Psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker is one of the leading defenders of academic freedom and liberal values of limited government, secularism, tolerance, and free enterprise.

0:00 How to save Harvard
12:42 The institution of neutrality
14:10 Universities should be nonviolent
20:31 How important is viewpoint diversity?
27:22 How bad is DEI?
32:02 How university policies are made
47:07 Why do progressives hate progress
52:00 The value of perspective

https://reason.com/podcast/2024/03/27...
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A year ago, he helped found the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, "a faculty organization to advocate for the free and civil exchange of ideas inside and outside the classroom." In the wake of the reaction by the campus left to the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, he published "A FivePoint Plan To Save Harvard from Itself" in The Boston Globe. His ultrainfluential home institution, he wrote, "is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context." Reason's Nick Gillespie and Pinker discuss if higher education is doomed, why so many people on the right and left are skeptical about moral and material progress, and how his 'stereoscopic' photography fits into his larger worldview.