Boston College appears in The Bob Zadek Show chiefly as the academic affiliation of guests and of scholars cited by guests, not as an institution the program examines in its own right. Three episodes name it, and in each case the reference serves to establish the standing of a person whose research or book supplies the hour’s argument. The excerpts do not describe the university’s founding, governance, curriculum, or campus controversies.
Peter Gray and the case for free play
The earliest reference comes in the February 2018 conversation with Lenore Skenazy. Describing the coalition behind Let Grow, the nonprofit she served as president, Skenazy names three figures: Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind; Daniel Shuchman, head of the organization FIRE, which she describes as fighting for free speech on campus; and Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn. She identifies Gray as a professor at Boston College who believes that kids learn the most when they have unstructured, unsupervised time. A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018)
Skenazy’s account of Let Grow’s two projects follows. The Let Grow Project has teachers tell kids to go home and ask their parents if they can do one thing on their own, such as walking the dog or making dinner. The Let Grow Free Play Club keeps schools open after the school day so that children play on their own, organize their own games, settle on rules, and in her telling get used to democracy, to building consensus, and to solving their own arguments. She frames all of this as restoring opportunities that have been taken out of children’s lives, and she urges listeners to get their schools to adopt the Let Grow Project.
In the September 2018 episode devoted to Haidt’s book, Gray returns — this time cited by Haidt himself. Bob Zadek, in posing his question, recalled an interview in which Haidt used a phrase that connected with him as a libertarian: that students have to be taught to cope with freedom. Zadek illustrated the point with the observation that when democracy is imposed too quickly on repressive societies, people do not adjust, and that in formerly communist countries many older members yearned for the old days because they could not cope with the responsibilities of liberty. [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]]
Haidt accepted the frame but amended it. He said Zadek’s formulation should be changed to say that children cannot be taught directly; the art of association and of freedom must be developed with practice, with adults serving as role models. He then drew on Gray, whom he identified as a developmental psychologist at Boston College who has written a great deal on the importance of play. Haidt reported Gray’s view that the best kind of play is unsupervised play outdoors in mixed age groups, and he walked through what such play requires: children deciding what to do without anyone ordering anyone around, reading one another for signs of agreement or disagreement, choosing rules and their variations, picking teams, and adjusting for the youngest child who cannot be pitched to hard. These, Haidt said, are the skills of association, and putting a coach in the frame removes them, because then adults make the decisions and a child cannot quit. He concluded that free play is essential for the social skills of freedom and democracy and that children have been systematically deprived of it, citing time-use research showing a decline in free play and a rise in adult-supervised, adult-driven organized activity.
Shep Melnick and the transformation of Title IX
The December 2018 episode on Title IX is built around a second Boston College figure. Zadek introduces R. Shep Melnick as the Thomas P. O’Neill Professor of American Politics at Boston College, a teacher formerly at Harvard and Brandeis, and author of The Transformation of Title IX, whose studies focus on the intersection of law and politics. Title IX’s Transformation: R. Shep Melnick on the New Civil Rights Debate (2018)
Melnick’s account of the statute is concrete. Title IX, he says, is one section of omnibus education amendments passed in 1972, a hodgepodge of changes in education law; the provision itself says only that any educational institution receiving federal funds cannot discriminate on the basis of sex. What that meant was left unclear, there was very little discussion of it in Congress, and when President Nixon signed the legislation he did not notice its importance — nor did the New York Times in its story on the passage. It is, Melnick says, a simple, open-ended prohibition whose meaning has been argued about ever since.
Questioned by Zadek about how enforcement escaped the statute’s constraints, Melnick described two sets of actors rather than one. Withholding federal funds was recognized early as too politically dangerous and administratively cumbersome to use except in extreme circumstances, so courts recognized a private right of action — not written in the statute — allowing any private citizen to sue a university or school system to require compliance. That became, he says, the fundamental enforcement mechanism. Administrators and judges then built on each other in a process he calls institutional leapfrogging: the agency takes a step, a court takes another, the agency goes beyond that, and each says it is only following the other.
Melnick also described the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education bypassing the Administrative Procedure Act’s prescribed method for making rules, instead issuing interpretations and the now-ubiquitous “Dear Colleague” letters, to which courts have largely deferred; the result, he says, is a series of incremental changes that add up to a huge change while everyone denies doing anything new — a uniquely opaque regulatory system. On sexual harassment, he credited the Supreme Court’s 1998 and 1999 position — that a school knowing of harassment serious enough to prevent people from getting an education has a responsibility to address and stop it — as reasonable, then contrasted it with the Office for Civil Rights in 2011 and 2014, which he says went far beyond by requiring schools to eliminate, prevent and cure all consequences of harassment. He noted that both the Obama-era letters and the proposal put forth by the Trump administration demand far more of colleges, universities and elementary schools, and explained the gap by the fact that the Title IX regulation’s definition of sexual harassment and even sexual assault is much lower than under most criminal statutes, so schools are required to police behavior that would not be criminal in almost any state.
Zadek’s own framing runs alongside the guest’s throughout. He tells listeners that the hour will show what is wrong with top-down government, the regulatory state, and what he calls the bullying in Washington, and says the root of it all is, as it often is, the income tax. Later he describes a regulatory agency performing executive, legislative and judicial functions at once, quotes Madison on the accumulation of all powers in the same hands as the very definition of tyranny, and observes that the regulatory state undoes the separation of powers. He characterizes Melnick as a professor of law at Boston College in Boston, Massachusetts, and revisits the professor’s title in the same terms at the top of the next segment.
Across episodes
The two treatments of Boston College do not form a development; they are separate uses of the same credential. In February 2018 Skenazy cites Peter Gray’s work at Boston College as one strand of the intellectual coalition behind Let Grow, and in September 2018 Haidt cites the same scholar by name and affiliation to ground his account of how free play builds the skills of association. The December 2018 episode introduces a different Boston College professor, R. Shep Melnick, on a different subject, the growth of Title IX enforcement through institutional leapfrogging and Dear Colleague letters. No speaker in the excerpts revises or responds to another’s characterization of the university.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state where Boston College is located, when it was founded, who runs it, or how it is governed; the only geographic detail offered is Zadek’s incidental reference to Boston, Massachusetts, and the phrase “at Boston College” applied to two scholars. They say nothing about the university’s own policies, its handling of any Title IX matter, or its response to the free-play research its faculty member is credited with. Nothing in the excerpts indicates whether Boston College is a party to any case or controversy discussed. The sources likewise do not record the guests’ institutional positions beyond the titles stated, nor whether either scholar’s Boston College work was supported or opposed by the university.