Stephen Scaltetti is a professor of philosophy at Ole Miss and the chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom. In this episode, we discuss his views on democracy and how it relates to Aristotle and Plato.
00:04:27.300I also think he's too pessimistic about the ability of ordinary people to have different degrees of knowledge.
00:04:37.020But that said, Plato is right to think that in the best sort of society, you want wise, prudent, and knowledgeable people in the decision-making roles.
00:04:51.140You know, that part of his insight is correct.
00:04:54.760I just think he takes that one insight and sort of misapplies it to his kind of understanding of the sociology of the republic.
00:05:04.820I will point out, you know, in America, the whole idea, if you look at the Federalist papers and writings of the early, many of the early founders, they also were very critical of, you know, raw democracy for these same ideas.
00:05:20.520They were worried that people who didn't know any better would get riled up about this, that, and the other, and because they didn't really have a lot of insight or prudence, would sort of make dramatic and quick changes without any reflection.
00:05:39.040And the reason we were set up as a republic, not as a democracy in that raw sense, was exactly this idea that we're supposed to have kind of speed bumps and hurdles that give time for reflection, that give time for people who know something to speak up, you know, and to put people, to let views that are more prudent weigh in on major decisions we make rather than rushing into things.0.53
00:06:07.800I mean, I would say that even if the reflex and the way he wanted to implement it, you know, might have been noble, the reflex to say there is a group of people that know more than you peasants, you rubes, is basically the default value of human history, right?
00:06:29.980So let's take in our very recent past, our COVID overlords said that the science is settled.
00:06:37.200There's a bunch of us that have medical degrees that can understand how protesting as 100,000 people at a BLM rally will not spread the virus.
00:06:50.100That's just settled science, according to the noble public health officials.
00:06:54.300But going to see your grandma when she's dying is very dangerous for spreading the COVID.
00:07:01.340And they rely on the imprimatur that we are the wise public health officials.
00:07:05.860So I think the old slippery slope, even if he perfectly meant it in the most noble and pure ways, is open to be gained by endless authoritarian people.
00:07:22.820And, you know, it's interesting, even in The Republic, in Book Eight of The Republic, he tells this, he gives this account of, well, how does a perfect regime like this, filled with perfectly enlightened philosophers ruling everything, how does it end up falling apart?
00:07:41.880What will bring its demise? And his answer to that is really interesting. It's not something like, well, people at the end of the day are, you know, just wicked and vicious and eventually they'll have appetites and emotions that will overcome their reason.
00:08:02.860And the thing that ends up tripping even this perfect regime is that people will make calculations and make and ground their beliefs and they'll be convinced they have knowledge, but they'll be miscalculating and they won't realize it.
00:08:19.940So it's that kind of the belief that, you know, something that you don't ends up sort of undermining even this perfect regime he's he's imagining.
00:08:33.380So it's even Plato's aware of the danger there. And, you know, it's an old story and it's it's one that is worth thinking about.
00:08:44.580And it's one that students, too, should be incredibly aware of. And that's part of why it's so important to educating people in liberty and in, you know, Western culture begins by reflecting on a lot of these themes. Right.
00:08:59.960I mean, even think about the figure of Socrates, you know, walking into the forum, and basically Socrates is going around telling not average people, but telling elite people, hey, you're not as smart as you think you are, and poking holes in their accounts just to show that they don't really have a grasp of the truth in the way they thought.
00:09:24.240And think about how pivotal Socrates is for our self-conception of, you know, Western culture and Western civilization.
00:09:33.000So that idea has been with us for a long time, and it picks up a crucial insight.
00:09:37.880Yeah, I mean, the idea of the fact that the architecture of the human mind is prone to intellectual hubris and lack of epistemological humility is something that certainly Socrates would have been familiar with.
00:09:51.840Another guy who faced a similar situation to what Socrates faced is a book that I'm just about to finish reading.
00:10:02.220It's the story of the trial of Galileo by the Inquisition.
