Biography
Who I am and what I'm doing here.
Greetings!
(Me in 2023 at Colorado State)
Thank you for being interested in my project. Here’s my life story…
I had a pretty exciting youth, and was suicidal and on drugs during the punk years of my late teens and early twenties before I found the ability to repair myself and my life through Philosophy in college. Philosophy had saved my life, so I got a M.A. at Colorado State University (CSU) and did what I could to pay it forward, teaching at Arapahoe Community College and the Community College of Aurora (CCA) in Colorado. Aurora is a minority-majority community and a major immigration hub, and I taught students from over 130 countries. We mostly talked about God, sex, and politics, and mostly all got along, because my rule was that there were no sacred cows or things we couldn’t discuss, but no one was ever allowed to get personal with anyone else.
It was at CCA where I got into politics as an education reformer. My biggest success was closing the Winter pay gap for adjuncts, who make 20-24k/year with no contracts or benefits, from 8 to 4 weeks statewide. I did media campaigns and worked on legislation as an activist, and I worked constructively with administration wherever I could to achieve tangible reforms.
That career came crashing to a halt when CCA’s administration, in the name of Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity (EID), introduced a program to mandate lowered standards for students in order to increase pass and retention rates in order to generate revenue for the college. I protested on behalf of my students, they fired me, and I became the first adjunct to be the subject of an American Association of University Professors Committee A investigation.
My story on the cover of Westword magazine, with a link to a student film about me.
From there I went back to CSU, where I got a Ph.D. in Political Science with subfields in Political Theory, Public Policy and Public Administration, and Environmental Politics. I wrote my dissertation examining what had happened at CCA, building my model of the contemporary university within Nancy Fraser’s concept of ‘Progressive Neoliberalism,’ wherein institutions take on progressive values to protect their core capitalist interests. I argued that university administrators abuse EID policies to shield themselves from criticism, while at the same time crafting policies which benefit themselves at the expense of harmed students and teachers, further contributing to the overall decline in public perception of legitimacy of the university system. I used social and political psychology to demonstrate how this decline in public perception is a contributing factor in generating skepticism of all university-generated research, including environmental research on topics like anthropogenic global warming.
I believe that the solution to these problems can be found in Public Deliberation Theory, which utilizes agonism (constructive conflict) and Habermasian ‘Ideal Speech Situations’ to create argumentative procedures, which lead to outcomes that can be accepted by all parties. This Substack is my attempt to use these tools to engage the public and improve public discourse by helping explain to each side what the other believes, and why. Towards that end, I am 100% pro-free speech.
My social media links:
https://twitter.com/BorkNathanial
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanial-bork-ph-d-7303a1a8/
I strive to be neutral, partial, and fair as best as I am able for the sake of this project, but if you’re curious as to what my political beliefs -really- are, they’re basically this :
Media by and about me:
1) ‘The Crimes of Professor Nate Bork’, a student film by Patrick Ellis about me:
2) ‘When Woke Becomes Dangerous.’ My podcast interview with The On Purpose Podcast, episode 137, alongside Jerrad Weaver:
3) My first publication in Quillette, discussing animal rights:
https://quillette.com/2022/06/14/do-animals-have-rights-a-roundtable/
4) My podcast with my long lost childhood friend Ruston Webb, aka The Muscular Gentleman. We discuss toxic masculinity, feminism, and wokeness through the lens of Philosophy and Political Theory”:
Dr. Bork and The Muscular Gentleman
And finally, since you made it this far, here’s young me (around 2000):
