ZadekpediaThe University of Chicago enters The Bob Zadek Show not as a topic but as an affiliation. Guests introduced by Bob Zadek carry Chicago appointments into discussions of economics, law and politics, and the institution is named chiefly to establish where a guest teaches or studied.
Economists and the market
Luigi Zingales is introduced as a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and co-author of Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists Obama Nationalizes General Electric (2011). In that episode he and Zadek define crony capitalism as companies controlling the government, the reverse of socialism, with the result that there is no freedom and no entrepreneurship and the market cannot search for the best solutions. Zadek describes crony capitalism as socialism on steroids and as the modus operandi of President Obama and his Democratic colleagues, while Zingales supplies the analytical framing and agrees with Zadek’s description of government allocating tax credits, cheap loans and regulations that keep out competition.
Casey Mulligan is introduced as a University of Chicago professor who served as Chief Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers for a full year between 2018 and 2019, and who returned to teach at the University of Chicago afterward You’re Hired! Chief Economic Adviser to Trump on What It’s Really Like to Work in the White House (2020). He tells Zadek that the Bush administration twice approached him about essentially the same position and that the match with what President Bush was trying to do was poor, whereas the Trump administration’s interest in reversing President Obama’s major policies fit his expertise. He identifies Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, as his initial attraction to the job, estimating it consumed perhaps 10 to 20 percent of his time.
Law and the administrative state
Richard Epstein is introduced as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of law at New York University Law School, which Zadek calls his alma mater, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago An Intellectual Discussion of Sexual Harassment with Richard Epstein (2018). In the discussion of sexual harassment law he traces the employment discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to a proposal by a Southerner, Howard Smith, intended perhaps to sink the bill, and notes that the legislative record contains no mention of sexual harassment. He attributes the transformation of the material to Catharine MacKinnon’s 1978 book Sexual Harassment of Working Women, which argued that workplace harassment should be treated as sex discrimination, and says he criticized that position as a technical matter, locating the real issue in the close association between harassment and assault. He describes the Supreme Court as cautious and wanting relatively high thresholds, and traces a lowering of the bar to the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letters from the Office of Civil Rights, which Betsy DeVos and the Office later removed.
Alumni and academic culture
Steven B. Smith is introduced as holding a PhD from the University of Chicago and as having taught in Yale’s philosophy department since 1984; Smith corrects the record, saying he is in the Yale Political Science department rather than philosophy Steven B. Smith on Reclaiming Patriotism (2021). He describes Reclaiming Patriotism in the Age of Extremes as growing out of his teaching and out of a hunger among students to do something for their country, and he argues that patriotism is a virtue required by democratic societies. He says that from the left, and among many academics, being regarded as patriotic is symptomatic of chauvinism and of an America-first outlook, and that the dominant attitude in universities and intellectual circles favors thinking as citizens of the world. He reports the look of barely repressed horror on colleagues’ faces when he described the book, and says he has not been ostracized.
Across episodes
Four episodes touch the University of Chicago, through Zingales, Epstein, Mulligan and Smith, and the episodes show no development in how the institution is treated: in each it appears only as a guest’s appointment or degree, never as a subject argued about.
Guests and episodes
2 appearances by 2 guests, 2011–2020. Guests A–Z by first name.
- Casey Mulligan (University of Chicago professor) — You’re Hired! Chief Economic Adviser to Trump on What It’s Really Like to Work in the White House (2020) — Economic policy and life inside the Trump White House.
- Luigi Zingales (University of Chicago Booth School of Business) — Obama Nationalizes General Electric (2011) — Crony capitalism and government interference in markets.