Nerds with Strong Opinions
In a special edition of the podcast, David interviews his former colleague Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The two discuss the state of free speech on college campuses and why it’s not just a higher education issue, but one that also impacts workforces and the United States in general. And of course, lacking Sarah’s moderating influence, there are also some (relatively minor) descents into nerdery over Star Trek.
Show Notes:
-FIRE’s 2021 College Free Speech Rankings
-Undoctrinate: How Politicized Classrooms Harm Kids and Ruin Our Schools―and What We Can Do About It
Wondering how much the shift towards treating students as “customers” of higher education, and charging them exponentially more for the service, has led to the sort of “Karen”-esque parade of students “talking to the manager” when they dislike an opinion, assertion, speaker, or professor. Would seem like a return to students being privileged for the very fact of being on campus, and the hopeful gratitude that would engender, might change the dynamic at issue. Maybe colleges have only themselves to blame for jacking up prices and turning to the student consumer model. Purdue seems the only institute of higher learning to jettison this model.
Regarding corporate recruitment at big name schools, I think some of that is an attempt at limited resource allocation. It's been a decade, but I was involved in standing up a hiring initiative at my large corporation. The HR perception seemed to be that the top students from pretty much any school were going to be better than the low to mid tier students at a top school, but the top tier school would have a deeper pool of "good enough" candidates to make a recruiting trip worthwhile. It was an ironically frustrating problem, as they were explicitly trying to do better at recruiting high potential new graduates, pulled a half dozen perceived high potential new hires into the planning, then proceeded to define a program for which none of us would have been eligible based on our alma maters.