at length, the time has long
passed to roll back the deregulation that made OPMs possible, and the
current Congressional inquiries into not only OPMs (Hall, 2022), but the
full range of the spider web privatization schemes we have examined in
this book must be investigated through the lens of, at minimum, a federal
consumer protection model.
In the Space In Between: Restructure, Redistribute, and Repair

Of course, we must do more than just stop the bleeding. As Newfield
(2021) argued in his work on possible post-pandemic futures, steps like
the ones above will ultimately not get us very far in transforming the fun-
damentally systemic problems of racial and economic inequalities embed-
ded in the system. To do that, we must restructure, redistribute, and repair
the harm. For instance, a redistributive model would not only restore pub-
lic funding, allocate that funding to students who are in the most need
(Newfield, 2021), but ultimately fully fund higher education so that col-
lege is free—a redistributive model that would also still require larger eco-
nomic transformations to address structural inequalities in college-readiness.
A redistributive and reparative model would also be coupled with a center-
ing of a feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonialist, and critical curricula. We can
learn from the decades of “old ideas lying around” to reorganize universi-
ties in the form of the two decades-long experiment in social ethics and
democratic pragmatism that was the partnership between Hull House and
the University of Chicago established before the Chicago Boys. We can
turn to the current civic university models that are the legacies Hull
House, such as in the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the
University of Pennsylvania, the Student Organizer Clinic at our own uni-
versity, or the contemporary college-in-prison movement which restored
and transformed access to higher education on the inside for thousands of
students as the result of local, state and national networks of incarcerated
student leaders, progressive college faculty, and allies in departments of
corrections (Sanford & Foster, 2006). For Newfield, redistributive models
like these would not only necessitate a new political economy of higher
education, but would also need to confront the central question of what
has been defined and acquired as “public resources” in the first place given
the legacy of slavery and settler-colonialism, most directly in the cases of
Indigenous land theft in the form of land grant colleges and universities.
We can add here the exploitation of the labor of Black, Brown and
Indigenous people of color to build public institutions that excluded or
later marginalized Black, Brown and Indigenous students. Learning from
both these lessons from the past, and from the analysis and collective
actions of community, student, and faculty activists, we must regulate the
use of non-profit academic institutions as pass-throughs for contemporary
private land grabs and commercial ventures, for example, the controversies
surrounding Columbia, NYU, and the University of Chicago, among oth-
ers (Baldwin, 2021).
Also beyond reformist strategies, we must take on the financial sector
operatives who, since the 1980s, have built two devastating financial orga-
nizations that have further transformed U.S. higher education, namely
bankers and legislators who consolidated financial service corporations
that targeted students across the class system, and a new class of high
financiers who created private equity and hedge funds that directly tar-
geted elite university endowments—both of which have driven the spec-
tacular growth in wealth and income for the top 1% and have decimated
the U.S. middle class (Eaton, 2021). We can learn from the student, labor,
community, and racial justice coalition in California in 2010 that success-
fully organized the millionaire tax campaign to demand that the University
of California and the California State University governing boards vote to
endorse Proposition 30 that would impose a tax increase on California’s
highest earners and also a tuition freeze. The legislation passed in
November 2012 and established California’s highest state tax rate for mil-
lionaires since 1942. The legislation also effectively froze tuition for
undergraduate students at public universities and community colleges in
California from 2011–2021 (Eaton, 2021). We must continue to push for
taxation of university endowments as a check on the ability of wealthy
private universities to continue hoarding investment returns that largely
benefit members of the elite themselves (Eaton, 2021). Indeed, such pro-
posals, which could include confiscatory levels of taxation, have already
been introduced in Congress, with support from Republicans, prior to the
pandemic. Even bolder, we must take steps not simply to regulate the
presence of for-profit interests in higher education, but to end outsourc-
ing altogether.
Because what we are witnessing in higher education has been, along
with whatever else, a kind of theft, it is also helpful to think about the path
forward in terms of justice and reparations. Here we can learn from the
not-so-new idea of repairing the harm, of putting into place plans for
transitional justice, a lesson of reparations that is as old as emancipation

and the ex-slave pension movement, and was taking shape in higher edu-
cation pre-pandemic in the form of public acknowledgments of the insti-
tution’s complicity with slavery, such as at Rutgers University, or in the
case of Georgetown University that set up an annual reparations fund, or
in the passage of state law, such as the one in Virginia which now requires
five of its state colleges and institutions to make reparations in the form of
community-based economic development and memorial programs, as well
as scholarships (Perry & Barr, 2021). In April 2022, Harvard University
announced its plans to establish a $100 million Legacy of Slavery Fund to
reckon with its own role (Hartocollis, 2022). This, too, in context of a
series of campaigns all across the country where students, faculty and staff
have demanded that their institutions rename their buildings and other
spaces of collective memory to right the record and refuse a narrative of
white supremacy and settler colonialism. Even more transformative, we
could argue, would be direct cash payments to descendants directly
harmed by the institutions’ practices.
Mourn the Loss and Begin Again: This Time, for the People

In his provocative 1996 book, The University in Ruins, Bill Readings
argued that there was no coming back from the university in ruins. The
university as we have known it, as we have thought of it in our dreams
even, is dead. Not only is it dead, but it should, in fact, be buried. It is this
inability or unwillingness to accept this death, and bury our dead, that we
believe has plagued us for the past 30 years in higher education, and which
has contributed to our current zombie state. In his own effort to move us
back to the land of the living, Readings asked us to “imagine what it
would mean to be in the University without being able to believe in the
university, in either its actual or its ideal form” (p. 19). He rejects the need
to affirm a grand narrative about the university, but rather seeks to recog-
nize that in late stage capitalism, the university “becomes one site among
others where the question of being together is raised, raised with an
urgency that proceeds from the absence of the institutional forms (such as
the nation-state), which have historically served to mask that question for
the past three centuries or so” (p. 20). For Readings, “the aim of peda-
gogy should not be to produce autonomous subjects who are supposedly
made free by the information they learn, which is the Enlightenment nar-
rative. Rather, […] teaching can be better understood as a network of
obligations [and] a question of justice not a search for truth” (p. 19).
Ultimately, he says, “the transgressive force of teaching does not lie so
much in matters of content as in the way pedagogy can hold open the
temporality of questioning so as to resist being characterized as a transac-
tion that can be concluded, either with the giving of grades or the grant-
ing of degrees” (p. 19). Nearly three decades ago he urged us to resist
“modernity’s paradoxical attraction to the idea of the ruin,” and to remain
vigilant in our “disentangling this ruined status from a tradition of meta-
physics that seeks to re-unify those ruins, either practically or aesthetically”
(p. 19).
Here, Readings’ prescription sounds in line with Newfield’s (2021)
vision where people, themselves, define the colleges and universities that
work for them in their own locales, meaning there would be a multiplicity
of models of higher education in the future. In this vision, the human
capital theory of higher education is discarded and the onus of job training
and employment is returned to employers as a responsibility that is no
longer, if it ever was, compatible with the mission of the university as a
place of inquiry, discovery, innovation, self-actualization, creativity, or cri-
tique. Further discarded would be the mission of equality of access to be
replaced with a mission of equality of outcomes across race and class,
including equality of outcomes across the different types of academic insti-
tutions. In keeping with the rejection of human capital theory as a major
organizing principle, Newfield advocates for the design of bachelor’s
degrees that are, essentially, not vocational, and require deep learning,
connected to students’ identities and commitment, and to personal and
social transformation. In order to bring about these kinds of educational
spaces, all areas of inquiry would be fully and equally funded so as to com-
mit to a genuine social investment in the discovery of the widest range of
ideas possible for thriving societies, and the planet.
In a vision that also goes beyond calls for reform and redistribution, in
their pre-pandemic recommendations, Wright and Greenwood (2017)
argue that we “must restore academics and students, the university’s value
creators, as beneficial owners, as direct participants, collaborators and
decision makers in all major institutional venues and processes” (2017,
p. 46). Specifically, and based on the model of the John Lewis Partnership,
the UK’s most profitable and successful department store, they propose
reconstructing universities as non-revocable Trusts, thus preventing pred-
atory managers from appropriating public assets for private gain, or from
essentially engaging in a “‘buy out’ of ‘their’ university” (p. 46). In the
John Lewis Partnership, the legal ownership of the business, which is the
Trust, is separate from the beneficial owners, who are the workers. In this
arrangement, the beneficial owners cannot sell or de-mutualize assets, but
they do have formal rights of decision making, select half of the members
of the governing board, and receive profit disbursements. Additionally,
the profit differentials between managers and workers have fixed limits.
According to Wright and Greenwood, the intent of the John Lewis
Partnership is to create happiness for all of the members of the company
by ensuring work that was meaningful, successful, and satisfying. Notably,
point out Wright and Greenwood, nowhere in the John Lewis Partnership
mission is there mention of “profit” (2017, p. 47). Not surprisingly then,
Wright and Greenwood, and drawing on the conceptual work of Boden
et al. (2012), make the case for a Trust University with the beneficial own-
ers being administrators, faculty, staff and students. The purpose of the
Trust University would be:
to facilitate socially, culturally and economically beneficial scholarship,

through the work of all employees and students, whether in research, teach-
ing and learning or public debate. Such a system of putting the assets of the
university into a non-revocable trust, making all members of the university
beneficial partners, with a clear purpose to engage in satisfying work that is
socially beneficial, and an equal say in working out how the university should
achieve that purpose, is the first step in recreating a public university. (p. 47)
Unlike the new-Taylorist organizations we have now that demand def-

erence and obedience to a command-and-control authority system, a
model of the Trust University, such as the Mondragon University that
Wright and Greenwood (2017) reference, are organized by covenantal
agreements that “go beyond contracts based on self-interest and promote
solidarity, mutual attention and understanding based on moral/ethical
principles. Shared governance once provided a weak version of such cov-
enantal relationships but this has been mostly demolished by the actions of
neoliberal policymakers and administrators” (p. 52). While not identical,
models like this are in line with the philosophies of European works coun-
cils or the German-type model of worker co-determination where workers
can directly elect half of the directors on corporate boards. In smaller
companies in the German model, workers elect a third of the directors,
and those managers, elected by workers directly, are obligated to collabo-
rate with workers in decisions about how the work gets done (Geoghegan,
2014). In borrowing from these models, the goal is to create true work-
place democracy, including genuine and substantial power sharing within
university workplaces, as opposed to campaigns to restore a more limited
form of “shared governance” (see also Kezar et al., 2019; Newfield, 2021),
or that seek largely symbolic seats on Boards of Trustees.
In these alternative visions of the university, we can include what
Newfield (2021) recently termed “abolitionist futures” where the univer-
sity as we know it would be dismantled and new ones built that are non-
capitalist, non-racialized, and we would add, non-patriarchal, and based
on current Indigenous structures of education that are informed by deco-
lonial orientations, values, practices. In the U.S. and around the world, in
the category of dusting off “unpopular ideas” whose time has come, is the
long tradition of popular education movements, of Freedom Schools, and
Labor Education Schools, the recently re-upped Strike Schools, and, as we
mentioned above, the movement to connect traditional campus commu-
nities and prison communities in educational spaces on the inside. In all of
these cases, the work of educating for critical consciousness as a practice of
freedom is work that can and should inform abolitionist visions for build-
ing self-sufficient and sustainable independent colleges and universities,
and with independence that must not come at costs to students. As we
cannot have true access without true affordability, ultimately, we must also
exclude private interests from the educational space.
In her 2020 Spectre Journal article, “A Semester to Die For: Dispatch
from the Frontlines of Care,” Nancy Welch recounts the hair-raising
words of her vice provost who threatened her campus community when
“[she] warned that if public health comes first, the university may not
survive. It’s a serious threat […] Rather than be held hostage to such a
threat, we should demand publicly provisioned, tuition-free higher edu-
cation” (para. 20). We must continue to engage fully in deliberations
about what it would mean to have the right to a publicly provisioned and
tuition free higher education in the U.S fully, and how that vision can be
concretized. As Geoghegan (2014) argues is the case in confronting
income and wealth inequality in social systems more broadly, none of the
reformist, redistributive or abolitionist proposals for higher education on
the table can fully succeed unless and until we first redistribute power.
Both of these goals, he contends, will take a revived and broad-based
labor movement.
Organize, Organize, Organize to Build a New Kind of Unionism

In her 2005 book, University, Inc., Jennifer Washburn argued:
The utilitarian movement in American higher education has a proud his-

tory. In the past, however, this movement was always counterbalanced by
other forces within the academy that rose up to champion pure research,
teaching, and the ideal of a well-rounded education that encompassed the
humanities and the arts. The biggest problem today is that these counter-
vailing forces are missing. Academic administrators are so focused on maxi-
mizing revenue and prestige that they have become blind to the deleterious
effects of commercialization. Similarly, professors who straddle the aca-
demic and business worlds often fail to perceive that anything is a miss,
because many of them are profiting handsomely from these collaborations
and drawing much-needed revenue into their labs. Faculty who are not
involved in such ventures, meanwhile, are often so consumed by their own
narrow disciplines, internal politics, grant writing, and the increasingly
competitive quest for tenure that they, too, have tended to stand aside as
their universities are drawn into a whirlwind of dizzying commercialism.
Although many are concerned about these trends—including former uni-
versity presidents, Nobel Prize-winning scholars, and other academic lead-
ers—few have translated their growing unease into a forceful call for the
kinds of changes needed to safeguard the universities’ integrity and auton-
omy. (2005, p. 228)
What we have found missing in our own lives as Generation X academics,

and on the American left more generally, is not only a more robust critique
of late-stage capitalism, but concrete intentional organizing against it. For
sure, there has been advocacy, and mass mobilizations, and one-off pro-
testing, but for much of the Second Gilded Age, it would seem, relatively
little organizing, if by organizing we mean a particular mode of social
change guided by distinct principles and practices expressly intended to
increase the capacity of ordinary people to build and sustain power. To be
clear, as our own work has made evident, there is no shortage of analyses
of “the ruined university,” and the American Left, writ large, has not been
short on narrative about inequalities. But since the 1980s, the academic
left, and also broader progressive movements for social change, have been
relatively short on incisive and intersectional analyses of global capitalism
at the macro level, with important exceptions we have relied on in this
book. Relative to other eras, for example, academic sociology’s
contemporary public failure to center an intersectional analysis of the rela-

