The NAB Project Podcast: Recent Episodes
Eli Kramer
What are the racial consequences of underfunding public universities? What are "new universities" and how is their focus on underserved student populations transforming U.S. higher education? What is “postsecondary racial neoliberalism” and how does the term capture key facets of the extant crisis in public higher education? How does the “culture of austerity” in U.S. public higher education delimit choices for administration and staff? Why do public universities often support trite models of diversity?
We explore these questions and more with Laura Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen the author's of Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities. Hamilton is Professor and Chair of Sociology at University of California Merced. She co-authored Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality(2013) with Elizabeth A. Armstrong, and authored Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College and Beyond(2016). Kelly Nielsen is a Senior Research Analyst at the University of San Diego Extension Center for Research and Evaluation. He is the author of numerous articles, including "Fake It 'Til You Make it': Why Community College Students' Aspirations 'Hold Steady,'" and, "Beyond 'Warming Up' and 'Cooling Out': The Effects of Community College on a Diverse Group of Disadvantaged Young Women."
What has been the legacy of Bob Dylan on modern cultural life? How can research on Dylan be co-collaborative with the public toward meaningful ends? How can popular music institutes and centers model a new route for the humanities? How ought the humanities to engage and co-collaborate with the world outside of the academy? What is the relationship between public humanities work and the liberal arts?
We explore these questions and more with our guest Sean Latham, the Pauline McFarlin Walter Endowed Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, the director of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, the editor of the James Joyce Quarterly, and the director of the University of Tulsa Institute for Bob Dylan Studies. He works with a team at The University of Tulsa and the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family Foundation to bring together the Bob Dylan Archive, the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies, and a new Bob Dylan Center in downtown Tulsa (scheduled to open May 10, 2022), as a new hub for publicly engaged humanistic research and scholarship. In particular, they aim to create in Tulsa a hub for popular music appreciation and reflection (including the Woody Guthrie Center, which is also in the city). He has written and edited numerous books on modern culture, and organized over 100 public humanities events including exhibitions, performances, conferences, and community-engaged research projects. He recently organized the edited collection The World of Bob Dylan (Cambridge UP, 2021) and has been working on a new book, Bob Dylan’s Odyssey: A Creative Biography.
How has the proliferating use of bibliometrics as a means to evaluate academic research shaped academic subjectivity? How are bibliometrics being used as a new technology of neoliberal, biopolitical governmentality, alongside the host of other ‘metrics’ (led by biometrics) that have emerged in the last two decades? What of most importance has been lost in the use of marginalia by scholars as a personal and political act? Does the production of neoliberal subjectivity and the power of bibliopolitics within academia exaserbate the two tier system of tenured and adjunct labor in higher education? Are there ways to resist the bibliometric regime and its multifarious form of surveillance and subjectivity formation? If so, what channels and modes of organizing should we be thinking about to resist our current trajectory?
We explore this questions and more with our guest Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University. He works on classical philosophy and modern receptions thereof, and the early modern period, up to and including the French enlightenment. He is interested in the history of Western receptions of its classical past, and the rich ethical legacy left by Stoic and academic schools in particular. He also has expertise in Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis and has published one single-authored and one coauthored book on Slavoj Zizek's work, and with Joanne Faulkner, Understanding Psychoanalysis. In the past, he has published on aesthetics, the theory of ideology, eschatology and political theology, and critical theory. He has written on a host of different thinkers: for instance John Macdowell, Jacques Lacan, Montaigne, Voltaire, Maimonides, Pierre Hadot, and Epictetus. He is also the author of Camus, Philosophe: To Return to Our Beginnings (Brill, 2015/16), the first monograph to bring the philosophy as a way of life (PWL) framework to the analysis of Camus' literary and philosophical work. Since 2011, he has published extensively on the work of Pierre Hadot and the 'very idea' of PWL, and most recent co-authored with Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life; History, Dimensions, Directions (Bloomsbury, 2021). He has published several articles on Francis Bacon's ethics and wider conception of philosophy. He is also a co-translator of The Selected Essays of Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as Practice (Bloomsbury, 2021), and he is presently coordinating with Michael Chase and Eli Kramer a new PWL book series with Brill: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Text and Studies.
