Episoder
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“The SJP doesn't have tunnels under our universities like Hamas has tunnels under Gaza,” ADL director Jonathan Greenblatt tells The Syllabus. “But they were clearly organizing and preparing in a way that really took us by surprise, and I regret that that happened.” In this week's episode of The Syllabus, Greenblatt reflects on the events following October 7 on our college campuses, the ADL's efforts in assessing and improving campus safety for Jewish students, and how the conversation surrounding free speech has evolved.
Guest Bio: Jonathan Greenblatt is CEO of ADL (the Anti-Defamation League). Greenblatt joined ADL in 2015 after serving as a special assistant to President Obama. He joined the government after a career in business as a social entrepreneur and corporate executive. In 2022, he published his first book, It Could Happen Here: Why America is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable—And How We Can Stop It.
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“The modes by which we transmit these beliefs and values are not just like we walk into the room, and we announce, ‘You only get an A if you write a paper that conforms with my preferred worldview,’” says Connecticut College philosopher Simon Feldman. In this week’s episode of The Syllabus, Feldman and his colleague Afshan Jafar join Mark Oppenheimer to talk about what professors’ politics should and should not mean in the classroom—and how the right, they feel, has distorted the topic.
Guest Bios:
Afshan Jafar: Afshan Jafar is the chair of the sociology department at Connecticut College. Professor Jafar was the 2021 recipient of the Helen B. Regan Faculty Leadership Award, the 2015 recipient of the Feminist Activism Award, and the 2014 recipient of the Helen at Connecticut College at Connecticut College . She is the author of Women’s NGO’s in Pakistan and her public scholarship has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, LA Review of Books, Inside Higher Ed, and Ms. Magazine, among others.
Simon Feldman: Simon Feldman is an associate professor of philosophy at Connecticut College. Feldman received the Connecticut College 2010 John S. King Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching.
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Manglende episoder?
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“The system of elite education, which I can define at greater lengths is making kids miserable, and it's producing an elite class that's wrecking the country,” says best-selling author and essayist Bill Deresiewicz in this week’s episode of The Syllabus. Syllabus host Mark Oppenheimer discusses topics in Deresiewicz’s book Excellent Sheep, including societal pressures to attend elite colleges, overwhelming careerism, admissions competition, and increasing inequality in access to education.
Guest Bio: William Deresiewicz is an essayist, critic, speaker, and author of the best-seller Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. Formerly a Yale and Columbia English professor, Deresiewicz transitioned to full-time writing and has taught or lectured at schools including Bard, Scripps, Claremont McKenna, and the University of San Diego. Deresiewicz is also active with Tivnu: Building Justice and Project Wayfinder, promoting social justice and purpose-based learning.
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“Our position is you don't need test scores and that individual schools should develop admissions policies that reflect the type of kids they want to recruit and the mission that they have,” says FairTest’s public education director Bob Schaeffer in this week’s episode of The Syllabus. Syllabus host Mark Oppenheimer and Bob Schaeffer discuss the evolution of college admissions testing, the recent trend towards test-optional policies, and whether high school records and holistic evaluations are better predictors of college success than standardized tests.
Guest Bio: Schaeffer is the public education director of FairTest and a member of its board of directors. He is the author of Standardized Tests and Teacher Competence and co-authored many FairTest publications, including Sex Bias in College Admissions Tests: How Women Lose Out. He holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from MIT.
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“The most important project, the most important mission, is to form our young men and women to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers,” says Princeton’s McCormick Professorship of Jurisprudence Robert P. George in this week’s episode of The Syllabus. Syllabus host Mark Oppenheimer and Professor George discuss the dual mandate of religiously affiliated universities, concerns about the lack of ideological diversity among faculty, and the decline of humanities departments and liberal colleges.
Guest Bio: Bio: Robert P. George is the McCormick Professorship of Jurisprudence and director of the University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton. He is a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund, and Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.
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“You’re going to have to be defending people, sometimes publicly, for saying stuff that you find abhorrent and that you hate. But that’s the gig.” says Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy at FIRE, on this week’s episode of The Syllabus. Mark Oppenheimer digs deep with free speech defender extraordinaire Alex Morey, as they discuss the chilling effect of fear and censorship on college campuses—and what the law really has to say.
Guest Bio: Alex Morey is an attorney and a journalist who leads FIRE’s Campus Rights Advocacy program, a team of attorneys and advocates. Morey is a member of the First Amendment Lawyers Association. She has a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School and a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, and has trained at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She attended the University of Arizona in her hometown of Tucson, majoring in journalism and French and graduating with honors. She was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Madagascar, where she taught English in rural, underserved schools.
