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Welcome to the Quillette podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia.

Quillette is where Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas

and fearless commentary. You are about to hear a free preview of this week's episode. To hear the

full episode, and to get access to all our podcasts and

articles, visit us at quillette.com and click the subscribe button. And this week, our recent theme

of culture war, Bizarro Turnabout continues, with yet more tales of conservatives encouraging

an illiberal, my guest might even say authoritarian, approach to higher education.

That guest is famed Harvard University psychologist Stephen Pinker, whom Quillette readers and podcast listeners will know as a stalwart defender of classical liberal values and scholarly freedom against the encroachments of so-called

woke campus culture warriors. Yet Pinker himself is deeply concerned by the Trump administration's

recent strong-arm efforts to force Harvard to become a less progressive institution, including

by denying Harvard the right to enroll foreign students and receive

federal government research contracts. Trump administration officials are even insisting that they

have the right to scrutinize the details of Harvard's academic offerings before they will relieve

such restrictions. Stephen expressed his concerns about the federal government's actions in a lengthy

May 23 New York Times essay entitled Harvard Derangement Syndrome, and he joined me this week on the

Quillette podcast to talk about it. Professor Pinker, thank you for joining the Quillette podcast.

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