How can we help college and universities students (both undergraduate or graduate), or other participants, navigate the fraught worlds of intimate social interaction, romance, and abuse in the 21st century? Are there any gaps between how issues surrounding consent, assault, and sexual violence are talked about in the academic literature and how higher education students experience these issues in their lives? What sort of interpersonal and bottom up programming could be done to address issues of sexual assault, violence, and other sorts of coercive dynamics in graduate departments?
We explore these questions and more with Lori Bednarchik a professor and one of the leading national experts on sexual consent and communication, and in particular sex-positive and skills-based approaches to violence prevention. Alongside her scholarship and research, she has worked closely with athletes, fraternity men, and college students across the country, challenging the norms surrounding relationships, consent, and sex. Bednarchik received her PhD in Human Communication from Arizona State University, and an MPH in Health Education and Health Promotion, and BA in English and Gender Studies from The University of Maryland. She lectures at Arizona State University, San Diego State University, California State University at San Marcos, among other universities. Previously, she worked as a Health Educator at San Diego State University where she created several award-winning programs on bystander intervention education, and alcohol risk-reduction. She also re-designed and facilitated a Peer Health Education Program specifically for fraternity men called FratMANers (Fraternity Men Against Negative Environments and Rape Situations).
What is world-systems research and how did it emerge from the student movements of 1968? What is “diagonalism” as a mode of organization for meaningful theory and social change? From a world-systems perspective, what are the major global changes that are likely to occur within the next 30 years, and how might social movements influence those changes? In particular, what will U.S. and global higher education look like 30 years down the road?
We explore these questions and more with our guest Christopher Chase-Dunn, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California-Riverside. Chase-Dunn specializes in "crossnational quantitative studies of the effects of dependence on foreign investment" as well as "studies cities and settlement systems in order to explain human sociocultural evolution. His research focuses on interpolity systems, including both the modern global political economy and earlier regional world-systems." He is the founder and a former editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research and the Series Editor of a related book series with Johns Hopkins University Press. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001. We join him today as he prepares for retirement and reflects on his career is it developed in the foment of the 68 student movements.
What was it like to be involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the height of the civil rights movement? What was the philosophy of education for liberation advanced by SNCC at their first residential freedom school they launched in Chicago, and what lessons does it have for higher education today? How did SNCC practice direct democracy, what value does that kind of decision-making have, and could it be integrated into higher education today? How should higher education in the Americas address its legacy of participation in the slave trade, segregation, and other dimensions of white-supremacy?
Today we explore these questions and more with are guest Dr. Fannie Rushing. Rushing was a SNCC field secretary and co-founder of SNCC's first residential freedom school in Chicago in the early sixties. She was a key co-leader of the movement. She is also a historian of the movement as co-chair of the Chicago Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee History Project. She received her Ph.D. in Latin American and Caribbean History from the University of Chicago. Rushing is currently an associate professor in the Department of History at Benedict University.
If and how should online media companies exercise censorious power over people on their platforms? How do we support and protect critical and honest independent media? What is Project Censored, and how can it support the development of critical media literacy in college and university classrooms?
In today's podcast we talk with our guest Mickey Huff on these issues and more. Huff is the current director of Project Censored. He is also the president of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation, and professor of social science and history at Diablo Valley College (where he is co-chair of the History Program and is chair of the Journalism Department). He edits or co-edits the Censored book series for Seven Stories Press. His publications include the co-authored work with Nolan Higdon United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America (and what we can do about it) (City Lights Books, 2019). His research explores media and propaganda, fake news, and critical media literacy. He is a co-founding member of the Global Critical Media Literacy Project.
What "gaze" does the US higher education study abroad industry want to cultivate amongst students? How does the lack of diversity in US study abroad programs affect the narratives told about it and diverse student experiences of it? What role should study abroad, and/or other cross-cultural experiences play in a liberal arts education? Despite it being a much heralded competence putatively cultivated during a study abroad experience, is global citizenship often empty of content in practice? How has the Covid-19 Pandemic shaped study abroad media and practice, including the new work in "virtual study abroad" programs?
