ZadekpediaThe University of Virginia enters The Bob Zadek Show in two distinct roles: as the object of a brief historical claim by host Bob Zadek, and as the academic affiliation of several guests.
Jefferson’s founding and the educated electorate
In the 2012 episode on student loans, Bob Zadek raised the university in the course of arguing about the purpose of education. He told guest Arvin Vora that Thomas Jefferson was the founder of the University of Virginia and called it the first public college in the country America’s Student Loan Problem (2012). Zadek said Jefferson was so proud of the founding that it was one of three achievements he had put on his tombstone, and that the tombstone did not read “third President of the United States” but did record him as the founder of the University of Virginia. Zadek attributed to Jefferson the conviction that an educated electorate was the only way the country could survive, and framed the point as one about voters rather than about scholarship: what was important, in his telling, was a public educated so that it could vote better.
From that premise Zadek posed a question to Vora: whether any student receiving a student loan should be required to take a series of courses on American history, on the American political system, and on what one needs to know to make an intelligent decision about voting. Vora did not accept the proposal. He answered that when a specific course is made mandatory it opens the door to political indoctrination, and he illustrated the claim with textbooks — including a Prentice Hall biology textbook he said was used everywhere — which he described as slanted even outside history and politics. Vora added that in Jefferson’s time there was no internet, no libraries everywhere and no Amazon.com, whereas now there are do-it-yourself approaches to universities, naming Khan Academy and programs like his own, so that a person can get a university-level education without the formal structure of a university. The exchange is the only place in these episodes where the university is discussed as an institution rather than mentioned as a credential.
UVA-affiliated guests
Three later episodes introduce guests by their University of Virginia positions, and in each case the university functions as the source of the guest’s authority rather than as a topic.
In the 2019 episode on the “deep state,” Jeffrey Bergner described teaching spring semesters at the University of Virginia. He said that about three years earlier he had taught one of his senior courses on immigration reform and thought it would be the only year he could do so; because Congress had not acted, he used immigration reform again the next year, and again the year after that, and he suspected he could keep teaching it Redefining the “Deep State” (2019). The anecdote was offered in support of Bergner’s and Zadek’s shared argument that Congress had failed to legislate on immigration, leaving an asylum law passed by Congress as a constraint the President could not undo by executive order.
In the 2021 episode on stakeholder value, Ed Freeman is introduced as a professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s school of business and as the author of Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach and, with Kirsten Martin and Bidhan Parmar, The Power of And Stakeholder Value: A New Story About Business (2021). Freeman used the occasion to qualify rather than reject Milton Friedman: he called Friedman one of his intellectual heroes and said the question was less whether Friedman was wrong than whether his reasoning applies to business today. Freeman argued that what Friedman missed, as an economist explaining how markets work, was what makes a business successful — products and services customers want, suppliers who make them better, employees who use their minds, good citizenship in the community, and money for shareholders, all going together.
In the 2022 episode on economic thinking, Steven E. Rhoads is introduced as Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Virginia, where Zadek said he had taught public policy for more than 30 years The Economist’s View of the World (2022). Zadek also named Rhoads’s books, The Economist’s View of the World and Incomparable Worth: Pay Equity Meets the Market, and framed the episode as an attempt to help listeners think like an economist, with the qualification that doing so does not guarantee the right policy conclusion. Zadek argued that during the pandemic the economist’s input was ignored, by a margin he put at 100 to zero, and that had policymakers taken an economist’s view many decisions would have been different and better.
Across episodes
The episodes show no development in the treatment of the University of Virginia across episodes: it appears once as a historical subject in the 2012 student-loan discussion and thereafter only as the affiliation of guests Bergner, Freeman and Rhoads, with no later episode returning to Zadek’s Jefferson claims or to Vora’s objections.