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“I'll say whatever I want to say, under reasonable standards, and if they want to fire me for saying that there’s systemic racism in the U. S. housing market, then fine,” says economist, legal scholar, and professor Neil Buchanan in this week's episode of The Syllabus. Are UF professors fleeing the state? Is it harder to recruit new professors? Syllabus host Mark Oppenheimer asks Buchanan these tough questions, after Buchanan’s decision to leave the UF.
Guest Bio: Neil H. Buchanan is a legal scholar and an economist. He is currently on sabbatical leave from the University of Florida and is a visiting professor at both Osgoode Hall Law School and the University of Toronto. He teaches tax law and writes about a range of issues, from intergenerational justice to the possible demise of democracy in the US and elsewhere.
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“You may be right that if we bend over and tell Chris Ruffo to hit us in the ass, that he won't really hit us that hard next time, because we're being so nice and bend over for him,” says Wesleyan president Michael Roth, discussing the famed anti-DEI crusader in this week’s episode of The Syllabus. “But I actually don't think that’s true.” Syllabus podcast host Mark Oppenheimer gets Roth to open up about legacy preferences, academic bias in college athletics, artificial intelligence, the history of the student, and recent controversies surrounding Claudine Gay and plagiarism in academia.
Guest Bio: Michael S. Roth became president of Wesleyan University in 2007. He has published several books, the most recent being The Student, A Short History.
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“Whether it's parents or alums or current students or faculty, everyone wants us to figure out how do you stop people from saying things that they don't agree with,” says the president of Mount Holyoke College, Danielle Holley, in this week's episode of The Syllabus. Holley and Oppenheimer discuss the complexities of defining hate speech versus protected free speech, as well as the intrusive nature of technology on campus. “I've had students who told me they want to study, but they can’t put down their phones,” Holley says. Holley offers her predictions for how the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ban will affect recruitment of minorities. And they talk about what it means to be a “women’s college” in an age when there are self-identified men on campus.
Guest Bio: Danielle R. Holley is president of Mount Holyoke College. She served as dean of the School of Law at Howard University (2014 - 2023) prior to joining Mount Holyoke. She attended Yale College and Harvard Law School and clerked for Judge Carl E. Steward on the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
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“So what upsets me about all the protesting, right? Leave aside my political views. It's making it really hard for people to learn,” says Georgetown professor Jacques Berlinerblau in this week’s episode of The Syllabus. “People that don't even know what's going on are being told, ‘Pick a side, man,’ and if they don't pick a side, their social life, like cascading dominoes, starts to veer off into another direction.”
Berlinerblau worries that the prevalence of protests might impede the educational experience by pressuring students to take sides, potentially stifling learning opportunities. But Berlinerblau says the answer is not shutting down protests altogether, saying “It’d probably be a really bad idea for us to try and shut the lid on their anger and their rage categorically as a rule of entrance to the university,” and calls for a reevaluation of how protests impact the learning atmosphere and the need for universities to balance free speech with their institutional missions.
Guest Bio: Jacques Berlinerblau is a professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University.
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“So at the higher education level, in colleges and universities, ethnic studies pedagogy actually doesn't align with K-12 education code,” says Brandy Shufutinsky, the director of education and community engagement at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, in this week’s episode of The Syllabus podcast. “At the college level, you're allowed to bring in a certain level of biases, while K-12 education code says a teacher can't.” Brandy initially welcomed the idea of expanding history curricula to include ethnic studies. However, her excitement waned as she discovered the heavy ideological underpinnings within the curriculum, lacking in historical substance.
Mark Oppenheimer and Brandy Shufutinsky discuss concepts like the “four eyes of oppression,” the clash between college-level ethnic studies pedagogy and K-12 education, the influence of activist groups in shaping the curriculum, and the need for an inclusive, unbiased curriculum that fosters learning over activism.
Guest Bio: Brandy Shufutinsky is the director of education and community engagement at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values. She holds a doctorate in education from the University of San Francisco in international and multicultural education and has her master’s in social work from the University of Southern California.
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The ethnic studies model curriculum has been at the center of controversy in California since its proposal in March 2021. After two years of drafting and heated debate, the State Board of Education adopted an ethnic studies model curriculum that primarily focuses on the untold “histories, cultures, struggles, and contributions” of Black, Latino, Native American, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. However, does a class that singles out only a handful of ethnic minorities in America truly serve our diverse country?
“It's not meant to be just a history class,” says Laura Roberts, vice chair of the Equity Task Force at Vacaville Unified, in this week's episode of The Syllabus podcast. “It's meant to be some of those empowering pieces of culture, of family, of community base. We're giving power to those voices that never had it before. So, there is going to be that scholarship mixed in, and again, what I say is I'm not to tell you whether it's right or wrong, your feelings, your experiences is going to shape what you believe...”.
Mark Oppenheimer and Laura Roberts discuss the parameters of the ethnic studies model curriculum, what classes will be lost to make room for this new required course, how grading a class based on personal experience can get tricky, and more.
