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S10 E1: Lesley Smith: Reflections on a career in research, education, and politics
9 Plays7 months ago
Lesley Smith is Regent at Large of the University of Colorado system, and she is also the Democratic nominee for Colorado House District 49 in the upcoming 2024 election. Before becoming a Regent, Dr. Smith worked for 30 years as a researcher and educator at CU Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. She was elected to the Boulder Valley School Board in 2005 and served for eight years. We discuss her career in education, research, and politics, as well as contemporary issues facing higher education. We note, on behalf of Dr. Smith, that her description of the cost of attending the University of Colorado (at 46:05) is based on estimates that include room and board, in addition to tuition.
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Announcement
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome back to the Free Mind podcast, where we explore topics in Western history, politics, philosophy, literature, and current events with a laser focus on seeking the truth and an adventurous disregard for ideological and academic fashions. I'm Matt Burgess.
00:00:27
Speaker
This will be my last season as host of the Free Mind podcast. It's been a great honor and a lot of fun to serve as faculty fellow for the past few years at the Benson Center at CU Boulder. But I have taken a new position as assistant professor of economics and presidential fellow at the University of Wyoming starting this fall, 2024. Before leaving CU, I prerecorded five episodes on the broad topic of the future of higher education.
00:00:54
Speaker
Over the past year, Americans have become aware of the profound challenges facing higher education. And I'm delighted to be able to bring you conversations with guests having diverse perspectives on these issues.
Guest Introduction: Leslie Smith
00:01:06
Speaker
First up is my conversation with Leslie Smith. Leslie Smith is region at large of the University of Colorado system. And she is also the Democratic nominee for Colorado House District 49 in the upcoming 2024 election.
00:01:22
Speaker
Before becoming a regent, Dr. Smith worked for 30 years as a researcher and educator at CU Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Sciences. She was elected to the Boulder Valley School Board in 2005 and served for eight years. We discussed her career in education, research, and politics, as well as contemporary issues facing higher education. Leslie Smith, welcome to the Free Mind podcast.
00:01:50
Speaker
Thanks, Matt. I'm really excited to be here with you. Yeah, well, I really wanted to have you on, partly because you and Heidi Ganahl were early and frequent supporters of my polarization work.
Leslie Smith's Career and Political Journey
00:02:03
Speaker
You're a Democrat, she's a Republican. Also, I think there's a lot of really interesting conversations happening about polarization, both on and off campus. And you have a really, really interesting background to be able to speak to many different facets of this.
00:02:20
Speaker
So I thought we'd start there. Tell us about your trajectory through research, through school boards, CU politics, and now state politics, and what motivated you to take the path that you've taken. Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot lately because now I've run for three different positions.
00:02:44
Speaker
I knew I wanted to be a scientist ever since I was in sixth grade. I didn't really know what student government was when I was an undergrad at Santa Barbara. And here I am, hopefully going into the state house. So it just seems a little strange. But in thinking about my pathway, I
00:03:05
Speaker
What I've decided is I like to solve problems and I step in when I see that I have the skillset to help solve a problem. And so, you know, I was a scientist at CU doing research and teaching and my kids were in elementary school. And at the time we had school closures and my children's school was closed.
00:03:33
Speaker
is in terms of the building. And we got moved into another school in a corner. And it was the most diverse school in the city of Boulder. And it really wasn't great for either school. So at that point I stepped in and started talking to both principals and talking about what we might do. And my children were at a Montessori school.
00:03:59
Speaker
And Maria Montessori started Montessori schools for the workers in Italy. And so our school wasn't very diverse because we couldn't have busing and we did not have any English as a second language programs. So that got me working actually with the administration for Boulder Valley and
00:04:23
Speaker
we got our school moved. And at that point, Boulder Valley started this de-stratification task force. And that was to help even out the low social economic status of some of these schools that had a very high percentage, even though the neighborhood wasn't like that. So that was my start. I asked to be on that task force. I did science education outreach and I thought, wow, you know, my director district
00:04:52
Speaker
seat is open, maybe I should think about running for school board. So I, you know, the way I do it is I talk, make sure I have talked to everyone, made sure I had the time available because I worked. My husband often was out of the country or out of the state for a month at a time. And I had my two smaller children. So I decided to go ahead and step in and run. So I did that for eight years and, um,
00:05:19
Speaker
When I finished, I thought, well, I'm just going to take some time out before I decide next steps.
Water Resources and Flood Discussion
00:05:25
Speaker
But the one thing I'd be interested to do for the city would be to be on the water resources advisory board because my background is water. And so I went ahead and applied. It was after the great flood and the city council knew that I had the background, but also I had done a lot of outreach, both as a CU employee and
00:05:48
Speaker
being on the school board and they knew because of the flood and hitting pretty much every part of town that there'd be a lot of outreach. Just for our listeners who aren't in Boulder, the Great Flood I believe refers to a 2013 rainfall event that caused some creeks to flood and large sections of the city of Boulder had their basements flooded and access issues and various other things, right? Major damage, couldn't get across through town on Highway 36, the main ingress and egress.
00:06:18
Speaker
So I went ahead and did that for five years, and then I was planning on running for CU Regent for CD2. So for those people that don't know how the Regents are set up, we were
00:06:33
Speaker
The University of Colorado is the flagship university. It is in the state's constitution. So when the state became a state, CU also became the flagship university. It's written in the constitution that there would be nine regents. And so we are elected by party and there's a regent for each congressional district. So when I ran, there were seven congressional districts and two at-large seats, so statewide.
00:07:01
Speaker
I was planning on running for CD2, um, two years. Uh, so I ran in 2018. I was planning on running in 2020 and somebody asked for those who don't know, that's the congressional district that includes Boulder city, right? Yes, exactly. And the university of Colorado, Boulder, we have four campuses. Um, so then, uh, somebody asked if I would run statewide and I said, sure.
00:07:27
Speaker
So off I went, and that was quite an experience. And I love being a region. It's been fantastic learning about all the different campuses. I thought what I could bring to the table was I'm a research faculty as well as a teaching faculty, and there weren't any regions that had that background. So I decided that that would be a good addition to the board.
Smith's Election Insights and Political Landscape
00:07:55
Speaker
Once I got on the board, actually,
00:07:57
Speaker
What has been a more important contribution is my extensive knowledge of policy governance, and I've helped get the board more focused on policy governance. So I was planning on running again last year, but we had this, again, related to water, horrific drought in fall 2022.
00:08:21
Speaker
The Colorado River was not running at record lows We were afraid that there would not be enough flow to generate the turbines to produce the fat power in Southern California and so forth and You know the legislature I heard a legislator say This is gonna be a huge issue that we're gonna have to deal with for a long time and nobody knows much about it and I thought hmm
00:08:46
Speaker
I actually do know a fair amount about water and policy related to water and water law. And I started talking to people and there was a lot of excitement because of my experience in water, my focus on climate change, and then also the full spectrum of public education from K-12 to higher ed. So I jumped in and I just won my primary by 72% and I will be in the general election this November.
