ZadekpediaBoston College appears in The Bob Zadek Show not as a subject of discussion but as the institutional home of guests and scholars whose work the program draws on. Across three episodes, the college is named as the affiliation of a developmental psychologist and of a professor of American politics, and as the setting for arguments about childhood independence, free play, campus speech, and the reach of federal regulation in higher education.
Peter Gray and the case for free play
In a February 2018 conversation with Lenore Skenazy, Bob Zadek’s guest described the origins of Let Grow, a nonprofit she said she was president of, and traced the idea to a proposal from Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Shuchman, and Peter Gray. Skenazy identified Gray as the author of Free to Learn and as a professor at Boston College who believes children learn most when they have unstructured, unsupervised time A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018). She described Let Grow’s two projects: the Let Grow Project, in which teachers tell children to ask their parents to let them do one thing on their own, and the Let Grow Free Play Club, in which schools stay open after hours for children to organize their own games.
Jonathan Haidt returned to Gray’s work in a September 2018 episode devoted to The Coddling of the American Mind. Haidt called Gray a developmental psychologist at Boston College who has written extensively on the importance of play, and said Gray holds that the best kind of play is unsupervised play outdoors in mixed age groups Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Haidt described how children in such settings must choose a game, set and vary its rules, pick teams, and adjust for younger players, and he argued that these are the skills of association. Once adults coach, he said, the adults make the decisions and the social skills are not learned. He added that time-use research shows children now have much less free play than they once did.
R. Shep Melnick and Title IX
A December 2018 episode on Title IX featured R. Shep Melnick, identified by Bob Zadek as the Thomas P. O’Neill Professor of American Politics at Boston College and the author of The Transformation of Title IX Title IX’s Transformation: R. Shep Melnick on the New Civil Rights Debate (2018). Melnick described Title IX as one section of omnibus education amendments passed in 1972, a simple prohibition on sex discrimination by educational institutions receiving federal funds whose meaning was left unclear. He noted that President Nixon did not notice its importance when he signed the legislation, nor did the New York Times in its story on the passage.
Melnick told Zadek that withholding federal funds proved too politically dangerous and administratively cumbersome, so a private right of action, recognized by courts though not written in the statute, became the fundamental enforcement mechanism. He described a process he called institutional leapfrogging, in which administrators took one step, courts another, and agencies went beyond both. He said the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education bypassed the Administrative Procedure Act and used interpretations and Dear Colleague letters, to which courts largely deferred. On sexual harassment, Melnick said the Supreme Court in 1998 and 1999 reached a reasonable position—that a school knowing of serious harassment that prevents students from getting an education must address it—but that the Office for Civil Rights in 2011 and 2014 went far beyond that, requiring schools to eliminate, prevent, and cure all consequences of harassment. He added that the definition of sexual harassment and sexual assault is lower under the Title IX regulation than under most criminal statutes, so schools must police behavior that would not be criminal in almost any state.
Zadek, in his own questioning, framed the regulatory state as combining legislative, executive, and judicial functions and quoted James Madison on the accumulation of powers as the very definition of tyranny. He also described Melnick as a professor of law at Boston College in Boston, Massachusetts.
Across episodes
The three episodes do not develop a common argument about Boston College itself. The February 2018 and September 2018 episodes both invoke Peter Gray’s work on free play, the earlier through Lenore Skenazy’s account of Let Grow’s founding and the later through Jonathan Haidt’s extended description of unsupervised play; the December 2018 episode turns on R. Shep Melnick’s account of Title IX and the administrative state. The episodes show no change in how the college is treated between the earlier and later broadcasts.