Welcome to the Unspeakable Podcast.

I'm your host, Megan Down.

My guest is Alana Redstone.

She is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

She's also the faculty director and a co-founder, along with educational strategist Ellie

Aveshai and English Literature

scholar Christina LaRose of the Mill Institute, an organization designed to help educators learn how to

foster productive, respectful classroom discussions that make room for a variety of viewpoints.

I should tell you that the Mill Institute, formerly the Mill Center,

is now part of the University of Austin, a brand new institution with a stated commitment to free speech

and intellectual diversity. I'll link to it in the show notes, but in this conversation, we talk

less about the Mill Center itself than about some of its core values and ideas.

One idea that interests me a lot is something Alana calls the certainty trap.

And we talk here about how feeling absolutely sure about things can lead to trouble and may in fact

have a lot to do with our current troubles as a society.

We talk about how Alana works with her own students to challenge their assumptions

and how the word truth can often throw us off course. Best of all, in the second part of the

interview, we run through a couple of things that I feel certain of and that maybe I should not.

I'll let you guess what those things are.

And Alana introduces a concept that I found profound, actually, that feeling confident

about something is perhaps a better, stronger position than feeling certain.

This may change your life a little.

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