00:09:16
Speaker
Congratulations. I don't want to jinx it, but you will be running in CD2 in the general election, which for those of you who don't live in Colorado is one of the bluest congressional districts in America. I'm optimistic about your chances, shall we say. They're pretty good. I'm not running for the congressional district. I'm running for the House district.
00:09:42
Speaker
Oh, sorry. Yes, you're right. Yeah. It is in CD2, so. It is in CD2, yes. Yeah, now it's really interesting. And water is one of those issues that seems to me at least to cut across party lines, kind of like wildfire in the West.
00:09:58
Speaker
you know, fire threatens your house, water threatens your way of life in a, or lack of water, threatens your way of life in a pretty visceral way. It's hard for partisan politics to get too much in the way of that. Has that been your experience or am I missing some non Pollyannish nuance there? No, that's completely, it's actually a conversation with a Republican Senator from the San Luis Valley that really got me thinking about running because
00:10:28
Speaker
I had been following the story about a development in Douglas County that wanted to essentially take a lot of the groundwater from the San Luis Valley for this development. And I knew that would be really detrimental to the farming there. And we were at a basketball game at a reception beforehand and we started talking about water and farming, fourth generation farmer,
00:10:55
Speaker
has an engineering degree from School of Mines. And so we just started talking about water and then it expanded to solar panels and lack of transmission lines. And I thought, oh boy, this is something that I would be really willing to step in and work on. And then there's another
00:11:18
Speaker
representative from the Western Slope, that's a Republican, that we have talked a lot about water because obviously our side of the divide, we get a lot of our water from the Western Slope and they're pretty sensitive about that. So we've had a lot of conversations. So I could see very much working in a bipartisan way across the aisle regarding water issues in the state.
00:11:42
Speaker
For listeners who aren't from Colorado, the front range refers to the large urban corridor from Fort Collins down to Pueblo, where most of the people in Colorado live, on average, bluer than the rest of the state. The western slope is the western part, west of the Continental Divide, mountains, ranches, and then there's the eastern plains, which is the other side, kind of towards Kansas and Nebraska, which is a lot of farming. And like, I think, basically every other state in the country,
00:12:09
Speaker
We have a urban rural political divide where our rural areas tend to be very red and our urban areas tend to be very blue. You know, maybe with some, I think Colorado Springs and Pueblo, maybe your slight exceptions to that sometimes. So let me ask you a broader question. We just talked about how
00:12:28
Speaker
water and wildfire, I think of the Western Wildfire Caucus, that Jonah Goose, who's a Democratic, our Democratic Congressman, and John Curtis, a Republican, now Senate candidate in Utah, run as two examples of nonpartisan issues. It's also my impression that the Mountain West is a relatively pragmatic, has a culture, a political culture that's a little bit more
00:12:56
Speaker
depolarized and pragmatic than the rest of the country. Not that it's not polarized. The National Governors Association this past year has been focused on reducing polarization. I believe the chair was Spencer Cox, Republican from Utah. The vice chair was Jared Polis, our Democratic governor in Colorado. I believe he's taking over now as the chair.
00:13:17
Speaker
You've got a Republican governor in Wyoming that talks about net zero and supports carbon capture and wind and nuclear. In addition, of course, the fossil fuel industry, which is big up there. Am I right about that? If so, what is it about the Mountain West that gives it that character?
Climate Change and Bipartisan Efforts
00:13:38
Speaker
Well, again, talking to farmers, and I went to the Colorado Water Congress last year.
00:13:48
Speaker
farmers and ranchers, you know, climate change, they don't talk about it necessarily in that way, but they know that erudification is happening. So the Southwest, the Mountain West is getting drier and that is definitely affecting their operations and their livelihoods. And so they are very aware that the environment is changing and it affects their livelihoods and their businesses. So I think
00:14:18
Speaker
You know, it's like when Heidi and I banded together on the sustainability issue, right? Yeah. So we did not talk about that in terms of climate change, but we talked about it in terms of sustainability and how that ultimately can lead to stronger finances because in the long run, if you make things more sustainable, you'll save money, right? So I think
00:14:46
Speaker
you know, finding those places where maybe we have a different phrase for it, but it's really the same thing. And if you can depolarize that phrase, you can work together.
00:15:02
Speaker
Yeah, totally. Well, right. And it's not just the threat of environmental issues. It's not just the threats that we feel in the Mountain West. It's also the opportunities. We have great geology in Colorado and Wyoming for carbon capture, lots of wind in parts of both of those states.
00:15:19
Speaker
And now geothermal. Geothermal, natural gas, if you believe in the transition fuel idea. Tons of shale in all of those states, including Utah. Sun, lots of pretty sunny places. And nuclear, of course.
00:15:40
Speaker
and minerals. I mean, there isn't currently nuclear in Colorado, there used to be, but it's, you know, one of the options that's on the table. So that's really interesting. So let me ask you about polarization in America in general.
00:15:58
Speaker
I think I might have mentioned to you at some point that I'm working on a book called How Polarization Will Destroy Itself, which basically has an optimistic, not complacent, like we're going to need to help it along, and we could help it along faster or slower. But my basic argument is that the core institutions of a liberal democracy, free speech, free and fair elections, rule of law, market competition,
00:16:23
Speaker
I argue they're probably going to be strong enough to significantly weaken the extremes on both sides in the long term, even without some kind of dramatic divine intervention. Although, of course, maintaining those institutions assiduously is very important for us to do. We shouldn't take for granted that those institutions exist. What's your take on the outlook of polarization?
00:16:48
Speaker
Do you feel optimistic? Do you feel pessimistic? Is there sort of a short-term, long-term difference? Obviously, this is a very polarizing election in a number of different ways. Well, to be honest, I'm an optimist by nature. And I feel like our state is doing some good things. And just given this last election, which I'll talk a little bit about in the primary,
00:17:15
Speaker
I think things are going to ramp down in terms of polarization.
00:17:19
Speaker
And I feel like on the national level, I don't have so much control. So, you know, I read the one piece that you sent me, which has a lot of your ideas right for your book. And I thought, wow, that's really interesting. And I hope in the long run nationally, you're right. So, you know, just looking at our own primary elections, just, you know, that happened last month,
00:17:49
Speaker
It's interesting to see that both on the very, very far left and the very, very far right, a lot of those people running in a primary did not get elected. So when I ran six years ago, a lot of people were running for the first time to be in the House or the Senate for our state House or our state legislature. And so I've known them, I talked to them and so forth.
00:18:18
Speaker
The last two years were really hard. Everyone, well, we know people- The last four years were really hard in terms of, you're talking about polarization, but economically, well, also I would say the last four
Political Polarization and Voter Behavior
00:18:29
Speaker
years. We had most members quit, right? Because they just found it too toxic and too polarized. And so a lot of people asked me, are you sure you want to be running for this position? And I said, yes. I'm hoping things will ramp down.
00:18:48
Speaker
And I think they will. And I'm optimistic that things won't be as polarized in our state house. And maybe we can be a model for other states if we manage to get it tamped down and work in a way that we can get things done in the state. And I know, of course, we've got the triumvirate, right? We've got the governor, the House, and the Senate all blue. That helps.
