Over the past several weeks, I have devoted my otherwise eclectic radio program, Have You Read The Times, to the discussion of a single topic. Every Monday from 11 p.m. to midnight, I gather a panel of eminent peers to discuss the politics, poetics and praxis of one of the most influential television shows of my childhood, Hey Arnold!

The show follows its titular character as he socializes with a multicultural cast of friends, attends a conspicuously middle-class public school and, in the words of Georg Simmel, “attempt[s]... to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society.”

Despite the seriousness and care with which I hastily piece together a skeletal outline for each episode, I still face the criticism that Hey Arnold! is not a subject that deserves continued attention. The attitude that media produced for children is not as nuanced and substantive as other forms is anachronistic and insulting. Hey Arnold! deserves as much attention as the works of Shakespeare or Rushdie.

If we disregard work targeted toward children, we significantly rob young people of agency. Although more than two decades of scholarship and criticism have done quite a lot to bring children’s literature into the academic fold, children’s culture in general is still marginalized in mainstream discourse.

Faux concern about the influence of technology and the omnipresence of corporate media looms menacingly in conversations about the generation below us. Children are simultaneously seen as constituting the most impressionable group in society as well as a group that isn’t capable of absorbing anything besides the bright colors and chirping that we often attribute to the media targeted at them. In reality, our generation watched television that was created to educate us, challenge us and endear us to its well-developed universe of characters.

This body of work deserves discussion in a variety of contexts. It deserves the rigorous application of postcolonial, psychoanalytic and other popular academic frameworks. If we overlook the word rigorous in the previous sentence, that is what I hope to do in my weekly radio program.

The sanitized criticism that we often find on children’s television is another reason for our community to take this body of work seriously. Our university is a hostile environment in which to take an explicitly political stance on just about any issue. At best, our campus is a place where people can score a few likes on social media by joining the latest fight about something quasi-political, but even that so-called misbehavior is fading fast.

Children’s television is a fantastic catalyst for this kind of transition. Animators have, in recent years, increasingly laced otherwise apolitical content with progressive social messages. Steven Universe, a popular animated children’s show, has a surprising number of adult viewers who see it as advocating for feminist and trans politics. The beauty of the show is that it accomplishes its political goals in a wholly unobjectionable way. The show’s characters wouldn’t fit traditional gender roles even if its creators hadn’t tinged the show with progressive politics, or allowed the writers to advocate for their vision of society. If the university is going to maintain its reputation of diversity without losing all political edge, we are going to have to emulate programs like Steven Universe and get better at producing and embracing veiled social criticism.

As I scour the depths of ’90s Nickelodeon, reappraising my childhood favorites, I hope to make explicit the implicit messages that many of us were fed during our formative years. I hope that by trawling the colorful waters of my early youth, I’ll learn something about myself. If you think about these issues too, I invite you to join me on Jackal Radio this Monday at 11 p.m.