Alice Goffman’s Philadelphia and the university next door
Alice Goffman told Bob Zadek that she grew up in a middle-class white neighborhood in Philadelphia, that her parents are professors who teach at the University of Pennsylvania, and that she went to college there. She described taking an ethnography class at Penn, which she characterized as a sociology method involving first-hand observation over time, comparable to embedded journalism. She also took a job in a campus cafeteria, where she met the African-American woman in her 60s who was her boss and who lived in a neighborhood not far from campus; Goffman began tutoring the woman’s grandchildren, and through that family met Ronnie, then 15 and home from a juvenile detention center, and his cousin Mike, 22, when Goffman was 21. Alice Goffman on Fugitive Life in an American City (2014)
Goffman described commuting into Penn for class while living in that neighborhood, and separately attending graduate school at Princeton, an hour away. She said the contrast between the two settings was striking: she described drugs, fighting, rape and drunk driving on the college campuses, and said the crimes for which the young men she knew were first arrested were really the same as what young people on those campuses were doing — but that the Penn and Princeton graduates did not have felony convictions, had never been arrested, had never had their pockets searched, their parties raided, or their fights turned into an aggravated assault charge. Zadek framed the comparison as a hypothetical diary of a privileged white Princeton student and a non-privileged black person in the inner city, with similar activities but profoundly different punishment, stigmatization and interaction with law enforcement. Alice Goffman on Fugitive Life in an American City (2014)
Goffman also said that unlike the people she wrote about, she got to leave when the project was done, to get a job and become a professor and return to a world where the police were not doing that kind of violence or making those kinds of arrests. Zadek introduced her as the author of On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, describing her as having spent almost a decade living in an inner-city neighborhood to experience firsthand the effect of surveillance and law enforcement on the lives of inner-city blacks. Alice Goffman on Fugitive Life in an American City (2014)
Amy Wax and the op-ed backlash
In a 2017 episode, Zadek introduced Amy Wax as a professor of law at Penn — the University of Pennsylvania Law School — a tenured professor, well-regarded, who had written extensively in her areas of expertise and had served on the staff of the Solicitor General of the United States. Zadek said Wax had written an op-ed several months earlier on the decline in what the piece called bourgeois values, and that it had caused an uproar; he said he wanted to discuss both the negative reaction of the academic establishment to a tenured law professor expressing her opinion with a colleague in a mainstream media publication, and the issues that drove her to write it. Amy Wax Defends Bourgeois Norms (2017)
Wax said the piece was called something like “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture,” that it was really Larry Alexander’s idea initially, that he showed it to her in a different form and asked whether she liked it and wanted to work on it with him, and that she agreed. She said they had talked about some of these issues before because they were longstanding friends and colleagues, that she changed some things and they tried to make the piece more universal, and that she told him these were a cultural script or set of behaviors and precepts that could help anyone regardless of background, level of education or affluence. She said it was published in the Philly Inquirer on August 9th, and that she had connections with some of the op-ed editors there who had asked her to write before. Amy Wax Defends Bourgeois Norms (2017)
The episode description states that Zadek interviews Wax about the op-ed and about the intense backlash she received from the academic community for suggesting that all cultures are not equally conducive to success in a modern society, and lists among its topics bourgeois values, academic freedom, cultural norms, the University of Pennsylvania, Larry Alexander and social capital. Amy Wax Defends Bourgeois Norms (2017)
Joe Cohn, FIRE, and due process on campus
Joe Cohn was introduced on two December 2022 episodes as the Director of Legislative Policy at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and as a 2004 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Fels Institute of Government Administration. Do you know your rights? (2022) Joe Cohn on Title IX and Due Process on Campus (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, that since then it had worked on the ground at schools and in the media, 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, federal agencies — were starting to tell colleges and universities what they needed to do, and were not always telling them to do the right thing that complied with constitutional rights. Do you know your rights? (2022) Joe Cohn on Title IX and Due Process on Campus (2022)
Zadek put to Cohn that there is no need to protect the rights of people speaking with banality, that it is the rights of the most disfavored speech that must be protected, and that here it is the rights of the accused — a class held in disfavor, numerically much more males than females, without a strong lobby. He said FIRE’s constituency is the Constitution and the principles that regulate the country, and that absent FIRE’s work nobody would do it. Do you know your rights? (2022)
Cohn said FIRE had engaged the Biden Department of Education in a number of ways: writing a letter to the president on inauguration day, as it has after each presidential election, highlighting issues including overbroad sexual harassment definitions that threaten free speech and the rights of the accused; meeting with Department of Education officials in the weeks that followed, before a proposed regulation was offered, to give top-level thoughts on why the 2020 rules made sense and to hear their criticisms; and submitting a formal comment. He also said a number of Harvard Law professors wrote instrumental pieces defending due process rights, as did a number of faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania, and named Lara Bazelon, who leads the racial justice clinic at the University of California, Hastings, as instrumental, along with parents who formed organizations such as FACE, Families Advocating for Campus Equality. Do you know your rights? (2022)
The second Cohn episode is described as covering the shifting landscape of Title IX regulations on college campuses, the history of the “Dear Colleague” letter, the erosion of due process for the accused, and legal battles to preserve fair hearings and cross-examination in campus disciplinary proceedings across the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. Joe Cohn on Title IX and Due Process on Campus (2022)
Across episodes
The excerpts show no development in how the university is treated: it appears in 2014 as the institution where Goffman’s parents taught and where she studied, in 2017 as the employer of Amy Wax, and in 2022 as the law school that graduated Joe Cohn and as a source of faculty defending due process. What changes is the role — from a campus adjacent to Goffman’s fieldwork, to the site of a speech controversy, to a credential and an institutional actor in regulatory debate — but no speaker in these excerpts compares the university across those appearances, and the excerpts contain no argument advanced in one episode and answered in another.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when the University of Pennsylvania was founded, where it is located, how it is governed, or what it charges; they do not describe its admissions, endowment, curriculum or policies. They do not say what became of the op-ed controversy beyond the fact of the backlash, nor what the 2020 Title IX rules provided or which court decisions, statutes or amendments governed the disputes discussed. No excerpt states the outcome of any case or regulation, and several sections break off mid-sentence.