Bad Education: Why Our Universities Are Broken and How We Can Fix Them

by Matt Goodwin

Depressed tutors and disillusioned students. Cheating parents and greedy vice chancellors. Culture wars and faculty misconduct. Welcome to the shadowy, decaying world of academia.

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Our universities are broken. Consumed by funding and admissions crises, governed by corruption and self-interest, they have become frontiers of cultural, social and political division. Established as ivory towers and sanctuaries of higher learning, they are now broken institutions that are failing a generation of young people. This explosive book shows us why, and what we must do to fix them.

Anonymous has spent decades climbing the greasy pole of academia, delivering underfunded courses to increasingly disengaged lecture theatres, sitting on rudderless committees, counselling depressed colleagues and frustrated parents, and guiding promising young students through the turmoil of a university education.

From outdated courses and campus politics to what tuition fees are really spent on. From culture wars and dangerous liaisons to writing papers no one reads and turning ill-equipped lecturers into therapists and sexual health advisors. In this searing exposé, Anonymous lifts the lid on higher education and shows us what really happens on campus - and why we should all be deeply concerned.

Unflinching, shocking and painfully amusing, this first-hand account provides an insider's view of how the founding principles of academia are in decline and why we should all consider what this means for the students of today, tomorrow and the world they will shape.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Education

245 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 6, 2025

Reviews

[Stuart Piper · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book misrepresents pro-peace campaigners as antisemitic. I’m guessing he may be of the age that believes the legacy media news? To be against Israeli apartheid currently being investigated as war crimes does not mean you are antisemitic.

As last night’s Israeli/Palestinian Oscar win acceptance speech for No Other Land well articulated, it is brave and urgent to question oversimplification of a conflict that spans decades. FreePalestine can advocate peace not war.

When the author critiques lack of free speech on campus, but then condemns universities for allowing protest, he undercuts his own argument.

[Lucy]

DNF - left it at 38%

AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL

Where to start with this.... I tried to push through and finish as an academic interest in Freedom of Speech (Masters Diss was written on this). I wanted to read an opposing view to mine. But it is so badly written I can't navigate around what he is trying to say. All he is doing is listing things to try and is also saying Liberals don't listen to opposing views when, in reality, he is trying to squash liberal views in order to get his more conservative approach across.

As someone who has nearly finished their PhD, where I focus heavily on critical thought, etc., this book doesn't hit.

[Naomi Greenberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely thought-provoking. I agree with many of the problems the author points out, though I think his logic has lots of jumps and gaps. The messy editing was also distracting.

[Matthew Beattie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bad Education is a book (which I pirated) by the Reform candidate in the upcoming by-election, Matt Goodwin. It is 245 pages, but if you remove anything that isn’t already obvious to the average reader it could easily be 80. It addresses real problems sluggishly: freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, and the environment of self-censorship found on many campuses. It barely discusses structural and financial issues with universities and instead focusses on the left-leaning culture in universities and how it has led to an erosion of academic freedom.

1) He never addresses the obvious contradiction between the ideal university being both a ‘politically neutral institution’ and a liberal one which encourages freedom of expression and debate. Rather than admit his preference for a politically liberal university (which is not an issue), he uses Fukuyama’s liberalism-as-status-quo ideas to pretend that the ideas set forth in this book are neutral and objective. He simultaneously criticises the insular nature of the modern university while pining for the days when it was seen as an Ivory Tower. The university is seen as having fallen a great deal and having become a laughing-stock, never addressing the numerous ground-breaking advances in science and engineering which British universities continue to make.
2) While he condemns the ousting of several academics by petition and student body outcry, he seems either neutral or positive on the coerced resignations of administrative staff due to their response to the events on October 7th in America, resignations coerced by the threatened withdrawal of funds by backers.
3) The university is supposed to be an all-powerful Soviet-style bureaucracy where power is instilled top-down, as well as an environment where the student body hold enough power to coerce this bureaucracy to do anything which they want. He complains about the progressive nature of most student bodies and how abhorrent their opinions are as self-evident without actually critiquing them in any meaningful way.
4) The book schizophrenically hops between America and Britain, barely having a scope. It exclusively discusses the humanities and social sciences when it does engage with academia. Otherwise it discusses teaching methods, hiring practices and administration. This is not a book about the British university; it is a book about specific aspects of them mixed with Americanisms and personal grievances. It is also painfully repetitive-- the same ideas are broached in almost every section.
5) Goodwin would rather talk about the political culture of universities than the structural and financial issues (seen especially at Dundee Uni) which are given cursory mentions. The fact that most universities are run on a loss on a model which treats the student as a customer while high-ranking members of staff make several hundreds of thousands a year, as well as the drop in academic standards in pursuit of tuition fees, should be the focus. Goodwin never proves a connection between the political culture of the university and the corruption at high levels. He never proves that this culture spawned the problems of the modern university.
6) The obvious answer to the attempts of universities to address inequity among undergraduate admissions is a move to a class-based understanding of inequality. Being a right wing-- populist? liberal? Goodwin cannot endorse this, so he tip-toes around it. He complains about the precarious employment conditions of his colleagues being given short-term contracts that ensure they do not get guaranteed contracts (11 Months as opposed to a year where it would become legally necessary) and long-term employment as if it is a unique feature of academic culture, as opposed to a feature of a legal system with poor labour rights. It is obvious he would prefer that universities return to being inaccessible to the vast majority of the population.

