Hey there and welcome back to Rootless. I am Leah Lieberwwitz and today we're going to talk about one of the things that have been bothering me for a little while now since I made some questionable life decisions and decided to be an academic, a career that ended in Columny and disaster. I've been writing about what's going on in American

universities for quite a while. But my guest today really knows what's going on in American

universities. He's Carrie Nelson, an American professor emeritus of English and Jubilee

Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,

and the longtime president of the American Association of University Professors,

and most importantly, one of the greatest, most morally and intellectually clear voices

who've been ringing the alarm long before it was cool.

And now the author of a new tractate called Mindless, What Happened to Universities.

So, Professor Nelson, while I welcome you to the show, I want to start with the most obvious first

question.

Tell us what happened to universities?

Well, I think there are two things, at least, about this project, Mindless, which actually

will be available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and so forth, just on the sixth.

There are two things about it that I think make a difference. First of all,

this pretty wide agreement, both from the left and the right, with very different reasons,

that universities in one way or another are in difficulty, that they have ideological, political

problems. A lot of disagreement about what those are, but there aren't that

many people who just want to say everything, this is the best of all possible worlds for higher

education and everything is fine. So there are two differences that I'm trying to make here. One is

to push an argument that a central element of the decline in higher education and the polarization

of higher education has been anti-Zionism, that it has helped fuel broader changes in higher

education.

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