“This research started for two reasons. The first was that when I entered Sarah Lawrence College, I was immediately uncomfortable. I hoped and was excited about joining a community that was deeply engaged in scholarship and took the search for truth very seriously. And by my second day, I realized we were not necessarily looking for truth in the most open-minded sense. People had lenses they brought to the table. This is the faculty, and they expected you to come in with such a lens. I came in without a particularly strong lens. I am an empirical social scientist. I try to operationalize social questions, and answer these questions.”

“One of the things that my empirics have shown that while faculty may have taken a hard left, college freshmen haven’t. College freshmen are a little left of center, the average American is a little right of center…I would say that many of these students are fairly open minded. Many of them want these ideas. Many of them want to argue with you which is sometimes a lot of work to handle, but also a joy.”