Free Thinking - Universities: Therapy or Learning?
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 22 June 2016
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Philip Dodd debates "Universities - therapy or learning?". New Generation Thinker Dr Seán Williams looks at the history of the university as a space for thought, considering the arguments put forward by Frederick Nietzsche. Dr Seán Williams is at the University of Sheffield's School of Languages and Cultures. He is an expert on German and Comparative Literature and is currently researching a cultural history of hairdressing.
Dr Matt Lodder, Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the University of Essex and Dr Joanna Williams, education editor of Spiked Online and former Director of the Study for Higher Education at the University of Kent discuss what is happening in academia and what it means.
Dr Shahidha Bari reviews Omer Fast's film of Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder. And Adam Mars Jones joins her to discuss the place for experimentation in the arts today.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:31.9 | On tonight's program, Culture Wars in the University. |
| 0:35.9 | If one such places were bastions of free speech, are they now |
| 0:39.5 | bastions of freedom from speech? His talk of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and no platforming, |
| 0:46.3 | a step towards the curtailment of the right to offend and to confront. Should Ovid's metamorphoses |
| 0:52.2 | be taught because it's troubling or not taught for the very |
| 0:56.1 | same reason? All will be revealed later as well as Nietzsche's views on the university. But first, |
| 1:03.6 | the avant-garde. It was a term first coined in 1844 and since then its death has often been |
| 1:10.0 | announced, but as it turns out always prematurely. |
| 1:13.7 | A new British film Remainder is based on the novel by the much-celebrated Tom McCarthy who has |
| 1:19.3 | said that to ignore the avant-garde is equivalent to ignore in Darwin. |
| 1:24.5 | So this evening's free thinking asks, is the avant-garde alive and well, reveling |
| 1:29.5 | in experimental sound, image and language, or is the avant-garde effectively dead? And are we just |
| 1:35.5 | witnessing the decline of revolt into style? Soon we'll reflect on this. But first, let's |
| 1:41.7 | have a look at the film Rema remainder, directed for the cinema by the Israeli |
| 1:45.3 | director Omo Fas, best known for his video work, often in galleries. The film's set in London |
| 1:52.0 | and begins with a nameless protagonist as an unidentified object falls from the sky onto his head. |
| 1:59.5 | He can remember almost nothing when he awakes from his coma, |
| 2:02.6 | which makes it easy for him to accept the request of his lawyer that he forgets what has happened |
| 2:07.7 | in exchange for eight and a half million pounds compensation. The rest of the film sees him trying |
... |
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