Banished

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -42:15 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Thought-provoking conversations about censorship, campus politics, and culture wars. Hosted by Carleton College professors Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder. Thought-provoking conversations about censorship, campus politics, and culture wars. Hosted by Carleton College professors Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder.

Childe Hassam, “The Avenue in the Rain” (1917) We were delighted to have the chance to speak with political scientist Yascha Mounk earlier this month at the University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire.1 We had a wide-ranging conversation about the threats facing diverse democracies today—and, why, in spite of the many challenges, Yascha remains optimistic. Show Notes Yascha is the founder of the publication Persuasion. His own substack is also worth reading.

We have been dying to discuss an article called “Why Aren’t Professors Braver?” since it was first published in The Chronicle of Higher Education back in September. It’s by the psychologist Paul Bloom and it starts with an ode to the professoriate: We tend to be pretty smart. We are sometimes socially inept, but in a sweet way. We are genuinely excited about ideas…We are often generous... mentoring students in ways that don’t lead to any tangible rewards. And we are a peaceable lot.

We were delighted to have the chance to speak with Adam Szetela about his new book, That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing. Adam shares what he learned from authors, agents, and editors about the effects of cancel culture in the publishing industry. His behind-the-scenes account is fascinating and sobering in equal measure.

Let’s play a game. What do you think are the politics of the person who said the following: When a person says something that a ton of people find offensive, rude, dumb in real time and then that person is punished for it, that’s not cancel culture. That is consequences for your actions. Made up your mind?

We were thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with Sarah McLaughlin about her new book, Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech. As a Senior Scholar at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Sarah is one of the leading experts on how global censorship intersects with free expression issues in the United States.

Over the summer, Yale historian David Blight kindly asked me to contribute an essay to a special edition of The New Republic called “Trump Against History.” The September 2025 issue features eleven historians reflecting on the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign to re-write U.S. history. My essay, which appears below, offers a distinctly international perspective. (You can read all of the essays here.) I am a historian of South Asia who moved to the United States in 2011.

The Trump administration is trying its darndest to decimate DEI. One of the many problems with the federal government’s anti-DEI crusade is that Trump and co. will categorize pretty much anything they don’t like as DEI, even if the connections are more imagined than real. Take campus affinity groups and houses, which have been around for much longer than DEI (as a concept or acronym). Nonetheless, these particular groups and houses have become key targets for the anti-DEI brigade.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -22:44 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Ken Stern (Director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate) joins Amna and Jeff to discuss these urgent questions: Are campuses hotbeds of antisemitism? How do we define antisemitism in the first place? Is there a difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism? How have colleges handled the student protests around Gaza? Why are so many higher education institutions facing Title VI lawsuits?

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -17:32 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Our friend and colleague Stony Brook sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has a new book out. And it’s a tour-de-force. We Have Never Been Wokeis essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the economic, political and cultural divides between the haves and the have-nots in the United States. We were delighted to host Musa for a book talk on the Carleton campus last month.