We discuss these questions and more with Kelly Hankin, Professor of Film Studies at the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies of the University of Redlands, and the author of the new book Documenting the American Student Abroad: The Media Cultures of International Education (Bucknell University Press, 2021). This dynamic interdisciplinary work illuminates a greatly heralded but little researched domain in humanistic higher education, the study abroad experience and its media cultures. Hankin was also Eli's undergraduate advisor at the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies, a student-centered integrative degree program and living-learning community at the University of Redlands. Hankins' leadership and collective work in this unique creative center in higher education greatly shaped and informed their new book.
- See here for more on the The Australian Consortium for 'In-Country' Indonesian Studies (ACICIS) Creative Arts & Design Professional Practicum virtual study abroad program, mentioned in today's episode.
What should be the role of philosophy as a shared, personal, and vulnerable endeavor in today's higher education system? As part of the authentic learning experience, how open should philosophy teachers be with their undergraduate students about their personal lives and challenges? Is there room in professional philosophy for personal and vulnerable philosophical teaching and writing? What should philosophers highlight and advocate for in today's liberal arts and higher education system?
We explore these questions and others with John Kaag, chair of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, in today's episode. He is the author of American Philosophy: A Love Story (2016), which was an NPR Best Book of 2016 and a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (2018), and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (2020). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications. He is known for works that interweave autobiography and history of philosophy, inviting readers to walk with him on his own philosophical journey while he serves as a psychogogic guide to them on their own quests to ever become who they are.
What can be learned from ethnographic interviews of Amazon’s last mile delivery workers in the greater LA area about the current global economy? How can undergraduate student researchers participate in this kind of labor research? Can academic and student research build opportunities for labor organizing, and resist the precarity that dominates the economy because of companies like Amazon? What are the purposes and goals of Labor Studies?
We explore these questions and more with our guests Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese, the co-editors of an important new collection entitled The Cost of Free: Shipping Amazon in the Global Economy (Pluto Press, 2020). This work explores the hegemony of Amazon on our imagination and economy, and what can be done to resist it. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson is Professor of Sociology at California State University, Long Beach, whose previous works include: Solidarity Forever? Race, Gender, and Unionism in the Ports of Southern California (Lexington Books, 2016), (co-author) Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2008). Ellen Reese is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside, whose previous works include: They Sat Cutback, We Say Fightback! (Russel Sage Foundation, 2011) and (co-editor) Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression, and Women's Poverty (Routledge 2007).
Is Fred Hampton-style coalition building a useful praxis for contesting anti-Blackness today, or are efforts at building a “Rainbow Coalition” inappropriate or ineffective in the current historical conjuncture? Does emphasis on emancipatory efforts for black persons, and especially men, in social-political theory, sometimes undercut the need to come to terms with deeper, perhaps insurmountable anti-black structures that have created modernity, as scholars such as Frank B. Wilderson III in the afro-pessimism tradition seem to suggest? Does BMS have a reformist (or maybe even fundamentally transformative) role in higher education, especially in the United States, or is it rather a site of resistance, one that is content in the ruins of an unredeemable model of higher learning?
Today we continue our discussion on the role of BMS in the academy and in society at large with Tommy Curry, a leader and founder of the field. Curry has co-launched the first book series on BMS with Temple University Press. He is also the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press 2017), which won the 2018 American Book Award, and of Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of Racial Empire (SUNY Press 2018).
What is distinctive about higher education journalism? What can we learn from people driven narratives in journalism , including telling the stories of "departmental drama" in higher education? What are some of the challenges in covering higher education – especially with respect to the faculty beat? Are there any blind spots in what higher education reporters focus on?
On today's episode we explore these and other questions with Emma Pettit, a Staff Reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education who focuses on faculty issues. She did her undergraduate at Villanova, and has pursued a career in higher education journalism since then. She is the 2017 Outstanding New Journalist, as presented by the Arkansas Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
What do the results of the US election mean for the future of US higher education? Even beyond electoral politics, what does it suggest about the current status of "little d" democracy, as well as about our national institutions? In light of this situation, can US higher education survive in its current form?
