meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
New Discourses

The Strange Death of the University, Part 1: The Red Thread

New Discourses

New Discourses

Education

4.82.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2022

⏱️ 105 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 95 We all know academia is in trouble. In fact, we're not even sure it can be saved. To put it simply, the university is dying. To be sure, it's a strange death, however, because the university is in some sense going back to its roots, returning to being theological seminaries, though in a completely new religion. That religion is the transformative religion of Dialectical Leftism, and its materialist watchword in the 21st century is "Sustainability." In this New Discourses Podcast series, host James Lindsay takes the listener through a 2022 UNESCO book, Knowledge-driven Actions: Transforming Higher Education for Global Sustainability (https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000380519/), that calls upon all "higher education institutions" to transform themselves so that they align, promote, and help complete the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals as a part of the 2030 Agenda. In this first episode of the series, Lindsay goes through the preliminary materials, including a foreword that explicitly grounds the entire purpose of the document in the work of the Critical Marxist Herbert Marcuse. "Transformation is the red thread running through all the Sustainable Development Goals," we're told in the first sentence of the foreword. The goal in this executive summary is clear. The university must be transformed. It must be made into a think tank that services the UN 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals meant to achieve it. All institutions of higher education, colleges, universities, seminaries, and beyond, must be bound and oriented in this one particular Neo-Communist direction. They must abandon their missions and take up the core value of sustainability, on the UN's agenda-driven terms. They must install "sustainability officers" and refuse to engage in any activity that supports "non-sustainable" practices. Join James and be shocked at what the United Nations thinks it can coerce the world's colleges into doing. Part 2: https://newdiscourses.com/2022/10/strange-death-university-part-2-new-sensibility/ Part 3: https://newdiscourses.com/2022/11/the-strange-death-of-the-university-part-3-the-strange-death-of-science/ Part 4: https://newdiscourses.com/2022/11/the-strange-death-of-the-university-part-4-the-strange-death-of-knowledge/ Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Subscribe to New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2022 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hey there, welcome everybody, this is James Lindsay, you're listening to the Nudist

0:23.4

courses podcast. We're going to do another little series. This is kind of an

0:28.4

education. I'm not going to read through an old school document or book or

0:34.4

whatever. For this series, which I want to call the strange death of the

0:41.0

university, I'm going to read instead through a very new document that was

0:47.0

published sometime this year. Let me see if I can find the actual date. It says

0:50.8

published in 2022, but it doesn't say which month. But this is a document that

0:58.4

is written by UNESCO, which is the United Nations Education Science and Cultural

1:06.5

Organization. And it is their education 2030 document so that it ties

1:13.8

directly into what the United Nations calls agenda 2030. And the title of the

1:19.3

document is Knowledge Driven Actions Transforming Higher Education for

1:23.7

Global Sustainability, an independent expert group on the universities in the

1:28.6

2030 agenda. So what we hear is that UNESCO in collaboration with or in

1:37.7

pursuit of, I should say, the United Nations Agenda 2030 program, or it's

1:47.2

funny to say the agenda 2030 agenda, is trying to put forth a document to

1:54.1

explain how to transform higher education and not just to transform higher

1:59.0

education, but to do so specifically for global sustainability. So if you don't

2:03.4

know a lot about agenda 2030, that is where we get our 17 sustainability

2:08.8

development goals or sustainable development goals. The 17 SDGs to transform

2:14.1

our world, that word Transformings appearing a lot. We've heard it in the

2:18.2

title of this document. We hear it in the 17 sustainability goals themselves.

2:24.1

And that word Transformers is a dialectical word. It is a word that in fact

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Discourses, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of New Discourses and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.