Common Ground

Today, we hear, to begin with, a portion of a recently released documentary about President Gerald R. Ford. The documentary premiered on National Geographic. The portion we are about to hear was presented to a packed audience at the Hauenstein Center on October 3, 2017, as part of the Center’s Character and the Presidency Series. A sponsor of that series is also a producer of the Ford documentary: he’s former ambassador to Italy Peter Secchia. Secchia and President Ford were friends. Following the screening, Secchia gave brief remarks about President Ford’s character; he says he’s always thought that Ford’s presidency should be taken a bit more seriously by historians, and that Ford’s decision to pardon Nixon was a testament, in fact, to his character. That’s the view explored in the documentary. After Secchia’s address, we hear from David Brooks, who needs no introduction—everyone’s familiar with his widely read column in the New York Times as well as his bestselling book The Road to Character. Brooks t

Today we hear from Rebekah Warren, a Michigan state senator from the 18th district. Considered by some to be the most liberal member of the Michigan State Senate—after all, Ann Arbor, the home of the University of Michigan, is in her district—Senator Warren is in fact known for her ability and her willingness to reach across the aisle. By working effectively with Republicans on the senate, Warren has been able to champion bipartisan legislation on human rights and the environment.

Today, we hear from Andrew Spear, a professor of philosophy at Grand Valley State University. More specifically, Andrew is an epistemologist. His primary interest is in knowledge—he asks how we come to our beliefs about the world; how we come to know things, or believe that we know things; how we justify our beliefs. I wanted to talk with Andrew because I wanted to know how his work as an epistemologist has responded to our present anti-epistemological political moment: “fake news,” Kellyanne Conway's “alternative facts.” All facts are politicized; what one chooses to believe seems entirely dependent on one’s politics. Andrew and I talk about the dangers of this state of affairs. One such danger: to become addicted to what Andrew calls, quite aptly, epistemic porn. In this episode, Andrew offers a definition of epistemic porn. We discuss the implications of the definition, as well as the definition itself.

In today’s episode, we offer a conversation between Janet Napolitano—21st Governor of Arizona, former secretary of homeland security, and current president of the University of California system—and Christine Todd Whitman, 50th governor of New Jersey and former administrator of the EPA. The pair talk about how they each got involved in politics at the local and state level, and what it ultimately took to win their gubernatorial races. They discuss what life was like once they got into office: how their leadership styles evolved and adapted to the demands of their roles.

Today, we hear from Martha Jones, the Society of Black Almuni Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, and formerly a professor at the University of Michigan. Jones brings some of her experience especially at that latter institution to bear on our topic today: politics on college campuses. We’re lucky she does. There’s been a lot of talk about campus politics, on both the left and right. On the right, we often hear about so-called liberal snowflakes who can’t bear to hear arguments that they don’t agree with, so they attempt to banish conservative speakers from their campuses and threaten to undermine the principle, the right, of freedom of expression. And on the center-left, we hear from some critics that identity politics is the problem: that students are so obsessed with the dynamics of personal identity and are thus incapable of or uninterested in the hard work of coalition building, sustained organizing, especially on the left. This latter position was stated pretty succinctly by the liberal c

Today, we hear from Scott St. Louis not so much about the Common Ground Initiative itself, or about the Hauenstein Center. Instead, we hear from Scott about his decision, at least right now it’s his decision, not to work exclusively down the traditional career path of a tenure-track professor in the humanities--more specifically, down the path of a professor of history. It’s a significant decision to Scott because, for a long time, that’s precisely what he wanted to do: earn a tenure-track professorship in conventional fashion. But the academic job market for folks in the humanities, history or otherwise, isn’t right now, well, even a market. There are so few jobs; the jobs that do exist are generally adjunct professorships, which are contingent, pay very little, offer pretty much no benefits. There are so many terrific PhDs on the market who are forced to take these jobs. And there are just as many graduate students working right now who are facing the reality that, when they try to enter the academic job m

This week, we’re bringing you the first installment of a new series for the podcast. We’ll offer some clips taken from lectures given as part of the Hauenstein Center’s Wheelhouse Talk Series. In that series, Gleaves Whitney, along with the program manager of the Cook Leadership Academy, Chadd Dowding, invite leaders from the community—sometimes professors at Grand Valley, or folks in politics or law or business, to come and talk to undergraduate and graduate students about leadership. Now, speakers can take these talks in many directions: their goal is, simply, to bring to bear their own experiences on the question—what does it mean to be an ethical, effective leader. Sometimes speakers lay out a set of points or principles. But often, they talk about something more personal. Sometimes, and often in a really moving way, speakers use their talks as occasions to think about what it means to lead a good life.

