threat to american privacy and liberty. it's a tierney a big tech. and on juneteenth, pulitzer prize winning historian annette gordon reed recalls the announcement of the end of slavery in texas on june 19, 1865. also been publishers weak best-selling author michael lewis exposes struggle to medical experts in the trump administration over the covid-19 pandemic and the premonition. in nine nasty words linguist john questions what gives exploitive word so much power? and why people look to use them? : : :

she's a writer at "the new yorker" magazine and she's written about domestic violence philosophy the child welfare system barack obama among other subjects. she'll be speaking with their featured author katie engelhart pray she is a reporter and i can mentor a film producer and she's also a national hello at new america. she is a correspondent for vice news in london and nbc news in new york. her new book "the inevitable" is a wide-ranging book about the right to die movement with activists that they part of this increasingly urgent issue.

the interviewer praises the book is an extraordinarily moving book that will change forever the way we think about death. katie is going to start us off with a raiding from the book and then shall be talking with all of you. take it away. >> thank you very much a thank you to marissa for this conversation and thank you all for joining us well. i'm going to read from chapter 2 of the book for those of you who have bought it paid 61. in a late morning on the day she planned to die in april of 2016 apple henry went to the downstairs bathroom. she walked past the mustard yellow curtains and the glass doors in the parler passed the padded rocking chair where she sometimes after hours to ease the swelling in her ankles she

said. she studied herself against the countertop before reaching up to the top shelf and getting around to the glass bottle that she had hidden there behind the toilet cleaner and the baby powder. to the bottles were small full of cough syrup and had spanish writing on the label. a third bottle and a suicide manual warns pino barber tell -- phenobarbital. i got it illegally she said of the drug supply. it's quite easy to do but very risky. she lives in a home in a small village in three under president a pub called the lazy toad the church of england parish church in the town council in which he has spent several terms and a reputation as brilliant and steadfast sometimes needlessly adversarial. in her 80s she was on an

unformed aesthetic plastic clogs often airings sometimes a --of lipstick or by the time time she planted by her white hair was so long it nearly reached her waist. it's way from the garden and in the mornings it took no small effort for her to pull her hair back and post an order on it with elastic and bobby pins and late morning it was falling down around her forehead. she stares slowly as she always did bent over and clinging to the banister nearly crawling so she fell she wouldn't fall far. her walker was waiting at the top of the staircase but she didn't need it. she was only going as far as the bathroom. for weeks he had worried that in the throes of dying she would make a mess of herself and the

house would smell for weeks. but dying in the bathtub she hopes to -- that and just in case he left a bottle of cleaning fluid under the towel rack for whoever mopped up after her. she explained all of this in her suicide note and if i should take my life the letter read i'm alone in the decision is wholly mine and laboriously planned. everything was ready with the internet provider planed how she'd planned to kill herself at 7:00 p.m. and reached -- until the executors had time to type the events around her house. she would later agree that this was the right thing to do things considered but by then she had told her friend for a handyman or caregiver to her gardener his wife and her acquaintances from the local swimming pool. she had gotten to on line forms that tell people about your death plans and events in that way there would a less

traumatized by suicide in the understand she hadn't acted rash lana bad day. she wants to be dead. she was entirely surprised knowing her personality as well as he did but she was compromised by the disease which kept her nervous system she told me later from doing the things that could be broken by a body. most had taken the news well although if you had not. a former colleague at the university even argued with her. consider -- have you considered the effect on your family. of course i have considered the effects and she told her about her eggs and paint and untreatable conditions and they flagrantly incomparable powell. her handyman jeff was saying that avril was spending less time in the garden and more conversation for real and told avril over cup of tea that he did not object to her decision.

i have no qualms about this at all he said. he asked whether the pain was that bad and it was drastic. avril brushed him aside and she said the suicide confessions were final and they were not invitations for anyone to try to stop her. thank you. i'm so delighted to be here because this is a really beautiful book and the really important book and i really urge anyone who is watching to buy it if you haven't already. it's hard to read. it's hard to read but it's also beautiful and ethan and funny as you just saw. i was going to ask something else for the first question that but just before we started we started talking and katie told me that there was only one of

her major subjects who is still alive and by after her reaction to the book. you haven't heard from her yet but what do you think her reaction will be the woman named maya. >> one of my chapters is about a woman named maya who is around 40 years old. she has multiple sclerosis which is in the secondary progressive stage which means she is slowly but predictably losing control over her body and experiencing other symptoms and she has plans which i think over time she gets further away but she plans to end her life in the suicide clinic. she is the one that i wrote about and i had interviewed her over the course of years. i did send her copy of the book

