ZadekpediaThe University of Pennsylvania appears in The Bob Zadek Show chiefly through the people associated with it: a professor, a law professor, and a law-school graduate whose work the show examines.
Alice Goffman and the neighborhood near Penn
Alice Goffman told Bob Zadek that she grew up in a middle-class white neighborhood in Philadelphia and that her parents are professors who teach at the University of Pennsylvania, where she went to college Alice Goffman on Fugitive Life in an American City (2014). She described taking an ethnography class at Penn, which she characterized as a sociology method involving first-hand observation over time, and taking a job in a campus cafeteria, where she met her boss, an African-American woman in her 60s who lived in a neighborhood not far from campus. Through tutoring that woman’s grandchildren, Goffman met Ronnie, who had come home from a juvenile detention center at 15, and then Mike, who was 22 when Goffman was 21. Within weeks of meeting Mike, he caught a shooting case; police raided his uncle’s house at night, and he lived on the run with a warrant out for a few weeks before paying a lawyer and turning himself in. His mother posted bail after he spent a week in solitary confinement.
Goffman said that when she accompanied Mike to court, he greeted people he knew, and she realized that young men were spending their time in courtrooms rather than high school. She described commuting into Penn for class while living in the neighborhood, and also attending graduate school at Princeton, an hour away. She said the crimes she saw young men first arrested for were the same as what young people on college campuses were doing, but that the people graduating from Penn and Princeton did not have felony convictions, had never been arrested, had never had their pockets searched, and had never had their parties raided or their fights turned into an aggravated assault charge. Bob Zadek summarized the contrast as a difference in the degree of punishment and stigmatization and interaction with law enforcement, and Goffman agreed the contrast was striking in terms of how police and courts operate for black and white people and for poor and rich people Alice Goffman on Fugitive Life in an American City (2014).
Amy Wax and the reaction to her op-ed
In a 2017 episode, Bob Zadek introduced Amy Wax as a professor of law at Penn, a tenured professor who had written extensively in her areas of expertise and had served on the staff of the Solicitor General of the United States Amy Wax Defends Bourgeois Norms (2017). Zadek said Wax had written an op-ed several months earlier on the decline in what the piece called bourgeois values, and that the piece caused an uproar. He framed the hour around two issues: the degree to which the academic establishment reacted negatively to a tenured law professor expressing her opinion with a colleague in a mainstream publication, and the issues that drove her to write the piece.
Wax said the piece was called something like “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture,” that it was Larry Alexander’s idea initially, and that he showed it to her in a different form and asked if she wanted to work on it with him. She said they tried to make it more universal, describing it as a cultural script or set of behaviors and precepts that can help anyone regardless of background, education, or affluence, and that it was published in the Philly Inquirer on August 9th. Zadek described the piece as stating what he considered obvious and asked Wax to explain its core premise Amy Wax Defends Bourgeois Norms (2017).
Joe Cohn, FIRE, and campus due process
Two 2022 episodes feature Joe Cohn, whom Bob Zadek introduced as the Director of Legislative Policy at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and a 2004 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Fels Institute of Government Administration Do you know your rights? (2022). Cohn said FIRE was founded in 1999 to be a fair and effective advocate for the civil liberties of students and faculty at institutions of higher education, and that he was brought on in 2012 to add advocacy in the halls of government because government actors—members of Congress, state legislatures, the White House, and federal agencies—were telling colleges and universities what to do, not always in ways that complied with constitutional rights.
In the same episode, Zadek argued that the rights of the accused are like disfavored speech: there is not a strong lobby for males accused of sexual harassment, and FIRE is the last line of defense for due process rights on college campuses. Cohn said FIRE had written to the president on inauguration day, met with Department of Education officials before a proposed regulation was offered, and submitted a formal comment, and he credited others doing the work, including a number of Harvard Law professors, faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania, Lara Bazelon of the racial justice clinic at the University of California, Hastings, and parents who formed organizations such as FACE Do you know your rights? (2022). A separate episode with Cohn, described as covering Title IX regulations and the erosion of due process for the accused across administrations, repeats the same introduction of Cohn and FIRE’s mission Do you know your rights? (2022).
Across episodes
The episodes show no development in how the university is treated: the 2014 Goffman episode uses Penn as the campus from which Goffman commuted into the neighborhood she studied, the 2017 Wax episode presents Penn as the employer of a professor whose op-ed drew backlash, and the two 2022 Cohn episodes cite Penn Law as Cohn’s alma mater and Penn faculty among those defending due process.