The Free Mind Podcast

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.