A War on ‘Woke’ Classes

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In this episode

Public colleges and universities across Florida have scrambled to comply with a new law that supporters see as a bulwark against the liberal indoctrination of students. The law prohibits core general-education courses that teach “identity politics” or those “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.” The law has forced colleges to scrutinize hundreds of courses in their catalogues, pressure testing whether anything they teach runs afoul of this sweeping new regulation of college curricula. Proponents of the law say it’s an overdue corrective to general-education offerings, which have ballooned on campuses across the country. But critics worry that the legislation signals a perilous encroachment on faculty control over curricula, creating political litmus tests for what students are allowed to learn in core courses.

Related Reading:

• The Curricular Cull: Inside a Sweeping Attempt to Regulate Gen Ed in Florida (The Chronicle)
• Professors Ruined Gen Ed. Florida Is Fixing It. (The Review)
• Florida’s Nakedly Ideological Attack on Gen Ed (The Review)
• What Is Happening in Florida? (The Chronicle)

Guest: Emma Pettit, senior reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but it may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from The Chronicle.

Emma Pettit Getting this feedback that just says essentially, to confirm compliance with this law, we need you to confirm compliance with this law. I mean, I personally would be a little bit frustrated by that or just confused by what exactly that means.

Jack Stripling In recent months, Florida’s public universities have set about purging from their core general education curricula any courses that smacked of, quote, identity politics or propagated theories of systemic racism. If that sounds like a subjective task, it is. But such is a mandate of a relatively new Florida law, which forces the state’s universities to narrow the topics covered in foundational undergraduate courses.

In a sweeping overhaul of college curricula, Florida’s university governing board has eradicated from general education what one official called, quote, indoctrinating concepts. Gone are courses like Theories of African American Studies, Evolution of Human Sexuality, and LGBTQ History. In their place are courses that, whenever applicable, promote a deeper understanding of Western civilization.

Put simply, gender studies is probably out, and the Bill of Rights is definitely in.

While the law is confined to Florida, it reflects a larger national debate about whether college curricula are, to quote the pundits, too woke. To understand what’s happening in Florida, and what it might signal for higher education in other Republican-controlled states, I turned to my colleague, Emma Pettit. Emma is a senior reporter at The Chronicle, who has written extensively about the collisions of higher education and conservative politics in Florida. In a recent investigation with our colleague Megan Zahneis, Emma examined how Florida’s public universities responded to the state’s new general education law. Emma, welcome to College Matters from The Chronicle.

Emma Pettit Thanks for having me.

Jack Stripling So you’ve been reporting extensively on Florida for a number of years, but lately you’ve been looking at how Florida’s universities have responded to a new law tied to curriculum. How did all this start?

Emma Pettit Right, so just to back up for a bit, Florida has been this hotbed of Republican-led higher education reform for years now. Ron DeSantis, the governor there and one-time presidential candidate, is a very strong critic of what he and others call woke ideology, or basically the overemphasis on racial and gender identities on college campuses, which they argue allows for discrimination, and takes ideas like individual merit and achievement, and subordinates them to identity politics and squishy concepts like equity. That would be their argument. So Florida lawmakers actually in 2022 passed something called the Stop Woke Act, which a lot of listeners might have heard about. It basically barred professors from training or instructing students in a way that they believed certain concepts about race and gender. And it’s tied up in court now, but that was a major effort by Republican lawmakers to try and control what professors can do in the classroom in their view to avoid indoctrinating students.

Another thing that DeSantis did is he appointed some conservative trustees at the public liberal arts college, New College of Florida, in order to refocus it on the Western intellectual tradition. Florida’s been the major battleground for all of these Republican ideas about what’s wrong with higher education right now, and specifically has been working on fixing it in their view.

Jack Stripling And then in 2023, the legislature passes SB 266. What does this law say exactly?

Emma Pettit So the law does a bunch of things. The law says that you can’t use any state or federal money towards DEI efforts. That got a lot of attention. What got less attention is its effect on gen ed curriculum at public colleges in Florida. So SB 266 bars core general education courses that quote, distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics or quote, are based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States. It also says that gen ed courses should, whenever applicable, provide instruction about the history and foundation of western civilization and the nation’s historical documents. Think, you know, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. And it also says that courses with a curriculum based on quote unproven, speculative or exploratory content are best suited as electives or prerequisites and should not be taken for gen ed credit.

