Disagree with a Professor

What happens when students who’ve done their homework sit down with the people who literally wrote the textbook — and disagree?

Disagree With a Professor is a podcast from the University of Virginia where student hosts do exactly that. Every episode, they sit down with an academic expert who has spent their career on one of the hardest questions in politics, psychology, law, history, or culture. The hosts come prepared, come curious, and come ready to push back.

Not to be provocative. Not to score points. Because they genuinely believe that’s how you actually learn something.

We’ve been told since grade school that disagreeing with an expert is rude. Maybe even arrogant. This show is built on the belief that it’s actually the opposite, that asking hard questions is a form of respect, and that changing your mind in public is a sign of intellectual courage, not weakness.

Episodes have covered:

• Terrorism law and the line between ideology and crime (former NYPD special counsel)

• Whether American isolationism is an economic and political dead end (political economist)

• Military conscription — and a former Green Beret who spent 25 years arguing for the draft, then changed his mind

• The psychology of your defining decade — and why life actually gets better with every decade, even if that’s incomprehensible to anyone in their 20s

The hosts don’t always walk away agreeing with the professor. Sometimes they don’t even agree with each other. But they always walk away with a new perspective.

Disagree With a Professor is created by Think Again, with production support from Awkward Sage Media.

New episodes drop regularly. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Find us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/thinkagain.uva/