Carole Hooven On Harvard's Existential Crisis

The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

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Carole is back to discuss her travails at Harvard, teaching in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. She originally appeared two years ago to discuss her superb book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. She’s now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and an associate in Harvard’s Department of Psychology, in the lab of Steven Pinker. She’s also an active member of the newly established Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. We talk here about her own experience in the last few years, targeted by the woke left on Harvard’s campus, and about Harvard itself, and whether the Ivy League can be reformed.

For two clips of our convo — on loving your intellectual enemies, and how you “can’t win a fight for rights by lying about facts” — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: Carole’s popularity with students before her cancellation; her many teaching awards; her Fox News appearance; the grad student who targeted her on Twitter and terrified the senior faculty; the friends who turned on Carole; the TAs who shunned and refused to teach for her en masse; the administration that abandoned her; the sprawling DEI infrastructure at Harvard; the monoculture there; its growing disdain for the working class; how Veritas was sacrificed for standpoint epistemology; feelings over rational debate; runaway grade inflation; “decolonizing” syllabi; Katie Herzog’s report on medical schools abandoning “male and female”; how you can acknowledge nature while still respecting identities and pronouns; CRT as the enemy of liberal democracy; Gay’s testimony before Congress; the quality of her academic papers even before the plagiarism emerged; Harvard threatening the NY Post with defamation; Gay’s resignation and NYT op-ed; the NYT scapegoating James Bennet in 2020; Chait’s cowardice when I was fired at New York Mag; the Trevor Project’s redefinition of homosexuality; the pro-Hamas protesters on campus; the belated alarm by big donors; how “white supremacy” became “Jewish supremacy”; how the SAT finds disadvantaged students — but the woke want to abolish it; my debate with Harvey Mansfield over homosexuality; Harvey mentoring students from minority groups; Carole and I debating whether the the federal government should withhold funds from DEI colleges; and, as always, how Trump makes everything worse.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Alexandra Hudson on civility and Jennifer Burns on her new biography of Milton Friedman. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to [e-mail].