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College Matters from The Chronicle

Is ‘Intellectual Diversity’ a Trap?

Calls are growing to bring greater ideological balance to the professoriate, but the history and motives behind the movement warrant scrutiny.

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By Jack Stripling
October 29, 2025
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Illustration by The Chronicle; Photos by iStock
Is ‘Intellectual Diversity’ a Trap? | College Matters from The Chronicle

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In this episode

Lately, calls for “intellectual diversity” are all the rage. From President Trump, to right-wing think tanks, to college presidents, arguments abound for adding more conservative voices to the professoriate. But are these arguments being made in good faith? How liberal are faculty, really? And what does a push for a narrowed, classics-driven curriculum mean for the canon-expanding courses that some colleges now offer on subjects as diverse as the Grateful Dead and Taylor Swift?

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Subscribe to College Matters

Everything happening in the world converges in one place: higher education. On College Matters, we explore the world through the prism of the nation’s colleges and universities. Listen to College Matters wherever you get your podcasts.
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In this episode

Lately, calls for “intellectual diversity” are all the rage. From President Trump, to right-wing think tanks, to college presidents, arguments abound for adding more conservative voices to the professoriate. But are these arguments being made in good faith? How liberal are faculty, really? And what does a push for a narrowed, classics-driven curriculum mean for the canon-expanding courses that some colleges now offer on subjects as diverse as the Grateful Dead and Taylor Swift?

Listen

Related Reading

  • Higher Education Needs to Embrace a Diversity of Beliefs (Fox News/ Gordon Gee)
  • Viewpoint Diversity is a MAGA Plot (The Review / Lisa Siraganian)
  • How One State’s ‘Intellectual Diversity’ Law Has Changed Professors’ Teaching (The Chronicle)

Guest

Brock Read, deputy managing editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling: This is College Matters from The Chronicle.

Brock Read: A decent number of campus leaders will grant the point that intellectual diversity is essential. Many of them will also grant the points that they have substantial work to do on that front. But I think the general assessment that most of them would make is that the medicine that Trump is offering here is worse than the disease itself.

Jack Stripling: As the Trump administration presses colleges and universities to change how they operate, few areas have proved as contentious as the politics of the professoriate. Conservatives have long pushed for colleges to hire more right-leaning faculty, arguing that professors are almost uniformly liberal. There’s a catchphrase for this kind of ideological rebalancing act, and it’s called “intellectual diversity.” The term has been around for decades, but it’s really having a moment right now in our political discourse.

To talk about it — and, stick with me here, how this all might relate to the Grateful Dead — I’m turning to my colleague, Brock Read, a deputy managing editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Brock, so glad to have you. Welcome to College Matters.

Brock Read: It’s great to be here, Jack. And a little bit unnerving because I’m used to being somewhere far away from the microphone, so be gentle.

Jack Stripling: I’m going to be gentle. I’m so glad to have you here. I’ve wanted to have you on for a while. Let’s talk about intellectual diversity. This term, as I’ve said, is not new. But I want to talk about where it comes from and its relevance to this particular political moment because I just feel like we’re hearing it all the time. What’s the history here?

Brock Read: Yeah, so let’s start maybe with a real short definition, just to make sure everyone’s on the same page. Intellectual diversity is this idea that colleges have an obligation to reflect this broad spectrum of political and intellectual thought. So the role of a professor in that context is to guide students on a search for truth, which means presenting a range of ideas and letting the best ones win out, not putting too heavy a thumb on the scale for their own beliefs or their biases. But, when I describe it in those terms, I’m leaving out something that’s pretty important, which is when we talk about intellectual diversity in the year 2025, it’s deeply inflected by political partisanship. So the idea here is that colleges are failing in their mission to reflect a broad spectrum of thought, specifically by leaving conservative ideas out or by belittling them, which is a thing the Trump administration has said.

Jack Stripling: We talked about the history a little bit, but give me a flavor for that. I know you’ve looked into some of this.

Brock Read: I’ll skip a ton here, but, you know, we’ll do some fast forwarding. So we’ll start in 1951.

Jack Stripling: Oh gosh. Brock, we’ve only got about a half an hour here.