tionships between populism, fascism, and wealth inequalities has been
marked. Most importantly, for the point here, American progressives
inside and outside of the academy have failed to effectively organize against
power using broad-based and deliberate organizing tactics that have so
long been the foundation of successful challenges to structural inequali-
ties, and particularly against capital. Instead, we have largely relied, in both
critical, feminist and critical race theory and practice, on some of the same
individualist, and at other times also corporatist, principles of social rela-
tions and social change. Indeed, the discussion of the over-rotation in
critical theories, including in feminist theories, toward the politics of iden-
tity at the expense of a more nuanced politics of identity as related to
structures of materiality already has volumes devoted to it (see Foster,
2004). Suffice it to say at this point that the abandonment of an organiz-
ing model and the lack of concrete education in the theories, practices,
and real-life connections to organizing traditions, whether that is labor,
community, tenant, student, or some kind of other relational practice of
building powerful organizations led by everyday people, has been an
Achilles’ heel for progressive academics and for contemporary labor and
democratic movements more generally. Even in feminist intersectionality
studies, and critical sociology, where the analyses of systems of inequality
and change are our raison d’être, there has been little formal teaching of
the principles and practices of organizing traditions, despite the ubiqui-
tous focus on social justice and social change (see Foster, 2020). However,
if we are to move forward toward a new vision of the college and univer-
sity, and toward a more just society, we will need to also consider how
colleges and universities can be spaces where academics learn organizing,
where they get organized and they create learning for other members of
the community to do the same.
Nearly 20 years ago, Nelson and Watt (2004, p. 10) argued:
We badly need cohesive campus-wide organizations capable of advocacy and

resistance in advance of such [attacks on higher education]. We need orga-
nizations that can defend individual faculty and that can apply credible force
when reason alone is of no use. Such an organization has to be grounded in
solidarity, common purpose, shared understandings, willingness to act,
strength of will, and mutual respect across disciplines. […] The description
above more accurately fits a union.
Moreover, if our analysis is correct, and we are increasingly “all working

class now” (Webb, 2011), then we will also need a new kind of unionism,
on campus and off. On campus, we will have to consider a new kind of
shared governance unionism, and one that connects to a new kind of
shared democracy unionism more broadly. A revitalized academic labor
movement in the U.S. can and should continue to seek out partnerships
with the wave of labor organizing in K-12 and also in “right to work”
states; it can and should focus on connecting senates/councils and unions
with non-union groups, student groups, other unions on campus and in
the community.
Such organizing can and should include not only a look at the oppor-
tunities for coalition among faculty governance bodies, it should include
a sharper focus on the opportunities to revisit the Yeshiva decision in the
context of the Pacific Lutheran and push to further unionize at both pub-
lic and private institutions. We must reimagine the relationships between
faculty unions and faculty councils/senates, and to rethink the structures
of shared governance, and to situate that work openly in the context of
the larger crisis of corporatization in ways that is not just about academia,
but about the crisis of capitalism. We must continue to organize in soli-
darity with our students, as it is students and their economic resources
that are the primary marks and the primary levers. We need not limit our
efforts on the formation of unions that have recognized legal rights to
bargain contracts. Any group of us can come together collectively to exer-
cise our power and make shared demands, even in right to work states,
and even in the shadow of Yeshiva, Pacific Lutheran, and Janus, and we
should do just that anywhere and everywhere we can. Reviving social
justice unionism broadly defined must be the centerpiece of the “unpop-
ular ideas lying around” as we move from a state of pandemic to endemic
and beyond. We should continue to build and support new broad-based
national alliances, and consider global alliances. In all cases, we must com-
mit to a model of organizing for the common good that, again, brings
back a progressive social democratic unionism that moves beyond narrow
contract battles over salaries and benefits alone, that takes on the corpo-
rate actors that drive policy, and toward the broader fight for a new and
just economy.
Organize to Build a New Economy

Ultimately, a new academic labor movement cannot come without a
revived labor movement, and that must happen within larger social and
democratic movements. Geoghegan (2014) calls on John Dewey’s legacy
here when he says, for Dewey, “Education in a democracy should above all
give children the nerve to demand democracy at work” Without it, there
could be no democracy in the schools. Which comes first: democracy in
the schools or democracy in the workplace? Dewey had no need to say: It
was all of a piece: a democratic way of life in school, at work, every aspect
of our lives. But if he is right, there cannot be real school reform until
there is labor reform as well. […] But it may be true that if private corpo-
rations take over education, the labor movement is really through”
(pp. 144–145).
In the case of higher education, to take one of many examples, the fight
for decent salaries and benefits for people with high school and college
degrees would mitigate the need for both groups of graduates to desper-
ately pursue undergraduate or graduate degrees at all cost, and regardless
of quality. Labor organizing against upcredentialing across industry sectors
can mitigate the same. Both would put a clamp on diploma milling and the
“rescue” from the disabled vehicle of social mobility by higher education
profiteering. Similarly, as sociologist Charlie Eaton reminds us in his own
conclusion to Bankers in the Ivory Tower (2021), while it is key in the short
term to excise millionaires taxes, debt cancelation, reform student loan
repayment systems, and reform taxation on endowments, for example, we
must also organize collectively to transform the entire U.S. financial sys-
tem if we are to both free higher education from the clutches of financial
elites, and also have any chance of collapsing inequality in U.S. higher
education. As Dewey might have said, they are all of a piece.
If we have any hope of doing this, though, we must fight for the right
of all workers to organize, a step that the Biden administration has taken
in the introduction of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act.
That said, we must also organize to change labor law itself, which, since at
least the 1940s, has been enacted and amended to protect capital and to
hamstring broad-based and real workplace democracy. Even further, the
work ahead requires recognizing that the labor movement is not just
about labor unions or even just about workplace democracy more broadly,
but other working class organizations building and exercising power for
working people and families around issues that impact their whole lives,
and the life of our societies (Berry & Worthen, 2021). Once more, history
teaches us that such movements are possible. In fact, it has been precisely
these kinds of cross-class, cross labor sector, multiracial-ethnic movements
that have had any chance of confronting the power of capital in the U.S.,
or of bringing forth any major reorganization of inequality. As evidenced
by the massive cross-class, multiracial-ethnic movements against the
reconstitution of racial-caste in the First Gilded Age, and the dismantling
of American apartheid capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s, these move-
ments for democratic socialist reorganizations of society were also met
with violence and repression, as they are again today. This turn toward,
and return of, fascist counterattacks in the U.S., and globally, tells us pre-
cisely that broad-based, cross-class, multiracial-ethnic movements for jus-
tice are the path ahead, and we will need to keep going.
Geoghegan (2014) also reminds us that the movements that have actu-
ally changed economic power relations in the U.S., and we could argue
around the world, have not been because college and university educated
people joined social movement organizations, despite what we know
about the role of Black, Brown, and Indigenous college students in the
freedom movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Surely, we know that the
U.S. labor movement was fueled by people who often did not even have
high school diplomas. In the final hour, then, we must also resist the
“grand narrative” fantasy of higher education as the vanguard of the resis-
tance to corporatization and protector of democracy. There are multiple
pillars of democratic engagement that must be sustained, like supporting
beams, including a free press, a strong labor movement, and strong civic
institutions, including educational institutions. We also cannot build col-
leges and universities for the people unless we also build all educational
institutions for the people, and that means linking the academic labor
movement to the fight to free K-12 education from predatory capitalism
as well. The very fact that the radical right and their allies in the liberal
capitalist elites are aligned in devouring journalism, the state, and educa-
tion K-PSE at the same time is not coincidental.
In the wake of the financial disaster of 2008, we witnessed everyday
people organizing new ways of doing the economy, from building shared
time banks, barter networks, establishing community currencies, or
exploring new, more ethical ways of community banking (Castells et al.
2017), a momentum that was, regrettably, not sustained. During the pan-
demic, and particularly during the 2020 Summer of Unrest, we saw new
momentum again, though with some worried that, here again, the
momentum has abated. As we go to press, there is international focus on
a potentially revitalized and global labor movement grounded in princi-
ples of democratic socialism. There is a window opening, and we must
seize it. We must also set forth our own playbooks for our own futures,
and plan to organize consistently and intentionally toward a new political
economy even when there is no crisis.
Rising From The Rubble
Over a decade ago, in her 2010 book, The Lost Soul of Higher Education,
Ellen Schrecker warned:
More than money is at stake here. One can envision a dystopic set of institu-
tions, dominated by vocationalism and the bottom line, where the drive for
productivity transforms most faculty members into temporary workers with
little job security or control over the content of their courses, while scientists
and engineers churn out patentable results in industrialized laboratories that
service their corporate sponsors. Such a constricted model of the academic
community would not only stunt the careers and futures of students and
teachers but also would undermine the very idea of the university as a place
for intellectual growth and meaningful scholarship. Academic freedom is in
danger here, as is the future of the well-informed citizenry that our demo-
cratic system requires.” (p. 233)
We knew this before, but in writing this book, we feel more and more
despairing that democracy and capitalism are not compatible after all; we
cannot sit on these two chairs simultaneously. The values of liberal democ-
racy and human rights are not in alignment with the values of profit and
extraction and disposability. The United States, a nation that has led inter-
national policy since World War II, and that frames itself as the bastion of
democracy and human rights, has been an outlier among Western democ-
racies in terms of putting our money where our mouth is. The U.S. has
not ratified major United Nations Declarations, such as the Convention
on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women
(CEDAW) or the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the only coun-
try other than Somalia, making it the most ratified treaty in history
(Human Rights Watch, 2009), for example. In failing to do so, the
U.S. makes it evident, regardless of what our leadership claims, that we do
not really subscribe to the values of dignity, or the universal right to

healthcare, or the universal right to education, or protection of children
and individuals with disabilities. On top of that, we are exporting a neolib-
eral capitalist outsourcing model all around the world that works against
these very rights to protect health, education, and lives of people globally.
As we do, the relationships between the rise of late-stage capitalism, the
demise of even the front of liberal education, and the rise of autocracies
are further cemented. The pandemic has taught us that capitalism can do
quite well in a horror show. Yet, democracy isn’t doing well, and neither
are its people. We have watched our own liberal democratic government
abandon us in these crises, and in this we also see where the Trump alt-
right and the liberal left meet.
In her conclusion to Shock Doctrine, Klein documents the ways in which
ordinary people devastated by disaster capitalism have successfully orga-
nized after massive assaults to rebuild their communities and societies
from the rubble left by looters, profiteers, and neoliberal agents of state
terror aimed at capturing and ultimately privatizing governance. In oppo-
sition to “capitalist makeovers,” she calls these movements of resistance a
“people’s reconstruction” (2007, p. 560). Klein teaches us that disaster
capitalism has the element of surprise as a key weapon in the arsenal, rely-
ing on Jean Baudrillard’s description of terrorist attacks as characterized
by an “excess of reality” (as cited in Klein, 2007, p. 579). In other words,
such events are so traumatic, so shocking, that people experience them
directly for some time before they are able to interpret the meaning of
what has happened. It is in these spaces of profound disorientation when
people have yet to be able to tell the story of what has transpired, to
understand it on their own terms, where opportunists have their strongest
advantage to execute economic and political power grabs with little or no
resistance. Also, key in the process of weakening the resistance to disaster
capitalism, she says, is the attackers’ assault on memory, both individual
and collective, to distort, disrupt, and redefine what we take for granted as
reality. But Klein (2007) also ends with the reminder that the shock even-
tually wears off. All around the world, in the aftermath of socially and
politically constructed disasters orchestrated by ruling neoliberal elites,
people have come to understand how the shock doctrine works. They
have been able to find their stories. They have collectively given their own
meaning to what has transpired. They have refused the erasure of their
personal and collective memories about how people can live and work
together in peaceful, vibrant, supportive, life-affirming, equitable,
sustainable democratic communities and societies. They have done this

without denying the devastation, but by, together, rebuilding communi-
ties and societies “from scrap” (p. 589). This, she says, is the core spirit of
a “people’s reconstruction.” This whirlwind of a book written amidst the
unfolding of the coronavirus outbreak is our attempt to help our people
tell the story of what has happened during the first years of the pandemic,
and what continues to happen as racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism
attacks our institutions. It is our attempt to preserve the memory of what
higher education in democratic societies has been prior to the disaster of
neoliberalism that has been accelerated by the pandemic, as well as the
memory of what it has never been but what we have aspired for it to be.
In doing so, we will admit to our hope that we can all rise from the rubble.
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Index
A life, 39
AAUP-AFT, 277, 281, 282, 284, 285 mission, 52, 54, 71, 87, 89, 146,
New Deal for Higher Education, 148, 252, 263, 284, 291
281, 285 predatory publishing practices, 52
Abruzzo, Jennifer, 269 program closures, 7
Academe, xviii, 8 research, 35, 39
Academia, ii, vii, viii, xiii, xv, xviii, 7, 35, research federally-funded, 35
47, 60, 77, 152, 205, 212, 312 state capturing of, xiii, 274
the culture of, 7, 77 union-busting, 39
Academic(s), xv, xvi, xix, xxi, 15, 32, Academy
39, 127, 140, 141, 157, 287, assaults on, 99
299, 300, 307, 310, 311 business model, 34
capitalism, xii, xiv, 20–22, 40, 59, capture by the state, 35
100, 169, 261, 264, 288, 298 gig, xii, 101, 283
disciplines, 7 and industry entanglement, 32
freedom, xviii, 7, 8, 34, 35, 37, 41, values of, 54, 203
48, 52, 61, 81, 98–100, 149, Accommodation
154, 221, 257, 260, 277, 278, political, xi, xiii, 35, 260
282, 291, 301, 315 strategy, xi
Generation X, 310 Accountability, 21, 23, 107, 113, 120,
governance, 69, 73, 76, 77, 93, 173, 185–187, 197–202,
145–147, 150 248, 250
labor movement, xviii, 39, 273, measures, 23
283, 295, 299, 312–314 Accredible, 216

Switzerland AG 2022
Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12370-2
372 INDEX
Accreditation Council of Occupational dream, 229–232