Jack Stripling Okay. So let’s clarify what we mean when we talk about general education. What’s included here? What is this law concerned with?

Emma Pettit So there are two buckets in Florida. There’s the core courses that’s standardized by the state. You know, every student has to take one course in these five different disciplines: communication, math, social science, humanities, natural science. The remaining gen ed credits are set from this menu of institution-specific gen ed courses. So it’s a blend, but it’s all referred to as gen education. So to get even more in the weeds, there is these restrictions in the law that say they apply to core courses and then these restrictions that apply to gen ed in general. We asked the university system if the restrictions that apply to the core courses also apply to the institution specific courses and we didn’t get the most satisfying answer.

Jack Stripling But I think when you hear from politicians, what they’re concerned about is courses that the university sees as foundational and students often encounter these in their first two years of college. And they want to make sure that those courses aren’t indoctrinating students with liberal ideas. I mean, that’s sort of the parlance in which I hear politicians talk about this. Is that sort of your feeling?

Emma Pettit Yeah, totally. That’s the rub.

Jack Stripling So you did have an opportunity to talk to the chancellor of the state university system about the law and the implementation of it. What did he have to say?

Emma Pettit He told us that he had heard from lawmakers concerns from parents of students who were going off to college and who were arriving home for Thanksgiving after beginning their freshman fall semester who would be sitting around the dinner table and just communicating, quote, cultural Marxism, beliefs or ideas that they’d never spouted before which suggested that it was something at college that they were learning. And the chancellor told us that that basically led parents to ask themselves and then ask lawmakers, what am I paying for? The chancellor also referenced some recent findings from Gallup that are pretty interesting. They show that the public’s confidence in higher ed has just dropped really significantly over recent years. And the concern related to the sector’s supposed rigid political agenda was actually the top reason that was cited in the poll that was released last year. So he told us that when a state like Florida can say that they’ve eliminated these unproven concepts from general education, thereby, you know, relegating them to either electives or majors that puts Florida in a position to say, quote, we are addressing the number one concern the American public has expressed about higher education. So the chancellor really sees this law as a way of taking skepticism towards higher ed and what it’s actually teaching head on and addressing the concerns that parents have really communicated, at least to Florida lawmakers, about what their kids are learning.

Jack Stripling So he’s saying we’re responding to our constituents?

Emma Pettit Yeah, exactly.

Jack Stripling And so the law passes, higher education gets its marching orders: purge your core general education curriculum of courses that teach identity politics. Easier said than done, I guess. How do colleges and universities respond to that?

Emma Pettit So through spreadsheets, basically. Every university got a spreadsheet that listed all of its gen ed offerings and they had to go and mark each course either reviewed in light of the law, no updates, reviewed, updated, or reviewed and removed from general education. And it bears mentioning they were all on this timeline for when their presidents and their boards of trustees had to approve the list. And there was money on the line. If they didn’t comply with SB 266, they risked some state funding. So the pressure was on. So the actual reviews itself looked a bit different from university to university, but they included the faculty, they included committees. Universities, you know, love committees, and they included a lot of back and forth between the provost office and departments. But basically what we learned is somewhere along the line, campus officials started having a good amount of back and forth with employees who work for the Board of Governors office of the State University System. And that’s according to public records that we obtained.

Jack Stripling And this is a systemwide governing board, right?

Emma Pettit Correct. The Board of Governors oversees the state of Florida’s 12 universities.

Jack Stripling I see. So you filed public records requests for email communications, things like that?

Emma Pettit Yeah, it seemed like most of the campuses had basically a point person, a main administrator who was trying to wrangle this massive task of reviewing sometimes hundreds of courses for compliance with this new and frankly pretty ambiguous and fuzzy state law. So once you know who that is and once you know who the employees in the Board of Governors office are, you can file pretty easy records requests.

Jack Stripling So what did you get back? Were there illustrative examples in these records that gave you some sense of how colleges were responding? What sorts of questions they were asking?

