Think About It

In 1837 Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a lecture that Oliver Wendell Holmes, father of our modern Supreme Court, called America's Intellectual Declaration of Independence. What does it mean for America, and us as Americans, to start thinking for ourselves? What does it mean to start our intellectual break from Europe nearly half a century after the American Revolution - and what new forms of living...

Jean Toomer considered Cane the "swan song" of African-American folk culture rapidly destroyed by the industrialization of the South and the north-bound migration of African Americans during the era of Jim Crow. I spoke with Ismail Muhammad to understand how to read a book celebrated as a major achievement of the Harlem renaissance without pigeonholing its ambition, scope and achievement, and what...

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The opening sentence of 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Roussau's Social Contract poses a central question for all of us. Why do we live under conditions of inequality, violence, dependency and general unhappiness (just look on twitter!) if society is made by us and for us? I spoke with Melissa Schwartzberg, who is Silver Professor of Polit...

Dale Jamieson is a professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at NYU School of Law. Convinced of the totality of climate change, Jamieson addresses the threat with the lens of a philosopher. Climate change is a recognition that rationalism is, in fact, not the guiding principle of international politics; it is both a threat and a contributor to our identity. Jamieson explores this in his ne...

How can the German response to the Holocaust teach us about America's legacy of the Confederacy? Susan Neiman, Director of the Einstein Forum and author of many books, including the recent "Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil", suggests that it's a way into talking about American racial politics and potentially a way forward. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as Univer...

Nobel-prize winner Samuel Beckett's plays, novels, poetry, radio plays and prose reveal our deepest humanity by stripping language to its bare essentials. He reveals how our bodies moving through space are far more than vessels for a roving consciousness. They contain a hint of transcendence which manifests itself as the human need for self-expression through which we locate ourselves in time, in...

Free speech and academic freedom are at the heart of universities, but in isolation these principles commonly lead to dead-end situations which little hope of progress. Robert Quinn, Director of the international NGO and network Scholars at Risk, offers a values frame that touches on five core principles for universities. Academic freedom, equitable access, accountability, autonomy and social resp...

We Americans are defined by our Constitution and we cherish especially the First and Second Amendments. But like all texts, the Constitution can be read to empower and protect our individual rights but it can also be used selectively, self-servingly, and in bad faith. And the Constitution guarantees two things: our own personal liberties, unfettered by threats from the government, and equal treatm...

America embodies the bold promise of assuring everyone's liberty to the greatest extent possible and has a history of imposing its will both internally and around the globe with great force. How can we make sense of the dual promise of personal liberation and rights for all and the expansionist idea to spread America's way of doing things around the globe? I spoke with Professor Aziz Rana of Corne...

The battles over free speech are also battles for the hearts and minds of students. Why else would people with little interest in the university want to address college students? Because the next generation will ultimately rule the world. I spoke with Yassin Nacer, a rising senior at UC Berkeley, about his understanding of the so-called free speech controversies. He explained how people who deny t...

What's really happening on campus? PEN America cuts through the myths, the caricatures, and the misinformation. In response to President Donald Trump‘s March 2019 executive order on campus speech, PEN issued a hard-hitting report that offers concrete guidelines for how best to respond to incidents. I spoke with Jonathan Friedman, Ph. D., who is Campus Free Speech Project Director at PEN, has taugh...

Phillis Wheatley, who was kidnapped in Africa and sold into slavery as a child in Boston, is the first Black person to publish a book in the US. Wheatley's status as the first African-American poet in the US is of great importance, and yet it is an ambiguous matter to assign her this role of being 'the first.' Poet Rowan Ricardo Philips talks about the significance of being "the first" and how to...

In August 2017 Laura Weinrib wrote: "Commentators have rightly observed that the ACLU has defended far-right speech since its founding, despite fierce criticism. But there is a common and mistaken premise in this analysis. It assumes that the organization has always believed, as it does today, that “freedom of expression is an end in itself.” We take a look back at the important history. Laura Wei...

The Kafka most known today is a writer of existential despair, a futile search for meaning, and the 20th century's nightmare of humans trapped in inhuman bureaucracies or situations of terror. Liska explains how Kafka's short parables and prose conundrums offer a way out of the dilemmas of modern existence: the tribalism, fear of difference, and defensive retreat into identities that are defined b...

The philosopher Richard J. Bernstein met Arendt first in 1972, when he was a young professor and three years before her death. He explained to me why Arendt’s work should be read today with renewed urgency, because it provides illumination into the forces that shape our present. Instead of a dry academic exposé, I got a moving anecdote about his first meeting with Arendt and a lucid yet impassione...

Why do populist movements, which exist on both the left and the right, attack universities? Is there any justification for their suspicion of elites who tell us what's true, how to live our lives, and how to solve our problems? What's the relation between populism, academia, and the ideal that everyone's opinion should matter, regardless of their education, birth and academic degrees? Hadas Aron i...

The ACLU defends your liberties - whether you're on the right, the left, and entirely off the political spectrum. The 100-year old organization has argued and won landmark decisions before the Supreme Court to defend individual rights. Is it right to put principle above all other consideration and offer legal aid to Neo-Nazis? Or are there factors beyond the ideals of the law that inform such acti...

What do we mean when we say "The First Amendment"? It's obvious: we mean the most robust protection of speech rights, religious liberty, freedom of the press, and freedom of association in the world today. Correct, says Eugene Volokh, absolutely correct. But it could change! Listen to this illuminating conversation with a leading expert on freedom of speech and constitutional law at UCLA. Volokh c...

How can universities allow more students from more backgrounds gain access to what continues to be the surest way of attaining economic success? How do different ethnic groups fare in college -- and what does it mean that some groups attain 'hypermobility' while others seem to lag behind? I spoke with Van C. Tran, who is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center at CUNY and who resea...

Where does our country's deep commitment to free speech come from? Stephen Solomon researched the range of political speech before the adoption of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights to chronicle years of robust and often controversial speech. Solomon is the author of Revolutionary Dissent: How the Founding Generation Created the Freedom of Speech, Associate Director of NYU's Journalism Instit...

Should the government intervene when there’s a speech controversy on campus? Or should universities be allowed to set their own rules, like other associations such as clubs, homeowner associations or churches? Jacob Levy of McGill University has written extensively about the tension between the idea that the state grants or restrict our liberties, while allowing private associations to set their o...

Self-appointed watchdog groups rank colleges on free speech. Legislatures want to punish universities that don’t uphold free-speech in ways they define. Is there really a crisis? Are students less committed to free speech that earlier generations? Are people allowed to say what they want, or do faculty and students self-censor so they're not challenged and canceled? I spoke with Jeffrey Sachs of A...

Free speech is hotly debated around the world today -- and will it be saved by the U.S. Supreme Court? Professor Eric Segall is skeptical about putting our faith and our fate in the hands of nine black-robed justices placed for a lifetime on the Court. He questions the outsized role of judges to overturn laws, which should only happen, he says, when there is clear and convincing evidence of an "ir...

How can different democracies define free speech differently? In many democracies, speech is regulated differently : in the US hate speech is protected but not child pornography, political speech is protected but not defamation. In other democracies, Holocaust denial or incitement of racial hatred is not protected by the state. I spoke with Adrienne Stone, one of the world's experts on these diffe...

Fake News. Post-truth. Alternative Facts. Conspiracies. Lies, lies, lies. We are living in a disorienting time when truth, it seems, is up for grabs. In Democracy and Truth: A Short History, Sophie Rosenfeld explains that a crisis of truth is not new, and that democracy has always (at least in its modern forms) had to find a way to mediate expert knowledge (of the elites) with the wisdom of the cr...