Great Books and Great Minds

In 2018, Phelosha Collaros, a senior leader at St. John's College, faced a social media firestorm after announcing the college president’s upcoming appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show.  The announcement, which aimed to showcase the college’s commitment to ideological diversity and civil dialogue, sparked intense backlash, with personal attacks and divided reactions from alumni and parents. Collaros became the face of the controversy as both sides of the political spectrum expressed concerns about the college's direction.

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Transcript

Michael Lee: [00:00:00] When We Disagree is a show about arguments, how we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. Lots of public speeches begin with a quotation from a famous person, say Mark Twain or Abe Lincoln or Susan B. Anthony or some other luminary. On the one hand, this tactic can be a good way to capture the audience's attention and leave the speaker some credibility.

Michael Lee: On the other hand, these opening quotations are often a specific type of logical fallacy called an appeal to authority. The fallacy happens. When someone argues that a claim is true, simply because an authority figure or expert said it. But here's the catch, just because someone's considered an expert doesn't automatically make their argument or advice valid.

Michael Lee: These kinds of appeals are everywhere. Think of celebrity endorsements. Think of old school cigarette ads with a picture of a doctor on it. Think of more modern toothpaste ads saying 4 out of 5 dentists [00:01:00] prefer this brand. Let's say a popular fitness influencer with millions of followers. Posts a video saying something like high repetition, weight training four times a week is key to losing weight while building muscle.

Michael Lee: Somewhere, someone is thinking, maybe even subconsciously, well this person looks great, made the claim really confidently and has millions of followers. So they've succumbed to this influencer's tacit appeal to their own authority. Just because the influencer has a big platform doesn't mean their workout plan is scientifically proven or suitable for everyone.

Michael Lee: The argument is being accepted because of this person's position, maybe even this person's looks, not the actual merit of the advice. But the appeal to authority is really a tricky one. We need experts. We need good sources. We need credible methods to sort out complicated issues. But, just by saying this, am I not appealing to authorities, and thereby committing the same fallacy I'm [00:02:00] discussing in real time?

Michael Lee: Here's the trick. We need to separate fake experts from real ones, charlatans from specialists, as well as people who know what worked for them versus people who have studied something from lots of different points of views, not just their own experience. What I'm talking about here is broad expertise, as opposed to narrow, Experience based insight.

Michael Lee: Moreover, we need to watch out for over investing in one expert. Let experts check other experts. Relying on authority figures without questioning their expertise or evaluating their evidence can lead us to make decisions based on popularity. Just because someone's famous or they've had some success with something doesn't mean their advice is universally reliable.

Michael Lee: I'm Michael Lee, Professor of Communication and Director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston. Our guest on When We Disagree is Felocia Calaros. Felocia is the Vice President for Board Governance and Strategic [00:03:00] Outcomes at St. John's College, and Felocia is the founder of DepolarWise.

Michael Lee: com, an educational platform to help people understand depolarization in the United States. Tell us an argument story. 

Phelosha Collaros: Thank you so much for having me, Michael. I would be happy to. Um, my, my argument story starts actually in 2018. It was, um, you know, shortly after we were kind of getting. Into the mode of, uh, online cancel culture and having some ramifications as a school where we had a lot more accountability and voice through our online platforms that we just kind of been prepared for before add to that, that we decided we wanted a lot more exposure for the school.

Phelosha Collaros: school. So those two things, uh, cumulated into a very interesting event in summer of 2018, where we had, um, two [00:04:00] opportunities going one, which was overt and the other, which was in progress. So the overt one was that I was part of the senior team that decided my then boss, uh, president Mark Roosevelt, who is yes.

Phelosha Collaros: The great grandson of Teddy Roosevelt and had run as a Democratic gubernatorial candidate. We decided he was going to appear on Tucker Carlson to talk up St. John's College. 

Okay. 

Phelosha Collaros: We also had in the background, um, uh, planned a visit from Frank Bruni from the New York Times, who was going to. Write an opinion piece about us.

Phelosha Collaros: So in our mind, we were upholding the values of the college, which is that we strongly, you know, um, are strong proponents of ideological diversity and talking across difference. But as you know, TV moves a lot faster than print. So we ended up announcing our president's appearance on Tucker Carlson. Far before the New York Times piece came out and it was an absolute, um, explosion on our social media sites.

