I've always been a Pinker fan, but the more I listen to Stock, the more everything about her seems to be the embodiment of a measured, reasonable, polite academic. If this happened to her, the rest of us mere mortals would most likely be chewed up and spit out by the woke machine.
Pinker believes in Materialism. He believes that removal of suffering makes the world better and a moral good. He makes this claim as we are heading into a population collapse that could be the end of civilization.
@AwwSnookems I care, and I know plenty of others who care, and all of us are somebodies. So, not only are you factually wrong, but you lost the argument.
I grew up in China and have reasonable lived experience. To me, the phenomenon the speakers spoke about sounded very much like what happened in the cultural revolution in China. I really hope those gatekeepers of freedom of speech are going to be able to guard the boundaries and stop this madness!
i have/had a chinese friend who works in UK, corporate stuff - they completely bought the DEI stuff, and any questioning of it is badly received. i thought the cultural revolution would be good inoculation against it. any thoughts?
@@twelvecatsinatrenchcoat O_O That sounds too insane to be true, but then again, it's sort of the same way in e.g.: blue collar workplaces. We often hear how management and the people in the offices outnumber us physical workers. And they SHOULDN'T.
Twenty five years ago, when I would hang out with my college friends at home having intellectual debates about the issues of the day, my grandfather would interject by saying, "Y'all are so edumacated (sic) that you don't know when to take out the trash." At the time I was irritated by him insulting my friends and I openly, but years later I realized he was 100% correct; we didn't know what we didn't know, but presumed to know everything because we had college degrees. I miss my grandpa.
Universities are first and foremost institutions where anything and everything should be questioned. As Kathleen points out, we must not let the very real need to expand academic freedom and inquiry within universities, spiral into a Right wing or Conservative reactionary movement which only fosters their own ideas.
"Universities are first and foremost institutions where anything and everything must be questioned." I'd change the word must to can. I don't think I'd have missed a lot from a university education and experience if the question of 1 orange in my left hand + 1 orange in my right hand = 2 oranges in my hands. If you want to question it, you can. It isn't a must. Students of 50 years ago didn't suffer an inferior education because they were taught and it went unquestioned that there are two human sexes.
The notion that academe might, even by a scintilla, inculcate Rightist views...is hilarious. Thick headed but thin skinned Leftist radicals have put paid to that idea. And poisoned the well of '' freedom and inquiry ''.
Exactly - the danger of building new/alternative universities is that of societal partition - a sort of self-segregation where left and right have increasingly different life experiences, and both become dumber through lack of opposition to their thinking. The case must be made, and a liberal approach to education advocated on its merits. Perhaps new institutions can demonstrate how teaching and research ought to be done, but it would be a long, long time before they could rival the resources of the existing universities. Better to help bring those back to form through persuasion and example.
I was fortunate enough to be at Sussex and in the philosophy department while Kathleen Stock was there. She helped me on a few different occasions, and she was near-universally beloved by the students. I can’t quite believe what happened to her, but I know a few things that were going on in that department in the 2010s that explains quite a lot (though unfortunately I can’t speak about them, at least not right now).
The esteemed folks on the panel should read, if they haven't already, Bertrand Russell's essay entitled The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed. The theme of which is that the the oppressed aren't any better than the oppressors, and that they turn out to be every bit as bad as their oppressors once they are no longer oppressed.
I think by now some of charatistics of woke which include free speech has bled into the Conservative Liberal and centrist relm. My example of this is the way some students were beaten by Zionist peeps and noone did a thing. In fact the pro Palestinian demonstrators were blamed for being beaten.
40:51 - I think I just fell in love with Kathleen Stock. In particular, at 41:50, she articulates a paradigm that's desperately needed not just in academia, but all knowledge work. If people are allowed to propagate ideas with zero pushback, they'll inevitable propagate not only bad ones, but good ones that are simply malformed. It's fragility and mediocrity all the way down.
I went to Uni in the late 90's in Scotland, tipping over into the early 2000's. The best thing about the experience was meeting people from different backgrounds and experiences with different perspectives and having horizon's broadened. Whilst you tended to group with people that you found like minded there was nothing in the air that made you think there were any views that were so out of bounds that they couldn't be discussed. The best thing a lecturer ever told one of our classes was not to allow people to take the truth hostage. The importance of evidencing your claims and have them withstand scrutiny. That seems to be the whole point of university to generate and test knowledge, graduates who can think for themselves, and generally more rounded human beings from a very formative time in their lives. As for things like student activism, there should be a place for it but it also needs to be able to withstand scrutiny and not be allowed to censor free speech. I'm not a free speech absolutist, actively calling for violence, lying about people with no fear of consequences isn't acceptable but it's a very concerning time when free speech is eroded as it clearly has been over the last 15 years or so.
I think, at some point the idea of „nobody’s ego or feelings getting hurt“ was put above a rational, fact based dialogue If all you have to defend your „theory“ is mostly emotional mumbo jumbo, than that is a problem, mostly yours but in regular times the weak thesis would not have survived a lively debate, end of story Taking a step back, what to me is life’s BIG Irony on an abstract level: that a small bunch of autogyno-thingy men, so men with a weird idea, managed to take over the whole debate and stop any rational discussion because Transph*bia So, well, who is the over-emotional again…? Onky, it is not funny because so many lives & well being of young troubled teens are at stake Hi from a 50+ totally not gender confirming, straight woman
For those who know the story of Coleman Hughes and his battle with TED who made Coleman jump through multiple hoops that nobody ever had to jump through. I got in the argument with someone on social media over this story. This person kept coming back and telling me that TED did the right thing because Coleman's talk was so controversial that many people would be traumatized by his talk. I finally got my last word by telling him, in the vein of woke, that as a man of Black and Latino descent, Coleman is always right and going against his position is an act of microaggression. This was the only way to win - by playing their game. 😂
You didn't win the argument by adopting their stupid rules and beating them at their own stupid game. They actually beat you by getting you to play their stupid game using their stupid rules.
Coleman’s basic tenet is to try to be more “color blind” which is where we don’t treat people differently based on their race. The fact that some think that is controversial tells you everything you need to know on how broken different aspects of academia are
I think by now some of charatistics of woke which include free speech has bled into the Conservative Liberal and centrist relm. My example of this is the way some students were beaten by Zionist peeps and noone did a thing. In fact the pro Palestinian demonstrators were blamed for being beaten.
Kathleen Stock said, "I thought philosophy was absolutely the paradigm, discipline for doing all the things that has just been mentioned, that University should do. We're trained in reason and argument and evidence and eliminating confirmation bias and examining our priors and being open-minded and all the rest of it." But then, after describing some rather horrific treatment she endured, she stated, "I'm a little bit depressed about philosophy." That depressed me. But maybe I misunderstood her. The training she describes having should have prepared her to confidently exercise philosophically (and I think she has) and recognize that the failure of others to apply philosophical principles consistently is no fault of philosophy per se. I think what she is actually depressed about is people. People's inability to be principled in the applications of philosophy. I loved Steven Pinker's phrasing of "allowing fallible people to venture ideas." I like it because I don't see it as out of bounds that I should be able to give voice to an idea that I haven't fully worked out the implications of-actually wanting the input of others to test it. The metaphor of steel sharpening steel might work.
