American Campus Podcast

Kendell Gerdes unpacks popular depictions of "sensitive" students throughout the 2010s. She tackles safe spaces, trigger warnings, #BlackOnCampus, and other student calls for accessibility over the last few years, showing how these matters are not in opposition to faculty academic freedom.

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Kendall Gerdes. 2024. Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism. University of Pittsburgh Press. (Use code 29GERDES30 for 30% off)
• Follow Kendall Gerdes on BlueSky
• Bradford Vivian. 2022. Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education. Oxford University Press. 
• Bradford Vivian’s Substack, Campus Information

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This is Part II of an earlier discussion with Mike Collins about Supreme Court affirmative action cases affecting higher education, including Lau (1974), Bakke (1978), Fisher (2016), and Students for Fair Admissions (2023). For more, check out Collin's recent book, The Anti-Civil Rights Movement: Affirmative Action as Wedge and Weapon. 

• Mike Steven Collins. 2024. The Anti-Civil Rights Movement: Affirmative Action as Wedge and Weapon. University Press of Kansas.
• Listen to Part I here

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This is Part I of a two-part interview with Mike Collins about Supreme Court affirmative action cases affecting higher education, including Bakke (1978), Fisher (2016), and Students for Fair Admissions (2023). For more, check out Collin's recent book, The Anti-Civil Rights Movement: Affirmative Action as Wedge and Weapon. 

• Mike Steven Collins. 2024. The Anti-Civil Rights Movement: Affirmative Action as Wedge and Weapon. University Press of Kansas.
• Heather McGhee. 2022. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. Penguin Random House.
• David W. Congdon. 2024. Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture. Cambridge University Press.
• Mary Anne Franks. 2024. Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment. Bold Type Books.
• James Marcus. 2024. Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Princeton University Press.
• Michael S. Collins. 2013. Understanding Etheridge Knight. University of South Carolina Press.
• Michael S. Collins. 2013. The Travelling Queen. Sheep Meadow Press. 
• Michael Collins. "’Tight Like This,’ recorded 1928, Chicago, Illinois.” The Rupture.
• Listen to Part II here

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The ICE disappearance of Columbia student protestor Mahmoud Khalil in March 2025 followed in the wake of Trump's promise to deport campus activists. But 50 years ago, the Carter administration set the stage for student deportations. Will Teague discusses the history of presidential threats to deport student dissenters, beginning with the Carter administration's attacks against Iranian international students in the 1970s.

• Will Teague. 2024. Resistance/Rise: Iranian Student Activism in the Late 1970s US. History of Education Quarterly. 
• Reza Aslan. 2022. An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville. W. W. Norton. 
• Timothy Snyder. 2024. On Freedom. Penguin Random House.
• Will Teague. 2018. “Hostages of the Crisis: Iranian Students in Arkansas, 1979-1981.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 77(2): 113–30. 

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Abercrombie and Fitch is back, millennials and gen x-ers! Ethan Lascity takes us for a walk down memory lane in a discussion ofLegally Blonde, Drumline, Van Wilder, and other college movies of the aughts.

• Myles Ethan Lascity. 2024. The Abercrombie Age: Millennial Aspiration and the Promise of Consumer Culture. University of North Carolina Press. 
• Lyz Lenz. 2024. This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life. Penguin. 
• Taylor Lorenz. 2023. Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. Simon and Schuster.  
• Follow Ethan Lascity on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram 

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In 1960, California experimented with tuition-free college for all public campuses in the state. As Andrew Higgins explains in Higher Education for All (UNC Press, 2023), the California Master Plan actually worked to make higher education more unequal for students. As calls for free college have gained traction in the 20th century, Higgins reminds us of critical shortcomings of the Cold War California experiment.

• Andrew Stone Higgins. 2023. Higher Education for All: Racial Inequality, Cold War Liberalism, and the California Master Plan. University of North Carolina Press.
• Ursula K. Le Guin. 1974. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. Harper & Row.
• Eran A. Zelnik. 2025. American Laughter, American Fury: Humor and the Making of a White Man's Democracy, 1750–1850. Johns Hopkins University Press.  
• “1964: Mario Savio’s “Bodies Upon The Gears” speech at a UC Berkeley student protest.” YouTube.  

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Adrian Daub explains the recent history of the cancel culture moral panic.

• Adrian Daub. 2024. The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global. Stanford University Press.
• Jennifer Burns. 2023. Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
• Samuel L. Catlin. 2024. The Campus Does Not Exist: How Campus War is Made. Parapraxis.

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Asheesh Siddique discusses the colonial creation of college trustee boards and explains how trustees govern our institutions today.

• Asheesh Siddique. 2024. The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World. Yale University Press.
• Asheesh Siddique. 2021, May 19. Campus Cancel Culture Freakouts Obscure the Power of University Boards. Teen Vogue.
• What are Universities for? 2024-2025 Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series. University of Massachusetts–Amherst.  
• Elizabeth Tandy Shermer. 2021. Indentured Students: How Government Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in Student Debt. Harvard University Press.   
• Thorstein Veblen. 2015. The Higher Learning in America: The Annotated Edition: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. Edited with an introduction and notes by Richard F. Teichgraeber III. Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Jasmine Harris discusses the historic experiences of Black women students and faculty at predominantly white colleges.

• Jasmine L. Harris. 2024. Black Women, Ivory Tower: Revealing the Lies of White Supremacy in American Education. Broadleaf Books. 
• Jasmine L. Harris’s website
• Heather Terrell and Victoria Christopher Murray. 2022. The Personal Librarian. Penguin Random House.

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On the post-World War II Red Scare and its consequences for American higher education.

• Ellen Schrecker. 1986. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. Oxford University Press.
• Ellen Schrecker. 2021. The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s. University of Chicago Press.
• Ellen Schrecker’s website

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