Matt Goodwin is a former professor of politics at the University of Kent who took voluntary severance last year, following a series of controversial posts after the Stockport stabbings. He has said that his departure had nothing to do with his views on the unrest, but was instead prompted by his disillusionment with developments in academic and university life.

In Bad Education he lays out his antipathy towards modern trends in British universities, which he argues have been captured by “woke” ideas of social justice, and undermined by a consumer-driven coddling of students.

These are not original complaints and Goodwin, for all his personal experience, does not have anything dramatically new to add to them. His is the kind of impassioned polemic that lacks the kind of sharp prose style or wit that could turn a prolonged gripe into something more memorable and rewarding.

Goodwin suggests that academics are no longer allowed to criticise the work of students because they have become fee-paying clients whose sensitivities are cravenly indulged by cash-hungry administrators. Hence, in a bout of desperate grade inflation, the number of first-class degrees awarded to graduates rose from 16% in 2010 to almost 40% by the early 2020s.

Yet the author himself is sometimes reminiscent of the student who attempts to mask the weakness of his argument and pad out the length of his essay by repeating the same points with very slight variations. Over and over again, he reminds us that free speech and inquiry are under threat from institutionalised leftwing bias that fosters a climate of fear and self-censorship.

It’s not really until the second half of the book that he manages to put some evidential meat on those ideological bones, although much of it is imported from the US. In this respect Goodwin is unconsciously aping those colleagues that he criticises for adopting American discourses such as critical race theory – neither recognise how radically different US circumstances are from those of the UK.

This is not to say that Goodwin has selected only wrong trees to bark up. For all his bluster and bitterness, there are several points he makes that are worthy of discussion. Risk-averse administrators have grown in size and income, with vice-chancellors awarding themselves huge pay rises while academics are often on precarious low-pay contracts. The conviction that students need to be protected from anything that might conceivably upset them does need to be challenged. And the attitude of many universities towards authoritarian China, source of much revenue, is utterly hypocritical.

The problem is that Goodwin lacks all sense of nuance and proportion. In his mind everything is going to the dogs, and everyone else is a coward or a knave. Alas, it is not hard to locate loud-mouthed academics who spend their time on social media denouncing anyone who doesn’t meet their Olympian political-moral standards, but they are the exception, not the rule, even if volubility can be easily mistaken for ubiquity.

Goodwin’s expertise as a political scientist was rightwing populism, of which he started out a staunch critic and towards which he has become increasingly sympathetic. The Brexit referendum appears to have been a watershed personal moment when he realised that educated opinion held popular opinion in contempt.

Again, it is possible to recognise that tendency without falling into a conspiratorial sense of despair. The truth is the so-called educated classes have always held different opinions from the wider public, usually arriving at a theoretical endorsement for liberal causes – sex, race and sexuality equality – some time before they achieve majority support.

In the 1960s universities were seen by many on the right as hotbeds of radicalism, and student activism as a byword for extremism. Opposition to segregation in the US and the war in Vietnam were commonplace among students and academics alike.

It doesn’t follow that such leanings amount to elitism. On the contrary, these positions have come to be seen, retrospectively, as almost self-evidently fundamental to any civilised view of the world. It’s in that belief, and the desire never to accept such iniquities again, that a kind of intellectual intolerance can take root, wrapping itself around causes such as gender identity, which are arguably more complex than earlier social justice causes.

Liberated from his youthful liberal leanings, Goodwin now seems too shrill and in thrall to popular opinion to make a temperate case. He calls those who still believe liberal arguments can win out over illiberal instincts “deeply naive and misguided”. Amusingly, for someone of the right, he argues that only government intervention in support of free speech can save our universities from progressive illiberalism.

I suspect other forces – namely economic – will have a more profound effect on tertiary education. Bankruptcy threatens many universities, and a declining number of graduates believe their degrees are worth the fees. A reorganisation and rethink is due. If that leads to more protection for academics with heterodox views that will be a good thing. Universities do need to be open to a plurality of opinions. It’s just a shame that Goodwin isn’t a more thoughtful advocate of that noble idea.