Yes, I think your conclusion about Stock is correct. I wished the panel would have discussed about the topic Pinker raised on free speech. It is important to have a conversation on what or where the common grounds are.
Academic philosophers esp need to step up to the plate and call out the BS in academia. Prof. Stock should have the entire discipline behind her; instead, she’s left hung out to dry. Socrates rolling over in his grave.
"Judith Butler's views are rather eccentric" is huge understatement! This woman (or whatever she may define herself) almost changed West's perception of what is man/woman with her crazy theories!
@@alexandrosalexandropoulos4836 what’s offensive is that Butler is wrongly referred to as a “Philosopher”. She’s nothing of the sort. She couldn’t get into UC-Berkeley’s Philosophy department if she tried. She’s in “Rhetoric” or “Comp Lit” or “English Lit” or “gender studies” - always some nonsense like that.
Best criticism of Judith Butler is from Slavoj Zizek. "The paradigmatic theorist of this new age and form of subjectivity is Judith Butler. She presents it as subversive in its character but it is easy to demonstrate that it is mainstream. Rejecting any fixed identity and trying on playful discursive identities fits perfectly our consumerist commodified society. This is why the obsessive attacks on patriarchy and the oedipal order sound at least for me false and desperate: they attack an enemy who is in full retreat as if reacting to something new which is already hegemonic - in short the problem with this vision of new fluid subjectivity is not that it is utopian but that it is already predominant. Yet another case of the hegemonic order presenting itself as a subversive agent."
Thank Godess for Kathleen’s last comment- the Left needs to recognize the problem and new solutions need to encompass true diversity of thought and political affiliations.
The left lacks self awareness and ability to self reflect. If they did, we wouldn't be here today. They won't "wake up" from this woke ideology until they are standing over mass graves with a shovel, burying bodies.
@@brianmeen2158 the question to always ask the left is "what would be too much / what would be too far" (with a policy). many of the left are too busy pushing to consider when the line might be crossed. I honestly think the left could be saved if they were taught to think like this in terms of trade offs. just don't mention the OG.
The education in grade school and middle school needs to be fixed also. The dumbing down of education has contributed to this situation especially now. They are now becoming “activists” younger and younger.
A couple of weeks into our foundation course at St Martins School of Art in 1977 we occupied the principal's office in protest against the governments education cuts. We threw him and his staff out and spent several days generally organizing a Trotskyist world revolution which proved very popular with most of our fellow students. With the benefit of hindsight it is clear that the principal, his staff and many of the teachers who were all more or less marxists were delighted and very happy to participate in our splendid display of anti- bourgeois shenanigans. ¡Hasta la vitoria siempre! and so on and so forth. Then we got down to making terrible art!
I wish the moderator had made an effort to bring Kathleen into the discussion more. It looks like the typical "male assertive", "female less so" situation.
At 16.00, Listening tp the story of Kathlen Stock's experince makes one's blood boil. Unfortunately most people...including parents who pay the salaries of the faculty and administrators cosolaying as adults and intellectuals, Have No Idea how insane much of hugher education has become.
Notice they do not have Amy Wax on the panel. As much as these people claim to admire and champion academic freedom and pluralism, they will never have anyone associated with them on the right.
Just build out from Hillsdale College and the nascent University of Austin. University of Chicago and St John’s College are probably salvageable. Fund the schools that don’t have diversity equity and social justice as their stated aims.
@@renzo6490 You must not have listened to any of the people on this panel if you still don't understand. At least three of them have had jobs taken away from them by "Social Justice Warriors" who do not tolerate any opinion if it's not as far to the Left as possible. I'm pretty sure that every single one of those people on this panel would not describe themselves as "conservative" - they are Liberals who just don't agree with the most extreme philosophies related on the far spectrum of the Left, and "DEI" is an apparatus to eliminate scholars who do not follow "the party line" politically, regardless of which field they are studying. And such academic bullying and censorship goes against what universities are ideally supposed to be: it's a place to expand your mind and ask difficult questions, and be tolerant of other opinions - not censor and bully and make sure everyone is thinking in exactly the same way.
University of Chicago has held the line more than most, and certainly more than Harvard and Columbia. You don't have to be antisemitic to study or teach at Columbia University, but it certainly helps.
My guess: Harvard & co will get serious about reform when the number of applicants plummets, and not before. Less rich universities might be brought to heel by the credible threat of losing their public funding. But our best hope is new institutions, which should be cheap, spartan, unabashedly intellectually elitist and demanding, not accredited by current (woke-captured) agencies, and 100% privately-funded.
It's tricky because it requires a very large portion of talented students and businesses to change their opinions simultaneously. For any individual student it's the loss of prestige and peer group. For businesses its the loss of such students.
Sadly, woke gender blender nonsthas infected the hard sciences as well, and perhaps in particular. After all, it's the doctors and surgeons who are going along with this.
@@virtualpilgrim8645 I think of it as referring to Charles Darwin's original theory of Evolution , since replaced by the Neo Darwinian synthesis model, as do biologists as far as I know
@@markphc99 "There is no dispute between me and Richard Dawkins and there never has been, because he’s a journalist,” explained Wilson. “Journalists are people who report what the scientists have found, and the arguments I’ve had have actually been with scientists doing research.” Davis followed up with a question of whether Wilson has any regard today for Dawkins’s concept of “the selfish gene.” “I’ve abandoned it, and I think most serious scientists working on it have abandoned it,” said Wilson. “Some defenders may be out there, but they’ve been relatively almost totally silent since our major paper’s come out.”
There's no point turning around and crying about a lack of lofty ideals...when you are the ones that fought to privatise education...and everything else!
What John is talking about, that the activist scholars wants us to accept everything the marginalized say as truth by default and that we should not dare to criticize it. This is simply authoritarianism, to me its a bit surprising that it is seldom called out as such but that's literally what it is. It just appeal to authority, its the view of knowledge that every dictator have. X is true because I say so. But this was the dominat view of knowledge for thousands of years with a few exceptions, a few glimpses of freedom and optimism before we finally broke free from this in a big way in the west with the enlightenment. And basically all progress comes from the knowledge production that was enabled by the freedom of expression and the tradition of criticism that the enlightenment enabled.
What does "marginalized" even mean anymore? And what could it possibly mean to be marginalized in a country like the United States? I'm in my late 40s and gay, and I never felt like anybody was pushing me to some margin that I was forced to live in. I was never prevented from doing what I wanted to do. My life hasn't been much different than any of the non-gay people I know. It would seem that someone is assumed to be marginalized just by being in a minority, regardless of the reality of their lives. I think we need to stop using this word to describe people because it doesn't accomplish anything, except maybe to put people in a victimhood mentality. Which is probably the whole point of it.
@@kingclover1395 I was just using a word they often use, might aswell said minority. But from their perspective they must claim that the group have suffered injustice in order to use victimhood to get privilege as compensation. I dont share this view be cause guilt is individual not collective. And "marginalization" I think should be talked about in terms of objective measures of discrimination.
Please see the French Revolution and what happens when Liberalism gets full control over institutions. It leads to the tyranny of the minority. The United States has prevented this for two hundred plus years but at last it has arrived.