Brock Read: Well, I’ll be quick about this. So William F. Buckley, he’s just published God and Man at Yale. This is based on his own experience as an undergrad. He says he had to fight this terrible indoctrination from a faculty that was dominated by these secularist Keynesians. Very influential book, kind of galvanizes this conservative argument that the professoriate is really an intellectual monoculture.

OK. Let’s fast forward a long way to the early aughts now. David Horowitz has taken up this mantle somewhat. Once upon a time, he was a leftist. He’s since become a fierce critic of campus liberalism. Horowitz issues this kind of cri du coeur to conservative students. He says, hey, we should be taking this language that we’ve heard emerging on the left, this language of diversity and underrepresented people. We should co-opt that. We should use that to make a very different argument that there is, and this is his words now, a lack of intellectual diversity on college faculties and in academic classrooms. The conservative viewpoint, he says, is underrepresented in the curriculum and on reading lists. So, that’s where you first really start to hear this kind of intentional use of the phrase as a counter corrective to a liberal belief in diversity.

Jack Stripling: And it’s set up as kind of a political jujitsu that this is a term liberals love: diversity. Let’s embrace it as conservatives and say, hey, diversify the faculty in terms of their viewpoints.

Brock Read: Absolutely. This is a, this is a true, we will hoist them with their own petard moment. Now, of course, as he’s doing all this, he’s also working on a book called the 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. So what you see here is on the one hand, he is making this case that conservatives are being shunned in higher education. On the other hand, he’s making this case that we need to drive out these individual leftists who are part of the problem here. So I think that’s an important thing. It’s a thing that folks like Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA took up later on that shows that this sort of fierce partisanship is being yoked with this broader argument about diversity.

Jack Stripling: And so that’s the history. Let’s talk about the present. Who’s really embracing this now?

Brock Read: At this point, kind of a lot of people, and I think that’s part of the story here. As a concept, I think, whatever the roots of intellectual diversity has now kind of won the day, at least in a lot of circles. I think it’s become a core tenet, arguably the core tenet, of the mainstream conservative critique of higher education and of the mainstream Republican attempt to reshape the sector.

So one group of people that are really focused on this, very obviously, Republican lawmakers. A lot of bills passed just this year, a big one in Ohio, it’s called SB1. It’s this mammoth, high-ed overhaul bill. One of the things that the bill says is that public institutions have to, quote, ensure the fullest degree of intellectual diversity across their courses. We can talk more about this later, but obviously the Trump administration made this a recurring refrain. It’s in the compact. We can talk about that. That’s, of course, all important. It’s maybe not that surprising. What’s a little bit more surprising, it’s not just conservative commentators and lawmakers who are making the case now.

To some extent, the call is coming from inside the house. Just last week, Gordon Gee, maybe the great gray eminence of college presidents recently retired from West Virginia University, he published this Fox News essay, and he described intellectual diversity as necessary for the survival of higher ed. Representative quote here, academia must wean itself urgently off its addiction to inflamed ideological convictions.

You can go back to earlier this year when Santa Ono, the former Michigan president was trying to convince folks at the University of Florida that he was the right man for the job there. He leaned into some of the same language. He wrote about the importance of rejecting quote, ideological capture. Again, a phrase that’s been used overwhelmingly on the right. So what we’re seeing here is a mainstreaming of this idea that intellectual diversity isn’t just desirable, it’s actually an imperative.

And I wanted to ask you about this, Jack, because you are, I think, our resident expert on all things pertaining to Gordon Gee. You read his piece on Fox. What did you think about it?

Jack Stripling: I thought it was really interesting. So Gordon Gee has been president at a number of universities, but most recently West Virginia University, and he’s retired. He actually, I don’t know if you saw this, Brock, but he tweeted out recently that he was not dead. He wanted people …

Brock Read: Is that like a regular reminder that he sends out on Twitter?

Jack Stripling: Yeah, he wanted people to know that, that he is still in fact living and it’s very on brand for him to say something like that. But I did read his column, which I thought was interestingly published on the Fox News website. I thought that was obviously very intentional. And what’s interesting to me is he’s not just making an abstract argument that colleges should have more conservative faculty. He’s connecting this idea directly to how colleges handled the pro-Palestinian protest on their campuses in spring of 2024. You’ll remember this is where students in some cases occupied buildings or flouted rules and were accused of antisemitism. And Gordon Gee is sort of holding this up and saying, hey, this happened in part because our faculty and our universities are so monolithically liberal. Like this wouldn’t have happened if we had had more intellectual diversity is sort of the suggestion, if not the implicit argument here.

