A group of wealthy men and women walk into a Talon Scouts office.

We have an ACU might like to sign.

Cool, the Talent Scout replies, what do you do?

One guy starts throwing dollar bills at two other guys who begin building an immense

climbing wall, while another provides athletes with get-out-of-jail-free cards.

Another starts a right-wing think tank that tells people how to use cooking oil to ward off infectious disease. Another gets really into allegations of plagiarism until his wife is accused of plagiarism.

The talent guy goes, okay, okay, I get it. The joke's going on too long already. What do you call this

fucking thing? And they go, the board of trustees. Anyway, that's my aristocrats version with this.

Hi, I'm Adrienne Dob.

And I'm Moywardan.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

Now, Adrian, we have had a lot of occasion as Americans, as people who work for a university, to think about all of the strange discourses

surrounding American colleges and universities, particularly the fancy private ones,

and how there's a lot of interesting imaginaries, like sort of projected onto these, right?

But today, we have an opportunity to talk about the people who are actually controlling these

institutions, the shadowy, ill-understood, tremendously wealthy individuals who make up the boards

of trustees.

That's right.

When we hear about the university and media and political discourse, and we talk to Samuel

Catlin about

this most recently. We normally hear about students. They occupy a lot of real estate in the minds of

our pundit class. We talk about faculty, and we sometimes hear about administrators. It's their

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