I disagree with McWhorter when he says they really believe what they spout. I think they're too smart to really believe the nonsense. I believe that they are cowards pretending to believe.
i remember in the 90s, in anthropology - the progressive wing and the classic kind of gave up trying to talk to eachother, at least in my uni. with that breakdown, no wonder they closed the department eventually.
I feel this discussion barely touched on the subject. It could use a longer and deeper discussion. But i do appreciate that you had this discussion and posted it!
I'm an admirer of Kathleen stock but I was astonished to read just before the election that she said that she intended to vote Labour. This is the government which cancelled a bill meant to protect free speech on Campus. A bill which had been passed by both houses. The same government intends to replace that bill with one intended to do the opposite of protecting free speech.
Don’t be shocked. She said she was still on the left but not too far left. The Left is fractured and the extreme elements are the problem. Voting Labour this time around was more about not voting Conservative. The UK is the outlier these days. While Europe is generally moving right the UK moved left. France also is schizophrenic. Moved right and then whiplashed left. Very strange.
@stephenl9463 No. The very left wing Jeremy Corbyn was soundly rejected by the British electorate when he was the leader of the Labour Party - on two occasions.. Britain has not suddenly lurched to the left.
A large amount of what gets learned at university is uncontroversial technical knowledge. You don't need two people with opposing points of view to teach math, physics, or electrical engineering. That's like saying that if a test question has four answer options, we should be teaching students why all of them are correct in their own way. That's incorrect, counterproductive, and silly.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that model for the teaching of STEM subjects. But in the humanities and in research across all subjects, opposing viewpoints and conclusions must be judged against one another.
Every serious subject that is of any value to the intellectual and conscious study and research of man's endeavours needs to be questioned, and seen from not just two, but multifaceted lenses, to actually continue growing in wisdom to be applied in ways that will actually serve societies' common good and cohesion, rather than furthering the science world for no actual functional benefit to humanity at large and a mental masturbation for the few to serve a even fewer ilk.
I think by now some of charatistics of woke which include free speech has bled into the Conservative Liberal and centrist relm. My example of this is the way some students were beaten by Zionist peeps and noone did a thing. In fact the pro Palestinian demonstrators were blamed for being beaten.
@@shiracohenyoga3492 That's ridiculous. Scientific subjects can be open to new ideas and further debate, but only with the goal of achieving a deeper more scientific truth. It certainly should have nothing to do with viewing scientific subjects through a 'lens' of achieving the 'greater good' (who will decide what that is?), that would simply not be science. What you propose is exactly what has occurred with wokeness infiltrating the STEM fields. Your whole post can be seen as a perfect example of 'mental masturbation'.
There’s an aspect of religious belief involved. The idea that Jesus is G-d, considered absurd at a time, with plenty of magical thinking with the virgin birth and miracles then the resurrection, or that the Quran is literally not only the direct word of G-d but perfect and immutable, have led to derivative belief systems masquerading as thought. Religious schools are recognized as such, but the strong dominance of the woke religion has infiltrated all these institutions with the possible exception of explicitly religious schools. The only way to address the problem is to first understand that it is a version of a religion and require full disclosure that if you send your child there, there will be these indoctrinations. If you send your Jewish child to a Catholic school, Jesus will come up and participation will be required, but not at a Yeshiva. The market, as enrollments to Harvard dropped after the Gay and Senate controversies.
"Woke Religion" is Liberalism. The purpose of Universities is the indoctrination of students in the Secularist Liberalist ideology. Liberalism is to liberate. What do you liberate yourself from when you are free of King, religion, family, marriage, shame...gender and "being human"
McWhorter had to throw in a climate alarm comment and ruin his point. Also, no one mentioned Hillsdale College, the best institute of higher learning in the nation, as an example to look to.
Congratulations to the host and panel for making this program about university reform and not about another silly WWF style yelling race about wokeism. For once, i was very pleased that the headline was completely incorrect. And i hope the headline got this panel viewed more than it might have been otherwise.
41:23 Is she right? I was a Philosophy major and we scorned the Frankfurt school and French postmodernists as garbled nonsense. These “philosophers” were only taught in Comp Lit and Modern Thought & Lit departments. I had to take one of these classes and couldn’t believe people took this shit seriously. As philosophers, we thought it was so patently absurd as to be beneath us. I wonder now if we had addressed the ideas, would it have made a difference.
I was curious about post modernism so I watched a few debates on the subject and I came out confused. It’s ultimately a battle of word twister I guess the biggest question I have is how these rather outlandish theories grew in the first place? How did they get passed along from group to group without seemingly ever been challenged..? I thought academia was about challenge and debate.?
@@brianmeen2158 There was/is debate, but it’s entirely within the domain of postmodernism. It’s very difficult to counter the “arguments” because they’re not arguments in the philosophical sense. I was at an ‘elite’ university 1987-1991 and never encountered these guys outside of literary criticism or critical theory. But by that time, cultural relativism was ubiquitous, so it had seeped out somehow. Nobody was drawing the line, and obvious horrors were simply ignored. I knew we were in trouble when genital mutilation was being excused.
@@brianmeen2158 I think Pinker's point made in the panel discussion is at least partly right . For a long time the schools of thought that gave rise to 'social justice philosophy', the Frankfurt school, Foucault and the Postmodernists, were not directly opposed because they were seen as being an adjunct/extension of the forces in society that were leading to greater equality and fairness. They were not dominant in academic departments to begin with (they were kind of funky outliers that gave certain subjects a kind of street-cred). What Pinker does not mention that I think was a key development is that all the humanities/social science departments in the Anglosphere universities became increasingly dominated by left-wing faculty, so that by the mid-00s (maybe slightly later) the average professor started to feel the pressure of being labelled a traitor if he/she questioned what had become the quasi religious dogma of social justice identity politics and there were simply hardly any faculty with opposing conservative (or even classically liberal) views. Thus we have ended up with the few brave souls who offered resistance like Stock and McWhorter being marginalised or bullied into leaving academe altogether. That's my two cents worth anyway.
I don’t think we can blame continental thinkers wholesale. They have a place in academia. Phenomenology is important. Where we lost the plot is in allowing their teachings to become fossilized into activist dogma. Sartre complaining about the French in Algeria is not the same issue as the west fighting wars in the Middle East. But ding dongs on the Left have grafted it onto the current situation. No critical thinking! Britain as a colonial power played out very different than Belgium as a colonial power. Try telling that to the woke SJWs!
I think Kathleen Stock is wrong. The right should fund universities where they'd want their children to go to. Some of the right will be more idealistic and will want to fund centres of excellence their kids might not even be able to get into! Those are the only kinds of universities sensible people need think about funding.
I question these validity of these six people. Do they represent their entire community? Even if they represented 10% of their community, would their point of view matter?
Interesting session, but concerning that the word “students” was not spoken by anyone answering the first question about what a university should be, and only said a few times at all throughout the whole dialogue
Any such discussion should start with identifying the cause of the problem. What are the incentives? This is the USA. EVERYTHING IS about money. What are the financial incentive system that drive this? Break it up. Donations should be anonymous Universities should not be allowed to have endowments. They should be taxed. Peer review must be reformed Fire 50% of all admin starting from the top. This panel was pretty week.
McWhorter, to me is always preoccupied with race and "brown people". What I see are people like this that see the world through the race lens and people that just don't.