00:19:17
Speaker
You know, within the Democratic side, there was a pretty wide ranging from very far left to I would say moderate right. And it was toxic. So you've explained how polarization
00:19:35
Speaker
is toxic for people in the state house. One of the interesting dynamics too, that I think relates to how polarized the state house is, is the balance of power, right? So if one party has a big victory, then what tends to happen is the other party is left only with their safest seats. And so disproportionately it's going to be their moderate members that are losing to the moderates on the other, you know, in this case, moderate Republicans losing to moderate Democrats in the last election. And so, you know, that on its own is going to make the Republican Congress probably less
00:20:04
Speaker
less moderate and vice versa in another state where it's flipped. But you talked about primaries, which is very interesting. I haven't paid as close attention as you have to Colorado politics, but I've seen similar things nationally. It was not a foregone conclusion that Lauren Boebert was going to win her primary in the fourth. It was not a foregone conclusion that she was going to win the general when we thought she was going to run in the third. Whatever you think about the veracity of this charge,
00:20:32
Speaker
It certainly was a sign that things have changed, at least to me, from 2020 to now, that Jamal Bowman lost in the Bronx a primary to a 70-year-old white guy who called him a racist. That would not have happened four years ago. Whether or not you think that that's a fair, that he was being fair. So what is it about the voters
00:20:58
Speaker
That you think is driving this because the voters I imagine most are not following, you know How toxic the discourse in the state house is or maybe i'm wrong. Maybe primary voters are more engaged But what is it about the vote the voters that's that's making them take a different tack this time well, um Actually, it's interesting because the universe of voters and the primaries I was surprised at how much smaller it is than in the general. So oh, yeah, I think you know
00:21:28
Speaker
People that do vote in primaries are more clued in to what's going on and Interestingly enough, I don't know if you since you said you haven't really followed the primary too much a lot of money was spent by a
00:21:47
Speaker
labor, business, and dark money, so we don't know who the donors were. And so it was really apparent that all of those groups were, a lot of the groups were really trying to put the thumb on the scale and say, we want to get this House, be it on the Republican side or the Democrat side, more central. I don't know how much that has,
00:22:15
Speaker
tip the scale in this election. You know, I've been reading all the articles that I've been able to read and, you know, there's a lot of money that poured in and there's probably some truth to that. And interestingly enough, I just read a headline today in the Washington Post saying that President Trump's pick for the VP has Republicans in that are, you know, in businesses and so forth.
00:22:45
Speaker
worried. Because he's a populist? Yup. Again, thinking about sustainability and saving money, people get nervous. How is this going to affect our economy? How is it going to affect businesses and so forth? There can be an interesting dynamic there too.
00:23:10
Speaker
In 2016, when President Trump was running for his first election, my recollection is that a lot of the business community was pretty outwardly against him, partly because of his populism. And then when he came to power, he arguably made some pretty major policy concessions to the business community to kind of keep their support.
00:23:33
Speaker
It's not hard to imagine a similar dynamic happening this time with, for example, Elon Musk just announced he's going to spend $45 million a month on a Trump-related pack. But is he going to- Don't put me into campaign finance. Yeah, right. Is he going to get- Well, and one of the things, one of the ideas that I'm exploring in this book is that at
00:23:57
Speaker
Although it probably does have a huge effect on any election where there's not a lot of name recognitions or local elections. I should say working hypothesis, I'm open to being wrong. My working hypothesis about high name recognition, national elections is that money matters less than people think because a TV ad isn't going to convince somebody to like Trump if they don't like Trump or dislike Trump if they like Trump, probably.
00:24:27
Speaker
Let's talk a little bit about, well, actually, I wanted to turn to campuses, but before we turn to campuses, let me just ask you this, you know, whether it's voters on their own, whether it's, you know, the business community, whoever is pushing back against the forces of extremism, are they basically doing so? Like, my theory is that,
00:24:53
Speaker
They're doing so because the extremes were only ever popular to the extent that they were because they claim to be in service to higher ideals that we genuinely care about and they're transparently failing at serving those ideals. And also they're creating polarization itself as an extremism is creating lots of bad toxic externalities for society. Is that right or am I missing something?
00:25:18
Speaker
You know, I can't say generally. Personally, my husband's German, and so we also watch a lot of what's going on in Germany and Europe. Yeah. And it's interesting. I mean, France did not go the way that people were expecting, fortunately.
00:25:39
Speaker
I wasn't surprised by that actually, but I'll come down to that. Go ahead. Yeah. It's sort of scary to see what's happening worldwide with populism and Orban and the restrictions that are happening to the press and potentially the legal system and so forth. So I look at things in a much broader sense and the US is sort of
00:26:07
Speaker
all of this is moving towards that direction and it's really scary. But I don't know how the average voter, if they put all these different pieces together or not.
00:26:19
Speaker
Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. Quick aside about France. The reason I wasn't surprised about France is that I grew up in Quebec. Quebec has some obviously cultural differences from France, but also some similarities. One of the cultural similarities, which is hard to understand in the rest of the English-speaking world, is
00:26:41
Speaker
The willingness to vote strategically in France and Quebec is like nothing I've seen anywhere else, right? So you, like Macron, I believe, had created a party out of thin air and then won the election, you know, a few years later. Right. Similar thing has happened at least once in my lifetime in Quebec with the CAQ party. So that is the kind of thing that
00:27:04
Speaker
people dropping out, people voting super strategically, massive swings in the polls in the short terms. For me, that's very on brand for France and Quebec, but maybe not something you'd see. There seems to be more ingrained party loyalty here. Let me ask you a more important question about populism.
Populism and Demographic Changes
00:27:21
Speaker
I think it's easy to look at populism, particularly, frankly, from an elite vantage point. You and I are both
00:27:30
Speaker
educated PhDs fit most evil's definition of elite. It's easy to find it scary because its populism tends to be angry, it tends to be bent on change, it tends to be anti-elite in some way or other, and sometimes it's associated with political movements that end up taking authoritarian turns.
00:27:54
Speaker
On the other hand, why do you think populism is such a potent force? Are people not right to be pissed off at some level? What do you think they're pissed off about and what do you think they're right to be pissed off about, if anything? Well, I can certainly understand. I think there's a large segment in the US that's worried that
00:28:23
Speaker
We are, you know, the makeup of our ethnicity is changing, right? At one point we're going to be majority Hispanic or Latino, however you want to say it. You know, I think that's worrisome for them because society is changing in a way that to them might be scary. They don't understand. They think it might be detrimental to their communities and so forth.