From the archive! A conversation between Cornel West and Robert George. When they came to the Hauenstein Center in 2014, West and George were both professors of philosophy at Princeton. Beyond that, the two shared, and still share, quite little in common. West was and is a progressive political philosopher, race theorist, and democratic socialist. George is a conservative Catholic philosopher of jurisprudence and natural law. We hosted the two at the Hauenstein Center because they had established a reputation at Princeton as unlikely friends. They team-taught a class in which they read with students the works of St Augustine, Alexis de Tocqueville, WEB Du Bois, and others. We asked the two to come out and essentially model the kind of dialogue and debate that they have in class: we wanted them to show us how two politically opposed thinkers could examine a host of issues, maintain disagreement about most of them, but still in the end learn from one another.

From the archive! The Hauenstein Center hosted a debate in 2008 between Christopher and Peter Hitchens. Gleaves Whitney, director of the Hauenstein, did his best to moderate the brothers as they exchanged their quite distinct views about the Iraq War and the existence of God. The event was held in a large Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the crowd sometimes got involved.

This week, we hear from Kate Medina, Executive Vice President, Associate Publisher, and Executive Editorial Director at Random House. Kate describes her career at Random House, where she’s worked with such writers as EL Doctorow, John Irving, Anna Quindlen, John Meacham, Nancy Reagan, and many others. She tells us what it takes to work in publishing: an entrepreneurial spirit, for one, plus a commitment to creative, intimate relationships—even friendships—between writers and editors. Our conversation starts with Kate describing her first encounter with James Joyce’s "Ulysses" while she was a student at Smith, and how it inspired her, ultimately, to become an editor.

Here's the second half of our conversation with Sam Anderson, critic at large at the New York Times Magazine. Last episode, we heard about how Sam became interested in magazine writing and criticism, and how he tends to approach texts and subjects. In this episode, we hear about Sam’s gradual shift from doctoral work at NYU to writing from time to time for Slate and then full time at New York Magazine, where he wrote mostly about sports before becoming book critic. We also get back to the question of whether Sam is a generalist. That topic allows us to address some of Sam’s favorite subjects: the people he’s written about and is endlessly fascinated by: we move from Dostoesky to Michelangelo, Samuel Beckett to Mark McGuire, the baseball player. We touch on all these folks because there’s something about each of them—their work, their stories—that preoccupies Sam. But what is it? We ask that. We consider some of the themes around which Sam’s writing tends to orbit. I ask whether he feels he has some real wri

For this week: the first half of our convesation with Sam Anderson, critic at large at the New York Times Magazine. We talk about Sam’s time as an undergraduate at Oregon State and LSU, how he became a sort of auto-didact. We talk, as well, about his early admiration for old New Yorker writers like James Thurber and E.B. White. Sam describes life as a PhD student in English at NYU, where he started to pitch articles to magazines almost entirely in secret. Sam describes his habits as a reader and critic, what he sees in Jacques Derrida’s command not to “double the text,” and how criticism itself should be a creative act.

In this episode, we hear from Teresa Mathew, a journalist and writing fellow at The Atlantic’s City Lab, who writes a good deal about religion and race, particularly about the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, in India as well as America. We discuss some of the cultural differences between faiths in India, as well as between the same faith, Catholicism, in India and America. Teresa considers what it means to inherit a faith and culture and tradition, as well as what it’s like to fear losing them. Teresa also talks about what it’s like to work as a freelance journalist in Brooklyn, and wonders how on earth anyone can be good at Twitter.

