The Gray Area with Sean Illing17 Jan 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

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(765)

The future of tribalism

Sean Illing talks with evolutionary anthropologist David Samson, whose new book Our Tribal Future delves into how tribalism has shaped the human story — and how we might be able to mitigate its negati...

22 Jun 202352min

When you can't separate art from artist

What do we do when an artist we love does something monstrous? Constance Grady, a culture writer at Vox, talks with Claire Dederer, the author of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. They discuss how to reckon ...

15 Jun 202353min

The case for not killing yourself

Sean Illing talks with Clancy Martin, professor of philosophy at University of Missouri Kansas City, about his powerful new book How Not to Kill Yourself, which combines personal memoir and philosophi...

12 Jun 202357min

What comes after Black Lives Matter?

What is the future of the racial justice movement in America? Sean Illing talks with Cedric Johnson, professor and author of After Black Lives Matter, about building a protest movement that meaningful...

8 Jun 202357min

Clickbait’s destructive legacy

Have clicks, likes, and shares driven media and democracy to the point of disrepair? Sean Illing is joined by Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor and the author of "Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and...

5 Jun 202352min

Simone Weil’s radical philosophy of love and attention

Sean Illing speaks with history professor Robert Zaretsky about Simone Weil, a 20th-century French writer and activist who dedicated her life to a radical philosophy of love and attention. They discus...

1 Jun 202356min

Peter Singer on his ethical legacy

Can we live a good life in a world where animals are factory farmed? Guest host Dylan Matthews talks with the world-famous ethicist Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation Now, the newly revised edi...

25 Mai 20231h 5min

Why the poor in America stay poor

Are we responsible for keeping poor people poor? Sean Illing is joined by Matt Desmond, a sociology professor at Princeton University and the author of the books Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the Ame...

22 Mai 202354min