"The Death of the University?" with Peter Boghossian

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Comedy Interviews, Self-improvement, Society & Culture, Education, Comedy

4.6 • 863 Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2023

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Universities are now dominated by diversity, equity and inclusion mandates, says the philosopher Peter Boghossian… and the result is a stultifying climate of intellectual conformism. In this all-new instalment of Permission to Think, our collaboration with the UTS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Josh and Peter debate how universities, and our culture at large, can reclaim true intellectual freedom.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Goody, humans. Welcome to the safe space to dangerous ideas, and this is an all-new, brand-new,
0:08.0	never-before-heard, flashy, exciting installment of permission to think, which is the collaboration
0:15.4	that we do with the University of Technology, Sydney. The Dean of Social Sciences there, Professor Alan Davison, is an absolute champion who is
0:24.3	committed to making UTS the place where free thinkers feel like they can go, where it's
0:29.6	actually fostering a climate environment in which students are exposed to all ideas, in which
0:35.6	students feel like they can roll with the punches
0:38.2	and wrestle with notions that may not exactly be orthodox in terms of the most politically
0:46.3	correct or woke opinion, but it doesn't even really matter where the opinion comes from.
0:50.1	The idea is that universities have always traditionally been places where you can go out on a limb and express some crazy notion.
0:56.5	And then the correct way to shut that down is to come up with a better argument, a better idea, and hash it out, not shout each other down and de-platform people and say they can't talk and that certain ideas are sort of prejudged to be wrong before we even have that conversation.
1:12.2	And there is too much of that going on campuses all over the Anglophone world.
1:18.3	Alan Davison is trying to push back against that and is trying to foster an environment
1:23.7	of genuine free speech and independent thought at the University of Technology.
1:28.0	Sydney, it's exciting that I can be one small part of that collaboration.
1:31.9	And if you're finding this show through UTS, then I hope you enjoy all our other episodes.
1:36.4	Because one person who has a similar mission to Alan Davison is today's guest, Peter Bogosian,
1:41.1	who was on a previous episode of Permission to Think here on Uncomfortable Conversations.
1:47.0	He's back because he's in Australia, courtesy of the University of Technology, Sydney,
1:52.6	and I was excited to sit down with him in the flesh and actually meet him one-on-one.
1:56.8	Peter is a philosopher. He was an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University
2:01.3	before he resigned at the end of 2021, saying that the university had become a social justice
2:08.3	factory, that he faced harassment and retaliation for trying to have recent rational conversations
	...

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