00:28:52
Speaker
You know, I know you talked about the urban rural divide, which tends to be red versus blue. You know, in those red part of the countries, farming and ranching, they're worried about their way of life. If, you know, they can still continue, you know, generations to come. And it's the blue areas, it's the big cities that are making all the decisions and not,
00:29:23
Speaker
perhaps not taking into account what those people out in the rural areas would want. I think a great example in Colorado is the reintroduction to wolves, of wolves. And we've had cattle killed and so forth. And personally myself, as being a scientist, I felt like
00:29:47
Speaker
that's something a wildlife biologist, people with expertise in that, they're the ones that should be deciding whether or not we should be reintroducing wolves. No one asked me, but that's just a prime example where, and that wasn't even the capital, that was the will of the people, they decided to get that. Well, in disconnect. Right, onto the ballot, but it's city slickers probably that,
00:30:17
Speaker
decided, oh, this would be a good idea and let's get the signatures and let's vote on it and it passed. The disconnect between who basically voted for it and who's impacted by it, I think is certainly, in my experience, visiting the Western slope for polarization related things and talking about this issue is definitely part of the resentment, which frankly, I understand. It can be true that it makes sense that people are pissed off about these people over here deciding something that makes my life harder over here.
00:30:47
Speaker
And it could also be true that there's a strong ecological case. There's a professor at CU who's a good friend of mine who's led the campaign to reintroduce the walls. And she has a lot of ecological research that supports that position from an ecological standpoint, and those aren't mutually exclusive.
00:31:05
Speaker
One thing you pointed out which is interesting and certainly is part of the story is what you might call cultural anxiety in terms of populism. I don't want to minimize that. It's almost certainly part of the story. There's a book by a fellow Canadian academic named Eric Kaufmann called White Shift from
00:31:24
Speaker
the very beginning, when Brexit was still new, that talks about this anxiety in the terms that you did. But I think that it can also be the whole story, and I don't think that you were saying that it was, but one of the things I think is really interesting about this moment politically is that
00:31:45
Speaker
Former President Trump is polling higher than Republicans have in decades with non-white voters. So some polls have him at 20% of black voters and even higher percentages of black male voters. Ron DeSantis, I believe, won the Hispanic vote in Florida in the last election.
00:32:05
Speaker
and Trump has gained in the polls among Hispanic voters. In fact, between 2016 and 2020, and if you look at the exit polls, the only race by sex demographic that Trump did worsen in 2020 than 2016 was white men. So how do you explain that? Because that seems different from what you would predict if it was just the cultural resentment, cultural anxiety story. Yes.
00:32:34
Speaker
It's interesting because we just had our border treat last week. Whites aren't monolithic, browns aren't monolithic, blacks aren't monolithic, women don't go forth, right? So I can't really explain why certain groups are attracted to Trump, but in terms of populism, I was obviously mainly talking about the white people in our country that are Trump's populist.
00:33:03
Speaker
Um, and I think they're worried, but I do think a lot of it is, um, not feeling like there's any, like their voices are not being heard in the capitals via the state capital or a federal capital. And, um, they're just angry that, you know, they, they don't feel like they're being heard or represented. Well, I think.
00:33:30
Speaker
they are clinging to people like Trump that sort of go down to the populist base. Now, do they really do better for them? That would be my question. Right. I mean, one of the things I asked in my piece is, you know, is Trump really a good Christian? Right.
00:33:49
Speaker
But let me ask kind of a bridging question. My next topic that I was going to get into was Canvas polarization, and I think actually a good topic to bridge these two topics is the diploma divide, which is growing ever bigger in terms of educated people voting for Democrats, disproportionately, meaning college-educated people without college degrees voting for Republicans.
00:34:12
Speaker
And if I had to crudely summarize it, my summary of my sense from what I've read is basically, and just from talking to people, is that the
00:34:25
Speaker
It comes from, you know, at least the last couple of decades of, you know, the median voter is a social conservative and a economic liberal. The people, educated people tend to think it's the opposite, but it's actually a tiny fraction of the country that's a economic conservative and social liberal and they're disproportionately elites, right? Then if you think about it, it makes sense. The, you know, if somebody says like, what's more, if you ask a working class person, you know, what's more important, uh,
00:34:53
Speaker
ensuring that people can work manufacturing jobs for a living wage or policing pronouns, you know, it's obvious which of those two it's going to pick, what they're going to pick, right? And my sense is that the populist reaction, which I think has happened both across parties, but also within both parties, especially I think the Republican Party, is the backlash against kind of the establishment Republican model of trickle-down economics, right?
00:35:22
Speaker
Why are business people afraid of JD Vance? It's probably not just that they think that he's Trumpy, it's also that he's willing to team up with Elizabeth Warren on antitrust policy, I think was one example. And he's not afraid to go after big tech under antitrust. And then on the left, it's the feeling that
00:35:49
Speaker
that material concerns, you know, historically the left has been the party of the working class, you know, for several decades. And at some point the feeling has become that material concerns among the Democrats were sidelined in favor of cultural concerns that whatever your position on them, you know, don't affect as many people in kind of a kitchen table way, right? So, you know, take one example that,
00:36:18
Speaker
I would argue probably both parties spend too much time talking about whether or not trans women can compete in women's sports. And we don't have to get into the specifics of that topic. But just as an example, there's some culture war topics that regardless of which side you take, you're not talking about that many people's lives being affected compared to inflation, compared to crime.
00:36:39
Speaker
Even things like crime and policing, you know, the number of unarmed people killed by police before George Floyd was murdered is at least two orders of magnitude less than the number of extra murders that happened in, arguably in response to some of the lax policing and prosecuting policies that followed that. And, you know, frustrations about that, frustrations about the,
00:37:06
Speaker
the effects that the border crisis is having, whether or not, whatever your moral positions are, there are a lot of people who are not allowed to work being bused to cities where they either have to be supported or be allowed to be destitute. Now, there's different solutions to that. Not all of them require closing the border. You can let them work too. There's different ways you can solve that problem.
00:37:34
Speaker
But I guess what's your response to my suggestion that populism is – yes, partly for some segments of white America is about anxiety, about demographics. Although even the demographic story, the demographic forecast is actually nuanced, right?
00:37:53
Speaker
The fastest growing segment of the non-white population that's projected to become a majority in 2060 or something is kids like mine, kids that are mixed. Because white adults are a large plurality, if not a majority of mixed race kids have a white parent.
00:38:15
Speaker
I don't know. To me, that's a really important nuance. I think some people hear that statistic and get concerned and sort of imagine. It's not like we're shipping in a bunch of people. We have a diverse society.
00:38:35
Speaker
where I have a diverse society that's thankfully not more segregated than it is. And that's the consequence that actually I think in the long term lowers the temperature. Does anybody talk about Italian and Irish immigration anymore with anxiety? No. So my hypothesis and my hope is that that's where we're going to end up with other types of immigration.
00:39:00
Speaker
Back when those immigrants were coming in, there was a lot of backlash against them. Oh, 100%. Yeah. You know, it's waves. And then eventually we get the melting pot, right?
00:39:12
Speaker
Yeah, but so what's your response to my claim that populism is about more than just cultural anxiety? It's a large segment of our population, disproportionately those without college degrees, feel like their economic interests have been ignored and trivialized, you know, ignored by the right and kind of trivialized and or sidelined by the left in favor of
00:39:38
Speaker
concerns that in some cases are real and not going to minimize the racism or discrimination or sexism or real phenomenon, but in some cases can look more like etiquette concerns than substantive concerns. What's your response to that claim? I'm hoping I understand what you're getting at.