but i haven't heard from her yet. and i think she will find it complicated. over the course of speaking with her i had five years of her telling me her suicide was just around the corner and she was preparing to take her life in a minute and five years have passed and that hasn't happened and i think somehow that will surprise her to read the book and she will be surprised by her own wavering. >> he's at one point in the book one of the many things he worried about in this unusual reporting was somebody might feel obligated in some strange way to follow through on their intentions of having talked about it with you obligated to you. how did you think about and did

you feel anything from that when you talked to them someone who didn't end up being in your book? >> on several occasions with this book i knew that someone had the intention to take their life before they did. in some cases i knew specifics when the that would take place, how would he would be there to find the body and i didn't intervene, which was obviously a very difficult and -- decision. i was nervous from the start by the idea that someone would be pushed towards death for the sake of my story that once they had gotten in a conversation with me he would feel as if

there were expectations to move towards death ended may -- in fact maya said so much on the phone. it was very direct along the lines of i don't want my daughter to guide the so your book has a good ending. i thought there was a fair point for him to make. i did have my own rules. i think they were imperfect. when i began talking to anyone i would make it clear that i wasn't writing a book about people who were going to kill themselves. i was writing a book about people who were thinking about it and i had no stake in how their story turned out. i made it clear people agreed to speak to me once once and there weren't obliged to speak to me again and again and they can

stop talking to me at any point and stop returning my calls at any point if i did have some people who just stopped and i chased them a few times but i eventually let them go. i think most importantly i chose to only talk with people who would let me into their lives who would introduce me to people around them. i didn't want a situation. this is more self protective. i didn't want to get in the situation where i was talking to someone with plans that nobody else knew. that would be too much for me so in most situations i spoke to a person, family member, friend and a woman in the excerpt i just led. or caregiver her former colleague at the university and at one point airbnb was able to find some averse neighbors and speak to them so i was able to

make sure that anyone had the opportunity to tell me to stop which was not helpful. something i didn't know to what to expect when i started reading your book i knew to expect avril but what i didn't realize was how many different kinds of participants in these plans you would find and talk to and you said at one point you are in a way most fascinated by the exit side or the people who volunteered. i think they were volunteered to be with someone when they were dying and at some risk of prosecution themselves and one that i was particularly thinking of was brian. i wondered if you could tell us about him because this is somebody who not only works but

volunteered on a suicide prevention hotline. it's very interesting and i'm wondering if you could tell me about him and how he made sense of those words? >> one of the groups i write about called the final exit network and their highly organized highly structured groups under a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and they guide people who want to end their lives and they have their own criteria for who is eligible and it's much more liberal that any right to die law that exists in the united states so anyone can apply through their web site through their medical records and retired -- we'll see those

records and exit guides will see them through their final --of these are volunteers from all walks of life and what they essentially do is teach someone how to take her life in a way that is less than guarantee. they use inert gas and a plastic bag effectively with a few other -- and in a few cases they will travel across the country and sit with someone who takes their lives but i had heard about this network and some of these articles are i had mentioned and a few i had spoken to and a couple of guys that the network step forward. i spent months meeting with people associated with the

networks either current or former members and in the end i spoke to 30 people including the founders and it was at the end of my process that i met this guy named brighter -- ryan. he's in his mid-70s and he's a rich tired corporate guy and he works a very white-collar job in portland oregon. they are both an exit guy and a suicide line -- and that's an interesting -- but he sees them as two separate kinds of dying in my book i try to look at what space exists between two on one hand you see despair suicides.

most art despair suicides they take their life because of depression and if you can stop them in the moment and stop them on their really bad day they probably won't try again and there's an other kind of person who's a lot more rational. i think in my book and find that the line is not as clear as it should be. >> how do you pronounce his name? >> nitschke. >> nitschke the early right to die laws particularly in this country are narrowly circumscribed. they have as you mentioned they allow eligible people are just people who are going to die in six months anyway which is the

same criterion for hospice care and then you write about this guy who is, who believes that this is just an arbitrary and air again lawmakers and doctors to decide when someone should be eligible to take their own life and i was wondering, please tell us about his beliefs but also what do you think of that? do think there should be limits and if so what should they be? >> nitschke is a hard man for me to describe. usually describe him as a modern-day jack kevorkian. he used to be a doctor and in the course of my reporting he lost his medical license because he runs diy death seminars are low round the world and he gives

