The Free Mind Podcast

Matthew Young is assistant professor of political theory in the Department of Political Science & Public Policy at Elon University. Paul Diduch if faculty director of the Engineering Leadership Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. Matt and Paul join The Free Mind Podcast's new host Joseph Porter for a discussion on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the Bible, and American politics in light of recent commends made by Vice President JD Vance.

Dan Jacobson is Bruce D. Benson Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. This is my (Matt's) last episode as host of the Free Mind Podcast, pre-recorded with Dan before I moved to the University of Wyoming this past summer. I am extremely grateful for my time as a faculty fellow of the Benson Center and I have enormous respect for the center's work bringing viewpoint diversity to higher education. So, I wanted to end my run as host by talking to Dan about where higher education is headed. Thank you all for listening over the past two years, and don't go anywhere. The Free Mind podcast will continue with a new host in the new year.

Justin Tosi is Associate Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He was previously a sabbatical fellow at the Benson Center and is co-author of Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk and Why It's OK to Mind Your Own Business, both in collaboration with Brandon Warmke, who was a previous guest on this show. We discuss an interesting new article of Justin's, which argues that censorship undermines its own goals.

Lee Jussim is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University, and a founding member of both the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences. In addition to being a renowned psychology researcher, Dr. Jussim is also an outspoken critic of cancel culture and the politicization of his discipline of social psychology, and of academia writ large. For his efforts, he has been the target of cancelation attempts. We discuss his upbringing, his research on stereotypes and other controversial topics, his brushes with cancel culture, the risks of becoming reactionary when facing cancelation attempts, and his tips for maintaining integrity and principles in the face of these pressures.

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and Assistant Professor of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He researches how society thinks and talks about race, inequality, national security, and other contentious issues in the public sphere. His new book We Have Never Been Woke, exposes and takes on the contradictions of chattering class elites, who simultaneously decry inequality and perpetuate it. We discuss his book, as well as other issues related to the politics of higher education.

Lesley Smith is Regent at Large of the University of Colorado system, and she is also the Democratic nominee for Colorado House District 49 in the upcoming 2024 election. Before becoming a Regent, Dr. Smith worked for 30 years as a researcher and educator at CU Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. She was elected to the Boulder Valley School Board in 2005 and served for eight years. We discuss her career in education, research, and politics, as well as contemporary issues facing higher education. We note, on behalf of Dr. Smith, that her description of the cost of attending the University of Colorado (at 46:05) is based on estimates that include room and board, in addition to tuition.

Jessi Streib is Associate Professor of sociology at Duke University and the co-recipient of the 2023 Early Career Award from the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility section of the American Sociological Association. She is author of four books, including Is it Racist? Is it Sexist? Why Red and Blue White People Disagree, and How to Decide in the Gray Areas, co-authored with Betsy Leondar-Wright, which comes out in 2025 and is available for pre-order. We discuss this book, and the questions it raises about how to diagnose and address injustice, and tensions between this and other societal objectives. The views expressed by Jessi on this episode are hers alone and do not necessarily reflect those of her coauthor.

Diego Reinero is a MindCORE Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies how people's moral and political views change through conversations and social networks. He has also done research that challenges the idea that the predominantly liberal political views of academics affect the quality of research and range of results published in his field of social psychology. Jumping off of this research, we discuss to what extent academia actually has a liberal bias, and it what ways claims of liberal bias may be overstated. 

Martín Carcasson is a Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University, where he is also the Director of the CSU Center for Public Deliberation. His research focuses on helping communities work through “wicked” problems through better communication, community problem solving, and collaborative decision-making. He is well known for designing and facilitating public dialogs throughout Colorado, on some of our toughest issues. In our conversation, Martín helps me talk through a question I have been struggling with: Do moderates need to be more intolerant?

Heidi Ganahl is a politician, author, and entrepreneur who has had success in multiple industries and philanthropic ventures. She served as Regent at large of the University of Colorado from 2017 to 2023, and as the Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2022. She founded Camp Bow-Wow—North America's largest pet-care franchise—the lifestyle brand SheFactor, the Fight Back Foundation that supports social entrepreneurs working to help kids in Colorado, and, most recently, the media non-profit Rocky Mountain Voice, which aims to provide news and commentary on issues facing Coloradans, while combatting ideological bias in media. We discuss her long-time advocacy for more choice and ideological balance in K-12, higher education, and media, and her ideas for how to reduce political polarization in general.   

Benji Backer is the founder and Executive Chairman of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), which is the nation's largest right-of-center environmental organization. He has been named to Forbes' and GreenBiz' 30 Under 30 lists, Fortune's 40 Under 40, and the Grist 50. He is also the author of the book The Conservative Environmentalist, which has received praise from voices across the political spectrum, including Van Jones and Dave Rubin. We discuss the book, the ACC, and what it means to be a conservative environmentalist. 

