Interview with Wes Bishop

The Public Sphere

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review. Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.

Today we’re talking to Wesley Bishop, a PhD candidate in History at Purdue University. His writings have appeared at Jacobin, The Socialist Worker, and TERSE, where he is the assistant editor. He is also a campus organizer with the Purdue Social Justice Coalition.

In late April of 2017, Purdue University in West Lafeyette, Indiana, announced plans to acquire Kaplan University—an online, for profit school—its 15 campuses and learning centers, and its 32,000 students and 3,000 employees. The ostensible was to expand their presence in online education. They plan to continue running Kaplan online as a private company with a different name. This is a unique situation for a lot of reasons which we get into during our discussion.

We also discuss the West Virginia teachers' strike and revisit the essay Wes wrote for Contrivers' Review last fall.

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