Yaron Brook, ever Ayn Rand’s ventriloquist, insists students are customers. Education, in his frame, is no different from a gym membership; you pay to be made “uncomfortable.” Professors as personal trainers, universities as masochism boutiques. It’s an absurd metaphor that fits all too well in our consumerist age: education rebranded as a service industry, discomfort sold at premium prices.
Catherine Liu cuts in sharply: I am not a service worker. And she’s right. Education is not concierge service; it is meant to disturb, dislodge, and disorient. Liu distinguishes “Leftist” universal reason from “Liberal” mushy inclusivity, nostalgic for Enlightenment rationality, perhaps, but her refusal to collapse education into hospitality is a rare moment of clarity.
Eric Kaufman diagnoses the “new left” as a cult of the sacred, where identity is fetishised and offence policed. Liu nods; Brook flirts with Marxism for a minute; suddenly everyone seems to agree the university has lost its bearings.
Brook is not wrong that conservatives self-select out of higher ed. But let’s be clear: not because academia is too “left,” but because they crave catechism, not critique. They want ideological madrassas, not laboratories of doubt. In this sense, Brook’s consumer model is apt: conservatives want a product that validates their priors. That is indoctrination, not education.
Meanwhile, the universities collude in their own corruption. They market “education™” as networking, branding, and employability. At the top tier, the Ivies, Oxbridge, Grandes Écoles, you might still buy proximity to power. But below that? Snake oil. At best, you get nosebleed seats in the auditorium of influence. At worst, an obstructed view behind a pillar. For most, the ticket is counterfeit: a credential that promises access and delivers only debt.
And yet, the true thing still exists. Real education, the kind Liu gestured toward, doesn’t need oak-panelled halls or hedge-fund endowments. It can happen online, in a book, in a seminar, even here with ChatGPT. It’s the deliberate encounter with discomfort, with error, with reason itself. But snake oil sells better than hard truths, and so universities keep hawking tickets they don’t own.
Philosophics 