Half Hour of Heterodoxy

A special Thanksgiving episode about gratitude featuring journalist, author, and lecturer A. J. Jacobs, whose book Thanks A Thousand: A Gratitude Journey was published this Monday. His other books include The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to become the Smartest Person in the World, and My Life as an Experiment: One Man’s Humble Quest to Improve Himself. This episode has three co-hosts: Deb Mashek, executive director of Heterodox Academy -- alongside Richard Davies and Jim Meigs, journalists and co-hosts of the podcast How Do We Fix It?. See the full list of episodes of Half Hour of Heterodoxy >> Transcript A transcript will be published shortly.

An interview with Lucia Martinez Valdivia, assistant professor of English and Humanities at Reed College. Chris talks to Lucía about how to use and misuse the concept of identity. We’ll discuss how people have multiple identities that go beyond what a college typically asks students to focus on. And Lucía explains how the identity of student or learner can unify the students on a college campus. Timeline 0:00 Intro and the humanities course 9:17 A hierarchical identity vs. many identities per person 12:40 Evolution, genes, and the sociology of health 15:36 The “diversity quota” and diversity as a commodity 20:10 What to do if a student feels excluded 24:56 A course on happiness Links * Lucía on Twitter * Transcript of a lecture by Lucía to incoming students about the study of the humanities * Professors Like Me Can't Stay Silent About This Extremist Moment, Washington Post op-ed by Lucía * Humanities 110 at Reed College ... See the full list of episodes of Half Hour of Heterodoxy >> Transcript Here is

When sociologists explain why men and women have different careers, different interests, and different priorities, they rely on socialization as an explanation. But is that explanation complete? I talk to sociologist Charlotta Stern about this question.

Show Notes In today’s episode, Chris talks to Julie Wronski, professor of political science at the University of Mississippi. In a new paper, she and her coauthors show a difference between the average authoritarianism of Bernie Sanders voters and Hillary Clinton voters. Most of us know how to identify authoritarian leaders, but in today’s interview Julie explains how to define authoritarianism among voters, and why her findings matter to people outside political science. Timeline 0:00 Intro 3:05 Why do people associate authoritarianism with conservatives? 6:00 Why is authoritarianism dividing parties now? 13:00 Bob Altemeyer's method of measuring authoritarianism 17:10 The right-wing measure vs. child-rearing measure of authoritarianism 25:18 Why is this relevant to other academics? Article Wronski, Julie et al. (2018). "A Tale of Two Democrats: How Authoritarianism Divides the Democratic Party." Journal of Politics 80(4): 1384- 1388. Books Altemeyer, Enemies of Freedom Stenner, The Authoritarian

Show Notes Do college students think that freedom of speech is important? Do they think their campus climate supports free expression? And do they believe First Amendment freedoms are secure in today’s America? To answer these questions, the Knight Foundation and Gallup conducted two surveys of college students in America. The surveys were conducted in 2016 and 2017, so they also reveal which attitudes changed between these consecutive years. Heterodox Academy is now hosting this dataset. This episode features David Askenazi of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and Jeff Jones of Gallup, who explain the survey results. Timeline 1:00  Theoretical vs. practical support for free expression 5:10 Support for violence and shouting down speakers 9:00 More people are saying the climate deters speech 12:20 What groups can speak freely? 14:10 Why Knight sponsored this survey 18:50 The superiority of the sampling method Survey Reports Knight Foundation: Free Speech on Campus: New Perspectives Emerge From Gallup

Show Notes A discussion of The Coddling of the American Mind, just published this month, with the authors Greg Lukianoff and Jon Haidt. Greg Lukianoff is director of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Jon Haidt is a founder of Heterodox Academy and professor of ethical leadership at NYU's Stern school. Timeline The history behind the Coddling article 1:59 Greg's battle with depression 6:15 Nietzsche or Stoic views of pain 9:00 The untruth of good and evil people 12:20 Is no one truly evil? 18:16 Solutions 20:09 Is Jon hopeful? 24:20 Books and Article Mentioned In This Episode: The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jon Haidt The Worry Cure: Seven Steps to Stop Worry from Stopping You by Robert Leahy Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Taleb The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations by Amy Chua People of the Lie: The Hope for Heal