00:40:01
Speaker
So there used to be, I think, such a push for graduate from high school and go to college, right?
Higher Education Challenges and CU Boulder Experience
00:40:10
Speaker
And now the pendulum has definitely swung, and I think in part because we have to, you know, we don't have as many people going to college. We have less students even graduating from high school because we, you know, our population growth is shrinking.
00:40:33
Speaker
So now there's a big emphasis on getting a certification, going to community college, you know, for the trades because, you know, back in the day before I was even going to school, well, maybe when I was going to school, but I went to an all-girls school, so we didn't have shop. But, you know, high schools all had a shop, right? And so people,
00:40:59
Speaker
And they were mainly for boys. Boys could go off and go to shop and continue on and go into the trades. And the high schools got rid of all that. And so the trend then swung to you need a college degree in order to get a well-paying job. And now I think we're realizing that we want people to get what they need,
00:41:25
Speaker
in order to get the jobs that they want. And so if that's just a certification, great. If it's a two year degree, great. Or if it's a four year degree, great. So matching sort of more students' interests and desires with the workforce needs, but not necessarily that requiring a four year degree. Does that make sense to you? It totally does. And that's an even better segue into talking about higher ed because
00:41:56
Speaker
It reveals, I think, that the structural challenges facing traditional for your higher ed institutions run deeper than just the demographic cliff. Birth rates have been declining and that's baked in. Even if birth rates went back up- You just had the state demographer do- Right, yeah. Even if birth rates went back up tomorrow,
00:42:25
Speaker
20 years before that shows up in our enrollment. So that's number one. The enrollment cliff is it colleges not nationally earlier than we expected because men have declined in their college attendance rate in the last eight years or so, I think. And then of course, the third pillar in our enrollment woes is trust. There was a new Gallup poll that just came out that
00:42:55
Speaker
found that trusted universities driven especially by Republicans and independents, but even Democrats a little bit also, has hit a new low. And the thing that was new this time, the surveys that I've seen kind of all have the top three reasons being they cost too much.
00:43:16
Speaker
They're not training the right skills and they're too politicized. There's various versions of that, but basically people think they're too kind of left activist. What was interesting this time is that historically cost and skills have been the higher of those two concerns. And this was the first time I've seen where actually politics were a bigger concern than cost. My guess is that has something to do with the new cycles
00:43:42
Speaker
around post-October 7th, but what's your, did you see that poll and kind of what's your take on the landscape we're looking at? Well, and you can imagine we regents and the president and the chancellors, we talk about all these places a lot. Good, I'm glad to hear that. Yes. You know, it's interesting, in terms of cost, we have started doing
00:44:10
Speaker
outreach trips across the state. In fact, next week I'm going up to the Northwest to Craig and Steamboat and so forth. And we always talk to counselors from the various school districts. And the first meeting we had, we were just appalled when the counselor said, well, my child is not going to go to CU because it costs $50,000 a year.
00:44:39
Speaker
No, it doesn't. We all just said, what? You're a high school counselor and that's what you're telling your students. And this isn't a rural part of the state, right? So we realize we need to get that information out because that's not true at all. That would be a private school or maybe out of state tuition at another university.
00:45:01
Speaker
It's a small fraction of that. Just in case we have any prospective students, because I think this episode, we're recording in July, but this will air in September, right around when people start thinking about these things. Do you happen to know off the top of your head what in-state tuition is at CU Boulder for Colorado students in case guidance counselors are listening? Yes. It depends on the major, like which school you're in. Sure, right. Faculty of Science, Faculty of Arts, College of Business, et cetera. So I would say average would be
00:45:30
Speaker
12,000 a year, uh, per semester per semester. I'm trying to think, you know, I, but still that's even if that's right, that's less than half, right? But the thing is right. We have a sliding scale. So depending on your income, your family's level, you may be fully covered with between
00:45:59
Speaker
you know, Pell Grants and then what we provide in terms of scholarships, you may end up paying nothing in terms of tuition. So there's a lot that goes into that. So one is, do people actually know the real cost for university? And the majority of our students are leaving, if they have any sort of debt, it's, you know, 20,000 or less over a four year period.
00:46:29
Speaker
And, you know, as we all know, when you get a degree, a college degree, over your lifetime, on average, you're going to make a million more dollars in that lifetime, right? So depending on your major and so forth, it could be pretty quick to pay off that fairly small debt. It's not going to be $100,000 or $200,000 debt that people think about. Okay, so people shouldn't be as concerned as they are about cost. What about job skills and politics?
00:46:59
Speaker
Okay, so I'll tackle politics next. Being a scientist and a science major, I always have a hard time wrapping my head around this because an atom is an atom and two plus two is four. So you don't really get into the politics when you're a science or a STEM major. But our board is made up of Republicans and Democrats.
00:47:28
Speaker
The Republicans believe deeply in CU and its mission, and they think that it provides a great education for any student across our state, be it rural, city slicker, Republican, Democrat, unaffiliated. And we have three different general education campuses. We have Colorado Springs, Denver, and Boulder, all different, very, very, very different experiences, student body, and so forth.
00:47:58
Speaker
I, it's just, it's unfortunate that this whole thing about CU is going to brainwash your students. I just don't buy that. Um, and you may push back against me, but you know, not as hard as you might think. So, uh, so first of all, for any conservative student or parent who's listening to this, I encourage you to go back to one of the first episodes I ever aired with Joey Fretino, who formerly was the president of the CU college Republicans.
00:48:27
Speaker
And I got to know him in the polarizing. And you got to know him through the polarization dialogues. And the whole point of that episode was to get a firsthand take of, you know, where's the there, there, and where isn't there, there, there, right? And some of the things he said that I think are very important, you know, that support the point that you just made are, he had a great experience and, you know, would do it over again. You know, his choice of major,
00:48:55
Speaker
although it's possible it was indirectly related to his politics, right? Maybe his interest in business.
00:49:03
Speaker
influence his choice to be Republican and his choice to go into business, but he didn't consciously choose to go into business because he was a Republican and thought that would be a safe place to be Republican. He just wanted to go into business. He had a good time. He did perceive a liberal skew in the demographics of our faculty, which is an empirical fact nationally, that there is a large liberal skew. He did say that a non-trivial fraction of his professors, he felt
00:49:32
Speaker
Although not not in business in some of his electives, he felt, you know, did did have a stake in what worldview is being presented. But to your to your larger point, he did not feel and other survey studies nationally support this. He did not feel that that.
00:49:48
Speaker
even if there were any attempts at indoctrination that there was much success. If conservatives are concerned about liberal indoctrination in education, probably K-12 is where the action is in terms of when students are more impressionable, more open to suggestion by their teachers. And I think
00:50:13
Speaker
We could do a whole episode on this, but I think you could make a strong case nationally that schools of education are particularly skewed. I was just recording an episode with somebody else where we're talking about what would happen, what would liberals do if they found out that the most widely cited education textbooks were written by literal Nazi sympathizers whose most famous ideas were directly connected to their literal Nazi sympathizing. We'd be upset about that. Replace Nazism and communism, and that's basically the reality.