Therapy Education left, 310
(ACOTE), 194 pragmatism, 31
Accumulation revolution, 33
by dispossession, 21, 22 settler capitalism, 31
wealth, xi, 4, 11, 12, 14, 116, 221 society, xvi, 1, 12, 20, 227, 254
Acheson, Ray, 50 white people, 4
Acquisitions, xi, 6, 32, 60, 109, 124, American Association of University
127, 130–139, 142, 191, Professors (AAUP)
192, 198 1966 AAUP Statement on Shared
corporate, 60 Governance, 154
ACUE, see Association of College and 2007 Report of an AAUP Special
University Educators Committee: Hurricane Katrina
Adamczyk, Amy, 152 and New Orleans Universities,
Adams, Vincanne, 50 16, 51, 59, 98
Ad Astra (higher education company), 2020 AAUP Purdue Public
140, 141 Statement, 151
Adelson, Aaron, 154 2020 AAUP’s Committee on
Adendroth, Mark, 30 College and University
Adhanom, Tedros, 2 Governance Principles of
Adjunctification, 45, 52 Academic Governance during
Administrative, 6, 20, 41, 46, 52, 53, the COVID-19 Pandemic, 146
61–63, 75, 87, 88, 93–98, 105, 2020 Faculty Compensation
138, 139, 145, 165, 185, 206, Survey, 96
231, 263, 292, 303 2021 Special Report:COVID-19
pay, 47, 96 and Academic
Afghanistan, 16, 43 Governance, 69, 145
Africa, 31, 110, 219 American Campus Communities
Africana Studies, 24 Inc., 91
Akhtar, Allana, 96 American College and University
Alabama College of Osteopathic Educators (ACUE), 82, 83, 124,
Medicine, 238 127, 180
Alexander, Michelle, 290 American College Health
Ali, Shirin, 224 Association, 161
Allen, Mark, 43, 118 American Council on Education
Altbach, Philip, 60 (ACE), 82, 124
Alternative education models, 49 American Federation of Teachers
Amazon, 95, 131, 252, 271, 272 (AFT), 277, 281, 282, 285
Labor Union on Staten Island, American Occupational Therapy
New York, 271 Association (AOTA), 194
American American Rescue Plan Act, 2, 247
academy, 7 Americans
calvinism, 12 African, 31
INDEX 373
history, 221 Association of Independent Colleges

middle-class, xiii, 299 and Universities, 252
non-traditional age, 131 Assumption College,
with some college credit, 131 Worcester, MA, 95
American university, xiv, xvi, 29, 30, AT&T, 32
50, 154, 270 Athletes, 97, 239–242, 244, 245
Amway, 124 college, 242–245, 269–270
Anderson, Nick, 160, 241, Athletic(s)
255, 278 competition, 38
Andrews, David, 93 college, 41, 96, 240
Anft, Michael, 134–137, 139 collegiate, 240, 241
Antebellum period, 31 Division I, 139
Anti-corporate resistors, 11 Division II, 139
Antoninis, Manos, 102 facilities, 8
Apkarian, Jacob, 273 Atkins, Robert, 79
Appalachia, 31 The Atlantic, xviii
Apparatus Auburn University, 161
administrative, 41, 44, 63 Audit, 23, 48, 66, 75, 77, 93, 113,
edu-political, xix, 110, 111, 121, 262, 264
140, 182–188, 193, measures, 233
195, 201 Auerbach, Nicole, 245
federal defense and surveillance, 35 Augusta University, 257
ideological, x, xiv, 19, 58 Austerity
of justifications, xii frames, 61, 85
of power, 20 measure, 6, 23, 25, 47, 53, 60, 183,
Argentina, 15 190, 211, 222, 280
Arizona, 62, 71, 72, 118, 124, 125, policies, x
131–133, 141, 275 Australia, xxi, 46, 62, 90, 91, 157,
Arizona State University, 110, 118, 209, 215, 219
125, 131, 163, 275 university workforce, 62
Arkansas State University, 188 Authoritarianism, 13, 292, 298, 299
Aronowitz, Stanley, 30 Avent-Holt, Dustin, 257
Arruzza, Cinzia, xiv, 290 Avery, Cameron, 63, 279
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, Azim Premji University, 3
82, 113, 114, 217, 271
Aslanian, Sasha, 209
Asmelash, Leah, 236 B
Association of College and University Bachynski, Kathleen, 240
Educators (ACUE), 124 Bader, Eleanor J., 13, 275,
Association of Governing Boards of 276, 285
Universities and Colleges Bailey, Nancy, 179
(AGB), 146 Bain & Company, 106, 120, 127
374 INDEX
Bain Consulting, 47 Biden, Joseph Robinette, 103, 228,

See also Bain & Company 243, 249, 250, 302, 303, 313
Baker, Simon, 102, 136 Big College, 243, 259
Baker Tilly Consulting Firm, 136 Big Pharma, 260
Baldwin, Davarian L., 305 Big Tech, 51, 117, 119, 124, 182,
Ball, Stephen J., 108, 109, 183, 185 185, 186
Balthaser, Benjamin, xiii, 8 Big Tech and Big Liberty, 128, 140
Baltodano, Marta P., 114 Big Ten Conference, 243
Bamberger, Cayla, 130 Bill and Melinda Gates
Barber, Benjamin R., 12 Foundation, 47
Barnes, Adam, 224 See also Gates Foundation
Barr, Anthony, 306 Biotech industry, 37
Barrett, Minna S., 151 Bipartisan Policy Center, 224, 229
Barrow, Clyde, xi, xv, 31 Black, Joanna, 173
Baudrillard, Jean, 316 Blackboard, 42, 106
Baum, Sandy, 38 Blinder, Alan, 240, 241
Bauman, Dan, 95, 96 Block, George, 209
Bayh-Doyle Act, 39 Bloom, Steven M., 38
Baylor University, 96 Blumenstyk, Goldie, 30, 38,
BBC News, 204 42, 47–50
Bear, John, 204 Boden, Rebecca, 308
Beatty, Brian, 167 Bok, Derek, 30
Beaumont, Thomas, 118 Bolivia, 16
Becker College, Worcester, Bolton, Aaron, 67, 83
Massachusetts, 130 Booeshaghi, Sina, 160
Benedix, Beth, 6 Borden, Taylor, 96
Benioff, Mark, 114, 115, 118 Boser, Ulrich, 205
Bergeron, Katherine, 88 Boston Consulting Group, 120
Berglund, Lisa, 85, 86 Bourdieu, Pierre, 11, 12, 20, 21
Berkeley Mafia, 15–17, 37 Bowles, Samuel, xvi, 23
Berkeley-Novartis deal, 41 Bowman, Cynthia Paez, 226
Berkshire, Jennifer, 117 Boyington, Briana, 220
Berlin Wall, 40 Bradley, Dana, 87
Berry, Joe, 314 Brazil, 15
Best College Rankings, 220 British Columbia Teachers’
BestColleges.com, 80 Federation, 184
Best, Eric, 220 Brooks Institute, 195
Best, Joel, 220 Brown (university), 87
Bezos, Jeff, 4, 110, 114 Brown, Kathleen, 285
Bhattacharya, Tithi, xiv, 285, 290 Brown, Sherrod, 201
INDEX 375
Brown, Wendy, 21 California Institute of Science and

Bryant University, 96 Innovation (CISI), 43
The Bubbler, 163 California Institute of Technology, 160
Buchanan, James McGill, 14, 108, California State University, 305
115, 116, 143 proposition, 305
The Bucks County Courier Times, California University of
Levittown, PA, 99 Pennsylvania, 240
Budget cuts, xviii, 257, 265, 295 Cambridge University, 31
Bureaucratic authority, 20 Camera, Lauren, 206–208
Burke, Lilah, 63, 124, 161, 190, 192 Campos, Paul, 96
Burnett, Erin, 151 Campus housing, 55, 89, 234–236,
Busch, Lawrence, 11–13, 30, 41, 238, 257, 258, 266–268, 276
42, 44, 50 privatized, 235, 238
Bush, George W., 43, 195 Canada, xxi, 183
Business, vii, viii, xii, xv, xvi, 10, 19, Canavan, Chelsey R., 280
30, 32–34, 38, 41, 45, 59, 60, Canceling Professor Tenure Act (
64, 67, 73, 83, 85, 86, 90, 96, South Carolina House Bill
101, 104, 106–107, 109, 110, 4522), 80
112, 120, 125, 131, 132, Canisius University, Buffalo, NY, 73
136–139, 141, 168, 169, 171, Capital
172, 181–202, 204, 213, 215, interests of, x, xiv
217, 222, 223, 225–227, 235, relationship to state, xiii
238, 249, 253, 283, 292, Capitalism
308, 310 academic, xii, xiv, 20–22, 40,
independent of, xvi 59, 100, 169, 261, 264,
Business Affairs Forum, 85, 88, 288, 298
89, 128–130 bandit, xii
See also EAB casino, 16, 20, 301
Business model, vii, xv, 34, 46, 60, 96, consequences of, xii, 246, 288
112, 131, 168, 171, 172, contemporary scholars of, xiii
181–202, 235 critique of, xii, 19
in higher education, 96, 168, 171, crony, xii
172, 181–202 disaster, vii, xii, xx, 1–27, 51, 55,
Business wire, 142, 226 57, 59, 60, 73, 78, 81, 86,
105, 145, 155, 157, 173, 176,
178, 187, 199, 225, 246, 261,
C 275, 316
Cai, Zhifeng, 231 gangster, 16
Calhoun, Craig, 13, 115, 116 gendered, 7, 8, 259, 276, 298
Calhoun, James C., 14 global, xi, xiv, xvi, 4, 5, 8, 20, 21,
California Community College’s 27, 85, 111, 233, 294, 310
Calbright initiative, 134 identity, 85
376 INDEX
Capitalism (cont.) Caplan, Arthur L., 240

industrial, vii, 19, 31 Cardenas-Navia, Isabel, 213
late stage, 105, 119, 289, 291, 292, Cardona, Miguel, 103
298, 299, 306, 310, 316 Career Education Corporation (CEC),
mafia, 84 195, 196
monopoly, 19 Carey, Kevin, 34, 44, 181, 187–189,
neoliberal, x, 288 191, 193, 194, 196–198,
oligarchy, 84 210, 211
patriarchal, xiv Carnegie classifications, 212
postmodern, xi Carnegie Corporation of
predatory, xii, 314 New York, 103
racialized, 23 Carnevale, Anthony P., 220
racialized disaster patriarchal, xiv, Carpenter, Robert, 235
xxi, 9, 18, 25, 55, 233, 246, Carrasco, Maria, 164
261, 266, 270, 272, 286–288, Carrera, Catherine, 284
290, 291, 295, 297, 317 Castells, Manuel, 314
state industrial, 25, 26 Castiello-Gutiérrez, Santiago, 153
statist, 17, 19 Cattel, Megan, 268
total, 26 Caymans, 43
transnational, xi Cellini, Riegg Stephanie, 207
unchecked, 37 Center for American Progress, 249
vulture, xii, 57 Center for Budget and Policy
Capitalist Priorities, 2, 3, 9
academic project, 21 Center for Disease Control (CDC),
class, xii, xiii, xiv, 22, 152, 185 153, 159, 161, 237
elites, 10, 17, 32, 100, 260, 314 Center for Public Integrity, 118
Cappellino, Anjelica, 268 Center for Sustainable Employment, 3
Capitalists Center for the Study of Public
apologists, 10 Choice, 116
exploitation, xii, 55 Central Michigan University, 210
identity, 126, 260 Central Ohio Technical College, 124
ideologies, xiv The Century Foundation, 189, 190,
makeovers, 10, 16, 18, 29, 316 192, 197, 200
opportunism, 17, 233 Chan, Priscilla, 114
project, xi, xii Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, 102, 115
raiding, 17 Charles Koch Foundation, 123–126
realism, 26, 296 Chatterjee, Piya, xii, 21, 24,
reconstructions, 10, 58 100, 290
social order, 18 Chernow, Barbara, 87, 88
social relations, 24 Chicago Boys, 15–17, 36, 37, 107,
system, xx, 25, 221 108, 142, 304
transformation, 59 Chicago School, 27, 84
INDEX 377
Chief People Officer, 63, 87 social, xv

Chile, 15 system, 36, 299, 305
China, 16 working, xv, 1. 22–24, 31, 38, 291,
Cho, Sumi, 254, 255 298, 299, 312, 313
Chomsky, Noam, 25, 26, 296 Classism
Christianity, 11 in curricula, 22, 34, 119
The Chronicle of Higher Education, in hiring, 58, 79, 80, 81, 86–88, 95,
xviii, 79, 94–97, 100, 123, 131, 97, 117, 118, 121, 127–129,
134–139, 188, 200, 229 177, 211, 252, 278
CIA, 35 in tuition, 38, 47, 49, 52, 174, 180,
Citizenship, xi, xiii, 21, 100, 122, 254, 268, 305
169, 234 Clawson, Dan, 30
democratic, xiii Clay, Rebecca, xii
City University of New York Clemson University, 276
(CUNY) system Clifton, Helen, 204
EverUp Micro-Credential Climate change, vii, xii
program, 204 Clinton, William Jefferson, 41
Professional Staff Congress (PSC), Codd, John, 179
176, 277 Cohen, Donald, 118, 182–186, 202
Research Foundation, 176, 277 Colby College, 141
Civil liberties, 11, 17, 100 Cold War, 40
Civil society, 25, 116, 281, 285, 288 Collective action, xxii, 55, 265, 266,
Civil war, 5 272, 275, 295, 298, 305
overt, 5 College Board, 219, 220, 224
Clark, Eva, 8 2021 Trends in College Pricing and
Clark University Worcester, Student Aid Report, 219
Massachusetts, 130 The College Crisis Initiative at
Class Davidson College (C2i),
administrative, 46, 52, 105, 8, 40, 61, 123, 140, 141,
145, 292 153, 158
bloated professional, xiii College Crisis Initiative, Davidson
boundaries, xi College, 8, 61, 123, 140,
capitalist, xii, xiii, xiv, 22, 152, 185 153, 158
corporate, xi, 53, 123 College of Arts and Sciences at
decimation of middle, xiv Fordham University, 277
inequality, 22, 26 The College of Saint Rose in Albany,
middle, xiii, xiv, xv, 18, 19, 294, New York, 76
299, 300, 303, 305 College of Staten Island, 145
power, 264 Colleges
professional-managerial, xii, xiii enrollment, 3, 46, 47
professional-technocratic, xiii experience, 178, 180, 233–235,
ruling in the U.S., 19 238, 239, 254, 292
378 INDEX
Colleges (cont.) Concordia University Chicago, 76

for-profit, 34, 40, 42, 43, 63, 187, Concordia University in Portland,
195, 207, 211, 212, 218, 247, Oregon, 130
249, 294 Connecticut College, 86, 88
junior, xx, 35, 36 Consciousness, 22, 122, 257, 261,
junior community system, 35 299, 300, 302, 309
private, 34, 39, 47, 61, 65, 91, 96, false, xi, 263
100, 130, 141, 247, 250, 265 Consultacracy, 113, 119, 140
public, xiii, 31, 40, 45, 93, 96, 117, educational, 140
118, 156, 220, 247–249, 254, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
277, 282 (CFPB), 225–227
College Scorecard, 207 Contingent Faculty Bill of Rights,
College sports 149, 303
commercialization, 245 Cooper, Anna J, 7
sexism, 244 Cooperative research and development
Collier, Daniel, 152, 153 agreements (CRADAs), 39
Collinge, Alan, 38, 220 Coppins, McKay, 91
Collins, Patricia Hill, 290 Cornell Institute of Labor Relations
Colonialism, 24, 110, 259 (ILR), 274
Columbia University, 250, 251, 267, Cornell University, Ithaca,
268, 270, 273, 275 New York, 86
West Harlem expansion, 270 Coronavirus, 8, 57, 86–88, 237,
Commodified, 6, 24 240, 243, 244, 247,
Commodities Futures Modernization 253, 317
Act (CFMA), 41 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and
Commodity, x, 22, 93, 222 Economic Security Act (CARES),
Communication Workers of America, 228, 247
276, 277 Coronavirus Response and Relief
Communities, xiv, xvii, xxi, xxv, 1, 10, Supplemental Appropriations Act,
18, 35, 36, 49, 60, 69–71, 74, 2021 (“CRRSAA”), 176, 247
81, 82, 86–89, 91, 99, 122, 124, Corporate
128, 134, 138, 149–151, actors, 38, 52, 312
155–157, 160–165, 207, 218, class, xi, 53, 123
219, 231, 233–235, 238, 239, Corporatism, 17, 26
243, 246–248, 252, 256, 259, Corporatization, xiii, xxi, 7, 26, 27,
266, 270, 278, 279, 282–285, 29–31, 34, 36, 39, 41, 42, 65,
290, 292, 296, 299, 301, 106, 149, 157, 218, 261, 263,
304–306, 309, 311, 265, 281, 286, 287, 295, 297,
312, 314–317 298, 312, 314
of color, 1, 99, 256 Corporatized, xi, 89
Community colleges, 35, 36, 49, 81, higher education, xii, 235
91, 124, 134, 160, 207, 218, Corredera, Enrique, 94
247, 248, 252, 283, 290, 305 Corvias Group LLC, 238
INDEX 379
Council of New Jersey College outbreak, 9, 50, 119, 158, 163

