On this edition author, academic and journalist Joanna Williams joins James from the UK to discuss her new work, Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity: Confronting the Fear of Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). The volume provides a carefully researched historical examination of the highly politicized anti-free speech movements that have developed at university campuses on both sides of the Atlantic.
Joanna Williams is th
e education editor of Spiked Online and was recently profiled in the Times Higher Education. She began her career teaching English in secondary schools and Further Education. For close to a decade she was a lecturer in Higher Education and Academic Practice at the University of Kent. Joanna is also the author of Consuming Higher Education Why Learning Can’t Be Bought (Bloomsbury, 2012).
Continue reading Confronting the Fear of Knowledge →
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Tom Slater of Spiked UK joins James on this week’s Real Politik to discuss the war against free expression being waged on college campuses across the West by today’s self-appointed emissaries of political correctness. In stark contrast from the 1960s, when college students at UC Berkeley and elsewhere forged paths toward intellectual and personal autonomy while vigorously defending all forms of speech, many faculty and students today seek to be shielded from virtually anything they deem threatening or hurtful.
Stemming from the backdropof now common anti-Enlightenment precepts that characterize much of the humanities, the crusade for political correctness reaches from scholarly publications and the seminar room to government-mandated efforts policing behavior and intimate relations.
Continue reading From Berkeley ’64 to PC Orthodoxy: Creating ‘Unsafe Spaces’ →
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Reflections on Media and Politics
