Freedom Center Today

Joel Runnels is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona, and a Fulbright Specialist at the University of Ghana’s Department of Linguistics/Ghanaian Sign Language Program. You can learn more about Dr Andrew Foster below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHHr6DYxRy0 You can find Joel Runnels’ literature review of Foster below: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26235342?seq=1

Why have four decades of public education reform underperformed? Why do education majors tend to have lower standardized test scores than other undergraduates? And why did a libertarian leaning, union-skeptical Republican elected to school board in a progressive college town ally with the local teacher union against administration? The answer to each question is that k-12 public schools, and increasingly colleges, do not exist to educate students. Robert Anthon Maranto teaches in the College of Education and Health Professions. You can learn more about him below. https://edre.uark.edu/people/faculty/uid/rmaranto/name/Robert+Anthony+Maranto/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maranto You might also be interested in a PhD program offered through his department available at the link below. https://edre.uark.edu/phd-education-policy/index.php Finally, you can take a look at the two articles that provided most of the context for his interview today below: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/8/1/2 https://kappanonline.org/maranto-carroll-cheng-teodoro-school-leadership-gender/

Tyler Cowen dropped by an informal conversation about a talk he gave at the University of Arizona. You can see that presentation below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&t=15&v=0kcQEsqKggo&app=desktop and you can learn more about Tyler below: https://www.mercatus.org/scholars/tyler-cowen#0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Cowen You can find him at Marginal Revolution below: https://marginalrevolution.com/ Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and also Director of the Mercatus Center.  He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987.  His book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better was a New York Times best-seller.  Many of his earlier books, including In Praise of Commercial Culture​ and Creative Destruction study the economics of culture and the arts. He was recently named in an Economist poll as one of the most influential economists of the last decade. Several years ago Bloomberg Businessweek dubbed him “America's Hottest Economist.”  Foreign Policy magazine named him as one of its “Top 100 Global Thinkers” of 2011. 

Rachel Ferguson is a Professor of Managerial Philosophy and Director of the Liberty and Ethics Center in the Hammond Institute. Her research interests include Hume’s classical liberalism, the philosophy of economics, and Aristotelian virtue theory. She is a board member for the Freedom Center of Missouri, ReThink 315, and LOVEtheLOU. Ferguson teaches political philosophy, game theory, and business ethics. She also facilitates the course on economic federalism that accompanies the Liberty and Ethics Center’s Spring Conference. In addition, Rachel coordinates a collection of liberty-oriented faculty from mid-sized Midwestern universities, which aims to engage with constitutional law and economics at the faculty, undergraduate, and high school levels. Dr. Ferguson received her Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Lindenwood University (1999), and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Saint Louis University (2008).

Dr. Ben-Porath received her doctorate in political philosophy from Tel Aviv University in 2000. She was awarded two successive Tel Aviv University President’s postdoctoral grants. In 2001-2004, she was a postdoctoral research associate at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Dr. Ben-Porath has been teaching at Penn GSE since 2004. At Penn, she served as a special assistant to the university president. She is executive committee member of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy, and the chair of the faculty advisory board for Penn Press. From 2012-2013 she was affiliated with the Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University. She is currently an associate member of the political science department and the philosophy department at Penn. You can find Sigal Ben-Porath’s book, Free Speech on Campus below: https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15762.html You can find information on a speaker series on free speech she is organizing below: https://www.free-speech-battles.org/events-1

Myron Magnet, prizewinning author of Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution and The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817, was the editor of City Journal from 1994 through 2006 and is now its editor-at-large. A longtime member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine, Magnet has written about a wide variety of topics, from American society and social policy, economics, and corporate management to intellectual history, literature, architecture, and the American Founding. You can learn more about Myron below: https://myronmagnet.com/ You can follow him on Twitter @MyronMagnet

Randall Curren is Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Education (secondary) at the University of Rochester (New York), and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues (JCCV) at the University of Birmingham (England).  He was the Ginny and Robert Loughlin Founders’ Circle Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey for 2012-2013, and held concurrent research professorships at the Jubilee Centre and the Royal Institute of Philosophy (London) in 2013-2015. Professor Curren is the author of 130 publications, including most recently Living Well Now and in the Future: Why Sustainability Matters, with geologist Ellen Metzger (MIT Press, 2017), Why Character Education? (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), Patriotic Education in a Global Age, with historian Charles Dorn (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and a series of papers on populism, civic friendship, and the rural-urban opportunity gap. He is editor of the Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Education, co-editor of the History and Philosophy of Education Series for the University of Chicago Press, and a past editor of the journal Theory and Research in Education. His work in philosophy of education, social and political philosophy, Ancient Greek philosophy, ethics, moral psychology, and psychometrics, has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and Templeton Foundation. 