Is Jacinda Ardern working at Harvard still? Can you please ask if she would come back to New Zealand and face her dues following the convid rollout? The prison experience that has followed convid is not ok either.
ThankU! Education, like all fields, is dominated by politics, egoes, jealousies, etc. Remember the play Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? Yeah those were college faculty guffaw
The other side means to reason in service of empathy for thy transgender community. But as a result those that reason in service of seeking truth are not given empathy and are called evil and mistaken for their intentions. But are treated horribly.
Today, universities are not a repository for knowledge. In the past few decades universities became factories for inventing semi-plausible theories ('theories' which sound good but don't work). Theories to 'improve' (or destroy?) society with. Theories such as: Decolonialization, White Fragility, Queer Theory, Anti-racism, Decarceration, Anthropogenic Global Warming, String Theory, Intersectionality, ... At this stage, many Western Universities are beyond saving. Even were we able to save some of them, they'd go bad again just a little time later. Good to listen to people debate the fundamental defects. Maybe the University of Austin can learn from talks such as this? LOL. These social scientists don't realize how and why hard sciences have been badly damaged too.
The interviewer should really be more concise and get to the questions for the panel. EDIT: Having heard his next comments, I wholeheartedly repeat my earlier point: his lack of conciseness ruins the fluidity of his great guests.
The current universities must give up the leftist idea of engineering society and return to offering ideologies and knowledge from both sides of the political spectrum. The problem developed in allowing one side to dominate. With a balanced institution accessible to academic excellence we return to the liberal idea of meritocracy. The best ideas wherever they may come from will win out. Universities need to be agnostic but the people teaching and studying at them need to run the gamut. And to underline the important comment made by Greg that the costs need to come way down. Education really needs to be inexpensive and with the Internet there is no reason why it cannot be.
A retired professor friend from UC Berkeley told me that a professor in the UC business school put an ad in the Wall Street Journal listing the names of the students in his class who had protested against the US support of the genocide in Gaza. In the ad, the prof told readers not to hire these students. My friend was concerned about these students’ future. I tried to console him by pointing out that those students will always have their integrity, something more important than a cushy job.
Oh yes, integrity is always better than earning a living! The students have a future of pure integrity. Having a "cushy job" shows lack of integrity, that's for sure.
@@erpollock How does the saying go? “What does it profit a person if they gain the whole world but suffer the loss of their soul in the process?”. These students, having had a glimpse of the real world, will be steered to find more honest work and enjoy a more satisfying life. Don't worry, my friend, they'll be okay because they are people principle.
Can anyone point to real examples of where "woke" is taking place. I only see it manifest in the people who are opposed to it. I really would be happy to be set straight if I'm wrong but, I'm not at all sure that "woke" actually exists to the extent that it's a real problem?
Simply no, not with so many special interests. From religions to sexes and biases. Schools have been screwed up my whole life and not getting better. It has been getting worse as social wars grow. Schools need to get back to teaching and leave out the religious and social wars. Also balance out the ratio of male to female teachers and counselors. Work on fixing the system. Instead of breaking it more from ideologies.
Wait? Does Steven Pinker believe young people in the past were less crazy? Free sex, love and peace? Drugs and Rock'n'Roll? Hippies? Young people are ALWAYS crazy. I don't know why they don't understand that. It is your job to educate them! lol ... blaming young people.
Every serious subject that is of any value to the intellectual and conscious study and research of man's endeavours needs to be questioned, and seen from not just two, but multifaceted lenses, to actually continue growing in wisdom to be applied in ways that will actually serve societies' common good and cohesion, rather than furthering the science world for no actual functional benefit to humanity at large and a mental masturbation for the few to serve a even fewer ilk creating division, favouritism and fear, which regress into rules and 'guideline' to create safety, when in actual fact we wouldn't need them in societies where trust and responsibility are foreground values.
I've always been a Pinker fan, but the more I listen to Stock, the more everything about her seems to be the embodiment of a measured, reasonable, polite academic. If this happened to her, the rest of us mere mortals would most likely be chewed up and spit out by the woke machine.
Pinker believes in Materialism. He believes that removal of suffering makes the world better and a moral good.
He makes this claim as we are heading into a population collapse that could be the end of civilization.
who cares about measured and polite?? its the arguments that matter GREGG...
@AwwSnookems
I care, and I know plenty of others who care, and all of us are somebodies. So, not only are you factually wrong, but you lost the argument.
@@GreggGiblin-sy5og taking "who's cares" literally is wild.
@@AwwSnookems
Not really.
I grew up in China and have reasonable lived experience. To me, the phenomenon the speakers spoke about sounded very much like what happened in the cultural revolution in China. I really hope those gatekeepers of freedom of speech are going to be able to guard the boundaries and stop this madness!
i have/had a chinese friend who works in UK, corporate stuff - they completely bought the DEI stuff, and any questioning of it is badly received. i thought the cultural revolution would be good inoculation against it. any thoughts?
Study the Cultural Revolutionin depth and reframe your question. You will become enlightened.
Read three body problem to understand first hand account of cultural revolution
@@charlesodonnell2993 what’s your opinion?
@@SogMosee so cult of personality still ?
When Administration is larger than faculty= problem
Administration is larger than the STUDENT BODY.
Yale has less than 5,000 undergraduates and 5,460 administrators.
@@twelvecatsinatrenchcoat Wow!
@@twelvecatsinatrenchcoat O_O That sounds too insane to be true, but then again, it's sort of the same way in e.g.: blue collar workplaces. We often hear how management and the people in the offices outnumber us physical workers. And they SHOULDN'T.
@@MattHunX I found that fact posted on the website of Bowdoin College, est 1794. It's legit.
@@twelvecatsinatrenchcoatMindboggling!
Twenty five years ago, when I would hang out with my college friends at home having intellectual debates about the issues of the day, my grandfather would interject by saying, "Y'all are so edumacated (sic) that you don't know when to take out the trash."
At the time I was irritated by him insulting my friends and I openly, but years later I realized he was 100% correct; we didn't know what we didn't know, but presumed to know everything because we had college degrees.
I miss my grandpa.
Universities are first and foremost institutions where anything and everything should be questioned. As Kathleen points out, we must not let the very real need to expand academic freedom and inquiry within universities, spiral into a Right wing or Conservative reactionary movement which only fosters their own ideas.
"Universities are first and foremost institutions where anything and everything must be questioned."
I'd change the word must to can.
I don't think I'd have missed a lot from a university education and experience if the question of 1 orange in my left hand + 1 orange in my right hand = 2 oranges in my hands. If you want to question it, you can. It isn't a must.
Students of 50 years ago didn't suffer an inferior education because they were taught and it went unquestioned that there are two human sexes.
@@samdg1234nah, you went to a shitty university
The notion that academe might, even by a scintilla, inculcate Rightist views...is hilarious.
Thick headed but thin skinned Leftist radicals have put paid to that idea. And poisoned the well of '' freedom and inquiry ''.
Universities don’t belong to the left.
Exactly - the danger of building new/alternative universities is that of societal partition - a sort of self-segregation where left and right have increasingly different life experiences, and both become dumber through lack of opposition to their thinking. The case must be made, and a liberal approach to education advocated on its merits. Perhaps new institutions can demonstrate how teaching and research ought to be done, but it would be a long, long time before they could rival the resources of the existing universities. Better to help bring those back to form through persuasion and example.