00:50:41
Speaker
with people like Paulo Ferreira, for example, Pedagogy of the Oppressed literally praises Mao to at least dictator in history. I think the most cited used assigned to textbook in schools of ed. So I guess the point of all that being the, particularly at a flagship school,
00:51:00
Speaker
The students, the faculty, and the faculty may be skewed to the left, although in fields that are not politically charged to begin with, that may not be perceptible, right? Like you said, an Adam's an Adam, right? A bridge is a bridge. And I know certainly when I went to school, which was quite a long time ago, I had no idea.
00:51:22
Speaker
what party any of my professors were, and it was never talked about, but times have changed. Yeah. And I suspect that may be related to the fact that the most politically bound, there's no fields that are politically balanced, I think except military history, which doesn't even exist in most schools, but the most politically balanced fields are, I think, math, engineering, and economics. And my guess in the case of math and engineering is that your politics, nobody knows what your politics are.
00:51:49
Speaker
It's not relevant. And then in economics, there is certainly a, although it still is, I think, a three or four to one liberal conservative ratio among faculty, there is more of a conservative political influence in the history of the field than in say, you know, ethnic studies, you know, where there isn't one. Well, and I'll just say, you know, it's interesting. So an outreach trip that we took
00:52:16
Speaker
actually three years ago because I came back and got COVID. We were on the western slope and we met with the chamber and they had a student sit in with us and he was graduating and coming to see you, Boulder. And I thought, wow, you know, because this kid looked like a farm kid, right? And I thought, oh, that's just interesting, you know.
00:52:45
Speaker
I wonder why he chose Boulder. And he came right up to me afterwards because I said, oh, I'm at Boulder. I would love to meet with you. And so he took me up on that. And so we met, oh, I think probably two years ago.
00:52:59
Speaker
And I asked him, I said, how, how was your experience, you know, coming from the Western slope and coming to Boulder, you know, much bigger city and so forth. And he said, Oh my gosh, this has just been the most fantastic experience. You know, my, my roommate is from.
00:53:16
Speaker
Cleveland, you know, I'm with all sorts of different people. We want to start a business and for some sort of like athletic clothing line for men. And he was just so happy to be at Boulder and I was so happy to see that he was having such a positive experience coming from, you know,
00:53:39
Speaker
what you would term more red, western. Yeah, more conservative part of the state. Let me ask
Handling Political Polarization in Universities
00:53:45
Speaker
you this. Do you think that flagship schools have a natural advantage in coming out of this polarized moment? I think, for example, compare it to Harvard and Penn schools like that, that have a very low admit rate, enormously skewed to kids from privileged families, and to varying degrees in recent years have
00:54:08
Speaker
asked admission questions that either directly or indirectly probably have selected for progressive activism.
00:54:16
Speaker
And, you know, so there's a famous case of the kid who got into Stanford with an essay where he wrote, you know, hashtag Black Lives Matter 100 times. Stuff like that. You know, literally. And if you look at the political demographics of undergraduates, there's national surveys on this. The most representative of the country are actually flagships in red states. I think University of Arkansas has a student body that basically looks like the country politically.
00:54:42
Speaker
But other kind of flagships, you know, are not so far off, again, because you're drawing a large sample of the state and, you know, most states, even what we think of as like a blue state or a red state is rarely bluer or redder than 6040. Right. And here's the electric outcome.
00:54:59
Speaker
But not so at some of these very selective New England and West Coast schools. And those tend to be the ones where you saw the most divisive protests following October 7th. The ones where people are in the streets chanting Death to America. People are holding signs saying basically the terrorists who portrayed it October 7th should target these people next, pointing at Jewish students. There's kind of pretty icky scenes
00:55:29
Speaker
Like that again regardless of what you think about the Israel Palestine conflict in this in this particular duration of it
00:55:38
Speaker
Those scenes were pretty rare at major flagships. For example, Boulder, I think I tweeted about this because I was so impressed by it. No, it was better than nothing. There was one day where there was about roughly 100 in my estimation pro-Palestinian protesters and about 50 yards away
00:56:01
Speaker
30 yards away, there's about 50 pro-Israel protesters. And the pro-Palestinian protesters were peacefully talking to people who walked by and the pro-Israel protesters were singing and the campus's head of issues management and somebody from campus police were just kind of standing in the side watching, you know, not intervening. It's like, that's free speech. That's the way it should be. So, yeah, do you think that flagship schools have an advantage and do you think that
00:56:29
Speaker
Do you think we have a responsibility to figure this out? Well, you know, it's interesting because the Boulder campus is the flagship campus. However, unlike, so I went to UC Santa Barbara and I knew one person from out of state my whole four years. That's not the case for Boulder, right? Right. It's like 45% or something. I don't think it's quite that high, but we have really a significant percentage of out of state students. So it's not,
00:57:00
Speaker
It's maybe not such a great reflection of sort of our state's population, or at least high schoolers, right? I think in the case of Boulder though, the leadership matters. So we have had very controversial speakers come, like Yanny, Yanny Lovelace, or however you pronounce his name. Miley Lovelace, yeah. Where, you know, at Berkeley they actually had
00:57:26
Speaker
was shooting there, right? And so what the campus leadership did was we're not going to block him from coming. We believe in free speech. But we are going to have an alternative event. And most of the students went there. And then some were outside protesting. But it was all very calm, sort of like what happened at the UMC. And that is the Dalton Trumbo fountain, right, which
00:57:56
Speaker
there's a whole history behind that, which is sort of an interesting place to gather, right? So I think leadership can make a difference and it percolates then through the student body. And as you said, at Boulder, they were quite respectful of each group, right? Yeah, I mean, even more recently, we had Yoram Hazoni speak. He gave a talk called The Case for Israeli Nationalism. You can imagine that.
00:58:26
Speaker
would be controversial, right? Today's post October 7th campus. And there were protesters, but the ones that were disruptive were quickly removed and the ones that were not disruptive were able to stay afterwards and ask good questions and have a robust discussion. Similar with Christopher Rufo when he was here. Right. So I think in that standpoint, rollers had a long history of
00:58:55
Speaker
of having controversial speakers, you know, as a regent, we'll sometimes get emails regarding that. But, you know, we say it's, we honor freedom of speech. And if a student group wants to bring in a speaker that might be controversial, so be it. And I think, you know, I think that's just a great example to just provide another avenue where students may say, I'd rather do this. And then it ends up not being
00:59:24
Speaker
messy like a Berkeley. So, so let me, let me, well, first, uh, praise see you in the regions in particular, and then, and then push you a little bit. So I think not, not enough people know this, but we have a.
00:59:38
Speaker
very strong free expression policy. Last time I checked, we were one of 55 canvases in the country that had a green light rating, the highest free speech rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. I think there have been some policy changes and there's maybe a few more than 55 now, but it still is a good
00:59:58
Speaker
It's a good thing that is relatively rare. We also have political non-discrimination in our discrimination policy, which I think is again relatively unknown and relatively unusual. You can't discriminate at least according to our policy in hiring.
