Professors behaving badly, higher ed scams, student hijinks.... This playlist features stories of the weird, scandalous, and controversial parts of academic life. Some stories are fun and lighthearted; some are tragic, heart-breaking, and rife with injustice. Colleges are complicated places.
Everything you've ever learned about physics, chemistry, astronomy, and even biology, is wrong. That was the conclusion reached by Alfred Lawson, major league pitcher, avionics pioneer, populist polit...Show More
John Buettner-Janusch was one of the first Americans to study lemurs. He held prestigious faculty positions at Yale, Duke and NYU, before surprising everyone with a series of increasingly bizarre crim...Show More
Through transcriptions of wiretapped conversations between Rick Singer, Felicity Huffman, and others, Episode 1 brings to life just how dirty these schemes were. We also hear from a student who cheate...Show More
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A bit more serious than the other podcasts on my Academia Gone Wild playlist, this season is a great deep dive into the college admissions scandal that brought down Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman
Conservative students don't feel like their ideas are welcome on campus. So they're fighting back. We go to Nebraska, where one skirmish spins out of control.
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Conservative students feel like their voices aren’t heard on college campus and liberal professors fret about their words might be taken out of context and end up a target of the wrath of wealthy outs...Show More
Social media sites offer quick and easy ways to share ideas, crack jokes, find old friends. They can make us feel part of something big and wonderful and fast-moving. But the things we post don't go ...Show More
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This story of Harvard incoming freshmen and their dank memes went viral a few years ago and this podcast brings more nuance to the conversation. I do wonder if they picked the most sympathetic studen...Show More
In the mid-1800s, Harvard Medical School had a reputation for being a “den of body snatchers.” And then, in November 1849, the school’s most prominent supporter, Dr. George Parkman, went missing. He w...Show More
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What a murder investigation at Harvard reveals about power structures in 19th-century Boston and unscrupulous corpse acquisition practices by Harvard Medical School. Great episode for Halloween weeken...Show More
In this special episode of Outlook, as part of our Lagos series, Helen Oyibo has been hearing remarkable testimony from three people whose lives have been affected by the confraternity system in Niger...Show More
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The fascinating history of fraternities at universities in Nigeria, which at certain points in time, functioned like extremely violent criminal groups. In the 1990s, these fraternities were even funde...Show More
Trinity Hall is a small Cambridge college - one of the 30+ which make up the university. After an investigation over several months, Tortoise has brought to light a number of allegations of sexual imp...Show More
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Why are colleges and universities so awful at handling sexual assault allegations? This episode sheds a light on some of the reasons why
The Lost in the Mall experiment is a classic case study in Psych 101 classes. The study's conclusion: if you are told something happened to you as a child, you're inclined to believe it and that we're...Show More
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As a person who took Psych 101 in college (as referenced in the episode), I’m always interested in stories that dig deeper into the academic studies that I read about in my textbook. There almost alwa...Show More
Today we are telling the story of James Hogue a life long con-man that decided the best way to become America's top running champ was to steal a dead kids identity, pose as a 16 year old and go back t...Show More
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A guy in his 30s takes advantage of some pretty terrible Ivy League admissions policies which were aimed at getting more non-Jewish white kids to enroll. He makes up a wild backstory, names himself Al...Show More
Mike tells Sarah how liberal magazines turned a "kids these days" moral panic into a national crisis. Digressions include Law & Order, Dave Foley and swimming pool etiquette. This episode contains det...Show More
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Working at a university myself, I know that the panic over free speech on campuses is so so so overblown. The best part of this episode is how Michael goes various accounts of how events were covered ...Show More
New federal data show that many graduate students don't make nearly enough money to pay back their student loans. WSJ's Melissa Korn explains why some graduates of elite schools, like Columbia Univers...Show More
rmmiller364 recommended:
I’m glad they made an episode about this because I had wanted to read the related WSJ article but it was behind their paywall... haha. As a professor, I agree with a lot of this. I am very distresse...Show More
Colleges today talk a big game about valuing diversity — so why are so many of them failing to retain first-generation students? We meet a homeless straight-A track star and her ad-hoc college applic...Show More
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A great episode about the challenges facing first generation college students, which should be required listening for everyone who works in education. I was a first gen student who went to a private s...Show More
Criminals in Pittsburgh have a plan. It involves gambling and manipulating the scores of college basketball games. But to pull it off, they'll first need some help from the basketball players themselv...Show More
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What happens when college athletes get tired of not being compensated and try to make some money on the side?
'Dollar signs with heartbeats' See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In September 2021, a group of female minority students at Arizona State University confronted two white male students who were studying in the library’s multicultural center. The women were upset wit...Show More
rmmiller364 recommended:
Wow, what a treat. The University of Lawsonomy was sure.... something. A school where the professors were also the students, the only books allowed were by the university founder himself, and the enti...Show More