Locals, 277 pandemic, xii, xiv, 3, 13, 25, 54, 75,
The County College of Morris 123, 146, 148, 156, 183, 215,
(CCM), Randolph, NJ, 219, 224, 231, 233, 294
65, 84 policy, xvii, 5, 7, 162
Coursera, 50, 172, 198, 204 pre-COVID mechanisms, 140
Courses, ix, xv, xxv, 12, 17, 24, 26, responses, xxi, 8, 16, 46, 53, 88, 94,
31, 33, 40, 42, 44, 46, 49, 52, 123, 137, 140, 141, 158,
54, 63, 68, 80–83, 89, 95, 98, 163–165, 167, 174, 203,
101, 109, 110, 114, 119, 122, 242, 280
126, 129, 134, 136, 140, 141, revenue losses, 64, 85
147, 148, 151, 158, 167, 168, storm, 130, 135
170–174, 177, 178, 185, 190, testing, 8, 9, 156–164, 242
196, 198, 204, 205, 207–209, vaccine, 1, 5
215, 246, 252, 255, 258, 262, vaccines access to, 1
264, 269, 273, 288, 303, 315 COVID-19 Emergency Relief and
online, 81, 134, 171, 196, 198, Federal Student Aid plan, 228
208, 264 CovidSHIELD, 162
COVID-19 Cowley, Stacy, 225, 229
acquisitions, 127, 130–139, 198 Creativity, xiv, xvii, 88, 124, 234, 301,
age of, vii, xxi, 219–232 302, 307
contact tracing, 8 Credly, 204, 215, 216
death by, xiii, 233, 286 Crisis
era, xiv, xvii, 5–7, 29, 46, 50, 98, climate, 15, 266
106, 111, 112, 126, 134, 135, COVID-19, 2, 7, 9, 19, 22, 26, 49,
138, 142, 183, 266, 294 51, 53, 61, 73, 146, 159, 164,
in higher education, vii, x, xi, 270, 293
xii, xiii, xv, xviii, xxi, 5, 9, disorienting nature of, 57
16, 19, 22, 26, 47, 51, economic, x, 10, 58, 71, 94,
52, 85, 94, 147, 148, 101, 207
190, 219, 231, 232, educational, 3, 82, 135, 142, 293
265, 286, 289, 293, 294 financial, xviii, 257
horrors of, xvi gendered, 3, 19
killed by, 4, 129 impact on women, 2
management of, xiii, 53, 54, 95, manufactured, xii, 293
126, 156, 160, 162, 167, 203, narratives, xii, 82
220, 265, 275, 293 pandemic, 270
mergers, 130–139 pre-COVID-19, 159
monitoring, 9, 158 public health, 8
opportunism, xi, xxi, 14, 51, real, xii
183, 233 social reproductive labor, 3
380 INDEX
Critical Davis, Angela, 285, 290

criminalization of analyses of Davis, Gray, 43
power, xiii Davos Man, 108, 110, 114, 115,
curricula attacks on, 119, 257 125, 191, 239, 259,
sites, xi 263, 295
sociology, xvii, 311 Davos, Switzerland, 108
Critical race theory (CRT), 7, 26, 99, Deak, Mike, 268
118, 222, 254–258, 265, Debt collective, 302
295, 311 See also Strike Debt
Critical theory, 27 Deferred Action for Childhood
Critical University Studies Arrivals (DACA), 250
(CUS), 287 DEI initiatives, 259
Crow, Michael, 131 Delaware State University, 130
CRT, see Critical race theory Del Cerro Santamaría, Gerardo, 206,
Cultural 208, 212
forces, xiii, 272 Dell, 106
logic, xv Deloitte Consulting LLP, 106
space, xv Democracy/democracies, xi, 122
Culture free zones, 10
of corruption, 17 multiracial, 5
rationalized, xi threat to, 298
of skills training, xi Western, xii, xv, xviii, xxi, 5, 315
technocratic, xi Democratic
vocationalized, xi anti, 14, 108, 115, 116, 119, 120,
Cultures of fear, 25, 59 224, 295, 299
of business, 59 institutions, xv, 5, 26, 130
Cunningham, Bolden, Sandra, 200 life, xxii
Cuomo, Andrew, 101 principles, xiv, xxii, 296
Curley, Christopher, 161 socialist, xvii, 267, 314
Curriculum, 25, 32, 49, 53, 55, 77, system, 116, 315
99, 100, 118, 128, 146, 148, Democratic Party, 36, 227
169, 173, 177, 206, 208, 217, Dennon, Anne, 212
234, 235, 253–264, 277, DePaul University, 254
291, 293 DePietro, Andrew, 220
Deprofessionalization, 45, 149, 152,
159, 291
D Derber, Charles, 20
“DEI” initiatives, 259 Deregulation, 10, 34, 38, 40, 84, 185,
Davidson College, Davidson, North 257, 292, 304
Carolina, 95 DeSantis, Ron, 154
Davidson, Samuel, 124 Desegregation, xiii, 59
INDEX 381
Desmarchelier, Renee, 215, 216 Douglas-Gabriel, Danielle, 6,

DeStefano, Joanne, 88, 89 62, 63, 250
Detentions, 5, 11, 16 Downward mobility, 4
DeVos, Betsy, 103, 195, 247, 250 Downsizing, viii, 6, 24, 41, 47,
DeVry University, 112 52, 83, 258
Dewey, John, 19, 313 DreamBox Learning, 114
Dickler, Jessica, 65, 66 Drozdowski, Mark, 80
Diep, Francie, 152 DuBois, William Edward Burghardt,
Digital Promise, 179 7, 23, 290
Dilawar, Arvind, 93, 94 Dudley, Taela, 190
Dimon, Jamie, 114 Duke University, 268
Disaster Duncan, Arne, 188, 239, 241
capitalism, vii, xii, xx, 1–27, 51, 55, DuPont, 32
57, 59, 60, 73, 78, 81, 86,
157, 167, 173, 176, 178,
187, 199, 225, 246, 261, E
275, 316 EAB, 85, 86, 88, 89, 128–130
capitalists, 9, 13, 17, 27, 40, 54, See also Business Affairs Forum
100, 296 Eckstein, Rick, 41, 239
economic, 15, 43, 187 ECMC Foundation, 135, 140, 141
exploitation of, xii Economic
opportunism, xiv, xxi, 4, 7, 14, 17, financialized logic, xx
23, 51, 239 goals, xiii, 10, 58
political, 16 justice, 36, 266, 281, 285
profiteering, 7, 10, 58, 102 landscapes, xi
Discipline and Punish, 109 space, xv
Disney, 86 tragedy as a result of
consultants, 86 COVID-19, 4
Diversity Economic crisis, 10, 58, 71, 94,
economic, 86 101, 207
and inclusion, 44 (see also DEI Economy
initiatives) gig, 4, 101, 216
racial, 278, 302 gig moguls, 4
Divestment, 25, 37, 38, 58, 187, global, xi, 23, 33, 34, 204, 291
249, 292 informal, 2
Divisive concepts, 254–256, 258, knowledge-based, xi
263, 277 Ed Tech Factory, 191
Dolby, Nuha, 251 Edelman, Marc, 269
Domhoff, William, 19, 290 Edfinancial Services, 226
Donnelly, Maxine, 177–179 EdTech, 51, 53, 106, 107, 112, 114,
Dotson, Miranda, 270 139, 172, 182, 187
382 INDEX
Education academic, 15
foundations, 47 capitalist, 10, 17, 32, 100, 260, 314
global, ix, vii, x, xix, 3, 14, 46, 53, catholic, 221
102, 105–108, 110, 112, 113, corporate, 10, 14, 17, 29, 30,
115, 120, 123, 127, 132, 141, 58, 84, 100
142, 168, 171, 182–185, 191, economic, 13, 21, 224
259, 292, 294 (see also Global, entrepreneurial, 60
education) financial, 222, 223, 313
less expensive myth, 131 intellectual, 10, 14
online, viii, 51, 131, 132, 167, male, xv
170–173, 191, 196 (see also neoliberal, 36, 216, 316
Instruction, online) political, xi, 8, 15, 162, 227, 290
Educational ruling, 22, 33, 296
badges, 205 white, xv, 22, 31, 60
consolidations, 130 Emergency Junior College, xx
consultants, 79, 85, 120, 128 Emergency Measures Act, Manitoba,
corporation, xix, 44, 54, 106, Canada, 183
182, 203 Empirical
cottage industry, 44, 85 data, xix
educational technology firms, 54, 168 evidence, xix, 11
entrepreneurs, 42, 44, 58, 140 Employment
historians, xviii, 33 semi-skilled, xi
initiatives, 123 skilled, xi
management corporations, 42, 43, Engels, Friedrich, 12, 17, 20, 290
203, 293 (see also EPMs) England, 267
software, 113, 114, 271 staged tuition strikes, 267
structural adjustment, 37 Enrollment management, 54, 151,
Educational management corporations 167, 210
(EPMs), 42, 43 firms, 54
Education Privatization Management Entrepreneurs, 110, 207
Corporations (EMS), 203, 293 identity, 85
Educause, 131 EPMs, see Educational management
Edupreneurs, 42, 54, 55, 91, 119, corporations
125, 183 Equal Educational
EDvantage, 118 Opportunities Act, 43
EdX, 198, 199 EQUIP (Educational Quality Through
Ehsan, Cameron, 268 Innovative Partnerships), 208
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 35 Etienne, Vanessa, 89
Elementary and Secondary Education Etzkowitz, Henry, xii
Act-ESEA, 43, 253 Europe, 4, 16, 30, 106, 163, 291
Elites European Union, 214
INDEX 383
Extraction, xii, xiv, 18, 37, 108, 129, salary freezes, 6

299, 315 senate, 87, 93, 145, 177, 278
resources natural, xii tenured, 6, 52, 62, 64, 68, 73–76,
Ezell, Allen, 204 78–80, 84, 94, 98, 124, 303
tenure stream, 45, 76
tenure-track, 6, 62, 64, 65, 76, 78,
F 83, 84, 95, 124, 211, 303
Facebook, 34, 103, 106, 114, 115 terminations, 7, 64, 73, 74,
Faculty 93, 139
compensation and benefits, 6 Fairbrother, Will, 163
contingent, 24, 38, 62, 93, Falwell, Jerry, 38, 131
101, 149, 273, 274, 282, FBI, 35
284, 303 Feagin, Joe R., 35
council, 78, 149, 151, 175, 276, Federal Family Education Loan
278, 280, 281, 312 Program (FFEL), 222
credentialing, 82, 262 Federal Reserve, 224
cutting benefits, 47 Federal Supplemental Educational
deprofessionalization, 45, 159 Opportunity Grants, 201, 230
employment, 47, 68 Federal Technology Transfer
firing, 6, 65, 78 Act, 39
full time non-tenure track, 6, Felson, Jacob, 152
47, 78, 303 Feminist theory, 311
furloughs, 6, 62, 94, 277 intersectional, 311
gambling with the lives of, 8 Ferrari, Katie, 59, 60, 101, 102
governance, 40, 54, 148, Fifth Amendment (of the
149, 154, 177, 203, 280, U.S. Constitution), 98
293, 312 Fincham, Robin, 121
governed by, 6, 52, 177 Fink, Larry, 114
handbook, 68, 74, 78 Finland, 120
hires, 81, 95, 118, 252, 278 Finnish
hiring freezes, 63, 87 consultant, 130
labor downsizing, 47, 52 people, 130
layoffs, 6, 62, 71, 77 public sector, 130
leaders, ix, xx, 234, 237, 263 society, 130
leadership, ix, xvii, 7, 30, 68, 73, universities, 130
278, 280, 286, 288 Fiscal emergency, 64, 280
lines, 47, 52, 303 Fiscal exigency, 61, 68
outsourced training options, 97 Fischer, Rebecca S. B., 46, 209
pay, 47, 96 Flaherty, Colleen, 65, 66, 78, 79, 81,
professionalization of, 148, 159 84, 94, 95, 134, 254, 255, 257,
right-size, 6 274, 276, 277, 282
384 INDEX
Florida, 5, 51, 81, 84, 86, 96, 134, Freedom Schools, 118, 309
154, 179 Fresno State University, 179
Florida Career College (FCC), 248 Friedman, Milton, 10, 13–15, 59,
Florida state legislature, 81 103, 108, 228
Florida State University, 118 Friga, Paul, 138
Floyd, George, 5, 266 Fritz, William J., 145–150
Flynn, Marilyn, 196, 197 Fuller, Andrea, 194, 196–198,
Forbes, 34, 121, 172, 211, 224, 259 213, 230
Force majeure, 64, 68 Fundamentalism
Fordham University’s Forward Task Christian, 13
Force, 150, 277 free-market, 10, 15, 107, 118
Forensic audit, 66 Furloughs, 6, 61–63, 69, 71–73, 94,
For-profit, xiii, 33, 34, 37, 38, 40–45, 129, 275, 277, 280
48, 51, 54, 63, 102, 103, 107, Furstenberg, François, 66, 93
112, 124, 171, 173, 182,
186–190, 193–196, 198–200,
203, 204, 206–208, 211–213, G
215, 218, 225, 235, 236, 239, Gabbatt, Adam, 118
247–250, 294, 303, 305 Gainful Employment Rule, 207
Fortin, Jacey, 254 Gallup, 90
Fortune Business Insights, 106 Games of Thrones, 198
Foster, Johanna, vii, viii, xiv, Gannon, Kevin, 175, 177
18, 311 Gardner, Lee, 61, 62, 75, 76, 79, 94,
Foster-Palmer, Sophie, xiv, 18, 295 100, 131, 132
Foucault, Michel, 20, 109 Garimella, Suresh V., 94
Fowers, Alyssa, 6, 62, 63 Gates, Bill, 106
Frankfurt School, 20 Gates Foundation, 47
Fraser, Nancy, 19, 290 See also Bill and Melinda Gates
Freedom Foundation
to accumulate, 13 GatorSafe App, 179
from educational malpractice, 13 Gay, Edward, 209
from exploitation, 13 Geiger, Roger L., x, xiv, xix, 38,
from housing insecurity, 13 39, 41, 46
from hunger, 13 Gender, xi, xiv, xvi, 18, 19,
from inequality, 13 23, 24, 83, 148, 223,
from poverty, 13 255, 260, 277, 284, 285,
from price gouging, 13 296, 300
to profit, 13 structures, xi, 296
from reckless exposure to Genentech, 37
disease, 13 General Electric, 32
from unemployment, 13 George Mason University (GMU),
from wage theft, 13 116, 117, 160
INDEX 385
George Washington University, financial collapse of 2008, 58 (see

