Cult-Like Mentality in Academia

My guest today is Vincent Lloyd. Vincent is a professor at Villanova University where he directed the Black Studies Program, leads workshops on anti-racism and transformative justice, and has published books on anti-black racism, including "Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination". Now, Vincent is one of those rare guests with whom I have profound disagreements on the topic of race, but who's actually willing to have the conversation, which I'm very grateful for.

Vincent came to my attention because of a stunning essay he wrote about his experience teaching a summer course on racism at the Telluride Association. He'll tell the full story in the podcast, but essentially his class was destroyed from within by a single hyper-woke person. It's a crazy story and I think it shocked him, and forced him to reckon with the anti-dialogue pro intimidation component of the campus far left. In any event, Vincent and I begin by talking about this strange experience of having his class imploded, and then we move on to debate our substantive disagreements about racism, police violence, race versus class, whether prisons are necessary, and much more.