Higher Ed Now

ACTA’s Program Coordinator for the College Debates and Discourse Alliance, Kayla Johnston, returns to her alma mater, the University of North Carolina (UNC)–Greensboro, for a conversation with two student leaders: Lauren Fletcher and Matt Kircher. Thanks to the generous support of the Barnes Family Foundation, the College Debates and Discourse Alliance has brought its debates and dialo...

ACTA President Michael Poliakoff welcomes The Honorable John Hillen, distinguished resident fellow at the Center for Politics in Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy and an executive-in-residence of the Political Science Department. Dr. Hillen is a combat veteran and Bronze Star recipient, a former assistant U.S. secretary of state, a successful business leader, and the author of The...

This episode features Zagros Madjd-Sadjadi, professor of economics at Winston-Salem State University. Dr. Madjd-Sadjadi has more than 30 years of teaching and economic consulting experience and was formerly the chief economist of the city and county of San Francisco. His work has been cited in the Congressional Record and led to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. This past year, Dr. Madjd-Sadja...

In this episode, ACTA Vice President of Policy Bradley Jackson talks with Jane Calvert, director of the John Dickinson Writings Project and a member of ACTA’s National Commission on American History and Civic Education. They contend that the study of history is less about rote memorization and more like being a detective excavating an unsolved mystery or a lawyer preparing to argue an import...

In this episode, Sadie Webb, ACTA's Associate Director of the College Debates and Discourse Alliance, converses with faculty leaders and students to explore the CD&D program's extensive work at Juniata College. Reflecting on their experiences with classroom and campus debates, Matthew Damschroder, Dean of Students; Derek James, Dean of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion; and four Juniata undergrads h...

  ACTA’s chief of staff and SVP, Armand Alacbay, sits down with Jon Hardister, who once chaired North Carolina's House Education Committee, and now serves as a trustee at Western Carolina University. Hear his insider insights on the key role trustees play in university governance, student success, and protecting free speech on campus.

ACTA president Michael Poliakoff speaks to Ohio Senator Jerry Cirino, vice chair of the Senate's Higher Education Committee, on his promise to enact legislation to enhance the quality of higher education in the Buckeye State. Senator Cirino aims to safeguard open discourse and intellectual diversity for both students and faculty, mandate institutional neutrality at Ohio universities, and ensure th...

Focusing on the role of higher education in preparing young Americans for citizenship, ACTA's president Michael Poliakoff speaks with Mitch Daniels, former Governor of Indiana, who also served as president of Purdue University from 2013 to 2022.  

ACTA's president Michael Poliakoff speaks with the distinguished scholar and education leader, Joshua Dunn, who took on leadership of the recently established Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in June, 2023. Professor Dunn was previously the executive director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual at the University of Colorado at Colorado...

ACTA's Paul and Karen Levy Fellow in Campus Freedom, Steve McGuire, interviews Aaron Sibarium, a journalist who writes for the Washington Free Beacon. Sibarium graduated in 2018 from Yale University, where he was the opinion editor of The Yale Daily News. Much of his reporting for the Free Beacon focuses on issues in higher education, and he has authored numerous blockbuster investigative reports...

ACTA’s Doug Sprei interviews Peter Skerry, professor of political science at Boston College, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He has been featured in a variety of scholarly and national media publications, and is the author of Counting on the Census: Race, Group Identity, and the Evasion of Politics (published by Brookings),...

For the past several years, ACTA has collaborated with the Alumni Free Speech Alliance (AFSA) to defend free expression, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity on college and university campuses. With hundreds of alumni advocates across 27 institutions, AFSA represents a national movement empowering alumni to exert positive, meaningful influence on their alma maters. One of the most active grou...

In this episode, the second of two conversations devoted to core texts, ACTA’s Academic Affairs Fellow Veronica Bryant speaks in Spanish with Clemente Cox, classics and philosophy scholar and the Academic Director of the Center of General Studies at the Universidad de los Andes. Their conversation includes the differences between Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic higher education, core curricula, the...

ACTA’s Academic Affairs Fellow Veronica Bryant is joined by two distinguished educators and advocates for core texts in liberal education: Dr. Charlotte Thomas, Executive Director of the Association for Core Texts and Courses, or ACTC, and Dr. José María Torralba, board member of ACTC. Dr. Thomas is a Professor of Philosophy at Mercer University, where she is also the Director of the Great B...

Those who listen to "The Glenn Show" will know that Professor Glenn Loury has published an extraordinary autobiography.  Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative breathes the spirit of candor, intellectual openness, and personal humility that has characterized his life and work. Professor Loury is a Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, which hails his new book as “a shockin...

Renowned legal scholar, professor, columnist, and commentator Jonathan Turley joins ACTA's Dr. Steven McGuire on Higher Ed Now to discuss why free speech has always been America’s most revolutionary and indispensable right; how academia spawned the latest, and perhaps most dangerous, campaign against free speech; and why an enriching college experience should resemble the famous bar scene fr...

ACTA’s College Debates and Discourse (CD&D) Alliance has launched more than 300 Braver Angels debates and workshops, engaging 11,000 students at colleges and universities across the nation. CD&D employs a highly collaborative approach that engages students and faculty to lead civil debates on controversial topics. In this episode of Higher Ed Now, CD&D Program Director Doug Sprei interviews...

ACTA president Michael B. Poliakoff and vice president of policy Bradley Jackson engage scholar, author and Professor Emeritus of Michigan State University, William B. Allen in candid conversation about his lifelong love of books and learning, the Founders, the philosophical thought leaders whose seminal works cut a path for the emergence of our American Republic, and why he remains optimistic abo...

ACTA President Michael Poliakoff interviews Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center and professor of law at George Washington University Law School. In this vibrant conversation, they explore Dr. Rosen’s new book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America. They also cover the critically import...

On today’s episode, Higher Ed Now producer Doug Sprei interviews Jennifer Keohane, associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design at the University of Baltimore, and Justin Eckstein, associate professor of communication at Pacific Lutheran University. Both of these remarkable professors advise and support the College Debates and Discourse (CD&D) Alliance, a joint ini...

Immediately after she delivered an electrifying keynote speech at Pacific Lutheran University's Wang Symposium on March 7, 2024, ACTA's Doug Sprei interviewed Monica Guzman, the bestselling author of I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. Ms. Guzman's influential work in the civil discourse movement has been amplified by her leade...

John Bolton served as the 25th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006, and as the 26th United States National Security Advisor from 2018 to 2019 during the Trump Administration. He is the author of The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, as well as Surrender Is Not An Option. Always an erudite figure in politics, Ambassador Bolton is an attorney, Republican cons...

Dr Anika T. Prather is a nationally-recognized speaker and advocate for the relevancy of classical education for the Black community. She has served as a lecturer at Howard University’s Classics and English departments and, most recently, as a Director of High-Quality Curriculum and Instruction at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. She has authored two books on Blacks and the...

Tony Banout, Executive Director, and Tom Ginsburg, Faculty Director of the University of Chicago's New Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression join Steve McGuire, ACTA's Paul and Karen Levy Fellow in Campus Freedom, to discuss institutional neutrality -- the idea that universities should not take official positions on social and political controversies. While explaining how this position supports th...

ACTA's President Michael Poliakoff joins Paul Levy, a member of ACTA's board of directors and the creator of the Levy Forum for Open Discourse at the Palm Beach Synagogue. Together they interview Dr. Glenn Loury, the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Economics at Brown University. Dr. Loury is one of the nation's leading social critics on topics of racial inequ...