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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices.

This year, 2024, is an election year in America, a presidential election year. And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one,

because we want to and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

I am delighted to be joined by Jacob Howland, who is Provost and Dean of Intellectual Foundations

at the University of Austin, which is an exciting new university. How

new is it? Well, it was publicly announced less than three years ago. And we're opening

our doors to the inaugural class of freshmen on September 9th this year. So we will have gone

from start to finish, or zero to one, if you like, in under three years.

Well, I thought I'd start by asking about an issue that probably doesn't affect the University of Austin very much at the moment,

which is the level of hatred for Israel on American university campuses,

because in Britain we have the same thing.

Most of our students would be very pro-Palestinian.

But I think quite a lot of Brits have been shocked at the vehemence on American campuses

that we've seen against Israel. And it's not something we usually associate with America.

We usually think of America as being quite pro-Jewish, quite hawkish in favor of Israel, usually,

even on campuses that you would imagine to be liberal and so on. So I want to start by asking

a sort of simple question, why are American university campuses such hotbeds, if that's the right

word, of anti-Israeli sentiment? That's a great question. So what we've seen

is this very strange alliance of left-wing causes, environmentalism, Black Lives Matter, Antifa,

and so forth, with Islamism, with Hamas. And I think it's a complicated situation. But one thing that needs to be

...