Bad Education: Why our universities are broken and how we can fix them (2025) by Matt Goodwin; Bantam / Transworld Publishers; London.
Over 20 years after he graduated from university and embarked on a successful postgraduate and lecturing career in higher education, Matt Goodwin had a revelation. He used to just go along, he says, with other liberal-left lecturers and the beliefs they tended to hold. He shared their outrage at what was wrong with the world. He even wrote for The Guardian. Then, an ominous truth started to gradually dawn on him:
Our universities are no longer interested in their original purpose. They are no longer prioritizing the search for truth, learning, and evidence over dogma. They are no longer protecting and promoting things like free speech and academic freedom … I also found my views about many other issues in society beginning to change—and in profound ways.
Bad Education is Matt Goodwin’s inspiring and well-argued attempt to describe his political journey from someone who venerated the ‘progressive’ ideas of our age to being an iconoclast who sought to radically question them. The ideological changes in the university system he witnessed made Goodwin question the very way higher education is constituted in the UK, as well as internationally.
The book is his account of these changes—and why he changed his mind. His shift from the political Left to the Right has been profound, he claims. And it’s a journey worth thinking about, judging by this book. It reveals other trends in wider political debates. The Left has changed—and so have the universities, Bad Education argues.
Goodwin quotes the historian Niall Ferguson on what he sees as the ‘new normal’ on university campuses: the repetition of slogans, the waving of placards, the denunciation of lecturers, as well as the cancellations. All this as a substitute for real thinking. ‘Liberals’ have started to behave in an illiberal way.
Financial pressures on universities, including tuition fees not keeping up with inflation or costs, have also added to the turmoil and uncertainty in higher education. The financial advantage of having a degree has been reduced, and graduates now fill non-graduate jobs. Yet, businesses seem to lack the ‘right’ applicants with the ‘right’ skills for vacancies. The 20th-century expansion of the university system now seems too ambitious, he argues. And Goodwin says that as the first person in his family to go into higher education.
Additionally, those who have not been to university feel looked down upon by those who did get a degree. And that helps fuel the ‘populist’ revolt across different nations in recent years, he argues.
All the above adds to a general feeling of decline—of things not working properly in education and in wider society.
So, what’s driving the ideological undermining of higher education? Goodwin sums it up thus:
Our universities, in short, have been captured by … a ‘new dominant ideology’ on campus, a new belief system, a new worldview which is being imposed… It’s a belief system that has little if any serious interest in the things universities are meant to defend and which they used to promote – free speech and academic freedom, objective scientific evidence, reason, logic, tolerance, debating in good faith, and the exposure of students to a diverse range of ideas and opinions…
What is replacing the above liberal values is a new dogma that is frankly cult-like, he says. New divisive ideas have moved from the margins into the mainstream of university life. And it’s difficult to opt out.
This new intolerance is defined by an obsession with identity issues and alleged injustices of ethnicity, gender, and the status of certain minorities. These are the categories that are now used to explain any disparities. Discussions of power imbalances—between ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’—permeate all intellectual activity.
Tolerance was once seen as vital, yet now, it is seen as less important than considering the alleged emotional harms caused by free speech. Goodwin explains how this prioritising of ‘safe spaces’ over intellectual rigour is undermining the valuable role universities had in debating conflicting visions of the world and assessing evidence for intellectual rigour.
Goodwin also cites the intolerance and hostility of many in the university sector towards any academic, including himself, who either supported Brexit or even just believed that the majority ‘Leave’ vote should be implemented. He explains that many in academia could not even tolerate being in the same room as a Brexiteer!
All the above has fueled the rapid rise of Critical Race Theory as an analytical framework. It has been applied to contemporary Western (but rarely non-Western) societies to explain how they are institutionally racist—stained by the dominant symbols, histories, and myths of the West. ‘White’ majorities, therefore, have a flawed culture that limits and controls the oppressed non-white minorities. This kind of thinking results in explanations of contemporary phenomena in society that are as crude as they are divisive.
As Goodwin notes:
Whereas liberals and civil rights campaigners used to argue that people should not merely be defined by the colour of their skin, their religious beliefs, upbringing or sexual orientation, the ideology that’s hijacking campuses rewinds the clock by doing exactly this, telling students that the only interesting and significant thing about them is not their individual achievements and character but merely their race, sex, gender or some other fixed identity
As Goodwin points out, such opinions can be classed as ‘luxury beliefs’—theories which only reflect the views of an elite group in higher education anxious to preserve their social status by holding the ‘right’ opinions on race. Students holding high-status opinions on ‘white privilege’ will gain respect from others at elite universities. Even here, the author points out that ideas like ‘white privilege’ actually encourage those higher up the social ladder to be less sympathetic to the plight of ordinary, working-class whites.
To maintain your elite status, familiarity with the new vocabulary of “white privilege, whiteness, cisgender and allyship” is vital. ‘Social justice’ means disciplining the rabble. If you are a lecturer, you need to decolonise your reading lists as well.
Not complying with this new ideology opens you up to cancellation or discrimination. Academic freedom has become more limited. Object to any of the above, and clearly, you’re suffering from ‘white fragility.’
Cancellation awaits many who question such claims around ethnicity or the causes of racial disparities. For instance, a few years ago, Nottingham University decided to drop its offer of an honorary Ph.D. to Tony Sewell in 2022. The reason? The Sewell Report had questioned whether racial disparities were always the result of racism. The Report dared to offer other explanations, too.
Matt Goodwin advocates a fightback against the oppressive new ‘woke’ orthodoxy, along with a revived faith in free speech and freedom of expression. The creation of new institutions in higher education should be applauded. What’s most needed is active government intervention—including additional legislation, if necessary—to safeguard individual rights and freedoms.