presentations and the people people in there his audience are in their 70s and 80s and he says they can take their lives in a way that's peaceful and quick and reliable. he sees this as a kind of minimization. people are going to take their lives anyway they might as well have access to the best information. and over the course of those five years of knowing phillip i saw an enormous philosophical shift in him so when i met him he had his own eligibility requirements for who should be given his instructions and again it was much more liberal than any law in any country and 55 he thought that was reasonable but would have a certain amount of life knowledge that by then and shouldn't have mental illness that is obvious to him upon

first meeting and again that's a vague and imperfect guideline that they should be rational and they should have something that is causing them suffering and her reason for wanting to die. over the course of five years he came to the point where he doesn't think there should be eligibility criteria at all. he says life is not sacred or the only way is if sacred is to say this and if you don't want to live anymore it's your right to die and you should be helped in the best way possible. life is a gift but if you can't refuse a gift if you can't decline the gift then it's a burden. so he will effectively offer anyone access to the suicide

manual which again offers information but also phone numbers and e-mail address is in different parts of the world. phillip is a complicated character in my book i tell the story of a young man who had clearly a long and tangled history of mental illnesses and to on a very bad day very bad month use phillip suicide manual to end his life. his family believes that information hadn't been accessible he would --. criteria are set by lawmakers set by doctors so doctors in a

place like california going through an extensive process of medical records and he decided whether or not they were worthy or not worthy or whether they deserve to die effectively. i think it's a strange possession -- position we put ourselves in that we have given that authority two. years because my research i found people are choosing to hasten their death for reasons that are not typical and they are choosing to die because they don't want to lose autonomy or be a burden on their loved ones. doctors have no special authority in that area so because they are able to prescribe legal drugs and he's given them the power to decide

who is worthy and who is not an i'm sympathetic to the idea that this is not a role for doctors. i think we saw from this debate come up in the early days of covid when there was lot about fear about ventilators and ventilator rationing and they were saying these rules should not be set by doctors but if anything it should be a random panel of americans that get together and decide who deserves ventilator axes because ultimately depression will come down to problems that are not easy to study in a textbook or in medical school. >> you've been talking about privilege to have access to this technology to die in a controlled way but something that comes up in your book over and over again which is very

troubling i think should be troubling to anyone if certain people worry that the right to die well inexorably become a duty to die particularly from where like america where health care medical bills regularly bankrupts people. there is a universal free health care and there is a very real danger that people may worry that the emotional and financial burden of taking care of them it's their responsibility to remove bad either from their children or the state or people worry that they are a burden and will feel obliged. what do you think about that? >> i think these are very valid concerns and they are often in this context by disability rights organizations. i had a man named john kelly and

a large group that opposes it. as a man with disabilities i've been in a lot of situations where they are in the hospital and suffering and doctors clearly think i would be better off dead he would be better if i was no longer suffering and he feels like legislation will put pressure and i think certainly in the united states context i found money and access to health care contributed to his decision and all sorts of ways. i had a patient who was going to die in the next year but she chose to die sooner because she had limited savings and she wanted to leave the money to her daughter and i was important to her to leave that legacy.

i heard the man who was a vietnam war veteran and he hated the idea that the savings would go to a nursing home and what he wanted to do was help people with agent orange attacks that he could stop thinking about it. the money does enter the equation. one of the interesting conversations i had in the book was in belgium i bet it doctor who is a larger-than-life celebrity doctor and one of the leading champions of euthanasia and assisted dying and he's involved in huge percentages of cases in belgium either the doctor who delivers the injection or their consulting physician and i was talking to him about how the laws work in the united states.

he said these laws absolution exists in nine states. there's no way a country should offer that. you can't offer someone -- before you offer them access to health care and every other country that has assisted dying laws have universal health care coverage. >> do you think you would agree with them? >> i think it's hard to say and maybe this is a testament -- pessimistic way of thinking about things but the situation is what it is you know and in another context i think a lot of americans end up in an elder home getting sick being forced

for different reasons either by family or financial necessity into nursing homes and a spend their final days in an institutional setting. i think it should be otherwise but i understand why people would want to avoid it. but i do think it's an absurd thing to order people, death before health care. >> you are sitting there in canada. >> true. >> in one case something you wrote about mayor clayton you said that you cut off contact with him. tell me about him. can you tell us about him and why he stopped talking to him?

