Welcome to the Cato podcast. My name is Walter Olson. I'm senior fellow at the Cato

Institute's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. And I'm joined today by Kenneth

Corvo, who is Associate Professor of Social Work at Syracuse University. We have both been writing about higher education

in America today. For my part, I've been writing mostly about the legal aspect and the

relationship with the federal government. But Ken has written a series of articles taking

a broader look at the problems with and plight of colleges and universities. So welcome to the podcast, Cam,

and start by telling us a little about your recent writings, if you could. Thank you, Walter. Good

to meet you. My research has been in the area of domestic violence for most of my career,

but I've had sort of periods where I'd looked at

structural issues a number of years ago I wrote a couple of pieces about federal grant

funding of schools of social work and what the implications of that might be. My recent interest

came about several years ago when the university

decided that our school had to join with a for-profit corporation to deliver online asynchronous

curriculum. And we voted against it and we were told that the vote didn't matter, and it was forced upon us.

Tell us what asynchronous means, because some of the listeners aren't going to be.

Yeah, it's asynchronous is when the content of the curriculum is sort of constantly available.

It's embedded in a digital format, and no professor needs to be present delivering it.

All right.

So it's sort of like some sort of specialized TED talk maybe and other material students link to.

Rather than having synchronous education, which can be in-personal or it can be digital,

where the person is actually presenting the material in real-time.

So this was forced upon us in spite of faculty objection, and it was clear that this was an

...