American Campus Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Believe it or not, an English degree is still worth pursuing in a capitalist economy, even if one is not independently wealthy! Of this we can be hopeful according to a new book called Major Trade-offs by Corey Moss-Pech.

References mentioned this episode:

• Corey Moss-Pech. 2025. Major Trade-offs: The Surprising Truths about College Majors & Entry-Level Jobs. University of Chicago Press.
• Robert Penn Warren. 1946. All the King’s Men.
• Jesmyn Ward books
• Maya Angelou books
• Harry Crews. 1978. Childhood: The Biography of a Place.
• Library of America Complete Novels of William Faulkner
• Corey Moss’s Pech’s website, Bluesky, and Twitter

Get in touch! Have a question for the host or a guest? A comment? Feedback? Want to request a topic or pitch an episode? Email Lauren at shephell@iu.edu

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Jennifer Leigh discusses the academy's struggle to accommodate learners and workers with disabilities, mental health challenges, and neurodivergences--especially since the Covid-19 pandemic. We talk about how US ed-tech companies take advantage of disability and mental health accommodations to exploit student and faculty intellectual property.

References mentioned this episode:

• Jennifer Leigh’s faculty page
• Nicole Brown and Jennifer Leigh, eds. 2024. Ableism in Academia: Theorising Experiences of Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses in Higher Education. UCL Press.
• Paul Novosad, Sam Asher, Catriona Farquharson, and Eni Iljazi. October 2024. Access to Opportunity in the Sciences: Evidence from the Nobel Laureates. 
• Torsten Bell. December 7, 2024. “The Science Behind Winning a Nobel Prize? Being a Man from a Wealthy Family.” The Guardian.
• Octavia Butler books

Get in touch! Have a question for the host or a guest? A comment? Feedback? Want to request a topic or pitch an episode? Email Lauren at shephell@iu.edu

Follow American Campus Podcast!
on Patreon: www.patreon.com/americancampuspodcast
on Bluesky: @americancampus.bsky.social

Alexa in the dorm room. ProctorU monitoring exams. TurnItIn helping* faculty grade. Tech services are omnipresent on and off campus, and they come with a cost. Lindsay Weinberg offers a critical analysis of today's Smart Universities.

• Lindsay Weinberg. 2025. Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age. Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Tamara Kneese. January 27, 2021. "How a Dead Professor is Teaching a University Art History Class." Slate.
• Sonel Cutler. March 29, 2024. "Graduate Students Went on Strike. Then a Dean Suggested That Professors Use AI to Keep Classes Going." The Chronicle of Higher Education.
• Alex Hanna and Emily Bender. 2025. The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. Haper Collins.
• Callum Cant, James Muldoon, and Mark Graham. 2024. Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering AI. Bloomsbury.
• Keep up with Purdue University’s Tech Justice Lab.

Get in touch! Have a question for the host or a guest? A comment? Feedback? Want to request a topic or pitch an episode? Email Lauren at shephell@iu.edu

Follow American Campus Podcast!
on Patreon: www.patreon.com/americancampuspodcast
on Bluesky: @americancampus.bsky.social

In 1926, an NYU professor took to the high seas with 500 undergraduates on a worldwide learning voyage. The experimental "Floating University" docked for excursions at nearly 50 ports, where students were introduced to world leaders Mussolini, Gandhi, and others. Tamson Pietsch recounts the endeavor, unpacking the larger story of US intellectual imperialism in the 1920s.

• Tamson Pietsch. 2023. The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge. University of Chicago Press. 
• Ross L. Jones, James Waghorne, and Marcia Langton, eds. 2024. Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne. Melbourne University Press.

Get in touch! Have a question for the host or a guest? A comment? Feedback? Want to request a topic or pitch an episode? Email Lauren at shephell@iu.edu

Follow American Campus Podcast!
on Patreon: www.patreon.com/americancampuspodcast
on Bluesky: @americancampus.bsky.social

Huey Long, Louisiana's notorious Depression-era governor and rumored presidential challenger to FDR, doesn't get enough recognition for his role in the expansion of LSU's campus throughout the 1930s. Listen as Bob Mann recounts Long's legacy at Kingfish U.

• Robert Mann. 2023. Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU. Louisiana State University Press. 
• Check out Robert Mann's other works
• Read Robert Mann on Substack
• Follow Robert Mann on Bluesky
• Browse Niall Williams’s novels 

Get in touch! Have a question for the host or a guest? A comment? Feedback? Want to request a topic or pitch an episode? Email Lauren at shephell@iu.edu

Follow American Campus Podcast!
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on Bluesky: @americancampus.bsky.social

Kendell Gerdes unpacks popular depictions of "sensitive" students throughout the 2010s. She tackles safe spaces, trigger warnings, #BlackOnCampus, and other student calls for accessibility over the last few years, showing how these matters are not in opposition to faculty academic freedom.

