American Campus Podcast

Matt Seybold takes us back to Knobs University, a fictional HBCU imagined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. Drawing parallels from the novel and its HBCU, Matt helps us see how we're living through our own second Gilded Age, a post-capitalist era of technofeudalism.

References mentioned this episode:

• The American Vandal Podcast
• The American Vandal Substack
• MattSeybold.com
• Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. 1873. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.
• Ron Chernow. 2025. Mark Twain. Penguin Random House. 
• Willy Theyer. 2024. The Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University. Translated by D. Bret Leraul. Northwestern University Press.
• Yanis Varoufakis. 2024. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Penguin Random House.
• Jodi Dean. 2025. Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Verso.
• McKenzie Wark. 2021. Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?  Verso.
• Cédric Durand. 2024. How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy. Translated by David Broder. Verso.

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On the medical school building boom of the early 20th century (1890-1940), and what it can tell us about the professionalization of academic medicine

Mentioned this episode:

• Katherine L. Carroll. 2022. Building Schools, Making Doctors: Architecture and the Modern American Physician. University of Pittsburgh Press.
• Amber N. Wiley. 2025. Model Schools in the Model City: Race, Planning, and Education in the Nation’s Capital. University of Pittsburgh Press. 
• Margaret Grubiak. 2022. White Elephants on Campus: The Decline of the University Chapel in America, 1920-1960. University of Notre Dame Press.

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Deirdre Clemente on the timeless campus style: casual.

• Deirdre Clemente. 2014. Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American Style. University of North Carolina Press.
• John Izzo. 2007. The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

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Tim Lacy lets us in on all things Great Books: champions, curriculums, and controversies.

• Tim Lacy. 2013. The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Daniel Wickberg. 2024. A History of American Thought 1860–2000: Thinking the Modern. Routledge.
• Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. 2019. Ideas that Made America: A Brief History. Oxford University Press.
• Earl Shorris. 1997. New American Blues: A Journey Through Poverty to Democracy. WW Norton.
• Leo Tolstoy. 1867. War and Peace.

Learn more about the Society for US Intellectual History

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On the APA's collaboration with CIA to develop 'enhanced interrogation techniques' for the U.S. War on Terror. Plus, Eidelson's advice for how we can hold our academic and professional organizations accountable when they violate their stated missions.

Mentioned in the show:

• Roy J. Eidelson. 2023. Doing Harm: How the World’s Largest Psychological Association Lost Its Way in the War on Terror. McGill-Queens University Press.
• Roy J. Eidelson. 2018. Political Mind Games: How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding of What’s Happening, What’s Right, and What’s Possible. Green Hall Books. [Free PDF]
• Roy Eidelson’s website
• ProPoublica, American Psychological Association tax filings
• Ruth Ben-Ghiat. 2021. Strongmen: Moussolini to the Present. W. W. Norton.
• Elle Reeve. 2024. Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics. Simon & Schuster. 
• Jonathan Blitzer. 2025. Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. Penguin Random House.

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For centuries, academics and university archivists have participated in and benefitted from the illicit trade of ancient artifacts. Roberta Mazza discusses this history and the academy's role in restoring and repatriating ill-gotten collections.

• Roberta Mazza. 2024. Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts. Stanford University Press.
• Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. 2019. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Verso. 
• BBC podcast: Intrigue: Word of God.

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Bradford Vivian unpacks calls for "intellectual diversity" and free speech, explaining how these seemingly fair-minded demands work to undermine actual diversity in the classroom and on campus.

• Bradford Vivian. 2022. Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education. Oxford University Press.
• Bradford Vivian’s Substack, Campus Information
• Jack Schneider and Jennifer C. Berkshire. 2023. A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School. The New Press.
• Tressie McMillan Cottom on the NYT and campus stories, 36:30. Half Castle 'Gainst The Scott Walkers (A Tale of Today, Episode #9). American Vandal podcast. 

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Alexa in the dorm room. ProctorU monitoring exams. TurnItIn helping* faculty grade. Tech services are omnipresent on and off campus, and they come with a cost. Lindsay Weinberg offers a critical analysis of today's Smart Universities.

• Lindsay Weinberg. 2025. Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age. Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Tamara Kneese. January 27, 2021. "How a Dead Professor is Teaching a University Art History Class." Slate.
• Sonel Cutler. March 29, 2024. "Graduate Students Went on Strike. Then a Dean Suggested That Professors Use AI to Keep Classes Going." The Chronicle of Higher Education.
• Alex Hanna and Emily Bender. 2025. The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. Haper Collins.
• Callum Cant, James Muldoon, and Mark Graham. 2024. Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering AI. Bloomsbury.
• Keep up with Purdue University’s Tech Justice Lab.

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In 1926, an NYU professor took to the high seas with 500 undergraduates on a worldwide learning voyage. The experimental "Floating University" docked for excursions at nearly 50 ports, where students were introduced to world leaders Mussolini, Gandhi, and others. Tamson Pietsch recounts the endeavor, unpacking the larger story of US intellectual imperialism in the 1920s.

• Tamson Pietsch. 2023. The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge. University of Chicago Press. 
• Ross L. Jones, James Waghorne, and Marcia Langton, eds. 2024. Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne. Melbourne University Press.

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Huey Long, Louisiana's notorious Depression-era governor and rumored presidential challenger to FDR, doesn't get enough recognition for his role in the expansion of LSU's campus throughout the 1930s. Listen as Bob Mann recounts Long's legacy at Kingfish U.

• Robert Mann. 2023. Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU. Louisiana State University Press. 
• Check out Robert Mann's other works
• Read Robert Mann on Substack
• Follow Robert Mann on Bluesky
• Browse Niall Williams’s novels 

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