Wendy Brown

Interview with political theorist Wendy Brown. Nuanced take on what higher education is for, that as a teacher I relate to (and had many heated discussions with other teachers about). You are there to help students find and shape and contextualise their own path; you are there to help them dig deeper; you are there to teach them how to have a civilised debate. You are not there to convert them, or to be afraid when they express views that are not yours.

I especially loved this:
"That those views are treated as something that you just have culturally, religiously, according to family — but not something that you develop, enrich, maybe change. To put it in brief, neoliberalism essentially aims to roll out education as vocational training, and the extreme right essentially aims to turn education into church. What you have in the middle are a bunch of kids earnestly concerned with social justice, climate crisis, police violence, screaming into that context that their views matter, and that their view should hold sway and if not dictate curriculums at least dictate the culture of campus."

https://www.nytimes.com/interact...

photographer: Mamadi Doumbouya