On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Anthony Jack, assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a fellow former resident of Mather House. Jack’s research documents the overlooked diversity among lower income undergraduates, the doubly-disadvantaged, those who enter college from local, typically distressed public high schools, and the privileged poor, his term for those who do so from boarding day and prep schools. 

Jack is the author of the new Harvard University Press title, “The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Poor Students.” He writes, “The experiences of low-income undergraduates are not just a product of their family background and economic circumstance. Academic life is inherently social. Focusing solely on grades or graduation rates obscures that fact. Imagine the culture shock that some lower income students experience navigating this hidden curriculum.” 

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Sabeel Rahman, the president of Demos a “think and do” tank committed to advancing policy change on issues of racial justice, democracy and inequality, working for an America where we all have an equal say in our democracy and an equal chance in our economy. 

When perspective 2O20 Presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke was asked recently if he considers himself to be a progressive, the response was a surprising, if expedient reset. “I don't know,” he expounded. “I'm not big on labels. I don't get all fired up about party or classifying or defining people based on a label or a group, I’m for everyone.” How does congressmen O’Rourke's politics translate for the 2020 campaign and beyond?

Rahman also an associate professor of law at Brooklyn Law School and has previously been a visiting professor at Harvard Law, a fellow at the The Roosevelt Institute, and a fellow at New America. He explores the history, values and policy strategies that animate efforts to make our society more inclusive and democratic and our economy more equitable.  

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome novelist ZZ Packer, the author of a story collection, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and editor of “New Short Stories from the South.” Born in Chicago and raised in Atlanta and Louisville, Packer has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, Tulane, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. 

When is stability at duty and when is it a trap? This was the thought provoking and insightful question delivered in the New York Times Magazine last year. 

“The reality is that our instability often reveals much more profound ruptures and that the obvious kind of civility, the civility of niceness is only the most superficial marker of much deeper moral obligations,” Packer wrote. “This indeed demands us to differentiate between the civility of manners and that of morals after all,” she so compellingly writes, “Deep down we probably all know it's not just civility we're missing, but decency.” 

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome back the foremost expert on American political communication, Kathleen Hall Jamieson.  Oxford University Press has published her newest work, “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President - What We Don't, Can't and Do Know.” 

The author of 16 books, including this latest forensic examination of Russian digital dirty tricks. Jamison is director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and the Packard Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. 

On this episode of The Open Mind, we welcome Ohio Governor and former 2016 Republican presidential candidate John Kasich, a longtime congressman, chairman of the Budget Committee and member of the Armed Services Committee. Kasich was the chief architect of the 1990s deficit-ending deal that ushered into the new millennium, a clean fiscal bill of health for the nation. 

Today of course, Kasich is better known as the two term Governor of Ohio, who's presided over recovery from the great recession, a critic of Donald Trump's hateful rhetoric, nativism, protectionism, and personal conduct unbecoming a president of the United States that have debased the highest office in the land.