Claire Lehmann: evaluation

Transcript context

…But do those actually influence anyone? On your list of worries about the United States or the world, how high should they be? “Well, too many people believe in poststructuralism or postmodernism.” Young people vote at pretty low rates in the US, as you probably know, and maybe they’ll vote Democratic to a disproportionate degree, but that possibly would be the case anyway. Why does it matter so much? It matters because people who go through elite colleges and go into the professions, particularly in journalism and law, are often trained and inculcated with these theories. So if you are thinking of the next generation of professionals, particularly in the media—and law is not far off—if you’re thinking about the next generation of professionals who have been trained to be skeptical of objective methods and have been trained to view social phenomena through simplistic narratives of impression, without looking at the complications in the data and that kind of thing, then it’s going to have a toxic effect. I think we can already see the results of that, particularly in some of the biggest media institutions. And I think being complacent about the effect that poststructuralism has had, particularly in the humanities, has backfired. Part of the problems with polarization is because generations of scholars have been complacent about its impact. With respect to political correctness, how is it that Australian universities are different?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.