63, 86, 280 also Great Recession)
Georgia, 138, 139, 257, 276 management consulting firms,
state legislatures, 154 120, 126
Georgia University System, 236, neoliberal currents, xx
237, 276 North, 294
Board of Regents, 237 pandemic, vii, xii, 5, 111, 239,
Gerber, Larry G., 30, 146–150, 251, 289
152, 159 society, 1
Gibbs, Lindsay, 244 technology conglomerates, 4
G.I. Bill, 35, 36, 221 Global and total educational
Gilbert, Erik, 188, 189, 193, 201 management privatization
Gilded Age syndicate, 105
First, xv, 7, 30, 34, 165, 221, See also TEMPS
229, 314 Gluckman, Nell, 97
Second, 4, 272, 287, 310 Goeghegan, Thomas, 259, 308,
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 7 313, 314
Ginsberg, Benjamin, 30, 44 Gogia, Laura, 168
Gintis, Herbert, xvi, 23 Goldfinger, Johnny, 84
Giridharadas, Anand, xii Goldstein, Dana, 3, 65, 106
Giroux, Henry, xvi, xx, 20, 22, 30, 35, Golembeski, Dean, 220
173, 292 Goodman, Peter, 108, 114
Global Google, 34, 103, 114, 175
capitalist system, xx Gopal, Vin, 200
disparities, 1 Gordon, Jane Anna, 9, 287
economy, xi, 23, 33, 34, 204, 291 Gordon, Lewis R., 9, 287
education, ix, vii, x, xix, 3, 14, 46, Government, xviii, 14, 26, 39,
53, 102, 105–108, 110, 112, 51, 84, 109, 116, 117,
113, 115, 120, 123, 127, 119, 122, 146, 147, 151,
132, 141, 142, 168, 171, 172, 177, 183, 185, 200,
182–185, 191, 259, 203, 206–209, 211, 214, 215,
292, 294 218, 219, 221–223, 225–229,
educational colonization, 112 234, 249, 267, 294, 316
education industry (GEI), ix, x, xix, federal, 14, 39, 158, 200, 201, 225,
106, 111–113, 115, 123, 132, 229, 234, 249
142, 168, 182–185, 191, 294 Grad PLUS loans, 211, 230
education markets, 107 Grajek, Susan, 131
edu-political apparatus, xix, 140 Grand Canyon University, 131
(see also Apparatus, Gray Associates Consulting Firm, 79
edu-political) Great Britain, 33
feminized service economy, 2 Great Depression, xx
386 INDEX
Great Recession, 33, 44–50, 60, 70, Harvard Medical School, 37

135, 224, 225 Harvey, David, 12, 17, 20, 290
Great Society, 22, 40, 229 Harwell, Drew, 271, 272
Greenwood, Davydd J., 292, 307, 308 Hastings, Reed, 107, 114
Gregory, Sean, 240, 243, 246 Hayek, Friedrich, 13
Griffey, Trevor, 278, 282 Hayes, Dennis, 20, 43, 187
Grinnell College, 302 Hayes, T’Keyah, 236, 238
Grueso, Hernando, 170 HCBUs, 32
Guaranteed Student Loan Healthcare
Program, 221 lack of access, 1
The Guardian, xviii privatized, 57
Guild Education, 125 Health Care and Education
Guilford, Jonathan, 91 Reconciliation Act 2010, 225
Gunter, Helen M., 121, 122 Health conditions, 1, 170
Gupta, S. L., 169 pre-existing, 1
Gupta, Utkarsh, 169 Health hazards, 1
Gürcan, Efe Can, 25 in the workplace, 1
Heathcote, Jonathan, 231
Heavey, Susan, 106
H The Hechinger Report, 196,
Hahn, Alicia, 224 209, 210
Hall, Rachel, 267, 268 Hedge funds, 60, 91, 305
Hall, Stephanie, 190–192, Heidegger, Martin, 20
197–199, 201 Henderson, Kenneth W., 180
Hamermesh, Daniel S., 96 Herbert, William A., 273
The Hamilton Project (Brookings The Heritage Foundation, 59, 141
Institute), 141 Herold, Benjamin, 253
Handwerker, Weber Elizabeth, 2 Hess, Abigail Johnson, 220, 230
Hans, Peter, 133 Heteropatriarchies, xiv
Harbaugh, Jim, 241 Heyboer, Kelly, 65, 130
Hardt, Michael, xx Heyward, Giulia, 254
Hare, Julie, 229 Higher education
Harmon Courage, Katherine, access to in America, xv, 35, 36
160, 162 Act of 1965, 221, 222
Hartley, Matthew, 151 adjunctification, 45, 52
Hartocollis, Anemona, 162, 306 administrative bloat, 53
Harvard (University), 66, 198, administrative staff, 6, 63
276, 306 administrators, xii, 5, 52, 60, 85,
Legacy of Slavery Fund, 306 96, 129, 149, 206, 235
Harvard Law School’s Project on bureaucrats, xiii
Predatory Lending, 248 commodification, xx, 29
INDEX 387
commodification of knowledge shared governance, 98, 146–148,

in, vv, 42 185, 293, 294
corporate elites, 30, 58 structural arrangement, xvi
corporatization, xiii, xxi, 27, 31, 34, wholescale demolition, 39
41, 106, 149, 218, 263, 265, Higher Education Emergency Relief
286, 295, 297, 314 Fund II (“HEERF II”),
critical scholarship, xx 176, 247
critical scholars of, xiii, 96 The Hill, 220, 224
cultural arrangement, 5 Hill, Phill, 199
disaster capitalism, vii, xx, 1–27, 51, Hipkins, Hon Chris, 215
246, 261 Hofstadter, Richard, 14
diseased, xx Holden, Todd, 275
EdTech companies Holt, Steven, 80
influence on, 180 Honlon IQ, 182, 192
Emergency Relief Fund, 176, 247 Honorlock, 271
endowments, 36, 94, 313 Hood, Christopher, 119, 205
executives, 41, 46, 53, 55, 59, 63, Hooks, bell, 236
66, 80, 105, 129, 132, 137, Hoover, Eric, 231
242, 260, 292, 294 Horn, Michael, 125
for-profit model, 37 HotChalk (OPM), 189–192
for-profit sector influence on, 51 House File 49, bill to ban tenure at all
hyper-neoliberalist model, 50 of Iowa’s state colleges and
institution, x, 45, 85, 141, 167, universities, x, 80
169, 209, 214, 217 Houston Community College, 248
leadership, xxi, 146, 237 Howard University, 236, 238, 268
managements, 152, 258, 260 Hull House, 304
marketization, xxi, 206 Huma, Ramoji, 269
massive expansion of access, Humanitarianism, xii
xv, 22 Humanities and social science
myth, v, 296 programs
neoliberal practices, xx, xxi, 20, 41 downsizing and devaluing, 41
neoliberal project, 22, 26 enrollments rapid decline, 45
neoliberal takeover, 26, 147 Human rights, 17, 100, 102,
open digital, 168 108, 315
policy, xviii, 51 The Hunter College, 277
pre-COVID, xiii Huntington, Samuel P., 108
private institutions, 135, 285 Hurley, Peter, 46, 209
public institutions, 171, 249, 302 Huron Consulting Group, 141, 142
racial segregation, 32 Hurricane Katrina, 16, 51, 59, 98
rationalization, xiii, 31 academic, 6
388 INDEX
I Inter-war era, 13
Ideland, Malin, xix, 110, 111, Iowa, 80, 81, 154, 268
181, 183 Iowa State University, 268
Ideological, x, xiv, 11, 14, 19, 29, 58, Iraq, 16, 43
60, 99, 257, 292, 295 Ithaca College, NY, 95
cover, xi, 291
Illinois Wesleyan University, 73
Immigrants, xv, 5, 284 J
anti, 46 Jackson, Michael, 119
Independent Florida Alligator, 178 Jackson-Lewis Law, 83
India, 3, 106 Jacob, Merle, xx
Indiana University of Jacobin, 59
Pennsylvania, 75 Jacoby, Russell, 30
Industrialization, 12, 31 Jandrić, Petar J., 20, 30, 38,
Inequality 40, 48
cultures of in academy, 6 Janus v. AFSCME, 312
systemic, 1, 297 Japan, 16, 219
wealth, 1, 309, 311 Jaschik, Scott, 81, 90, 164
Innovation, xiv, 38, 48, 113, 123, Jaspers, Karl, 20
124, 126, 138, 140, 172, 186, Jayme, De Oliveira Bruno, 173
214, 216, 285, 307 The Jesuit Higher Education Labor
Inside Higher Education, xviii, 61, 94, Coalition, 280
110, 134, 137, 235 Jobér, Anna, 110, 111
Institute for College Access and Johansson, Nils, 50
Success, 224 John Hopkins Bloomberg
Institutional restructuring, 6, 51 School of Public
Instruction Health, 231
blendflex, 54, 153, 167 John Lewis Partnership,
hyflex, 173, 177 307, 308
in-person, 8, 152, 153, 156, 160, Johns Hopkins University, 66
174, 177, 180 Johnson, Benjamin, 30
online, 127, 167–180, 189, Johnson, Lyndon B., 221
203, 293 Johnson, Stephenie, 205
Instructional design, 54, 167, 190 Johnston, Courtney, 226, 272
Intellectual dumping, 109 Jones, Diane Auer, 195
Intellectuals, xii, 13, 27, 34, 99, 157, Journalism
287, 294 critical, xviii
co-optation, xi hollowed out, xxi
International Labor Organization, 2 independent, xviii, 136
International Monetary Fund practice of, 314
(IMF), 40 serving private interest, xxii
INDEX 389
K KnowledgeWorks, 179
Kahraman, Ömer Ersin, 25 Koch brothers, 14, 107, 111,
Kansas State University System, 78 115–118, 125, 141
Board of Regents, 78 Koch, Charles, 115–119, 143
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, 19 Koch, David, 107, 115, 117–119
Kaplan, Juliana, 228 Koch Industries, 115, 117
Kaplan University, 44 Koller, Daphne, 172
Kato, Shizuka, 214 Korn, Melissa, 213, 230
Katzenberg, Stuart, 275 Kornbluh, Anna, 51
Katzman, John, 188, 189, 191, KPMG, 120
194, 198 Kroger, John, 61
Kazin, Michael, 288 Kruckeberg, Dean, 173
Kearns, Lisa, 240 K-12
Kelderman, Eric, 218, 228, 229, institutions, 60
242, 270 markets, 119
Kelly, Brian, 97 Kuehn, Larry, 170, 184
Kelly, Cait, 209 Kumar, Aishwarya, 243
Kerr, Clark, 36, 38 Kuusela, Hanna, 120–122, 130
Kerr, Emma, 9 Kweskin, Amy, 92
Kesslen, Ben, 267, 270
Keuka University, NY, 73
Kezar, Adrianna, xii, 44, 101, 273, L
274, 283, 302–304, 309 Labor
Kim, Joshua, 110, 190, 213 control over, 25
King’s College, 267 exploitation of animal, xii
King-White, Ryan, 239 exploitation of human, xii
Kinsella-Walsh, Matt, 63, 279 force, xiv, 18, 24, 77, 95, 111,
Kishor, Nawal 149, 291
Klein, Naomi, xii, xiv, 9–11, 13, gendered, xiv, 3, 18
15–18, 20, 37, 38, 40, 51, productive, xiv, 18
57–59, 81, 84, 100, 121, sedimentation of rationalized, xiv
182–186, 217, 224, 234, social reproductive, xiv, 2,
296, 316 3, 18, 155
Knowledge Labor Department, 2
commons, xiii, xvii, 33, 37, 41 Labor Education Schools, 309
economy, xvii, 21, 39, 80 Laissez-faire, 19
erosion of tacit, 120 Larkins, Frank, 91
factory, viii Lash, Scott, xx
monopolization, 120 Latin America, 15, 219
privatization, 120, 121 La Trobe University, Melbourne,
unhealthy dependencies, 120 Australia, 90
390 INDEX
Law, 12, 15, 20, 26, 32, 39, 81, 83, Liberal, xiii, 6, 8, 23, 24, 31, 32, 35,
118, 129, 141, 192, 194, 211, 41, 42, 45, 50, 52, 55, 60, 84,
221, 226, 228, 240, 245, 91, 94, 101, 111, 119, 140, 142,
247, 253–255, 269, 276, 169, 184, 190, 211, 222, 254,
306, 313 259, 260, 295, 298,
practice of, 306 302, 314–316
Layoffs, 6, 21, 51, 62, 64, 71, 73, 75, antiracism, xiii
77, 87, 94, 97, 105, 128, 265, Liberal arts
277, 280, 284, 295 de-legitimization of, xiii
Learning multiculturalism, xiii
blended, 137 program closures, 119
distance, 42, 59, 167, 170, 171, programs elimination, 6, 52
175, 209 traditional model, 23
lifelong, 131 university, 6, 35, 42
management systems, 42, 112, weakening, 52
262, 284 Liberalism, 12, 19
online, 52, 124, 133, 139, 160, statist, 19
170–180, 183, 207, 209, 215, Liberation, xiii
247, 253, 261 Black, xiii
remote, 3, 8, 54, 168, 171, Libertarian, 13, 14, 18, 50, 99, 107,
203, 207, 234, 253, 111, 115–119, 142, 143, 256,
266, 293 257, 292, 295
LeBlanc, Paul, 132 fundamentalism, 13, 14, 111
LeBlanc, Thomas, 86 Libertarianism
Le Cordon Bleu, 195 nationalist, 5
Lederman, Doug, 61, 62, 64, 67, 90, racist, 5
92, 137, 138, 171, 190, Liberty, xiv, 11, 17, 18, 100,
191, 198 118, 257
Lee, Madeline Y., 5 personal, xiv, 11, 18
Lehman College, 176 Lincoln University, Pennsylvania,
Lehren, Andrew W, 248, 249 38, 68, 131
L.E.K. Consulting’s Global Education Linke, Uli, 25
Practice (GEP), 127 LinkedIn Learning, 204
Leonard, Christopher, 117 Locke, Richard, 87, 88
Leong, Nancy, 85 Loewen, Peter John, 157, 159
Leslie, Larry L, xii, 20, 30 Lofe, Donald P, 63
Letizia, Angelo J, xxii, 51 Lohr, Steve, 172
Levinthal, Dave, 118 London School of Economics, 267
Levitt, Jay Martin, 59, 94, 95 Long, Chelsea, 231, 255
LGBTQ/LGBTQIA individuals, Louisiana, 51, 253
18, 256 Louisiana State University, 97
INDEX 391
Lowenstein, Anthony, 16 Marion University in Wisconsin, 74

