What’s the role of a university in a democratic society? What responsibility do universities have to foster the public good, and what responsibilities does the public have to support centers of education and research?

These have become some of the most fraught and pressing questions in our current moment. But of course, they’re also timeless questions — ones that are as old as the United States itself.

On this episode, Mark explores these questions (and more) with literary scholar Kevin McLaughlin and historian Karin Wulf. In addition to having thought deeply on just these types of issues, Kevin and Karin are also the co-chairs of “Brown 2026,” an initiative marking the 250th anniversary of the U.S. and exploring the past and future role of universities in a democratic society.

Guests on this episode:

1. Kevin McLaughlin is a literary scholar and director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study at Brown.
2. Karin Wulf is a historian and director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library.

Learn more about Brown 2026.

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MARK BLYTH: From the Rhodes Center for International Finance and Economics at Brown University, this is the Rhodes Center Podcast. I'm the director of the Center and your host, Mark Blyth. What is the role of a university in a democratic society? What responsibilities do universities have to foster the public good, and what responsibilities do the public have to support centers of education and research? These have become some of the most fraught and pressing questions in our current moment. But of course, they're also timeless questions, one certainly as old as the Republic itself.

This is why I was so curious to talk with Kevin McLaughlin and Karin Wulf, two scholars at Brown who think deeply about just these types of issues. They're also the co-chairs of Brown Twenty Twenty-Six, an initiative marking the 250th anniversary of the United States, which, among other things, explores the past and future role of universities in a democratic society. Kevin is a literary scholar and director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study at Brown. Karin is a historian and director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library. Here's our conversation.

Karin and Kevin, welcome to the Rhodes Center Podcast.

KARIN WULF: Thanks for having us.

MARK BLYTH: Thank you. So this is a little bit of an unusual one. I mean, usually the way that this podcast works is we have someone at Brown coming in to give a talk, present research, and then we pull them in and we talk about it. But this is about a project at Brown, Brown Twenty Twenty-Six. So what is it and what are you trying to do with it?

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: Well, I'll start first. Thanks very much for inviting us. It's really a pleasure to be here. I listen to your podcast all the time. It's great. So the Brown Twenty Twenty-Six initiative is a presidential initiative supported by Christina Paxson. And Karin and I are the co-chairs of a steering committee that was formed about a year and a half ago now to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence.

The reason we called it Brown Twenty Twenty-Six is to signal that this is a forward-looking initiative, in the sense that we are looking at the history and the legacy of the American Revolution. But we're very focused on a very specific topic, which is the role of universities in democracies. And Twenty Twenty-Six is to signal that this is as much about the future of that relationship as it is about the past.

And basically, the initiative is designed to address a very wide range of different publics, the campus, the students, but also our alumni group, the broader public. We're trying to reach the local community, the national community and the international community for that reason.

So the programming that we're sponsoring runs from more academic stuff like conferences and symposia to conversations with high visibility individuals, some from the arts and entertainment world, to more academic talks by former Supreme Court justices and others. And we're trying to steer a very broad based initiative that really focuses on what do universities contribute to democratic societies.

KARIN WULF: Can I just add?

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: Of course.

KARIN WULF: One thing there, Mark, which is that there are lots of organizations, including governments at every level, from local to national, that are thinking about marking the 250th anniversary of American independence. But the University here, Brown, has an opportunity to do something different. That is Rhode Island 250 is a fantastic state initiative led by the Secretary of State's office, focusing on Rhode Island's role in the American Revolution.

The University, though, and Brown, is really distinctive among universities across the country in taking up this challenge, thinking about the relationship between higher education and democracy. And to be clear, this was an initiative that was designed over two years ago. It is not meant to answer the immediate moment. But we always knew it would land in a moment, we just didn't know what kind of moment it would be.

MARK BLYTH: And that is exactly why I wanted to have this conversation on this podcast. So we usually do economics and finance and stuff like this, but it's that moment. And what I think is very interesting about what this project is attempting to do, in particular, the relationship to democracy dovetails in with the volatility of the moment. And here's what I mean by this.

In normal times, this would not at all be a controversial affair. But we're not in normal times. The university as an institution is under attack from its own state. Whether it's policing, what can be taught in the name of free speech, or defunding research. That's never been controversial. We really are in uncharted waters.

Behind this assault is a critique of the university itself, especially the Elite Research University, that it is somehow out of touch with public opinion, out of step with the needs of the country, and out of runway to keep the system of privileged funding that it has relied upon, going and going and going.

