What went wrong at Harvard | Steven Pinker | The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

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

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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 Five-Point Plan To Save Harvard from Itself" in The Boston Globe. His ultra-influential 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.

[nyworker]

They have gone from an institution of higher learning to an institution of louder yelling.

[dgfox]

How refreshing to listen to two grown ups talking rationally about academic issues.

[jmarty]

Steven Pinker is such a pleasure to engage with, because he's so generous with facts that build a vivid picture in the mind of the listener. He understands what understanding is, and strives to provide it. And he succeeds, in my opinion.

[danchiappe]

I teach evolutionary psychology and every year it gets more difficult to teach it for political reasons. It used to be so fun to teach, too.

[leakyabstraction]

Things like this is why I regrettably stopped calling myself liberal or leftist, and I express my political association to be centrist. The same way how years ago I realized I had to stop calling myself a feminist, even though I've been explicitly interested and believing in gender equality for over 20 years. While arguably the true meaning of these concepts have not changed, as a pragmatic matter of daily life it became untenable to carry these labels, because they cause people to misjudge me and assume increasingly absurd things about me. The state of intellectuality today is, to a significant degree, a complete embarrassment...

[The_left_hand_pillar]

The diversity statements aren't just for professors, I saw a requirement for diversity statements in a job posting for a controller position at a local university

[darrengagliardi]

One serious problem is that the focus of much of higher education has drifted away from the goal of striving to discover what is "true." Instead, the goal seems to now be to strive to defend and support a particular ideology. This accounts for the explosion of many activist oriented areas of study. Activism is a far cry from scholarship. Activism seeks to silence opposing viewpoints, whereas scholarship relishes the opportunity to broaden and deepen legitimate understanding through challenging discourse. This problem will fester as long as the goal of activism supersedes the goal of true scholarship.

[Think__Yourself]

I graduated from Harvard in 2022 but never got into Professor Pinker's class despite trying the lottery system. His straightforward approach was refreshing in an overwhelmingly partisan environment. Leftism was the water we sam in, and many students felt like his class was a breath of fresh air. The university often sent emotionally charged emails about political events, positioning itself morally whilst maintaining billions of dollars in investments into fossil fuels. These transparent attempts at moral posturing were so blatant that many students, including myself, set up email filters to automatically archive these obviously duplicitous messages from the dean and administration.

[williampage]

The recent public face of Harvard has simply shown what we have known for years, it is a joke.

[tonycosta]

I stopped donating money to my Ivy League alma mater years ago. When they abandoned free speech in favor of wokism, I said I’m done.

[doliver]

Thank you for a reasoned adult conversation. No tribal signaling, no slogans, no histrionic screaming. What a nice little vacation.

[babyqueenxo]

The problem is even Dr Pinker thinks her plagiarism is a pinkie finger while we powerless students are held to higher standards than our College Pres. 🤦🏻‍♀

[TansuTansu]

Pinker has to walk through a mine field to vaguely answer questions without seeming to criticize the institution that signs his checks while also appearing to be not insane.

[christianbolt]

I wouldn’t let my kid go to Harvard even if it was free. It scores too low on FIRE free speech rating

[NJIT]

My son in 11th grade. Took sat before 2024 and got in 1500’s. He received booklet with invitation to apply. He is not interested. I can’t blame him.

[mthai]

Harvard physically conquered and destroyed my home town to the point that not one single person born there remains.

[PrezVeto]

The threat posed by DEI litmus tests ("diveristy statements") in academia to not only universities, but society at large, if allowed to persist, is difficult to overstate. It's far more threatening than anti-communist loyalty oaths ever were because the demand for those came primarily from outside the universities. The demand for DEI testing is coming from inside universities now that the believers have reached critical mass in each institution and want to prevent themselves from ever being toppled from power. They already finished the first wall of requiring allegiance of new faculty. Now they're working on the second wall, which aims to prevent anyone who dissents from their faith from even being seen as learned in _any_ academic field (i.e. from getting an advanced degree). Under those circumstances, it's entirely appropriate for legislatures to tear down the walls they've built, precisely to _save_ academic freedom from the heretics who claim it as they deliberately destroy it.

[reneprovosty]

to me it is incredible that "the west " has decided that the "enlightenment " was a bad idea

[stevenlightfoot]

I am very pleased I never attended Harvard.

[sondragoldstein]

What a pleasure to hear a calm, measured discussion of divisive and hostile issues in academia and America.