The Gray Area with Sean Illing17 Tammi 2019

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

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

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The case for failure

Is our society's fixation with success hindering our ability to find humility? Sean Illing speaks with Costica Bradatan about his new book In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility, which explore...

16 Maalis 202346min

Poetry as religion

Sean Illing speaks with poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht, whose new book The Wonder Paradox asks: if we don't have God or religion, what — if anything — do we lose? They discuss how religion ...

13 Maalis 202354min

Revisiting the American Dream

In America, there's been an increase of available jobs, and there's also been a series of high-profile layoffs, strikes, and calls for unionization. The social safety net for workers is disappearing, ...

9 Maalis 202341min

The cost of saving pandas

The giant panda is no longer endangered. This, of course, is good news. But the model of conservation that worked to protect these iconic bears has failed to help the countless other threatened specie...

6 Maalis 202343min

Breaking our family patterns

Sean Illing speaks with marriage and family therapist Vienna Pharaon, whose new book The Origins of You aims to help us identify and heal the wounds that originated from our family, which shape our pa...

2 Maalis 20231h 2min

For Black horror fans, fact is scarier than fiction

Guest host Alissa Wilkinson talks with Dr. Robin R. Means Coleman about her new book, The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar. Dr. Coleman is the Vice President & Associate ...

27 Helmi 202349min

Taking Nietzsche seriously

Sean Illing talks with political science professor Matt McManus about the political thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher with a complicated legacy, despite his crossover...

23 Helmi 20231h 3min

The dark history of Silicon Valley

Sean Illing speaks with Malcolm Harris, a journalist, critic, and author of the new book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. Together, they discuss the weird history of the ...

16 Helmi 202358min