Jay Caspian Kang

Michael, we got two reporters in the room and we asked them what the rest of us are all missing.

Hilary Burns covers higher ed for the Boston Globe, and Jay Caspian Kang writes for The New Yorker.

So we asked

them both the same question.

For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

Welcome back to Future You.

And Jeff and I are with Hillary Burns of the Boston Globe and Collegetown and Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker.

Jay, I want to turn to you as we kick off this second half, which is, in your view, what's the biggest story of the last 18 months that the higher ed sector perhaps is underreacting to? We've talked about some of these broad currents, but as you think about the one or two stories maybe that...

... you know, all of these, these different kinds of folks, but it is, uh, something that's rising out of these, these specific material conditions.

I mean, one thing that I think struck both Jay and I reading it is, um, in, in some ways it feels like in dialogue, Naomi, with The Shock Doctrine, but also like going one step beyond it.

Like it feels like we are in a kind of accelerated shock doctrine.

There's a great passage in the book: "Today, a constellation of corporations and reactionary regimes have evolved their own shock tactics, and done the original practitioners of disaster capitalism one better by provoking and deepening the global scale crises from which they benefit.

That's crazy.

You get, like, racists, and then you get, like, Tyler, Tyler yelling about the Academy, and then you get people yelling at Tyler from the University of Toronto.

Fighting my holy jihad against the robots, Jay.

[laughs] Exactly.

You know, it's like,

like, Jay Kang had a good column this week about tanking.

Right.

in basketball and about this sort of like optimization like you can kind of optimize everything you can kind of like uh find a workaround around anything and it's sort of like he tied it to like the death of shame more broadly but it really reminded me of the position players pitching thing because it's like there is no incentive for them to try