I think a lot of college presidents who handled campus protests probably don’t see it that way. There are non-ideological reasons that they didn’t want to call in the National Guard or the state police and have snipers on rooftops, as happened at Indiana University, that probably have nothing to do with their politics on Palestine. But it has definitely given an opening to people who want more intellectual diversity to say, see, this was an example of left-wing politics gone awry, and that was definitely the argument that Gee made.

Brock Read: Yeah, this is the kind of moral rot that happens if you don’t have enough diversity of thought on campus.

Jack Stripling: We should talk about the counter-argument that is being made very vociferously by a lot of faculty, one of whom is Lisa Siraganian. She’s a professor at Johns Hopkins University, and she recently wrote a piece for us called “Viewpoint Diversity is a MAGA Plot.” It makes the case that this isn’t really about balancing the scales, it’s about an entirely different agenda, and I’ll just quote from her piece: “The point is not to promote an encounter between different ideas. The point is to replace people with whom the right disagrees and doesn’t like with completely different people who like and agree with them.” So this concept that this is really a Trojan horse, not a good faith effort to balance the scales, is certainly an argument out there worth considering.

Brock Read: Yeah, absolutely.

Jack Stripling: We should talk, though, about the foundational beliefs that inform this movement. It’s all based on the idea that the professoriate is almost uniformly liberal. This is a common belief. What do we know about that, Brock?

Brock Read: We do have some useful data. It’s not perfect, but here’s what we know. So, a lot of the best stuff here comes from UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. Every few years, they do this big faculty survey. The last one was in 2022-23.

They surveyed full-time professors across the country, and more than 7,000 of those professors described their political views. So, 44 percent of those professors described themselves as liberal. Another 12 percent said they’re far left. Now that leaves about 32 percent calling themselves middle of the road. And then a much smaller group, 12 percent identifying as conservative. Only one in 200 professors said they were far right.

So that’s the first question. Now, a second question, though, might be, well wait a second, are professors actually getting more liberal? It’s a little bit more mixed on that. So if you go all the way back to the 1995-96 survey, then yeah, you see that there’s ever so slightly more professors who identify themselves as moderate than as liberal, and there’s 20 percent calling themselves conservative. So a bit of change since then, but there really hasn’t been much change over the last decade or so.

Now, that said, there’s always a caveat, and here’s one caveat that I do think is important. Liberals do not outnumber conservatives equally across all disciplines.

So there was another study in 2018 …

Jack Stripling: Another study?

Brock Read: Another study, Jack. I’ve got so many studies. You don’t even want to know. What this one did is it looked at the voter registrations of professors at fancy liberal arts colleges. And this study found that in engineering departments, there were 1.6 Democratic professors for every Republican. That’s pretty close. In English departments, though, the ratio was 48 to one.

Now I wouldn’t take the raw numbers super seriously — this is a very small subset of colleges we’re talking about here. That said, the numbers do make a kind of key point, which is when conservatives are talking about these failures in intellectual diversity, overwhelmingly they’re talking about the humanities and the social sciences — the purportedly softer fields where, the argument goes, it’s especially easy for ideology to creep in. Virtually nobody’s talking about ideological capture in STEM disciplines.

Jack Stripling: Yeah, and it’s interesting, I did some quick math. It looked like about 56 percent of those professors said they were either liberal or far left. So a little over half are saying that, across the spectrum, and then more pronounced in humanities disciplines, perhaps not so much in the hard sciences. I think that’s not unsurprising, but it’s an interesting factoid to put into the conversation here, because I think when people write about this, they often say, this is a monolithically liberal institution, and the data don’t really show that. It shows that they’re slightly more liberal than not.

Brock Read: Yeah. There’s gradations here, too. And I think it’s really important to say, and look, maybe this is obvious, just because a professor is liberal or conservative, it does not necessarily follow that that professor is an indoctrinator. Could that professor be an indoctrinator? Sure. Could they have blind spots that mean that doctrinaire liberal views get more air time than others? Sure that’s more likely, and maybe that’s more prevalent. There is some interesting data suggesting that influential progressive books on criminal justice, say, or the Israel-Palestine conflict, those books are assigned more often than books that offer competing takes. That work hasn’t been peer reviewed yet. Let’s not go overboard. But it’s worth keeping in mind.