We have, in the eyes of some, become hedge funds that run universities for tax purposes, and these narratives tend to have deep public traction. Almost the majority of voters think that college is not worth it, and almost all of them think it's too expensive. How can we respond to those criticisms? Because obviously, I don't think that's quite right. You don't think that's quite right.

KARIN WULF: No.

MARK BLYTH: But if we're going to say, hey, look at us, we're a huge part of this. We're an enormous part of this country. How do we basically change and challenge that narrative?

KARIN WULF: Yeah. Well, let me just start by saying two kind of context setting points. I'm a historian, so I'm always going to want to pull back and look at the broader historical context. And I think the premise of your question is that there is this relatively, you said normal times, unproblematic relationship between higher education or constant relationship between higher education and, let us just say the federal government for purposes of being quick about it.

But that's not necessarily true. That is, there is a historical context to how the relationship between the government and higher education has developed. Since the mid-20th century, it's been a funding one, increasingly a funding one that's focused on the STEM disciplines. We'll just be shorthand there as well.

So first of all, it's not the case that there is a normal and that now we're in an abnormal situation. Things have been complicated for a long time. I would point in particular to the defunding of state universities starting in the Nineteen Eighties, as precipitating part of this current crisis that we're in. It's really multifaceted. It's not just about universities, and it has a long, long history.

The second thing I would say is that the University doesn't exist. That is, higher education is a really complex industry. It's a really multifaceted landscape. Most institutions of higher education are not the kinds that we are sitting in. There are eight Ivies, there are 13 in the Ivy plus, and there are maybe 130 R1 or research intensive universities among the thousands of 2 and 4-year colleges across the country.

Most adult Americans have some experience of higher education, some college. And so when we lump all of this together and we say, what about the University, I think we are often mistakenly talking about institutions like Brown, when for most Americans, it's not institutions like Brown. It's their local community colleges or their regional comprehensive universities. So those are just two context setting things that I'd like to start us off with.

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: One thing just to add to that, Mark, that you may be able to comment on from your perspective a little bit is that it seems to me that the American university model that, as Karen points out, was really an exception that started after the Second World War in a partnership between the federal government and universities, both on the education side with the GI Bill and on the massive investment in science during the Cold War and in the Nineteen Sixties.

It seems to me that the model that was developed during those long Nineteen Sixties was very much the envy of the world, and a model that many nations tried to imitate and are still trying to imitate. And so it seems to me that although we can certainly expect the criticism to continue, it can't be a question for the University of simply withdrawing from this partnership, and it can't be from the federal government's side either. But clearly, there are some stresses here that can't be denied.

And as you point out, one of the main ones is, of course, the cost of higher education in the United States, which has continued to skyrocket. The wealthier universities have found ways to provide financial aid to blunt that for some of the students who can't afford to pay full tuition, but that, as Karen points out, is only a small part of a much larger system. And it's just undeniable. If we're looking at that Gallup poll that you referred to a minute ago, that cost is one of the real drivers of a lack of trust in the University, that in the last 10 years has really skyrocketed, that poll suggests, right?

MARK BLYTH: Yeah, and those costs have increased, much faster than the rate of inflation, faster than the rate of growth in wages. So you understand why people are a little bit suspect as to where this is going. I mean, my own personal thing on this is, without much evidence whatsoever, I think the subjective feeling comes from the fact that there's a bloat. There's this bureaucracy that's there now.

But what people don't realize about this is a huge part of this is a federal mandate. When you get that money, the strings that come with the money means that you need to employ people to make sure that the money is processed in a certain way. That certain standards are maintained, cetera, cetera. So it's not as if they just give us a check and then we hire our mates. That's not what happens.

The second point I would want to put into the conversation is this one. In finance, there's actually something that the old people in finance, basically my generation, called the Chomsky trade. And the Chomsky trade was actually after Noam Chomsky, because Noam Chomsky, in an interview in the 80s, said, if you want to make money 20 years from now, just look at what the federal government did 20 years ago.

So if you go back to the 60s, right, you got transistors that becomes the digital revolution. You go to the Nineteen Seventies, you get the beginning of biotech. You go to the Nineteen Eighties, you get the beginnings of supercomputers, Right And you just go 20 years forward and this is what this is.