Phelosha Collaros: I became a face of that explosion and that experience is [00:05:00] something that stuck with me. 

Michael Lee: Uh, okay. I have a lot of questions. Let's start at the beginning. Um, St. John's, for those of us who don't know, St. John's is part of a great books tradition, if I'm not mistaken, and absolutely a proponent of the liberal arts.

Michael Lee: Um, in the, in the loosest sense of liberal, meaning lots of viewpoint diversity, lots of skepticism, lots of questions, almost like education based on dispute, debate, and the nurturing of controversy. Do I have that right? 

Phelosha Collaros: Yeah, I would say we're an education, innovation and disruption. So you take the curriculum through the history of time, you know, starting from the ancient Greeks all the way, you know, through Einstein and, um, you're really looking at beliefs, what people believe to be true at the time.

Phelosha Collaros: And then this major disruption comes through and people recalibrate to that. And we see that recalibration in an integrated way. So we don't have specializations, we don't have majors. Everyone is forced to take. Yeah. You know, the math, the sciences, the [00:06:00] art, the history, and we see how that argument basically, as history evolves, becomes this kind of turn of new ideas and new realities.

Phelosha Collaros: So we, we think. Our alumni have a real grasp on how to deal with disruption, a real grasp on civil dialogue and an education in democracy. 

Right? 

Phelosha Collaros: And so we were caught unprepared in many ways for what happened after the announcement. 

Michael Lee: And you're also. At the same time, dedicated to this curriculum, this history of, of argumentative thought curriculum, and you're also trying to curry some additional favor and get some good publicity for the school using that.

Michael Lee: And so you're taking opportunities to go on prominent talk shows with your president, et cetera, and so. How did the, how did this interview with Tucker Carlson come about? Or did Tucker invite you on the show? What was the backstory there? 

Phelosha Collaros: Yes. [00:07:00] So we were pitching simultaneously again, according with our values, different ideological platforms.

Phelosha Collaros: Right. So again, the New York times was one of them and Fox was another one of them so that we could reach a broad based audience. We, we. We want to be a place that is welcoming of different families from different backgrounds, because we feel like every student should be able to find a home at St.

Phelosha Collaros: John's. This curriculum is for them. We want to welcome them. 

Michael Lee: So before your president, Mark Roosevelt goes on Tucker, what happens? 

Phelosha Collaros: Well, we announced that we are going on Tucker. Now I will say the only good thing about it. Was that, um, it was very shortly, uh, before the appearance, so we didn't announce this, you know, and that's pretty typical because, you know, that kind of prominent media outlet thinks and change you.

Phelosha Collaros: You don't know it's locked in until it's locked in. So I would say it was maybe like 24 to 48 hours before the actual appearance. And this is again, I would for context, you know, 2018. This is a time at which [00:08:00] Tucker Carlson had shortly taken over. This meet this, uh, show and it wasn't the Tucker we came to know later that was even too extreme for Fox News.

Phelosha Collaros: So we had to, we thought that this was a prominent media outlet. We were going to reach millions of viewers and we were going to also have, um, you know, points of view from other media outlets that would be coming out. 

Michael Lee: And how did you become the face of this? 

Phelosha Collaros: So I think partly it was because I, um, although I had a career in corporate philanthropy and association management, I was an alumna of the college.

Phelosha Collaros: And I had been, I had been president of the alumni association before I actually came and took a position as a vice president there. And I was on all of our social media platforms. As a volunteer, and then as a alumni associate president, and then as a staff person, I was kind of somebody who interacted a lot with our alumni through those mediums.

Phelosha Collaros: Um, the other answer is, I think no one else [00:09:00] attempted to go into that fray and steer the conversation. So I just remember hours of, on the one hand, personal attacks, which was new for me. You know, I've kind of been used to an environment where you. Address ideas and disagree about ideas and context, not the personal attacks.

Phelosha Collaros: That was a that was a revelation. And then after the kind of explosion on social media from our alumni on the left, our parents and alumni on the right began to write in. Mostly through email saying, if this is the community you're creating, we're considering withdrawing our students. We're considering withdrawing our donations.