>> he was around 25 when we first hadn't connected and he started getting a lot of attention in canada because of something he wrote in the big national newspaper arguing that people with mental emesis a typical elements that should be eligible for the country's assisted dying lot and he has a long history of anxiety and depression and psychosomatic pain and ocd and because of that he should be eligible to die under the law. he started getting a lot of pickup from journalists who write articles about how he was suffering and a lot of op-ed writers in the country for the right to die to be extended. when i got in touch with him he had become as he put it himself the poster boy in canada for

this cause and i found this story to be a lot less straightforward so i spoke to adam for i think it was close to a year and was also able to talk extensively with that of his parents one of whom father supported his campaign and thought he should end his life and i also talked with clinicians and psychiatrist and therapist and you know i was really young and there were things the untried yet. there were treatments and there were behavioral therapies that he hadn't tested if it would be effective on his condition.

but the reason i stopped talking to adam was i had a sense that first of all he felt like he was in control of this narrative. he was shaping this narrative and i was playing this role that he really wanted a journalist to play and i was following his story and he started giving me voice messages on facebook asking me to call him, to asking me to interview him telling me that he had iracing collected a lot of compelling material i think was how he put it. and i felt whatever was happening wasn't healthy for him and i felt i'm not a psychiatrist but i felt a

narcissistic energy coming from and that really frightened me and he really really wanted me to do the coverage and i had gone out of my way in the beginning to be very careful with adam so after the first time we spoke i asked him if i could speak to his father as well to get his blessing and that was a decision i questioned later whether i was -- who was 26 years old and would agree to speak with me and asked his father. in the end i told him i thought it was best if we just pause contact for a while and he ended up taking his life using drugs that he procured from the internet and i had this very

experience afterwards of getting in touch with one of the therapist that he had mentioned a psychologist is mentioned in our phonecall and when he was on the phone he said i've been waiting for a call. i figured journalists would be calling me after he died. he said that i should speak to them and tell them everything. i don't actually know where they are that entitles the therapist to tell me what he did but it reinforced my decision that i wasn't being helpful to him by agreeing to talk to him. >> it so difficult because you mentioned and i didn't realize this but there is a norm in journalism not to write about suicide or to write about it in a particular way because it's been known as you write for

three centuries that it's contagious and writing about suicide can it in people to read about it. i wonder you are sympathetic and respectful of the people that you describe in your book and i was wondering if you worried that would have that consequence from your courage and your sympathy and respect. >> i take some issue with some of the prohibitions on reporting and i'm very sympathetic to suicide away to want to trigger someone who's vulnerable and i think some of the guidelines are written before the internet existed when it was quite possible that no one had heard

of the suicide method until they picked it up and i don't think that's true anymore. everyone i spoke to had done research on line and i had an 8-year-old who had browsers in places i didn't know how to access and they had nothing to learn from a newspaper. but i did think a lot about this and it's difficult because i feel like many the people who i spoke to they weren't killing themselves out of impulse so i felt i was doing something that was a little bit different. there's one study that i'm aware of that looks at whether reporting on assisted legal is dying would lead to nonlegal suicide and the verdict is sorted out. the american paper actually said it might influence suicide and the pay freeze in the same dated didn't. i didn't think about that but

i'm very a diverse to reporting on death and dying that is filled with euphemisms. i'll think it's helpful to anyone. >> you mentioned to me you said you'd deliberately used language in the book that would the proposed by the suicide prevention advocacy groups and he wrote about in detail. could you tell me about that decision and how you thought about it? >> i wrote about method for instance which is interesting. my part of the book i talked to the guardian and they took it all up and there was a long back-and-forth and this information is not news to anyone who wants it. my book has descriptions as well

as other things but they didn't wanted in there. i used phrases like killed himself which i think we have stopped using and we would say someone died by suicide because of suicidal impulses as a result of mental commisso they died by suicide rather than -- but in the case of people that i've met the whole point was they were doing it themselves. they spend months or years preparing and in the weeks and months following the voice felt untrue to the story. so i didn't use it and i tried to be as specific as possible.

i didn't want to be gratuitous side didn't describe -- although i know in some cases a lot of details and the one-story that i mentioned earlier i did write about one suicide about the typical suicide we hear about, a young man suffering from severe depression took his life and i was a lot more careful with that one and i checked more with his family about what could go in the book and what couldn't and i have description of an object that was in his hand and his body was found and asked me to take it out and i took it out.