But that said, let’s stipulate for a minute that the professoriate is too liberal. Let’s say that’s a problem that needs to be addressed. So the most logical way that a college would address this, might be to say, Hey, well we’ll hire a bunch more conservative professors right now. That’s a very expensive way to address the problem, but it’s a clear way to do it.

Now you’ve actually done some reporting on this, Jack. And I wonder, how much of this is really happening across the sector?

Jack Stripling: It’s fascinating to me, Brock, because we did a show a while back about these Western Civilization centers that are popping up on some college campuses. This is really a trend that’s taken place over the last decade or so, and a lot of these are civics-driven institutions that really emphasize appreciation for and study of Western civilization. These are wildly popular with conservative legislatures who all of a sudden have found tons of money for higher education, which is a relief to some of these college leaders, but it’s for a very specific purpose.

So we look at, you know, a place like the University of Texas at Austin, which has something like this. And when conservatives talk about forming these centers, they are often reluctant to say, this is really about like installing right-wing faculty on your campus. But sometimes they have said the quiet part out loud. Dan Patrick, the Republican Lieutenant Governor of Texas, said at one point that what was then known as the Liberty Institute at UT Austin was an answer to quote, “loony Marxist UT professors.” It’s very clear that some of the people who support this see these centers as a way of rebalancing the intellectual diversity of these institutions.

And like I said, even at a time when a lot of colleges are laying off professors or laying off staff, there’s tons of money flowing to these centers. This past spring, the Texas Board of Regents announced that the system would invest a hundred million dollars in UT Austin’s School of Civic Leadership. So it’s a very strange juxtaposition, a time of austerity across higher education, but lots of money being found in red states for hiring professors in these particular fields.

Brock Read: It creates an interesting dynamic too because some of these institutions, within institutions, feel a little bit like sleeper cells. They’re establishing these units. They’re growing very quickly but are not necessarily linked all that closely with what you might consider the backbone or the standard core of the institution.

Jack Stripling: And I think this movement is really being energized, Brock, by Trump’s higher education compact. Again, we’ve talked about this on the show, listeners will know about it, but this is the document the Trump administration first sent to, I think, nine universities, saying sign on to essentially our higher education agenda. It says some things about intellectual diversity, which I think re-energized this conversation. Tell us a little bit about that.

Brock Read: Yeah, it says quite a bit, actually. So the compact talks about maintaining a vibrant marketplace of ideas. That’s a quote. It’s clearly a code for intellectual diversity, if you want to even call it a code. It’s very straightforward. That’s what they’re talking about. And this is clearly a topic that matters a good deal to the White House. They give it a lot of attention in the document.

Now, the question here is, how does the document say institutions have to go about maintaining a vibrant market place of ideas? Well, the compact doesn’t say that you should hire more conservative faculty. Doesn’t say you should teach a broader range of courses or really do anything all that additive. The main thing that it says is that colleges have to be willing to consider, and I’m gonna quote now, transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas. So this stipulation, which is clearly more stick than carrot, it seems like that’s kind of a non-starter for most colleges. So of the nine universities that got the White House’s first offer to take up the compact, none of them have signed on. Seven of them had said no. Far and away, the number one rationale that university presidents gave when they were declining was, well, we think research funding should be based strictly on merit. So playing the compact game in general is a bad idea. That said, the next most consistent argument, I would say, there were several leaders who said, well we won’t restrict our academic freedom or academic autonomy. I think that’s very much a response to the specter of shutting down departments and the fact that the Department of Justice would be enforcing this and presumably in the position therefore to determine what counts as belittling conservative ideas.

Jack Stripling: Right. I think there’s a lot of resistance, as you say, to giving the federal government any inroad to telling colleges who they should hire or whether they are politically diverse enough. Sounds like a recipe for really infringing on autonomy, at least from the presidents that I’ve talked to.

Brock Read: Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, and that’s where we’re at right now. So as we talked about earlier, a decent number of campus leaders will grant the point that intellectual diversity is essential. Many of them will also grant the point that they have substantial work to do on that front. But I think the general assessment that most of them would make is that the medicine that Trump is offering here is worse than the disease itself.