Phelosha Collaros: So now you have both populations because we are a very ideological diverse school coming in and seeing this event as a real fracture to our community. 

Michael Lee: Uh, just to get a flavor of the arguments that you're dealing with, what was being said by your more liberal alums? What was being said by your more conservative alums?

Phelosha Collaros: Right. I think another thing I was unprepared [00:10:00] for was that society had taken a turn into a mentality that conversation is complicity. And so here we are in the first Trump administration, right? There's a lot of sensitivity around that. Um. Our president by even appearing on Tucker Carlson was somehow endorsing views from the right views from the Trump administration that our alumni on the, you know, the, especially the farthest left spectrum found important and just being in conversation was.

Phelosha Collaros: Was a way of validating this position that they found was, um, just unacceptable. 

Michael Lee: That's right. There's a kind of an associative guilt that we assume in this culture where we're trending towards some kind of personal and tribal purification where If you and I are friends, but then I learned that one of your friends friends did something that I find politically disagreeable, then I have to unfriend all of [00:11:00] you.

Michael Lee: Otherwise, risk validating the whole project by dent of my association with you four degrees removed from Kevin Bacon and so forth. 

Phelosha Collaros: Yes, absolutely. That was the era. That was the burgeoning era, right? I think in retrospect, now we see like, Oh, You know, it all kind of has a continuity of what happened to our culture.

Phelosha Collaros: But at that moment, it was, it was emerging and, um, a bit, you know, shocking and discombobulating that that's where we come. Mind you, you know, our president, uh, Mark Roosevelt, you know, had run as a Democrat in, in Massachusetts, you know, he was ready to go on Tucker Carlson and have a little bit of a fisticuffs with him, you know, but nobody has this context.

Phelosha Collaros: They, they're just knowing that he's appearing on the show and that therefore that validates the show that validates. It's the network that validates a point of view that they highly disagree with. 

I 

Phelosha Collaros: would say the community on the more right side of the spectrum, just maybe they, uh, got caught up in that emerging narrative.

Phelosha Collaros: Also that schools were swinging [00:12:00] extremely left and that the comments on social media they were seeing were just proving we were producing some kind of population or mindset. In this direction, they suddenly felt not welcome at the school. If that was the, the, the, uh, kind of tenor and tone of the alumni body.

Phelosha Collaros: And again. You know, we're seeing a piece in any one of these moments, we're seeing a slice of a very vocal group, whether it's on the right or on the left, but that becomes kind of a emblematic of what St. John's community is. And so looking at that from different perspectives, you were either angry or afraid and feeling like this wasn't your school anymore.

Michael Lee: Did you feel like these communities had anything in common? I mean, they obviously have different icons and saints and they feel differently about the then president and future president, um, and Tucker Carlson and maybe taxation and military policy and all sorts of stuff. But [00:13:00] was there anything that united them either in the way they argued or what they argued about or what their ultimate goals were?

Michael Lee: They're 

Phelosha Collaros: incredibly smart people. Here's the thing. We, we produce alumni that are incredibly discerning, um, very articulate, um, very capable, right. And have a sense of courage that they can tackle anything because we make them tackle anything when they're here at the school. So to send those people out in the world with kind of a fearlessness and a confidence.

Phelosha Collaros: that they have discerned reality correctly. Um, that's a fun thing to get back at you once they're out because they are very smart people. I think what surprised me the most was the more ad hominem attacks that were, you know, you should be ashamed of yourself. You know, those, those kinds of things didn't feel in keeping or in character with our alumni body.

Phelosha Collaros: So we have, you know, to. You know, two burgeoning, I mean, two, two very ideologically diverse sides of this, [00:14:00] both of them very smart, very articulate, uh, you know, have cases to explain how they're feeling, you know, uh, have complaints about how we've handled it, have complaints about what the school was that they thought their school was and now is not.

Phelosha Collaros: And then I think for me, it was just being Well, I had a naivete and the naivete was if you spend four years at this college or more, you are going to somehow be inoculated against. Um, you know, fear, aggression, herd mentality. You're going to be above that. And so to, to really reckon with the fact that we are just as vulnerable to these societal trends and this tribalism as anyone else, and that really having a civil dialogue mentality or depolarization mindset is a daily practice.