Kathleen Stock is always the most clear thinking and articulate member of a panel.
She got a little steam rolled which was sad, but she is on a panel with three of America's strongest voices.
I wouldn't go that far, although I do think she is awesome.
she has a clarity in thinking, in manner and in intention and I can't believe she was considered expendable ever.
Did you hear her on the "Wider Lens" podcast? She said that she identifies more as a man than a woman. Quite odd to hear that
@@properpolymath2097 I’ve seen her on a wider lens. I didn’t hear her say anything even remotely like she “identifies more as a man than a woman.”
I was fortunate enough to be at Sussex and in the philosophy department while Kathleen Stock was there. She helped me on a few different occasions, and she was near-universally beloved by the students. I can’t quite believe what happened to her, but I know a few things that were going on in that department in the 2010s that explains quite a lot (though unfortunately I can’t speak about them, at least not right now).
The esteemed folks on the panel should read, if they haven't already, Bertrand Russell's essay entitled The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed. The theme of which is that the the oppressed aren't any better than the oppressors, and that they turn out to be every bit as bad as their oppressors once they are no longer oppressed.
lol. I’d wager my first born they have all read it.
@@joge2468 I hope you're right, but I doubt it.
Four of the most educated, well-read people out there today and you’re assigning them reading material 😂
@@jayl271322 No insult was intended. But don't forget, I said 'if they haven't already. '
I think by now some of charatistics of woke which include free speech has bled into the Conservative Liberal and centrist relm. My example of this is the way some students were beaten by Zionist peeps and noone did a thing. In fact the pro Palestinian demonstrators were blamed for being beaten.
40:51 - I think I just fell in love with Kathleen Stock.
In particular, at 41:50, she articulates a paradigm that's desperately needed not just in academia, but all knowledge work. If people are allowed to propagate ideas with zero pushback, they'll inevitable propagate not only bad ones, but good ones that are simply malformed. It's fragility and mediocrity all the way down.
And me, Greg Lukianoff because of his appropriate outrage.
you a woman?... the old fashioned kind?
I went to Uni in the late 90's in Scotland, tipping over into the early 2000's.
The best thing about the experience was meeting people from different backgrounds and experiences with different perspectives and having horizon's broadened. Whilst you tended to group with people that you found like minded there was nothing in the air that made you think there were any views that were so out of bounds that they couldn't be discussed.
The best thing a lecturer ever told one of our classes was not to allow people to take the truth hostage. The importance of evidencing your claims and have them withstand scrutiny.
That seems to be the whole point of university to generate and test knowledge, graduates who can think for themselves, and generally more rounded human beings from a very formative time in their lives.
As for things like student activism, there should be a place for it but it also needs to be able to withstand scrutiny and not be allowed to censor free speech.
I'm not a free speech absolutist, actively calling for violence, lying about people with no fear of consequences isn't acceptable but it's a very concerning time when free speech is eroded as it clearly has been over the last 15 years or so.
I think, at some point the idea of „nobody’s ego or feelings getting hurt“ was put above a rational, fact based dialogue
If all you have to defend your „theory“ is mostly emotional mumbo jumbo, than that is a problem, mostly yours
but in regular times the weak thesis would not have survived a lively debate, end of story
Taking a step back, what to me is life’s BIG Irony on an abstract level: that a small bunch of autogyno-thingy men, so men with a weird idea, managed to take over the whole debate and stop any rational discussion because
Transph*bia
So, well, who is the over-emotional again…?
Onky, it is not funny because so many lives & well being of young troubled teens are at stake
Hi from a 50+ totally not gender confirming, straight woman
For those who know the story of Coleman Hughes and his battle with TED who made Coleman jump through multiple hoops that nobody ever had to jump through. I got in the argument with someone on social media over this story. This person kept coming back and telling me that TED did the right thing because Coleman's talk was so controversial that many people would be traumatized by his talk. I finally got my last word by telling him, in the vein of woke, that as a man of Black and Latino descent, Coleman is always right and going against his position is an act of microaggression. This was the only way to win - by playing their game. 😂
You didn't win the argument by adopting their stupid rules and beating them at their own stupid game. They actually beat you by getting you to play their stupid game using their stupid rules.
❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤ you lost by playing their game by their rules
❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤ I think I would’ve done the same thing as you
Coleman’s basic tenet is to try to be more “color blind” which is where we don’t treat people differently based on their race. The fact that some think that is controversial tells you everything you need to know on how broken different aspects of academia are
I think by now some of charatistics of woke which include free speech has bled into the Conservative Liberal and centrist relm. My example of this is the way some students were beaten by Zionist peeps and noone did a thing. In fact the pro Palestinian demonstrators were blamed for being beaten.
Kathleen Stock said, "I thought philosophy was absolutely the paradigm, discipline for doing all the things that has just been mentioned, that University should do. We're trained in reason and argument and evidence and eliminating confirmation bias and examining our priors and being open-minded and all the rest of it."
But then, after describing some rather horrific treatment she endured, she stated, "I'm a little bit depressed about philosophy."
That depressed me. But maybe I misunderstood her. The training she describes having should have prepared her to confidently exercise philosophically (and I think she has) and recognize that the failure of others to apply philosophical principles consistently is no fault of philosophy per se. I think what she is actually depressed about is people. People's inability to be principled in the applications of philosophy.
I loved Steven Pinker's phrasing of "allowing fallible people to venture ideas." I like it because I don't see it as out of bounds that I should be able to give voice to an idea that I haven't fully worked out the implications of-actually wanting the input of others to test it. The metaphor of steel sharpening steel might work.
Yes, I think your conclusion about Stock is correct.
I wished the panel would have discussed about the topic Pinker raised on free speech. It is important to have a conversation on what or where the common grounds are.
She referring to Philosophy as an academic discipline, ie philosophy departments.
@@joge2468 Not necessarily, don't you know what PhD. stands for?
Very expensive kindergartens these American Universities
I like that. I'm going to steal it, hope that's okay.
We once lived in awe of great universities and its learned faculty. And, then it became the punch line.
Academic philosophers esp need to step up to the plate and call out the BS in academia. Prof. Stock should have the entire discipline behind her; instead, she’s left hung out to dry. Socrates rolling over in his grave.
this is like the superfriends seeing this particular cast of people onstage together.
Careful with that. We've tried to form a superfriends before, it didn't work out.
"Judith Butler's views are rather eccentric" is huge understatement! This woman (or whatever she may define herself) almost changed West's perception of what is man/woman with her crazy theories!
She has been at the forefront of destroying western civilization
Credit where it's due. No, she didn't.
@@alexandrosalexandropoulos4836 what’s offensive is that Butler is wrongly referred to as a “Philosopher”. She’s nothing of the sort. She couldn’t get into UC-Berkeley’s Philosophy department if she tried. She’s in “Rhetoric” or “Comp Lit” or “English Lit” or “gender studies” - always some nonsense like that.
