Jeff Goodwin

As the City Council prepares to vote on NYU's controversial expansion plan, 34 of the University's academic departments and divisions have passed resolutions against the plan, including the Stern School of Business and the Economics Department. Three faculty members: Jeff Goodwin, Professor of Sociology, Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, and Ann Pellegrini, Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies, explain their concerns, and look at how corporate influence is affecting higher education in general.

Guests today include: 

• Benjamin Barber, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the New York think tank Demos and Walt Whitman Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Rutgers University; 
• Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and former National Security Council official in the Clinton administration; 
• Simon Schama, University Professor of art history and history at Columbia whose work focuses on revolutions; 
• Mona Eltahawy, Egyptian New Yorker and columnist and public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues; 
• Jeff Goodwin, professor of sociology at NYU and author of No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991;
• Youssef M. Ibrahim, an Egyptian and a former New York Times Middle East and European correspondent who served as the paper's Tehran bureau chief in 1978-1979; 

As well as Shinasi A. Rama, deputy director of the NYU Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy and one of the leaders of the Albanian student movement; Suketu Mehta, New York City-based journalist, professor of journalism at NYU, and author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found; Neferti Tadiar, professor and chair of women's studies at Barnard College; Anne Nelson, adjunct associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University who's covered revolutions as a journalist in Central America; Omar Cheta, PhD candidate in the departments of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and History at NYU; Shiva Sarram, who was eight years old during the 1979 revolution in Iran and the founder of the Blossom Hill Foundation, which works with children affected by conflict.; Gladys Carbo-Flower, recording artist and witness to Cuba's revolution; Didi Ogude, a recent NYU graduate who was ten years old during South Africa's regime change in the nineties; Hesham El-Meligy, a Muslim-American community organizer from Staten Island; and Ali Al Sayed, Egyptian New Yorker and owner of Kabab Café in Little Egypt, Astoria, Queens.