Emma Pettit It seemed like when I was reading through the records, I just kept thinking the word confusing, question mark. I mean, I should say the administrators whose emails we obtained declined to talk to us or just didn’t respond. I can’t read their minds, but I can imagine that they were occasionally thinking, huh? Or hmm, this seems a little bit vague, and I guess I’ll give a concrete example. At the University of West Florida, Dallas Snider, who’s the vice provost there, at some point in time was told about five courses that seemed to be problematic in some way. They learned that they might not comply with this law. So he wrote to one of the Board of Governors employees, quote, “Would you please provide more details about the issues? We don’t want to put in the time and effort to make changes and then be told we made the wrong changes. We are trying to get this right the first time.” And unfortunately for Snider, they didn’t get it right the first time. Trustees at the University of West Florida actually voted on a revised course list only to learn of more problems, of more potential conflicts with the law. So in August, Snider got a spreadsheet from a governing board employee that listed 18 courses that, quote, We had some additional questions about after our review. And they flagged various issues about those courses. Let’s see. There was the Intro to Poetry courses description that didn’t include selections from the Western canon reference of the law. There was a course called Basic Communication Skills that had no, that’s just marked No Western Canon. And then it gets even vaguer. Some other courses like Introduction to Machine Learning were told they needed to, quote, confirm that they met certain criteria of state law. The word confirm appears a lot in these records.

Jack Stripling So, you have a bunch of university people who seem confused about a new law. And the main message they’re hearing from the outside is: Confirm you’re complying. Sounds pretty ominous.

Emma Pettit Yeah. One would think. I’m just imagining myself as a university employee who’s trying to review all the things that we have in general education. Ideally keep a lot of the things that we want in general education, because normally these are things that are decided by the faculty or by committees in the universities themselves. And then just getting this feedback that just says, essentially, to confirm compliance with this law, we need you to confirm compliance with this law and just going… I mean, I personally would be a little bit frustrated by that or just confused by what exactly that means.

Jack Stripling And these don’t sound like they’re all courses that are called Cultural Marxism in America or How to Be a Better Liberal Protester. Machine Learning’s in here. They’re looking under the hood at everything.

Emma Pettit Yeah. Yeah, they are. And, you know, a lot of the review seemed focused on SB 266 past descriptions of what humanities core courses should be or what natural science core courses should be. So a lot of it seemed to be just updating course language and course descriptions to align with the law, which is, you know, a pain, bureaucratic, but not really ideological in any way. There was one university where we got the most insight into actual concerns that were communicated to a university administrator.

Jack Stripling Tell me about that.

Emma Pettit Right, so I’m talking about Florida International University. So there is an administrator there, Jennifer Doherty-Restrepo, who is the main point person for helping the institution comply with this law. And she gets a spreadsheet that’s pretty similar to the one that Dallas Snider received at the University of West Florida. You know, it has words like “confirm” in it. And she tells professors at a Faculty Senate meeting that she didn’t know what to do with that. It was vague written comments. And so she decided to get on the phone and she tells professors at this Faculty Senate meeting that she spent an hour and a half on the phone with a Board of Governors employee, who she didn’t name, going line by line through each of the courses that they had flagged for additional review. And while they went line by line through those courses, she said that she was taking notes. And in our records request, we got another spreadsheet that was written by Doherty-Restrepo that appears to contain the concerns that were communicated to her. Though I should say, the spreadsheet doesn’t say who said what.

Jack Stripling OK, so we don’t know who’s telling her they’re concerned or why.

Emma No.

Jack But some outside entity is looking at these courses and saying, hey, this sounds a little Marxist.

Emma Pettit Well, I guess I’ll let listeners be the judge of that. But yeah, I can run down some of the comments that were in the spreadsheet. So one that caught my eye, there was a course called Labor and Globalization. And the comment was that it is, quote, too focused on struggles/challenges of those in low wage jobs and should be revised. There are two other courses, The Basic Ideas of Sociology and then a course called Global Women’s Writing: Gendered Experiences Across Societies and Cultures. And those are described as being, quote, too focused on women and the advice is to remove them from the general education curriculum. And then there’s a sociology course called Social Problems that should be removed, quote, due to the premise of the course. And the course description says it examines problems through contemporary and historical lenses that occur in health care, criminal justice, the economy, war, social stratification, et cetera.