Loyola University, 124 Market
Lu, Hannah, 161 countervailing, x
Luft, Rachel E, xiv, 18, 290 the culture of, 7, 77
Lumina Foundation, 103, 140, 191 driven thinking, xviii
Lury, Celia, xx free, x, 10, 11, 15, 40, 59, 77, 107,
Luthi, Ben, 228 111, 118, 142, 257, 294
Lynch, James, M, xx fundamentalism, 11–15, 21,
Lyons, Douglas, 124 107, 292
Lyotard, Jean-François, 20 intrusions of, 6
logic, 12, 258
order reasoning, 12
M unregulated, 113
Machtley, Ronald K, 96 Marketization, xxi, 26, 157, 206, 212
MacIntosh, John, 135, 136 Marquette University Board of
MacLean, Nancy, 14, 59, 116, 142 Trustees, 76
Macron, Emmanuel, 270 Marquette University,
Macur, Kenneth, 78 Wisconsin, 63, 76
Madeloni, Barbara, 93 Marris, Emma 280
Maira, Sunaina, xii, 21, 24, Marshman, Ian, 91
100, 290 Martin, Andrew, 72, 92
Majewski, Michelle, 74 Martineau, Harriet,7
Makin, Bob, 64, 280 Martinez, Marianne, 63, 72, 73
Malloy, Jonathan, 212 Marx, Karl, 12, 17, 20, 263, 290
Maloney, Edward J., 190, 213 Mary Kay Cosmetics, 124
Management Mask mandates, 5, 276, 277, 281,
discourse market-based, 63 286, 288
performance, 48, 125 Mason Technologies Inc., 176
scientific, 48 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
tactic, 53, 61, 125, 128, 220 (MIT), 31, 36, 198
Management Consulted, 120, 126, Mass incarceration, 5, 11, 40, 43
127, 141 of Black and Brown people, 40
Manning, Jeff, 190, 194 Mass Open Online Courses
March Madness basketball (MOOCs), 49, 171, 172, 205,
tournaments, 244 208, 216
Marcos, Imee, 209 Maximus Education LLC, 226
Marcus, Jon, 196, 210–211, McBride, Dwight, 71, 72
213, 230 McCarthy Era
Marian University in Indianapolis, repression, 37
Indiana, 84 repressive attacks, 99
392 INDEX
McCarthyism, 35, 98, 99 Mitchell, Josh, 38

McClendon, Jacques, 239, 241 Mitchell, Katharyne, 21
McCoy, Henrika, 5 Mizelle, Kathryn Kimball, 289
McDonald’s, 34 Modernity, 19, 307
McDonaldization of Society, 20 Mok, Ka-Ho, 38
McGovern, Jennifer 242, 245, 246 Mondragon University, 308
McGuire, Fran, 149 Monmouth County Board of Chosen
McIver, Mia, 278, 282 Freeholders, xx
McKenzie, Lindsay, 172, 208 Monmouth Junior College, xx
McKinsey and Company, 47, 120 Monmouth University
McMenamin, Lexi, 267, 268, 270 Black and Diaspora Forum
McMinn, Sean, 8, 90, 158 United, 281
MeasureOne, 224 Students for Systemic Change,
Medaille College in Buffalo, 271, 281
New York, 68–69, 78 Monsanto, 37
governing board, 78 Mont Pelerin Society, 13
Medicine, 20, 32 Moody, H., 210, 268
practice of, 20, 32 Moody, J., 163
Megachurches, 130 Moore, Shannon Dawn Maree, 51,
Mega-universities, 13, 130–132, 134 173, 183, 184
Mercatus Center, 117 Morabito, Nate, 252
Mergers, 6, 7, 91, 124, 127, 130–139, Moral bankruptcy, 8
141, 199 Morgan, Dafydd, 267
Meritocracy, xi Morrill Act, 31, 32
Merkley, Eric, 157, 159 Motorola, 43
Miami University St. John’s, 141 Movement
Michigan State University, 97, 118 anti-abortion, 5
MICROBOL, 214 anti-corporatization, 218
Microcredentialing, 203, 204, 206, anti-science, 5
209, 212–218, 293 anti-truth, 5
Microsoft, 106 for Black Lives, 266
Mihyo, Paschal B, 109 Civil Rights, 5, 36
Mikaelian, Allen, 118, 182–186, 202 college athlete labor, 244,
Military industrial complex, 35 269–270
Miller, Ben, 248–250 college-in-prison, 304
Mills, Wright C, 19, 297 human rights, 100
Mintz, Steven, 45 for racial justice, 5, 266, 270
Missouri, 63, 72, 81, 242 solidarity, 55, 266, 295
Mitchell Institute, Victoria Muehlenkamp, Bob, 94, 95
University, 46 Mulhere, Kaitlin, 118, 252
See also Victoria University Mullen, Bill V., xiii, 8
INDEX 393
Multiculturalism, xiii National Endowment for the

Mulvey, Irene, 285 Humanities, 36
Murakami, Kery, 89, 234 Nationalism, 24
Musk, Elon, xxi, 4, 110 Nationalist, 5, 7, 111, 292
Musto, Pete, 219 attacks on higher education, 7
Mychalejko, Cyril, 99 National Labor Relations Act, 39
National Science Foundation
(NSF), 35, 38
N National Student Clearinghouse
Nabatchi, Tina, 122 data from, 207, 212
Nadworny, Elissa, 8, 90, 158, 161 Research Center, 160
NAFSA, Association of International National University, San Diego,
Educators, 47 California, 73, 93
The Nation, 58, 93 The National Women’s Law Center, 2
National Association of College and Nation-states, 15, 306
University Business Officers Navient, 225, 226
(NACUBO), 67, 138 Neem, Johann, 132
The National Association of Systems Negri, Antonio, xx
Heads (NASH), 102, 103 Nelson, Cary, 30, 303, 311
National Center for Collective Neocolonialism, 111
Bargaining in Higher Neo-conservatism, xi, 12, 40
Education, 273 Neo-conservative, xiii, 40, 98
National Center for Education philosophies, xiii
Statistics, 171, 206 Neoliberal
National Center for Science and economic order critique of, 21
Engineering Statistics economic philosophy, 11, 27
(NCSES), 211–212 economists, 15
National College Players Association fascism, xx
(NCPA), 244, 269 fundamentalism, 12–14, 21
National Collegiate Athletic global order, 26
Association (NCAA) philosophical thought, 25
Board of Governors, 245, 269 philosophies, xiii, 20, 25
Football Bowl Subdivision policies, 157, 159, 265, 308
(FBS), 240 practices, xiii, 13, 17, 20,
National Competitiveness Technology 29, 60, 265
Transfer Act, 39 project, 22–24, 26
National Council for State response to COVID-, xxi
Authorization Reciprocity society, xii, 26, 183
Agreements, 171 thinking, 47
National Defense Education Act, 36 values, 13, 17, 20, 29
National Endowment for the Arts, 36 visions of society, xii
394 INDEX
Neoliberalism The New York Times Coronavirus

age of, 4, 206 Tracker, 8
logics of, 17 New York University, 230, 251, 275
rise of, 37, 159 New Zealand, 209, 215
Netflix, 102, 103, 106, 114 Ng, Andrew, 172
Netter Center for Community Nguyen, Terry, 268
Partnerships, 304 Nietzche, Friedrich, 20
Neubauer, Ian, 91 Nietzel, Michael T., 212, 251, 259
New America (think thank) NIL laws, 245
New Deal, 13, 40, 221, 222, 224 9/11, 11, 25, 43, 59
Newfield, Christopher, 30, 262, 263, No Child Left Behind, 43
287, 292, 300, 304, 307, 309 Nolen, Casey, 72, 73
New Hampshire, 138, 282 Non-faculty employees, 6
state legislatures, 138 Non-profit
New Jersey, xx, xxi, 64, 65, 84, 149, institutions, 44, 45, 171, 200,
153, 163, 168, 174, 200, 210, 211
277, 303 privates, xiii, 207, 235
New Jersey Bills S3708 (S1112), Noodle Partners, 189–191, 194
S3709 (S1113), S3710 North Carolina, 95, 124, 252
(S1114), 200 North Carolina Central
New Jersey Contingent Faculty Bill of University, 238
Rights, 149, 303 Northern Ireland, 267
New Jersey Office of the Secretary of Northwestern-Mills merger, 136
Higher Education Restart Plan, 174 Northwestern University, 45,
New Jersey Secretary of Higher 180, 275
Education, 200 Northwood University, Midland,
New Jersey Senate Education Michigan, 96
Committee, 200 Nous Group, 126
New Orleans, 7, 16, 51, 59, 101, 124 Novartis, 41
New Public Management
(NPM), 48, 120
philosophies, 48 O
regimes, 120 Obama, Barack Hussein, 207,
The New School, New York City 208, 218
AAUP (AAUP-TNS) chapter, 77, Oberlin College, 63, 279
151, 152, 276, 277, 279, 280 UAW chapter, 279
The New School Labor Occupy (Wall Street), 303
Coalition, 279 Oduola, Ayoade M. J., 163
Newsom, Gavin, 102 Ohio, 51, 68, 73, 201, 243
The New Times Magazine, 254 Ohio State University, 278
The New York Times, xviii, 8, 106, 108, University Senate, 278
113, 229, 233, 240, 241 Oklahoma, 254
INDEX 395
Oklahoma City University, 134, 276 Oracle, 106

