Steven Bartlett

pressure on universities so that they don't produce people who are too critical.

In the U.S., you've had the Trump administration took over the Kennedy Center, which is the most prestigious arts venue in Washington, and tried to change its nature and tried to change its, you know, who could play there and who couldn't.

And the result is actually that it's now been shut down for two years.

Yes, although the mechanisms have been different.

I mean, I was involved in the argument, you know, some years back about this.

You know, I think it was incorrectly called cancel culture, but whatever.

The argument that was happening inside universities and some press and other institutions about what you could and couldn't say changed.

And I thought it was, you know, that there was this peer pressure and sometimes institutional pressure on people and people were canceled.

That means they lost their jobs or they were kicked out of whatever group they were in because they'd said something the wrong way.

You know, I argued against that and wrote about it and so on.

What you have now is a little different.

You now have the president.

attempting to change media ownership.

And you're beginning to see what happens when the administration goes into universities and you can't teach this course.

You can't hire that teacher.

That was the deal that was given to Harvard, I don't know, some months back.

The reason why Harvard wound up refusing to deal with the Trump administration and when it started to sue them was because the administration was trying to actually decide who would teach what courses at Harvard.

I don't believe there's a precedent for that.

But I agree with you that it is an illiberal instinct to try to control speech.

And there's a left-wing version of it and there's a right-wing version of it.