In short, this book is a complaint about a lack of conservative institutional power in universities couched with some uncomfortable truths and littered with culture war platitudes, not a principled plea for freedom of conscience. He also frequently mentions the 1960s and 70s as an ideal time for the university in terms of civil and academic freedoms (around the same time that students in the US were getting shot by the National Guard). This is because there was a more even balance of political partisanship among academic staff. There are no mentions of how the wider political environment (such as social liberals, whose ideas have always been popular on campuses, disappearing from the Republicans and Conservatives as a faction) may have influenced academics to become more left-leaning -- Goodwin essentially states that a vanguard state of highly-organised activists seized control of university administrations to bar any right-wingers from ever being employed again.

His resignation from his professorship is clearly a calculated step toward entering the political arena definitively but is veiled as some form of virtuous sacrifice. I agree with the manifesto presented at the end, the calls for freedom of debate or that academics may be assured they can express themselves and pursue their own research interests, that they not suffer from political, sexual or racial discrimination (be it 'positive discrimination' or not) in hiring and that they are judged exclusively on academic merit – I have significant trouble with the idea that he believes a word of it. The fourth and fifth chapters have some value, everything else is hot air.

Please don't let this man into parliament, he's an idiot.

And for the love of god please don't let him be the face of a movement towards more heterodoxy in academia, because that would be an actual noble cause and he would destroy it.

[Thomas D · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent and accessible book, succinctly explaining the serious difficulty into which the university sector has plunged and suggesting how it may begin to be overcome. I really believe that if our Western civilisation is to be saved, then we need to fully acknowledge the depth and reach of this problem. In fact, I would go further than Goodwin by suggesting that the sector needs radically pruned, scorched even, if it is to survive as something in any way useful towards the future flourishing of our society. At the moment, these institutions are really functioning like a cancer, and like a cancer they need radical intervention.

[Imogen · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at 68%.

Valid points, - and I wholeheartedly agree with everything Goodwin says - , but nothing I didn’t already know; repetitive; no tangible solutions for people who work at universities to attempt (i.e. no advice given on how we can curtail the dominant fixed group identity ideology), other than government action. Ultimately, a boring, pointless read.

[molly williams · Rating 1 out of 5]

DO NOT BOTHER READING! ! ! ! !! If I could rate a book 0 stars I would - I went into this completely open minded hoping to listen to someone's view point that was substantially different from mine to understand the view point, however what I got was;
- Poorly made unsubstantiated points
- Stats with no context, and if there was context only one view point was considered (e.g. 80% of higher education teachers were left leaning. The author went on to explain that it's because universities didn't want to entertain a different view point rather than something already seen in the literature that the more educated you become the more likely you are to have a left leaning bias)
- A lot of what I can only describe as whinging? About the author's "friends" being asked to leave their jobs, about cancel culture and about how uncomfortable he had been made to feel for his view points
- He makes a point towards the end of the book which can be summarised into his belief that his political opinion should be treated like a protected characteristic. WHICH IS WILD AS THE AUTHOR DOES NOT BELIEVE THEIR SHOULD BE PROTECTED CHARACTERISTICS
- The author is misogynistic when describing what women want to see, as again he quotes statistics with no context

In summary, I could rant about this book for a long time but what it comes down to, is that this is a poorly written, poorly researched twit longer from someone trying to make money off the current political climate. I think Matt Goodwin might just be a contrarian but who knows, this book was garbage don't bother reading it.

[Kieran Phelan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having read a number of Goodwin’s books, and university faculty, I was excited to read this. It’s short- I read it in an afternoon. The book does a reasonable job of accounting for a number of political shifts in HE. That being said, the book leaves you wanting on much of the detail of why or how universities got to the point of his diagnosis. There is little acknowledgement, for example, of just how different US and U.K HE are, or indeed how U.K. HE is more messy than “elite” and “non-elite” universities. There is also no discussion/ acknowledgement of how U.K./US academic cultures are very different, especially in their approach to governance, relationship to political movements, and organisation. Cursory parallels-whilst interesting- do little to attend to this meaningfully. The chapters at times also repeated previously mentioned points, which felt at times a bit heavy laboured. However the resources at the back of the book were thorough: well researched. I would have loved a longer reflection of solutions; particularly a more thorough discussion of further liberal and interventionist approaches to university reform.