ultimately did didn't like that the story was put in the book about assisted dying. they thought he was being used as an example. >> they are want to ask you one more question. i should tell everyone watching this please put questions in the q&a. you brought up something super interesting but please your put your questions there and we will go to them in a second. i want to ask you you had written an extraordinary piece in the times about dementia and is he writing the book all of these are difficult questions but another difficult question about assisted dying which is many people dread the prospect

of euthanasia and they say i'd rather be dead to go through that but somebody who has dementia may not have any desire to die and maybe happy so then the question is are these different people and should the person with dementia be governed by the person they used to be who had signed a living will or left instructions that they'd in new circumstances be euthanized? what do you think of that? >> we have to do something for people with dementia. more than anything else people tell me they would rather die than have dementia and many people who are diagnosed they could live for years and the condition that they don't want to be in and they feel very

alone and abandoned by the medical who can't help them. in canada the government is right now debating the extension to the federal dying law that would allow people to write an advanced interactive think that i have dementia and when i get to the point where i don't recognize my husband any more and i'm nonverbal i would like to receive a lethal injection and it wouldn't surprise me if it passes. the one poll i've seen is that canadians are in favor of it but it's very difficult. that's people in one country and the netherlands and doctors are still hesitant to participate and a lot of people who write advanced direct is in there and your doctor won't do it and it comes down to the question is

someone in advanced dementia suffering? the doctors sometimes feel like that is unclear in the moment and so they are unwilling -- the locket theoretically require since he smiling and laughing and seems to be enjoying a different kind of quality of life and on the other hand critics will say once again this is doctors taking authority over decision they know nothing about and if they respected the autonomy the patient they would argue that she existed before she lost her memory and were able to speak clearly what her wishes were. even the countries i think the quote is -- instead of waiting until 10 minutes after him midnight to do it yourself before doctors get involved.

and that's obligated to that someone in an early stage of dementia can -- but it really means they lose time because they have to be cognizant and aware of their desires for the day of their death and i don't know when they will do that so they end up dying months or years before they really want to. there's no perfect solution but i really can't tell you how many people i've met who say i will kill myself if i have dementia. i will help my mother i will help make grandfather and they may or may not need it. i went down a rabbit hole and i was thinking about this and i heard a story on local news channels about couples, usually the wife would get dementia and the husband would murder her out

of mercy and out of love and sometimes are prosecuted after-the-fact or they risk prosecution for some time in and those stories are not uncommon actually so we can continue -- i think it's something that needs to be talked about because people will do this anyway and we need to let them feel that they are doing something it's very dignified and save. it's very complicated. stack it's incredibly complicated. i want to go to questions during the q&a. someone named claire said katie did your own mental health waiver at all during this process? >> i think certainly when i was

with the people who i read about in the book it was really very important to me to maintain the same level of professionalism as they would for anyone else. i didn't want to be more emotional or more promoted than any other story because i really wanted them to feel like i was a natural person that they could just pour out whatever was in them without worrying about a reaction from me. it was very challenging and i think after people died i was sort of surprised even though everyone told me what they were going to do and my friends who agreed that it was going to happen but i never thought prince and a young man would

actually take his life even though he told me he would very clearly. it's difficult to write a book for so long about decisions that are so serious and so consequential. i found there was a lot of intensity and it was hard to move between assignments with within normal levels of sadness and trauma. >> someone named barbara asked please tell us more about what you label euthanasia underground. >> it comes from activists themselves and it has refers to a network of fact this who are

working to educate people about ways of taking their lives and activists who help. some of these are very informal. they share information and there are collectives of people who will help each other secure certain lethal drugs that are particularly sought after so adam who i just spoke about for instance i know someone on the internet and i don't know the specifics but someone on the internet said he would take his life and some are highly regimented and again we have professionals and white-collar workers around the country who put plastic bags over their heads. i just use that term to describe the whole group.

