Other Projects
& Media
Additional Books
Selected Editorials
“History explains why the left is mad over Biden’s student loan relief,” Washington Post, July 28, 2022.
“ ‘Laboratories of Inter-race and Interfaith Fellowship:’ Higher Education for American Democracy’s Vision for a more Democratic Academy & Country,” 54:1 Change (January 2022), 9-16.
"Higher Education for the 99 Percent," Dissent, September 17, 2021
"Why Do We Celebrate Labor Day?" TheHill, September 6, 2021.
"Fixing the Student-Debt Crisis Isn't Enough," Chronicle of Higher Education, August 16, 2021
"Policymakers created the student loan industry -- and the debt crisis," Washington Post, August 4, 2021
"75 years of reforms have failed to fix our college financial aid system," Washington Post, May 3, 2021
"Our focus on a president’s first 100 days in office leads us astray," Washington Post, April 30, 2021
“Democrats have the right idea of what covid-19 relief should look like,” Washington Post, March 27, 2020
“Democrats shouldn’t marginalize Bernie Sanders’s ideas and supporters,” Washington Post, February 27, 2020
“The Right to Work Really Means the Right to Work for Less,” Washington Post, April 24, 2018
“The Toxic Practice Fueling the Fierce Competition over Amazon’s Second Headquarters,” Washington Post, January 20, 2018
How Tax Policy Made College Unaffordable,” Washington Post, December 21, 2017
“I’m one of the 40 million Americans paying off the $1.3 trillion in student debt,” TheJournal.ie, April 6, 2017
“The Student Debt Crisis and Its Deniers,” Public Books, March 15, 2017
“From Chicago to California: A Call for Unionized Universities,” Dissent: A Quarterly of Politics and Culture, February 18, 2014
“UIC United Faculty on Front Lines of Crisis in Higher Education,” LAWCHA's Labor Online, February 5, 2014
Selected Media Mentions & Interviews
Interview, "Student Loans: The Fund-Eating Dragon," NPR's Throughline, July 21, 2002.
Interview, Mitchell Stevens, “Private Pain, Public Disinvestment: Talking Student Debt with Elizabeth Tandy Shermer," Public Books, May 17, 2022
Interview, Jacqui Germain, “Student Loan Interest Rates Mean Borrowers End Up Owing Thousands More Dollars,” Teen Vogue, March 15, 2022
Interview, Sydney Lake, “Is Biden Actually Going to Cancel Your Student Loans?” Fortune, February 28, 2022
Interview, Adel Aali, ThePeel.News podcast, January 14, 2022.
Interview, Danielle Moodie, Woke AF podcast, January 12, 2022 ("No More Band Aids" episode).
Interview, Abigail Johnson Hess, “Lawsuit Claims 16 Top Colleges Overcharged Over 170,000 Students by ‘Hundreds of Millions of Dollars,’ ” CNBC, February 11, 2022
Interview, Sydney Lake, “How Biden Might Approach Student Loan Forgiveness in 2022,” Fortune, January 11, 2022.
Interview, Nikki Nolan, Matter of Life and Debt podcast, December 31, 2021.
Interview, Jessica Ann Levy, Who Makes Sense Podcast, October 4, 2021.
Interview, Sydney Lake, “Mass student loan forgiveness? Don’t Count on it says Biden appointee,” Fortune, September 21, 2021
Interview, Michael Brown, Shadow Politics radio program, August 2, 2020
Interview, Dan Zak, “American Exceptionalism Was Our Preexisting Condition,” Washington Post, July 22, 2020
Interview, Christopher Borrelli, “Do you appreciate your supermarket cashier? Re-reading Studs Terkel’s ‘Working’ for the Pandemic,” Chicago Tribune, April 22, 2020
Interview with Jen White, “What’s Behind America’s ‘Union Moment’?” WBEZ, October 29, 2019
Interview, Dissent Magazine’s Belabored Podcast, released March 6, 2015
BBC4 Women’s Hour Segment on Reproductive Politics and the Republican Primaries, March 7, 2012
Selected Scholarly Publications
Selected Journal Articles & Book Chapters
“Financing Security and Opportunity: The New Deal and the Origins of the Millennial Student Debt Crisis,” in Nelson Lichtenstein et al. (eds.), Capitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
“A Fraught Partnership: Business and the Rise of the American Public University,” 157-178 in Kim Phillips-Fein and Richard John (eds.), Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
“ ‘The South’s No. 1 Salesman:’ Luther Hodges and the Nuevo South’s Transatlantic Circuitry,” in Andrew Preston and Doug Rossinow (eds.), America’s World: The Transnational Circuitry of U.S. History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
“Banking on Government” in Steven Conn (ed.), To Promote the General Welfare: The Case for Big Government (Oxford University Press, 2012), 65-84.
“Counter-Organizing the Sunbelt: Right to Work Campaigns and Anti-Union Conservatism, 1943-1958,” Pacific Historical Review 78 (February 2009), 81-118.
“Origins of the Conservative Ascendancy: Barry Goldwater’s Early Senate Career and the De-legitimization of Organized Labor,” Journal of American History 95 (December 2008), 678-709.
Selected Literature Reviews
“The Ongoing Crisis in American Colleges,” European Journal of American Culture 37:1 (April 2018), 90-94.
“The Geography of Postwar American Business,” Business History Review (June 2016).
“Whither the Right? Old and New Directions in the History of American Conservatism,” Reviews in American History(December 2016), 644-652.
“Neo-Liberalism,” Journal of Modern History 86 (December 2014).
“The New History of Capitalism,” Journal of American History, online interchange, 101 (September 2014).