00:10:08.520i mean oftentimes when i speak to people now who have this reflex against tenure which would be
00:10:21.280part of what we're talking about here in that it is one of the sub-branches of freedom is academic
00:10:27.740freedom and being able to say what you want and how you want to say it's on so many politicians
00:10:33.880will often have this reflex, you know, you've got the fat cats, dead wood, who are sitting around
00:10:39.660doing nothing now that they've got tenure, but they don't appreciate the fact that certainly
00:10:44.620folks like me would have never survived. I can't remember if we discussed this last time, but
00:10:49.420wouldn't have survived 15 minutes had we not protected by tenure. So is there a way for us
00:10:56.540to remain true to the ethos of academic freedom as enshrined in tenure, but also maybe
00:11:03.720tweaking it a bit so that we ensure that to the extent that part of human nature is for some
00:11:09.260people to be parasitic deadwood, how do we address that then? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean,
00:11:16.100I am a strong advocate of academic freedom. And I also believe that having tenure is a crucial
00:11:24.920protection, uh, to ensuring, uh, that people can, uh, engage in wide ranging inquiry and debate
00:11:33.620and exploration. I mean, you know, we have to let the scientists be free and we have to let
00:11:38.820philosophers and thinkers, um, explore any avenue they, they want. Um, and so I also am very
00:11:46.300skeptical when people, you know, in the legislators or government will see the university system and
00:11:57.400think that the solution to some of our problems would be just to do away with those kind of
00:12:04.140things. So now I want to say a little bit more about that. I actually agree, though, with a lot
00:12:12.380of the criticisms that a lot of the legislators have, because, I mean, I understand their
00:12:19.020frustration, right? I mean, here they're giving, the state is giving millions and millions
00:12:24.920and millions of dollars to these institutions. And then it just seems like a lot of people
00:12:30.680in the institutions take that money, and they just sort of turn around and present one-sided
00:12:40.940views of things or create echo chambers or only use the money to sort of critique the powers that
00:12:49.820be and the citizens of where they're living. So I actually am somewhat sympathetic to the
00:12:54.820frustration public officials feel. But the solution to that problem is not to abolish
00:13:05.460academic freedom or abolish tenure, it's to take steps to make sure that the big debates going on
00:13:13.300in our countries are the ones that are being reflected in the universities and that, you know,
00:13:20.440many different voices are being heard in the university and there's robust debate with major
00:13:28.360sides represented. So you need to add more voices in and protect academic freedom to kind of solve
00:13:38.020the problem, in my opinion. Sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead. So some people will say we just need
00:13:45.280to protect academic freedom and preserve tenure. And I'm actually, I mean, I'm for that, but I feel
00:13:51.980that that's not enough, because that doesn't recognize why those things are coming under
00:19:18.440The student just comes into my office and, you know, I ask the students the same questions, but then no matter what comes out of their mouth, you know, I challenge their answer or complicate their answer.
00:19:31.060And it really is amazing to see the difference between students who have thought carefully about the material
00:19:41.060and taken the time to get the material clear in a way that they can articulate in their own language.
00:19:49.700And not just, there's other students who, they'll memorize the material as sort of a script.
00:19:56.180And what happens is as soon as you hit that kind of student with a challenge question,
00:20:01.060They just repeat the script because because they've never kind of parsed the material in concepts that they really understand and grasp.
00:20:10.500So in one way, I mean, I'm taking extra steps to make sure that the students are exercising those intellectual muscles that you're talking about, where they're having to formulate things in their own terms and come up with their their own arguments.
00:20:28.180Um, now that said, you know, as the months have gone by and, and as I've kind of learned
00:20:36.280more about, uh, AI, I have now, I have come around to a view where I'm actually more optimistic
00:20:43.640about the way, uh, human beings are going to be using AI.
00:20:49.560And, um, and again, maybe this is too optimistic.
00:20:52.760You can kind of shoot me down and push back on this, but, you know, I think about what
00:20:57.080it must have been like to live in a time when the printing press was first came online.
00:21:02.980And suddenly, you know, there's all of these books swarming around.
00:21:08.840And I can imagine a lot of people thinking at first, like, how on earth this is going
00:21:54.500And I guess I think that when AI is just widely available, a lot of the fear we have about it, I think, will go away because it's going to turn out that at the end of the day, what people enjoyed is the process of thinking about things for themselves.
00:22:21.780And I think AI will be used more and more just to do the tasks that don't require thought and don't require intellectual habits, but are just more operational.
00:22:35.680And there's going to be it'll be vague and hard to tell, you know, sometimes which which falls in which bucket.
