Academy of Ideas

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. 

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.

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.

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 Furedi sociologist 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 Jones professor of creative writing, Birkbeck, University of London; prize-winning novelist and short-story writer; book reviewer, The Times; Man Booker Prize judge.

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. 

From the Battle of Ideas 2015 When 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

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.

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

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

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.