Programming Note: Darts and Letters is off. We are producing a new season on Cited Podcast, which is called “the Rationality Wars“.

Not a Safe Space: The Politics of Academia

  • Thumbnail for EP46: School Scams (ft. Derek Robertson & Gavin Moodie)

    EP46: School Scams (ft. Derek Robertson & Gavin Moodie)

    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. 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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  • Thumbnail for EP36: Koch Block My Campus (ft. James L. Turk & Jasmine Banks)

    EP36: Koch Block My Campus (ft. James L. Turk & Jasmine Banks)

    Right wing money in academia is pervasive and influential. Libertarian-minded billionaires like the Kochs and their partners have funded scholars and think tanks across the US, and similar things go on in Canada too. On this episode of Darts and Letters, we explore big money and its corrosive influence on academic freedom and academic integrity.
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  • Thumbnail for EP35: The Bland Corporation (ft. Daniel Bessner)

    EP35: The Bland Corporation (ft. Daniel Bessner)

    There’s a foreign policy intellectual blob that serves as the architects for empire. They’re at academic departments, quasi-academic think tanks, and places like the RAND Corporation–famously lampooned in Dr. Strangelove as the BLAND Corporation. On this episode, host Gordon Katic speaks with Daniel Bessner about how the ideas and ideology of the technocratic national security state came to be, who carries them, and how the defense-intellectual complex keeps it standing from the media to quasi-academic think tanks to academic departments and beyond.
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  • EP32: Academic Disaster Capitalism (w/Gary Rhoades)

    School’s back. Alongside the usual challenges of managing college and university life comes sorting out how to keep people on campus safe during the Covid-19 pandemic. On this episode of Darts and Letters, we speak with Gary Rhoades, professor at the College of Education at the University of Arizona and former general secretary of the American Association of University Professors about academic capitalism, rising resistance to it, and how the pandemic has changed the story. Or not.
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  • Summer Bonus EP: Decolonizing Marxism (w/Boaventura de Sousa Santos)

    On this summer bonus episode of Darts and Letters, we speak with Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a global Marxist thinker, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra (Portugal), and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He argues for a contemporary, decolonial Marxism that operates on a deeper conception of power and oppression that includes analyses of colonialism, gender, and race across borders.
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