Higher education has been in a tailspin for a really long time,
the affordability crisis, the rocketing tuition prices, and
it's made itself an easy target as something that is frivolous
and elitist and like a hotbed of woke leftist ideologies.
I think we read again to understand how the world looks
to somebody who is not us. The idea that AI could produce
good literature is such a condescending attitude to to
what people read for it who AI couldn't have done for English
but Shakespeare did. So can the machine do it better?
No, the machine can't do it better.
Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World.
I'm Christian Girimurthy, and this is the podcast in which we
talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their
lives and the events that have helped shape them.
My guest today is Rebecca Kwong, the best selling novelist whose
books explore some of the most fraught debates of our time,
interrogating racism in publishing, cultural
appropriation, tokenism and diversity in politics, not to
mention empire and colonialism. Her novel Yellow Face in
particular struck a nerve, highlighting the pressures and
hypocrisies of the modern literary world, from social
media mobbing and cancel culture to the uncomfortable questions
about who gets to tell which story.
She has a new novel out now and another one on the way.
Rebecca, welcome. Thank you for coming.
Thanks for having me. How would you change the world?
I would totally reform higher education.
I would make it so that students could study under conditions of
total academic freedom, something that we should be able
to take for granted in the US, and freedom, including the
ability to graduate debt free without taking on loans that
follow them for the rest of their lives.
I would make higher education popular and accessible at every
point in your life. I would turn a good education
from a luxury product. This is something that everybody
is entitled to because I'm a PhD student, I'm transitioning to
being a teacher. And the way I see it, there are
two main crises facing academia right now.
And the first is just this rising tide of anti
intellectualism and overt attacks on academic freedom and
federal funding and certain topics that our government
doesn't think it should be taught in colleges and
universities. And on the other hand, those
people who criticize our research centers and
universities as being elitist and out of touch and frivolous,
they're they're not altogether wrong because we also have a
tuition crisis and a student loan crisis where tuitions
increased since 1978 at a rate of something like 1300%.
Its quadruples the rate of inflation and made it nearly
impossible for anybody without significant family wealth or
special circumstances like merit based scholarships to to get a
good education without hundreds of thousands of dollars in
loans. And this is devastating because
I think the work that we do in the humanities, the work we do
in the Academy, as as obsolete and out of touch and as
irrelevant as the critics may claim it is.
It is precisely those skills of slow attention, close reading
and critical thinking and arguing in good faith that are
the safeguards that will protect our ability to connect and make
policy and really look out for each other in this world of
increasing fragmentation and isolation and social media
tribalism. So I for if I could have
anything I wanted for Christmas, it would be a defence of the
best things about the Academy that would be accessible to
everybody. There's a lot to unpack in that.
I mean, can we begin with academic freedom in in what way
do you really think academic freedom is under attack?
Well, there's literally topics that at some universities you
can't talk about anymore. You can't teach in all of its
depth and nuance. Take gender roles, right?
Take the issues of gender presentation.
The policy at so many universities now is you can only
teach that there are two genders, 2 sexes, which is
something that no equity in the fields of biology or gender
theory agrees upon. You know, even if you are an
animal biologist looking at like really simple organisms, like
even you wouldn't think that there are only two sexes.
And this is something and, and even no matter what your
political views are, right, it's something that you should be
able to debate and discuss in the round and read literature on
and really carefully think about in the classroom, which should
be a protected space where all ideas merit consideration.
So when you say you can't, I mean what?
What happens if a professor raises that question in a as as
a discussion? They get fired.
This has happened there. There are a lot of like DEI
programs that have been shuttered, but I think it a
better description is just inconvenient truths for this
administration's dogmatic ideology, right.
And that encompasses gender, encompasses history, it
encompasses new wants, reflections on specific
geopolitical situations. And it's just a total avoidance
of truth and complexity in favor of ideology and quick, simple
reductive judgments. And that makes it very hard to
be in a classroom where you don't know if a student is
filming you, you don't know if. If, and this just happened in
the USA, teaching assistant I believe gave a student a poor
grade on a paper because she didn't respond to the prompt.
The prompt was about whether support for gender presentation
would minimize bullying. It for for younger for for
children. And the response was the
response paper just called trans people demonic.
It cited or it had talked about the Bible without citing it, and
it it in no way engaged intellectually with the demands
of the class. And the the TA said, we haven't
done the to prompt. You can have any range of views,
but you have to carefully defend them and cite them.
And that student immediately went to the governor and and
tried to get that instructor suspended.
I actually think the instructor has been suspended.
So those are the conditions under which American academics
are teaching right now. And what effect is that having
on the freedom to think? You know, how do academics feel
in American universities right now in your world?
