Snap judgement: Japan PM’s electoral landslide

13:07Rebecca Jackson:As Professor Peterson explained, this is because Symposium discusses, among other things, Plato's views on gender and sexuality. His was one of 200 courses said to be under review by the university's administration for prohibited content. He was told to either nix Plato from the syllabus or be reassigned to teach another class.

13:32Rosie Blau:So why did the university ban Plato's work?

13:36Rebecca Jackson:This is part of a broader effort by university administrators to try to comply with a slew of harsh new higher education bills that have come out of the Texas state legislature. In the past couple of years, Texas politicians have passed laws that ban universities from teaching DEI, they overhaul the curriculum, and they give less and less power to faculty to decide what they want to teach. Another professor who I spoke to in the School of Government told me that in the first week of classes this term, his ethics of public service class was canceled because he couldn't tell the Dean which days he planned to speak about race and gender.

14:15Rebecca Jackson:Professors across A &M in all different departments are anxious because they've seen the stakes of this kind of crackdown. In the fall, one professor who was teaching about gender fluidity in a children's literature class was fired by the university after a video of her teaching came to light in Austin.

14:32Rosie Blau:And is it just Texas A &M or is this a bigger thing?

14:37Rebecca Jackson:It's much bigger. Texas A &M is perhaps the starkest example of it. But I also visited University of Texas at Austin, which is the state's flagship school. There, 40 % of faculty said that last fall they changed their curriculum to try to comply preemptively with the state's laws. I spoke to the president of the University Democrats, a student club there, and she told me that the club now has to jump through hoops to get their outside speakers approved and has to read this disclaimer at the start of every meeting saying that their opinions don't represent the university. This is part of a trend that actually goes far beyond Texas.

15:13Rosie Blau:So what's

15:14Rebecca Jackson:happening more broadly then? There's a drive across Republican-run states to legislate what is taught and to punish professors and students who speak of prohibited ideas. A new report by a non-profit called Pen America found that lawmakers in 32 states filed 93 bills last year censoring higher education. 21 of those passed, subjecting more than half of America's college students to these policies.

15:39Rosie Blau:We've had a number of years of people trying to monitor other people's speech on campuses. Isn't this just a corrective from the right?

15:49Rebecca Jackson:So that's certainly what a lot of conservatives are saying. There were real problems and universities needed to be reformed. And this is the proper way to go about it. But I dove into a database of free speech cases collected by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression, FIRE. What they found is that in 2020, most of the attempts to censor student speech on campus involve left-wing efforts to curb right-wing speech. But in the years since, there's been a striking political reversal. Now, as many as 80 % of these cases are coming from the right. I put some of this to Brandon Creighton.

16:25Rebecca Jackson:He's a former state senator in Texas, who was the author of many of these bills. And this year, he was appointed as the chancellor of Texas Tech University, one of the biggest public university systems in the state. He explained to me that academic freedom is in fact alive and well. He said that campuses across America have been commandeered for decades. And if anything, he sees a shift back towards the center now. He also explained to me that he sees public universities and is as an extension of the state.

16:55Rosie Blau:So what do you make of that assertion that academic freedoms are alive and well?

17:00Rebecca Jackson:Rosie, to be honest, I don't find it so compelling, and neither do lots of the researchers and faculty that I spoke with. And even some conservatives who have been fighting against the left-wing influence on campuses are pretty shocked by what's going on now. One of those people is Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank. For years, he has been saying that there need to be real changes on college campuses and that wokeism has infected the way that we teach and the way that students learn. But he says that the establishment Republicans who have been fighting for reforms have now been crowded out by radicals who are overcorrecting.

17:38Rebecca Jackson:In some cases, these laws have been so dramatic and so absurd that the courts have had to step in. One court struck down a Texas law that attempted to ban on-campus expressive activities between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. The federal judge in that case quipped that the First Amendment does not have a bedtime. So where does that leave academic freedom in American universities? At least in red states, Rosie, I think academic freedom is really at risk right now. If you look at Texas A &M, since we published this article, they have gutted their Women and Gender Studies program entirely. Many academics will now have to decide whether they're going to sit there quietly and adapt in order to comply with these rules or stand up for the cause of free speech?

18:23Rebecca Jackson:I asked Martin Peterson, the philosophy professor who nicks Plato from his syllabus, where he stood on that question. In terms of, you know, poking the bear, do you not feel that?

18:33Andrew Miller:So several people have told me I should stop now, don't, don't poke the bear too much, etc, etc. But I guess that is the problem here, that I can keep poking the bear up to a certain point. And when it's too late, it's too late.

18:48Rebecca Jackson:You're willing to take the vote?

