The Oh, Hello and

welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood.

Two guests today. First, David Palumbo Lou,

will talk about the Rights War and Academic Freedom,

and then Jody Dean will sort out Trump for us. First, Campus Wars. Sometimes people

on the left dismiss universities as bastions of privilege irrelevant to the class war, which

takes place at the point of production.

But the right takes the academy very seriously, seeing it as an intolerable realm of freedom of thought

where minds of the future are shaped in ways they don't like.

Some of these battles have taken the form of attacks

in various professors, George Cickerel-Ammar who was driven out of Drexel University

and Johnny Eric Williams of Trinity College who has survived vicious attacks

from people who wanted them fired.

All have experienced death threats and other forms of harassment.

David Palumbo Lou teaches comparative literature at Stanford is the latest high profile target. Here he is to tell us why and why it matters.

In the interview, Palumbo Lou mentions Robert Spencer. For a moment I thought he was

misnaming Richard Spencer, the well-dressed neo-Nazi, but in fact he was talking about the professional

Islamaphobe and David Harwood's sidekick who runs an odious website called Jihad Watch.

All right, here's David Palumbo Lou.

Welcome David. First of all, you teach what, literature at Stanford, right?

Yeah, I'm a professor of comparative literature here at Stanford.

What's your specialty there?

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