Aydelotte Foundation director, Patricia White, speaks with four Swarthmore faculty members who have organized the speaker series, "From South Africa to Gaza: World History and the Politics of Responsibility." The final event in the series this semester will be held on Thursday, April 18 at 7pm ET when Naomi Klein delivers a talk titled, "Palestine, Zionism, and the Doppelganger Effect." The talk can be streamed here https://video.ibm.com/channel/NC4DHY6VReS.

In late February, Andy Hines and Dennis Hogan organized a symposium at Haverford College called, "Universities and Democracy: The Politics of Higher Education Today." It brought together researchers, organizers, elected officials, and many others in the Philadelphia region to discuss the local and national transformation of the political economy of higher education. Published on the same day as the AAUP's national day of action for higher education, we bring you four of the talks from that symposium by Vineeta Singh, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Donna Murch, and Davarian Baldwin. We plan to broadcast more of the talks from this event in the future. Speaker Bios Vineeta Singh is assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her writing on critical and abolitionist university studies can be found in Public Books and Critical Ethnic Studies. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He is the author of the books Elite Capture and Reconsidering Reparations. Donna Murch is associate professor of history at Rutgers University, where she is chapter president of the New Brunswick chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. Her newest book is Assata Taught me: State Violence: Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives and she is the author of the award-winning Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. Davarian Baldwin is the Paul E. Rather Distinguished Professor of American Studies and founding director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the award-winning author of several books, most recently, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities.  The symposium was sponsored by the ⁠John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities⁠, the ⁠Haverford College Distinguished Visitors Program⁠, and the ⁠Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College⁠.

Tim Burke, Rachel Buurma, and Andy Hines speak with Tristan Ahtone and Maria Parazo Rose about their work on "Land Grab Universities," a project that makes a direct, irrefutable claim about how the wealth of land-grant universities is linked to indigenous dispossession. The discussion considers how to understand the present ramifications of the Morrill Act of 1862, how the process associated with land-grant universities might extend to other institutions, and the next phase of their project. Tristan Ahtone is a member of the Kiowa Tribe and is Editor at Large at Grist.  Maria Parazo Rose is a spatial data analyst at Grist, where she writes and makes maps about Indigenous affairs, conservation, and climate migration The Aydelotte Foundation is an interdisciplinary research center and intellectual community located at Swarthmore College. It supports the creation and dissemination of knowledge about liberal arts education as it exists across the broadest possible range of contexts and institutions. Theme music is "Advocad" by Jonas Hipper.

Tim Burke, Rachel Buurma, and Andy Hines speak with Stephen Sparks take a somewhat different approach to talking about every professor’s favorite subject, namely ChatGPT and AI generally. It is not just an issue for American academics: faculty in South African universities are also reckoning with its impact. The problem of technologically sophisticated strategies for cheating (as well as some of the classics) is painfully familiar there as well as here, all the more so during the pandemic. Stephen Sparks is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at University of Johannesburg. The Aydelotte Foundation is an interdisciplinary research center and intellectual community located at Swarthmore College. It supports the creation and dissemination of knowledge about liberal arts education as it exists across the broadest possible range of contexts and institutions. Theme music is "Advocad" by Jonas Hipper.