18:50Andrew Miller:I'm the chair of Academic Freedom Council on this campus. If I can't speak, who can? I feel I have a moral obligation to do it. And even if it has catastrophic consequences for me, the Euclidean theory, I do it for greater good.

19:04Rebecca Jackson:Come March, he will skip over the unit on Plato. But instead, he's planned a two-class series on the value of free speech.

19:13Rosie Blau:Becca, thank you so much for talking to me. Thanks for having me on, Rosie.

19:34Yes, we're talking to him, or at least about him.

19:38Rosie Blau:Andrew Miller writes our backstory column on culture.

19:41Noah Sneider:Released 50 years ago this month, Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese's sleazy, highbrow masterpiece, routinely ranks among the best films of all time, and often tops lists of movies set in New York. It's revered not only for its depiction of the city, but also the character of Travis Bickle, a cabbie-turned-vigilante, coruscatingly played by Robert De Niro. Half a century on, I think one of these characterisations has held up better than the other.

20:12Noah Sneider:Today's New Yorkers often complain about urban blights like high prices and rats, but watching Taxi Driver really puts that in perspective. There was a sanitation strike when the film was shot in the summer of 1975, and it shows. Unemployment and the murder rate were soaring, the population was shrinking, and New York City in this film is overrun by drunks and druggies, strippers, pimps, child prostitutes and stick-up artists. Everything was worse in the 1970s, you might conclude after watching it, except for the movies. Now, on screen, as in reality, New York contains multitudes. It's the home of moonstruck lovers and greedy financiers, hustlers, mafiosi.

20:53Noah Sneider:It's where Harry romances Sally, King Kong swats a biplane, and Superman takes flight. Yet for many movie fans, the cesspit city in Taxi Driver is cinema's supreme version of New York. In a way, I think that's a mistaken way of thinking about the film, because if you watch Taxi Driver closely, it's clear that it's less a portrait of a place than of Travis Bickle's febrile perception of it, refracted through his rain-slicked windscreen and crumbling mind. In this film, the shimmery surface of the metropolis is a mirror. Maybe great cities always are.

21:33Noah Sneider:And as for Travis's character, Well, he's a damaged, alienated Vietnam veteran. He's transfixed by what reviles him. He loathes the decadence of the East Village and Times Square, but hangs out in porno cinemas. Above all, he's a loner. The taxi is kind of a symbol of his isolation. It's as if there's a secret to communicating that no one's told Travis. He wants to make friends and court women, but he doesn't know how. One of the shocks in a film that's full of them is a late mention of his parents. He had seemed so irredeemably alone.

22:15Noah Sneider:Travis is a product of his era, but his neuroses and contradictions feel very familiar today too. As for a lot of misfits, politics offers him a jolt of power for his ego and a sheen of virtue for his rage against filth and scum. The politician he fixes on hardly matters, nor does it really matter whether Travis supports him or plots to assassinate him. Racism and misogyny are outlets for him too. You're just like the rest of them, he tells a woman who bolts after he takes her to a skin flick on a date. Today, Travis Bickle would find consolation on incel forums. He buffs up his body like an acolyte of the manosphere and in the end he seeks redemption in violence.

22:57Noah Sneider:His most loving relationship is with his guns. As for too many mass shooters over the past half century, murder seems the only way for Travis to get the world's attention. And the cosmic joke of the film is that it does.

23:14Noah Sneider:Throughout the film, Travis's anguish has appealed to viewers' sympathies, while he's repelled them with his prejudice and his bloodlust. The climax is a horrific shooting spree at which we, the viewer, finally see Travis for the psychotic he is. But at the same time, within the story, society takes him at his own estimation and the newspapers decide that his is the right kind of violence and that Travis is a hero. I think in a way posterity has made a similar mistake with Taxi Driver, replacing the alarm it's supposed to cause with admiration. These days, the film's most immortal line, you talking to me, tends to get parroted as a slogan of macho bristle, whereas it's actually spoken by a maniac to his own reflection in a slumland bedsit.

24:05Noah Sneider:Outsiders in New York often feel like they're in a movie, gawking at the city's skyscrapers and the yellow cabs like Travis's and watching the steam rising from manhole covers. So does Travis, actually. He thinks he's in a western or a gangster film. But in a way, I think 50 years on, his genre is horror. he embodies something that still today is very real and very close that you prefer not to see

24:56Rosie Blau:That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. See you back here tomorrow.

25:19Rosie Blau:This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Youth mental health is a complex challenge that requires comprehensive solutions. We must strengthen after-school programs.

25:56Rosie Blau:We must make digital literacy tools available in our schools. We must work with mental health professionals to support children. And we must empower mentors, educators, and parents to keep kids happy. Learn more about our commitment to finding lasting solutions at empowerourfuturecoalition.com slash solutions. Paid for by the Coalition to Empower Our Future.