So when we marvel at the consumer products that come out of this game at the end of it, for example, the iPhone is a great example from Mariana Mazzucato that every single key technology in the iPhone was made with public funding. Steve was a genius who put it in a shiny box with rounded corners, that's why we all fell for it and had the foresight to do it, but all those technologies were publicly funded. So if we're now in a situation of, well, this is just bloat. Let's just cut all this. There's no next iPhone, there's no next Apple. That's actually what's at stake in this.

KARIN WULF: Well, I mean, I love the way you phrased that as really a question about investment. Investment, as people in your discipline know, it's really hard to think long-term. And that's what we're asking people to do. I think one thing that happens with higher education is that we get tangled in the question of how is higher education valuable for the individual, versus how is higher education a collective good. How is it useful, and how is it actually a civic good? And there are two pieces to that too. But let's go back to the question of how is it an individual good.

We still show that people who go to college, even people who have some college, have better career outcomes, including better incomes than people without. And that is the Department of Education looking at that and that's the Gates Foundation. This is not my area of expertise. And obviously here at Brown, we have people who look at these things and who are real experts in this, but nonetheless, even non-experts can see that pattern is true. That there is an individual outcome here that's better, if you have even some college, not even a college graduation.

But then there is the collective good, and that you can break down into, as you're saying, like the collective good-- I don't know. Do we still feel that the iPhone is a collective good?

MARK BLYTH: Collective hazard.

KARIN WULF: Right. Exactly. The collective good of things like technology or certainly advances in health care, but then there is also this collective civic good of having a more highly educated population. That seems worth talking about, too.

MARK BLYTH: Do we really want to go against the grain there? Kevin, do you want to comment on this?

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, I was just going to jump in. I think in addition to linking up with what you both said is that there's a connection between a democratic society and the research and development that's done as it's funded by the federal government in universities, which is, as you point out, Mark, have to be responsive to certain norms of ethics about how that money is spent.

That will not be the case if the research and development becomes privatized through Silicon Valley moguls like Elon Musk and the others, which I think looks to be what they're after, to be the replacement for the research and development arm. And why do we need NASA if we have SpaceX?

MARK BLYTH: Exactly. So let's get into that for a minute and then pivot back more to Twenty Twenty-Six. The very first Rhodes Center Podcast was with the investor and economist Bill Janeway. And Bill was at Warburg Pincus back in the 80s and basically was very successful in that space. And he describes in a book that he did a few years ago, the entire venture capital industry as being a partner in a three card game, with the universities, the VC industry, and then the private sector, writ large, that takes ideas to scale. And that's basically it.

So Kevin just alluded to something that I think is probably the case as well. That you've got a bunch of tech firms, and this is just my hypothesis on this one, to echo Kevin's, that maybe a little bit overindexed on AI investment. May have caught up in a big arms race. That's probably not going to pay off the way they think. And wouldn't it be nice if you could find a nice guaranteed funding stream called all the research money the universities go to.

Now, I can imagine that of Palantir can spin off drones. I can imagine that Andreessen can fund some pretty crazy firms if they got that money and take even riskier bets. I'm not sure what Elon would do beyond more rockets, but they don't do biotech. They don't do health. They don't do public health. So what's at stake if we go down that road?

KARIN WULF: Well, the other thing is that universities, it's not just a three-card game. It's that universities have been a relatively economically effective and efficient way to get that kind of research outcome. That is, we briefly alluded to this by, you talked about the canard of administrative bloat at universities, where in fact, there's a lot of increased accountability measures that have to do with precisely federal funding.

So let's pretend that all of those accountability measures are off the table. But universities have still provided research at relatively low cost because research is part of the core mission of universities. It's about creating and sharing knowledge. That is not the mission of industry. The mission of industry is to serve its shareholders right now. You want to talk about a complicated card game. That is definitely one.

But just to go back to the investment point, the research that universities does is also long-term research. It's investing for the long term. We only have iPhones now because of investments that were made not just 20 years ago, but 40 years ago. So it's a really long game. And while plenty of industrial players used to have labs, not so many do anymore. I don't think they're prepared to step into this space.

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, and there's obviously built-in cost sharing between the universities and the government if the private sector replaces the universities as research and development. Even if you assume that we're going to have less than 60% overhead covered by federal grants, the other 40 is still covered by the university.

MARK BLYTH: And also in those overhead charges, essentially would just-- they don't disappear, right? The costs of keeping the lab warm, the cost of keeping the animals alive, whatever it happens to be, they don't go away. So you would simply turn around and put them in upfront costs. They would become part of the grant. And it would still be more cost effective then actually going through the private sector.

