79. Anthony Kronman — The Assault on American Excellence

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2019

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The former dean of Yale Law School argues that the feverish egalitarianism gripping college campuses today is out of place at institutions whose job is to prepare citizens to live in a vibrant democracy. In his tenure at Yale, Anthony Kronman has watched students march across campus to protest the names of buildings and seen colleagues resign over emails about Halloween costumes. He is no stranger to recent confrontations at American universities. But where many see only the suppression of free speech, the babying of students, and the drive to bury the imperfect parts of our history, Kronman recognizes in these on-campus clashes a threat to our democracy. Shermer and Kronman discuss:

free speech vs. hate speech
how language effects how we think about other people
diversity of characteristics (race, gender) vs. diversity of viewpoints
the search for universal truths vs. understanding other’s perspectives
affirmative action in the academy: from the University of California to Harvard
taking down statues of Hitler and Stalin vs. taking down statues of Confederate Generals
the problem of applying current moral values to the past, and
how to reform the academy to refocus on excellence.

Anthony T. Kronman served as the dean of Yale Law School from 1994–2004, and has taught at the university for forty years. He is the author or coauthor of five books, including The Assault on American Excellence; Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life; and Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	As you know, we do these each week, released on Tuesdays in conjunction with usually newly published books that released that day.
0:07.0	This week's book is The Assault on American Excellence by Anthony Cronman.
0:13.6	He is, as it says right there on the cover,
0:15.5	the former dean of the Yale Law School.
0:18.7	He served as the dean of the Yale Law School
0:20.6	from 1994 to 2004 and has taught at the university for 40 years.
0:25.1	He is the author or co-author of five books including Education's End,
0:30.1	Why Our Colleges and Universities have given up on the meaning of life and
0:35.0	confessions of a born-again pagan which I really liked but we get into that
0:42.0	in the conversation I ask him what he means by a pagan
0:44.3	turns out he's actually pretty religious in Jordan Peterson kind of way that is the
0:49.6	search for and discovery of universal truths in myths and stories in literature and so forth.
0:58.0	We also get into, well the core of his book is on the current crisis on college campuses involving free speech, hate speech,
1:06.2	political correctness, micro-aggression, safe spaces, trigger warnings, the hypersensitivity of students to speakers like Milo
1:17.0	Yonopoulos and we get into who he would invite, what does it mean to have viewpoint diversity, he believes
1:24.3	in that, and yet recognizes the role of racial and gender and other categories of diversity
1:31.6	that colleges have driven for striven for over the decades.
1:36.3	So we kind of try to nuance what's the right amount of that to have given our controversial history in the United States on those issues.
1:46.9	Then we talk about what it means to be excellent, what is excellence, what's the role of a college in a university? And then we finally touch on memory. That is the pulling down of statues, the renaming of colleges, that sort of thing, which Yale was embroiled in over Calhoun College.
2:08.0	John C Calhoun was a slave trader, slave owner.
2:12.0	Yale himself, LEO Yale, was a slave owner. Yale himself, L. E. Yale was a slave trader but not owner. Anyway.
2:17.0	And then the difference between that and say a public park that has a Confederate statue put up in the 1910s or 20s in the Jim Crow era
	...

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