Jack Stripling So going back to the wording of the law, which talks about getting rid of identity politics, courses that are heavily focused on women might not pass muster?

Emma Pettit Yeah, I think that’s a fair conclusion to reach. And again, I should say we don’t know who exactly communicated this feedback, but it seems like there were certain ideas or certain perspectives that were being advanced in these courses that someone somewhere was saying, hey, this doesn’t fly with this new law.

Jack Stripling So in the end, how many courses did Florida purge from its curricula?

Emma Pettit So we actually don’t know how many were purged from the universities. We don’t have access to all of their starting points. But a lot, a lot were kicked out. So the University of Florida, for example, went from around 1,200 courses to around 290 that qualify for gen ed. It’s important to say that these courses aren’t kicked out of the curriculum writ large. They’re still, of course, available on offer to students, but they just don’t fulfill gen ed requirements anymore. And I should say many, many courses that were kicked out through this process were kicked out because they hadn’t been offered in years or were part of a data cleanup. So for reasons unrelated to SB 266. But some were chopped or seem to have been chopped because of their content.

Jack Stripling I see.

Emma Pettit And then the Florida state colleges, there’s 28 of them. The Department of Education put out a press release that there was a 57 percent decrease in the number of courses that have a gen ed designation before and after this culling process. So quite a bit, quite a bit on the cutting room floor.

Jack Stripling Wow. When you talk to supporters of this law, how do they justify it?

Emma Pettit So I think supporters would point to something I just said, which is that the University of Florida went from around 1,200 courses that fulfill some gen ed requirement to around 290. And I think the supporters would say, you know, 1,200 courses that all count towards what’s supposed to be the foundation of any undergraduate’s, you know, collegiate education. Really? Like, is that not a symptom of a university that is just letting their general education just balloon into this ill-thought-out elective sprawl that’s just totally unfocused? You know, I think that there’s a lot of criticism of gen ed and higher ed in general, which is that it’s generally additive rather than subtractive. And there are all sorts of incentives for adding more courses to gen ed than there are for thinking critically about what to prune. You know, if you’re a professor who wants to get butts in seats and you want to teach about some esoteric topic, you know, there are good reasons to apply or to ask for your course to count towards gen ed. So if you’re someone who thinks the gen ed curriculum at a university should really teach students foundational entry-level, not esoteric lessons about math or history or science or the humanities, then you might look at that 1,200 number and just think, wow, there are an awful lot of courses on that list that you’d be glad to see go.

Jack Stripling Stick around. We’ll be back in a minute.

BREAK

Jack Stripling Emma, we’ve been talking about why a general education curriculum might balloon. And there may be some rather apolitical reasons for narrowing what’s offered in gen ed. But I think there’s another debate going on, which is about what gen ed is for. If it’s about competency, then you could argue students can gain certain skills regardless of what’s being studied. You can learn critical thinking in a course about comic books, I guess. But if gen ed is really about content, you could argue that Ben Franklin is more important than comic books — so we’re cutting comic books. What do you think the gen ed reformers really want?

Emma Pettit So gen ed is like a third rail of higher education. You know, there have been debates, you know, boisterous and vicious and in our pages that have gone on forever about what should qualify towards general education. Should it be this focus on, you know, the Western intellectual tradition? Should we set up young people to understand the great works of history and to learn these larger narratives of who we are and where we came from, from figures like Plato and Locke? Or does that focus on those types of works and that intellectual tradition leave out great writers and great thinkers from marginalized backgrounds or women in a way that they shouldn’t be? In a way that, you know, students are not served in living in today’s society. This has been a continuous back and forth that’s gone on for years and years and years, certainly longer than I’ve been at The Chronicle for. And then there’s this other kind of push and pull between do we tailor a general education curriculum towards getting students prepared for the workforce and focusing on job specific training and kind of that competencies element that you were talking about. Leadership or communication or public speaking or all of these skills that could make someone more employable in order to show that there’s this real return on investment. Or do you think that college should not be just for turning a student into a worker with practical skills? Do you want them to, you know, explore niche, interesting texts, comic books, or just, you know, anything that they might find interesting that someone could say is a little frivolous or extraneous, but that might really deepen their understanding of themselves. You know, these are themes and these are tensions that have existed for a long time when we talk about general education.