Phelosha Collaros: It's not that you go somewhere, you get inoculated, you come out and now you're able to kind of transcend society. We're all human. And I think that recognition recognition for me [00:15:00] of that humanity brought with it, a sense of compassion that, um, you know, I was dealing with humans that were in pain, that's another thing that they had in common on both sides, but they somehow were in pain and that that was more important than anything.

Phelosha Collaros: Maybe I was experiencing personally, could I. Could I help with that? Maybe was my question and not just be feeling somehow assaulted or, you know, somehow diminished in, in my role in engaging with these communities. 

Michael Lee: Well, how'd the interview go? 

Phelosha Collaros: So funnily, the interview went Fine, you know, there wasn't 1st of all, it's network television short.

Phelosha Collaros: Um, there were some questions about what St. John's did and why it did it that way. And, uh, you know, really gave Mark Roosevelt a platform to talk about the school and, um, Tucker Carlson was very complimentary, which. That's a double edged sword. And then the interview ended with President Roosevelt saying, Well, Tucker, I think we probably [00:16:00] disagree on everything else, but it's good to know we agree on St.

Phelosha Collaros: John's College. 

Okay. 

Phelosha Collaros: So, I would say the reaction to the interview was interesting. Um, there were people that actually had the grace to come back and say, You were right. We should have just waited and saw it and withheld our reaction until the interview was actually out there. There was others who disappeared and I, you know, didn't ever engage with them again.

Michael Lee: Well, I think I might know the answer to this question before I ask it, but I'm going to ask it anyway, which is Um, was it worth it? And I mean, was it worth it on two levels? First, was it worth it politically in terms of the blowback or potential bad PR that you got both nationally and with your alums who who seems like they were kind of stirred up in a hornet's nest there?

Michael Lee: And then also, was it worth it? ideologically, in the sense of, was this a good [00:17:00] example of broad minded controversy, nurturing debate, seeking civil dialogue, 

Phelosha Collaros: right? You know, I think that that answer may be very different at the time and very different in hindsight, right? So in hindsight, when you know the terminus point of what happened to Tucker Carlson and, you know, like there's.

Phelosha Collaros: Maybe more, we would maybe have made a different calculation in 2022 than we made in 2018. Right at the time in 2018. I think we, what was worth it was that we were walking the talk. And so it is. Maybe well, it's much easier to say that you're an ideological diverse community and that you believe in civil discourse and and it's much different thing to stick your neck out there and do it.

Phelosha Collaros: Um, yeah, so I think that there. We did get, I will tell you, um, from a more, uh, mercenary perspective, it had its [00:18:00] positive effect in terms of awareness visits to our website, kind of, you know, like putting us on the map in a way we hadn't been before. And then the New York Times piece coming just a couple months later, book ended that.

Phelosha Collaros: So we were on the map in a way the college never had been before and getting more interest, more applications, more views than we ever had before. So I think, yeah. That promise prominence from just a basic business perspective. You can't buy that kind. We couldn't buy that PR. We are a small coach on a budget.

Phelosha Collaros: We couldn't buy that PR. So it was worth it from an exposure standpoint and just, and just elevating the college to a level of attention that we'd never seen before in both the left and the right. Was it worth it from a culture standpoint? My view on that is if it wasn't the Tucker appearance, it would have been something else.

Phelosha Collaros: It is very difficult to hold together an organization that is a proponent of ideological diversity. [00:19:00] And in this time, I'm hoping that the time will swing back to a different time. But during that, those years, you know, between 2018 and, and, and through that, throughout the pandemic, there was going to be a trigger point, a flashpoint in our community that is so diverse, you know.

Phelosha Collaros: We're not a school that takes the political stand. And there are those schools that are much more validly on the left or the right. We were trying to walk a center line and we were trying to demonstrate what that looks like. And that that at some point was not going to be easy. 

Michael Lee: Yeah, that sort of gets me to it.

Michael Lee: But the practical and a philosophical question, which is about the limits of ideological diversity, you've said a few times that this choice in 2018 to go on Tucker Carlson's show might have been different in 2022, which implies that there is kind of some limit to the associations that you're willing to do.

