This episode is the recording of an event held at Swarthmore College on October 27, 2025. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd and Nayanika Ghosh discussed the history of discursive and institutional tactics deployed to delegitimize knowledge-making in the humanities and in the sciences. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd is a historian of US colleges and universities. Shepherd is the author of Resistance from the Right (University of North Carolina Press,2023) and host of the American Campus Podcast. Her forthcoming book projects are Degrees of Liberation withJohn R. Legg and Inventing the Liberal University. 

Nayanika Ghosh is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her research brings interdisciplinary scholarship on science, race, and gender in conversation with the histories of U.S. higher education, the New Left, and the Cold War. She is currently working on her first monograph, Genes and the Left: Sociobiology and the Backlash Against Radical Science.

This episode is the recording of an event held at Swarthmore College on April 14, 2025 between Ruth J. Simmons and Anthony Bogues. They were discussing “Liberal Education and the Current Crisis.”

This event was presented by the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College’s Series on Race, Racism and the Liberal Arts, and the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Slavery and Justice at Brown University

Ruth J. Simmons is a President’s Distinguished Fellow at Rice University and Senior Adviser to the President of Harvard.  She was previously President of Prairie View A&M University, Brown University, and Smith College.

Anthony Bogues is a writer, scholar, curator, and the Director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University.

Aydelotte Foundation director, Patricia White, speaks with four Swarthmore faculty members who have organized the speaker series, "From South Africa to Gaza: World History and the Politics of Responsibility."

You can watch Naomi Klein's talk in the series, "Palestine, Zionism, and the Doppelganger Effect," here.

In late February, Andy Hines and Dennis Hogan organized a symposium at Haverford College called, "Universities and Democracy: The Politics of Higher Education Today." It brought together researchers, organizers, elected officials, and many others in the Philadelphia region to discuss the local and national transformation of the political economy of higher education.

Published on the same day as the AAUP's national day of action for higher education, we bring you four of the talks from that symposium by Vineeta Singh, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Donna Murch, and Davarian Baldwin.

We plan to broadcast more of the talks from this event in the future.

Speaker Bios

Vineeta Singh is assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her writing on critical and abolitionist university studies can be found in Public Books and Critical Ethnic Studies.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He is the author of the books Elite Capture and Reconsidering Reparations.

Donna Murch is associate professor of history at Rutgers University, where she is chapter president of the New Brunswick chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. Her newest book is Assata Taught me: State Violence: Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives and she is the author of the award-winning Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

Davarian Baldwin is the Paul E. Rather Distinguished Professor of American Studies and founding director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the award-winning author of several books, most recently, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. 

The symposium was sponsored by the ⁠John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities⁠, the ⁠Haverford College Distinguished Visitors Program⁠, and the ⁠Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College⁠.

Tim Burke, Rachel Buurma, and Andy Hines speak with Tristan Ahtone and Maria Parazo Rose about their work on "Land Grab Universities," a project that makes a direct, irrefutable claim about how the wealth of land-grant universities is linked to indigenous dispossession. The discussion considers how to understand the present ramifications of the Morrill Act of 1862, how the process associated with land-grant universities might extend to other institutions, and the next phase of their project.

Tristan Ahtone is a member of the Kiowa Tribe and is Editor at Large at Grist. 

Maria Parazo Rose is a spatial data analyst at Grist, where she writes and makes maps about Indigenous affairs, conservation, and climate migration

The Aydelotte Foundation is an interdisciplinary research center and intellectual community located at Swarthmore College. It supports the creation and dissemination of knowledge about liberal arts education as it exists across the broadest possible range of contexts and institutions.

Theme music is "Advocad" by Jonas Hipper.

Tim Burke, Rachel Buurma, and Andy Hines speak with Stephen Sparks take a somewhat different approach to talking about every professor’s favorite subject, namely ChatGPT and AI generally. It is not just an issue for American academics: faculty in South African universities are also reckoning with its impact. The problem of technologically sophisticated strategies for cheating (as well as some of the classics) is painfully familiar there as well as here, all the more so during the pandemic.

Stephen Sparks is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at University of Johannesburg.

The Aydelotte Foundation is an interdisciplinary research center and intellectual community located at Swarthmore College. It supports the creation and dissemination of knowledge about liberal arts education as it exists across the broadest possible range of contexts and institutions.

Theme music is "Advocad" by Jonas Hipper.