Inventing the Liberal University, with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

For this last session we are very happy to announce that we have invited American based Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, historian of US colleges and universities, host of the American Campus Podcast and author of Resistance from the Right.

Her session will focus on her forthcoming monograph titled Inventing the Liberal University, to which you will find a brief presentation below:

American colleges and universities are routinely depicted in US media as progressive institutions. Shepherd offers an alternative history of the campus that brings forth the sector’s little discussed conservatism. She traces the emergence of the idea that the academy is a palisade of ‘liberalism gone too far’ from its first appearances among 20th century conservative thinkers to its current iteration as a bastion of 'wokeism' by reactionaries and liberals alike in 2026. Shepherd offers a necessary correction to overstated claims about the college by attending to the hidden structural role of the academy within the larger US political economy.

In the morning on April 13, a special episode of the American Campus Podcast will be recorded live on our very campus (live from the MIN!) with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, Jon Hauser and Eléana Sanchez to discus attacks on higher education in the US and France. The episode will then be broadcasted on all our favorite podcasts platforms.

This session will conclude a wonderful year for our PoKES seminar and we would be delighted to share this moment with you!

Attendance in person is preferred but it is possible to attend online as well. Please email michael.stambolis@univ-tlse2.fr for the link.

You'll find resources about our guest below:

Link to Lauren Lassabe Shepherd's personal website

Link to the American Campus Podcast, a social and political history of US higher ed

Link to Resistance from the Right, Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023)

This seminar is organized as part of the InterClim project in partnership with the Région Nouvelle-Aquitaine, the Institut Universitaire de France, Université Bordeaux Montaigne, University of Bordeaux, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, the IRM, SPH and our own lab the CAS.