Sean Decatur doesn’t see a free speech crisis on campus

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, News Commentary, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2019

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sean Decatur is the president of Kenyon College and the first African-American to hold that job. He’s also one of the most thoughtful voices in the debate over free speech and political correctness on campus. "Colleges and universities have been charged from their very origins to advance civility, and this has meant regulating student behavior on campus,” he says. "If anything, the approach taken earlier in history was far stricter than anything that 21st-century critics of higher education see as a product of 'political correctness.’” Decatur manages these conflicts as a college president, looks at them as a historian, and brings a perspective that’s unusually alert to the larger social context. As such, this is a conversation that begins in the fights over speech but quickly dives into more fundamental questions, like what kind of learnings we value, whose definitions of civility matter, what we ask colleges to teach, and what the role of the student has become. This debate often plays out with far less nuance than it deserves. Decatur's perspective is an antidote to that. Book Recommendations: Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education by Nathan D. Grawe The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah Lab Girl by Hope Jahren Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for the show comes from Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice, produced with Vox Creative.
0:08.0	As state legislatures consider more than 500 anti-trans bills, the latest episode of Into the Mix asks how best to support and protect transgender youth.
0:19.0	Like Ali Aske, a young man who, despite growing up in a loving and supportive home, felt the need for friendship with other trans and queer kids.
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0:36.0	First, sweet tarts stared to combine sweet and tart, but they didn't stop there.
0:42.0	Now they've combined soft and bouncy to bring you new sweet tarts, gummies, fruity splits.
0:48.0	A uniquely delicious dual-sided gummy with one side that's sweet, and the other side that's tart, but entirely smooth and squishy.
0:58.0	A powerfully perfect combo, sweet tarts, dare to combine.
1:03.0	We somehow measure excellence in institutions by the number of students we reject, and the more students that we don't let in, it must inherently be a better place.
1:18.0	Hello, welcome to Mr. Cloncho on the Vox Media Podcast Network.
1:31.0	I'm Mr. Clon, welcome to the show.
1:33.0	Let me begin today actually with a request.
1:36.0	I am on the weeds, ask me anything recently.
1:39.0	The weeds is the policy podcast psychohost by wasn't on this, ask me anything.
1:43.0	One of the questions that Matt and Sarah and Dara got was, is Ezra ever going to finish his book, and then they'll just laugh and move on.
1:53.0	That's motivating, I appreciate that. I am going to finish my book.
1:56.0	Part of getting a draft finished, because this is hard, is going to be my work converges for a bit.
2:02.0	You're going to notice in the coming months a certain convergence between the themes I'm thinking about for the book and who's on the podcast.
2:10.0	But I also wanted to ask this of you. If you're a listener of the show, I think at this point you probably know the themes that the book is dealing with.
2:17.0	Political identity, polarization, the ways in which a party is sorted, the ways in which the collisions of our coalitions have become more personal and more intense, and how that is affecting other institutions in American politics.
2:30.0	If there is someone you think I should talk to on this, someone you think would be interesting for me to interview, somebody who studies polarization and political identity,
	...

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