AAUP chapter, 276 Oregon, 130, 190
Oldham, Grace, 62 Organization for Economic
O’Leary, Ann, 102 Cooperation and Development
Ølgaard, Daniel Møller, 50 (OECD), xix, 213–215
Oligarchy, 14, 84, 115, 116 Orgeron, Edward, 97
Omicron, 81, 102, 103, 162, 163, Orleck, Annelise, 292
182, 198 Otter, Kelly, 201
era, 110 Outsourcing, viii, 11, 43, 54, 61, 82,
Omnibus Crime bill, 40 101, 109, 112, 120, 128, 185,
O’Neal, Catherine S., 89 187, 192, 196, 206, 208, 221,
O’Neil, Cathy, 39, 49, 121 279, 305, 316
O’Neil, Robert M., 51 Oxfam International, 2
Online instruction, 127, 167–180,
189, 203, 293
Online learning, 52, 124, 133, 139, P
160, 170–180, 183, 207, 209, Pace University’s Return to Campus
215, 247, 253, 261 Task Force, 150
Online learning business model, 171 Pacific Lutheran, 312
Online program management PA Consulting Group, 126
corporations (OPMs), 42–44, 47, Page, Max, 30
54, 83, 110, 112, 133, 168, 172, Pandemic
181–202, 208, 304 consequences on individuals and
Online programs, 44, 131–133, 139, families, 4
188, 189, 193, 196, 199, 200, economic consequences, 4
212, 218 effects in education, 3
new, 132, 133, 193 global, vii, xii, 5, 111, 239,
OpenStax, 124 251, 289
OPMs, see Online program health effects, 4
management corporations impact, viii, 3, 18, 91, 111
Opportunism, xi, xiv, xxi, 4, 7, 14, 17, induced policy change, 6
23, 51, 55, 66, 112, 136, 137, in the midst of, xvii, 97, 123, 186,
157, 165, 183, 233, 239, 235, 264, 288
264–286, 291, 293, policy decisions, 5, 86
294, 296 profiting of, 227
disaster, xiv, xxi, 4, 7, 14, 17, relief funding, 3
23, 51, 239 task forces, 53, 145–154
Opportunity two track, 2
equal, 5, 222 See also COVID-19, pandemic
pandemic, 55, 130, 241, 244, 246, Papa New Guinea, 16
265, 278, 286, 295, 296 Parent PLUS Loans, 230
396 INDEX
Parents, xii, 60, 114, 135, 153, 156, Pettit, Emma, 276
160, 170, 179, 180, 190, 198, Pfeifer, Jay, 141
222, 223, 230, 235, 238, Pharmaceutical giants, 4
242, 258 Pharr, Maria, 252
Parents Defending Education, 118 Philanthropy, 109, 113, 135
Paris, viii, 13, 270 Philantro-capitalism, 113
Parlapiano, Alicia, 3 Philippines, 209
Parrott, Sharon, 231 Pickman, Ben, 245, 269
Patriarchy, 19, 99 Piedmont Community College,
Patrick, Dan, 257–258 124, 252
Paucek, Chip, 188 Pierce, Resneck Susan, 146
Paul Mitchell Schools, 248 Piketty, Thomas, xii
Pearson Media Company, 106, 182 Plutocracy, 116
Peele, Thomas, 247, 252 Poland, 16
Pell Grant, 41, 201, 218, 230, 231, Police, 5, 11, 185, 257, 270, 285
247, 248, 250, 281, 302 Policy trinity, 10, 38
PEN America, 254 Polio vaccine, 37
Pence, Mike, 59 Political
Penn State University, 278 accommodation, xi, xiii, 35, 260
Faculty Senate, 279 construction, xi, xii
Pennsylvania, 138, 139, 300 goals, xiii
merger plan, 139 landscapes, xi
state legislatures, 138 unrest, 10, 15, 58
Pennsylvania State System of Higher Political economy
Education, 124 feminist intersectional, 9
Pentagon, 35 of higher education, xvii, 304
People radical right, 119
black, xiv, 1, 18, 40, 254, 305 Populist, xiii, 111
brown, xiv, 1, 18, 40, 88, 305 politics, xiii
of color, x, xiv, xv, 1, 18, 25, Portland, 130, 190
223, 225, 227, 228, 230, Post-Civil Rights era, 5
233, 258, 291, 294, Postmodernity, 20
300, 305 Post-secondary education, 3, 23, 32,
economically marginalized, 46, 60, 123, 126, 131, 195, 213,
1, 299 215, 216, 222, 249
gender nonconforming, xiv, 18 Powell, Farran, 302
indigenous people, xiv, 18, 305 Power
undocumented, 1 class, xiii, 264
working class, xv, 1, 299 elite, xiv, 13, 17, 19, 21, 100, 265
Performance rankings, 49 gender, xiv, 19, 24
Peterson-Horner, Elka, 41, 239 racial, xiv
INDEX 397
Precariat, 292, 299, 300 good/goods, 11, 26, 36, 37, 43,
Private 52, 93, 102, 183, 184, 235,
interests, x, xii, 45, 52, 170, 258, 262, 281, 289
183–185, 201, 215, 221, 263, research privatization, 37, 41
290, 291, 297, 303, 309 Public Higher Education Workers, 93
interest think tanks, 140 Public Service Loan Forgiveness
Private-public partnerships, 208 (PSLF), 226
Privatization Pucci, Antonio Redfern, xvi, 12,
course content, 44, 174 21, 40, 100
of the disaster responses, 58 Purcell, Michael, 83
hyper, xiii Purdue-Global (university), 34, 44
of risk, 13
ProctorU, 271
Professional Staff Congress (PSC), Q
176, 177, 277 Quarless, Duncan, 151
Professoriate, xi, 24, 61, 79, 82, 104, Queen Mary College of London, 267
140, 149, 154, 263, 299 Queen’s University in Belfast, 267
Profilio, Brad J., 30 Queer theory, 8
Progressive
Era, 32
scholars, xi, 288 R
teachers, xi Race, xi, 4, 18, 26, 35, 154, 159, 212,
Project 1619, 254 214, 221, 254, 255, 260, 277,
Project Kitty Hawk, 133, 134, 138 285, 300, 307
Promethean, 253 Racial
Proprietary agents, xix justice, 5, 246, 258, 266, 270, 271
Protecting the Right to Organize structures, xiv, 296
(PRO) Act, 313 violence, xiii
Protect Purdue Implementation Racialized, xiv, xxi, 1, 5, 7–9, 18, 19,
Team, 151 23–25, 31, 43, 55, 61, 233, 246,
See also The Safe Campus 259, 261, 266, 269, 270, 272,
Task Force 276, 286–291, 295, 297, 298, 317
Protests, xv, xviii, 32, 238, 246, 250, income, 1
267, 268, 272, 275–277, 279, Racism
280, 287 in admissions criteria, 32, 36
Protopsaltis, Spiros, 231 in cost of tuition, 282
Psaki, Jen, 228 in the curricula, 99, 254
P3 contracts, 235 emotional experience of, 1
See also Private-public partnerships environmental, 1
Public in hiring, 86
colleges and universities, xiii, 40, 93, psychological experience of, 1
117, 118, 247, 249, 282 structural, 99, 111, 269
398 INDEX
Racist, 5, 13, 25, 34, 36, 86, 99, 111, Respondus, 271
254, 256, 277, 287, 292 Restart planning, 69, 145–154
evangelical, libertarian Rhoades, Gary, xii, xiv, 45
reordering, 13 Rice University, 268
Radford, Jynnah, 46 Rio Salado College, 124
Ralston, Shane J., 204, 206, 208, Ritchie, Hannah, 5
216, 217 Ritzer, George, 20, 49, 290, 301
Ranking, 39, 49, 54, 131, 135, 136, Robber barons, 4, 5, 42, 113
203, 212, 293 Robbins, Robert, 71
college, 39, 49, 54, 135, 203, Rollins College, Winter Park,
220, 293 Florida, 95
See also University ranking Rönnberg, Linda, 183
Rationalization, xiii, 12, 19, 31, Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 35
291, 301 Rose, Emma, 213
Readings, Bill, 30, 306, 307 Ross, Abbie, 255
Reaganomics, 12, 14 Rowan, Lisa, 231
Reconstruction Era, 31 Rpk Group, 134, 136, 137
Redden, Elizabeth, 159, 212 Ruch, Richard S, 30, 33, 34
Red Scare, 98, 99 Ruddy, Sean, 224, 225, 229, 230
Reductions in force (RIF), 68–77 Ruipérez-Valiente, José A,
Reich, Justin, 171, 172 171, 172
Reiman, Jeffrey, 290 Ruiz, Neil G, 46
Remote learning, 3, 8, 54, 168, 171, Russia, 16
203, 207, 234, 253, 266, 293 Rutgers University
See also Online learning; Online administration, 83
instruction Rutgers AAUP-AFT, 284
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 31 Ryan, Michael, 181
ReportLinker, 106
Reproduction
of gender order, xvi, 23 S
of racial order, xvi, 23 Sacramento State (University), 176
Republican Party, 84, 142 The Safe Campus Task Force, 151
Republicans, 25, 36, 80, 81, 117, 153, See also Protect Purdue
184, 224, 225, 227, 255, 305 Implementation Team
Resistance St. Amour, Madeline, 153
in the COVID-19 era, xiv Saint Leo University in Florida, 84
to the dominance of market, xiv St. Petersburg College, Florida, 277
of the faculty unions, students, and Sakakeeny, Kria, 2
other interest groups, 55 Salary freezes, 6, 69, 89
to the politics of disaster Salary reductions, 6, 71, 275
capitalism, 316 Salem State University, 94
INDEX 399
Salesforce.org, 114 SeaChange Capital Partners, 135, 136

Salk, Jonas, 37 Searson-Prakaash, Elise, 215
Sallie Mae, 222, 225 Seattle, Battle of, 40
Saltman, Kenneth J, 9, 51 Securities and Exchange Commission
San Francisco Bay Guardian, 43 (SEC), 41
San Francisco public schools, 115 Segregation, 32, 221, 256, 290
Santa Barbara City College, 276 residential, 1
Saul, Stephanie, 162 Selingo, Jeffrey, 45
Savransky, Becca, 92, 99 Seltzer, Rick, 235–238
Sayers, Justin, 71 September 11th, 16
Schiano, Greg, 97 See also 9/11
Schlissel, Mark, 69–71 Seton Hall Board of Regents, 65
Schneider, Jack, 117 Seton Hall University, South Orange,
Schnell, Lindsay, 276 New Jersey, 65
Schoenfeld, Bruce, 241, 243 Seville, Lisa Riordan, 248, 249
Schonfeld, Zach, 86, 243 Shared governance
Schooling assaults on, 7
in capitalist societies, xvi dismantling of, 73, 145–154
K-12, xi Shaver, Tony, 245
Schools, xi, 3, 14, 20, 21, 25, 31, 33, Sheffey, Ayelet, 226, 228
34, 39, 42, 43, 45, 47, 59–61, Shermer, Tandy Elizabeth, 220–225,
66, 78, 91, 93, 99, 101–103, 227, 228, 230, 232
105, 107, 109, 111, 113–115, Shock doctrine, 10, 15, 25, 38, 47,
117, 118, 125–127, 130, 131, 50, 55, 66, 138, 167–180,
133, 138, 139, 153, 160, 174, 182, 183, 217, 256, 260,
179, 184–186, 191, 192, 194, 289, 316
197, 205, 211, 218, 225, 229, Shock therapy, 10, 11, 16, 81
235, 237, 238, 240–242, Silicon Valley, 185
248–255, 262, 267, 268, 271, Silver-Greenberg, Jessica, 225
283, 284, 289, 290, 292, 300, Simmel, George, 123
302, 313, 314 Simpkins, Harvey, 117, 118
K-12, 39, 107, 118, 252 Singer, Natasha, 113–115
Schrecker, Ellen, 30, 70, 315 Singh, Kishore, 102
Schwab, Klaus, 170 Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 289
Schwaber, Danny, 205 Slaughter, Sheila, xii, xiv, 20, 30
Schwartz, Natalie, 160, 170, 171, Slavery, 31, 228, 254, 256, 259,
199, 212 304, 306
Schwarzman, Stephen, 114 Smalley, Suzanne, 110, 133, 134,
Scotland, 267 180, 218
Scott, Robert H., 38 Smalls, Christian, 271, 272
Screen New Deal, 183, 187 Smith, Ashley, 284
400 INDEX
Smith, Christine, 136 South Piedmont Community

Smith, Danielle Taana, 25 College, 252
Smith, Tina, 201 Soviet Union, 40
Soares, Kristen, 252 SpaceX, 4, 110
Social Spectre Journal, 309
change, xii, 260, 295, 310, 311 Spelman College, 276
contract, 5, 224, 256, 257 Sports Travel Magazine, 242
equality, xi, xiii Sputnik, 35
justice, 13, 55, 156, 283, 311, 312 Sri Lanka, 16
landscapes, xi Staff, x, xxi, 6, 9, 21, 38, 51, 55, 62,
mobility, xiii, 4, 42, 260, 299, 313 63, 70, 72, 76, 86–88, 92, 94,
reproduction, xi, xii, xiv, 18, 19, 96–99, 101, 105, 115–117, 129,
21–23, 301 135, 138, 139, 141, 145, 150,
Socialism, 99, 111, 258, 315 151, 157, 160, 164, 176, 188,
revolutionary, xiii 191, 196, 208, 240, 246, 261,
Social relations, 11, 18, 23, 24, 116, 263, 265, 266, 272–275,
121, 234, 301, 302, 311, xiv 277–282, 284, 286, 292, 295,
of teaching and learning, 105, 111, 297–299, 303, 306, 308
114, 292 gambling with the lives of, 8
Social reproduction theory Staisloff, Rick, 136–138
class reproduction, 18, 22, 23 Stanford University, 49, 172,
gendered carework, xiv, 18, 19, 23 243, 268
Society Starr, Kenneth W., 96
embedded in, xx State
at large, 205, 217, 231 actors, xii, 5, 14, 114, 181, 184,
Sociological 185, 194
classical theory, 19 the culture of, 7
theory, xvi, 7, 23, 290 governance privatizing of,
Sociologists, xi, 11, 12, 19, 29, 108, 109, 163
245, 297, 313 interest, xvi
Sociology, xvii, 27, 45, 256, 257, 290, intervention, 12, 257
310, 311 legislators, 8, 54, 137, 149,
discipline, 19 168, 174, 194, 234,
Soley, Lawrence C., 204 300, 303
Solomon, Dan, 244 policies, 51
South Africa, 16 repression, 17
South Carolina spending, 45
bill, 255 tyranny, 17, 100
General Assembly, 80 violence, 17, 100
Southern New Hampshire University, The State Hornet, 176
131, 252 State University of New York system
INDEX 401
Higher Education Labor United predation, 44, 187

(HELU), 282, 285, 302 records, 118
United University Professors, 282 tuition, 9, 43, 44, 46, 47, 71, 107,
Steele, David, 300 172, 180, 182, 187, 189,
Stephens, Jamain Jr., 240 220, 269
Steyer, Tom, 102 working class, 31
Stop Woke Act, 179 Students for Systemic Change,
Storey, Amy, 74 271, 281
Stowers, Ryan, 123 Surveillance, 29, 31, 35, 179, 257,
Strada Education Network, 103 266, 285
Strathern, Marilyn, 31 of the population, 11
Strauss, Valerie, 111, 117, 119 Svirnovskiy, Gregory, 6, 67, 97
Strike Debt, 302 Switzerland, 13, 108
See also Debt collective
Strike Schools, 309
Structural T
adjustments, 10, 37, 40, 102, Tambelini Group, 168
224, 259 Tarver, Jordan, 224
forces, 272 Taylor, Astra, 57, 81
violence, 9, 21, 25 Taylorism, 48, 125
Strupp, Joe, 251 Teaching
Student Loan Asset Back (SLAB), 41 in-person, 54, 178, 203, 293
Student Organizer Clinic, 304 (see also Instruction,
Student(s) in-person)
African-American, 32 online, 168, 178 (see also
athletes, 55, 89, 158, 239–246, Instruction, online)
254, 266, 269, 270 remodeling, 51
black and brown, 32, 242, 246, 259 underfunding, 41
body international, 46, 209 Technocratic, xi
of color, 38, 65, 91, 99, 148, 212, functionaries, xii
223, 248, 255, 291, 314 Teichgraeber III, Richard F., xv
debt forgiveness, 228, 281 Temple University’s Hope Center for
economically marginalized, 38, 246 College, Community and
and families financial health, 9 Justice, 231
fees, 52, 236 TEMPS, 52, 97, 105–143, 181, 183,
gambling with the lives of, 8 234, 248, 258–260,
health of, 9, 163, 267 292–294, 297
the impact on, 7, 97 See also Global and total
loan debt, 38, 41, 213, 218, 224, educational management
228–231, 233 privatization syndicate
middle class, xv Tennessee, 254
402 INDEX
Tenure/tenure system, 62, 154 Twin pandemics, 5

