The Awful Shadow: Unblocking the Self / Unboxing Big-Box Academia cover art

The Awful Shadow: Unblocking the Self / Unboxing Big-Box Academia

The Awful Shadow: Unblocking the Self / Unboxing Big-Box Academia

By: Jack Stamps
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THE AWFUL SHADOW is a restless memoir of tragedy, perseverance, personal restoration, and the unveiling of one public university’s ugly underbelly. Told through shifting, often colorful and humorous narrative styles and allusions to gothic fantasy video game elements, the author recounts a five-year odyssey through the death of his daughter, a dysfunctional workplace, a prolonged lawsuit settled out of court, crumbled relationships, a near death experience, spiritual transformation, music composition, and more.

At the heart of THE AWFUL SHADOW is a slick, university-style textbook called ACADEMIA CULPA that teaches specific administrative transgressions, woven from legal discovery, personal accounts, interviews, open records, and graphical data.

THE AWFUL SHADOW concludes with a near-death experience, an outpouring of renegade prayers, and a new, sober view of a world anxiously grappling with its own transformation.

Jack Stamps 2024
Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Chapter 23 - The Eyes
    Sep 12 2025

    A haunted walk through the origins of “The Eyes of Texas”—told as a fantasy with musical set pieces. John Henry, Alice, and Old Man Joshua pull the veil off a campus anthem; a paper tyrant named Jaihartd tries to sell “comfort” over truth.

    Content note

    Discussion of blackface/minstrelsy, racist caricature, and institutional whitewashing.

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    39 mins
  • Chapter 22 - BRAC-Listed!
    Sep 8 2025

    In this searing and darkly satirical chapter, Jack peels back the layers of secrecy surrounding a big-box university's Behavioral Risk Assessment Committee (BRAC)—an obscure, almost mythological campus entity with no visible public charter and yet, somehow, the power to investigate faculty and staff without their knowledge or consent.

    What begins as a Kafkaesque tangle of open records requests turns into something even more disturbing: a bureaucratic specter capable of branding a man a threat based on bolded email hearsay, surreal musical titles, and cartoonishly bad assumptions. This episode dives deep into:

    • 🕵️‍♂️ Hidden administrative surveillance
    • 🎵 The criminalization of instrumental music
    • 📜 Open records requests as weapons of clarity
    • 🧠 Mental health, family loss, and the long shadow of post-lawsuit grief
    • 🍫 A PayDay bar, a piñata, and a lanyard collection all make cameos

    Plus: A faculty member accuses Jack of “stalking by SoundCloud,” a dean drops a pizza-parlor-pedophile punchline, and the university Police confuse him with his own father. It’s absurd, it’s infuriating—and it’s all true.

    With help from fellow whistleblower and historian Alberto Martinez, this episode isn’t just a personal reckoning; it’s a surgical dissection of a shadow system that treats reputation as risk and satire as threat.

    🟧 Trigger warning: gaslighting, defamation, uninvestigated accusations, and the misuse of mental health frameworks as instruments of silencing.

    🟦 Content warning: brief discussion of depression, injury, and grief.

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    33 mins
  • Chapter 21: The Awful Shadow
    Jul 8 2025

    At the base of every sacred tower lies a crypt. In this episode, we descend beneath the surface of university branding into the procedural catacombs where faculty complaints are sorted, neutralized, and entombed. Drawing parallels between the Erdtree of Elden Ring and the University of Texas Tower, Dr. Jack Stamps uncovers the silent mechanics of complaint triage—a system designed not to resolve harm, but to contain it.

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    25 mins
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