Welcome to the Quillette Podcast, which is usually hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia. Quillette is where free thought lives. We are an independent, grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

And this week, our recent theme of culture-war bizarro turnabout continues, with yet more tales of conservatives encouraging an illiberal—my guest might even say authoritarian—approach to higher education.

That guest is famed Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker, whom Quillette readers and podcast listeners will know as a stalwart defender of classical liberal values and scholarly freedom against the encroachments of so-called “woke” campus culture warriors.

Yet Pinker himself is deeply concerned by the Trump administration’s recent strong-arm efforts to force Harvard to become a less progressive institution—including by denying Harvard the right to enrol foreign students and receive federal government research contracts.

Steven expressed these concerns in a lengthy May 23 New York Times essay entitled Harvard Derangement Syndrome. And he joined me this week on the Quillette podcast to talk about it.

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Transcript

Jonathan Kay: Professor Pinker, thank you for joining the Quillette Podcast.

Steven Pinker: Thanks for having me.

JK: This is an unusual situation because, if I were interviewing you just a couple of years ago, it would be about the latest progressive illiberal outrage in the Ivy League. And we’d both be agreeing about all those nasty illiberal progressive extremists. Why can’t they just accommodate diversity of opinion?

Now the shoe’s on the other foot. But before we get started with the current situation, a lot of your piece in the New York Times—which I discussed in the introduction—is about establishing the fact that you, of all people, are more than aware of the problem that these heavy-handed federal government gestures are meant to address.

You start off by saying that you are the author of a 2014 essay that was literally called “The Trouble with Harvard.”

The Trouble With Harvard

The Ivy League is broken and only standardized tests can fix it.

The New RepublicSteven Pinker

SP: Yes.

JK: This is eleven years ago, which I realise is like—I don’t know—three hundred years in culture war time. But in those primordial days, what was the trouble with Harvard?

SP: Then the primary focus was on Harvard’s mysterious and opaque admissions policy, what they call “holistic admissions.” I could not have anticipated that it would become famous in a Supreme Court case because—as I predicted—it basically serves as a massive way to discriminate against Asian American applicants.

But it’s not just racial preferences. It also favours children of alumni, big donors, athletes, musicians, activists. And I mischievously said, well, why don’t we daydream and imagine that there’d be some way of admitting students that wouldn’t require upper-middle-class parents to go on a frenzy of social activities for their adolescent, to burnish their teenager’s CV. They’ve got to sort clothes for the homeless. They’ve got to gather petitions. Climb Mount Kilimanjaro and then do a cello performance with their Sherpas. Stuff like that.