Just What is MAGAcademy? Not Trump U, for God’s Sake.

My interview with Nolan will be broadcast on May 6, on my show, Finding Fringe, Oregon Coast, a la KYAQ.org. But you get the interview here, ahead of time. Streaming May 6 and every Wednesday, 8 pm PST, at the website for the 91.7 FM radio station. Here it is, please listen in.

Here are Mickey and Nolan:

“Higher education is in crisis, but not exactly for the reasons that seem to garner the most attention in our fickle, mediated world. A veteran “road” scholar, Higdon writes accurately and scathingly about the neoliberal professional managerial class of opportunists, careerists, and virtue signalers who executed a slow motion controlled demolition of the academy from the inside. I’ve lived it and seen it up close for 25 years and this book simply nails it, sometimes hilariously (because no one should have to cry all the time). Corporate grifters have no place in higher ed. Masterfully framed with a foreword by critical scholar Henry Giroux, and bookended with real and achievable proposals to rebuild education in the public interest, Higdon’s MAGAcademy is a must read for anyone concerned with the future of education and critical scholarship not to mention democracy itself.” — Mickey Huff, Distinguished Director, Park Center for Independent Media; Professor of Journalism, Roy H. Park School of Communications, Ithaca College; Executive Director, Project Censored; and President, Media Freedom Foundation

Just in time, 11th hour hired gun, precarious teach, adjunct faculty, freeway flyer, road scholar, these are just a few of the terms for Part-Time Non-Tenure track faculty at your many many colleges and universities, not just in the USA, but Canada, Europe, Mexico, elsewhere.

Is that 5,999 total colleges and universities in the U$A?

• Four-Year Colleges & Universities: Approximately 2,637 institutions.
• Two-Year Colleges: Approximately 1,294 institutions, which includes most community colleges.

Breakdown by Control

• Public Institutions: 1,892 total (including both 2-year and 4-year).
• Private Nonprofit Institutions: 1,754 total.
• Private For-Profit Institutions: 2,270 total

Shit, Nolan’s book, I joked, has created some vicarious PTSD in me since I have been fighting for part-time faculty and my own teaching since career, since, drumroll, 1983!

“Disposable Teachers” was published just 13 years ago, here, at Dissident Voice, but I have been railing about the lack of pay, the lack of protection, the lack of honor, and the lack of consideration for non-contracted part-time faculty for 20 years at DV.

So, “the weakest and most vulnerable,” non-tenured, have gained equal pay for equal work, and more:

• salary and workload equity, to include immediate pay scale; pay for vacation and holidays
• paid professional development days
• hiring equity and reappointment rights, to include one hiring process per career and right to seniority reappointment after six months
• evaluation transparency, to include strong grievance procedures
• conversion right from term faculty to regular faculty, to include automatic regularization of the person, not the position
• college health and pension benefits
• seniority rights, pro-rated
• maternity leave that doesn’t disadvantage faculty
• right to participate equally in union and professional matters
• and more.

The US national percentage of “adjuncts” teaching in all institutions of higher education, including private colleges, state universities, community/technical colleges, as well as for-profit and on-line schools, is reaching the 8 out of 10 mark. Twenty percent of faculty are now tenure-track workers.

In Washington State, just counting the 34 community and technical colleges, 46 percent of all state-supported instruction is taught by adjuncts. I think of it this way: 8,059 PT to 3,598 FT (2010, SBCTC).

Castes, Untouchables/Two tiers, Two lives

It gets worse, according to Pablo Eisenberg, senior fellow at Georgetown Policy Institute, in his piece, “The ‘Untouchables’ of Higher Education” (Huffington Post, 29 June, 2010) :

American universities and colleges are riddled with a caste system that violates our societal sense of fairness, justice, and decency. Neither the general public, nor parents, nor the large majority of students are even aware of its existence. College administrators and tenured faculty, who are acutely aware of the system, have done little or nothing to remedy the problem. It is a festering sore that threatens not only the quality of higher education but the system’s ability to recruit and retain good teachers.

Most university teachers in the United States are part-time, contingent employees. Their job title of “adjunct” is added to terms designating academic rank (lecturer, assistant professor), but carries no job rights, benefits, or expectation of continued employment beyond the present semester. Most full-time “academic” jobs are now held by administrators.