Best criticism of Judith Butler is from Slavoj Zizek. "The paradigmatic theorist of this new age and form of subjectivity is Judith Butler. She presents it as subversive in its character but it is easy to demonstrate that it is mainstream. Rejecting any fixed identity and trying on playful discursive identities fits perfectly our consumerist commodified society. This is why the obsessive attacks on patriarchy and the oedipal order sound at least for me false and desperate: they attack an enemy who is in full retreat as if reacting to something new which is already hegemonic - in short the problem with this vision of new fluid subjectivity is not that it is utopian but that it is already predominant. Yet another case of the hegemonic order presenting itself as a subversive agent."
@@dt6822 Totally agree on Zizek. Thanks for answering.
Thank Godess for Kathleen’s last comment- the Left needs to recognize the problem and new solutions need to encompass true diversity of thought and political affiliations.
I don’t think that is very likely though .
The left lacks self awareness and ability to self reflect. If they did, we wouldn't be here today. They won't "wake up" from this woke ideology until they are standing over mass graves with a shovel, burying bodies.
@@brianmeen2158 the question to always ask the left is "what would be too much / what would be too far" (with a policy). many of the left are too busy pushing to consider when the line might be crossed. I honestly think the left could be saved if they were taught to think like this in terms of trade offs. just don't mention the OG.
The education in grade school and middle school needs to be fixed also. The dumbing down of education has contributed to this situation especially now. They are now becoming “activists” younger and younger.
MORE IMPORTANT it is the root
A couple of weeks into our foundation course at St Martins School of Art in 1977 we occupied the principal's office in protest against the governments education cuts. We threw him and his staff out and spent several days generally organizing a Trotskyist world revolution which proved very popular with most of our fellow students. With the benefit of hindsight it is clear that the principal, his staff and many of the teachers who were all more or less marxists were delighted and very happy to participate in our splendid display of anti- bourgeois shenanigans. ¡Hasta la vitoria siempre! and so on and so forth. Then we got down to making terrible art!
This story makes me physically sick.
Wow! Four of my favorite intellectuals! I've read at least one book from each of these giants and heard on many podcasts.
I wish the moderator had made an effort to bring Kathleen into the discussion more. It looks like the typical "male assertive", "female less so" situation.
Women tend to waffle.
Not all heroes wear capes, these guys really are trying to save our historically excellent institutions.
At 16.00, Listening tp the story of Kathlen Stock's experince makes one's blood boil. Unfortunately most people...including parents who pay the salaries of the faculty and administrators cosolaying as adults and intellectuals, Have No Idea how insane much of hugher education has become.
Can universities be saved? No.
I like to call it the Great Awokening.
One hour well spent. Thanks for sharing this discussion
This is a great conversation
I, for one, don’t think the Woke universities should be saved. They should be closed and the faculty and professors never hired again anywhere
Notice they do not have Amy Wax on the panel. As much as these people claim to admire and champion academic freedom and pluralism, they will never have anyone associated with them on the right.
Thank you for sharing this with the public 🙏🏿🙏🏾🙏🏽🙏🏼🙏🏻
Just build out from Hillsdale College and the nascent University of Austin. University of Chicago and St John’s College are probably salvageable. Fund the schools that don’t have diversity equity and social justice as their stated aims.
Explain to me..
What is bad about diversity,equity and social justice?
I seriously don’t know.
@@renzo6490 You must not have listened to any of the people on this panel if you still don't understand. At least three of them have had jobs taken away from them by "Social Justice Warriors" who do not tolerate any opinion if it's not as far to the Left as possible. I'm pretty sure that every single one of those people on this panel would not describe themselves as "conservative" - they are Liberals who just don't agree with the most extreme philosophies related on the far spectrum of the Left, and "DEI" is an apparatus to eliminate scholars who do not follow "the party line" politically, regardless of which field they are studying. And such academic bullying and censorship goes against what universities are ideally supposed to be: it's a place to expand your mind and ask difficult questions, and be tolerant of other opinions - not censor and bully and make sure everyone is thinking in exactly the same way.
@@renzo6490woketard
University of Chicago has held the line more than most, and certainly more than Harvard and Columbia. You don't have to be antisemitic to study or teach at Columbia University, but it certainly helps.
My guess: Harvard & co will get serious about reform when the number of applicants plummets, and not before. Less rich universities might be brought to heel by the credible threat of losing their public funding. But our best hope is new institutions, which should be cheap, spartan, unabashedly intellectually elitist and demanding, not accredited by current (woke-captured) agencies, and 100% privately-funded.
Corporate sausage factories.
It's tricky because it requires a very large portion of talented students and businesses to change their opinions simultaneously. For any individual student it's the loss of prestige and peer group. For businesses its the loss of such students.
Between AI hallucinations and university capture, I’m thinking it’s time to get serious about Foundation.
GREAT panel!
How have I not seen this before? Most of my favorites all on one stage? Oh this is going to be a stellar way to spend a hour!
I thought universities were institutions of higher learning. But then I was a hard science student , and we don’t encounter any of this rubbish
Sadly, woke gender blender nonsthas infected the hard sciences as well, and perhaps in particular. After all, it's the doctors and surgeons who are going along with this.
Let’s calm down there. The AMA has recently revised language replacing pregnant women w pregnant people.
Darwinism is not hard science, it's a philosophy/religion.
@@virtualpilgrim8645 I think of it as referring to Charles Darwin's original theory of Evolution , since replaced by the Neo Darwinian synthesis model, as do biologists as far as I know
@@markphc99 "There is no dispute between me and Richard Dawkins and there never has been, because he’s a journalist,” explained Wilson. “Journalists are people who report what the scientists have found, and the arguments I’ve had have actually been with scientists doing research.” Davis followed up with a question of whether Wilson has any regard today for Dawkins’s concept of “the selfish gene.” “I’ve abandoned it, and I think most serious scientists working on it have abandoned it,” said Wilson. “Some defenders may be out there, but they’ve been relatively almost totally silent since our major paper’s come out.”
Drs. Stock and McWorther are worth catching in other videos, podcasts., etc.
It is good, people coming to their sences and leading scientists are running the discussion.
There's no point turning around and crying about a lack of lofty ideals...when you are the ones that fought to privatise education...and everything else!
These guys should set up a university of their own
Some of them (well, at least one) joined the University of Austin faculty. Another works at Ralston College.
What John is talking about, that the activist scholars wants us to accept everything the marginalized say as truth by default and that we should not dare to criticize it.
This is simply authoritarianism, to me its a bit surprising that it is seldom called out as such but that's literally what it is. It just appeal to authority, its the view of knowledge that every dictator have. X is true because I say so.
But this was the dominat view of knowledge for thousands of years with a few exceptions, a few glimpses of freedom and optimism before we finally broke free from this in a big way in the west with the enlightenment. And basically all progress comes from the knowledge production that was enabled by the freedom of expression and the tradition of criticism that the enlightenment enabled.
What does "marginalized" even mean anymore? And what could it possibly mean to be marginalized in a country like the United States? I'm in my late 40s and gay, and I never felt like anybody was pushing me to some margin that I was forced to live in. I was never prevented from doing what I wanted to do. My life hasn't been much different than any of the non-gay people I know. It would seem that someone is assumed to be marginalized just by being in a minority, regardless of the reality of their lives. I think we need to stop using this word to describe people because it doesn't accomplish anything, except maybe to put people in a victimhood mentality. Which is probably the whole point of it.