00:22:42.420But I'm I think it's going to lead to human beings actually valuing thinking for themselves more and more.
00:22:50.920And I think as part of that, we're going to end up valuing things like podcasts and conversations and things where two human beings or three human beings are trying to figure out something for themselves more.
00:23:08.140And we'll be leaving all of the kind of just operational mechanical stuff to the powers of AI more.
00:23:15.000So and I feel like I'm talking too long, but let me just give you one other example.
00:23:19.760You know, I when I was younger, I played a lot of chess and was very, you know, I still love chess a lot.
00:23:27.760And it's so interesting to me that we live in a world where, you know, the computer chess engines now can beat anyone, anyone.
00:23:36.200No human being can beat these top chess programs.
00:23:39.740And yet watching human beings play each other in a game of chess is more popular than ever.
00:23:46.100If you go online and there's all these chess tournaments and, you know, people follow the ups and downs of their individual heroes.
00:23:54.460So I think maybe AI is going to allow us to actually hone in on exactly the kind of qualities you're talking about rather than just replacing all of them.
00:24:05.480So anyway, that's my optimistic story.
00:24:09.340I'm going to add to what you just said.
00:24:11.040I think it's going to build on what you're saying.
00:24:12.560And then I want to talk specifically about chess because that's a segue to a story of my former professor in AI.
00:24:19.720So I was going to say that if you use AI to reduce the computational complexity of searching for information, then I think that's perfectly valid.
00:24:35.940because I am facing an informational landscape
00:24:55.740hey, Grok, how did Western European countries
00:25:00.500on average score in their happiness indices?
00:25:04.720Now, I could go to specific indices that exist where I will get this information, but if at the drop of one query, I can get that AI system to synthesize that for me so that I could then use that information, which would have taken me 10 times longer to amass in my creative process, that's great.
00:25:29.340Where I think draw the line that you're talking about is that the ultimate creative process, for me to call it a Gadsad process, it has to come from my mind, from my words, from my hand.
00:25:47.160And otherwise, and now I'm hardly an artist, so I'm just extrapolating here.
00:25:52.720I don't think when you use an AI system to generate a new image, I mean, yes, you could
00:26:01.520call that digital art, but you can't call it Stephen Scaltetti art if all he did was
00:26:07.800press a button that generates fractal patterns.
00:26:13.180What made Da Vinci great is that it had to come from his innate talent.
00:26:17.160So I think that's where I would draw a line. And if I may then move on to your second point. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.
00:26:22.180Yeah, and I just want to say, I think, as I've thought about this more, I'm just more and more confident that other human beings want to see other human beings doing that.
00:26:36.540I think human beings are just mesmerized, not just by just seeing a piece of art, but by watching another human being being able to create it.
00:26:47.420And so that's why, you know, just again to go back, I think that's why podcasts are in part so popular.
00:26:54.720It's because it's not just like reading a transcript or reading a, you know, like a book.
00:27:00.240It's watching a human being answer questions on the fly in their own words, working through the material.
00:27:09.020And I think that just is gripping to us.
00:27:12.340And again, it's like watching a chess master struggle through a hard game, even though we all know that there's a computer out there who might be able to, that there's something just that we desire to understand about what other human beings go through in that process.
00:27:29.100So anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
00:27:31.080I'm going to come to the podcast in a second, but to stay true to my promise, I want to mention the AI story, which I don't think, I can't remember if I've mentioned this publicly.
00:29:09.900And I shared with him the thing. He was so touched. He would love to hear from you. So I rushed to the computer. She had given me his email address. I wrote to Professor Newborn, whom I hadn't interacted with since 1985, but whose praises I've been hailing for many years. And we connected. And I will be speaking on this beauty right here, suicidal empathy at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
00:29:38.480he happens to he was at McGill at the time he's now moved to about 90 minutes away from San
00:29:45.220Francisco so he may be coming to this event where his former student from 1985 will be
00:29:54.420and that happened so now I'm gonna tie it all together that happened because I quickly realized
00:30:02.820many years ago that if my job is twofold to create knowledge and to disseminate knowledge,
00:30:08.620I'm going to use all available forms and mediums to try to achieve that goal. So going on Joe
00:30:16.760Rogan, I didn't know that Monty Newborn's daughter would end up listening to it, but here we are.