How did we get here?

Nolan’s last two paragraphs in this book:

The central crisis of our time is that this corporate expansion coincided with the measurable decline of American democracy. The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a global organization that tracks the health of political systems, documented the United States shifting from a “full democracy” in 2007 to a “flawed democracy” by 2025.4 This decline stems from the inherent contradiction between democracy, which depends on collective decision-making, and capitalism, which elevates individual self-interest. The physical reshaping of the White House mirrors the internal reshaping of the nation’s civic soul.

The White House was not the only institution consumed; public education was, too. Neoliberals promised that treating higher education like a corporation would make it more efficient and innovative. Yet, as the university adopted corporate logic, democracy withered and the MAGAcademy emerged. During the neoliberal era, poverty reached historic highs, and wealth inequality became the worst it had been since the 1920s.5 Child poverty tripled between 2021 and 2024, and by 2023, 37 percent of adults could not cover a $400 emergency expense.6 Neoliberals insisted that education would fix these problems, but while the percentage of degree holders has tripled since the 1970s, economic instability has only grown worse. Part of reversing the trends that brought about the MAGAcademy will depend on liberating the university from the market-driven hubris of the managerial class. Here are my proposals to reclaim higher education from corporate control and realign it to truly serve the people.

Nolan’s book looks deeply at the entire suite of issues tied to the shifting baselines and inherent broken nature of education tied to exponential growth in profits, in student enrollment and in making a university more and more like a Club Bed or Air B&B.

Here’s Nolan giving us 8 proposals:

• Replace Virtue Signaling with Honesty
• Abandon the “College for All” Mandate
• Faculty Power: The Mechanics of Collective Action
• Reclaim Pedagogy from the Machine
• Embrace Intellectual Diversity
• Build the Civic University
• Reject Austerity Propaganda
• Beyond the Ballroom

Ahh, that last one, and Trump LLC and his ballroom — and the rest of the dirty POTUS scam — we talked about my own trauma working out at a cardio rehab lab while watching the TV with sound-off that fucking NCAA March Madness, with my two out of four alma maters in the dance — Arizona and UT. Of course, I taught at Gonzaga; thus, there’s that one too.

I cut my teeth on social justice, border rights, environmental activism, labor organizing, poetry, journalism, photography, scuba diving, and my own growth into communism there in Tucson, at Pima Community College and U of Arizona.

This shit, man, again, if I were at U of A (I did it at UT-El Paso), I’d be railing against this fucking pimping and prostitution: University of Arizona men’s basketball coach Tommy Lloyd currently earns a guaranteed salary of $7.19 million for the 2026-27 season. Following a pursuit by North Carolina in April 2026, Lloyd signed a new five-year contract extension worth $37.5 million in total guaranteed compensation, which keeps him in Tucson through the 2030-31 season. (born December 21, 1974).

And this is accepted, as well as firing faculty for, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and many, many other bogus and Orwellian reasons. The Jewish State of Israel is Jewish, man, and it harbors rapists, murderers, torturers, starvation experts, pollution purveyors, and more, but this is verboten in a classroom? As an adjunct? We will be fried. And in a city, well, no recommendation from school x for school y, and there you go.

Just calling out these fucking coaches and teams and dozens of support personnel and thousands of people at a big-time university making bank on sports programs, you know, NOTHING about teaching or pedagogy, and you will get in trouble. I have been censored and fired (let go, or no contract or no classes the next semester) many times at more than a dozen institutions of higher learning where I worked.

Atomization and fragmentation and siloization, well, well, here we are:

This is the time to fight “fragmentation of the time and place of work” as Ulrich Beck illustrates it in his book, The Brave New World of Work (Polity Press, 2000).

My union, when I had that short-lived job with SEIU, paid for me to attend a contingent faculty labor conference in Mexico City: Join the participants from the tenth annual Coalition on Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL X), who have signed a political declaration that brings attention to the pernicious effects of neoliberal policies on education. It calls for “the expansion of social and democratic rights in education and in welfare for all humans, within and beyond our national borders.”

