The Public Sphere

Today we are discussing the head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt.

His tenure has been controversial. He has been in the news for potential ethics violations regarding airline fares. There have been odd details about personal security and a lack of transparency. Environmentalists have voiced concerns about policy process and changes that have occurred under his orders.

Pruitt is, by all accounts, deeply religious and in this episode we'll try to connect the dots between his faith and environmental policy.

• Ralph Drollinger, "Coming to Grips with the Religion of Environmentalism," Capitol Ministries (April 2, 2018).
• Katherine Stewart, "A Christian Nationalist Blitz," New York Times (May 26, 2018).
• Jeremy Pierce, "Dominionismists," First Things (August 14, 2011).
• Scott Pruitt at the Federalist Society.
• Steve Eder, "Scott Pruitt Before the E.P.A.," New York Times (April 21, 2018).
• Scott Pruitt & Luther Strange, "The Climate-Change Gang," National Review (May 17, 2016).
• Margaret Talbot, "Scott Pruitt's Dirty Politics," New Yorker (April 2, 2018).
• Umair Irfan, "Scott Pruitt is slowly strangling the EPA," Vox.com (March 8, 2018).

On the show today, Pete talks to Samantha Parsons, a co-founder of Unkoch My Campus and Transparent GMU. These organizations expose the influence The Charles Koch foundation on colleges and universities throughout the United States.

In a recent episode of The Public Sphere, Pete and I discussed the lawsuit brought by Transparent GMU against the George Mason University Foundation, the fundraising arm of the school. We’ll get an update on that lawsuit and talk the problem of “dark money” from a national perspective.

Samantha Parsons is a grassroots campaign organizer and co-founder of UnKoch My Campus. She provides students, faculty, and other university stakeholders with the support needed to investigate, expose, and launch strategic grassroots campaigns to address undue donor manipulation of their campuses. She is a 2016 alumna of George Mason University with a degree in Conflict Analysis and Resolution. As a student, she supported the growth of campus activism throughout the state of Virginia as a member of the Virginia Student Environmental Coalition and the Virginia Student Power Network. Her research interests include university policy development, institutional funding models, the role of the academy in a democratic society, and critical conflict resolution.

• UnKoch My Campus: http://www.unkochmycampus.org/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UnKochMyCampus/
• Twitter: @UnKochCampus
• Petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/demand-president-cabrera-release-all-donor-agreements-to-faculty
• To Donate to UnKoch My Campus: https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/help-expose-the-koch-brothers-and-protect-our-universities

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review.

Visit www.contrivers.org to read great essays and interviews. You can also sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or like our Facebook page. If you have a suggestion for the podcast, or an essay or review you'd like to pitch, get in touch with us through social media or email.

The Public Sphere is on iTunes where you can rate and review us. Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.

Thanks for listening.

Pete talks to Kate Doyle Griffiths about the teachers' strike in West Virginia and her article in Viewpoint Magazine.

Kate is a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center in the department of Anthropology. She writes about work, women and queers, strikes and social reproduction, health and healthcare in the USA and South Africa. She is a member of Red Bloom, and an organizer with the International Women’s Strike. Here's a link to Kate’s Patreon page.

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review. The Public Sphere is on iTunes where you can rate and review us. Visit www.contrivers.org to read great essays and interviews. You can also sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or like our Facebook page. Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon. If you have a suggestion for the podcast, or an essay or review you'd like to pitch, get in touch with us through social media or email.

Free speech is a core tenet of our democratic and academic systems. But as in politics, universities are increasingly under siege by large donors carrying bags of cash. What do billions of dollars entitle you to? Does it entitle you to shape what is taught and researched at a public university? How can you tell when or if ideology is subverting core institutional values?

These are the questions at the heart of controversies over the Charles Koch Foundation donating millions of dollars to US universities. The spirit of the questions also applies to other billionaires making donations like Phil Knight or George Soros, but the Charles Koch Foundation has stirred more controversy in part because of the lack of transparency around many of these donations and the strings that have come attached to the money, such as influence in faculty hiring, scholarship and fellowship awards, and curriculum decisions. They’ve also drawn attention because some feel that the far-right ideology of Koch funded “university-based research centers” may be itself be so extreme as to cast doubt on the scholarly validity of the research it produces and teaches.

We’ll be talking mainly about George Mason University today. GMU is a public university in northern VA that has received $95.5 million of that $142 million donated by Charles Koch Foundation since 2005. On Tuesday, April 24 a student group on campus, Transparent GMU went to trial against the GMU and their fundraising arm, The George Mason University Foundation to release documents under the FOIA. While that case is still undecided, documents detailing the donor agreements were released, providing us with direct evidence that the Kochs dictated hiring and other academic policies, which GMU is now admitting.

• Jane Mayer interviewed on NPR Fresh Air.
• Jane Mayer at Stanford University.

Today Pete and Luke are discussing John Dickerson's argument in May issue of The Atlantic that the modern presidency is too unwieldy for any individual to succeed. Implicitly he is pushing back against the idea that Trump's personality is ill-fitted to the job: Anyone would be overwhelmed by the office, he thinks.

This week, we’re talking about A Kingdom of Dust, by Mark Arax. This long-form article was published in California Sunday Magazine in late January. It’s a long winding lyrical account of the largest grower of almonds, pistachios, and pomegranate in the country. You would probably recognize the Wonderful brand from the bottles of pom juice you seen in the grocery store or Fiji water.

