Eleanor Goldfield & Mickey Huff host this week’s program. This week, the violation and capitulation of higher education.
First up, I sit down with Zachary Levenson to talk about the war on sociology and what happens when the academic governing body deems all existing sociology textbooks illegal to teach in the state of Florida. Zach highlights the purposefully vague verbiage of new policies, the anti-intellectualism fueling them, and why educators must never self-censor or comply in advance.
Next up, cohost Mickey Huff sits down with Nolan Higdon to talk about his latest book MAGAcademy on how corporatism paved the way for the hostile takeover of Higher Ed. Nolan discusses the neoliberalization of academia, the purposeful devaluing of professors and treatment of students as customers that all predate the current attacks on higher ed. Nolan also warns of the dangers of compliance in advance and the smooth rhetoric of corporate takeovers wrapped in social justice ideologies.
Notes:
Zachary Levenson is associate professor of sociology at Florida International University. He is the author of the award-winning book Delivery as Dispossession (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Nolan Higdon is a political analyst, author, host of The Disinfo Detox Podcast, lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Project Censored National Judge. Higdon’s areas of concentration include critical AI literacy, podcasting, digital culture, news media history & propaganda, and critical media literacy.