This is a standard investment problem in a way because what you've got is, what's the optimal institution to host the particular type of investment? So if you've got a three-month horizon, it's probably not a university. If you've got a one-year horizon, maybe it's a university. If you've got a 5 or 10-year or 20-year horizon, it's absolutely university because there just aren't many institutions like that.

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: So let me come back to your initial question about how we reverse the trend, which seems clear now, of distrust toward the university. We've already talked about the cost for students to attend in the United States, but there's also, I think, been a deficit in terms of the university's communication to the general public of what we actually do.

All of the things that we're now talking about are not things that have been deliberately communicated from the universities to the general public. Certainly in scientific research, there's always impact statements that are part of federal grants, but those are just going back to the agencies and explaining the social impact of some kind of scientific research.

I think it's clear that we need to do much more in the university to provide infrastructure within the university to the people who work in universities, like faculty, to undertake much more effective communication. And fortunately, with the new technologies that we have, it's quite possible to do this.

But I don't think we've had a deliberate effort from the universities themselves to try to emphasize investing in infrastructure to do that and make it possible for faculty to engage the public more broadly. And I think that's one of the things that we're trying to do around this initiative, which is take it as an opportunity for us to try to open up channels of communication.

KARIN WULF: Yeah, and I think it's interesting because I think when we started this initiative, we were thinking about the broader public and however one defines that, whether it's our campus, whether it's our broader Brown community, whether it's here in Providence, the world, whatever.

But actually, I think there's a real opportunity and even an imperative now for us to have conversations on campus about what we're about. Like, what is it that we actually do have in common? And sometimes we have over-- we have over over-described those divisions between STEM and HSS, let's say, or between we think high research cost and low research cost disciplines, which I can tell you as a historian, we get grumpy about that. It's a lot of energy costs, let's just say, to produce high quality historical research.

But there's a real opportunity for us to talk more to one another in a deep way about the context for our work, about the values we share, the mission we share, and how we go about doing our work, and I honestly think that would be enormously valuable too.

MARK BLYTH: So let's go back to Twenty Twenty-Six and the notion of democracy. We live in increasingly polarized times where democracy itself is not trusted by increasingly large slices of the population. We are in a quasi authoritarian moment, according to some. How can the university, if not change that, show people that there's a different way that democracy can function, and that it means something more than just polarization and noise?

KARIN WULF: I always think that as an organization, whatever your organization is, the thing you do should do with integrity. You should do because it's core to your mission and it's core to your capacity and your expertise. And the thing that we do in a university is we generate and share knowledge. And I think that's what we ought to be about doing.

So I'm not sure that doing anything different, substantially, serves us better. I don't think we need to turn ourselves into something that we're not. But I do think that a clearer articulation, beginning in and among ourselves, about what are our values and what is our purpose and being clear about that, and recognizing that it is as true for me as a historian as it is for you as an economist and Kevin as a literary scholar and all of our colleagues as data scientists or whatever that we share a common purpose, we are better able to communicate that to the public at large.

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, I think Karin's point about the collectivity of universities is really important. That's what the word university means. And I think a little bit of history here, maybe, on Karin's turf. It's a little bit hard to deny--

KARIN WULF: Don't worry.

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: It's a little bit hard to deny that there wasn't something like the democratization of higher education in the Nineteen Sixties in the United States. All you have to do is look at statistics, and they're really dramatic. So there was a huge growth in higher Ed, which meant a huge growth not only in research, but also in education, including liberal arts education in the Nineteen Sixties was really unprecedented. I mean, the American University before that time was not a democratized institution. It was very much an elite institution.

And so I think the word democracy has some meaning in that context. Now, there were things happening in the Nineteen Sixties that gave a certain inflection to that process, right? Let's say, for example, the Vietnam War and the distrust that sowed in the public with images on television every week of what was happening in Southeast Asia.

The civil rights movement was also happening in the Nineteen Sixties. And part of the democratization of the university was the way in which it absorbed also these things that were happening. And very much the discourse that we're seeing now aimed against the university also has its origins in this period, going back to the early Nineteen Seventies.

And I think the democratization came with what is also undeniably a diversification of the university. And this led to some tensions, which I think have now come home to roost, so to speak. So we're hearing things now that really have their origins in the Nineteen Sixties that we need to, I think, recognize and pay attention a little bit more to that history.

MARK BLYTH: Any good examples of that? I mean, any particular figures that spring to mind from this period that we're making those noises now?