On this special post-election episode, we have an open discussion with friend of the show Leonard Waks on these questions and more. Waks is an internationally renowned historian and philosopher of higher education, philosopher of technology, pragmatist, process philosopher, and Dewey scholar. He is also a member of the NAB Advisory Council.
*Click here for the interview with Noam Chomsky that James referenced on the show.
*Click here for the article by Glenn Greenwald that James mentioned.
*Click here for the David Graeber interview about anti-Semitism on Double Down News.
*Click here for the Inside Higher Ed article about the different responses fromJewish faculty at the University of Illinois to complaints of anti-Semitism on campus.
*Click here for the article by Sarah Lazare about ending the US-backed war on Yemen, which James drew from on the show.
*Click here for the article featuring the quote from the later singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen about democracy that James shared during the discussion.
*Click here for Angela Davis's book on abolition democracy.
*Click here to follow a collection of PIC abolitionists at Northwestern University on Twitter, and click here to follow #nucommunitynotcops, the movement demanding NU divest from policing and invest in Black communities.
If and how does understanding our workplaces as "private governments", especially how many of them are run on deeply undemocratic models of organization and decision making, apply to US colleges and universities in their function as employers? Should higher education in the US function on any market principles, or are other institutions and arrangements more conducive to sustaining quality higher ed? Does the the perverse marriage between libertarianism (of the right-wing variety) and authoritarianism effect formal education at the K-12 or post-secondary levels?
We explore these and other questions today with Elizabeth Anderson, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a political philosopher, ethicist, and feminist philosopher, whose 2017 work Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It), which she received a Progress Medel Laureate for by the Society for Progress, plays a central role in our discussion. She also was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008, has received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her work, and in 2019, she received a "Genius Grant" from the MacArthur Fellows Program.
How do we best support graduate students in media studies? Do universities and graduate programs have a responsibility to readjust their model of grad education in the field? What is the value of a humanities-based approach to media studies? How can media be a site of convergence for the disciplines?
In today's episode we investigate these questions with Walter Metz, Professor of Film Studies, and Dean and Director of Graduate Studies for the college of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He received his S.B. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Materials Science and Engineering, and Film and Literature (in the Humanities Department) in 1989; an MA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa in 1991; and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1996. He is the author of three books: Engaging Film Criticism: Film History and Contemporary American Cinema (Peter Lang, 2004), Bewitched (Wayne State University Press, 2007), and Gilligan’s Island, (Wayne State University Press, 2012). He is currently writing a manuscript about Dr. Seuss and the animated films made at Pixar Studios.
His film criticism website is located at: waltermetz.com
What is the current landscape of higher education in the United States, and in particular Illinois? How pervasive is the corporatization of higher education? How should public universities transform in the coming years? Given the scale of issues that face public higher education, how much change can come from attempts at the state and federal level of governance? What kind of advocacy, organizing, and reform ought people in and concerned for higher education in the US be focusing on today?
Today we explore these questions with Randall Auxier, a specialist in the history, philosophy, policy and practice of higher education. He is a Professor of Philosophy and Communication at SIUC, and a long time union organizer at that institution. Currently he is running as the Green Party Candidate for Illinois House of Representatives to represent District 115. We also discuss particular reforms and projects he plans for higher education as part of his candidacy.
What can today's higher education student and scholar activists learn from the critical theory tradition? What role can higher education and social movements play in constituting or readying people to participate in the public sphere? How did the critical theory tradition try to balance the need to take a critical distance from the world and the need for revolutionary/transformative movements and struggles? What is the relationship between critical theory and other philosophical traditions within the academy such as pragmatism and anarchism, and other fields such as cultural studies?
In today's podcast we have the honor of exploring these questions with the eminent intellectual historian of critical theory Martin Jay. He is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation was revised into the seminar work on the history of critical theory, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950. It is now a classic in the field. This work drew on the many personal relationships he developed with key figures in the movement, such as Leo Löwenthal. His research traverses Marxism, socialism, historiography, cultural criticism, visual culture, and post-structuralism/postmodernism. He was the recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.