Alexandra Oprea is a political philosopher with a specialization in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE). She is a lecturer at the Australian National University. Her research interests include education policy, collective decision-making, institutional design, and the history of political thought. You can find out more about Alex and her research below: https://alexandraoprea.com/ You can follow her on Twitter at @AOprea_PPE. If you would like to read more on the topic of conversation here on the Freedom Center Today, you can find her recent paper, “Inadequate for Democracy: How (not) to Distribute Education” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1470594X20924667

Fredrik DeBoer is a writer and academic with a PhD from Purdue University. His writing has appeared in such places as The New York Times, Harper’s, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Playboy, New Republic, Foreign Policy, n+1, and Jacobin. You can find his first book, The Cult of Smart below: https://www.amazon.com/Seed-Soil-Confronting-Differences-Educational/dp/1250200377

Dr. Cordsci is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Regional Economic and Enterprise Development (CREED), and an Affiliate Scholar at the Classical Liberal Institute at the New York University School of Law. Carlo joined Sheffield University Management School in May 2019 after completing his PhD at the Department of Politics, University of Sheffield. Find out more about Carlos: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/management/people/research-associates/carlo-cordasco, Follow him on Twitter: @CarloLCordasco

On this episode of the Freedom Center Today he talks about games, gamification, and the danger of assigning numeric scores as we try to deal with thorny social problems. Thi Nguyen is a philosophy professor at the University of Utah. Dr. Nguyen studies trust, art, games, and communities. You can read more about him and follow him on Twitter at the links below: https://objectionable.net/ https://twitter.com/add_hawk?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Chad Van Shoelandt earned his PhD at the University of Arizona, where he was involved with the Freedom Center. He is presently a professor of philosophy at Tulane University in New Orleans. You can find out more about Chad at the links below: https://sites.google.com/view/chad-van-schoelandt/home https://sites.google.com/view/chad-van-schoelandt/home He is co-editor of  The Routledge Handbook of Anarchy and Anarchist Thought.

Tony Gill earned his PhD at UCLA, and is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington, adjunct professor of Sociology at the UW, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He served as a research associate to the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University from 2014-17. Professor Gill specializes in political economy and religion & politics, with an emphasis on church-state relations, religious liberty, and religious economies. Additionally, he also works on tipping. He is author of The Political Origins of Religious Liberty (Cambridge 2007) and Rendering unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America (University of Chicago Press, 1998), and is a frequent contributor at AIER. You can find his complete biography here: https://www.polisci.washington.edu/people/anthony-gill

Kathryn Norlock is the inaugural Kenneth Mark Drain Endowed Chair in Ethics, Full Professor the Department of Philosophy, an affiliated faculty member in Sustainability Studies, and an associated faculty member in Gender and Women's Studies at Trent University.

Dr. Roger Kreuz is Associate Dean and Director of Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychology at the University of Memphis. He is the coauthor of Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language, Getting Through: The Pleasures and Perils of Cross-Cultural Communication, and Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging. You can learn more about Dr. Kreuz and his work below: https://www.rogerkreuz.net/ https://www.memphis.edu/psychology/people/faculty/kreuz.php

In this Freedom Center Today episode we have Alfred Archer and Natascha Rietdijk talking about the modern press, fake news & what needs to be done to avoid further polarization in the world of partisan politics. Natascha’s Bio: https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/staff/n-w-rietdijk Alfred's Bio: https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/staff/a-t-m-archer

Dr. Travis Timmerman is a philosophy professor at Seton Hall University. He earned his PhD at Syracuse University after completing his undergraduate education at Arizona State University. You can find his online bio below: https://www.travistimmerman.com/ You can find links to his work below: https://setonhall.academia.edu/TravisTimmerman https://philpapers.org/s/Travis%20Timmerman

