Pinker on “What’s wrong with our universities”

Here’s a new one-hour interview of Steve Pinker by John Tomasi, inaugural president of the Heterodox Academy.

Here are the YouTube notes:

Are our higher education institutions still nurturing true intellectual diversity? Our guest today is Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, and today, we’ll be exploring the growing concerns within higher ed that institutions are turning into echo chambers, stifling dissent and censoring certain perspectives.

In this thought-provoking episode, we’ll be discovering the challenges to academic freedom in the era of cancel culture. We’ll explore how questioning a consensus can now come at a cost, impacting the pursuit of truth within academic institutions. We’ll also uncover the story of the Council for Academic Freedom at Harvard, which was formed to combat these challenges.

Join us as we delve into policies protecting free speech, and the vital role of civil discourse in the academic community. Together, we’ll navigate the complex landscape of universities, grappling with the delicate balance between common knowledge and the suppression of dissenting opinions.

The audio isn’t great, but you should be able to hear what’s said.

As background, you might first read Steve’s Boston Globe op-ed, “Steven Pinker’s five-point plan to save Harvard from itself,” which is now free online (my take on it is here).  This was published before Claudine Gay was fired as President, and perhaps Harvard will now enact some of Pinker’s suggestions.  These include adopting institutional neutrality and disempowering DEI.

I won’t summarize the video, as there’s a lot of stuff discussed here, and if you have a spare hour you can listen for yourself. In general, it deals with “cancel culture” and also goes through Pinker’s “Fivefold Way” and why he suggests a panoply of specific reforms.

h/t: Daniel