The NAB Project Podcast

Welcome to the Inaugural NAB Podcast!

The NAB Podcast dialogues with key leaders, scholars, and policy makers in higher education, and especially the liberal arts, exploring both the challenges we face and the opportunities for renewal and revitalization in higher education. Join James Anderson and I as we explore the bold terrain of higher education.

For our first podcast we talk with Dr. James Hall,  Dean of University Studies and Executive Director of the School of Individualized Study at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Dr. Hall is the former convener of the Consortium for Innovative Environments in Learning (CIEL) and is a central leader and advocate of innovative and student-centered higher education. We explore the past, present, and future of the bold, innovative, and utopian experiments that shape US higher education.

The NAB is pleased to announce our interview of the eminent Marxian economist and  worker cooperatives advocate Richard D. Wolff. We discuss the macro level economic forces at play because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the failure of our current capitalistic market structures to in any way adequately respond, and what this means for us within higher education as teachers and scholars. Dr. Wolff is the founder of Democracy at Work, an organization dedicated to providing nuanced critiques of capitalism and to promoting democratization of workplaces as a systemic solution to the problem posed by the prevailing capitalist economy.

Welcome back to the NAB Podcast!

Our two part episode today is with our colleague and friend, NAB advisory board member Dr. Leonard Waks. He is an internationally renowned historian and philosopher of higher education, philosopher of technology, pragmatist, process philosopher, and Dewey scholar. In this two part interview, Dr. Waks shares with us a unique perspective on the paradigmatic changes that we are living through today and their implications for higher education.

In the first interview we survey the macro-transformations unleashed by the pandemic and what they mean for us as scholars, philosophers, teachers, and citizens.

In the second interview, we explore how these broader forces are shaping higher education, and what ameliorative opportunities are available for a revitalized higher learning system. In particular, we explore Dewey’s conception of schools as “social centers”, a focal point to serve and solve culture’s most pressing problems, as a template for what higher education can be in the years to come.

As we continue to struggle through these difficult, uncertain, and tragic times globally, it becomes difficult to find our spiritual/moral centers.

In today’s episode, we talked with Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, a process philosopher, theologian, and higher education leader, on spirituality and higher education during the pandemic. We explore questions such as:

We explore these questions and more through the lens of the Jewish wisdom tradition, ending with a reflection on the recent anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

How are the public and civic roles of higher education transforming in response to the current health and economic crises? How do we build opportunities for civic science, that both respects expertise in times of crises, but does not fall into disempowering reliance on hierarchical solutions? How do we as scholars and teachers escape often condescending cynicism and simplification of those who flout basic public health protocols and respect them as fellow citizen-creators?

On this episode we tackle these questions and more with NAB advisor and colleague Harry Boyte, a philosopher, community organizer, citizen scholar, and higher education reformer committed to democracy as a community based way of life. He is the Senior Scholar in Public Work Philosophy at the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg University. He is also the principal and co-founder, along with Marie Strom and Trygve Thronveit, of the Institute for Public Work at Augsburg.

Further, he is the framer of “public work” an action-oriented civic agency approach to civic empowerment, and the founder of Public Achievement, an international civic education and empowerment initiative. His commitment to democratic life and learning began in the 1960s, when he was a Field Secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization headed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and later when he was a community and labor organizer in the South.

How is the pandemic transforming global higher education? How should universities address their respective national crises and contexts, while keeping true to their cosmopolitan mission and ethos? Can they do so while resisting the storm of hyper-nationalism spreading across the globe? How can an ecological model of the university help guide the transformation of higher education?

We explore these questions as part of a philosophy of higher education practice with Dr. Ronald Barnett, the world’s leading master scholar of the university. Dr. Barnett is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at University College London Institute of Education, where he was a Pro-Director and a Dean. He is a past-Chair of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), and was awarded the inaugural prize by the European Association for Educational Research for his “outstanding contribution to Higher Education Research, Policy and Practice.”

He recently has been elected as the inaugural President of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society (PaTHES). He is one of the most important leaders in establishing the philosophy of higher education as a serious field of study. For nearly 40 years, he has been advancing a particular set of ideas, identifying creative concepts and practical principles to transform universities and academic life for the twenty-first century.

As protests spread across the US as a rebellion against police brutality, white supremacy, systematic racism, and fundamentally unjust systems, the freedom of persons of letters, teachers, scholars, students, staff, and other higher education professionals, is all the more essential in order to build toward systemic change in the United States.