Chris Surprenant is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Orleans, where he directs the UNO Honors Program and is founding director of the UNO Urban Entrepreneurship and Policy Institute. Chris Surpenant Info: https://www.uno.edu/profile/faculty/chris_surprenant http://www.chriswsurprenant.com/

Bob Chitester is the founder, and executive chairman of the board of Free To Choose Network, a 501(c)(3) public foundation housing Free To Choose Media, an award-winning global entertainment company which produces and distributes thought-provoking public television programs and series; izzit.org, an educational initiative that produces video-centric teaching units for a large network of K-College educators; and Free To Choose Press publishing company. You can read his full bio here: https://www.freetochoosenetwork.org/about/team/b_chitester.php

Bob Chitester is the founder, and executive chairman of the board of Free To Choose Network, a 501(c)(3) public foundation housing Free To Choose Media, an award-winning global entertainment company which produces and distributes thought-provoking public television programs and series; izzit.org, an educational initiative that produces video-centric teaching units for a large network of K-College educators; and Free To Choose Press publishing company. You can read his full bio here: https://www.freetochoosenetwork.org/about/team/b_chitester.php

Bob Chitester is the founder, and executive chairman of the board of Free To Choose Network, a 501(c)(3) public foundation housing Free To Choose Media, an award-winning global entertainment company which produces and distributes thought-provoking public television programs and series; izzit.org, an educational initiative that produces video-centric teaching units for a large network of K-College educators; and Free To Choose Press publishing company. You can read his full bio here: https://www.freetochoosenetwork.org/about/team/b_chitester.php

James Stacey Taylor is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at The College of New Jersey. He received his M.LITT from St. Andrews University, and his MA and PhD from Bowling Green State University. You can read his full biography here: https://philos.tcnj.edu/faculty/james-stacey-taylor/

Bob Chitester is the founder, and executive chairman of the board of Free To Choose Network, a 501(c)(3) public foundation housing Free To Choose Media, an award-winning global entertainment company which produces and distributes thought-provoking public television programs and series; izzit.org, an educational initiative that produces video-centric teaching units for a large network of K-College educators; and Free To Choose Press publishing company. You can read his full bio here: https://www.freetochoosenetwork.org/about/team/b_chitester.php

Bob Chitester is the founder, and executive chairman of the board of Free To Choose Network, a 501(c)(3) public foundation housing Free To Choose Media, an award-winning global entertainment company which produces and distributes thought-provoking public television programs and series; izzit.org, an educational initiative that produces video-centric teaching units for a large network of K-College educators; and Free To Choose Press publishing company. You can read his full bio here: https://www.freetochoosenetwork.org/about/team/b_chitester.php

Dave Schmidtz is the Director of the Freedom Center at the University of Arizona. You can find one of his many online bios here: https://freedomcenter.arizona.edu/person/david-schmidtz

Christopher Robertson is Associate Dean for Research and Innovation and Professor of Law at the University of Arizona. He is affiliated faculty with the Petrie Flom Center for Health Care Policy, Bioethics and Biotechnology at Harvard, and a reporter for the Health Law Monitoring Committee of the Uniform Law Commission. Robertson also founded the Regulatory Science Program, with support from the University’s four health science colleges. You can read Dr. Robertson’s full bio here: https://law.arizona.edu/christopher-robertson Books by Christopher Robertson Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance Is Incomplete and What Can Be Done About It https://www.amazon.com/Exposed-Health-Insurance-Incomplete-about/dp/0674972163/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Christopher+Robertson%2C+Exposed%3A+Why+Our+Health+Insurance+Is+Incomplete+and+What+Can+Be+Done+about+It&qid=1585515418&sr=8-1 Nudging Health:  Behavioral Economics and Health Law https://www.amazon.com/Nudging-Health-Law-Behavioral-Economics/dp/1421421011/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Nudging+Health%3A+Behavioral+Economics+and+Health+Law&qid=1585515518&sr=8-2 Blinding as a Solution to Bias:  Strengthening Biomedical Science, Forensic Science, and Law https://www.amazon.com/Blinding-Solution-Bias-Strengthening-Biomedical/dp/0128024607/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Blinding+as+a+Solution+to+Bias%3A+Strengthening+Biomedical+Science%2C+Forensic+Science%2C+and+Law&qid=1585515575&sr=8-1

