Last year was a rough one for academia – inauspicious, to say the least. The Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on students, universities lurching between open and closed, leaving students strained and uncertain about their futures, and stuck in Zoom classrooms. Meanwhile, mental health struggles soared. Students paid full tuition price for this cut-rate experience. On the research side, there have been at least 72 retracted papers on Covid-19 and a total of 32,000 retractions. And, of course, universities themselves kept alive their long, esteemed tradition of operating like cartels – with a handful of them facing a lawsuit for alleged violations of antitrust law related to the amount of financial aid they paid out.

All of that is bad. But wait – there’s more! In this episode of Darts and Letters, we take two of the most frustrating aspects of the  higher education world: endless culture wars around free speech and identity, and the continued corporatization of the curriculum.

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Darts and Letters is hosted and edited by Gordon Katic. The lead producer is Jay Cockburn. Our managing producer is Marc Apollonio. David Moscrop is our research assistant and wrote the show notes.

Our theme song and music was created by Mike Barber, our graphic design was created by Dakota Koop, and our marketing was done by Ian Sowden.

This is a production of Cited Media. This episode received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It was  part of a wider series of episodes about neoliberal educational policies. The lead researcher is Franklynn Bartol at the University of Toronto and our academic advisor is Dr. Marc Spooner at the University of Regina.

Darts and Letters is produced in Toronto, which is on the traditional land of Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat Peoples.