Sam Abrams is a Professor of Politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a non-resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and a board member of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). He is the author of multiple books and numerous articles, in outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among many others. He has written several articles over the past decade on the lack of political diversity in higher education and the challenges it causes. More recently, he has written about antisemitism on college campuses. We discuss both of these issues, as well as his views on what universities can do to address them.

Brandon Warmke is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, and the Spring 2024 Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy here at the Benson Center. He is co-author of several books including Grandstanding: The use and abuse of moral talk, Why it's ok to mind your own business, and Conservatism, the basics, which will be published in 2024. We discuss his book, Why it's ok to mind your own business, as well as the state of conservative academic and intellectual life.

Cory Clark is Executive Director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also Visiting Scholar in the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences. The Adversarial Collaboration Project brings together scholars who have contrasting views on important scientific questions to work out their differences through rigorous collaborations. It is based on the idea that viewpoint diversity produces better science. We discuss this project, as well as Dr. Clark's other work on trust in academia, nuances in gender bias, and more.

Todd Zywicki is the George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia School of Law. He is also the Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy here at the Benson Center. He previously served as Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Taskforce on Federal Consumer Financial Law, Chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Law & Economics in 2019, and Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. We discuss the rule of law, its importance to economic development and western civilization, and the threats it faces in our society today. 

Sasha Breger Bush is an Associate Professor of political science at the University of Colorado Denver, who studies international political economy, and the author of Derivatives and Development: A Political Economy of Global Finance, Farming, and Poverty. Prof. Bush has recently sounded the alarm on what she calls the whole world debt crisis. We discuss her work, as well as recent public debates about debt and deficits in the United States.  

Roger Pielke Jr. is a Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, who studies the politics of science and authors a popular Substack blog called The Honest Broker. Never one to shy away from controversy, Prof. Pielke has done high-profile research and writing on climate change and natural disasters, the origins of COVID-19, and the inclusion of transgender and intersex women in women's sports. We discuss the relationship between science and politics and what can go wrong when science is politicized.

Alexandra Coţofană is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates. Dr. Coţofană is a cultural anthropologist who studies a range of topics including the cultures of political elites. Our conversation focuses on one of her quite unique study topics: the role of beliefs in magic and the occult in the elite politics of Romania. 

Brad Wilcox is Professor of Sociology and Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a non-resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. We discuss two-way interactions between family structure and stability, socioeconomic outcomes, and culture in the U.S. context, and the important role families must play in any project of civic renewal. 

Smriti Mehta is a Ph.D. student in Psychology at the University of California Berkeley, and the co-chair of UC Berkeley's new Heterodox Academy (HxA) Campus Community, which is dedicated to promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement on their campus. I (Matt) co-chair a similar group at University of Colorado Boulder. We discuss what it's like to start an HxA Campus Community, why it's needed, what the hurdles are, and how we might overcome them. Smriti's podcast can be found here: Nullius in Verba | a podcast by Smriti Mehta and Daniël Lakens (podbean.com) 

Jennifer Smith is Associate Professor of English, Coordinator of Digital Humanities, and Associate Director of the Center for Faith and Learning at Pepperdine University. She is a noted medievalist, and also a 2022-2023 sabbatical fellow at the Benson Center. We discuss the life and legacy of the fifteenth-century English bishop Reginald Peacock, who was defrocked and exiled for heresy–i.e. canceled–for questioning the infallibility of the church and advocating the authority of reason.

Alice Evans is a Senior Lecturer in the social science of development at King's College London, the author of The Great Gender Divergence, forthcoming from Princeton University Press, and the host of the Rocking Our Priors podcast. We discuss Dr. Evans' research on gender inequalities over the past millennium globally, and its relevance to today's movements and debates about feminism in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Lionel Shriver is an author and journalist, whose many books include We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) and most recently Abominations: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-Destruction (2022). Our conversation focuses on one of the fascinating contradictions of Ms. Shriver's life that she has written about. 

Kevin Priola is a State Senator of Colorado, representing the 13th District, and previously the 25th. He recently crossed the floor, from Republican to Democrat, and faces a recall effort as a result. Our conversation focuses on the challenges and opportunities facing moderates in today's extreme and polarized political landscape.

Joey Fratino is a graduate of CU Boulder, who served as the President of the CU Boulder College Republicans until graduating in 2022. Our conversation explores the conservative student experience on campus. We discuss recent survey studies of conservative college student experiences and how these compare to Joey's experience at CU. 

Season Five of The Free Mind podcast launches with a conversation between Matt Burgess and Alex Trembath, Deputy Director of the Breakthrough Institute, which is a think-tank focused on technological solutions to environmental problems. Our conversation explores climate change, the eco-modernist movement and its similarities and differences with conventional environmentalism, and the science and politics of nuclear energy. 

Matt Burgess, Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies here at CU. Matt is a Faculty Fellow at the Benson Center, a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Economics, and an Institute Fellow at CU's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. Our conversation today explores the state of political polarization and free inquiry in higher education.