[David McGrogan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really admire Matt Goodwin's gumption and willingness to stand up for his beliefs, and I'm very sympathetic to him politically, but this book has something of the feeling of a missed opportunity. It provides a very good description of the problem facing universities in the Anglosphere in 2025. But it does not really give the reader a clear sense of why this has happened, and its solutions are not very convincing. It also creates the impression of having been rushed to publication: I noticed a number of places where the narrative elides what is going on in the UK and USA in such a way as to indicate a lack of thorough editing by the publisher. I suspect ultimately the problem may be that Goodwin was a little bit too self-conscious about justifying his description of universities as being almost beyond repair in order to head off criticism, with the result being that the book is too heavily weighted towards the provision of statistics to reinforce that description, and too light on reasons and solutions.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brave and thought-provoking but unbelievably repetitive.
Favourite bits:
On the dominant left-wing 'orthodoxy' stifling opposing views: "It was as if somebody had just asked Kim Jong Un to address our students - though in fairness the North Korean dictator would probably have got a warmer reception than somebody who had voiced sympathy for people who had voted for Brexit."
On grade inflation: "If the entire incentive structure in the university is to keep students happy, to ensure they give us high scores in student satisfaction surveys, then why would you cause a stink on campus by demanding that students work harder, by failing their essays or by suggesting they are cheating?"

[Elena · Rating 1 out of 5]

I DNF’d this audio book after 90 minutes.
He makes a single useful point about considering alternative political views. However, the next 90 minutes was a general whinge about how his freedom
Of speech and opportunity for healthy debate had been quashed. He didn’t share his really important views and opinions which had been censored. He also didn’t share the views of his colleagues which they had been ‘attacked’ for. He came across as an angry person who wrote a book because he wanted to throw stones. It’s a shame because I would genuinely like to understand alternative political viewpoints, but I’m not prepared to listen to/ read through all that whining to find them.

[Paul Renwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Matt Goodwin makes very clear what his political leanings are at the start of the book. He has clearly researched the subject matter extensively with interesting lines of thought.

However I struggled with the book as I felt that it lacked balance. Clearly from the title of the book his purpose is to outline what he believes is bad about universities. Though, I felt it went too far and could have done with some acknowledgment of positives within the university sector.

[Ari Damoulakis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Conservative lies amnd nonsense as usual with some of these types of books. Doesn’t even understand the young people of today. Also, it isn’t unusual to finish a degree in something you don’t get a job in, but the education and what you learn, if you enjoy it it is never a waste of time and a great time of your life to look back on.
It is maybe a bit disappointing, but you’re hopefully still surviving and enjoying many aspects of your life anyway.

[Heiko Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

a case study in how not to interpret statistical data

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

7/10

[Karen Soole · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a sad assessment of our universities. Nothing here that I haven't come across before. It tends to hopelessness rather pointing to solutions but maybe that is how the system is.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good explanation of how universities have lost their way and I like the practical manifesto on how to get out of the mess.

[Satya · Rating 2 out of 5]

*2.5 STARS*

There is a problem with higher education. 72 percent of Universities could be in financial deficit by 2026. Furthermore, 1/3 of graduates go into non-graduate jobs.

*I do not think that university is only about finding a job, but this is a problem when the average student loan debt is £43,700.

Goodwin argues that the problem is the woke ideology.

However, I think that there are four problems in higher education:
1. The decline in vocational training and the granting of university status to the polytechnics in 1992.
2. The funding model. Universities make a loss of £2,000 and £4,000 for humanity and science undergraduate degrees from domestic students.
3. (Lack of) Access to higher education for working-class students and the removal of maintenance grants (2017).
4. The marketisation of higher education.

Goodwin also considers (3) and (4), but there can be no book on the problems of higher education without a consideration of (1) and (2).

There is also a problem in Bad Education of switching between the United Kingdom and the United States. Higher education is not the same in both countries.

There are also points in which it is not clear whether Goodwin is referring to the United Kingdom or when he is referring to the United States. I would have preferred a consideration of only British universities.

Although there is a problem with higher education in Britain, its universities are still ranked as the best place to study in the world when it comes to a quarter of all subjects.

I also cannot speak for all students, but I feel very privileged to study the course I am studying at the institution I am studying in.