Academy of Ideas

#PodcastOfIdeas: Free Speech at Manchester University

Student Elrica Degirmen on her fight for free speech on campus

In this edition of the Podcast of Ideas Rob Lyons speaks to
Elrica Degirmen who is leading the fight for free speech at the
University of Manchester, and is currently running for election to the
Student Union on a free speech platform. 

#PodcastofIdeas: Martin Durkin on Brexit

The polemical filmmaker talks about his crowdfunded documentary making the case for leaving the EU.

With the date for the UK’s referendum on membership of the EU
now set for 23 June, Rob Lyons speaks to filmmaker Martin Durkin about
his forthcoming feature-length documentary, Brexit The Movie, which sets out the case for leaving the European Union and it’s anti-democratic technocracy behind.
You can find out more about Brexit The Movie and contribute to the Kickstarter fund here. Donations close on Wednesday 2 March.

#PodcastofIdeas: Gravitational Waves

Physics teacher and communicator Gareth Sturdy discusses a major scientific discovery.
Earlier this month, scientists confirmed the detection of
gravitational waves, confirming an important conclusion from Albert
Einstein’s work. But what are gravitational waves and what does their
detection mean for our understanding of the universe?
In this podcast, Gareth Sturdy from The Physics Factory talks to Rob
Lyons about space-time, the Big Bang and the on-going debates in physics
between quantum mechanics and relativity theory.

Book Launch: Frank Furedi on the Power of Reading - from Socrates to Twitter

Podcast: Frank Furedi discusses his new book in conversation with Russell Celyn Jones.
Have we forgotten how to read well? Is there a tendency to reduce reading to a minimalist set of functional skills? Or is reading over-fetishised as a signifier of civil and enlightened society? In The Power of Reading, Frank Furedi addresses twenty-first-century anxieties about the future of reading. He takes a wide-ranging historical approach to examining the changing meanings attributed to the act of reading. From ancient Rome to contemporary society, his book focuses on the relationship between reading and social discourses about morality and culture. He questions key contemporary beliefs such as that the internet damages our ability to digest information and that boys don’t read, and argues for the art of reading, not as a mechanism to moral good or social and economic advancement, but as a humanist pursuit.
In this podcast, recorded at the launch of the book earlier this month, Furedi delivers a talk on reading followed by a discussion of the book with Russell Celyn Jones.
SPEAKER
Frank Furedisociologist and social commentator; former professor of sociology, University of Kent in Canterbury; author of numerous books, including Authority: A Sociological History, On Tolerance and Wasted: Why Education Is Not Educating.
CHAIR
Russell Celyn Jonesprofessor of creative writing, Birkbeck, University of London; prize-winning novelist and short-story writer; book reviewer, The Times; Man Booker Prize judge.

#PodcastOfIdeas: Brexit, US election and public health naggers

Listen to the team discuss Brexit, the US presidential election and public-health naggers.
In this edition of the Podcast of Ideas, Rob Lyons, Claire Fox
and David Bowden discuss the lacklustre start to the EU referendum
debate and how the lack of cohesion in the pro-Brexit camp doesn’t bode
well for the campaign ahead. In the US, politics is also in disarray,
with anti-establishment candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both
narrowly missing out on winning their respective caucuses in Iowa,
signalling a crisis for both the Republicans and Democrats. The team
also discuss the latest killjoy advice from the UK’s most senior doctor,
Dame Sally Davies, who believes that women should ask themselves
whether they want to raise their risk of breast cancer every time
they’re tempted by a glass of wine. 

#BattleFest2015: From literature to Twitter - the death of the reader?

