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.