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Kendall Gerdes. 2024. Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism. University of Pittsburgh Press. (Use code 29GERDES30 for 30% off)
• Follow Kendall Gerdes on BlueSky
• Bradford Vivian. 2022. Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education. Oxford University Press. 
• Bradford Vivian’s Substack, Campus Information

Get in touch! Have a question for the host or a guest? A comment? Feedback? Want to request a topic or pitch an episode? Email Lauren at shephell@iu.edu

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This is Part II of an earlier discussion with Mike Collins about Supreme Court affirmative action cases affecting higher education, including Lau (1974), Bakke (1978), Fisher (2016), and Students for Fair Admissions (2023). For more, check out Collin's recent book, The Anti-Civil Rights Movement: Affirmative Action as Wedge and Weapon. 

• Mike Steven Collins. 2024. The Anti-Civil Rights Movement: Affirmative Action as Wedge and Weapon. University Press of Kansas.
• Listen to Part I here

Get in touch! Have a question for the host or a guest? A comment? Feedback? Want to request a topic or pitch an episode? Email Lauren at shephell@iu.edu

Follow American Campus Podcast!
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on Bluesky: @americancampus.bsky.social

This is Part I of a two-part interview with Mike Collins about Supreme Court affirmative action cases affecting higher education, including Bakke (1978), Fisher (2016), and Students for Fair Admissions (2023). For more, check out Collin's recent book, The Anti-Civil Rights Movement: Affirmative Action as Wedge and Weapon. 

• Mike Steven Collins. 2024. The Anti-Civil Rights Movement: Affirmative Action as Wedge and Weapon. University Press of Kansas.
• Heather McGhee. 2022. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. Penguin Random House.
• David W. Congdon. 2024. Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture. Cambridge University Press.
• Mary Anne Franks. 2024. Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment. Bold Type Books.
• James Marcus. 2024. Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Princeton University Press.
• Michael S. Collins. 2013. Understanding Etheridge Knight. University of South Carolina Press.
• Michael S. Collins. 2013. The Travelling Queen. Sheep Meadow Press. 
• Michael Collins. "’Tight Like This,’ recorded 1928, Chicago, Illinois.” The Rupture.
• Listen to Part II here

Get in touch! Have a question for the host or a guest? A comment? Feedback? Want to request a topic or pitch an episode? Email Lauren at shephell@iu.edu

Follow American Campus Podcast!
on Patreon: www.patreon.com/americancampuspodcast
on Bluesky: @americancampus.bsky.social

The ICE disappearance of Columbia student protestor Mahmoud Khalil in March 2025 followed in the wake of Trump's promise to deport campus activists. But 50 years ago, the Carter administration set the stage for student deportations. Will Teague discusses the history of presidential threats to deport student dissenters, beginning with the Carter administration's attacks against Iranian international students in the 1970s.

• Will Teague. 2024. Resistance/Rise: Iranian Student Activism in the Late 1970s US. History of Education Quarterly. 
• Reza Aslan. 2022. An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville. W. W. Norton. 
• Timothy Snyder. 2024. On Freedom. Penguin Random House.
• Will Teague. 2018. “Hostages of the Crisis: Iranian Students in Arkansas, 1979-1981.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 77(2): 113–30. 

Get in touch! Have a question for the host or a guest? A comment? Feedback? Want to request a topic or pitch an episode? Email Lauren at shephell@iu.edu

Follow American Campus Podcast!
on Patreon: www.patreon.com/americancampuspodcast
on Bluesky: @americancampus.bsky.social

Abercrombie and Fitch is back, millennials and gen x-ers! Ethan Lascity takes us for a walk down memory lane in a discussion ofLegally Blonde, Drumline, Van Wilder, and other college movies of the aughts.

• Myles Ethan Lascity. 2024. The Abercrombie Age: Millennial Aspiration and the Promise of Consumer Culture. University of North Carolina Press. https://uncpress.org/book/9781469680910/the-abercrombie-age/ 
• Lyz Lenz. 2024. This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life. Penguin.  https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/704120/this-american-ex-wife-by-lyz-lenz/ 
• Taylor Lorenz. 2023. Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. Simon and Schuster. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Extremely-Online/Taylor-Lorenz/9781982146863 
• Follow Ethan Lascity on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram 

Get in touch! Have a question for the host or a guest? A comment? Feedback? Want to request a topic or pitch an episode? Email Lauren at shephell@iu.edu

Follow American Campus Podcast!
on Patreon: www.patreon.com/americancampuspodcast
on Bluesky: @americancampus.bsky.social