In order to address this essential need, on today’s episode we speak with Henry Reichman, Chair of the American Association of University Professor’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. He is one of today’s leading voices defending a broad vision of tenure as the due process rights and job security necessary for higher education to thrive. He has recently published a new book on the subject, The Future of Academic Freedom.

We explore with him the historical meaning of tenure, its relevance today, the work of the AAUP to defend academic freedom, and the future organizing needed for dignified work in higher education.

How has the legacy of state terror and racial genocide shaped higher education in the United States? Given our history, what opportunities exist to support revolutionary organizing work within institutions of higher learning? How do emergent disciplines committed to exploring social reproduction and terrains of struggle – such as Ethnic Studies (and its subfields), Critical Race Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Critical Sociology – navigate knowledge production within educational spaces tied to the legacies of violence, exploitation and white supremacy scholars in those fields endeavor to dismantle?  What role can higher education play in the powerful movement developing to end the violence of policing and to radically reorganize the work that fell under that institution’s jurisdiction? How might a philosophy of PIC (prison industrial complex) abolition inform our pedagogical projects within, against and beyond what remains academic?

In today’s episode, we talk with Dylan Rodriguez on these subjects. Rodriguez is Professor of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and is a founding member of Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association. He continues to work in and alongside various social movements and counter-hegemonic collectives.  He is the author of Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (2006) and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (2009).  His work explores historical logics of racial genocide and how they “permeate our most familiar systems of state violence, cultural production, institutionalized knowledge, liberation struggle, and social identity.”  He is also interested in how people, especially scholars, inhabit racial genocide.

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* Resources mentioned by Prof. Rodriguez during the Podcast:

** James referenced an author who wrote an article about the debate in/over the humanities in the post-interview discussion. Here’s the citation information for that piece:

Are we on the edge of a successful movement for revaluing labor in higher education, or are we doomed to an increasingly slavish situation? The pandemic brings to the forefront the precarity of teachers, researchers, scholars, student workers and staff in higher education, as institutions face financial crises, jobs are cut, and remaining positions are simply not adequate to meet the health and living demands of most, least of all during a public health crisis.

For this special two-part May Day podcast, we talk with Yulia Gilichinskaya and Tony Boardman, active members of the UC Santa Cruz COLA (cost of living adjustment) movement. Yulia, Tony and other graduate students helped organize a wildcat grading strike (using in-person and online organizing tactics) among teaching assistants last fall. The COLA movement has since extended to the broader UC system, with other students and academic workers becoming allies while organizing on their own campuses. Meanwhile, many UCSC strikers have been fired or refused rehire. The union representing graduate student workers across the UC system, UAW Local 2865, is now exploring the potential for a sanctioned unfair labor practice strike.

In part 1, carried out several months ago, we talked with Yulia and Tony about the origins of the COLA movement, the emergence of the wildcat in Santa Cruz, and the successful use of online organizing tactics in conjunction with direct, collective action on UCSC campus.

In part 2, carried out recently, we discuss where the movement is today, in light of the pandemic, the build-up toward an ostensibly impending ULP strike, and what prospects exist for organizing in higher education and beyond.

The movement against the systematic racism and police violence that brutalizes black people (especially men) has catalyzed in the last few weeks in response to the murders of George Floyd (and Breonna Taylor). Many in the academy have heralded this as a moment to incite revolutionary change in our society. Yet all too often we turn a blind eye to ways in which our own discourses (even supposedly anti-racist ones) mask the ways we participate in practices that perpetuate the erasure of black voices and bodies in our own academic communities and institutions. In particular, US liberal arts colleges have been all too often prone to creating a hostile environment for black men in both discourse and practice.

Today we discuss this deeply problematic situation with Tommy Curry, a leader and founder of Black Male Studies (BMS). BMS creates a much needed space to theorize about racially subjugated males and to build places for interdisciplinary scholars devoted to the subject in the academy, especially black scholars (and other scholars of color) in the field who find all too little support and mentorship for their work. Curry has co-launched the first book series in the field with Temple University Press. He is also the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press 2017), which won the 2018 American Book Award, and of Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of Racial Empire (SUNY Press 2018).

In the podcast, we explore the limitations of academic discourse, including what it misses in the current movement against racist police brutality and white supremacy, and what it misses about its own communities and the way it structural dismisses the experiences of black men. Curry provides us insight into how BMS built a field that respects and draws on these experiences and provides the mentorship and resources to cultivate, support, and mentor black scholars and teachers.