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: Well, so I think the obvious thing was the Powell Memo from Nineteen Seventy-One, which was addressed to the US Chamber of Commerce, and it was about the fact that the university was taking over a space that private industry and free enterprise was supposed to occupy. And that's where I see the connection between the Silicon Valley people who are now interested in usurping some of the university's role. But yeah, please, Karin, go ahead.

KARIN WULF: Oh, no, no, no, no, I was just going to say that It is a little odd, though, that there are these potent critiques of higher education, that universities are too elite, when in fact, what we know is universities have become much more diverse spaces and places of much greater opportunity for more people over time. So there's no one story, there's no one origin moment, and there is no one narrative here. There's a lot of conflicting stuff that's going on, and it's some of that is just beyond the University itself.

MARK BLYTH: But it is significant, though, what Kevin points out. That we have been here before. I mean, you started with this. It's not always been an uncontested relationship. I mean, I vaguely remember Ronald Reagan going off on the universities.

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: Right.

KARIN WULF: Oh, there's a--

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: Department of Education under Reagan.

KARIN WULF: Yeah. The 40s. I mean--

MARK BLYTH: So in a way, it's not unprecedented. It's just the ramping it up.

KARIN WULF: Yeah. Well, and it's landing in a different moment. It's a different media moment. It's a different political moment.

MARK BLYTH: But it's also a moment, if you go back to the 60s and early 70s when the universities, in a sense, embraced the vibrant democracy of the street and the social movements, that's when they got slapped. And in a sense, post Twenty Twenty, there's a bit of a reflection of that going on as well. There's a very similar echo, I think, in that moment.

KARIN WULF: I never forget that I arrived to do my PhD on a campus that only started accepting women as undergraduates, not even 15 years earlier. So the idea to the critique of universities as these crazy liberal hotbeds, it's like, have you ever been on a campus? Universities are slow-moving places. They're fairly conservative institutions in all kinds of ways. Yes, there are some quite liberal people, but there are also plenty of quite conservative people. And there institutions that have been slow to change, as demonstrated by my PhD granting institution.

MARK BLYTH: I'll give you another example from where I'm from, from Scotland. There are two major universities-- were two major universities in Glasgow. There's now three. And I won't mention which one this is, but the students' union for one of them admitted, I think it was, if I get this right now, women, I think in Nineteen Eighty, but Catholics later than that. So yeah, rather conservative institutions and peculiar in some ways.

All right, let's think about students, OK? So in this regard, how can or should students think about their role in a university with all of this going on? What are some of the things we now about how students understand higher education, their experience in it, and how does that feed into the democratic purpose of the university?

KARIN WULF: Well, so Kevin alluded to some of the people that we've had on campus. One of our public launch events in January was with Brown alum Daveed Diggs, the fantastic Broadway star, actor, producer, rapper. Amazing guy. I loved listening to him talk to students. Honest I'm going to get to your question here.

MARK BLYTH: That's fine.

KARIN WULF: But he was so great. Students were coming to him to talk about concerns they had about, in fact, how the University is too slow-moving, too conservative, whatever. They wanted some rapid action change. And he was so great. He said, look, here's the thing-- he's a little older than they are now.

And he said, when you get to be my age, you start to appreciate that there are some slow-moving institutions that nonetheless have the right idea. They may not move as quickly as you like, but sometimes that's a good thing because they hold on to their values and they consider their progress and their direction.

And I thought that was so useful. Students are amazing. They're like lightning in a bottle, but they are in the sense that they're here and they're gone. And then there's the next generation of students. And they're so vibrant and energetic, but their experience of college is this one moment. So I think that college can be intense and great for them. But when you're on the other side of it, when you're inside the slow-moving ship, you see them as a source of energy and inspiration, but you don't want to redirect the entire ship.

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, and I think we want to be very careful, those of us who work in the University, and especially who teach students, to find opportunities to convey to the students why the distrust of the University that's all around them, in their families, in their communities, should not prevent them from getting the kind of liberal education that will contribute to a democratic society in the long run. And I think we're seeing that our students are facing a lot of pressure right now.

But I don't think it has to be a choice between preparing yourself to become employed after you've finished your degree, and also getting a broad-based liberal arts education at the same time. And I think that's what we have-- we have to try to highlight the linkage between these two things. Over the course of a lifetime, again, going back to the point Karin made about the slowness of things, we're preparing students during the four years that they're here for a lifetime.

MARK BLYTH: Exactly.