i'm really surprised to find a lot of organizing but i think it was a mistake because i think whenever the medical system falls short people will find a way. ultimately it's not rocket science. it's something that requires some knowledge that people are teaching themselves and i think they are doctors probably know what happening and they just look the other way. >> someone named margaret says we are about to pass access to mental disorders within 18 months to 24 month sunset clause in canada. i take it you know what that means. do you think anyone can differentiate what you call despair suicide from her request being made about a mental

disorder and what other types of despair would lead to her request? >> yes canada is planning to expand the lost of people with mental disorders who are not suffering from specific types of disorders like heart disease but they are putting a pause on it so typically state laws require someone to wait 10 or 15 days between making a request and actually dying but in this case when it comes to mental illnesses there's a much longer waiting period. when i first started researching i assumed i believed what i heard from the critics so people will say by virtue of having a

mental illness someone's thought processes is -- with the ability to reason and make decisions is corrupted so they shouldn't be allowed. psychiatrists have said to participate in assisted death with someone with a severe depression was akin to collaborating and suicidal despair. but medical capacity and legal capacity is different from what people expect. capacity is not holistic rate someone as capacity in a general sense, capacity at a specific time is related to specific choice of the someone have the capacity to make a specific choice about their health care and whether or not they wish to die and already people with a range of mental disorders may

call sorts of decisions about their lives whether to get married or whether that's by house so they have the capacity to make those decisions. i'm also sympathetic to mental health advocacy groups who say we virtually hard to prove over the years that mental illness experience can be just as bad as physical illness and summering suffering from mental numbness is not irrational. they are suffering a disease and they have access to a personal choice. i think the laws, the law that exists in canada and several european countries that requires the someone has suffered for a long time and that someone had tried a certain number of treatments and a number of

therapeutic methods that have to have failed but ultimately i'm really wary of where this law could go. when i was in belgium i met women as young as 29 who had been approved to die because of their history of depression. and i guess my impulse was maybe i'm just falling into the trap if the patient tries hard enough they can get better. i don't know really where i fall on this. i will say it's not that easy to draw a line if we are looking at what makes him ineligible but already lots of people participate in assisted death because people get cancer in people with obsessive compulsive disorder get heart disease and may qualify to die and outweigh.

already it falls into the quayshaun. did you change your mind about this at all? >> i'm anxious about how patients will be evaluated. i've been going to europe where this is already legal. i just saw, i saw the possibilities for problems that i hadn't anticipated. in the country you see a divide in psychiatry and for psychiatrists who think it's right and some who don't do what you have is doctor shopping until they find one of several physicians who will say yes and you have cited crisp -- psychiatrists who are involved

in more than a quarter of euthanasia is in the country they become specialists and i think that's possibly -- but then again i think people have the right to say enough is enough whether they are suffering physically and/or in other ways. i think the right to life can become a duty to live if we are always working and that the goal is keeping people alive so i guess i'm willing to see what the canadian model looks like and if people are coming to the european system. >> well, on that note greenlight suggested that we and right on time and we should go i would

love to ask you questions for hours more. please everybody read this book. it stays with you for a very long time and thank you for writing it. >> thank you so much for having this conversation. thank you. thank you katie and larissa for the thoughtful conversation and thank you again everyone for spending this time with us and for making space for this conversation. if you missed any part of tonight's event it will be up on our youtube channel that greenlight stark for the next few days the keep an eye out for that. if you don't already have a copy of kitty's book you can buy "the inevitable" at the greenlight bookstore.

we are open noon to seven for limited capacity browsing daily rican shop greenlight bookstore.com and find the link in the chat. curbside pickup anywhere in the u.s.. thank you so much again everyone and have a wonderfully rest of your evening. ♪♪ ♪♪

>> what it was supposed to do was. a knowledge and skill and citizenry but academia has now decided that its real job, its primary job is to promote radical political ideology. this jump from one purpose to another is not some random term for mission creep. the purpose that academia has substituted is so remote that it's actually charters the most colleges and universities make a point of categorically forbidding. that's pretty astonishing fact.

it's the only purpose that it's for been in most charters. the framers knew that campuses promoted political ideology it would destroy them. they knew that ideologist would be rigid enough to prevent the freedom for the exploration of new ideas. they knew that the two purposes were not just different they were polar opposites. one requires constraint and the other requires a fixed commitment. in other words one can't coexist with the other. one can't allow the other to exist. that's how far off course academia has gone with this

capriciously self repurposed thing. another way of assessing this is we are not just dealing with too many left of center faculty in relation to right of center faculty. it's really a different problem altogether. we are dealing with two very different kinds of people. on the one hand we have academic scholars and on the other hand political activists. on the campuses the activists are now clearly controlled the majority. there are there are certainly a number of academic scholars but they do not have the numbers to control policy. now these two types of people want fundamentally to -- and academic teacher wants to think analytically independently and the political activists want the exact opposite.

students analyze the strengths and weaknesses of different ideas as much is the wrong one. political activists will squelch academics.