Harvey Mansfield on Free Speech and Higher Education Today

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 24 August 2019

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What is the status of freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and liberal education on university campuses today? How has modern feminism shaped the modern university? In this Conversation, Harvey Mansfield considers some of the central issues and tensions in higher education today. Describing his own recent “disinvitation” from giving a commencement address at Concordia University in Montreal, Mansfield argues that the incident has much to teach us about current attitudes toward freedom of speech—and the importance of modern feminism in shaping these attitudes. Kristol and Mansfield also discuss the state of liberal education and free speech on campus and in America as a whole.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal.
0:15.0	Welcome to Conversations and welcome to Harvey Mansfield.
0:19.0	Joining us once again.
0:21.0	Thank you for taking this one to do this. That's nice of you. And I thought
0:26.8	we would discuss higher education, which you've been involved in for your entire life and
0:32.1	Professor of Government at Harvard since 1962.
0:36.7	And so how we can talk about free speech, talk about liberal education,
0:41.7	more generally how fairs higher education these days.
0:46.2	Yeah, we can do all those things.
0:48.4	Good.
0:49.4	Perhaps a best lead-in would be an example of higher education. Recently, when I was disinvited from Concordia University in Montreal,
1:02.0	Concordia has a small liberal arts college within it that's devoted to great books and I was invited to give their commencement address and then later on disinvited.
1:15.0	So I wrote an article about this in the Wall Street Journal.
1:21.0	One remarkable thing was the letter. First I had a letter
1:26.8	from a principal as he's called Mark Russell to invite me and then I had another letter, second letter from him to disinvite me.
1:36.4	So this was a kind of sort of problem that he had and he solved it in a way which I think is an example of the science of public administration.
1:47.0	Yeah.
1:48.0	Here you invite someone and then you write a second letter to disinvite you,
1:53.0	how do you handle this?
1:54.6	It's sort of a hot potato.
1:56.4	Yeah.
1:56.9	And according to the best science,
	...

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