Jack Stripling And I think part of college is sort of an act of discovery, right? And there’s got to be some concern that if we greatly constrict what’s in general education, then we disallow the type of discovery that might happen if a student wanders into an anthropology course who had never considered that field of study but then gets excited about it.

Emma Pettit Yeah, of course. I mean, I was thinking about my own college education. I went to Villanova and there’s a good number of courses related to ethics and philosophy and religion and theology that are required as part of the core curriculum there. And you know, it’s interesting, it’s actually the opposite of wandering in that I was forced to take a course on ethics. I was forced to take a course on philosophy. And I actually don’t know if I would have enrolled in such a course for myself, but I ended up really enjoying those classes. And I ended up really enjoying debating with my fellow students about, you know, Locke and Hume and all these thinkers and, you know, who was defining the good life the best. At the same time, you know, as a student, I loved choosing for myself random things that just sparkled to me or called to me in this way. And I think that anyone who’s thinking about education probably acknowledges that there is a bit of both that goes into, you know, setting up students for success. But I think a lot of supporters of this law would argue that actually we’re giving students too much choice or the menu of options that faculty have set out for students does not make for a satisfying meal. They would say that we’ve wandered away from these, you know, fundamental ideas about America’s founding or the Bill of Rights or the Western intellectual tradition that students need to take. It’s kind of like broccoli versus letting students just take, you know, a bunch of desserts for their courses.

Jack Stripling I think there’s a political dimension to this conversation about the Western canon and having students exposed to it. It’s often viewed, I think, by faculty as sort of a conservative idea. Have you talked to people who have that feeling?

Emma Pettit Yeah, I’ve talked to people who have that feeling. I’ve talked to people who I think would identify as education conservatives who feel that way. I think like with anything that gets a political label in higher education, there’s a lot more bleeding around the border than can really be captured by saying, oh, it’s a conservative idea. But yes, it’s certainly conservative coded now, in part because it’s Republican legislatures that have largely led the effort to set up these civics centers or these centers that are attached to public universities that focus on the Western canon. I think there’s this idea that something has been really lost through the development of college and through the development of the general education that we’ve wandered away from thinking about these classic works in favor of what they would see as either frivolous or watered down or...

Jack Stripling Or trendy ideas.

Emma Pettit Or trendy, right, right. It’s this greater push and pull between tradition and progression, I guess, of how much new do you incorporate before you’ve thwarted the thing entirely.

Jack Stripling So we know that faculty care deeply about what gets taught on their campuses, how it’s taught, who gets to teach it. They probably care deeply about whether it’s in gen ed or not. What do faculty think about this new law in Florida?

Emma Pettit Yeah, they’re pissed. They’re really, really upset. They think that the faculty writ large should be in the driver’s seat when it comes to deciding what’s in the curriculum. As one professor put it to me, it should not be, quote, state bureaucrats who are politically motivated. They worry that without their courses counting towards gen ed credit, students will be disincentivized from taking them. And that limits their exposure to new ideas and opportunities for discovery. And they’re really worried that these courses will die on the vine if they’re purged from gen ed. And that will have a ripple effect both on students’ education, but also on their department’s bottom line.

Jack Stripling Hmm. So if it’s only available to people who are majoring in a certain area, we can conclude that fewer students might take it. Courses like that might not exist anymore after this.

Emma Pettit Yeah, of course. You know, one university president did say at a public meeting that in removing these courses from gen ed, we’re not hiding them from students. And that’s true. They will still show up in a course catalog. But it’s just a fact of life that if something doesn’t count towards a requirement and students are under great pressure to graduate as soon as possible and, you know, not rack up any more debt or just get out into the workforce, that anything that doesn’t fulfill a requirement towards their major or towards gen ed really goes down on the list of priorities.

