Some of the videos of the Academic Freedom Conference are now up, but rumors are they won’t be for long. (I think they’ll eventually all be up on YouTube). Click on the screenshot to see the available videos; you can access them by clicking on any link that has “video” by it.
Go to the site by clicking on the screenshot below.
And I have to give a plug for our hour-long panel on Academic Freedom in STEM. You can go to the video by clicking on schedule below or on my screenshot below that.
Have a listen. I leave myself out of the evaluation, but Mimi, Anna, and Luana all did a good job, and Luana turned her 8-minute talk into a nice piece on Bari Weiss’s site.
There are other talks you may want to hear, too. For a start, I’d recommend Jon Haidt’s talk (like all of us, he’s been demonized for merely appearing at this conference), while some of the other interesting ones aren’t up yet.
I’m looking forward to Thiel and Pinker. I hope their talks are uploaded soon – or even better, transcripts. I would much rather read something than listen to it.
Yes, all good linguists prefer to read rather than watch a video. It takes a lot less time!
And you absorb it much better when it is in print. If I want live people I prefer to attend alive event if it is a discussion. However, with music it is different: live is preferable to recordings.
Well done. Please keep up this important work! 🙂
Some people would do well to moderate their presentations. What can one say about someone (Haidt) who starts with examples of chutzpah and then goes on to claim that there is more diversity in the room of the conference than it seems anywhere in all of academia. To add to the irony, one example he gave of chutzpah was that critics refused to attend and then claimed the conference lacked diversity. What happened to the celebrated diversity of the conference then if critics weren’t there, even if by their own choice? And who knew, as Jussim states, that identifying as “socialist” (in the layperson’s understanding of the term, not a political scientist or economist) meant that you were equivalent to being a radical or Marxist? There are certainly a lot of people around the world who endorse policies described as socialist (universal healthcare, social safety net, …) who would support economic capitalism, hardly a Marxist worldview.
It’s fair to say, though, that what gets labelled as “socialist” in the US is not really socialist. Most European countries have universal healthcare and a welfare state, but none of them are socialist.
I haven’t watched the video yet, but even if the critics of the conference refused to attend that wouldn’t rule out the speakers agreeing with each other on academic freedom but strongly disagreeing with each other on everything else, including whatever got them into trouble in the first place. That would probably count as diversity of views. They just don’t think that means they can’t share a platform.
It might be fun then to have another conference with round table discussions, arguments, and counter arguments with the same speakers. No matter how heated it gets, nobody will walk out offended.
Here is what Haidt actually said: “There is more diversity, more ideological and political diversity, in the room today than in probably any other room, anywhere in any of America’s top hundred universities this year.”
I’m struggling to find the chutzpah.
Thank you for posting this…..great commentary from panelists.
How do you watch? Mine wanted me to cast to tv??