Out d'Coup LIVE | Brian Bailie on Assault on Public Higher Ed and Striking Back for Our Collective Future

On today’s show, Brian Bailie returns to the podcast. Bailie is an Assistant Professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of Cincinnati’s Blue Ash College. Brian’s latest article, co-authored with Steve Parks, “Are We an Academic Journal? Editing as Ethical Practice for Change,” just dropped in Reflections: A Journal of Community Engaged Writing and Rhetoric. You should also check out his piece in Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society. The article, “So, Richard Spencer is Coming to Your Campus. How He was Allowed on, and How You Can Confront Him,” came out over the summer and its timing couldn’t be better as we’ve seen the growing threat of white supremacists on our campuses and in the streets. 

I wanted to have Brian back on the show to give us an update on the assault on public higher education in Ohio (and across the country). We talked back in May, we were seeing draconian cuts in public higher education in Ohio - especially at Ohio University and the University of Cincinnati system, of which Brian is a part. We’ll talk about where things are now, as the fall’s semester is in full gear. And, as we discussed back in May, universities are using the pandemic to fundamentally transform public higher ed - if we let them get away with it, that is. 

As we are less than a month out from the election, we’ll also discuss how Trump’s authoritarian, public pedagogy is pushing American democracy - as flawed as it is - right up the cliff’s edge. What is this public pedagogy doing to our civic culture and have we passed a point of no return? 

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A special shout out as always to Jonathan Mann who wrote our intro song, “There Are No People in the Future.” Check out all is great stuff on his YouTube page and follow him on Twitter @songadaymann.