In our last episode, you heard three writers and editors on the left debate and discuss with three writers and editors on the Right. In this episode, you’ll hear the second part of that panel conversation. We begin with the left’s response to the right’s remarks about the possibility of fusion, or of coalition building—both within the ranks of one’s political movement, and outside those ranks. In this episode, we first hear from Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin Magazine, then Sarah Leonard and David Marcus of THE NATION. Then, on the right, we hear Ingrid Gregg, then Winston Elliot of The Imaginative Conservative and Dan McCarthy of The American Conservative. We hear from these speakers, we also get some good questions from the audience, including one from David Sehat, past guest on the podcast and host of Mindpop.

On May 5th, right in the middle of the Hauenstein Center’s Conservative / Progressive summit, three writers and thinkers on the right met with three on the left to discuss the significance of election 2016. What did the victory of Donald Trump, as well as the rise of Bernie Sanders on the left, mean for American politics? Was the center being pulled apart, and could that, in their view, be a good thing? It comes as no surprise that our panelists, separated ideologically, don’t agree about many points of politics or, as we in fact hear in this episode, culture. Still, they do have in common a critique of the so-called neoliberal center, or at least most of them share a similar distrust for it. They haggle over some of the key differences between their respective positions. They also talk about the opportunities they see in building new coalitions post-2016, and how they go about articulating the alternatives to the political status-quo for which they advocate. Panelists include: Sarah Leonard at The Nation

In this episode, we hear from Keisha Blain, a professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, senior blog editor at the African American Intellectual History Society, and editor of the Global Black History section of "Public Books." Keisha Blain has, as much as any scholar, redefined what it means to be a publically engaged academic in the 21st century. She’s senior blog editor at the African American Intellectual History Society, and has contributed significantly to the fast rise in significance and influence of that organization among historians and folks interested in the history of African American thought. She is also one of the co-founders of the #Charelstonsyllabus, a movement on Twitter that offered a detailed reading list, crowdsourced among historians, to offer a detailed history of racial violence in the US. That syllabus drew a ton of attention, at the New York Times and elsewhere. We talk about Charleston syllabus, as well as the Trump 2.0 syllabus, which Blain also co-authored. We also d

In this special episode, guest interviewer Winston Elliott talks with Christopher Nelson, president of St. John's College, about his work at St John’s, and about the unique kind of liberal arts education offered there.

Today we hear from Peter Kalkavage, a tutor at St John’s College and author of The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Peter and I discuss his writing about philosophy and music. Reading Peter’s writing, you can tell that one of his aims isn’t just to think about music as a fine art, but to think about music as itself a way of thinking. His approach allows him to write about and think through music in some surprising or perhaps just unfamiliar ways: he asks how music contributes to the formation of one’s opinions, one’s beliefs about the world. But then he also writes about music in ways that are familiar, but that require a great deal of imagination and precision. Peter asks why music, particularly classical music and sacred music but also some rock n roll thrown in, why music makes us feel certain ways, gives form to our emotions—in a sense, helps us feel our own emotions.

Today we hear from Jon Lauck, a Midwestern historian and the author, most recently, of "From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism." The book get its title from a line in the first chapter of "The Great Gatsby." Nick Carraway, the narrator, is a Midwesterner who’s decided to go East to New York to learn the Bond business. He’s just returned to America from World War I, and notes that, “Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe.” That’s an attitude plenty of Midwesterners seem to take to their region of birth—at least, that’s one perspective about the Midwest we often encounter in American fiction and literary criticism. Jon Lauck’s book examines this trope, one might call it a cliché; as does Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gilead, who says that Lauck’s book “exposes the origins of this extraordinarily potent cliché.” Robinson liked the book; so did other Midwesterner

In this episode, we hear from Chadd Dowding, program manager of the Cook Leadership Academy at the Hauenstein Center. I ask Chadd how he goes about identifying emergent leaders in their early 20s and how he helps them develop their projects and initiatives. I also ask Chadd how the students he works with, especially those involved in politics, have responded to election 2016. We also hear from Micaela Cole and Matthew Oudbier, two student-fellows in the academy. Micaela is on her way to getting an undergraduate degree in political science, and Matt is about to start a phd program in philosophy. I ask how they define leadership in their respective fields. And they clue us in on the ways they’re trying to orient their work to the changing political climate in America.