American Campus Podcast

References and suggested readings:

• James Chandler. 2026. The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning. Prickly Paradigm Press. 
• Robert Mackey. April 18, 2026. Trump’s antipathy for Pope may have roots in childhood Protestant church. The Guardian.
• Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America.
• Wendy Brown. 2017. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution. Zone Books.
• Sam Moyn 2024. Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. Yale University Press.
• Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations.
• Tyler G. Anbinder. 1994. Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s. Oxford University Press
• Laura K. Field. 2025. Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. Princeton University Press.
• Jennifer Pitts. Kayfabe, Trolling, Satire, and Cynicism. Prickly Paradigm Press blog.
• Richard Hofstadter. 1966. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Vintage.
• Thorstein Veblen. 1918. The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. Open Access PDF.
• American Campus episodes on Thorstein Veblen and with Laura Field on Furious Minds.

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References and suggested readings:

• Trevor Griffey. 2007. “The Strongest Chapter in WA: Bellingham's KKK.” The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project.
• Allan J. Lichtman. 2008. White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement. Grove Press.
• Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925)
• Lothrop Stoddard Wiki
• Perlstein’s mea culpa: Rick Perlstein. April 11, 2017. I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong. New York Times Magazine.
• On MAGA small business owners and car dealers: Alexander Sammon. May 30, 2023. Want to Stare Into the Republican Soul in 2023? Slate. 
• Higher Ed Labor (in California and Beyond) Substack
• Follow Trevor on Twitter, BlueSky
• https://x.com/trevorgriffey/status/2080041013507510403?s=46 

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An intellectual history of inequality in the US.

References and suggested readings:

• Kim Phillips-Fein. 2026. Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America. W. W. Norton.
• Kim Phillips-Fein. 2018. Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. Picador.
• Kim Phillips-Fein. 2010. Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal. W. W. Norton.
• Corey Robin. 2018. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Endmund Burke to Donald Trump, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press. Open access PDF. 
• Richard Herrnstein. 1971.  “i.q.” The Atlantic.
• Pioneer Fund, the dark money trust that won't let race science die American Campus episode with John P. Jackson Jr.
• Victor S. Navasky. 2003. Naming Names. Hill and Wang.
• Thomas Mann. 1996. Magic Mountain. Vintage.
• Anna Veltfort. 2019. Goodbye, My Havanna: The Life and Times of a Gringa in Revolutionary Cuba. Redwood Press.
• Kim Phillips-Fein’s faculty page
• kimphillipsfein.com

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How Napoleon's École polytechnique inspired A&M universities on the Western US border (ft. some of our favorite topics: American imperialism, science, and social hierarchy)

References and suggested readings:

• Sveinn M. Jóhannesson. 2026. The Scientific-Military State: How Enlightened Engineers Reinvented Early American Government. University of Chicago Press. 
• James McNeill Whistler. 1879. Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (known as Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) painting.
• Livy’s History of Rome
• Tacitus The Annals of Imperial Rome
• Sveinn M. Jóhannesson’s website

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A century later, what did Veblen get right?

References and suggested readings:

• Christian J. Churchill and Gerald Levy. 2011. The Enigmatic Academy: Class, Bureaucracy, and Religion in American Education. Temple University Press. 
• Thorstein Veblen. 1918. The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. PDF.
• Thorstein Veblen. 1899. The Theory of the Leisure Class. PDF.
• On Google’s former motto, “Don’t be evil.”
• Know Your Meme: “Wait. Is this f****** play about us?”
• Arthur J Vidich and Joseph Bensman. 2000. Small Town in Mass Society: Class, Power, and Religion in a Rural Community. University of Illinois Press.
• Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism.
• Tragedy of the education commons episode with Guy Standing
• Herbert Blumer. 1986. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. University of California Press.
• Peter Gould. 2026. Part for the Whole. Whetstone Publishing.
• John Williams. Stoner.
• Elizabeth Cotton. 2025. Ubertherapy: The New Business of Mental Health. Bristol University Press.
• christianjchurchill.com 
• Jerry Levy’s faculty page

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On class rank, Latin honors, the 4.0 grading scale, and other old traditions

References and suggested readings:

• Joshua R. Eyler. 2024. Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do About It. Johns Hopkins University Press. 
• Josh Eyler. February 26, 2024. The Origin of Grades in American Schools. Saturday Evening Post.
• Adam Laats. 2024. Mr. Lancaster’s System: The Failed Reform That Created America's Public Schools. Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Victor Hugo. Les Miserables.
• Follow Josh on LinkedIn and Bluesky
• Josh Eyler’s faculty page, email Josh at [email protected] 

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Muscular Christianity and its various forms on the campus

References and suggested readings:

• Amy Laura Hall. 2026. Erecting the Pulpit: Muscular Christianity from Teddy Roosevelt to Donald Trump. Bloomsbury.
• Theodore Roosevelt. 1899. The Strenuous Life speech.
• From the vault: [Lawrence] Wright talks to Alec Baldwin about Scientology and Tom Cruise. October 10, 2022.
• Darren Dochuk. 2019. Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America. Basic Books.
• Bethany Moreton. 2010. To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Harvard University Press.
• Daneil Silliman. 2021. An Evangelical Is Anyone Who Likes Billy Graham: Defining Evangelicalism with Carl Henry and Networks of Trust. Church History, 90(3): 621-643.
• Darren E. Grem. 2014. Christianity Today: J. Howard Pew, and the Business of Conservative Evangelicalism. Enterprise and Society, 15(2): 337-379.
• Ahmanson family’s Institute on Religion and Democracy Wiki
• Adam Laats’s research on K12 schools 
• Geoffrey Canada’s Wiki 
• Waiting for Superman trailer on IMDB
• Dana Goldstein. September 23, 2010. Grading Waiting for Superman. The Nation.
• Julie A. Webber. 2002. Failure to Hold: The Politics of School Violence. Rowman & Littlefield.
• Frank Deford. September 8, 2010. Football Fans Ignore Increasing Violence. NPR.
• Audre Lorde. 1982. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Crossing Press.
• Ayoush Lazikani. 2025. Medieval Moon: A History of Haunting and Blessing. Yale University Press.
• Amy Laura Hall’s faculty page, Twitter, Bluesky

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References and suggested readings:

• Ira Halpern. 2026. Imagining Health: Medicine, Social Protest, and Modern American Literature. University of Massachusetts Press.
• Abraham Flexner. 1910. Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
• Regina Kunzel. 2024. In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life. University of Chicago Press.
• Ivan Illich. 2000. Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis - The Expropriation of Health. Marion Boyars Publishers.
• Ira Halpern’s faculty page

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On the origins of natural language processing and how corporations like IBM leaned into predictive algorithms.

References and suggested readings:

• Xiaochang Li. 2026. Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture. University of Chicago Press.
• Anil Seth. July 15, 2026. “Once again we are told AI may be conscious – I study consciousness, and I have my doubts.” The Guardian.
• Paul Kockelman. 2024. Last Words: Large Language Model and the AI Apocalypse. Prickly Paradigm Press.
• Lief Weatherby. 2025. Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism. University of Minnesota Press.
• Carlo Ginzburg. 2026. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, 50th anniversary edition. Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Kate Crawford. 2022. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press.
• Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones. 2024. How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms. W. W. Norton.
• Christopher Manning and Hinrich Schütze. 2026. Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. MIT Press.
• Danial Jurafsky and James Martin. 2026. Speech and Language Processing.
• Xiaochang Li’s faculty page and @[email protected]

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References and suggested readings:

• Guy Standing. 2026. Human Capital:  The Tragedy of the Education Commons. Penguin Press. 
• “Linda McMahon slaps her daughter Stephanie McMahon-Helmsley: RAW IS WAR, Apr. 17, 2000”
• Nafeez Ahmed, Peter Jukes,  and Hardeep Matharu. July 9, 2026. Palantir Co-Founder Peter Thiel and Reform UK’s Cambridge University Recruitment Pipeline Project Revealed. Byline Times.
• Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. 2011. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change. Bloomsbury.
• Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola. 2021. Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War. Pluto Press.
• Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff. 2026. Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. Harper.
• Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition.
• Guy Standing. 2021. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class Special Covid-19 Edition. IB Taurus & Co.
• Guy Standing. 2023. The Blue Commons: Rescuing the Economy of the Sea. Pelican.
• Guy Standing’s website

Support the show

Leave feedback or request an episode / browse the American Campus bookshelf