@@kingclover1395 I was just using a word they often use, might aswell said minority. But from their perspective they must claim that the group have suffered injustice in order to use victimhood to get privilege as compensation.
I dont share this view be cause guilt is individual not collective.
And "marginalization" I think should be talked about in terms of objective measures of discrimination.
Please see the French Revolution and what happens when Liberalism gets full control over institutions. It leads to the tyranny of the minority.
The United States has prevented this for two hundred plus years but at last it has arrived.
I disagree with McWhorter when he says they really believe what they spout. I think they're too smart to really believe the nonsense. I believe that they are cowards pretending to believe.
Some are true believers. Some are pretending. It's always a mix.
Don't underestimate the human minds ability to rationalize absurdities.
Cant believe intellectuals at universities let this happen sorry easily. Why was That?
The answer is no the universities in college cannot be saved
i remember in the 90s, in anthropology - the progressive wing and the classic kind of gave up trying to talk to eachother, at least in my uni. with that breakdown, no wonder they closed the department eventually.
By who - administrators have proven to be incompetent and faculty have proven to be cowards.
I'm so grateful that I graduated university in 1968.
I feel this discussion barely touched on the subject. It could use a longer and deeper discussion. But i do appreciate that you had this discussion and posted it!
Well I'm just thrilled that they are finally discussing the issue that has needed addressing for the last 50 years.
Our last generations rebelled against their parents rules. This generation wants to correct them.
The answer is an unequivocal no.
What a great lineup!
Controversial..JFC he said “maybe don’t judge people based on their race”. It was insane
Bro I’m a minute and thirty seconds in and this intro music has go me so effing pumped!
wonderful and underrated video. Would love to hear some more pushback and disagreement though
I'm an admirer of Kathleen stock but I was astonished to read just before the election that she said that she intended to vote Labour. This is the government which cancelled a bill meant to protect free speech on Campus. A bill which had been passed by both houses. The same government intends to replace that bill with one intended to do the opposite of protecting free speech.
Don’t be shocked. She said she was still on the left but not too far left. The Left is fractured and the extreme elements are the problem.
Voting Labour this time around was more about not voting Conservative.
The UK is the outlier these days. While Europe is generally moving right the UK moved left. France also is schizophrenic. Moved right and then whiplashed left. Very strange.
@@stephenl9463 They will advance nothing but the forces of wokeness
@stephenl9463 No. The very left wing Jeremy Corbyn was soundly rejected by the British electorate when he was the leader of the Labour Party - on two occasions.. Britain has not suddenly lurched to the left.
This panel is so inspiring
A large amount of what gets learned at university is uncontroversial technical knowledge. You don't need two people with opposing points of view to teach math, physics, or electrical engineering. That's like saying that if a test question has four answer options, we should be teaching students why all of them are correct in their own way. That's incorrect, counterproductive, and silly.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that model for the teaching of STEM subjects. But in the humanities and in research across all subjects, opposing viewpoints and conclusions must be judged against one another.
STEM requires opposing viewpoints to advance. See also "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". It's not all figured out just yet.
Every serious subject that is of any value to the intellectual and conscious study and research of man's endeavours needs to be questioned, and seen from not just two, but multifaceted lenses, to actually continue growing in wisdom to be applied in ways that will actually serve societies' common good and cohesion, rather than furthering the science world for no actual functional benefit to humanity at large and a mental masturbation for the few to serve a even fewer ilk.
I think by now some of charatistics of woke which include free speech has bled into the Conservative Liberal and centrist relm. My example of this is the way some students were beaten by Zionist peeps and noone did a thing. In fact the pro Palestinian demonstrators were blamed for being beaten.
@@shiracohenyoga3492 That's ridiculous. Scientific subjects can be open to new ideas and further debate, but only with the goal of achieving a deeper more scientific truth. It certainly should have nothing to do with viewing scientific subjects through a 'lens' of achieving the 'greater good' (who will decide what that is?), that would simply not be science. What you propose is exactly what has occurred with wokeness infiltrating the STEM fields. Your whole post can be seen as a perfect example of 'mental masturbation'.
More brainpower is on that stage than in some small cities.
There’s an aspect of religious belief involved. The idea that Jesus is G-d, considered absurd at a time, with plenty of magical thinking with the virgin birth and miracles then the resurrection, or that the Quran is literally not only the direct word of G-d but perfect and immutable, have led to derivative belief systems masquerading as thought.
Religious schools are recognized as such, but the strong dominance of the woke religion has infiltrated all these institutions with the possible exception of explicitly religious schools.
The only way to address the problem is to first understand that it is a version of a religion and require full disclosure that if you send your child there, there will be these indoctrinations. If you send your Jewish child to a Catholic school, Jesus will come up and participation will be required, but not at a Yeshiva. The market, as enrollments to Harvard dropped after the Gay and Senate controversies.
"Woke Religion" is Liberalism. The purpose of Universities is the indoctrination of students in the Secularist Liberalist ideology.
Liberalism is to liberate.
What do you liberate yourself from when you are free of King, religion, family, marriage, shame...gender and "being human"
McWhorter had to throw in a climate alarm comment and ruin his point.
Also, no one mentioned Hillsdale College, the best institute of higher learning in the nation, as an example to look to.
Congratulations to the host and panel for making this program about university reform and not about another silly WWF style yelling race about wokeism. For once, i was very pleased that the headline was completely incorrect.
And i hope the headline got this panel viewed more than it might have been otherwise.
Can universities be saved from WEIRD. THAT is the question of our age.
John McWhorther: as a linguist, you should know that the plural of "persona non grata" is "personae non gratae", not "persona non gratas".
You cant help people that don't want it.
They need to be saved from oligarchs!
Wrong thread.
41:23 Is she right? I was a Philosophy major and we scorned the Frankfurt school and French postmodernists as garbled nonsense. These “philosophers” were only taught in Comp Lit and Modern Thought & Lit departments. I had to take one of these classes and couldn’t believe people took this shit seriously. As philosophers, we thought it was so patently absurd as to be beneath us. I wonder now if we had addressed the ideas, would it have made a difference.
I was curious about post modernism so I watched a few debates on the subject and I came out confused. It’s ultimately a battle of word twister
I guess the biggest question I have is how these rather outlandish theories grew in the first place? How did they get passed along from group to group without seemingly ever been challenged..? I thought academia was about challenge and debate.?
@@brianmeen2158 There was/is debate, but it’s entirely within the domain of postmodernism. It’s very difficult to counter the “arguments” because they’re not arguments in the philosophical sense. I was at an ‘elite’ university 1987-1991 and never encountered these guys outside of literary criticism or critical theory. But by that time, cultural relativism was ubiquitous, so it had seeped out somehow. Nobody was drawing the line, and obvious horrors were simply ignored. I knew we were in trouble when genital mutilation was being excused.
