Podcast: Introducing “Power Line University”

An action shot from a seminar.

I get a steady stream of emails from readers and listeners who want to know if any of my or Lucretia’s college courses are webcast or otherwise available online, and unfortunately the answer is No, partly for legal reasons but also for some technical reasons (streaming live classes is not as easy as it might seem, and the recording quality is often poor). But we have for the longest time been thinking about offering some of our class content on Power Line in an organized fashion, and so with this episode, we are pleased to inaugurate a new feature, “Power Line University.”

The first PLU course will be devoted to the Federalist Papers, or, as we like to call it, “the owner’s manual for the Constitution.” For this first trial episode, Lucretia and I decided that each of us would share three favorite passages from The Federalist, and explain why these passages in particular are significant or relevant to our current moment. (If you want to follow along at home on this first episode, the passages we selected are from Federalist #s 1, 10, 43, 31, 55, and 57.)

We haven’t decided yet how many episodes our Federalist course will be—probably five or six— but our intention is that future episodes, starting next week, will be done in webinar style on Zoom, so you can tune in live to our virtual “classroom” and pose questions or comments. Eventually we may try to offer some seminars in Zoom meeting format (though likely limited to VIP subscribers for security reasons), where participants will get to appear on camera, speak live and discuss the issues with other participants, and so forth. And if you can’t make the webinars or live classes, they’ll still be available in podcast form.

We have lots of ideas for future short courses, such as going over the Constitution itself, the Presidency, Lincoln, classical political philosophy perhaps—but above all we’d like to hear from listeners: please send along your ideas and suggestions (and questions on the topics we are covering) in the comment thread or directly by email. I will be doing a special series on science policy with Ken Green, who has just completed a terrific book on the defects of scientific models (such as the ones behind the COVID panic) starting some time in February.

The good news is, no “diversity” statements will be required for participation, and in fact we’re going to make a Bingo card out of the Stanford “Banned Words list” for each session. We won’t have any tests or term paper assignments, though ridicule from Lucretia is not ruled out! (Actually this is all just a plot to get her back in the classroom, since her university has seen fit to punish her by making her an administrator.)

And so, on to the classroom. . .  Listen here, or wander over to the main lecture hall at Ricochet.

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