Michael Lee: Yeah. Curry the things you're willing to expose your college [00:20:00] students and presidents to which then implies that they're at some point viewpoint diversity becomes too diverse. 

Phelosha Collaros: That is the rub, isn't it? And I know personally. That I am struggling with the answer because it's very personally important to me.

Yeah. 

Phelosha Collaros: Of how we dignify humanity in everyone without dignifying maybe a, a, a position or a stance like misinformation or prejudice that you don't want to, um. To be a proponent of right that you actually want to work on the, on the end. 

And 

Phelosha Collaros: so that, that to me is, it's a fundamental question of our age is how do we separate human dignity from the kind of complicity, um, the kind of like, like over tolerance of, of destructive forces in, in society.

Phelosha Collaros: That is, that's very, very tough. 

Michael Lee: Yeah, and [00:21:00] just to take sort of y'all's point of view right back at you, which is to say that if conversation is not complicity, then going on any person's show is not dignifying misinformation, is not endorsing the broader swath of their opinions that they share when you're not in conversation with them, and is also this issue of platforming that you were talking about.

Michael Lee: We have a problem of persuasion as well, which is How do we reach the very people that we need to reach if we don't go where they are? And that means that you have to sometimes go on television shows or talk shows or podcasts and speak to people with whom you might have horrific disagreements with.

Michael Lee: And so my point is, and this is again taking y'all's point back at you on this question of whether you would go on Tucker in 22 or Tucker in 24 or Tucker in 25. Which is to say that if you're trying to walk the talk, as you say, then it's [00:22:00] actually where you walk. The talk best is where you have to make the most difficult determinations about whether to go on somebody's potentially problematic show.

Michael Lee: So going on Tucker in 22 or 24 is actually more an example of walking the talk than it would've been an 18. 

Phelosha Collaros: I think that's true. And I wonder, you know, it's, it's funny in that kind of alternative reality, would we ended up making the same decision? We may have, it may have just been a harder decision to make.

Phelosha Collaros: And we would have had to told our, our narrative to ourself again, in a more powerful way. It was easier to your point, easier to make that decision in 2018, despite the kind of implosion that we had on both sides of our community through that experience. But, um, but yeah, those decisions are getting harder.

Yeah. 

Phelosha Collaros: Um, I'm hopeful. That how you described it is the right way to think about it is that conversation is the bare minimum that we can do to have a collective reality and a collective direction to solve problems. Right? [00:23:00] So, if we are going to change. Our perspectives on both sides that there's no way to do that without being in some kind of relationship.

Phelosha Collaros: We need to be in relationship and that how to be in relationship without conversation. Um, it doesn't seem possible to me. 

Michael Lee: Yeah. And it is a kind of recognition of the political landscape that we live in too, which, which is to say, we often like to think of these things as red states, blue states, political tribes, Republicans, Democrats, et cetera.

Michael Lee: And those are really massive, important differences, mega identities, some have theorized, but there's also a kind of liberalism versus illiberalism and openness to dispute, dispute, debate. Conversation amongst disagreement, civility, wide exposure, curiosity, humility on the one side, and then a more shut off, cloistered, cancelatory, restrictive, tribalized view on the other side of that illiberalism.

Michael Lee: The force of [00:24:00] illiberalism can exist on the left and the right. In other words, it's not a red state, blue state thing. It is the kind of Ouroboros where the snake eats its tail. And it's really difficult to see differences between the left and right. 

Phelosha Collaros: That's absolutely true. I, you know, I think that, um, we need to recognize no matter what our political ideology is, the vulnerabilities of that tribalism.

Phelosha Collaros: It is not just existing on 1 side or the other. You know, this experience was. Was profound to me, and it actually started to deepen my desire to do something like to polarize dot com because I've been kind of always resistant to that deep political identity. When I registered to vote, I registered as an independent at 18.

Phelosha Collaros: there was something about just the, this idea of alliance in a way that is. So I did like part of your identity that had always been a little uncomfortable to me. I come to learn, um, not until 20, you know, around 2016, when my mother started speaking about it [00:25:00] more that our legacy in Columbia was, uh, grandparents.