Jack Stripling: Stick around, we’ll be back in a minute.

BREAK

Jack Stripling: So, Brock, if I was president of the United States, do you know what I would do to create more intellectual diversity on college campuses?

Brock Read: Well, that’s a horrifying thought, Jack. But what would you do?

Jack Stripling: I would require colleges and universities to hire more Grateful Dead scholars on their faculty.

Brock Read Naturally.

Jack Stripling I’m an unabashed fan of the band and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about them, because over this past weekend, the University of Oregon hosted a Grateful Dead themed football game against Wisconsin. For a Deadhead like me, this was absolute magic. It’s a little cringy anytime there’s marketing around this band. But this was a Deadhead’s dream. The team was decked out in Grateful Ducks uniforms, the players wore jerseys that had green and yellow tie-dye numbers. And there’s a legitimately strong connection between the Dead and Oregon. They played Autzen Stadium something like 10 times, so this was great.

But all of this got me thinking about the Grateful Dead, and pop culture, and how pop culture is represented in higher education. There’ve been a slew of Grateful Dead courses over the years, people studying it. To me, one of the fun things about college is you could go to a university and take an unexpected course on pop culture. We’re seeing this with Taylor Swift courses now. But I’m concerned that in this environment, where we see so much push to ever more prescriptive curricula — lawmakers saying everybody’s gotta take civics, everybody’s got to take Western civilization — that the things that get squeezed out are gonna be courses like that. Am I right to be concerned about this, Brock?

Brock Read: Well, I wouldn’t mourn it quite yet. I think, and I hope that we don’t end up mourning this myself. I was looking around, there’s a lot of attention paid to the rise in Taylor- Swift-related courses over the last several years. There’s a lotta Taylor Swift courses right now. Way too many of them use the exact same titling conceit, it’s like Sociology: Taylor’s version, which feels like, okay, let’s move on.

Jack Stripling: So you’re coming out is that there are too many, in fact.

Brock Read: Well, I’m not saying there are too many. I’m just saying get your nomenclature straight. You know, be a little bit cleverer.

Jack Stripling: I feel like you’re triangulating here, Brock. Take a position on the proliferation of Taylor Swift courses.

Brock Read: Look, as a Buffalo Bills fan, I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t mind hearing a little less about Taylor Swift, but that’s my own cross to bear.

Jack Stripling: You’ve got a lot to be thankful for then, but go ahead.

Brock Read: Anyway, look, even a few of these Taylor Swift courses, at least a few them, have been at public institutions in Ron DeSantis’ Florida over the last year. So, I do think there’s room for this kind of stuff to live alongside civics.

But look, I would say that, I mean, I’ve told a number of people over the years, the single most important class that I took in college in terms of its impact on my life and maybe on my thinking more broadly was a Bob Dylan course. So, you know, I went to Williams, which is one of those colleges that has a winter study period. Like every January for a month, you take one course and one course only, and you don’t do a heck of a lot else. My senior year, I took this course during winter study, that was all about Bob Dylan. It was taught by a local music critic. You know, I thought, look, I’m a kid who cut his teeth on alt rock and college rock, but maybe I should just give the old guy a try here. And it was amazing. I mean, we listened to like all the different Basement Tapes recordings of “You Ain’t Going Nowhere.” We watched as much of Renaldo and Clara as we could stand. We debated whether high art versus low art was a meaningful distinction. All of that had a real impact on me, not just in terms of turning me into a Dylan fan.

So, you know, I think one thing I would say, and I’m gonna try to, ha ha ha, I’m going to try to bring it all back home here, Jack, is I actually do think this is kind of connected to the intellectual diversity discussion. You know, I love a lot of the Western canon, but so many of my favorite moments as a student were ones when I felt that the canon was expanding into new territory that I didn’t know it could inhabit.

You know, so one way to create intellectual diversity, and the way that gets talked about the most right now is to encourage this multifaceted critical thinking about all the classic texts and subjects, whether they’re literature, economics, whatever. Another way to create intellectual diversity is to expand our notion about the texts and the subjects that deserve critical thinking. So look, I mean, I would argue that inviting The Dead or Taylor Swift into the canon, it might do that. And it might bring us a step closer to inviting some other stuff into the canon, whether it’s Indonesian Gamelan or Congolese Rumba that really deserves a place there and might expand some minds too. I think that’d be an incredible thing.

