Former UC Berkeley chancellor and Columbia professor Nicholas Dirks joins us to discuss freedom of speech and hate speech and Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on university campuses along with a range of other issues including scientific cooperation with China; university donors and university ties to corporations; student loan forgiveness and increasing calls for free colleges and universities. Live and interactive. Join us with your questions and comments!
Nicholas B. Dirks is a widely respected and highly influential historian and anthropologist, and a prominent leader in higher education. In June 2020, Dirks assumed leadership of the New York Academy of Sciences as President and Chief Executive Officer. In 2012, Dirks was named as the 10th Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley and served in that role until July of 2017. He launched major initiatives in undergraduate education and research collaborations in areas such as neuroscience and genomics.
Before joining Berkeley, Dirks was the executive vice president for the arts and sciences and dean of the faculty at Columbia University, where he worked to improve and diversify the faculty, putting special emphasis on interdisciplinary and international initiatives. The Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and History, Dirks joined Columbia in 1997 as chair of the anthropology department. Prior to his appointment at Columbia, for ten years he was a professor of history and anthropology at the University of Michigan. Before that, he taught Asian history and civilization at the California Institute of Technology.
We will be speaking with professor Dirks about his new book: CITY OF INTELLECT: The Uses and Abuses of the University