00:30:22.820So yeah, that's right. So you're exactly right about all of these new modes of educational
00:30:27.860delivery. Here's the question. While we're seeing an increasing number of dinosaur professors
00:30:34.980maybe becoming lukewarm to it, I still am baffled at why it is that more people are not as visionary
00:30:44.100in their insights as Stephen Scaltetti. Are we going to break through this or does it take a
00:30:50.700very long time for professors not to be laggards? Yeah. Well, let me, you know, as we're talking,
00:30:56.500it just kind of dawned on me that, you know, I believe that freedom and what it means to be free
00:31:06.180really has these kind of three parts. And we've actually kind of hit all three in our discussion
00:31:13.820without even kind of realizing it. Like, a part of freedom is just not being interfered with,
00:31:20.240and that's the point of academic freedom. You can do your thing. The scientist can be the
00:31:25.700scientists without, you know, political influence, and you can do your research without being
00:31:30.800inhibited. It also, being free means living under a kind of constitutional system where you're not,
00:31:38.180don't have a tyrant who can come after you in an unexpected way at any given time. And we talked
00:31:44.660about that when we were sort of worried about the Plato's solution to ignorance. But then this last,
00:31:51.640part of freedom requires that human beings have to be a certain kind of person. You have to have
00:31:57.800a certain set of virtues. I mean, you can have the greatest constitution and you can have no one
00:32:03.240interfering with you, but you also have to have as a human being a certain psychological skill set.
00:32:10.040And, you know, I think the American founders understood that you kind of need all three.
00:32:15.240I think there's a long history of all three of those components in Western culture.
00:32:21.340So I guess here's here's what I'm telling you, Gat, is maybe the reason I'm able to say these things that sound visionary is I'm just picking up on the things I've learned.
00:32:33.920Having studied Western culture and Western civilization all these years, I think no matter which technology comes along, no matter how powerful, I think there is this incredible combination of ethics, politics, and then space to operate that makes for an exceptional kind of life.
00:32:59.380And I think we'll just rediscover that if we forget it at any point, unless the really dark thing happens, which is that people in positions of power use the tools of AI for ill.
00:33:15.380AI doesn't bother me as much as the idea of a human being abusing AI.
00:33:23.720By the way, I love the way you connected our conversation to the tripod. That was fantastic. I mean, to your point about a human interfering and having nefarious consequences to AI, do you remember a couple of years ago when Gemini, because it had been woke-ified, when you would ask it,
00:33:46.740Can you show me a picture of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington?0.75
00:33:54.020It turned out that they were all black.0.99
00:34:02.580You know, as well as a lot of the things that happened during COVID, you know, where it's pretty clear that the federal government was through kind of backdoor channels trying to manipulate.
00:34:16.360social media in lots of different ways. And, you know, you just imagine the power of AI being used
00:34:26.460to pull off those kind of things rather than setting up this game of telephone between human
00:34:31.400beings. You know, it really is, it's going to be a danger. But on the bright side, just going back
00:34:40.200look, we've always had that danger of having unaccountable rulers, you know, wielding very
00:34:47.440powerful tools against their population. That's a perennial problem. And we just all have to be
00:34:52.480vigilant about it if we're going to continue to live in a free country. All right. So I want to
00:34:57.180link what we're talking about to an old form, not TikTok, but these things called books, as I tell
00:35:06.520My children, you know, these things that they don't quite know what they are.
00:35:10.180You know, you open these pages and there are these words in there.
00:35:12.800This is actually apropos because this book is called Burning the Books about the lengths that heroic people have gone through to try to protect the written word at great personal cost.
00:35:28.260how do we get our children who have become so uh unable to focus to have the cognitive focus
00:35:38.100and discipline to actually take a book sit on a couch and immerse themselves free themselves
00:35:44.480into a book you would think that someone children that have me as their father if i may put it this
00:35:52.860way, would be the most voracious readers. And it is probably harder to get them to read than
00:36:01.520anything else that I've... By the way, we had gone recently, two months ago, I'd been invited to give
00:36:06.720some lectures in Israel. And one of the deals, I usually don't strike these types of kind of
00:36:12.120concrete deals with my children, but I felt that I needed to do some Skinnerian conditioning.