From the Battle of Ideas 2015When Roland Barthes infamously declared ‘the
death of the author’ in 1967, he also intended it as a celebration of
‘the birth of the reader’. And while literacy campaigners continue to
fight the Reading Wars over literacy rates, by most measures reading is
in a healthier state than ever. Polls indicate the number of Americans
reading books has doubled since the 1950s, and reading is increasing
among under-30s, while sales of printed books are proving remarkably
robust in competition with e-books. The announcement that Harper Lee
would be publishing her sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird generated
a storm of international media interest, as did Mark Zuckerberg’s
announcement that he was launching his own online book club with 31
million members. Meanwhile, that once-seemingly doomed literary form,
the essay, seems to have enjoyed a resurgence, as new media embraces the
‘long-read’ and serious literary journals and small publishers continue
to thrive rather than face extinction online.
Nonetheless, many others share Philip Roth’s concern over the
long-term health of ‘people who read seriously and consistently’. He
warned that ‘every year 70 readers die, and only two are replaced’.
Perhaps the stress should be on reading ‘seriously’: young people may be
reading more than before, but by far the largest spike comes from young
adult fiction, with no strong evidence they are moving on to more
serious material. Moreover, adult society seems increasingly ambivalent
about drawing the kind of sharp divisions between the nineteenth
century’s ‘men of letters’ and the ‘unlettered’, though a special type
of scorn seems to be reserved for the term ‘tabloid reader’. At the
same, where reading was once closely associated with liberation and
dangerous subversion – the prosecuting QC during the court case over Lady Chatterley’s Lover
famously asked whether the jury would tolerate ‘your wife or servant’
reading such a text - increasingly university students demand the right
not to read books that come with a real or imagined ‘trigger warning’.
Is the twenty-first-century reader facing a crisis of cultural
confidence like that of the author in the twentieth? Has the legacy of
the millennial Reading Wars been that we focus too much on reading as a
technical skill rather than on what we read? Can we still appeal to an
ideal of ‘the reading public’, or is the reality one of many discrete
audiences with only occasionally overlapping tastes? Is the digital age
undermining erudition or broadening our horizons? Is society losing the
ability to read serious and difficult literature, or are we simply
becoming more selective and discerning?







Speakers




Teresa Cremin
professor of education (literacy), Open University; trustee, UK Literacy Association; board member, Booktrust




Professor Frank Furedi
sociologist and social commentator; author, Power of Reading: from Socrates to Twitter, Politics of Fear, On Tolerance and Authority: a sociological history




Sam Leith
literary editor, Spectator; judge, Man Booker Prize 2015




Laurence Scott
lecturer in English and creative writing, Arcadia University; author, The Four-Dimensional Human: ways of being in the digital world (winner of Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for 2014)


Chair



David Bowden
associate director, Institute of Ideas

#PodcastOfIdeas: the battle for free speech on campus

Tom Slater, deputy editor of spiked, on this year's spiked Free Speech University Rankings.
A year ago, spiked‘s groundbreaking Free Speech
University Rankings (FSUR) revealed that there was active suppression of
speech and expression at 80 per cent of UK universities. Tom Slater,
deputy editor of spiked and coordinator of the FSUR project, talks to Rob Lyons about the FSUR 2016 and why, if anything, censorship on UK campuses is getting worse.

#BattleFest2015: Campus Wars - safe or sanitised?

From the Battle of Ideas 2015  Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of
the launch of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at the University of
California, Berkeley, through which academics and students successfully
overturned the censorious policies of university management. Against the
backdrop of McCarthyism, the FSM ushered in a new era of student
activism across the US and Europe, with free speech at its heart. So it
is striking that today, student radicals appear to be at the forefront
of calling for restrictions on what they and their fellow students are
allowed to say, read and hear.
In February, the online magazine spiked launched the UK’s
first Free Speech University Rankings. It found that 80 per cent of
universities censored speech, and that the vast majority of this was
carried out by students’ unions. No Platform policies, which originally
banned fascist speakers, are now used to ‘protect’ students from a wide
range of controversial ideas, and not only right-wing ones; even
feminist speakers have been disinvited because some students objected to
their views. At the other end of the spectrum laddish comedian Dapper
Laughs was banned from Cardiff University after campaigners claimed he
promoted ‘rape culture’. And last October, a high-profile debate on
abortion was cancelled at Christ Church, Oxford, after protesters
claimed the discussion would harm the emotional wellbeing of female
students and make them feel ‘unsafe’.
One former student union president has argued that while inviting
speakers is not in itself an endorsement, it could be seen as
‘legitimating their views as something that’s up for discussion’. Should
some issues be seen as beyond discussion, if discussing them is likely
to upset students? Toni Pearce, the current president of the National
Union of Students, has declared: ‘I’m really proud that our movement
takes safe spaces seriously.’ But should safety on campus really extend
to protection from emotional as well as physical harm? Or should
students be expected to cope with controversial ideas. Should campuses
be bastions of open debate, where anything goes, or does creating ‘safe
spaces’ actually allow many vulnerable students more opportunity to
speak their minds? Is this trend exclusive to campus life, or are
student leaders responding to a wider censorious culture? And what is
the future of student politics, now that spirit of the Free Speech
Movement seems a distant memory?







Speakers




Ian Dunt
editor, Politics.co.uk; political editor, Erotic Review




Christina Hoff Sommers
writer and resident scholar, American Enterprise Institute; host, weekly video series, The Factual Feminist




Gia Milinovich
producer, broadcaster, professional dork




Tom Slater
deputy editor, spiked; coordinator, Down With Campus Censorship!


Chair



Ella Whelan
staff writer, spiked; writer, Spectator