This is a story of a tycoon of American agri-business, the rights to California’s scarcest resource, water, the company town of Lost Hills and the workers who live there, and the role of philanthropy in providing what are usually public services.

Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.

• Brian Schatz, "California’s Housing Crisis Is So Bad, Families Are Squatting Abandoned Homes Just to Survive," MotherJones (March/April 2018).
• Clair Potter, "How to learn from Conservatives," Public Seminar (April 18, 2018).
• Ronan Farrow, "Inside Rex Tillerson’s Ouster," The New Yorker (April 19, 2018).
• Mark Arax, "A Kingdom from Dust," California Sunday Magazine (January 31, 2018).
• "Drought by the Numbers," KCET.org .
• Map of the Central Valley.

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers' Review.

Visit www.contrivers.org to read great essays and interviews. You can also sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or like our Facebook page. If you have a suggestion for the podcast, or an essay or review you'd like to pitch, get in touch with us through social media or email.

The Public Sphere is on iTunes where you can rate and review us.

Thanks for listening.

Joining us today is Sean Guillory, who teaches in the Russian and East European Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Sean has a Ph.D. in History from UCLA. He is the host of the Sean's Russia Blog Podcast, a weekly conversation on Eurasian politics, history, and culture. You can follow him on Twitter at @seansrussiablog and support him through Patreon.

Sean recently wrote a great essay for Contrivers' Review on the Russian Revolution. When I approached him for the piece, my idea was to get a meta-review:  a discussion of all the takes on the Russian Revolution — a timely but controversial topic. What we got was a richer critique of how writers in general mistreat the Russian Revolution. In some ways, any history of a revolution might fall prey to these errors. But America's long history with Russia, Marxism, and anti-communism makes our reading of the Russian Revolution particularly vulnerable.

• Sean Guillory, "Making Sense of the Russian Revolution," Contrivers' Review.
• Baskar Sunkara, "The Few Who Won," Jacobin.
• Sheila Fitzpatrick, "What's Left?" London Review of Books.
• Vladimir Tismaneanu, "One Hundred Years of Communism," Public Seminar.
• Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain (University of California Press, 1997).
• Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Havard University Press, 2009).
• Reds (1981).
• Edmund Wilson, To The Finland Station (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).
• Lars T. Lih, Lenin (Reaktion Books, 2012).
• Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd (Belknap Press, 2017)
• Mark Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017)
• China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (Verso, 2017).
• Mikhail Zygar, All the Kremlin's Men (PublicAffairs, 2017).

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers' Review.

Visit www.contrivers.org to read great essays and interviews. You can also sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or like our Facebook page. If you have a suggestion for the podcast, or an essay or review you'd like to pitch, get in touch with us through social media or email. The Public Sphere is on iTunes where you can rate and review us.

Thanks for listening.

Our cover art a modified version of a photo from the Fonds André Cros, preserved by the city archives of Toulouse and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license by the deliberation n°27.3 of June 23rd, 2017 of the Town Council of the City of Toulouse.

This week we are talking about Facebook and the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Since the story broke, it's morphed several times. At first we feared the manipulation of public opinion using "Big Data." Then public opinion seemed shocked at how much data Facebook was keeping and potentially reselling. Feeling suddenly vulnerable, people asked, "Why didn't we know this?"

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said to CNN (March 21, 2018) that he wasn't sure Facebook shouldn't be regulated, it set off a another wave of punditry:  on privacy, data, social media, and democracy.

We also take a few minutes to discuss the ouster of David Shulkin at the department of Veteran's Affairs and the hiring of John Bolton as National Security Advisor.

• Charlie Warzel, "Facebook Has Had Countless Privacy Scandals. But This One Is Different." Buzzfeed.
• Matthew Yglesias, "The case against Facebook," Vox.com.
• "Is Facebook Bad?" The Weeds podcast from Vox.com.
• Eliana Johnson, "John Bolton's knife-fighting skills alarm his critics," Politico.
• Mike Allen and Johathan Swan, "How to survive in Trumpland," Axios.

Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review. Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.

Today we’re talking to Wesley Bishop, a PhD candidate in History at Purdue University. His writings have appeared at Jacobin, The Socialist Worker, and TERSE, where he is the assistant editor. He is also a campus organizer with the Purdue Social Justice Coalition.

In late April of 2017, Purdue University in West Lafeyette, Indiana, announced plans to acquire Kaplan University—an online, for profit school—its 15 campuses and learning centers, and its 32,000 students and 3,000 employees. The ostensible was to expand their presence in online education. They plan to continue running Kaplan online as a private company with a different name.  This is a unique situation for a lot of reasons which we get into during our discussion.

We also discuss the West Virginia teachers' strike and revisit the essay Wes wrote for Contrivers' Review last fall.

Visit www.contrivers.org to read great essays and interviews. You can also sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or like our Facebook page. If you have a suggestion for the podcast, or an essay or review you'd like to pitch, get in touch with us through social media or email.

The Public Sphere is on iTunes where you can rate and review us.

Thanks for listening.

Hi and welcome to THE PUBLIC SPHERE from Contrivers' Review. I'm Luke Mergner joined by Pete Sinnott at our "studio" — in air quotes — in Glendale, CA.

Two weeks ago we discussed the collective autobiography, Quit Lit, documenting the mass exodus of non-tenured faculty from Higher Education to a depressed and depressing job market. Today, we're talking about Ron Srigley's "Whose University is it anyway?" — a diatribe about the balance of power between administrators and professors in the modern university. As educators at every level face funding crunches, how does the growing administrative bloat in higher education serve the students?