Campus Loyalty Oaths [Some Sunday Context]

This Day

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It's Sunday, and on Sundays we like to bring you new conversations and conversations from the archives that help provide a little context for the stories playing out today. Today, as we see a chilling effect on free speech around the country, we revisit part of our conversation on the history of universities and government funding, and how a lot of pressure was applied during the Cold War era for academics to pledge loyalty to the United States.

Plus, a plug for our upcoming two-parter on the history of chilled speech -- which newsletter subscribers can watch in full right now!

https://thisdaypod.substack.com/

Find out more about the show at thisdaypod.com

This Day In Esoteric Political History is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX.

Your support helps foster independent, artist-owned podcasts and award-winning stories.

If you want to support the show directly, you can do so on our website: ThisDayPod.com

Get in touch if you have any ideas for future topics, or just want to say hello. Follow us on social @thisdaypod

Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Brittani Brown, Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Audrey Mardavich is our Executive Producer at Radiotopia

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia.
0:07.4	My name is Jody Avergan.
0:09.7	And happy Sunday, everyone.
0:11.5	On Sundays, we like to bring you new conversations and stuff from the archives that provide
0:15.8	a little Sunday context, as we like to call it.
0:19.0	And here's what we've got in store for you today. A couple
0:21.5	things about the growing pressure on free speech in this country, with people getting fired and
0:26.6	suspended, lists being made on social media and elsewhere, all this being egged on by the government.
0:33.3	It is scary stuff. Now, next week, next Tuesday and Thursday in our usual slots, we're going to
0:38.8	run a two-parter going right at this. Our thoughts about the way in which people are being hounded
0:43.7	in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and a conversation about a couple other
0:48.4	eras in American history, the early 50s and the early 2000s, that showed very similar patterns. Think about blacklists and
0:56.8	whisper networks in the anti-communism days or Bill Maher getting fired. Freedom fries, you remember
1:02.7	freedom fries or the show 24? So we're going to talk about all that and that is coming on Tuesday
1:08.8	just as a regular podcast for all to listen to.
1:12.0	But if you would like early access to it and you'd like to watch it, we just posted the full
1:17.5	video of our recording to our newsletter for subscribers only. So if you're looking for a little
1:23.5	nudge to subscribe to our newsletter, maybe this is it. You'll get to watch the full conversation
1:27.7	right now. And of course, he will be supporting our work, which really matters to us. Thank you to
1:33.3	everyone who has already become a subscriber of our newsletter. If you want to do that,
1:36.3	you can go to thisdaypod.com, thisdaypod.com, and you can sign up for the newsletter right now.
1:46.7	Meanwhile, it is Sunday, and I do have something for you to listen to. This is an excerpt from an episode we did not that long ago.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.