Episode 1829
A Genocide Foretold / Chris Hedges
Apr 17 2025
There's a lot of attention being paid to the Trump administration's attacks on higher ed, but the “leadership” of higher ed—the presidents, the boards of trustees—have been hollowing out higher ed for decades by following a neoliberal low road model. All the people on the board of trustees, not just here at Loyola, but at most colleges and universities, are not educators. They don't know anything about how education, or research for that matter. There are businesspeople. Once upon a time that made sense because their job was to raise money. But now with the rise of, “we need to run everything like a business,” they have imposed not just a business model on the school, but the McDonald's business model—the low road business model of “don't invest in people, hyper exploit them.”
Members of the leadership team of the SEIU 73 Faculty Forward Union representing non-tenure-track faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola University Chicago update us on their 14-month-old fight for a fair contract. NTT faculty Matt Williams, Paige Warren, Sarita Heer, and Deb Goodman discuss the precarity and exploitation facing faculty at Loyola and on campuses across the United States and the union's efforts to bargain collectively at a corporatized university. We will follow up with them next Tuesday after strike authorization votes have been tallied.
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Apr 15 2025
Mar 27 2025
Posted by Matthew Boedy
I’m on strike. I’m in the WGA, the Writers’ Guild of America (East), and I’m on strike. That means no writing for money, no working Guild jobs, no crossing picket lines, no scabbing. I can write for this show, because it doesn’t pay. What I can’t do is research anything for any reason, because that research could become knowledge that I might one day use in a script written as part of a Guild job. Or worse, I might accidentally divulge that knowledge to a scab, who might then write something based on that knowledge—so it’s safest if I don’t learn anything new. It’s too much of a threat to our collective bargaining power.
Obviously, no one can remain entirely ignorant of what’s going on in the world. Not even the President. It’s unavoidable then, that, here and there, this or that might leak out of the zeitgeist and into my brain, on strike though my brain may be.
Case and point: a friend of mine told me Alan Dershowitz had an op-ed in last week’s Wall Street Journal defending torture. Ordinarily, my learning such information might constitute a breech of union solidarity. I might begin to wonder what sort of defense Alan Dershowitz had come up with for torture, and there would begin the inevitable process of fantastical and fabulistic invention and imagination—exactly the thing I’m on strike from. I might even be tempted to read Mr. Dershowitz’s op-ed to find out what his argument is.
Luckily, none of that is necessary. I mean, it is, after all, an op-ed by Alan Dershowitz defending torture. It not as if someone has figured out something persuasive to say about why torture is a good thing. There can be no fabulistic invention or imagination, because there is nothing to spark it. There can be no flights of fancy, because for flight, one needs air, and there can certainly be nothing as substantial as air, not even hot air, in an op-ed by Alan Dershowitz defending torture. Dershowitz cannot possibly have presented anything new or insightful or remotely worthwhile. It’s plainly inconceivable.
And don’t you dare call me closed-minded. It’s not that I would be unwilling to be persuaded by a persuasive argument written by Alan Dershowitz, it’s just that Alan Dershowitz is zero-percent certain to present one. Think about it. Be honest. Do you really need to read... read more
Episode 1823
Covertly Manufacturing Consent for US Imperialism and Militarism in Hollywood / Tanner Mirrlees
Mar 19 2025
Mar 11 2025