Stroud's June 2023 University of Chicago Press blog post independently foregrounds the Hu Shih/China comparison

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In a guest post published on the University of Chicago Press's own blog to accompany the book's release, Scott R. Stroud explicitly reaches for the Hu Shih/China comparison to explain why the Ambedkar-Dewey story matters: "Like Hu Shih (Ambedkar's classmate in Dewey's 1915-1916 course) in China, Ambedkar does not repeat what Dewey writes or says. But he takes inspiration from certain ideas, ideals, and methods that Dewey practiced or theorized about."

This is a third independently-documented instance of Stroud drawing this comparison in his own words, distinct in venue and date from the two already recorded in claim-stroud-ambedkar-scholarship-explicitly-cites-hu-shih-china-comparison (a 2024 Navayana Pragmatism post and a 2025 Countercurrents essay by a different author). This one is earlier (2023-06-27, timed to the book's publication) and carries more institutional weight — the publisher's own official blog rather than Stroud's personal site — making it the strongest single piece of evidence that the comparison is not an incidental flourish but a framing move Stroud reaches for whenever he explains the book to a general audience.

It does not, on its own, establish that the 2022 Pluralist article's specific opening sentence survives verbatim into the book's Introduction or Chapter One — that remains open; see question-stroud-2022-article-and-2023-book-china-scholarship-citations.