I mean, it has a huge silencing effect.
And the worst thing is that it just makes you a bad teacher.
There are all these things that you can't expose your students
to and think carefully through. I what I'm, I'm not saying that
teachers have to be able to impose their personal political
beliefs or ideologies on their students.
And I'm not saying that, oh, it's a shame that we can't be
openly left. Actually, it is a shame that we
can't be openly leftist in the classroom.
I'm saying that you have to be able to introduce your students
to all the literature that's out there again, to discuss ideas in
the round, all the opposing viewpoints and and put them in
contention and help your students think through them
rather than just telling them this is the dogmatic truths is
the only thing you're allowed to believe.
I mean, why do you think this is happening?
You know, do you think that's part of a bigger plan?
I mean, the attacks on academia are part of a very old playbook.
I have conflicted feelings about this because I think as of the
last two years, the attacks on funding, the withdrawal of visas
for foreign scholars, these like really censored conditions that
have led to the firings of suspensions of so many scholars.
That is new and that is terrifying.
But higher education has been in a tailspin for a really long
time. I, I mean, so many people have
written about the affordability crisis, the rocketing tuition
prices and the impact that not having support to pay off your
student loans has had on a whole generation of people who can't
find good jobs and are really struggling under the weight of
that debt. So for a long time, the college
education, like people's trust and research institutions and
higher education has been eroding and it's become it.
It's made itself an easy target as something that is frivolous
and elitist and like a hotbed of woke leftist ID.
And it's all strayed so far from its original mission that when
this administration came to power, I think it was easy to
point fingers and say that this is the root of all of our social
ills. A.
Lot of it also began with the the the protests against Israel
or pro Palestine protests on college campuses as well.
And, you know, accusations that universities had failed to
tackle anti-Semitism. You know, do you think they had
also made themselves easy to criticize on that topic as well?
I, I mean, I was at student protests at my institution.
I was at the encampments, I was watching people chanting in the
streets and, and these were peaceful protests.
These were acts of love and solidarity.
And I saw the police cars and, and I saw the fear in people's
eyes. I, I don't think universities
were kind to student protesters. If anything, the, the over
violence with which they responded was devastating.
And I think the very fact of the protests did open a lot of
schools up to exactly what this unit, this administration was
seeking, which was any excuse to to find them, to sanction them
and and to force them to lick the boot.
I mean, what's quite interesting is the administration has
published their foreign policy strategy, and it's sort of
illuminating, I think, in terms of what they're doing at home as
well, which is seeing things as a battle of civilization and
that they feel their mission is to preserve or take back a
civilization that was under threat.
Do do you feel that is the real goal?
I, I mean, this might get me in trouble, but I'm very suspicious
when fascist thinkers argue that they're really about bringing
back Western civilization about the Greeks, you know, the, the
classics, the hot or the tenets of conservative thought that
that make us a proud sophisticated people, etcetera.
Because I, I really try to listen to voices on all sides of
the political spectrum and I try take seriously any thinker who
is drawing from those traditions and, and I've read some of these
polemics and they don't understand what Socrates is
talking about. They are not close reading the
classics. This is not about respect for
some civilization that they think they're intellectual heirs
to. I think the lesson that we've
learned about fascism from a lot of respected scholars who write
about the history of fascist ideologies is that it's totally
inconsistent as an ideology. All these claims about the, the
philosophies that inspired it or the, the principles it adheres
to, they're all just convenient drivel to say in the moment.
But fascism is ultimately about getting power and holding on to
power. There there is no claim about
Western civilization that fascists can make that is
consistent and defensible and and they don't care.
It's just a talking point to. Them.
Who do you think are the fascists?
Yeah. I think this administration are
fascists. And just explain why.
I think they are doing everything in the playbook to
seize control of all arms of government through
unconstitutional means, to enact a suite of policies that are
discriminatory and violent and and motivated by this ethno
nationalist hatred. I think that's that's about as
fascist as you can get. What is your reply?
Lies of people who who may not be supporters of Trump, but who
say, look, Trump is not a Nazi, he may want power, but to jump
to fascist associates him with the biggest evils in our history
and that that's an unfair branding, if you like.
I would say, read the news, pay attention to what's going on in
the US. Look at the deportations, look
at what ICE is doing. People are being grabbed on the
streets for just, even if they're fully documented
American citizens, right? They're still being brutalized
on the streets for looking a certain way or presenting as a
certain race. Look at the family separations.
If. If that's not evil, I don't know
what is. And So what?
What is your role then in this? I thought a lot about this.
I was reading the very good Timothy Snyder book on On
Tyranny, which has 21 lessons to learn from the 20th century on
fascism. And one of the lessons that
really stuck with me is care about professional ethics.
