Higher Ed Now

Higher Ed Now delves into issues of merit, fairness and equality, academic freedom, and more with Dorian Abbot, associate professor in the department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. It’s now well known that Dr. Abbot was invited last year to give the prestigious Carlson Lecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology—and then, in September, he was disinvited by MIT after a group of activists launched an online cancellation campaign against him. This conversation between Dr. Abbot and ACTA's Michael Poliakoff took place in Washington DC on the same day that Dr. Abbot received our Hero of Intellectual Freedom award.

Nadine Strossen is one of the nation's leading champions of free expression, a renowned author and educator, and a long-time close friend of ACTA. From 1991 to 2008, she served as the first woman and youngest person to lead the American Civil Liberties Union. Today she is a professor at New York Law School, and in 2018 she authored the book Hate – Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship. In this episode she sits down for a far-reaching conversation with ACTA's Michael Poliakoff and Doug Sprei. .

ACTA's Doug Sprei interviews Paul Carrese, Founding Director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. Professor Carrese shares the underpinnings of this influential program, which aims to prepare the next generation of young leaders through the study of great works of civic, economic, political, and moral thought.

For six decades, Dr. Gordon S. Wood’s scholarship has advanced the understanding of the formative years of our nation. His work on the American Revolution and the creation of the American Republic is not only renowned for its meticulous accuracy and groundbreaking insight but also for its elegant and effective presentation, which has made it resonate among professional historians and a much wider public. Dr. Wood has served on the faculty of Brown University, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, William & Mary, and Cambridge University. In addition to the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History, he has held a Guggenheim fellowship, and in 2010, Dr. Wood was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama. Speaking of awards, Dr. Wood was recently presented with the Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education at ACTA’s 25th plus one Anniversary Celebration at the U.S. Library of Congress. This episode features his award acceptance speech at that event, in which he discusses America’s founding and the various inaccuracies of the 1619 Project.

ACTA’s president Michael Poliakoff has a bracing conversation with Ed Yingling, a co-founder of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance (AFSA)—a new consortium of alumni groups dedicated to preserving free speech on their college campuses. Yingling and ACTA Board member Stuart Taylor, also co-founders of Princetonians for Free Speech, launched the project with an explosive op ed in the Wall Street Journal on October 18, 2021. The piece, Alumni Unite For Freedom Of Speech: Many Left-of-Center Professors Now Realize That They Too Can Be Brutally Canceled by the Mob, prompted a flood of inquiries from alumni of more than 60 colleges and universities, all seeking guidance on how to recruit and organize alumni from their respective alma maters as bulwarks against the creeping illiberalism and cancel culture gripping college campuses.  Yingling describes what inspired him to take action, provides a start-up plan for alumni to stand up new groups and link up with others in the expanding alumni free speech movement, and previews exciting developments at AFSA in 2022.

ACTA's president Michael Poliakoff joins author and editor Robert McCrum to explore his latest book, Shakespearean, an inspiring portrait of one of the most influential writers in history. McCrum elaborates on how Shakespeare's works resonate today as vividly as they did centuries ago, and why it is paramount to keep his works alive and strong in the modern college curriculum.

ACTA's Jonathan Pidluzny and Nathaniel Urban interview George Harne, Executive Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of St. Thomas in Texas. "Liberal education is almost like becoming a conductor in training," Dr. Harne says. "The goal is to be able to get a vision of an integrated whole, to know the natures of things, the essences of things, and then to know their objective relations with one another. . . Being liberally educated also means as you continue to learn, being able to integrate that new knowledge into the symphony of knowing." 

The acclaimed author, journalist, and activist Jonathan Rauch sat down with ACTA's Doug Sprei to explore the social and political vectors that led him to write his remarkable new book, "The Constitution of Knowledge." Rauch is a research fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor at The Atlantic; he's also a champion of civil discourse, and a longtime friend of ACTA who sparked our flourishing College Debates partnership with Braver Angels and BridgeUSA.

Professor Abraham Unger has a unique vision for liberal arts education. Long before before spending a decade as Director of Urban Programs at Wagner College in New York, he was an undergraduate student concentrating on classical guitar at the prestigious Manhattan School of Music. In this episode of Higher Ed Now, he sits down with ACTA's Michael Poliakoff and Doug Sprei to reflect on the precarious condition of colleges and universities today, and explores the concept he is shaping for liberal arts education based on the conservatory model he experienced as an undergraduate.

ACTA's Armand Alacbay sits down with John W. Altman -- distinguished entrepreneur, business leader, educator, and veteran trustee at several colleges and universities -- to explore the distinct strengths that trustees should bring to any institutional governing board. Having recently stepped up as ACTA's board chairman, Altman brings a lifetime of experience and insight into helping higher education institutions stay on course and fulfill their mission.