00:36:17.240I actually made them sign a contract. Well, I say I, but it was my wife and I. We made them
00:36:22.820sign a contract that they would have to read, I think it was by the end of the summer, four books
00:36:28.160that were not part of their school curriculum. And to me, it really hurt me. And I'm not trying
00:36:35.980to denigrate my children, because I think most children are facing that challenge. Is there a
00:36:41.540way for us, Stephen, to make young people rediscover the joy of just sitting with a book?
00:36:48.800Yeah, I think there is. And you put your finger on it. Just telling them to read a book isn't going to do it. You have to give them the experience of the joy of reading a book. And that actually requires that you help people learn to read.
00:37:09.080let me give you a quick story you know I was increasingly disappointed with the quality of
00:37:16.380the papers students were turning in in my classes so I I started this practice of setting aside a
00:37:22.340whole day of class just to talk about how to write an excellent philosophy paper right and
00:37:28.260and one time I did this and a student approached me after class and he said you know that was just
00:37:35.140so helpful. I've actually never had a teacher just explain what I'm supposed to be doing when
00:37:41.460I sit down to write a paper. I didn't realize that there were just these, I just literally
00:37:46.280didn't know how I was supposed to be spending my time in that project. And then he paused and he
00:37:51.180said, he said, you know, it actually would be really helpful if you could kind of teach us
00:37:56.640how we're supposed to read. And I, and I like looked at him and he, and he could tell by my
00:38:01.640Facebook. He's like, well, no, I can read. I can read fine. And I know my eyes are passing over
00:38:07.700the words and I'm following along, but is that what I'm supposed to do? What exactly do you do
00:38:15.880when you're reading? And it was just really clear that this very bright, precocious, and
00:38:22.760and well-motivated student, had never been shown how, look, slow down, and, you know,
00:38:31.580when an author is starting a new paragraph, you know, that means that they've finished an idea
00:38:36.640in the previous paragraph. Give yourself time to stop and just say, okay, now what was the point
00:38:42.060in that paragraph? What was the idea there? And just the joy of reading requires that you're
00:38:48.840really in you are asking questions of the text right you're competing with the author uh to win
00:38:56.400you over you're you're you know you're duking it out your arm wrestling whatever the wrestling
00:39:01.840with the author but you're really engaged trying to probe it so it requires a lot of
00:39:07.860activity on your part to read and if you do that then you experience this incredible sense of joy
00:39:14.480and wonder because when you're reading someone who's uh wonderful and brilliant you know you're
00:39:20.360pushing as hard as you can and you you end up being just so impressed right and amazed by how
00:39:26.660wonderful and smart people can be but i mean a lot of students i think they're just so used to being
00:39:31.860passive recipients of things just showing up on their screen or showing up on the tv or or um
00:39:38.340that they just don't have that skill of, of being active, um, when they read it.
00:39:44.620So that's the thing you have to, that's the thing we have to teach is, so, you know, I'm also a fan
00:39:49.600for students who are in your, um, children's position is find, uh, less reading, um, but then
00:39:59.220a deeper conversation about the thing that was assigned, uh, so that they can, and then maybe
00:40:05.080maybe have them go back and reread what you talk about, because then they can sort of see
00:40:09.940the difference between just having your eyes go over something and actually kind of wrestling
00:40:15.160with the text. Easier said than done, but I think that's what it takes.
00:40:19.200Yeah. Regarding your passive versus active modes, I think one of the greatest difficulties that many
00:40:25.680doctoral students face is that when they come to that stage where they have to now
00:40:31.320generate that novel insight called the doctoral dissertation they have a very hard time the ones
00:40:38.120who fail at this task are the ones that could have very easily mastered the passive stage you teach
00:40:45.940me something professor i will learn it and i'll get an a on the exam but now there's an empty piece
00:40:52.000of paper or empty word document now i'm supposed to populate that paper wait a minute here that's
00:40:58.360too difficult but i was going to say that uh my son is currently reading a book so we uh we
00:41:04.280recently went to southern california i was doing some shows for in a sort of promotion for the
00:41:10.800forthcoming book and as i always do wherever i am i try to find some used bookstore to go look for
00:41:17.400you know to hunt for treasures and as we were in some in an area we we found a book that looks
00:41:23.960sort of antiquarian it turns out to be a 1943 uh autobiography of a uh american bomber uh pilot
00:41:35.200as he was about to drop some bombs over tokyo so no this is not the nagasaki and hiroshima
00:41:45.400but related and then he gets shot down and so on and so then my son is immersed in that book
00:41:53.520and at one point we were walking home and i said do you realize that you this book was sitting in
00:42:00.060a corner somewhere completely forgotten you now have revived that guy that guy is alive he's alive
00:42:09.520in the fact that there is a 14-year-old boy in a completely different era in a different country
00:42:16.160that's living and breathing his life story. And I think that touched him. So any way that we can
00:42:24.360use to implore young people to read, boy, we'll be doing a good service. Yeah. No, that's right.