KARIN WULF: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: My favorite example of this is there was a survey a few years ago of the survivability of hedge funds, because they all blow up. Very few of them last 20 years. They're dinosaurs in the industry. Most of them are like 18 months to two years, five years, done.

And they looked at the college majors of the people who ran hedge funds. And if you did applied math, ACoM, all that sort of stuff, you were most likely to blow up. Guess which major had the longevity? History. It was. It was historians. Basically, they've seen it before. When it came down the Turnpike, they weren't blindsided by it.

KARIN WULF: Well, I always say that it is really tough to see the arguments about what students should major in and what's practical and what's not practical when the statistical analysis shows us that, in fact, humanities majors do incredibly well in terms of their careers, and they do well in their careers in all kinds of different places, which your example just beautifully illustrated. And I would just call out the Humanities Indicators Project of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences, which has a state by state breakdown of employment opportunities by college major. And that's really great data.

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: Let's hope they don't get canceled.

MARK BLYTH: Well,

KARIN WULF: Private organization.

MARK BLYTH: I remember I gave a talk in New York a few years back, maybe 10 years ago, and before it was called AI, it was called Big data. It was the same thing, more or less. And this was also when parents had this great idea that their children shouldn't actually have any fun or friends. They should all learn coding.

And we had a conversation about this and I said, you realize this is the one thing that's most likely to be automated. So they're not developing any social or intellectual skills or friends or whatever. You're literally teaching them to be redundant. And the room went completely silent. So how many of you are actually doing this? There must have been 200 people in the room. I'd say about 80 people raised their hands. And I was like, please stop. Stop now. This is not what education is.

KARIN WULF: Yeah. And part of what you're doing is you're educating people about what education is, right? And that's what I mean about let's stay core to our mission and our expertise and our capacity. Let's be what we are. Because what we are is a place that creates and shares knowledge in the public interest. That's what we do in all of our disciplines across all of our domains here. And that's why you asked us at the beginning, how does this connect to democracy, and you don't get that kind of arrangement in higher education in anything but a liberal democracy.

MARK BLYTH: OK, let's close it out with a discussion of the fun stuff. If you've got a program, you're bringing people to campus-- like, sell me. Sell me this whole thing. Tell me what I need to block out my diary months in advance. So I need to who's coming, what's hot. Give me the whole thing.

KARIN WULF: Well, we can't do that, in part, because we have some holds on high profile people who they don't always let you, let you say things. What I will say, though, is that there have been some really fantastically rewarding programs that we started this year, started them as pilots, and that will amplify and build into next year.

So I'm just going to call out our wonderful postdoc coordinator, Rebecca Graham, who helped run Brown Twenty Twenty-Six reads, which was a project to distribute books through the Dean of the College. Thank you, Rashid, who's also on our steering committee, to distribute books and then match the authors with small groups of students for discussion. We're going to ramp that up and do that in a bigger way in this coming year.

And that's amazing, because as you know, it's fantastic to get hundreds of people in a room watching Daveed Diggs. That's incredible. And Jon Batiste. Yeah, we've had some really great stuff and there will be more. That's intense. But what's really intense is when you have a group of 15 students who've read the same book and who want to talk about it. That's great energy too,

MARK BLYTH: Kevin.

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, and we've also been partnering with a lot of departments and centers and institutes at Brown. One example of that is your Umbrella Institute, the Watson Institute, partnered with us on an event with former Justice Breyer. It was a great event for us. And there's things that we're sponsoring around the gamut, really, from things that will be high visibility and popular. Karin talked about Daveed Diggs. We're going to have Ken Burns here in the fall. He's launching a new film, I think, called the American Revolution.

KARIN WULF: Indeed, yes.

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: And he will be here to present his new documentary and there's some public events that will be happening with him around the family weekend in October. And then we're doing more academic things around specific disciplines. The history department is thinking about an event in the spring on the history of the Research University, for example.

KARIN WULF: The rise and question mark of the Research University.

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: And I have some colleagues in American literature here at Brown who are organizing a conference this fall called Fictions of the American Revolution. So those are more academically oriented work, but it's helping us convene the conversation within the University as well that Karin was talking about before.

MARK BLYTH: Karin and Kevin, thank you very much.

KARIN WULF: Thanks for having us.

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN: Thank you.

MARK BLYTH: This episode was produced by Dan Richards. I'm Mark Blyth. You can listen to more conversations like this by subscribing to the Rhodes Center Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll be back soon with another episode of The Rhodes Center Podcast. Thanks.

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