What's the status of the labor movement and of labor unions in higher education today? Have academic labor unions been trapped in the two-tier structure of higher education (between tenured and non-tenured faculty), and can they sufficiently transform the arrangements within higher education so as to bring about an end to that system?
In today's Labor Day podcast we explore these questions with Mia McIver, President of UC-AFT, which represents non-Senate faculty and librarians working throughout the University of California system. She is a lecturer at UCLA, and received a Ph.D. in English literature from UC Irvine. During her graduate studies she held the Krieger Fellowship in Critical Theory.
*Eli mentioned in this episode Michael McHugh's proposal for restructuring The New School in New York as a worker cooperative, i.e. a new model of "cooperative university". He wrote a dissertation on the subject which can be found here.
The foreword, co-authored by David Graeber and Andrej Grubačić, to the forthcoming re-release of Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution — which James mentioned toward the end of the podcast — along with Grubačić's thoughts on the sudden death of his friend and collaborator, can be read here. PM Press first published the foreword to the forthcoming book, along with Grubačić's thoughts on Graeber's sudden passing, here.
Why are those with humanities PhDs mostly confined to careers within the academy? In what ways can humanities PhDs thrive and serve others with vocations outside of the academy? What would a more holistic humanities graduate education for broader careers and relationships with the local community look like? Who benefits from the dominant culture of humanities graduate education, and who is responsible for improving or reconfiguring that culture? What role should equity and social justice advocacy play in humanities PhD work outside of the classroom and beyond traditional research? How should humanities graduate education look in the times of Covid-19?
We explore these questions and more with Katina Rogers through her most recent book Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, July 2020). Her work traverses higher education reform, scholarly communication practices, humanities professionalization and career development, public scholarship, and scholarly fair labor advocacy. Rogers is co-director of the Futures Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center, which Roger's describes as an "an incubator that advances equity and innovation in higher education through student-centered teaching and learning, and promotes reinvestment in higher education as a public good." She is also the co-director of the CUNY Humanities Alliance, Director of Programs and Administration of HASTAC, and is an adjunct faculty member in the GC’s Master’s Program in Digital Humanities.
How should we in higher education address the growing crises in our culture of a pervading loss of meaning, and sense of purpose and value in life? What role can revisiting wisdom traditions and current research on their practices play in helping us all live more authentic and less self-deceptive lives? These questions are all the more pertinent during the pandemic where isolation is all the more potent.
On this episode we explore this crises of meaning with John Vervaeke, an award-winning lecturer at the University of Toronto in the departments of psychology, cognitive science and Buddhist psychology. Vervaeke explores the meaning crises and the value of wisdom traditions and practices through public facing work, including an active Youtube channel, magazine and online articles, and through other venues. His work and teaching is at the intersections of psychology, philosophy as a way of life, and dynamic public facing pedagogy.
*If you are interesting in learning more you can check out his YouTube channel, his Facebook , or follow his Twitter handle (@vervaeke_john).
Welcome to the Inaugural NAB Podcast!
The NAB Podcast dialogues with key leaders, scholars, and policy makers in higher education, and especially the liberal arts, exploring both the challenges we face and the opportunities for renewal and revitalization in higher education. Join James Anderson and I as we explore the bold terrain of higher education.
For our first podcast we talk with Dr. James Hall, Dean of University Studies and Executive Director of the School of Individualized Study at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Dr. Hall is the former convener of the Consortium for Innovative Environments in Learning (CIEL) and is a central leader and advocate of innovative and student-centered higher education. We explore the past, present, and future of the bold, innovative, and utopian experiments that shape US higher education.
The NAB is pleased to announce our interview of the eminent Marxian economist and worker cooperatives advocate Richard D. Wolff. We discuss the macro level economic forces at play because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the failure of our current capitalistic market structures to in any way adequately respond, and what this means for us within higher education as teachers and scholars. Dr. Wolff is the founder of Democracy at Work, an organization dedicated to providing nuanced critiques of capitalism and to promoting democratization of workplaces as a systemic solution to the problem posed by the prevailing capitalist economy.
Welcome back to the NAB Podcast!