01:00:15
Speaker
You know, grading and anything else on the basis of political affiliation and political philosophy, you know, and so those those are kind of rare policy and we have, like you said, we have a very strong practice, not just policy of
01:00:30
Speaker
allowing and I would say facilitating controversial speakers. It's not just like, oh yeah, your speaker can come, but they can also disrupt. That's free speech. It's like, no, we have time and place. So a lot of people who are for reform, there's kind of ranging from moderates
01:00:49
Speaker
like me, to people who are conservative. A lot of the policies that they would push for, the three policies that pretty much most of us agree on are free expression, which CU has, institutional neutrality, which as far as I know, CU doesn't have, but may be considered at one point.
01:01:07
Speaker
And then, with all based in Chicago, the Schill's report is the third one, which we sort of have. The Schill's report is about, you know, basically, we don't hire based on politics or ethnicity or gender or anything else. We just hire, you know, based on scholarly qualifications. Do you think that the, and again, you know, as a matter of policy, we sort of have that one. Do you think that universities should adopt those policies?
01:01:36
Speaker
Free expression, certainly. The institutional neutrality, that's interesting because I see that that's being brought up now, especially from those schools where the presidents had to go and testify in Congress and they're not around any longer. And then the show report
01:01:58
Speaker
I was not aware of that one. That's also Chicago. It's called the Chicago trifecta, all three of these policies. It seems like the Supreme Court is taking care of that issue, right? No, this is actually a common misconception about the law.
01:02:16
Speaker
Discrimination in admissions was what the Supreme Court struck down. Discrimination in hiring was never allowed as a matter of law, except in federal contracting could prioritize, I think, all the affirmative action policies.
01:02:34
Speaker
there's some gray area in federal law, where you have the disparate impact doctrine of the civil right, you know, that that's been in the jurisprudence of the Civil Rights Act that basically says, if you're, if you can show evidence of disparate impact, even without disparate treatment, then you might have a problem. And some some workplaces have interpreted that to mean that if your demographics of your workforce
01:02:58
Speaker
is different in some way, substantial way from the demographics of your applicant pool, then that implies disparate impact that needs to be remedied. Sorry, the other exception in hiring discrimination in federal law is if it's remedying a specific past discrimination, then it's okay. But again, the law doesn't allow that to be applied in a cosmic way, right? So you can't say, you know,
01:03:25
Speaker
50 years ago, society discriminated, therefore we, this company, are going to discriminate. If we, this company, know that we discriminated 10 years ago, then it's okay to discriminate, to correct that. But there is this gray area with disparate, it's never okay to discriminate, but then also disparate impact, and sometimes those two can come into conflict with each other. And then there are several states, including, for example, Michigan and California, and I believe Washington, that have explicitly through ballot measure said,
01:03:54
Speaker
you can never discriminate. So I guess what I'm saying is that the Supreme Court decision has not changed the law. I think that many legal experts I've read would argue that many of the practices that go on in universities in terms of hiring have long violated the law. But the reason I think it hasn't come to a head is that it's very hard for the courts to deal with.
01:04:24
Speaker
So I wrote a Chronicle of Higher Education article recently that talked about this. And to have a court case, you need to have a plaintiff. And many universities' discrimination policies, including ours, require a plaintiff too.
01:04:40
Speaker
So what happens if you have a job, somebody says, I'm creating a faculty line and I'm going to hire this specific person because they're this specific demographic. In order for the court to stop that, you need to have somebody who didn't know they couldn't apply for a job that was never posted and was willing to risk their career suing over it. And even if they did, they might still lose.
01:04:59
Speaker
So there have been two cases, one at Santa Cruz and one at Texas A&M. Somebody sued over this type of thing. In one case, it was demographic discrimination. In one case, it was DEI statements. And in both cases, the court said, you might have a point about discrimination, but you don't have standing to sue because you can't prove you actually were going to apply for this job. So I guess the point is, I think there's— I was thinking of the Supreme Court in terms of students that we admit.
01:05:27
Speaker
Oh, sure. Yeah. But, but, but flagship schools tend to have such high admit rates, you know, unless you're Berkeley or UNC or something that it, it almost doesn't matter kind of whether you're, whether you like affirmative action or not. Right. Like, like we're the, I remember, you know, post George Floyd, a lot of people I know were looking into the data, you know, how can CU be more diverse, right? The, and, and.
01:05:47
Speaker
It seemed like applications was where the action was for the undergrads. Even if you were allowed to, you're not going to make a huge difference by turning the knob because it's just not a very big knob in the way that it is at Harvard. Yeah. The question of institutional neutrality, I think is an interesting one. You would know better than me because obviously, this is not my area of expertise.
01:06:17
Speaker
When Chicago, when this came up, and I assume this is a policy that their board of trustees voted for, I would be curious, has Chicago stuck with it? That's a great question.
01:06:35
Speaker
My sense, I don't completely know the answer. I'm sure that you could find instances where they didn't, but my perception is that they have stuck to it far more closely than anybody else almost. And to be fair, because they're one of the only ones until recently that had it. Right. Yeah, because I'm curious what other
01:06:56
Speaker
What other universities signed on to this policy? Several recently, I believe. Have they stuck with it? I believe Harvard, several in the last year. That was because of what happened on October 7th and then... Yeah, which of course...
01:07:15
Speaker
Which, of course, conservatives are maybe understandably raising eyebrows about. We didn't want to be neutral until we had to condemn a mass. That's not a good look. No. If you're going to be neutral, you got to be neutral on everything. You can't pick and choose. It's an interesting concept. I don't know. I would need more information about it to really
01:07:39
Speaker
Yeah, you're a sitting region. I don't want to pin you on the spot for policy stance. How many more months? Six more months and it takes quite a long time to get a new policy through. It's not going to happen on my watch.
01:07:56
Speaker
I mean, I think one of the reasons, the less cynical view of why presidents have started adopting institutional neutrality is they realize that once you're expected to make statements about current events, you know, kind of when does it stop, right?
Institutional Neutrality and Policy Issues
01:08:12
Speaker
And what does it really do? You know, like, does anybody, I remember when we had a controversy about some,
01:08:21
Speaker
a sabbatical visitor who wrote an op-ed about Kamala Harris's eligibility to be president a few years ago. I remember seeing a message from our dean at the time saying that he disagreed with what he was saying, but he had the right to say it. I'm just like, does anybody care what a chemist thinks about law?
01:08:41
Speaker
think about the same kind of thing for other presidents. One of the things that I'm going to be helping with the president with at the University of Wyoming is that they've just adopted an institutional neutrality and we're going to have rapid response dialogues. So the way I pitched it to him was anytime
01:08:59
Speaker
something happens in the world that people are pressuring you to make a statement about. Instead, we'll have a faculty panel of the most relevant expert faculty representing different perspectives, and then we'll have our BridgeUSA chapter facilitate a student dialogue about the issue. That sounds interesting. The university can engage on the issues as they come up, but they don't have to engage in a way where we... Say yes or no.
