PodcastBeyond Knowledge: Academia's Role in Times of Crisis
Here’s what she said:
Our mission in universities is to encourage the best thinking, to make sure that people learn to critique their own positions and their own ideas.
In times of crisis, one of the things that universities could do and should do is be open to allowing different points of view to flourish.
We’re not sufficiently attuned to why we need diversity in educational institutions. This mad rush by universities all over the world now to downgrade the humanities and to upgrade the technical fields is really misguided.
Education, to some extent, is following the money more than it is following the ideas. And it’s difficult to get support for unorthodox ideas, where you can’t actually point to the impact immediately.
If people don’t like the prescription that comes out of the knowledge, they’re going to start quarreling about the knowledge.
[Academic] disciplines are like islands scattered throughout an ocean. Each discipline has its own language, its own customs, its own idea of what a native is and what a foreigner is, and so on.
