Episode 129: Higher Ed 'Crisis' with Asheesh Kapur Siddique and Joe Darda

Asheesh Kapur Siddique is Assistant Professor of History at UMASS Amherst where he studies the British Empire between the 17th and Early 19th centuries. He is the author of the manuscript The Experience of the Archive: Knowledge and the Making of the Early Modern British Empire (currently under contract with Yale University Press). His public-facing work has appeared in outlets such as The Daily Beast, Inside Higher Ed,and Teen Vogue.

Joe Darda is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University where he studies post-1945 American literature, culture and politics. He is the author of three books on the reconfiguration of race in the age of civil rights: The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism (Stanford University Press, 2022), How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America (University of California Press, 2021), and Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War (University of Chicago Press, 2019). With the historian Amira Rose Davis, he coedited a 2023 special issue of American Quarterly titled “The Body Issue: Sports and the Politics of Embodiment.”

In this conversation, Asheesh, Joe, and Nathan unpack what it means to talk about higher education in 'crisis' today. We discuss how athletic department exploitation has served as a model for the university writ large, the ghastly restructuring and cuts at major public US universities, administrative bloat, artificial intelligence, the value of the humanities, and so much more.

 

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