Our two part episode today is with our colleague and friend, NAB advisory board member Dr. Leonard Waks. He is an internationally renowned historian and philosopher of higher education, philosopher of technology, pragmatist, process philosopher, and Dewey scholar. In this two part interview, Dr. Waks shares with us a unique perspective on the paradigmatic changes that we are living through today and their implications for higher education.
In the first interview we survey the macro-transformations unleashed by the pandemic and what they mean for us as scholars, philosophers, teachers, and citizens.
In the second interview, we explore how these broader forces are shaping higher education, and what ameliorative opportunities are available for a revitalized higher learning system. In particular, we explore Dewey’s conception of schools as “social centers”, a focal point to serve and solve culture’s most pressing problems, as a template for what higher education can be in the years to come.
As we continue to struggle through these difficult, uncertain, and tragic times globally, it becomes difficult to find our spiritual/moral centers.
In today’s episode, we talked with Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, a process philosopher, theologian, and higher education leader, on spirituality and higher education during the pandemic. We explore questions such as:
- What does pastoral/spiritual support look like in these difficult times?
- What is our role as teachers, educators, scholars, and activists in helping each other address injustice while taking care of ourselves and others?
- What lessons does the pandemic offer for seminaries and other spiritual/religious centers of higher learning?
We explore these questions and more through the lens of the Jewish wisdom tradition, ending with a reflection on the recent anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
How are the public and civic roles of higher education transforming in response to the current health and economic crises? How do we build opportunities for civic science, that both respects expertise in times of crises, but does not fall into disempowering reliance on hierarchical solutions? How do we as scholars and teachers escape often condescending cynicism and simplification of those who flout basic public health protocols and respect them as fellow citizen-creators?
On this episode we tackle these questions and more with NAB advisor and colleague Harry Boyte, a philosopher, community organizer, citizen scholar, and higher education reformer committed to democracy as a community based way of life. He is the Senior Scholar in Public Work Philosophy at the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg University. He is also the principal and co-founder, along with Marie Strom and Trygve Thronveit, of the Institute for Public Work at Augsburg.
Further, he is the framer of “public work” an action-oriented civic agency approach to civic empowerment, and the founder of Public Achievement, an international civic education and empowerment initiative. His commitment to democratic life and learning began in the 1960s, when he was a Field Secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization headed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and later when he was a community and labor organizer in the South.
How is the pandemic transforming global higher education? How should universities address their respective national crises and contexts, while keeping true to their cosmopolitan mission and ethos? Can they do so while resisting the storm of hyper-nationalism spreading across the globe? How can an ecological model of the university help guide the transformation of higher education?
We explore these questions as part of a philosophy of higher education practice with Dr. Ronald Barnett, the world’s leading master scholar of the university. Dr. Barnett is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at University College London Institute of Education, where he was a Pro-Director and a Dean. He is a past-Chair of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), and was awarded the inaugural prize by the European Association for Educational Research for his “outstanding contribution to Higher Education Research, Policy and Practice.”
He recently has been elected as the inaugural President of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society (PaTHES). He is one of the most important leaders in establishing the philosophy of higher education as a serious field of study. For nearly 40 years, he has been advancing a particular set of ideas, identifying creative concepts and practical principles to transform universities and academic life for the twenty-first century.
As protests spread across the US as a rebellion against police brutality, white supremacy, systematic racism, and fundamentally unjust systems, the freedom of persons of letters, teachers, scholars, students, staff, and other higher education professionals, is all the more essential in order to build toward systemic change in the United States.
In order to address this essential need, on today’s episode we speak with Henry Reichman, Chair of the American Association of University Professor’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. He is one of today’s leading voices defending a broad vision of tenure as the due process rights and job security necessary for higher education to thrive. He has recently published a new book on the subject, The Future of Academic Freedom.
We explore with him the historical meaning of tenure, its relevance today, the work of the AAUP to defend academic freedom, and the future organizing needed for dignified work in higher education.