And it it seems a bit frivolous or counterintuitive at first
blush, because why should we care about professional ethics
when everything is falling apart?
But his point is, is deeper. He says, you know, if you're a
doctor, then maintain your obligations and responsibilities
to your patients rather than giving in to medical
misinformation and fad cures and claims about health that are
untested. If your lawyer care about the
Constitution, care about the law, don't be corrupt.
And and if you're a teacher, care about teaching your
students to discern between what's real and what's fake and
empower them to think carefully about this world that they're
inheriting and how to sort through the barrage of
propaganda that's being flung at them.
And I think that's the place where most academics can make
the most of an intervention. I remember last spring, I was
teaching an undergraduate writing seminar called Reading
and Writing the Modern Essay. And it was tons of fun and I had
14 wonderful kids and the discussions always really lively
and people are always so well prepared and eager to talk about
the assigned readings. And and I noticed the week of
the inauguration, the atmosphere in the class, it was just dead.
Nobody was talking. Nobody really wanted to be
there. Like people looked like they've
been crying. I think a lot of them were
grappling with what does this mean for them?
What does this mean for what what they'll be taught in a
classroom the the world that they'll be entering in after
they they finish their time in college?
And I said, I, I can't fix this for you guys.
And I don't even know that I have many of the tools to teach
you how how to deal with this, this very uncertain terrain
we're entering. But in this class, we are
learning to articulate our thoughts clearly.
We're learning to read closely and to understand the impact of
our words and our rhetoric, how they create an effect in other
people. We're learning to build that
slow, careful authority and that slow attention to what people
are really saying and writing about rather than making quick
judgments about others. And, and we're learning to
discern again between a web of lies crafted by rhetoric and
truth claims about the world. And I said, that's what I can
give you. And I think these are tools that
you'll need to take with you. And that's the best I can do.
But I think that really matters. And I think everybody in the
humanities, I always, I, I have this like humanity's inferiority
complex because it seems like being out there doing Cancer
Research is so much more obviously relevant.
But I do really think empowering people to form their opinions
carefully rather than being buffeted left and right by all
the memes and the tweets and, and propaganda they're seeing
like that is a really important form of empowerment and
something that we're uniquely positioned to do.
So that's a role, that teaching role that but I, I guard very
closely. Do you worry as a teacher about
the impact of AI on what students are doing?
Oh obviously I think anybody who teaches is just complaining
endlessly about students writing essays with IAI cheating with
AII. Think so.
I'm not teaching this semester because I'm on dissertation
fellowship, but my colleagues are complaining about students
using AI to write their emails explaining why they can't come
to class. So.
What do you think is the impact on on on mind if you like of
using AI to form arguments, help you with writing you know, does
it stop you thinking for yourself?
Might it help you think? I, well, so I, I'm not a
Luddite, I'm really open to ways in which AI could make us more
effective teachers. And I think there's actually
enormous potential in the realm of digital academic culture to,
to use AI to make learning more accessible.
I think I, I've spoken to people at Duolingo and I think their
mission there, even, you know, whether you disagree with how
they're implementing it. I think that mission to use the
technological tools at our disposal to make learning free
and available to everybody. I think all of that is really
cool. So I don't want to, I don't want
to undercut all the cool work going on there.
I'll say what I can see in the classroom, the way that students
are actually using AI. It's not very controversial,
like every almost every teacher will agree with me.
It makes you a poor thinker. It makes you it's, it's
cognitively debilitating. It's not just the sort of
cognitive outsourcing. It doesn't just help you avoid
doing that hard work of articulating your own thoughts
and slowly forming an argument based on logical premises.
There's good evidence that it actually makes students less
confident and less they, they feel like, oh, if there's a
machine that can do all this thinking better than me, then
why should I ever learn how to, or why should I trust myself to
do this? And I think that is devastating.
But so so I what's? Your answer to that when people
say you know well because it's tempting to say, well, the
machine is better. Why?
Why is the machine not better necessarily?
Well, so let me let me circle back to that because I think
this is a huge structural issue that, you know, involves all the
ways in which higher education is already broken.
I don't think that you can answer it simply by saying don't
use AI in the classroom. I've made a little bit of fun of
the students who are using AI to cheat and write their essays and
e-mail, even e-mail their instructors.
But you also have to think from the students perspective, the
immense pressure they're under. Imagine, I mean, I've already
talked about how terrifyingly, how terrifying the burden of
tuition and student loans are. So imagine you've taken that
enormous gamble to study at an elite institution.
And also imagine the kind of job market that Gen.
