Save Our Universities! | Interview: William Inboden

The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg

The Dispatch

Politics, News

4.6 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jonah Goldberg talks to William Inboden, executive vice president and provost at the University of Texas and one of the leading conservative voices in higher education. Jonah and Will discuss the absurdity of the ivory tower, the inconsistency of our free speech standards, and the threat posed by Chinese interference in American universities. Shownotes:—William’s piece for National Affairs—WSJ piece on research funding—Chesterton’s Fence—An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America—University of Texas Statement on Academic Integrity—Select Committee on the CCP report on espionage in academia—The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do about It, by John Agresto—Will’s article on the White House compact in The Chronicle of Higher Education—Keith Whittington in The Dispatch on the White House compact We’re running a listener survey, which you can find at thedispatch.typeform.com/podcast. The Remnant is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of Jonah’s G-File newsletters—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention.
0:18.0	Can you digger?
0:27.6	Greetings your listeners.
0:28.6	This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnanton podcast.
0:30.8	Brought you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media.
0:32.9	I am still in Grand Rapids, Michigan, even though you may not be hearing this until next week.
0:38.3	So I will be home by the time you hear this.
0:40.2	Possibly. Possibly not. I have no idea. There's a lot of really exciting stuff going on in
0:45.4	higher ed these days. There's also a lot of terrible stuff going on in higher ed,
0:49.4	which is why the exciting stuff feels so necessary. And probably one of the most important people in that
0:56.3	whole space is my friend, previous remnant guest, Will In Bowden. He's currently is the executive
1:02.0	vice president and provost of the University of Texas at Austin. He was formerly the director
1:07.6	of the Alexander Hamilton School for classical and civic education at the University of Florida, which is where I first met him.
1:14.1	And he's got this great piece in the current issue of national affairs. We'll put it in the show notes.
1:19.1	You can find it also just by Googling like national affairs and
1:25.6	restoring the academic social contract, which from people been talking about, talking about the piece, not necessarily restoring the academic social contract, which from people have been talking about, talking about the piece, not necessarily restoring the contract. And we figured we'd have them on to talk about it. So we're going to sort of do this as if he wrote a book, even though it's shorter than a book. And so the first question in Will, first of all, welcome to the remnant. Welcome back is what's your article about? Thank you, Jonah. It's great to be with you.
1:45.8	I'm honored to be here again and love to be keeping this conversations going with you on
1:49.8	the state of higher education today. So yeah, to my article, you know, just summarized it in a
1:56.1	couple of parts. One, it's an effort to understand how did we get here in this current moment of so much
2:02.4	turbulence and disputations and controversy over higher education and American universities.
2:09.7	It's, you know, early since October 7th, it's been, you know, top of mind for so many Americans
2:14.6	as we've seen, you know, some of the donor revolts and changes
	...

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