How has the legacy of state terror and racial genocide shaped higher education in the United States? Given our history, what opportunities exist to support revolutionary organizing work within institutions of higher learning? How do emergent disciplines committed to exploring social reproduction and terrains of struggle – such as Ethnic Studies (and its subfields), Critical Race Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Critical Sociology – navigate knowledge production within educational spaces tied to the legacies of violence, exploitation and white supremacy scholars in those fields endeavor to dismantle? What role can higher education play in the powerful movement developing to end the violence of policing and to radically reorganize the work that fell under that institution’s jurisdiction? How might a philosophy of PIC (prison industrial complex) abolition inform our pedagogical projects within, against and beyond what remains academic?
In today’s episode, we talk with Dylan Rodriguez on these subjects. Rodriguez is Professor of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and is a founding member of Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association. He continues to work in and alongside various social movements and counter-hegemonic collectives. He is the author of Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (2006) and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (2009). His work explores historical logics of racial genocide and how they “permeate our most familiar systems of state violence, cultural production, institutionalized knowledge, liberation struggle, and social identity.” He is also interested in how people, especially scholars, inhabit racial genocide.
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Resources mentioned by Prof. Rodriguez during the Podcast:
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http://criticalresistance.org/resources/the-abolitionist-toolkit/
- https://abolition.university/
- https://www.bu.edu/afam/files/2020/06/Grow_abolition_on_campus_2020_.pdf
- https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/04/abolition-as-praxis-of-human-being-a-foreword/
** James referenced an author who wrote an article about the debate in/over the humanities in the post-interview discussion. Here’s the citation information for that piece:
Hartman, Andrew. “Culture Wars and the Humanities.” Raritan 36, no. 4 (2017), 128-
Are we on the edge of a successful movement for revaluing labor in higher education, or are we doomed to an increasingly slavish situation? The pandemic brings to the forefront the precarity of teachers, researchers, scholars, student workers and staff in higher education, as institutions face financial crises, jobs are cut, and remaining positions are simply not adequate to meet the health and living demands of most, least of all during a public health crisis.
For this special two-part May Day podcast, we talk with Yulia Gilichinskaya and Tony Boardman, active members of the UC Santa Cruz COLA (cost of living adjustment) movement. Yulia, Tony and other graduate students helped organize a wildcat grading strike (using in-person and online organizing tactics) among teaching assistants last fall. The COLA movement has since extended to the broader UC system, with other students and academic workers becoming allies while organizing on their own campuses. Meanwhile, many UCSC strikers have been fired or refused rehire. The union representing graduate student workers across the UC system, UAW Local 2865, is now exploring the potential for a sanctioned unfair labor practice strike.
In part 1, carried out several months ago, we talked with Yulia and Tony about the origins of the COLA movement, the emergence of the wildcat in Santa Cruz, and the successful use of online organizing tactics in conjunction with direct, collective action on UCSC campus.
In part 2, carried out recently, we discuss where the movement is today, in light of the pandemic, the build-up toward an ostensibly impending ULP strike, and what prospects exist for organizing in higher education and beyond.
The movement against the systematic racism and police violence that brutalizes black people (especially men) has catalyzed in the last few weeks in response to the murders of George Floyd (and Breonna Taylor). Many in the academy have heralded this as a moment to incite revolutionary change in our society. Yet all too often we turn a blind eye to ways in which our own discourses (even supposedly anti-racist ones) mask the ways we participate in practices that perpetuate the erasure of black voices and bodies in our own academic communities and institutions. In particular, US liberal arts colleges have been all too often prone to creating a hostile environment for black men in both discourse and practice.
Today we discuss this deeply problematic situation with Tommy Curry, a leader and founder of Black Male Studies (BMS). BMS creates a much needed space to theorize about racially subjugated males and to build places for interdisciplinary scholars devoted to the subject in the academy, especially black scholars (and other scholars of color) in the field who find all too little support and mentorship for their work. Curry has co-launched the first book series in the field with Temple University Press. He is also the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press 2017), which won the 2018 American Book Award, and of Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of Racial Empire (SUNY Press 2018).
In the podcast, we explore the limitations of academic discourse, including what it misses in the current movement against racist police brutality and white supremacy, and what it misses about its own communities and the way it structural dismisses the experiences of black men. Curry provides us insight into how BMS built a field that respects and draws on these experiences and provides the mentorship and resources to cultivate, support, and mentor black scholars and teachers.