00:42:31.480That's right. And I think part of it is just it takes time to appreciate something, including
00:42:36.900other people but once once they can do that and they have that experience there is something
00:42:41.180wonderful about it and i think it kind of go back to an earlier point i was making i do think human
00:42:46.140beings ultimately do connect with each other in that way so i'm sure that meant a lot to your son
00:42:52.700that he had that experience of uh of of um imagining what that must have been like and the
00:42:58.460decisions that airman was facing and all of that so that's how it starts like book book by book
00:43:04.260intellectual experience by intellectual experience. But it does require that conversational
00:43:09.140part, talking about the book, having a reading group, getting together with friends where you're,
00:43:16.920you know, you're trying to think through it together. I think that's just as important as
00:43:23.760the reading itself, because that's kind of what motivates the reading. And that's what helps you
00:43:27.960read better at the end of the day as well. I'll just add one final personal note to what we're
00:43:33.220talking about here about reading and then i want to spend maybe a few minutes talking about some of
00:43:37.300the exciting things happening at the center and then we could wrap it up uh on one of my trips to
00:43:43.080old miss i was being driven back to the memphis airport by one of your the one who really runs
00:43:50.680the center a young recent graduate of uh of old miss and i won't mention her name because maybe
00:43:57.660she doesn't want her name to be mentioned but anyways uh i was bemoaning to her the fact that
00:44:29.360Thank you for that very optimistic and encouragement.
00:44:32.120All right. Let's talk about some of the very exciting things that are happening. Before I cede the floor to you, many great guest speakers have come, including most notably recently, Jonathan Turley, whom I've never had the pleasure of meeting, but I would love to connect with him. Maybe I haven't come on the show.
00:44:49.560Number two, I just posted earlier, without you having requested this of me, a really cool course on totalitarianism in films or something, which I love because I love the idea of doing content analyses and cultural products to demonstrate something.
00:45:11.240Yeah, I'm really, you know, I'm really proud of the classes that the Declaration Center is offering.
00:45:21.620I mean, they really are fascinating and interesting classes.
00:45:24.200And we're emphasizing, you know, debate, conversation and all of this.
00:45:30.580But the topics also are just fantastic.
00:45:33.340So every semester we offer our Freedom Studies 101 class, although now it's going to be called Freedom Studies 1010 because they've redone the academic catalog.
00:45:44.980But basically, it's our introduction to the ideals of American freedom, which kind of looks a lot of many of the themes we've talked about in this conversation today, but in an American historical context.
00:45:57.720And then every semester we offer different sort of upper division classes.
00:46:01.560And, you know, as of July 4th, we'll be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
00:46:12.860And so one of the courses we're offering in the fall is Freedom Studies Principles of Ordered Liberty.
00:46:20.780And it's going to be just a careful look at the Declaration of Independence, the thought process that went into the document.
00:46:28.600they're going to be reading very carefully line by line
00:46:33.280what each sentence in the declaration means
00:51:17.820Great university, great guys like you.
00:51:20.440So anybody who is thinking of where to send their kids, please consider Ole Miss.
00:51:27.080Please consider the Declaration of Independence.
00:51:28.680Anything else you want to add, Stephen, before we wrap it up?
00:51:32.760Yeah, well, I appreciate you saying that again.
00:51:35.020I will just say I do honestly believe the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom here at Ole Miss is we are doing something that's unique.
00:51:45.260And we really are trying to add a new perspective, add new voices into academic discussions and into the milieu of higher education.
00:51:56.540and we're excited to be part of this experiment,
00:52:00.280but if you send your son or daughter here,