Professor Matt Goodwin Bad Education: Why Our Universities Are Broken and How We Can Fix Them

About

Sunday Times best-selling author Matt Goodwin returns to the festival with a talk based on his explosive new book on the culture of universities. 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.

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 talk shows us why, and what we must do to fix them.

Matt Goodwin spent decades working as an academic in some of the worlds 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.

Matt Goodwin is Professor of Politics at the University of Kent. The author of four books, including the Sunday Times bestseller National Populism, he appears regularly in print and broadcast media including the Sunday Times and the BBC. He has advised more than 200 organisations on political issues. He lives in London.
A Q&A Session will follow.