01:09:25
Speaker
Before we pretend that we know or care what the president thinks about every issue, right? Well, and you know, I will say that, uh, you know, again, as regents, you know, we get a lot of emails when something controversial comes up, right? And, uh, we have a lot of discussions. We hardly ever make a statement because again, we have Republicans and Democrats. We may not see eye to eye on it, on it.
01:09:55
Speaker
controversial issue. And it's really hard because we all have to agree to a statement. And so more often than not, we don't ever have a statement from the regions. Yeah, no, right. Well, and that in a sense is one of the ethical arguments that people make in favor of institutional neutrality. It's that if we want to have a culture of academic freedom beyond just a policy of academic freedom,
01:10:23
Speaker
It has a chilling effect if the president and the chancellor and whoever else are signaling that they have a particular stance, and it's always kind of a stance on one side, right? So how many schools had several statements decrying the decision about affirmative action, this Marine Court decision, which is among the public as a two to one majority support for that decision,
01:10:48
Speaker
And then how slow are people to make decisions or to issue statements about the attack on Israel even before there was retaliation. But let's go to a brighter topic. One of the things that strikes me in national politics generally, not just higher ed, is that there's a lot more agreement on things than people think. If you had to, and a student of mine and I did this four years ago, if you had to make a platform of
01:11:17
Speaker
policies that had two-thirds majority support. You could do a heck of a lot. You raise the minimum wage, build more infrastructure, give permanent status to the Dreamers, the DACA recipients, but also have more border security. You could still have a Second Amendment, but you could also have universal background checks.
01:11:40
Speaker
The talking heads are way more divided than the public is. Is there anywhere either in Colorado politics or higher ed or both where you see that phenomenon where there's just like something that needs to be done and there's just a huge appetite among voters on both sides to roll out their sleeves and do it?
01:11:56
Speaker
Yeah, well, first of all, I got to know Rene through the series. And I love that study. And it would be wonderful if somehow politicians could realize that there are a lot of issues that the majority of the public agree with. And spend your time on that, please. But they need their sound bites of why they're different and beat up on each other so that they would get elected or get
01:12:24
Speaker
You know more money through fundraising So I so my district is actually really large. It's it's um Very western boulder all the way up to the continental divide. It's yep western Larimer which is north of us Up to wyoming to the continental divide and then clear creek and gilpin which are at the continental divide so it's it's large and
01:12:50
Speaker
And it's mainly mountain rural and I've spent a year and a half traveling around and then also doing CU outreach. And really the number one issue is the cost of housing. So that is something where I would say across, you know, what's the proper way to attack this?
01:13:10
Speaker
There's going to be different opinions on that, but that is definitely a topic that crosses political boundaries, urban, suburban, rural, et cetera. And I would say it's not only just in the state, right?
01:13:26
Speaker
Totally. I mean, in fact, as bad as cost of living is in the US, it's much worse in Canada statistically and has become the single dominant national election issue in Canada right now. And like you said, there's interesting cuts across Democrat Republican, it cuts across class. There's high cost of housing, there's high cost of buying, there's usually high cost of renting, there's speculation, there's gentrification. And some of the ideas
01:13:57
Speaker
building more supply is one of the off proposed solutions to that. And that often has both conservative and liberal flavors of it, right? The mixed zoning, maybe it's somewhat of a liberal flavor, but also cutting red tape, making it easier to build is kind of a conservative flavor. Do you find there's a constructive appetite among Colorado politicians in general to work on that issue? Is that issue kind of risen to the fore statewide at this point?
01:14:24
Speaker
Well, definitely not this last session, but the session before the governor tried to get Senate Bill 213, which was sort of using a big hammer saying, you must do this in terms of increasing housing stock, and that flopped on its face.
01:14:46
Speaker
You know, that required getting out, having elected officials going out and talking to city council, county commissioners, et cetera. And so they chunked it up into smaller bites. And so this past session, several bills passed, which not everyone was happy with, but I think it could really move the needle on the housing stock. You know, and it's so different. We went up to Summit County.
01:15:16
Speaker
And we think housing is expensive in Boulder, the average housing cost, but in Summit County, because it's a ski industry, I mean, it's millions of dollars for the average house. And then- And just for our listeners who don't know, Summit County is Aspen and Vail and Breckenridge, or a subset of those? Just Vail, Breckenridge.
01:15:38
Speaker
All the big ski towns besides Aspen. Exactly. Which is different than Boulder, which is different than Grand Junction. So I'm quickly realizing that housing is an issue across the state, but the solutions that tackle it are going to be very different and very specific to each community. And I think that's what
01:16:04
Speaker
people need to realize and understand, um, when they're trying to put policies together, it's just not going to work, you know, one, one size fits all. Yeah, that makes total sense. So just one last question to wrap up. If, you know, when you look back on what we hope and suspect will be our first term in office, uh, what, what is one thing that you hope to have accomplished?
Future Challenges and Optimism for Colorado
01:16:35
Speaker
You know, the main reason why I'm running is water, climate change, and the environment. And I really do see a need that we are going to have to move to not just our state, but our country, our world to a clean energy economy. I do realize that communities do, you know, they
01:17:01
Speaker
Their economies are driven by the fossil fuel industry. I met with the pipe fitters. They have good unionized jobs. They're worried about losing those jobs. So I am very understanding of that too. So I think we need to come up with a very good, clear plan. Can't do it.
01:17:23
Speaker
switch on a light or turn off the light switch, it's going to have to be well thought out with the economic impacts taken into mind. If I could start moving the needle on that, I feel like that would be a big accomplishment. Yeah, and it would take a whole other podcast to go into the reasons for this.
01:17:50
Speaker
I would say if any state can figure out how to do this, Colorado would be near the top, if not at the top of my list. Because I think that there's an appetite, a very large appetite from a number of different sides to not to do something, but also like you said, to do something that
01:18:11
Speaker
pays attention to the details, that pays attention to making sure that people aren't left behind, and that makes it an opportunity as opposed to a cost to the economy of Colorado. Yes. Well, that's a very optimistic note to end on. Well, I'm an optimist, so there's that optimistic view. I think of myself as a cynical optimist, which only makes sense at the time.
01:18:39
Speaker
As academics, we question, right? Yeah, exactly. There you go. Thank you. You get it. Well, Leslie Smith, thanks so much for being on the Free Mind podcast. Thank you for all your support of our polarization work that we've done over the years and best of luck in your future in politics and I'm excited to see where it goes. Well, thank you, Matt.
01:19:01
Speaker
Best of luck to you. I've really enjoyed working with you all these years. I'm sorry to see you go, but I'm excited for your next step and I'm sure you're going to do great things for Wyoming. Same to you. Thanks a lot. Take care. Okay. The Free Mind podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder.
01:19:24
Speaker
You can email us feedback at freemind at colorado.edu or visit us online at colorado.edu slash center slash Benson. You can also find us on social media. Our Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts are all at Benson Center. Our Instagram is at TheBensonCenter and the Facebook is at Bruce D. Benson Center.