by Maximillian Alvarez | Jun 23, 2026 | education, ICE, Israel, Palestine, Politics and Movements: International, Politics and Movements: US, video, Working People
We sit down with Dr. Steven Thrasher to talk about his new book, The Overseer Class; how our police state today evolved from yesterday’s slave plantations; and why Dr. Thrasher has been blacklisted from academia after defending his students at Northwestern University during the Palestine encampment movement in 2024.
Guests:
Steven W. Thrasher, PhD, is the author of The Overseer Class: A Manifesto and the award-winning book The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide, which was a New York Times’s Paperback Row Editors’ Pick, named one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 by Kirkus Reviews, was longlisted for both the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Literature, and won the 2023 POZ Award for Best in Literature. He is also the inaugural Daniel Renberg Chair for Social Justice in Reporting at the Medill School of Journalism and a faculty member of Northwestern University’s Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. An internationally renowned scholar on race, gender, and infectious disease, Dr. Thrasher’s writing has been published by the Guardian, Atlantic, New York Times, Scientific American, Literary Hub, and in many academic journals.
Credits:
Studio Production / Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
So I did stand between the students and the cops. I got beat up for it and I survived. It wasn’t that bad at the time and the students had an encampment for five days. But then a few weeks later, Congress called our president to the Hill and Congressman Jim Bank
by Rodney Coates | Jun 19, 2026 | education, Juneteenth, Op-Ed, Racial Justice, Slavery
The abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass is known for many things, but perhaps among the most significant is his views on education’s relationship to slavery. Douglass himself was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818. Douglass described in his 1845 autobiography how one of his enslavers, Mrs. Auld, began teaching him to read when he was a child. Mrs. Auld’s husband ordered her to stop…
Source
by Michael Beyea Reagan | Jun 19, 2026 | budgets, education, education funding, Government Shutdown, Op-Ed, Pennsylvania, Republicans, Schools, Wall Street
In school districts from Pennsylvania to Illinois, Kentucky to West Virginia, state and local budget delays are putting the pinch on classrooms and costing districts tens of millions of dollars in additional borrowing fees — money going straight to Wall Street. In effect, political failures like budget delays, faulty tax software programs, or just political impasses are forcing some of the…
Source
by Nadra Nittle | Jun 17, 2026 | Civil Rights, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Justice, disability rights, doj, education, Health and Human Services, Heritage Foundation, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Linda McMahon, News Analysis, office for civil rights, Project 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., special education, Trump Administration
The Trump administration took aggressive new steps on Tuesday to shut down the Department of Education. Through agreements with other federal agencies, the administration announced that it would give the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) oversight of some of the Education Department’s key functions. HHS will oversee special education and…
Source
by Amy Goodman | Jun 12, 2026 | AAUP, Austerity, education, firings, Higher Education, Interview, labor, Layoffs, Mass Layoffs, tenure, The New School, Trump Administration
The Trump administration is continuing its assault on higher education, but in a departure from its earlier high-profile fights with individual institutions like Harvard, it is now rewriting the federal rules that govern all universities and colleges. Rules are being proposed by the Education Department and other agencies to impose the administration’s preferred policies on thousands of schools…
Source