Jack Stripling: Yeah, it’s funny, because the reason we have Dylan studies and Grateful Dead studies courses is because these intellectuals, these hippies, from that period wanted to process the art that moved them in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And, in a lot of ways, the debate we’re having today about intellectual diversity feels a little like a re-litigation of the ‘60s and ‘70s. I’ve spoken to conservatives like Chris Rufo, who see higher education as hopelessly liberal, and they would say that all this “wokeism” on college campuses really was ushered in by what Rufo would call New Left radicals of the ‘70s, who went straight and became professors.

What’s interesting to me, since we’re talking about the Grateful Dead, is that they figure into that story both figuratively and literally. First of all, they were the soundtrack of the counterculture movement that people like Rufo despise. But secondly, they were physically present on these campuses during a period of enormous change and political activism. And some great music came out of that. The 5/8/77 show at Cornell is widely considered to be among their best shows if not the best show. They played a show at Columbia University during the 1968 protests on that campus. Will you indulge me to talk about that, Brock? Can I talk about the Columbia show?

Brock Read: I mean, this is your podcast, Jack, so I feel like the answer has to be yes.

Jack Stripling: I do think it’s worth pausing on this, because it connects so deeply to our present conversation. When the pro-Palestinian protests happened at Colubmia in spring of 2024, a lot of people said, hey, these demonstrations feel a lot like the demonstrations that at Columbia in 1968, which were about the Vietnam War and civil rights. And they were right. Both these protests were passionate and obsessively covered by the media. And they drove college leaders crazy for the same reason: Even if you’re sympathetic with protesters, they are by definition disruptive, and they can be frankly annoying when you’re trying to run a college. Or, as it turns out, when you’re trying to put on a concert on a college campus.

That’s effectively what happened when The Dead showed up at Columbia on May 3, 1968. They didn’t entirely get along with these radicals, which is kind of funny to consider. How the band even got there is sort of a crazy story to begin with that’s worth telling. I have a friend, David Gans, who hosts a Grateful Dead radio show on Sirius XM, and he described all of this beautifully in his book, This is All a Dream We Dreamed. The show was essentially impromptu. A Columbia student, who heard The Dead were in New York in ‘68, somehow managed to reach the band’s manager at his hotel. And he convinced the manager to bring The Dead to campus to play in solidarity with these demonstrators.

And you would think that The Dead and these radicals would’ve gotten along famously. But Bob Weir, who is one of the founding members of The Dead, actually got a little annoyed with these kids. He remembers the protesters trying to grab his microphone and make speeches, which Weir wasn’t having. And the demonstrators bickered with Weir, and called him a “honkey” and a “bourgeois” SOB. And Weir spent like five minutes or so having to shoo them away so he could play. So it’s kind of amusing to think that even The Dead sort of reached their limit with Columbia’s student activists. There are probably some college presidents today who could relate to that.

Brock Read: If you’ve lost Bob Weir, I mean, try to imagine somebody reaching out to Taylor Swift’s manager and saying, Hey, you want to you want a play our protest?

Jack Stripling: Sure, I’ll be right over, yeah.

Brock Read: There’s an encampment.

Jack Stripling The times they are are a different, as they say, Brock.

Brock Read: That’s expertly quoted. But here’s the thing that stands out to me, right here. Here we do have a band. It’s very clear. This is like a fulcrum of intellectual diversity, right? I mean, Ann Coulter and Al Franken love this band. So we know that multiple political perspectives can be contained within it. Apparently a University of Oregon football game managed to use The Dead as a way to yoke together Nike and Ken Kesey, which seems like quite an accomplishment. So maybe we, yeah, maybe we just need to focus on how can we bring the most varied perspectives together to discuss whether Cornell really was the best Dead show.

Jack Stripling: Well, we will work on that. You do have a great taste in music, and I’ve learned a lot from you, but sadly, this is a blind spot for you. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Brock Read: Thanks so much for having me and I’ll get to work on self-improvement. There’s still time for me with The Dead.

Jack Stripling: College Matters from the Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you’d like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our Chronicle producer is Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling, thanks for listening.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this podcast. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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About the Author
Jack Stripling
Jack Stripling is a senior writer at The Chronicle and host of its podcast, College Matters from The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling.
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