Toby Young talks to Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford, about his experience of being mobbed by his colleagues. They discuss what motivates academic outrage mobs and what can be done to defend free speech at British and American universities.
Published on May 15, 2019
Quillette Podcast 33 – Professor Nigel Biggar on Academic Outrage Mobs, What Motivates Them and How to Fight Back
They talk about a kind of impersonal guilt – one is inescapably racially guilty, if white, but not personally guilty, as long as you acknowledge your guilt & offer your commitment to diversity, equity etc.
This is Limbo getting reinvented. You keep your job and status in whatever bureaucratic hierarchy you are in, but are left immobile, pallid and mute, neither demoted nor promoted, waiting for some ultimate judgement in the future.
The ‘idea of a university’ has undergone enormous change in the last 30 years. Academic exploration of controversial issues, which once was the norm , is banned by so many who have no training in the principles of logic and rational argument. We live in a shallow age
To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person. He, too, who spends his day in dispensing his existing knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either leisure or energy to acquire new.”
― John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University
It may be a good idea for ALL University lecturers to read the whole of Newman’s Idea of a University
Pingback: Chicago Boyz » Blog Archive » The Idea of The University