Academy of Ideas

#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

#BattleFest2015: Is technology limiting our humanity?

From Big Data to the driverless car, we seem
to live in an age of dizzying technological progress, which many hail
as a ‘new industrial revolution’. Robotic intelligence is becoming so
advanced that many warn machines could take white-collar jobs within a
generation, while computers are moving ever closer to passing the Turing
Test. Meanwhile, smart technology is increasingly marketed as desirable
for reducing the capacity for human error: Google’s developers note
that most accidents had by their driverless car are caused by other
drivers. Global companies such as IBM are involved in designing
purpose-built smart cities, such as South Korea’s Songdo, which can
manage the climate and water supply or respond to citizens’ movements in
real time.
While much of this seems cause for celebration – liberating us from
banal tasks and informing our ability to make choices – others sound a
note of caution. Wall Street’s ‘flash crash’ in 2010 was allegedly
caused by ‘spoofing’ technology tricking automated trading systems into
believing a share crash was taking place, wiping over £500 billion off
the market in a few minutes: an example of the real-world impact of
entirely virtual activity. It similarly remains unclear how the
driverless car would respond to systems failure or pedestrian behaviour.
Architect Rem Koolhaas raises the concern that cities where citizens
are ‘treated like infants’ with no ‘possibility for transgression’ are
not necessarily desirable places to live.
Is it troubling that innovation seems so concerned with eliminating
human failure or has that always been the aim of technological
development? Is humanity facing its ‘greatest existential threat’ from
today’s robots, as Tesla’s Elon Musk warns? Does the ‘new industrial
revolution’ mean a welcome transformation in how we interact with the
world or a limitation of our capacity in act waywardly and
unpredictably?







Speakers




Dr Tom Chatfield
writer and broadcaster; author, Live This Book! and How to Thrive in the Digital Age




Dr Norman Lewis
director (innovation), PwC; co-author, Big Potatoes: the London manifesto for innovation




Juliette Morgan
C&W Tech Global Lead – London
Head of Property – Tech City UK




Andrew Orlowski
executive editor, Register; assistant producer, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace




Dr Paul Zanelli
chief technical officer, Transport Systems Catapult


Chair



Claire Fox
director, Institute of Ideas; panellist, BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze

#PodcastOfIdeas: Charlie Hebdo, Corbyn’s reshuffle and Brexit

Charlie Hebdo one year on, Corbyn's reshuffle, debating Brexit and more
In this edition of the Podcast of Ideas, Rob Lyons, Claire Fox and David Bowden discuss the state of free speech one year on from the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Labour’s seemingly interminable shadow cabinet reshuffle, David Cameron’s decision to allow his ministers to campaign for Brexit and the way the debate is shaping up, the latest absurd campaign in the war on sugar and Simon Danczuk’s texting shenanigans.

#BattleFest2015: Can the UK economy survive Brexit?

After the Conservative Party’s victory in
the general election, it now looks likely that David Cameron will follow
through on his promise to hold an in/out referendum on the UK’s
membership of the European Union by the end of 2017. Although Cameron
himself would prefer the UK to remain a member, there is now a serious
possibility of ‘Brexit’, particularly given the rise of UKIP and a
general disillusionment with the EU among many voters across the
political spectrum. Euroscepticism has re-emerged on the left, too, with
the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Jones calling for the UK to leave
the EU.
Business leaders have frequently warned of economic catastrophe if
the UK leaves the EU. One much-quoted estimate is that between three and
four million jobs depend on trade with the EU, though the claim that
these jobs would all be in jeopardy if the UK left is controversial. The
UK would likely continue to have free trade with the remaining members
of the EU. But the economic issues run much wider than trade. Brexit
could have significant implications for inward investment, the role of
the City of London as a global financial centre, UK influence on the
rules and regulations of a block that would remain a major trading
partner, as well as agricultural support, free movement of workers, and
so on.
But perhaps it would be wrong to see the question of EU membership in
narrowly economic terms. There is much concern that the EU now
determines large areas of UK law, while lacking the accountability to
voters that national parliaments have. The travails of the Eurozone have
dampened enthusiasm in many quarters for the long-term project of
‘ever-closer union’. Some see the possibility of Brexit not as a
rejection of Europe but as an opportunity to rethink our relationship
with other EU member states.
Is the EU reformable, or are its current ways of working too
entrenched? Would an independent UK be able to survive and thrive
outside the EU? Is Europe as we know it already doomed, or has it proven
itself capable of weathering the crisis?Recorded at the Battle of Ideas 2015







Speakers




Kishwer Falkner
Baroness Falkner of Margravine; chair, House of Lords EU Financial Affairs Sub-Committee; member, EU Select Committee




Thomas Kielinger
UK correspondent, Die Welt




Matthew Kirk
group external affairs director, Vodafone




Philippe Legrain
visiting senior fellow, LSE’s European Institute; author, Immigrants: your country needs them and European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics are in a Mess – and How to Put Them Right




Phil Mullan
economist; director, Epping Consulting business advice; author, The Imaginary Time Bomb


Chair



Peter Lloyd
consultant, financial markets research; campaigner, Manifesto Club; writer, Free Society

#PodcastOfIdeas: The tyranny of health

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick discusses public health's war on our bad habits.
In the run up to Christmas, the season of excess and indulgence,
Rob Lyons and David Bowden are joined by writer and retired GP Michael
Fitzpatrick to discuss the ever increasing curbs on our ability to eat,
drink, smoke and be merry.

#PodcastOfIdeas: Paris, bombing Syria and climate-change talks

Listen to the team discuss the Paris attacks, bombing Syria and the climate change talks
In this week’s Podcast of Ideas Rob Lyons, Claire Fox and David
Bowden discuss the aftermath of the Paris attacks, intervention in
Syria, Jeremy Corbyn’s embattled position as Labour leader and this
week’s UN climate change conference .