Matthew Goodwin’s book of nonsense

He promises much. There is, he says, a “secret code of silence among professors and academics on campus – what the Mafia call omertà”. “Well, to hell with that,” he says. “I’m going to tell you everything.”

“This is why I decided to blow up my career as a professor,” he continues. “This book is a shot across the bows of the establishment and a threat to the established order of things. Put simply, after reading this, it is highly likely that the established universities will never hire me and my former academic colleagues will never speak to me again.” The reader is promised that everything would be evidenced, backed up by footnotes, and the contents of the book would be incendiary.

To cut to the chase, the book spectacularly fails to live up to the promises Goodwin makes. What follows, in this brief 200 page tome, is a rehash of a critique of universities that has been made multiple times over the last decade, often far more convincingly than it is here.

Academics lean left, and conservative professors are in a minority. Students are censorious, often in the name of liberal causes. Gender critical speakers are harassed and cancelled. Current students don’t value free speech and free inquiry as much as their professors feel they should. Universities are badly run, in financial difficulty, and desperate to please students because their income and their league table ranking depend on it.

Plenty of these critiques have substance and are valid, but none is original. Even a casual reader would quickly become aware of this. Goodwin is acutely aware of status and informs the reader early on that he rose “to become one of the youngest professors in the country”. He is also determined to make sure everyone knows he is in good company with his new stance and critique of academia.

Goodwin’s book has no index, but a manual tally shows how often he cites known critics of liberal orthodoxy and campus censoriousness. Professor Eric Kaufmann, now Goodwin’s colleague at the privately-operated University of Buckingham, is cited on no fewer than 12 pages of the 219-page book. Noah Carl, who lost a job at the University of Cambridge, is named or cited on eight pages. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt gets citations on six pages, writer and “prominent scholar” Yascha Mounk is cited on six pages, gender critical academic Kathleen Stock on five, historian Niall Ferguson on four.

All of these people have written extensively – usually at book length – on liberal excess and campus culture, and most of them have written firsthand accounts of their own cancellations. Goodwin is insulting the basic intelligence of his reader, assuring them that they are reading a new and forbidden critique of universities, while bombarding them with repetitive citations of other figures making essentially the exact same argument.

Everything about Bad Education feels half-arsed. The book’s subtitle could just as easily be “will this do?” Despite its brevity, it is endlessly repetitive: the same handful of case studies are cited in multiple chapters, the same experts are reintroduced a mere dozen or so pages after they were last mentioned, the same few sources of data are reintroduced time and again.

Goodwin’s telling of his own story is that once he accepted the result of the Brexit referendum, he was ostracised by colleagues, journal editors, and potential funders. In an all-too-brief section of the book, Goodwin says he lost sleep, drank too heavily, and sought therapy during this time – a hint at a more human and candid book that could have emerged, with a little more time and work. 

But all too quickly the book reverts to regurgitating sources and making the familiar arguments on diversity and inclusion policies, and campus censoriousness. Those citations, though, often don’t actually support the points that Goodwin uses them to make. 

Students, he says, “have clearly noticed that something is going very wrong on campus”, backing this up with statistics from the Student Academic Experience Survey showing “the share of students who have enrolled and think university is ‘value for money’ is sharply down, from 50% in 2013 to 39% in 2024”.

Anyone familiar with the history of UK university education will have heard a faint alarm bell at those dates. In 2012, the government tripled tuition fees for UK students, from £3,000 to £9,000 – but that increase only applied to students who started their degree in the autumn of that year.

The student survey of 2013, then, mostly surveyed students whose fees were drastically lower than those of today. It wasn’t until 2015 that the student survey was only talking to respondents who paid £9,000 fees – and in that year, 40% said they got good value for money, versus 29% who said it was poor or very poor.

In reality, the very report Goodwin cites to say that students are newly disillusioned with universities comes to almost the opposite conclusion. “This year, the number of students saying they have had ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ value for money is the lowest it has been since the full rollout of £9,000 fees in England,” it says. “We now have the largest (positive) gap between the green and the red lines on the graph – 13 percentage points – since 2014”.

Abusing a statistic in this way – shoehorning it into an argument, shorn of context to support a point you had already decided to make – would be unacceptable in an undergraduate essay. And yet here it is, deployed by an individual who reminds the reader on multiple occasions of his own impeccable academic credentials.

Other references fall apart similarly quickly. At one point, Goodwin cites a list from Academics For Academic Freedom (AFAF) showing that “in recent years, more than 200 academics and speakers have been sacked from their jobs, harassed or disinvited from Britain’s universities”.

AFAF does indeed keep such a list. It dates back to 2005 and has 207 different incidents on it. Out of the 200+ incidents in the document Goodwin cites, only eight relate to academics actually losing their job or not having a contract renewed. 

But the list overwhelmingly consists of attempts by students to cancel or heckle an outside speaker, regardless of whether they were successful. Goodwin, whose entire thesis is that campus free speech should be elevated and sacrosanct, is essentially complaining about the speech of students. 

There is a known difficulty in social science around separating correlation from causation. Because social sciences deal with the world as it is, conducting experiments is hard and the real world contains too much noise and confusion to be sure of what causes anything to happen.

That means the same events can be subject to multiple explanations. Matt Goodwin looks at his promising academic career and sees it stutter and stall due to his heretical political views and the censoriousness of his colleagues. Those same colleagues see Goodwin as a man who once studied populism and became increasingly enraptured by it – doing ever-less convincing work, and becoming more and more openly contemptuous of academia.

Either could be right. Both could be partially right. Or there might be another explanation altogether. But Goodwin seems convinced in Bad Education that his decision to quit the University of Kent would be seen as shocking or in need of deep explanation. 

To most outsiders, it looks like Goodwin saw quitting as an opportunity for more money and greater publicity, plus adulation from a new in-crowd.  Since leaving Kent he has started a popular Substack, picked up a GB News presenting role, a place on the conservative speaking circuit, and is now a “senior visiting professor” at the University of Buckingham. That is hardly an act of heroic self-sacrifice.

It is to be hoped that Matt Goodwin is a cynic, a man who decided to dash out a book to go alongside his savvy career move, and who threw it together over a couple of weeks – rehashing a familiar case already better made by others in his new in-group. The alternative, that Goodwin genuinely thought this microwave ready-meal of book would challenge, threaten, or alarm anyone, is almost too sad to contemplate.