Guest Bio: Laura Roberts is a social studies teacher in Vacaville, Cal., where she is the founder of a high school equity team. She currently serves as a board member for the Ida B. Wells Education Project.
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“I think at Hillel, we've hosted more Palestinian speakers than any organization on any campus, including [from] Palestinian rights organizations, because we do want to create opportunities for Jewish students and other students to understand Israel, including all the communities within and around Israel,” says Adam Lehman, CEO of Hillel International, on this week's episode of The Syllabus podcast. “However,” he continues, “we wouldn't host, a Palestinian speaker coming from an organization that was bent on the destruction of Israel.”
Hillel’s reach has doubled in the last year and will engage a record number of 200,000 students in the year 2023, but does Hillel’s new motto “All Kinds of Jewish” include messianic Jews and Jewish Voices for Peace? Lehman speaks with Mark Oppenheimer on the positives and the negatives of this drastic uptick in student engagement; the tricky matter of donor retention; how to handle students on the political left and right;, the future of Hillel with interfaith marriages on the rise; and Hillel’s role in Ukraine.
Bio: Adam Lehman is the president and CEO of Hillel International, the largest Jewish student organization in the world, serving more than 850 college and university campuses in the U.S. and 16 other countries. Adam worked as a lawyer and executive, including at AOL. A graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Law School, Lehman joined Hillel several years ago.
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Robert Vitalis, a political scientist at Penn, is a man caught in the middle.
He has spent most of his career identified with the left, and with Palestinian rights. And on this week's podcast episode, Vitalis defends the Palestine Writes conference, held in September 2023 at his university, against charges that it was antisemitic. He also decries donor meddling, and says candidly that Penn president “Liz McGill threw the academic mission” of the university “under the bus.”
On the other hand, since the attacks of October 7, Vitalis has insisted to his friends on the left that they grapple with the crimes of Hamas—which has upset the very leftists who agree with him about Palestinians’ rights. “I've insisted over and over again that folks have to wrestle with the fact that Hamas committed these atrocities,”
Vitalis tells host Mark Oppenheimer in this episode of The Syllabus.
He also believes that “the massive retaliation by Israel” was “one of the things that [Hamas] wished for, in that it intended for Palestinian civilians to die …. By saying that over and over again, I've been accused of blood libels against the Palestinian people.” As a result, Vitalis has lost friends on both sides of the political aisle. And now this free-speech absolutist is seeking early retirement.
Guest Bio: Robert Vitalis has taught political science at the University of Pennsylvania since 1999. His newest book, Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy, was published in 2020.
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Ivy League scandals seem a dime a dozen these days, but New York Times columnist David French believes that the worst scandal in American higher education isn’t in the Ivy League. David French joins host Mark Oppenheimer to discuss the moral collapse at Liberty University and other Christian institutions of higher education, turning Christian theology on its head.
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“At one point [President Salovey] copped to being a Zionist”—that’s according to Evan Morris, a Yale professor, telling Syllabus podcast host Mark Oppenheimer about his meeting with Yale president Peter Salovey to demand that the university come out more forcefully against Hamas. But what does it matter if the Yale president is a Zionist? For that matter, who cares what university presidents think about politics? Apparently, the answer is: everyone. In the past few weeks, administrators have been called on as never before to come out with forceful political statements. In episode 3 of The Syllabus, Oppenheimer presses Morris, an outspoken faculty activist, on why it matters what university presidents think. In this candid conversation, they talk about DEI, antisemitism, Jews, double standards, and much more.
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Meet Raphi Gold, a Gen Z’er without social media, or even a smartphone. She’s unusual, and not just because she tries to observe the Jewish Sabbath, taking Saturdays off from work, or because of her passionate interest in the environment. Here’s the kicker: she has a flip phone. And no social media. She’s the college student you didn’t think existed.
Raphi’s choice to stay out of the constant barrage of notifications, stories, and tags may leave her behind on the minute-to-minute updates on Israel and Gaza — and sometimes her friends’ social plans — but is that the healthier choice? Mark Oppenheimer asks Raphi how she hears about Israel and Gaza without any of the sources that her friends rely on.
Guest Bio: Raphi Gold is a Sophomore at Princeton University hoping to study English and minor in Environmental Studies and Journalism. At school, Raphi writes for the Daily Princetonian newspaper, manages the Princeton Garden Project, and engages in climate activism through Divest Princeton. In her free time, Raphi loves running, baking, and embroidery.
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On October 14, a week after Hamas’s attacks in Southern Israel, Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer for The Atlantic, wrote an article entitled, “Students for Pogroms in Israel”; the sub-head was “By excusing murder and kidnapping, activist groups have already changed campus politics in America.” Conor joins Mark Oppenheimer to talk about how, exactly, he thinks campus politics have changed.
