MAGAcademy
How Corporatism Paved the Way for the Hostile Takeover of Higher Ed
Arriving Spring 2026
We’re putting the finishing touches on the book. Join Nolan’s Gaslight Gazette for free to get a heads-up the moment pre-orders go live this spring.
About Nolan Higdon
Nolan Higdon is a political analyst, author, host of The Disinfo Detox Podcast, lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Project Censored Judge. Higdon’s popular Substack includes the bi-weekly Gaslight Gazette, which chronicles important and well-researched examples of disinformation, character assassination, and censorship in the United States. Higdon’s areas of concentration include critical AI literacy, podcasting, digital culture, news media history & propaganda, and critical media literacy. All of Higdon’s work is available at Substack (https://nolanhigdon.substack.com/). He is the author of The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education (2020); Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (2022); The Media And Me: A Guide To Critical Media Literacy For Young People (2022); and Surveillance Education: Navigating the conspicuous absence of privacy in schools (Routledge). Higdon is a founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas. Higdon is a regular source of expertise for CBS, NBC, The New York Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle.
Inside the MAGAcademy
In MAGAcademy: How Corporatism Paved the Way for the Hostile Takeover of Higher Ed, Nolan Higdon delivers a searing indictment of the structural rot that allowed the modern university to be transformed into an ideological fortress. For decades, neoliberal administrators and careerist faculty traded academic freedom for corporate efficiency, replacing critical inquiry with market logic and genuine equity with performative DEI mandates.
When Donald Trump returned to power in 2025, he didn’t need to build a new apparatus of control, he simply weaponized the one the “resistance” had already perfected.
Blending personal memoir from the front lines of faculty labor disputes with sharp political analysis, MAGAcademy traces the collapse of the campus from the 1970s to the 2024 Gaza protests and the eventual capitulation of elite institutions like Columbia and Berkeley. This is not just a book for academics; it is a warning for every citizen. When higher education prioritizes profit over principle and compliance over courage, the foundations of democracy itself begin to crumble.
For years, the “liberal” university was hollowed out from within. Behind the glossy brochures and corporate social justice rhetoric, a new class of professional managers was busy deprofessionalizing faculty, indebting students, and silencing dissent. They built a system of surveillance, liability-avoidance, and top-down control, and then acted surprised when a new administration used those same tools to dismantle academic freedom.
In MAGAcademy, Nolan Higdon reveals:
The Corporate Blueprint: How the shift toward “student-as-customer” destroyed intellectual rigor and left campuses vulnerable to political bullying.
The 2025 Crackdown: A chilling look at how federal funding was weaponized to purge “unpatriotic” curriculum and deport student activists.
The Neoliberal Failure: Why the Democratic establishment’s fixation on the “hollowed-out center” created the very vacuum the MAGA movement filled.
The Path Forward: A pragmatic manifesto for reclaiming the university as a democratic public good through collective action and the restoration of faculty governance.
MAGAcademy is a provocative post-mortem of a system in crisis and a roadmap for building a future for higher education that is actually worth defending.
“I wrote this book because I am witnessing the collapse of the American university in real time. To save it, we must first understand how we paved the road to our own undoing.”
First Look: What Early Readers are Saying
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.
MAGAcademy Episode 1: An Introduction to MAGAcademy (January 28, 2026)
MAGAcademy Episode 2: The Neoliberal Roots of Systemic Decay in Higher Education
MAGAcademy Episode 3: The Death of the Professor: How Adjunctification Destroyed Faculty Solidarity
MAGAcademy Episode 4: Students as Customers and Products — The Marketization of Learning
This institutional capture pattern mirrors what happened with media consolidation over the same timeframe. Universities got hollowed out the exact same way local newsrooms did, both turned into profit centers where the actual mission became secondary. The boardroom replacing the classroom is like private equity buying up news outlets, same playbook diferent sectors. Once institutions prioritize metrics over meaning, theyre ripe for ideological capture.