Arizona State University enters The Bob Zadek Show not as a subject but as an institutional reference point. Across three episodes the university is named in three unrelated connections: as the administrator of a public-square blog whose writer proposed a state immigration policy, as the academic home of a law professor who helped draft a conservative constitution, and, in two separate remarks by the same guest, as the employer of a music professor hired to teach music through the lens of Critical Race Theory. The excerpts supply no account of the university’s founding, location, governance or curriculum; what follows is limited to what the episodes state.
Zócalo Public Square and the California residency proposal
In the July 20, 2018 episode, Bob Zadek introduced his guest, the journalist Joe Mathews, and described Mathews as writing for Zócalo Public Square, which Zadek characterized as a blog center sponsored or administered by Arizona State University, with Mathews’s column syndicated in newspapers around the country California Discovers Federalism (2018). Zadek said a piece of Mathews’s in the San Francisco Chronicle had caught his attention, and he framed the morning’s subject as Mathews’s proposal that California in particular, and perhaps states in general, be allowed to create, enforce and regulate their own immigration policy independent of the federal government. Zadek gave the title of the piece as “In Great American Tradition, Let California Take Undocumented Immigrants” and asked Mathews to expand on it.
The episode’s own summary describes the proposal as one for California to create its own residency status for undocumented immigrants, effectively using the 10th Amendment to bypass federal immigration enforcement, and lists among the topics explored the economic necessity of immigration for an aging society and the role of federalism in setting policies like the minimum wage and occupational licensing. Zadek opened the segment by describing his distress at news coverage of what the federal government was doing to immigrant families and children at the borders, and said he wished he had the capacity to change things himself. The excerpt of Mathews’s answer breaks off at the point where he begins to define California residency, so the excerpts preserve his thesis only as Zadek restated it.
The university’s role in this episode is thus administrative and incidental: it is named as the institution behind the outlet that published the proposal, not as a participant in the argument. Nothing in the excerpt indicates that anyone at Arizona State University endorsed, drafted or advanced the residency proposal, and the excerpts do not say what Zócalo Public Square is beyond Zadek’s description of it.
Ilan Wurman and the conservative constitution
The December 20, 2021 episode supplies the university’s second appearance, this time through a faculty member. Zadek introduced Ilan Wurman as an associate professor at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, teaching administrative law and constitutional law, writing in the Yale Law Journal and other leading law journals, and the author of two books, A Debt Against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism and The Second Founding: An Introduction to the 14th Amendment The Conservative Constitution (2021). Wurman appeared as a member of the conservative team in the National Constitution Center’s Constitution Drafting Project, which Zadek described as sponsored by a nonprofit organization funded by Congress and located in Philadelphia, and which invited three teams of legal scholars — libertarian, progressive and conservative — to rewrite the Constitution as each saw fit.
Zadek framed the episode as the final interview in a series, following earlier shows with a member of the libertarian team and a member of the progressive team, and said the topic was perhaps his favorite series across the roughly 700 shows he had done. The episode summary states that the discussion covered the team’s approach to balancing self-government and liberty, restructuring the Senate with single nine-year terms, and reforming the Supreme Court with 18-year term limits, and that Wurman explained his team’s focus on correcting modern deviations from originalist principles, particularly regarding the Commerce Clause, substantive due process and the Necessary and Proper Clause. Wurman’s own first words in the excerpt are thanks for having him and an expression of excitement about the conversation; the excerpt breaks off as Zadek begins the segment on the Post Office and core principles, so the excerpts do not preserve Wurman’s substantive exposition in his own voice.
Here the university functions as a credential: it identifies where Wurman teaches, and the episode’s summary lists his title and field accordingly. The excerpts do not describe the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, its curriculum, or any institutional position it took on the drafting project.
Critical Race Theory and the music professor
The May 29, 2022 episode, featuring Jonathan Butcher on Critical Race Theory, names Arizona State University twice, both times in remarks by Butcher rather than by Zadek. In the first, discussing how Critical Race Theory moved from law schools to colleges of education and throughout higher education, Butcher said he had written a piece a couple of months earlier about a music professor hired at Arizona State University to teach music in higher education from the perspective of Critical Race Theory, and that the words “Critical Race Theory” were used Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022). In the second, answering Zadek’s question about whether Critical Race Theory crowds out basic education, Butcher returned to the same example, saying that Arizona State University had just hired a professor to teach music through the Critical Race Theory lens, alongside a California curriculum stating that math is a tool of white supremacy and of capitalism, the Critical Race theorist Gloria Ladson-Billings’s 2019 keynote to the National Council of the Teachers of Mathematics, a science teachers’ association’s hiring of a Critical Race theorist to speak about critical affinity spaces in science teaching, and literature teachers using the hashtag DisruptTexts to replace classic works.
In both instances the university serves as an example in Butcher’s argument that Critical Race Theory is a worldview applied across subjects rather than a subject of its own, and that it is crowding out what he called objective quality education. Zadek’s questions in the episode supply the framing — he asked why the discussion concentrates on K-12 education and what effect the teaching has on core education in reading, science, math and civics — but the Arizona State University example is Butcher’s. The excerpts do not name the professor, the course, the date of the hire, or any response by the university.
Across episodes
The three episodes do not develop a common question about Arizona State University; each names it in passing for a different purpose — as the administrator of Zócalo Public Square in 2018, as the academic home of Ilan Wurman in 2021, and as the employer of a music professor in two 2022 remarks by Jonathan Butcher — and the excerpts show no development from one treatment to the next.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state where Arizona State University is located, when it was founded, how it is governed or funded, or what programs it offers, and they do not say what Zócalo Public Square is beyond Zadek’s description of it as a blog center sponsored or administered by the university. They do not name the music professor or the course at issue, give the date of the hire, or record any statement by the university. They do not say whether the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law or anyone else at the university took a position on the Constitution Drafting Project. Nothing in the excerpts indicates that the university itself advanced, endorsed or opposed any of the arguments in which it is mentioned.