Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

And if you're like me, nothing makes you happier than talking to people you disagree with.

Most of us, I think, go out of our way to surround ourselves with people with utterly different perspectives.

It's so boring, so tiresome to talk to people who think you're right.

What we would like is to always be talking to people who have completely wrong ideas from our point of view.

Well, anyway, that's what we tell ourselves sometimes.

Most of us would actually say, if you asked, yes, of course, I love having a diverse selection of opinions,

exposing themselves to me all the time. But in fact, in practice, okay, sarcasm aside,

many of us find it more comfortable, find it more easy to be surrounded by people we kind of agree with,

or at least when we disagree, it's in relatively mild ways.

And the Academy, colleges and universities, is no different from that.

And the Academy for Various Reasons has leaned toward the liberal side of the spectrum for a very long time.

And I think it's true, I think of the data back up the idea that it's becoming more liberal over time.

So we can ask why this is, we can ask whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.

And that's what we're going to do today in our discussion.

I'm going to talk to Musa Algarbi, who was a sociologist, a member of Header of Docs Academy for a long time,

and someone who's really, I think done a very good job of sort of putting people's

feature of the fire in the public sphere, in being honest about their commitment to intellectual diversity.

This is probably a good place for me to tell a story that Musa actually told while we recording,

but due to technical glitches, the recording didn't come through.

So I'm going to try to tell it not quite as well as he did, but you know, it helps a

illuminate his perspective where he's coming from.

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