In this very special episode, I rejoin my bestie Cindy Cheng alongside our esteemed colleague Armando Ibarra, to talk about our own slice of the world, the University of Wisconsin, Madison (or the UW as it’s often affectionally called). Depending on what poll you look at, UW Madison is either the 26th or 10th highest ranked public university in the world. Founded in 1848, the university is one of the nation’s oldest land-grant institutions, supported directly by the federal government as a public institution serving the people of Wisconsin and the Midwest more broadly. In any given year we teach a total of over fifty-thousand students with a combined faculty and staff of over twenty-seven thousand personnel. Despite being the most prestigious university of the state, we accept 61% of our Wisconsin-based applicants, which reflects our deep commitment to educating as many state residents as possible; compare that to the acceptance rates of UCLA and UC Berkeley, which respectively land at 9 and 11%, reflecting an increasing move toward public schools as elite universities. UW Madison is driven by a core mission called “The Wisconsin Idea,” a phrase said to be coined by UW President Charles Van Hise in 1904, remembered by his famous quote, “I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the university reaches every family in the state.” The Wisconsin Idea website captures the spirit of this charge simply: “One of the longest and deepest traditions surrounding the University of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Idea signifies a general principle: that education should influence people’s lives beyond the boundaries of the classroom.” In this episode, we discuss the legacy of UW Madison's extraordinary work on behalf of the public good of Wisconsin and the toll that recent attacks on higher education have taken on the school's outreach efforts.

In this episode, I join my fellow queer studies friends and colleagues Robert McRuer and Anthony Michael D’Agostino to make a case for why teaching sex matters more than ever to the intellectual and interpersonal growth of generations of American youth. In the absence of any standardized sex education at the K-12 level, and in the face of a growing loneliness epidemic exacerbated by social media addiction and our society’s post-covid emotional hangover, we discuss how studying the history of sexuality can grant Gen Z a greater sense of agency, freedom and awareness about how different groups of people across history have organized their intimate and erotic relationships. We especially stress how the history of LGBTQ sexuality offers many powerful examples of alternative community formation, including the celebration of long-term friendship and mutual aid that emerged out of different forms of exclusion from a predominantly heterosexual society. Not only does sex matter to higher education because it is a fundamental part of our species existence, but also because it provides equipment for living in a time of intense alienation and social atrophy. Moreover, in a world dominated by rampant sexual harassment, abuse and intimate partner violence, the study of sex and sexuality in all its dimensions (sociological, psychological, cultural, historical and political) has the potential to produce less abusive, more thoughtful, caring, and self-aware citizens who just might have healthier friendships, romantic relationships, marriages, and community networks because of it. We think the real scandal is how aggressively politicians and members of the public want to banish discussion of sex and sexuality from the very university spaces where those conversations need to be happening if we want a future where more people have better and more humane sex, and like it!

In this week's Knowledge Drop, I reunite with my superhero teammate and bestie Anthony Michael D'Agostino to talk about what it means to get a PhD in the humanities. A PhD or Doctor of Philosophy is a terminal degree or the highest level of official education one can receive in a given field. Only two percent of Americans have a doctoral degree and it's nearly always a requirement to be a full-time university professor. We talk about the process of getting a Ph.D., the pleasures and challenges of contributing genuinely original knowledge to a field of study, and how the degree has been an integral part in shaping the scholars and teachers we've become. Our hope is to give listeners a picture of the kind of years-long training that professors go through in order to teach generations of college students.

Today, I’ve brought together two of the most accomplished teachers I know to talk about the unique opportunities and challenges of teaching Gen Z, that awesomely diverse group of sixteen to twenty-eight year olds who are poised to inherent a wildly uncertain American future. On one end of the spectrum, Darieck Scott has been teaching at UC Berkeley for nearly thirty years as professor of African American literature; as he nears retirement, Darieck still celebrates the capacity of the university classroom experience to spark a life-changing encounter with the unknown—in his words, to experience something “mind-blowing”—including students’ interactions with literary texts and works of art that long preceded the digital age. On the other, my fellow UW Madison colleague Ainehi Edoro has been a professor for seven years; still at the start of her teaching journey, Ainehi has committed herself to training this generation of students in social media and AI literacy, encouraging them to be intelligent and inventive producers of digital media content rather than passive consumers of it.

