Glenn Loury
speaker
197 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Glenn Loury’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I am, although independent media gives me hope. Everybody has got the opportunity to be heard now, and pockets of influence can develop, emerge, and flourish. And you can't stifle the conversation in the same way that you used to be able to. because you could control a few of the portals of dissemination of information. Now that's not any longer possible.
I think it's going to just get more capacious. I think we're, I don't know, it's not my field, you know, about media, but I think we're on the verge of something, you know, revolutionary. Everybody's got an encyclopedia and a global translator in their pocket. Everybody can basically talk to everybody almost without restraint.
So I actually wish that I were going to live long enough to see what would come of this. But I'm 76, soon to be 77. What happens to the universities? Well, there's a confrontation now. And I just read an interesting piece by Peter Berkowitz. I don't know if you know who he is. He's at the Hoover Institution. He's a political theorist.
And he's talking about the Harvard Trump administration confrontation. And he's saying on the one hand, yeah, Harvard had gotten a little lax in its enforcement of restraint on the anti-Israel demonstrators and had gotten very woke in its kind of... latter-day modernist relativism of the humanities and the social sciences. And those are things that can be critiqued, he says.
On the other hand, he says the Trump administration's cancellation midstream of commitments to funding and wholesale assault and demanding to be able to dictate curriculum and hiring decisions of Harvard was over the top, and some of it he doubted was going to survive in the courts.
He says, in effect, this is almost a quote, both sides stand to get bloodied if they end up in court with one another for different reasons. So what about a compromise? And the compromise would involve, according to Berkowitz's thinking, basically Harvard conceding that, yeah, its curriculum had gotten too far left and anti-Western.
And there should be an effort to stand up a school within the university of general education whose purposes would be more liberal. affirming of the Western cultural inheritance, and that while the school would be an independent entity that has had its own faculty and whatnot, the undergraduates would be required to take some courses in the school as a part of what a Harvard education would mean.
So that's a kind of a concession to the critics of the drift left of the curriculum and faculty. and that the administration would back off of its peremptory gangster-type tactics of trying to gut the whole enterprise. And, you know, I think that's worth thinking about. What happens to the university?
Well, I've said recently in a public statement that I think, you know, if you ask what's going on in the university outside of the politicized discourses, what's going on in the sciences and so on, What's going on in the social sciences at the very best places in terms of the state of economics as a discipline, for example, psychology as a discipline, for example.
What's going on in the humanities where people are writing important books, where they're discovering new things about history, where they are examining in a critical way. Culture, not all of it is from the left. The US universities are sources of excellence and of exquisite human achievement. we have the best institutions in the world.
And that's a tremendous boon, both in terms of the straight-up people want to come here and study, but also in terms of the spillover benefits, and not only in the sciences and engineering and the patents, but also in the quality of the American cultural footprint in global affairs.
We don't want to squander that over a politicized campaign to stamp out wokeness inspired by the fact that people don't like anti-IDF demonstrations emanating from the student body. That's the tail wagging the dog here. Take the long view. We want to cultivate these excellent centers of human intellectual achievement. And I think that's the position I try to defend.
Well, I'm a teacher who taught his last class at Brown University after nearly 50 years of college teaching. In that last class, I engaged my students in open-ended conversation. We talked about ideas, and I reminisced about what we had done over the course of the semester. The course was on race and inequality, and we'd read widely.
I got a letter from one of my students recently appreciating me and hoping that my post-teaching endeavors would flourish and saying that I had changed his life.
that I had shown him something that he didn't realize before, which was the fact that even though he recoiled against the conservative tone of some of my arguments, that he realized that there was stuff that he had never thought about before that he needed to think about. And he said that he was better off for thinking about them, inspired by me, inspired by my example.
He says, your eloquence, this is me patting myself on the back, but I'm just telling you what the kid said, and your passion, you know, and this is from face-to-face encounter twice a week for 90 minutes with 20 people sitting around a table and me taking them by the hand and leading them through a corpus of work on a sensitive and important set of questions.
I don't know that YouTube can do that for you. When AI gets to the point that the bot on the other side of the screen has the same degree of empathy, eloquence, erudition, passion, and curiosity that I have, well, they won't need me, will they? Professor, thank you. My pleasure, Tom. Thank you very much.
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