MAGAcademy: How corporatism paved the way for the hostile takeover of higher ed. w/ Nolan Higdon (G&R 496)

About this episode

The episode discusses how corporatism has influenced higher education and facilitated Trump's actions against universities, featuring guest Nolan Higdon.

🎉 Support Green and Red Podcast and get the latest at https://www.patreon.com/greenredpodcast. Trump’s war on universities , DEI and student activism have been well documented over the past 18 months. But his ability to do this is a result of an architecture put in place by neoliberalism and university administrators. They turned the university into a for profit corporation and transformed students into consumers. Trump has taken this model and used it to wage war on higher education. In our latest, we talk with Nolan Higdon, scholar and author of MAGAcademy: How Corporatism Paved the Way for the Hostile Takeover of Higher Ed., about how corporatism created a blueprint for Trump's hostile takeover of the university. Guest bio//Nolan Higdon is a political analyst, author and host of The Disinfo Detox Podcast. He is a lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Project Censored Judge. Higdon's popular Substack includes the bi-weekly Gaslight Gazette, which chronicles important and well-researched examples of disinformation, character assassination, and censorship in the United States. He is the author of MAGAcademy: How…

People in this episode

Host: Green and Red

Guest: Nolan Higdon

Topics covered

• corporatism
• higher education
• neoliberalism
• student activism
• Trump
• disinformation

Keywords

• corporatism
• higher education
• neoliberalism
• Trump
• student activism
• disinformation
• MAGAcademy

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of California, Santa Cruz, Project Censored, Gaslight Gazette

Books & works: MAGAcademy: How Corporatism Paved the Way for the Hostile Takeover of Higher Ed.

More episodes of Green & Red: Podcasts for Scrappy Radicals

• Clean Up on Aisle Five: Essential Work and Poverty Wages at America's Grocery Stores w/ Ann Larson (G&R 502) · June 11, 2026 · 48 min
• Rainforest Radicals: The History of Rainforest Action Network w/ Prof. David Benac (G&R 501) · June 9, 2026 · 1h 4m
• 500 Episodes and Counting! The Secret History of the Green and Red Podcast! (G&R 500) · June 6, 2026 · 44 min
• Anti-Austerity Protests Shake Bolivia. Here’s Why. w/ Dr. Rodrigo Acuña (G&R 499) · June 4, 2026 · 49 min
• The Rise and Fall of the Earth Liberation Front w/ author Matthew Wolfe (G&R 498) · June 2, 2026 · 60 min
• Radicals, Realists and Repression: The State of U.S. Activism w/ G&R Panel Discussion (G&R 497) · May 28, 2026 · 1h 34m