In our dialogue we share some of our observations about the long-term effects of Covid, economic uncertainty, and non-stop political upheaval on our students as well as our divergent strategies for responding to this generation’s shifting educational and career aspirations. Later in the episode, we invite the Nerd Form the Future production team, UW Madison English major Ella Rae Olson and journalism major Oliver Gerharz, to join our conversation. They help us debunk a series of myths about Gen Z, reminding us that this generation is incredibly hardworking, self-critical about their own overreliance on technology, deeply eager for more in-person interaction, and earnestly committed to making a more just world. We collectively arrive at the conclusion that we could all use a hefty dose of intergenerational dialogue to dispose of some of the narrow cliches we’ve attached to the most diverse generation in American history before they’ve even come into their own.

As economies tumble, as the Earth burns, and as governments implode all around us, it's become easier and easier to dismiss higher education as elitist, irrelevant, and out of touch with reality, that place where ordinary people have to face everyday uncertainty without the privileges or comforts of the classroom. In this episode, my colleagues Elisabeth Anker, Kristina Huang and I bring the university back down to earth as a place where students discover a wide variety of equipment for living—this is an expansive toolkit of intellectual and emotional capacities for navigating the chaotic realities of our time with greater confidence, hope, and imagination. At some point, you’ll hear me describe the university as a kind of social, cultural, and political Swiss Army Knife, an institution who’s value lies in the fact that it can accomplish so many different kinds of common good for generations of youth and the society they will inherit. Across the arc of our conversation, we carefully unfold all the different tools in the university’s back pocket: colleges provide millions of faculty, staff, and students with long-term employment opportunities while offering a permanent space for community gathering; they educate people both intellectually—by expanding their knowledge—but also institutionally—by teaching students how to navigate complex systems and more gracefully communicate and negotiate with authority-figures like professors and members of the administration; college campuses also offer literal geographical spaces to practice democratic freedoms like the public expression of free speech, non-violent civil disobedience, and the collective sharing of knowledge; and perhaps most importantly, universities offer a check and balance on the dominant ideas of the society they serve. They are fundamentally good for providing a space for innovation, dissent, and deliberate sustained thought about what kind of life each individual wants to live, and how we will live it together.

In this bonus episode, I join my life-long pal and fellow professor Anthony Michael D'Agostino in a hilarious, honest, and passionate conversation about what it's like to teach college students these days. We talk about the importance of meeting students where they're at by speaking directly to their greatest hopes, fears, and desires, while pushing them to questions their most tightly held assumptions about the world. And we also discuss the major challenges that attend teaching today, from the decreasing literacy and comprehension levels of students, to the influence of AI on independent thinking, to the decrease in university budgets and classroom resources. Despite the gravity of these topics, most of this episode features us laughing about the most playful, exuberant and just plain funny aspects of teaching at the university level.

One of the most enduring myths about the modern universityis that humanities education—understood broadly as the study of human history, language, and culture—no longer offers a reliable path to employment or financial stability for the millions of students who seek out higher education. In my conversation with professors Sarah Ensor and Matthew Tinkcom, we argue otherwise. We point out that the most powerful, inspiring, and valuable aspect of a humanitieseducation is its collaborative nature. In humanities courses students continually practice talking to one another about the things that matter most to their overall wellbeing and their future place in our society. We just happen to useliterature, media, language and history as the objects that inspire our conversations.

Without a doubt, the ability to collectively interpret the world around them grants students countless professional skills, like actually being able to communicate their thoughts in full sentences while navigating complex social dynamics with their peers; but it also makes students more capable democratic citizens who are better able to formulate original opinions, share their distinct points of view with others, and best of all, move through the world with greater confidence about their beliefs. If making money, owning property, and building generational wealth is considered the only worthwhile goal of a successful life, then the humanities will always be the underdog, because one of its primary aims is to question the very idea that there should be only one narrow idea of the good life. Put another way, if today, the science, tech, and business fields sell students on the fantasy ideal of nabbing high paying corporate jobs even at the expense of their happiness and self-worth, the humanities is far more interested in the question of what makes a life worth living. If it’s hard to quantify the value of this kind of education, it should be, because figuring out our purpose in life takes hard work that no ChatBot can possibly do for us. We come to the conclusion that the question of what makes a life worth living is one that every major—whether it be chemical engineering or gender and women’s studies—should help students try to find their own answers to. The humanities just happens to have a head start.

This is the first of a two-part Knowledge Drop about the role that university professors play as genuine mentors and guides for generations of youth, rather than ideologues who force their values on their students. We'll take you behind the magic curtain of the university classroom to show how professors facilitate the dynamic, free exchange of ideas among students. In Part I, we focus on distinguishing between indoctrination, which is a form of brainwashing or coercive control, and authentic schooling, which is a form of collaborative and reciprocal interaction between students and teachers. We stress that university education is exactly where democratic forms of learning flourish most, and should be courageously defended as part of a free society. You can now email our podcast with questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes at: therealnerdfromthefuture@gmail.com.