Dr. Vernon L. Smith was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 for his groundbreaking work in experimental economics. Dr. Smith has joint appointments with the Argyros School of Business & Economics and the Fowler School of Law, and he is part of a team that will create and run the new Economic Science Institute at Chapman. Here is a link to Dr. Smith’s full bio: https://www.chapman.edu/our-faculty/vernon-smith You can learn more about the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University here: https://www.chapman.edu/research/institutes-and-centers/economic-science-institute/index.aspx And you can learn more about Vernon Smith’s coauthor, Sabiou M. Inoua, here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=d4XLUPYAAAAJ&hl=en Here is a link to the video of the presentation Dr. Smith made for the Voices of Culture lecture series at the University of Arizona: https://vimeo.com/397787102 And finally, here is a link to the USA Today article that he wrote on the coronavirus: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/03/23/coronavirus-economy-lives-suspense-not-wall-street-crash-column/2898448001/ James Harrigan & Vernon Smith

Robert Gordon is an art historian at the University of Arizona. In this episode, Robert explains talks about poverty as it has been expressed in art throughout the ages, and what it all might mean. You can find out more about Robert Gordon here: https://music.arizona.edu/people/directory/regordo1/ And he is a link to a lecture he gave for the National Association of Scholars in answer to the question “How Does Western Civilization Contrast with Other Civilizations?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFKf2JJGRSQ

On today's episode we have Robert Gordon. Today Gordon and I will discuss his role at the Freedom Center, and discover how someone with a PhD in Art can end up teaching at the School of Music.  Show Notes: Robert Gordon https://music.arizona.edu/people/directory/regordo1/

Show Notes: You can visit Otto’s homepage here:  http://www.ottolehto.com/ More from Otto on Universal Basic Income: https://www.adamsmith.org/research/basic-income-experiments https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/schrdingers-basic-income-what-does-the-finnish-ubi-experiment-really-show  

Dr. Phil Magness is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of numerous works on economic history, taxation, economic inequality, the history of slavery, and education policy in the United States. He joined us to discuss inequality in the United States. Show Notes: Dr. Phillip Magness https://www.aier.org/staff/phillip-w-magness/ http://philmagness.com/ Published research by Dr. Magness on Inequality: Dr. Magness on Inequality-01 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ecin.12865 Dr. Magness on Inequality-02 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ssqu.12672 Dr. Magness on Inequality-03 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08853908.2018.1517063?journalCode=uitj20 Dr. Magness on Inequality-04 https://appii.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Magness-and-Murphy-Challenging-the-Empirical-Contributions-of-Piketty.pdf

In this, the second of a two part conversation, Professor Asia recounts the origins of the American Culture and Ideas Initiative. https://acii.arizona.edu/

Meet Dan Asia, Professor of Music at the University of Arizona, and Director of the American Culture and Ideas Initiative. In this, the first of a two part conversation, Professor Asia explains how he came to be a professor of music, and how he came to the University of Arizona in Tucson. Daniel Asia https://music.arizona.edu/people/directory/asia/

Dave Schmidtz https://freedomcenter.arizona.edu/david-schmidtz The Equality Conundrum:  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/the-equality-conundrum David Schmidtz, The Elements of Justice:  https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Justice-David-Schmidtz/dp/0521539366

James Harrigan talks to Kerry Montano of the Freedom Center about the Ethics, Economy, & Entrepreneurship project.

Dave Schmidtz and James Harrigan talk about the Freedom Center's dual enrollment course offering, Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship.

This week, Dave Schmidtz and James Harrigan talk about moral science for a bit, then move on to G. K. Chesterton, equality, and the United States.

James Harrigan and Dave Schmidtz continue their discussion of the birth of the Freedom Center, this week talking about How Dave came to be a philosopher in the first place, and how he got to Tucson.

In episode one, James Harrigan talks to Dave Schmidtz, Director of the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, about the Freedom Center’s origins.