Jack Stripling And I think at a fundamental level, you know, we talk about faculty autonomy and deciding what goes on in a classroom. But it seems to me that all of these fights in Florida are really about, you know, are we going to have politicians and their appointees on governing boards decide what gets taught in classrooms? Or are we going to leave that to people who have PhDs who teach day in and day out on these campuses? It feels like that is a unifying theme of the fights happening in Florida and elsewhere.

Emma Pettit Yes, absolutely. And I think that’s a big unifying theme and just the loss of trust in higher ed that’s going on right now. I think that people who are skeptical of, you know, boards and politicians making those decisions, I mean, most faculty members fall into that camp, at least from my interviews, would say they don’t know anything. They don’t know anything about what should count towards gen ed. They don’t know anything about, you know, my discipline. Like, get your hands off of my syllabus or get your hands out of my curriculum. I’m the one who went to school for so long in order to be able to make these decisions in my domain. The other side would say we need this intervention because you, the faculty at large, have messed up so badly. So they would say, look at the sprawl of a gen ed curriculum that you created or look at these incorporations of DEI principles that have suffused themselves throughout gen ed and would say, we trusted you and we don’t like what you’ve done. We hate it. In fact, we’re very skeptical of what you’ve brought to the table. And so now it’s time for other people to take their turn. And those other people are elected lawmakers and appointed board members who are responsive to the public in ways that hired faculty members are not.

Jack Stripling That’s really interesting. Yeah. So a lot of the things we’re kind of seeing nationally right now — a loss of faith in higher education, a loss of faith in institutions more broadly, perhaps a strain of anti-intellectualism — they’re all at play here. The article that you and Megan published on this described what’s happening in Florida as, quote, one of the most sweeping attempts to regulate college’s curricula in recent memory. Why is this an important story in your view, Emma?

Emma Pettit Well, I think that aside from just Florida educating a massive amount of students, so this law actually having like a huge effect on the day in and day out educational experience of a ton of students in America, Florida has just been this proving ground for education reform that then takes hold in other parts of the country. And I think it really stands to reason that skepticism of gen ed and skepticism of the faculty’s ability to discern and determine what goes in gen ed, that skepticism is spreading.

I want to point out this 2024 report from this organization called Speech First. They took a look at 248 colleges’ general education requirements and found that 165 of them required students to take a DEI-related course in order to graduate. And among those 165 courses, 98 of those are public. So you can look at the spread of gen ed requirements, you know, incorporating DEI principles, and you can look at the skepticism towards DEI that we’re seeing. I mean, skepticism sounds like even just an understatement. We’re looking at real hostility towards DEI and higher ed’s embrace of it. And you can see just how many public colleges have incorporated DEI into their gen ed. The writing’s on the wall. This is going to be, I think, a big fight or at least something that states are really going to focus on taking Florida’s lead.

Jack Stripling But isn’t this different looking into the curricula? It’s one thing to say the DEI office is a problem and let’s get rid of their staff. When we talk about DEI within courses, then we’re saying any course that has women in the title, any course that has African-American in the title, any course that has gender in the title, is subject to suspicion. That’s a little different, isn’t it, than saying this DEI office, this bureaucratic arm is something we ought to rein in?

Emma Pettit Yeah, I think that it is different. You know, curriculum is the heart of what a university does or what a university is supposed to do. Now, I think that defenders of Florida’s law and Florida’s process would say we didn’t just do that. We didn’t just press our air horns whenever we saw the word gender. We actually looked at the course description. We looked at the syllabi in some cases and said, made judgment calls as to when something seemed too tilted into identity politics or indoctrination or distortions of significant historical events or whatever, that we deem inappropriate for students to learn. I think that they would say it was more nuanced than that. That being said, yes, curriculum is quite different I think than just closing an office, even though these offices did a lot of things and had on some campuses it seems like a lot of reach. Curriculum strikes at the heart of what a university does. It’s an essential function and you’re seeing lawmakers becoming more interested in legislating on that.

Jack Stripling As you say, Florida is a bellwether state in a lot of ways and what happens here may happen elsewhere in the country in the days to come. Thanks so much for coming on the show to talk about this. I appreciate it, Emma.

Emma Pettit It was my pleasure.

Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, Laura Krantz, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.