Show Notes Jason Stanley is Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He formerly specialized in the philosophy of language, but has recently changes his focus to populism and politics, with his books How Propaganda Works, published in 2015, and How Fascism Works, which hits bookstores this month. The chapters of the book, each describing a characteristic of fascism are: The Mythic Past Propaganda Anti-Intellectualism Unreality Hierarchy Victimhood Law and Order Sexual Anxiety Sodom and Gomorrah Arbeit Macht Frei What sets Jason's book apart from books by Albright, Snyder, etc? 1:05 Differentiating Fascism from totalitarianism 3:02 Why are some democracies strong? 6:22 A critique of John Stuart Mill 12:00 Linguistics is like behavioral economics 16:12 Race and politics 17:54 What can professors do? 26:05 ... See the full list of episodes of Half Hour of Heterodoxy >> Transcript This is a transcript of this episode.

Show Notes Robert Quinn is the executive director of Scholars at Risk Network, which helps protect and relocate members of higher education communities whose freedom and security are threatened in their home countries. Since the founding of Scholars at Risk in 2000, SAR has assisted over 1000 scholars through temporary research and teaching visits. You can join the network here. You can find out more about Scholars at Risk at www.scholarsatrisk.org and on Twitter at @ScholarsAtRisk. Rob's MOOC is Dangerous Questions: Why Academic Freedom Matters. You can other interviews with Rob at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Quote:  "We’ve been developing curricula, workshops. We have a MOOC on academic freedom. It’s called "Dangerous Questions: Why Academic Freedom Matters"... hosted on the Future Learn platform. So we ran it as a test in June. We had over 1000 participants from over – I think it was 90 countries. The comments were really amazing because there’s a real tendency

Show Notes Jessica Good is a social psychologist at Davidson College. She received her PhD in social psychology from Rutgers University and has taught at Davidson since 2011. Her research focuses on stereotyping and discrimination. I invited her to the show to talk about her new paper on multiculturalism, a contentious topic in the political world and academia. Her new paper is called Valuing Differences and Reinforcing Them: Multiculturalism Increases Race Essentialism. Her coauthors on this paper are Leigh Wilton, who's the first author, and Evan Apfelbaum. The paper itself is not in the public domain but here's an article in Pacific Standard that summarizes the paper. What is multiculturalism? [0:00] Challenges of implementing polyculturalism [08:15] Belonging in science and math courses [12:34] What do people want to get out of confrontations? [14:45] Power differentials and confrontations [18:26] Avoiding the words "sexist" and "racist"  [19:57] See the full list of episodes of Half H

Show Notes Rick Mehta (@RickRMehta) is a professor of psychology at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. His research focuses on the mechanisms involved in decision making. He has recently begun to study viewpoint diversity in universities and Canadian psychology departments specifically. His talk Free Speech in Universities: Threats and Opportunities covers the philosophy and psychology of free expression. The Canadian state of affairs [0:00] Rick’s big talk on free speech [3:52] Drug dealers are more open than professors [9:07] The bullshit receptivity scale [13:12] Consequences for Rick’s heterodoxy [17:06] Continuing research on decision making [23:25] See the full list of episodes of Half Hour of Heterodoxy >> Selected Quote Rick Mehta: After I did my talk at ideacity Conference held in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, a filmmaker came up to me, a Canadian documentary filmmaker and she said she had no trouble in the past getting drug dealers to appear before her camera and speak about their expe

Fabio Rojas is a professor of sociology at Indiana University at Bloomington. He’s the author of From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement and Theory for the Working Sociologist published by Columbia University Press. He blogs at Orgtheory.wordpress.com. 06:30 Understanding the rules of activism 08:13 Doing activist work that’s unsatisfying but important 11:18 Visiting Wellesley University’s Freedom Project 22:15 Is understanding necessary for effective activism? 26:34 Two new articles: a new survey of student activism; Defining scholarly roles

Robert Wright is a former senior editor at The New Republic, and he currently hosts The Wright Show. He’s also the author of several bestselling books on evolution and society. His latest book Is Why Buddhism Is True. Behind Bob’s Mindful Resistance Newsletter [0:00] Tribal tweets and popularity [5:28] Evaluating Heterodox Academy [16:00] The Google Memo [21:40] The intellectual dark web/Evolutionary psychology [25:25] Bob’s near-term plans [31:45] Mindfulness and De-Biasing Oneself [37:46]

0:00 The uniqueness of Evergreen State 5:42 Activities since leaving Evergreen 10:10 Economic privilege in academia 15:00 Safe space, identity politics, etc. 20:10 Why Evergreen needs a better president

John Inazu is professor of law and religion at Washington University in St. Louis. His scholarship focuses on the First Amendment freedoms—specifically speech, assembly, and religion. His first book is about freedom of assembly. His second book, which we discuss, is Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference. It was published in 2016 and a paperback edition with a new introduction comes out this year.

