Steven Pinker: What Went Wrong at Harvard

Psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker is one of the leading defenders of academic freedom and liberal values of limited government, secularism, tolerance, and free enterprise.

A year ago, he helped found the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, "a faculty organization to advocate for the free and civil exchange of ideas inside and outside the classroom." In the wake of the reaction by the campus left to the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, he published "A Five-Point Plan To Save Harvard from Itself" in The Boston Globe. His ultra-influential home institution, he wrote, "is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context." Reason's Nick Gillespie and Pinker discuss if higher education is doomed, why so many people on the right and left are skeptical about moral and material progress, and how his "stereoscopic" photography fits into his larger worldview.

Previous appearances:

• Steven Pinker: Rationality Has Made Us Richer, Kinder, and More Free
• Steven Pinker Wants Enlightenment Now!
• Steven Pinker on the Decline in Violence and the "Better Angels of Our Nature"
• Biology vs. the Blank Slate: Q&A with Steven Pinker

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Nick Gillespie: Last December, you published an op-ed titled "A Five-Point Plan to Save Harvard from Itself" in The Boston Globe. You wrote that Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense, but calling for another Holocaust depends on context, and that deplorable speech should be refuted, not criminalized. But you also note that outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn't want to hear hate speech. Can you bring us up to date on the climate at Harvard?