@@brianmeen2158 I think Pinker's point made in the panel discussion is at least partly right . For a long time the schools of thought that gave rise to 'social justice philosophy', the Frankfurt school, Foucault and the Postmodernists, were not directly opposed because they were seen as being an adjunct/extension of the forces in society that were leading to greater equality and fairness. They were not dominant in academic departments to begin with (they were kind of funky outliers that gave certain subjects a kind of street-cred). What Pinker does not mention that I think was a key development is that all the humanities/social science departments in the Anglosphere universities became increasingly dominated by left-wing faculty, so that by the mid-00s (maybe slightly later) the average professor started to feel the pressure of being labelled a traitor if he/she questioned what had become the quasi religious dogma of social justice identity politics and there were simply hardly any faculty with opposing conservative (or even classically liberal) views. Thus we have ended up with the few brave souls who offered resistance like Stock and McWhorter being marginalised or bullied into leaving academe altogether. That's my two cents worth anyway.
I don’t think we can blame continental thinkers wholesale. They have a place in academia. Phenomenology is important. Where we lost the plot is in allowing their teachings to become fossilized into activist dogma. Sartre complaining about the French in Algeria is not the same issue as the west fighting wars in the Middle East. But ding dongs on the Left have grafted it onto the current situation. No critical thinking! Britain as a colonial power played out very different than Belgium as a colonial power. Try telling that to the woke SJWs!
I think Kathleen Stock is wrong. The right should fund universities where they'd want their children to go to. Some of the right will be more idealistic and will want to fund centres of excellence their kids might not even be able to get into! Those are the only kinds of universities sensible people need think about funding.
With Steven Pinker walking on like Sulley in Monsters Inc....
....this is going to be good!
I question these validity of these six people. Do they represent their entire community? Even if they represented 10% of their community, would their point of view matter?
Where did this take place? Do I hear screaming outside of the building?
Interesting session, but concerning that the word “students” was not spoken by anyone answering the first question about what a university should be, and only said a few times at all throughout the whole dialogue
Any such discussion should start with identifying the cause of the problem. What are the incentives? This is the USA. EVERYTHING IS about money. What are the financial incentive system that drive this? Break it up.
Donations should be anonymous
Universities should not be allowed to have endowments. They should be taxed.
Peer review must be reformed
Fire 50% of all admin starting from the top.
This panel was pretty week.
McWhorter, to me is always preoccupied with race and "brown people". What I see are people like this that see the world through the race lens and people that just don't.
I like the guy on the left who's drinking vodka.
Is Jacinda Ardern working at Harvard still?
Can you please ask if she would come back to New Zealand and face her dues following the convid rollout?
The prison experience that has followed convid is not ok either.
Could the BE a better panel??? Me thinks not
Glenn loury
ThankU! Education, like all fields, is dominated by politics, egoes, jealousies, etc. Remember the play Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? Yeah those were college faculty guffaw
Steven Pinker is really the only one worth listening here. Everyone else is just engaging in politics.
So, the solution is for rich people to save us by redirecting their giving??? Wow. I guess a Plutocracy is better than a Democracy?
FK democracy
I mostly agree with these people but still have to infer that this format was a laughable circlejerk.
The other side means to reason in service of empathy for thy transgender community. But as a result those that reason in service of seeking truth are not given empathy and are called evil and mistaken for their intentions. But are treated horribly.
Today, universities are not a repository for knowledge. In the past few decades universities became factories for inventing semi-plausible theories ('theories' which sound good but don't work). Theories to 'improve' (or destroy?) society with. Theories such as: Decolonialization, White Fragility, Queer Theory, Anti-racism, Decarceration, Anthropogenic Global Warming, String Theory, Intersectionality, ... At this stage, many Western Universities are beyond saving. Even were we able to save some of them, they'd go bad again just a little time later. Good to listen to people debate the fundamental defects. Maybe the University of Austin can learn from talks such as this?
LOL. These social scientists don't realize how and why hard sciences have been badly damaged too.
Right wing is going to colleges, left wing to Pride [lgbtq].
Any course could be put on TH-cam. 85% is the same every year.
The interviewer should really be more concise and get to the questions for the panel.
EDIT: Having heard his next comments, I wholeheartedly repeat my earlier point: his lack of conciseness ruins the fluidity of his great guests.
Yeah he should be a panelist instead of a moderator.
Not a big fan of Kathleen Stock, but dear lord, if you are going to have her on a panel, give her equal time.
Why aren't you big fan of hers?
Yes, why aren't you a big fan of hers?
She’s a big girl. She can speak up.
@@joge2468 i think the same. If she had a problem with it she would have said something
I found her thoughts important and a solid contribution.
Whose measuring her time? And why?
The current universities must give up the leftist idea of engineering society and return to offering ideologies and knowledge from both sides of the political spectrum. The problem developed in allowing one side to dominate. With a balanced institution accessible to academic excellence we return to the liberal idea of meritocracy. The best ideas wherever they may come from will win out. Universities need to be agnostic but the people teaching and studying at them need to run the gamut.
And to underline the important comment made by Greg that the costs need to come way down. Education really needs to be inexpensive and with the Internet there is no reason why it cannot be.
A retired professor friend from UC Berkeley told me that a professor in the UC business school put an ad in the Wall Street Journal listing the names of the students in his class who had protested against the US support of the genocide in Gaza. In the ad, the prof told readers not to hire these students. My friend was concerned about these students’ future. I tried to console him by pointing out that those students will always have their integrity, something more important than a cushy job.
Oh yes, integrity is always better than earning a living! The students have a future of pure integrity. Having a "cushy job" shows lack of integrity, that's for sure.
@@erpollock How does the saying go? “What does it profit a person if they gain the whole world but suffer the loss of their soul in the process?”. These students, having had a glimpse of the real world, will be steered to find more honest work and enjoy a more satisfying life. Don't worry, my friend, they'll be okay because they are people principle.
No, no they can't .
Well I wouldn't call that "A Debate" because everybody agree with each other. Is there an actual debate with someone from the other side about this?
This!
3 conservatives and a toothless Pinker. Had to dissent from this circle of anti-establishment thinkers. The dishonesty. Or is it ignorance?
But im not doing it. Im thinking about it.
Can anyone point to real examples of where "woke" is taking place. I only see it manifest in the people who are opposed to it. I really would be happy to be set straight if I'm wrong but, I'm not at all sure that "woke" actually exists to the extent that it's a real problem?
What is the point of these discussions? Just a bunch of people all agreeing with eachother... boring
Harvard is just embarassing haha
John McWhorter should smile more
Simply no, not with so many special interests. From religions to sexes and biases. Schools have been screwed up my whole life and not getting better. It has been getting worse as social wars grow.
Schools need to get back to teaching and leave out the religious and social wars. Also balance out the ratio of male to female teachers and counselors. Work on fixing the system. Instead of breaking it more from ideologies.
Wait? Does Steven Pinker believe young people in the past were less crazy? Free sex, love and peace? Drugs and Rock'n'Roll? Hippies?
Young people are ALWAYS crazy. I don't know why they don't understand that. It is your job to educate them!
lol ... blaming young people.
No.
Racism of low expectation.
Every serious subject that is of any value to the intellectual and conscious study and research of man's endeavours needs to be questioned, and seen from not just two, but multifaceted lenses, to actually continue growing in wisdom to be applied in ways that will actually serve societies' common good and cohesion, rather than furthering the science world for no actual functional benefit to humanity at large and a mental masturbation for the few to serve a even fewer ilk creating division, favouritism and fear, which regress into rules and 'guideline' to create safety, when in actual fact we wouldn't need them in societies where trust and responsibility are foreground values.