Alan Kahan, Professor of British Civilization at the University of Paris—Saclay, and Visiting Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy at the Benson Center. We discuss why Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, why the book is still worth reading today, and what Tocqueville thought about race, religion, and the prospect of American decline.

Alex Priou is a Teaching Assistant Professor at CU's Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics, and Society. Our conversation today explores the work of the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato, paying particular attention to his great book The Republic. We discuss why Plato wrote dialogues instead of treatises, how Platonic dialogues should be read, and why the Republic still resonates with students over two-thousand years after it was written.

Deirdre McCloskey is a Distinguished Professor of Economics and History Emerita, and Professor of English and Communication Emerita, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. We discuss the effects of liberalism on human progress, the challenges and benefits liberalism derives from innovation, whether popular economic critiques of liberalism hold water, and her unique intellectual biography that spans over 50 years in higher education in a wide variety of academic disciplines.

Taylor Jaworski, Associate Professor of Economics and my successor as Associate Faculty Director of the Benson Center. Taylor has been a Faculty Fellow at the Benson Center, and he has written widely on the economic history of the United States. We discuss the development of the American economy during the periods of the Founding and the Second World War, the history of America's transportation system, and the ways in which various notions of progress emerge from the study of economic history.

Season 4 will be Shilo Brooks's final season as host of the Free Mind Podcast.  Matt Burgess will assume hosting duties beginning in 2023.  Stay tuned!

Alexander Duff, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas. Duff discusses the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, one of the most towering and controversial thinkers of the 20th century. We discuss Heidegger's political and metaphysical philosophy, his affiliation with the Nazis, and his writings on technology. 

Daniel J. Mahoney, Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption University and a visiting fellow at Princeton University.  Mahoney discusses cancel culture, explores what is valuable about our civilizational inheritance, and urges resistance to efforts to silence the life of the mind and free pursuit of truth. 

Paul Ulrich is an Associate Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Intellectual Foundations Program at Carthage College. Our conversation today explores Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind.

Robert Pasnau, Professor of Distinction in Philosophy at CU Boulder, is the founding director of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization. Pasnau discusses how the unlikely center got started, and how its mission to foster free inquiry, heterodox ideas and diverse political perspectives has affected academic life at CU and across the nation.

Jeremy Fortier, Post-doctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the City College of New York. Fortier explores the thought and writings of 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. We discuss Nietzsche's popular appeal, his complicated legacy, his criticism of the Western Tradition, his style of writing, and the basic problems his philosophy confronts. 

Kevin Williamson is a correspondent at National Review and author of several books, including his most recent book Big White Ghetto. The Benson Center was delighted to present Williamson's investigation into how progressive business elites have created disciplinary corporations.

Season Two of The Free Mind podcast launches with a conversation between Shilo Brooks and Bradford Wilson, Executive Director of the James Madison Program at Princeton University and fellow at Princeton's Butler College. Wilson explores Hamilton's life and intellectual legacy. We discuss Hamilton's unusual upbringing, the enduring importance of his political thought, and the fateful contributions he made to the form and structure of the American economy.

Colleen Sheehan, professor of political science and director of graduate studies at Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. She discusses what makes Jane Austen's characters so enduring, the lessons Austen teaches about love in Emma, and what readers can learn from Austen's complex use of language and penetrating psychological insights into human nature.

Joshua Katz, Costen Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics at Princeton. Katz's uncontroversial intellectual pursuits and his warm and fair-minded demeanor make the story of his attempted cancellation at Princeton all the more surprising. Katz reflects on his experience and discusses potential threats to the truth-seeking mission of higher education. 

Jeff Black is a professor at St. John's College, a unique great books college with campuses in Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Black explores what the so-called “great books” are, how reading them can provide a liberal education, and why they're more relevant than ever in today's political and cultural landscape.

Patty Limerick, professor of history, founding director of the CU Boulder Center of the American West, and author of The Legacy of Conquest. We explore her challenge to, and affection for, the myth of the West, the continuing relevance of applied history, and the role humor should play in public and academic discourse.

Lucas Morel, the John K. Boardman, Jr. Professor of Politics and head of the Politics Department at Washington and Lee University. In this episode Morel discusses Frederick Douglass: the political lessons of his autobiographies; his thoughts on freedom, religion, and the Constitution; and how his reflections on slavery and race enrich contemporary civil rights discussions. 

Glenn Loury, the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown, is not only an acclaimed economic theorist, he's also among the leading critics writing on racial inequality in America from a heterodox point of view.

Wayne Ambler, associate professor emeritus at CU Boulder and former dean and director of the Rome Program at the University of Dallas' Rome Campus, explores the city's historical development, its influence on Western Liberalism and the American Founding, the lessons it can teach today's students, and its place in the broader history of political philosophy.

In monthly episodes, my guests and I will explore topics in Western philosophy, politics, literature, and history; and we'll do so with adventurous disregard for intellectual trends and the academic fashions of the moment.