Phelosha Collaros: One was a liberal and one was a conservator. They married at a time when the partisan, uh, you know, uh, Antipathy in Colombia was a little bit less, but as the conflict between these 2 groups, the conservative and the liberals increased to the point at which 200, 000 people died in Bogota burned, which is now called the lovey.

Phelosha Collaros: They were in a mixed marriage and could not keep their family safe. They were going from a liberal town to a conservative town, and there was really no place anymore where they were where people weren't being purged in some way or the other because of their political identity. Now, there's a lot of identity stacking there.

Phelosha Collaros: academics have stripped it apart to find out what role class played, what role race played, what role regional identity played. But the macro conflict was between liberals and conservatives. And I come from a family who was trying to do that in their one household between two [00:26:00] people who were in a marriage.

Phelosha Collaros: And so I, I see the, um, the conflict as both Um, very relevant now, but also in a continuity of what has happened to humanity before when we fail to recognize that under those identities, there are human beings who, who. Require human dignity when we start letting go of that and let the kind of prejudices and, um, uh, you know, uh, the hatred or the what we call now effective polarization take away that human dignity.

Phelosha Collaros: What is possible as we saw in Colombia is incredibly dark. And so how do we how do we get out of that pattern? And I think it is. Back to what you're saying about being in relation, having conversations, you know, try trying to not completely X out a particular human or a side that we're not going to engage with because we've to humanize them.

Phelosha Collaros: [00:27:00] So that is something that I think is present on my mind as I work toward. Depolarize. com and try to work toward increasing understanding of really the destructive forces of viewing your political party as a religion and thinking that it can do no wrong. 

Michael Lee: You have a intergenerational, international perspective on civility, dialogue, the importance of debate and curiosity, but you also it's informed clearly by your ideological commitments at St.

Michael Lee: John's and then your. Practical experience with this ranging from this decision, whether or not to go on Tucker Carlson show and many others, as you look, as you look towards the next encounter with difference as the next difficult dialogue, what lesson or lessons from these experiences that you've recounted here stand out?

Phelosha Collaros: I think the first one really is this idea that. There is no good [00:28:00] side and no evil side, right? We have to just start there and that's going to clearing that out allows you to have curiosity and not be so fragile when you're intersecting with somebody of the opposite viewpoint. Right? It is not about, um, about people that do not deserve to be.

Phelosha Collaros: It is about people who have different life experience and have had different, um, relationships come from a different family that there's a real fundamental, um, uh, uh, creation of a person that may be like Jonathan height might say in his righteous mind book, but there's something. That fundamental about people's identity that starts with the family, they're in the location, the region that they live, that there's some fundamental things.

Phelosha Collaros: So dividing political parties and good and evil and thinking your side can't do wrong or the other side can't do right. That's got to be the 1st thing that goes. If you're going to move forward here. I think the 2nd thing for my personal development was to [00:29:00] understand that this never ends. There's not a point at which you've done enough work.

Phelosha Collaros: Yeah. 

Yeah, 

Phelosha Collaros: as a collective or as an individual where you can say we're somehow immune or beyond, um, this kind of societal fracture that's happening and we can just rest on our laurels and, and, uh, and not have to do the hard work of reengaging yourself and your community. In these depolarization of bridge building strategies and thinking now about depolarization mindset, uh, you know, much in the way that we think about meditation or we think about other practices that are ongoing, that are, that are really daily practices.

Phelosha Collaros: It's that reminding of self of other people's human dignity. Giving that to them, reminding yourself about your own failability, you know, that you're missing information and there's no possible way that you're right about all your conclusions. So, so be curious. Um, that is an ongoing thing we need to remind ourselves about and, um, and come at it with a humility.

Phelosha Collaros: Uh, so that we're not, [00:30:00] um, pulled into kind of blind spots that can also dehumanize others. Felicia 

Michael Lee: Calaros, thank you so much for being on When We Disagree. 

Phelosha Collaros: Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation. You're doing good work. Keep it up, and I look forward to adding When We Disagree to depolarize.

Phelosha Collaros: com. You're definitely part of this bridge building circle, and we need everyone to be part of it. 

Michael Lee: Thank you. When We Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee. Recording and sound engineering by Jesse Kunz and Lance Laidlaw. Reach out to us. At when we disagree at gmail.

Michael Lee: com