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Bad Education

Why Our Universities Are Broken and How We Can Fix Them

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Bad Education

By: Matt Goodwin
Narrated by: Matt Goodwin
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

THE EXPLOSIVE NEW BOOK FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF NATIONAL POPULISM AND VALUES, VOICE AND VIRTUE.

Depressed tutors and disillusioned students. Cheating parents, funding crises and faculty misconduct. Culture wars and campus protests. Welcome to the broken world of academia. Welcome to Bad Education.

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Our universities are broken. Established as sanctuaries of truth and higher learning, they are now decaying institutions that are failing a generation of young people. Consumed by funding and admissions crises, dominated by dogma and governed by self-interest, their founding principles have been corrupted. This explosive book shows us why, and what we must do to fix them.

Matt Goodwin spent decades working as an academic in some of the world’s leading universities, delivering underfunded courses to increasingly disengaged lecture theatres, sitting on rudderless committees, counselling depressed colleagues and concerned students, watching standards slip and academic integrity decline.

At the heart of this crisis is an increasingly politicised campus. Once bastions of free speech, forums for open debate and incubators of bold new ideas, our universities are increasingly becoming monocultures, ruled by an ideology that is silencing respected voices, stifling discussion and violently shutting down diverse opinion, betraying intellectual freedom.

Unflinching, shocking and urgent, 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.

©2025 Matt Goodwin (P)2025 Penguin Audio Developmental Psychology Education Political Science Social Psychology & Interactions Society Student

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Critic reviews

Buy this book. You could save yourself, your parents or children a lot of money. (Douglas Murray, bestselling author of The War on the West and The Madness of Crowds)
If you want to know how our universities became woke madrassas, this is the book to read. But it isn’t just a litany of complaints. Matt Goodwin also has a concrete plan for turning them back into universities again. Essential reading for anyone who’s been wondering how Britain’s once great higher education sector became a dumpster fire. (Toby Young, director of The Free Speech Union, associate editor of The Spectator)
Our universities increasingly resemble the pre-reformation Catholic Church, with academics as the new clerisy. They demand our submission to a corrupted faith and control access to the good life. But in Matthew Goodwin they have met their Martin Luther who has resigned from the church and, in this book, publishes his excoriating contemporary 95 Theses. An urgent call for reformation. (David Goodhart, author of The Road to Somewhere)
‘More than anything else, argues Matthew Goodwin, the cultural left sympathies of staff, students and bureaucrats are killing the golden goose of higher education in the West. Intolerant activists and administrators control the parameters of debate and cancel dissenters while subtler currents of political discrimination induce self-censorship and progressive conformity, strangling political diversity. Only democratic intervention from outside the university can save a noble institution that has been at the centre of western civilisation. Deeply personal and impeccably researched, Bad Education seamlessly blends ‘lived experience’, human tragedies and generalisable data into a rich, tight, fast-paced read.’ (Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics, University of Buckingham)
Matt Goodwin's critique of today's universities is fierce, but it is well buttressed by empirical data. Anyone who cares about these culturally and politically crucial institutions should take careful heed of what he has to say. (Nigel Biggar, CBE, Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology, University of Oxford, and Chair of The Free Speech Union)

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