Ep45 “The Future of Higher Education Part 2” with Niall Ferguson

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Problems in Higher Education

Neil Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and Harvard's Belford Center, identifies three main issues in higher education: students' lack of free speech, professors' political activism, and the rise of an unaccountable bureaucratic class.
Ferguson argues that these trends have made higher education dysfunctional in the last 10 years and are too deeply ingrained to be fixed from within existing universities.
He compares the current situation to the German universities in the 1920s, which declined due to political radicalization.

Neil deGrasse Tyson and Joe Lonsdale discuss the University of Austin, a new private university in Texas that prioritizes the pursuit of truth through scholarship, academic freedom, and free speech.
It has a unique governance system with legislative, executive, and judicial branches to protect academic freedom and due process.
The first class of 100 students will start in the fall, and tuition will be free for the first four years.
Tyson believes that true academic freedom and the pursuit of excellence are incompatible with diversity, equity, and inclusion objectives.

The speaker expresses concern about the decline of free speech on university campuses and proposes creating institutions that discourage and penalize stifling conformism.
The speaker suggests a Chatham House rule in class to protect privacy and prevent comments from being taken out of context on social media.
The speaker emphasizes the importance of creating an institutional framework and constitutional protections to safeguard freedom.