We tried:

Political Declaration of COCAL X
Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor
Mexico City, August 9-12, 2012

We, the contingent academic workers from Mexico, Canada, Québec and the United States convening in Mexico City in 2012, and our friends and colleagues who support our ideals, hereby declare the following:

Humanity faces the effects of severe environmental degradation, growing inequality, and worldwide social, political and economic distress. These dire circumstances demand of us that we marshal our collective intelligence so as to find solutions. The university, along with labor unions, political parties and the media, is central to constructing a democratic future that can meet this challenge. We are committed to working toward this end with our many like-minded colleagues and comrades, united in the conviction that, to the extent that our institutions are the servants of corporate neoliberal elites, they must be rebuilt.

As academic workers of higher education in North America, we find ourselves in precarious working conditions due to the damaging effects that three decades of neoliberal policies have had on the living and working conditions of the majority of workers and on social welfare in general. Within academia, specifically, these policies have disempowered faculty, created an expanded and well-compensated administrative class to manage the machinery of the higher education regime, and branded students as customers and consumers. Overall, these policies have had pernicious effects, resulting in the gradual privatization of educational spaces, the commercialization of teaching and support services, and the restriction of enrollment and research, to the benefit of the privileged without consideration for the social needs of the majority. Millions of young people around the world—particularly from poor and working classes—are being denied access to a free, quality education and to its promise of individual and collective emancipation.

Around the world, students, workers and others who seek justice and freedom have begun to proactively and energetically resist the continuation of these neoliberal policies. We who represent upwards of seventy per cent of academic workers and whose precarious working conditions—rather than isolated cases—represent a new normal, consider ourselves the new higher education political actors and stand in solidarity with them. We declare ourselves in permanent struggle to change these conditions and convene at COCAL X to express our commitment and obligation to democracy and the common good embraced and articulated in our nations’ constitutions as well as in agreements signed before international bodies such as the UN and UNESCO. We advocate for the development and implementation of educational and social policies and practices that respect “the common standard of achievement for all people and all nations” articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, rejecting a state-centric understanding of rights, calls on all the nations of the world to agree that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”

This 10th Conference of COCAL is a time for us to reflect upon the trajectory that has characterized our coalition during its sixteen years of existence, as well as to deepen and improve coordination, cooperation and solidarity among academic workers, unions and associations of higher education in and beyond North America. We do so with solemn understanding of the responsibility of higher education in the development of democratic possibilities founded on respect for universal human rights. In this spirit, we will always seek international unity and solidarity with other sectors of workers and the independent and democratic organizations that represent them, as an important element in the struggle for a better and more just world for all the inhabitants of our planet.

Thus, we, the contingent academic workers from México, Canada, Québec, and the United States convening at COCAL X, issue this Political Declaration in order to make it known among the peoples of our nations and to call upon them to work with us toward a common goal: the expansion of social and democratic rights in education and in welfare for all humans, within and beyond our national borders.

We, the undersigned, hereby affirm it.

*****

More than 14 years ago!

The administrative imperative seems to be: promote and increase thyself at the expense of the common good. That administrative salaries have climbed at an annual rate of 5%-10% in the midst of financial crises at so many educational institutions is obscene. Not only are administrators undermining and marginalizing the faculty, they are appropriating institutional resources for personal advancement and gain. That they are doing so by paying lip service to mantras such as “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” and “civility” is especially obscene.

The administrative imperative seemingly posits that the administration is always right, it can’t be questioned, and that it always wins due to the strength and number of its weapons. Resisting the administrative imperative requires publicly challenging administrators (as Ginsberg has done) when they seek to take over successful programs, pour millions of dollars into technological boondoggles, or implement wacky schemes that everyone warns will fail. Administrators know that faculty members are timid and are unlikely to organize to resist administrative actions. When faculty do organize and go public, administrations become defensive, occasionally backing down or admitting error. When they do face major resistance from the faculty, administrations often back down to avoid constant media attention. — Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty

Get it, read it, and listen to Nolan and me rumble in the jungle of higher education in the podcast and on the radio next month. MAGAcademy: How Corporatism Paved the Way for the Hostile Takeover of Higher Ed

Ya want more? The Official Companion Podcast

Get a head start on the journey. I’ve recorded a series of companion episodes to give you an exclusive look at the topics we’ll be tackling in MAGAcademy: How Corporatism Paved the Way for the Hostile Takeover of Higher Ed. Go behind the scenes, hit play to get the inside track before the book hits the shelves.

Nolan Higdon’s Gaslight Gazette — Substack.