Have universities become bastions of ideology instead of truth?

Over the past decade, universities have faced mounting criticism that they have abandoned their core mission of truth-seeking in favor of ideological conformity. Critics argue that identity politics and censorship have stifled academic freedom, while others counter that these concerns are exaggerated or used to resist necessary shifts in how knowledge is produced and who gets to shape it. At the same time, calls to limit certain kinds of speech have come from multiple directions: students demanding speaker disinvitations, and universities themselves drawing hard lines around protest-related speech.

In this episode, expert guests Omer Bartov, Mohammad Fadel, Dorian Abbot and Pablo Avelluto debate whether academic freedom is genuinely under threat or if power is simply shifting away from previously dominant worldviews. They explore whether initiatives for justice and inclusion deepen the intellectual mission or replace critical inquiry with moral conformity, and ask what kind of intellectual culture universities should build for the future.