ZadekpediaArizona State University is mentioned in The Bob Zadek Show only incidentally, as an institutional affiliation rather than as a subject of discussion. The university appears in three distinct connections: as the sponsor or administrator of a public-square blog, as the home of a law school whose faculty member was interviewed about constitutional drafting, and as the employer of a music professor cited in a discussion of Critical Race Theory in higher education. No excerpt describes the university’s founding, governance, size, curriculum or policies, and none treats it as a topic in its own right.
Zócalo Public Square
In the July 20, 2018 episode on California and federalism, Bob Zadek introduced his guest, the journalist Joe Mathews, by describing where Mathews writes. Zadek told listeners that Mathews writes for Zócalo Public Square, which he described as a blog center sponsored by Arizona State University or administered by Arizona State University. Zadek noted that Mathews’s column appears syndicated in many newspapers around the country, and that a piece of Mathews’s in the San Francisco Chronicle had caught his attention and furnished the topic for that morning’s conversation California Discovers Federalism (2018).
The Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law
The university returns in the December 20, 2021 episode on the conservative Constitution, when Zadek interviewed Professor Ilan Wurman. Zadek introduced Wurman as an associate professor at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, adding that Wurman teaches administrative law and constitutional law, has written extensively in the Yale Law Journal and most other leading law journals, and has authored two books: A Debt Against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism and The Second Founding: An Introduction to the 14th Amendment The Conservative Constitution (2021). The episode’s subject was Wurman’s work as a member of the conservative team in the National Constitution Center’s Constitution Drafting Project, in which three teams of legal scholars — one libertarian, one progressive and one conservative — were asked to rewrite the Constitution according to their ideologies. Zadek framed the interview as the final one in a series, following earlier conversations with a member of the libertarian team and a member of the progressive team. Wurman’s affiliation with the university is stated once, in Zadek’s introduction; the excerpt records no further discussion of the law school or the university, and Wurman’s own remarks in the excerpt are limited to thanking Zadek for having him on the show.
Critical Race Theory in Higher Education
The university’s third appearance comes in the May 29, 2022 episode on Critical Race Theory, in a conversation between Zadek and Jonathan Butcher, author of Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth. Answering Zadek’s question about why Critical Race Theory draws so much attention in K-12 education, Butcher said the theory started in higher education, came to the United States by way of the Frankfurt School, and moved from law schools to colleges of education, and that the words “Critical Race Theory” can today be found in class descriptions in law schools around the country. As an illustration, Butcher said he had written a piece a couple of months earlier about a music professor hired at Arizona State University to teach music in higher education from the perspective of Critical Race Theory, and that the hiring used the words “Critical Race Theory” Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022). Later in the same episode, discussing whether the theory crowds out core education, Butcher returned to the example, saying that Arizona State University had just hired a professor to teach music through the Critical Race Theory lens, in a list that also included a California math curriculum, the Critical Race theorist Gloria Ladson-Billings as keynote speaker for the National Council of the Teachers of Mathematics in 2019, a science teachers’ association that hired a Critical Race theorist to speak about critical affinity spaces in science teaching, and literature teachers using the hashtag #DisruptTexts Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022). In both instances the university figures as a single data point in a broader argument about the spread of a worldview across subjects; Butcher did not describe the professor, the course, the hiring process or any response from the university.
Across episodes
Three episodes touch on Arizona State University — the 2018 conversation with Joe Mathews, the 2021 conversation with Ilan Wurman and the 2022 conversation with Jonathan Butcher — and the episodes show no development: the university is named only as an affiliation or an example, and no guest or host returns to discuss it as an institution.