Arthur Sakamoto (@sakamoto_arthur), sociologist at Texas A&M, discusses three myths about Asian Americans. 0:00 The questionable claim of a high Hmong dropout rate 08:00 The poverty rate and wealth of Asians and non-Asians 14:01 Are Asians disadvantaged by living in costly neighborhoods? 20:10 Assimilation and the mobile labor market 23:40 Why do sociologists selectively talk about cost of living? 25:31 White privilege and the alleged bamboo ceiling

Caroline Mehl and Raffi Grinberg direct the OpenMind Platform, an interactive tool to help individuals learn perspective taking and intellectual humility using principles from psychology. There are beta versions of Open Mind for use in corporations, organizations, and religious communities. You can check out Open Mind at openmindplatform.org and follow Open Mind on Twitter at openmindusa.

Show Notes My guest today is Richard Reeves. He’s a social and political commentator and he has written for the several newspapers and magazines in the US and the UK including the Guardian and The Atlantic. He has also written a biography of John Stuart Mill, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand. Between 2010 and 2012, Richard was director of strategy to the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. He has also served as director of Demos, the London-based political think-tank. He is currently a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brooking Institution in Washington DC. You can find out more about him at his website www.richardvreeves.com. We discuss All Minus One: John Stuart Mill's Ideas on Free Speech Illustrated, edited by Richard Reeves and Jonathan Haidt, with illustrations by Dave Cicirelli. Selected Quotes “The way that media and communications and societies have developed have not been in the direction that Mill hoped, which was bringing more and more heterodox opinions together in sort of daily pr

Show Notes David Frum (@davidfrum) is a senior editor at the Atlantic Magazine and a frequent contributor at MSNBC. He is a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and is known for coining the phrase “axis of evil.” He has been a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributor at the National Review. He is the author of nine books including most recently Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, which we discuss today. Selected Quote Chris Martin: How do you currently define conservatism? David Frum: Conservatism fundamentally is a habit of mind. It’s a mental disposition and it’s connected to the constitution of the individual mind. We also use the word “conservatism” to describe a particular ideology and what has happened in the United States in recent years is that definition has frozen, and what we now call “movement conservatism” is an anthology of policy solutions to the problems of the 1970s and 1980s. As it has become more obsolete, conservatives have lost interest in policy a

Show Notes Musa al-Gharbi is a research associate at Heterodox Academy and a PhD student in sociology at Columbia University. He is a writer whose work has been featured in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and several other venues. The topics of his research include terrorism, extremism, war, antiracism, and, more recently, U.S. political elections. Selected Quote So there’s this real problem where in order to move the needle on a lot of the social issues that progressives want to address, they just need to be able to engage with a far larger band of people than we’re training them to engage with. I mean even from the religious standpoint, most Americans are religious and most people, especially outside of the United States – again, if you’re talking about in developing nations, even more religious and in a different way than Western Europeans and Americans often are – and we’re just fundamentally not training social researchers to be able to speak in a religious language or even feel co

Show Notes Deb Mashek (@DebMashekHXA) is the new executive director of Heterodox Academy. She is currently professor of psychology at Harvey Mudd College, but will be leaving that position to serve full time as executive director. We talk about her career and her three priorities for 2018. Selected Quote "I regularly have students and colleagues swinging by for closed-door conversations where they say things like, 'There is this question I wanted to ask in class, or there’s an idea I wanted to raise in a meeting, but I didn’t feel comfortable with doing so because other people might tell me that I’m being ridiculous, or that it's an offensive question.' And that has a very chilling effect on inquiry and on the pursuit of knowledge." Transcript This is a professional transcript but it may contain errors. Please do not quote it without verification. Chris Martin: My guest today is Deb Mashek. She’s the new Executive Director of Heterodox Academy and this is her first appearance on our podcast. Deb als