ban, 80, 81 2U, 44, 49, 188, 191, 193–199
dismantling, 24, 41 Tyranny, 17, 100, 116, 296
elimination, 68 Tyton Partners, 141
eroding, 48, 80
protections, 81, 260
Tesla, 4 U
Texas Udacity, 44, 49, 204
anti-abortion law, 255 Ukraine, xxi
state legislatures, 138 Russian invasion of, 4
Texas Monthly, San Antonio, 244 UNESCO (United Nations
Thatcherism, 12, 40 Educational, Scientific and
Thériault, Annie, 2 Cultural Organization), xviii, 3,
Third-party “insourcing,” 44, 187 102, 120, 214, 215
Third Way (think tank), 141 UNESCO Global Education
Thunderbird School of Global Coalition, 120
Management, 110 UNESCO Global Education
Tiede, Hans Joerg, 62, 64 Monitoring (GEM), 102
Times Higher Education (THE), UNICEF, xix, 3
102, 140 Union busting, 39, 59, 63,
Title IX 83–85, 94, 95
protections, 244 Unionism, 55, 272, 283,
violations, 244 284, 310–312
Tlaib, Rasheeda, 237 social justice, 55, 283, 312
Toczynski, Terry Conrow, 59, 95 Unionization
Torture regimes, 11 academic staff, 51
Toyota, 43 faculty, 51
Transitional justice, 306 graduate students, 51, 265,
Traub, Matt, 242 273, 274
Triple Helix, 206–208, 217 Unions, x, ix, viii, xviii, 18, 39, 53, 55,
Trump, Donald, 42, 103, 111, 153, 58, 61, 63, 65, 76, 83–85, 87,
195, 205, 207, 208, 218, 237, 93–95, 149, 151, 175, 176, 232,
243, 247, 250, 316 259, 260, 267, 270–277,
era, 46 279–285, 303, 311–313
folks, 111 United Auto Workers (UAW), 63,
Trumpism, 205 276, 279, 282, 283
Trump University, 205 United Campus Workers of Georgia,
Trust University, 308 236, 239, 276
Tuchman, Gaye, 29–31, 45, 297 United Kingdom
Tucker, Hank, 90 Bangor Rent Strike campaign, 267
Tucker, Mel, 97 Cardiff Rent Strike campaign, 267
Turner, Cory, 247, 248 United Nations, xviii, 2, 3, 102,
Turner, Sarah E., 47 214, 315
INDEX 403
Convention on the Elimination of Universities Admissions Centre

all Forms of Discrimination (UAC), Australia, 215
Against Women University
(CEDAW), 315 American, xvi, xiv, 29, 30, 32,
United Nations Human Rights Office 33, 45, 46, 49, 148, 149,
of the High Commissioner, 102 154, 270
United States British system, 31
colonial era since, 29–34 consolidation, 138
corporate ascendency in, 19 consumed, 310
higher education, xviii, 13, 22, 29, corporate, 19, 30, 43, 46, 116, 162,
50, 90, 91, 147, 249, 273, 284, 298, 300
278, 286 entrepreneurial, xii, 40, 291
imperialism, 19, 24 European, xvi
military, 11, 236, 238, 290 flagship state, 24
structural inequalities, 4, 291 free inquiry, xvii
white supremacy, 4 German, 148
United States Bureau of Labor German research model, 32
Statistics, xviii, 2, 61, 272 governance European model, 30
United States Census Bureau, xviii, 3 governing boards, 32, 73, 74, 78,
United States Congress, 40, 58, 249 84, 145–147, 149, 305
neo-conservative takeover, 40 Hamburger, 34
United States Department of history of, xvi, 37
Education, xviii, 44, 61, 187, hollow
188, 195, 205, 210, 211, 222, imperial, xii, xxii, 23
226, 228, 231 leaders, 89, 122, 234, 239, 293
NextGen Initiative, 226 managers, 145, 153, 159
United States Department of neoliberal, xii, 27, 38, 157, 246
Labor, 95, 276 non-profit, 44, 60, 131, 188, 212,
See also Labor Department 218, 294
United States Internal Revenue Service presidents; compensation, 95;
(IRS), 227 deferred-compensation, 95, 96
United States Senate Health, private, xvii, 65, 210, 212, 305
Education, Labor and Pensions public, 38, 48, 81, 93, 100, 103,
(HELP) Committee, 195, 196 130, 173, 210, 220, 223, 248,
United States Supreme Court 263, 268, 305, 308
Brown v Board of Education public liberal arts, 6, 8, 23, 24, 35, 42,
decision, 14 46, 55, 84, 119, 190, 211, 302
Yeshiva decision, 39, 312 right-sizing, 39, 65, 97, 137
United Steelworkers Association, 277 senior administrators, 63, 70
United Student Front (USF), 270 strategic plan, 86, 211
Unity College, 176 traditional American, xvi
Universal Technical Institute, trustees, 103
Inc., 248 University-educated proletariat, 292
404 INDEX
University-Industry Cooperative University of Missouri/University of

Research Projects Program, 38 Missouri system, 86, 89, 133
University of Akron, Ohio, 68 University of Nevada, Reno, 177
University of Alabama, 89 University of New Mexico
Faculty Senate, 278 AAUP-AFT chapter, 277
University of Arizona, 62, 71, 72, University of North Carolina at
118, 133 Chapel Hill
University of Arkansas, 133 AAUP faculty union, 279
University of Arts Helsinki, 130 United Electrical, Radio and
University of Auckland, 130 Machine Workers of America
University of California at Berkeley, 15 (UE) union, 279
University of California at Santa University of North Carolina system,
Barbara, 141 133, 134
University of California Davis, 285 University of Northern Iowa,
Strike University, 285 268, 276
University of California San University of Notre Dame,
Francisco, 37 Indiana, 97, 238
University of Chicago, 13, 15, 267, University of Pennsylvania, 63, 75, 95,
276, 304, 305 240, 251, 304
UChicago for Fair Tuition, 267 University of Phoenix, 44
University of Colorado-Boulder, 78 University of Pittsburgh, 277
University of Florida, 84, 153, 154, University of Sheffield, 267
176, 178, 248 University of South Florida, 134
University of Georgia University of Southern Carolina
AAUP chapter, 277 (USC), 193, 194, 196, 197, 279
United Campus Workers of GA, United Statement of Grave
236, 239, 276 Concerns, 279
University of Illinois Urbana- University of Texas Austin, 271
Champaign, 162 Faculty Council, 277–278
University of Iowa, 268, 276 University of Vermont (UVM), 94
University of Maryland, 132, 160, 275 University of Virginia, 14
University of Maryland-College Park University of Wisconsin Board of
(UMCP), 275 Regents, 81
AFSCME campus staff union, 275 University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, 86
University of Maryland’s University University of Wyoming
College, Purdue, 132 Women and Gender Studies
University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 62 Program, 255
University of Massachusetts University ranking, 131, 212
Boston, 268 UnKoch My Campus, 118, 123, 281
University of Michigan, 69, 70, Up-credentialing, 52, 125, 193, 194,
241, 284 204, 313
Fall Campus Labor Council, 285 Upskilling, 125, 137, 179, 204, 213, 293
INDEX 405
Uruguay, 15 War on Terror, 10, 16

U.S. College Football Playoff, 239 Warren, Debby, 238
U.S. News & World Report, 39, Warren, Elizabeth, 147, 201, 237, 238
131, 206 Warren, Kevin, 243
Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 16, 43
Washburn, Jennifer, 7, 30, 32, 35–41,
V 43, 50, 310
Vanderbilt University, 141 The Washington Post, xviii, 6, 62, 220
Vasquez, Michael, 200, 201 Washington University in St. Louis,
Veblen, Thorstein, xv, xvi, 19, 32, 50, Missouri, 63, 72, 92
287, 290 Watermeyer, Richard, 156, 157,
Vedder, Richard, 91 165, 293
Venmo, 126 Waterstone, Marv, 25, 26, 296
Vera, Hernan, 35 Watt, Stephen, 30, 303, 311
Verger, Antoni, 182, 184, 185 Wayne State University, 237
Verizon, 106 WCNC-TV Charlotte, North
Victoria University, 46 Carolina, 252
Vinopal, Courtney, 228 Wealth, xi, xiv, 1, 4, 11, 12, 14, 16,
Violent Crime Control and 18, 40, 53, 60, 66, 113, 115,
Elimination Act, 41 116, 187, 221, 223, 227, 228,
Virginia, 14, 306 266, 295, 296, 305, 309, 311
Visco, Mark, Jr, 254 extraction, 18
Volk, Steve, 6 Webb, Belinda, 312
Vujnovic, Marina, vii, viii, 60, WebCT, 42
149, 173 Weber, Max, 12, 20, 290
Weissman, Sara, 65, 84
Weissmann, Jordan, 212
W Welch, Anthony, 38
Wage freezes, 64, 280 Welch, Nancy, xxi, xiv, 5, 18, 20–24,
See also Salary freezes 31, 33, 290, 299, 309
Wales, 267 Wells-Barnett, Ida, 7
tuition strikes, 267–270, 275 Western Governors University,
Walker, Scott, 81 124, 131
Wall Street, 34, 38, 66 Western Nevada University, 210
The Wall Street Journal, 194, 197, 230 Western Washington University, 132
Walsh-Messinger, Julie, 163 Westinghouse, 32
Walton family, 118 Westminster College, Fulton
Ward, Myah, 228 Missouri, 63
Warfare, 17, 18, 24 WGU labs, 124
Warhol, Andy, 191 Whatley, Melissa, 153
War on Drugs, 10, 290 Whealler Johnston, Susan, 138
406 INDEX
White, Amanda, 179 of color in schools and the

Whiteboard Higher Education, academy, 99
141, 142 domestic, 2
White House, 207, 228, 237 low wage campus, 38
White, James, 78, 79 low wage in higher education, xxi
White supremacist, 7, 99, 111, 221, unionized, 59, 272, 274
255, 257, 258, 295 women, 2; in schools and the
attacks on higher education, 7 academy, 99
White supremacy, 4, 5, 13, 224, Workman, John, 128
266, 306 World Bank, xix, 3
Whitford, Emma, 63, 67, 103, 130, World Economic Forum, 3, 108
135, 136, 139, 156, 158, World Health Organization, 2, 4, 286
231, 267 World War II
Wiio, Juhani, 122 era, 22
Wikipedia, 117 post-period, 22, 23, 35, 36
Wiley, 106, 182 Worthen, Helena, 314
Wiley Education Services, 83, 189 Wright, Susan, 292, 307, 308
Wiley University Services, 83, 189 Wynyard, Robyn, 20
William & Mary (university), 244
William Paterson University, 64, 83
Williams College, 231, 302 X
Wilson, Colleen, 276 Xerox, 106
Wilson, Woodow, 32, 271
Wisconsin, 63, 74, 76, 81
Wisconsin state legislature, 81 Y
Wittenberg University in Springfield, Yeshiva decision, 39, 312
Ohio, 73 Ylönen, Matti, 120–122, 130
Wokeness, 98, 261 Young Democratic Socialists, 267
Wolf, Tom, 300 Young, Molly, 190, 192, 194
Women Youth Entrepreneurs (YE)
of color, 259, 294 Program, 118
gender and sexuality studies, 24
sacrifice of, xiv, 18
Wong, Ashley, 275, 276 Z
Wood, Sarah, 9, 178 Zahneis, Megan, 145
Woolley-Wilson, Jessie, 114 Zhou, Naaman, 62
Wootton-Greener, Julie, 177 Zimpher, Nancy, 103
Workday Enterprise Management Zoom, 254
Cloud, 139 fatigue, 254
Workers Zuckerberg, Mark, 106, 114, 197

Higher Education and Disaster Capitalism in The Age of Covid19

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Higher Education and Disaster Capitalism in The Age of Covid19

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PALGRAVE CRITICAL UNIVERSITY STUDIES

Higher Education and

ISSN 2662-7329 ISSN 2662-7337 (electronic)

Cover credit: © Inimma-IS/getty Images/iStockphoto

When the WHO first declared COVID-19 to be a global pandemic on

Paris, France J. Michael Ryan

whether it is called “predatory capitalism,” “bandit capitalism,” “crony

traditional mission of the university has roots in classical Greece with a

[i]intrinsically political, designed to educate the citizen for intelligent and

As scholars and teachers committed to this centuries-old mission of col-

the university as the social institution that is “embedded in society,” and

groundwork for the marketization of higher education. In our view, our

consequences that are hard to fathom. In the case of higher education, as

West Long Branch, NJ, USA Johanna E. Foster

demic fallout. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 42(5–6), 651–666.

3 Bringing the F.U.D to Thin the Ranks 57

9 Aspiring Diploma Mills Don’t Stop for Pandemics203

12 Resisting the Spider Web of Pandemic Opportunism265

13 After Shock: Our Stories, Our Future287

Introduction: Disaster Capitalism Comes

The Eye of the Storm

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Center for Sustainable Employment at the Azim Premji University in

As data on health effects and economic consequences of the pandemic

what we might call an “academic Hurricane Katrina,” have exposed long-­

intersectional feminist and queer theory. While these attacks, including

monitoring, tracing, testing, and masking as we approached the end of the

Disaster Capitalism: A Primer

combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportuni-

Certainly, critical analyses of the centrality of what would become the

“it is clear from the outset that neoliberalism works as an all-encompassing

As a plan of action, neoliberalism thus demands that social institutions

Harvey’s (2005) influential argument that neoliberalism is, in fact, a kind

Historian Nancy MacClean (2017) offers a somewhat different account

In much of the Southern Hemisphere, neoliberalism is frequently spoken of

Sadly, the Chicago Boys and Berkeley Mafia continued to prescribe

of the very features of corporatism, or a kind of statist capitalism, and akin

physically, emotionally, economically, and spiritually. Nor is it to say that

As we shall see, wars of social reproduction to consolidate racialized and

Critiquing Neoliberalism in the Context

As we will argue throughout this book, just as the seeds of neoliberalism

groundbreaking study, Men and Women of the Corporation. Following the

[g]lobal competitiveness, the reduction of the (publicly financed) costs of

In this configuration of global capitalism, where “freedom” and “choice”

The university whose loss Giroux, Newfield, and other commentators

the neoliberal program has sought aggressively to restore higher education

Welch’s analysis is at home in the long tradition in sociological theory

In this way, the neoliberal project is primarily aimed at putting those

Racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism also emerges in the context of

expansion of market logic through the privatization of every aspect of

A Newer Version of an Old Beast:

In her insightful 2009 book, Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 29

Higher Education, Industry and Profit

According to journalist Jennifer Washburn’s comprehensive history in

converged, and American colleges took on the organizational character of

“civilizing” projects. Embedded in the provisions of the second Morrill

notion of the knowledge commons, suggests, of course, that what has

America already had… a system of degree-granting academic institutions

Eisenhower Thought to Add “Academic”

The Whole World (Was Not) Watching:

takeovers underway on campuses would go unseen and unresisted. By the

Fire Wall Erodes and Academics Fiddle While Rome

West Long Branch, NJ, USA Johanna E. Foster

3 Bringing the F.U.D to Thin the Ranks 57

9 Aspiring Diploma Mills Don’t Stop for Pandemics203

12 Resisting the Spider Web of Pandemic Opportunism265

13 After Shock: Our Stories, Our Future287

what we might call an “academic Hurricane Katrina,” have exposed long-

to improve the College’s long-term viability. Next year’s projected $7-million