Z ers are entering right now. There's, there's some evidence
that for, for American young men, having a college degree
doesn't affect the unemployment rate compared to people who
don't have a college degree. And that, I mean, that leads to
a whole host of social issues that we have to deal with.
So, so imagine that you're in this pressure environment where
you really just need an internship, you need that
perfect transcript, you need that GPA, and you need this to
pay off so that you can pay off for your loans and you can
support your family. So if I'm there, of course, I'm
looking for ways to cut corners. And if there's this tool that
can quickly write an essay for me when I'm not even convinced
of the learning outcome or the benefits of writing the essay
myself, like, of course I'm tempted to do that.
And I think it's insane to just expect that a whole country of
18 to 22 year olds should have this herculean self restraint
not to take the easy option when they are facing this terrifying
job environment. So that's the first thing.
Which means that the answer is not so simple as saying AI is
not going to make you a better thinker or proving to them that
they have to learn these skills. It it demands a total revolution
in how we think about education and, and how we do grading, how
we design our lesson plans. I think, and for a lot of
people, it's been a good wake up call.
Maybe this model of just assigning paper and paper after
paper every week without really scaffolding the skills that
students are supposed to be learning through writing those
papers. Maybe that grading model isn't
something that we should perpetuate.
Maybe we have to look at different ways of doing
assessments and different ways of communicating clearly with
our students. Like This is why I want you to
learn this skill. This is what I want you to
master. This is why AI isn't going to
help you do that. So that's all background context
to, to your quest, to the my really answer to your question
of like, can the machine do it better?
No, the machine can't do it better.
And the answers are going to differ depending on the field.
I'll just talk about creative writing and, and writing in
general because that's what I teach.
Writing is about communicating A subjective experience from your
skull, this inaccessible part of you, your consciousness to
another person. Before you can do that, you have
to decide what you think. And then you have to figure out
if there are good grounds for what you think.
So you have to work through the logic of your argument and work
through what forms of evidence do I have to make this argument.
And then you have to articulate it in a way that is clear and
concise and, and, and legible to somebody who is not you, who
doesn't have access to your senses, impressions and biases,
etcetera. This is all work that AI cannot
approximate. It will just tell you what lots
of other people have thought on this topic and assemble a
response that looks passively human.
But now you've sidestepped the all of the important work of, of
figuring out your position on an issue and, and what you want to
get across to another person. So if you're doing that for all
of your writing, then you're not even really a person anymore.
You're just, I don't know, a chimp pressing buttons in the
realm of creative writing. I think so there's been all
this, there are all these start-ups trying to to push like
AI products to either assist in writing fiction or replace
fiction writers altogether. I think none, none of that has
taken off because people just don't want to read AI generated
work. They I think we read again to
understand how the world looks to somebody who is not us.
We don't just read for content. I think the the idea that AI
could produce good literature is such a condescending attitude to
to what people read for. It's like people are are happy
to look at machine produced drivel that just hits the same
tropes over and over again. Almost nobody is reading for
that. And we think about literary
innovation. That's the main thing that large
language models cannot do because it's it's baked into
their design. They're good at approximating
what other, you know, the styles in which other people have
written before. But the authors that get us most
excited that I think revolutionized literature are
the ones who are always pushing the boundaries and stretching
the rules of the English language and, and coming up with
new ways to articulate an emotion or an experience.
So AI couldn't have done for English what Shakespeare did.
It couldn't do what Vladimir Nabokov did.
He came to English after a lifetime of writing in Russian.
So his English doesn't sound like anybody else's.
His precise word combinations, the way in which he's playing
and experimenting with the sounds, that's that's totally
unprecedented. There's nothing in the corpus
that could produce another Nabokov.
You could produce a really shoddy, gross Nabokov now, but
that's not what we write for. We write for different ways to
capture the, you know, our rapidly changing environments we
find ourselves in. Let's talk about your writing
then. It's taken a long time to get
there. I mean, you pack an awful lot in
to your to your writing in terms of ideas.
And you are prolific. You know, you've had five books.
Is it already? I think 7th is coming out next.
The 7th is coming out next year, so it's six out already.
What do you get yourself from writing?
It's really just a compulsion for me.
It's the way I make sense of the world's.
I've always been a storyteller. When I was a child, I'm an older
sister. My little sister's three years
younger than me. So I was always spinning tales
to her about like the midnight train, for instance.
We, we slept in the same bedroom and I would tell her in the
dark, our, our bedroom has been lifted, shifted onto a train
carriage. And it's a bit like the
plagiarism of The Polar Express. Now, now we're going on this
magical adventure and all sorts of things are happening outside
the train. So I think I like, I ever since
I, I can remember being literate, I've just always spun
narratives to make sense of what's going on around me.
And I think I continue to write to create a record of who I am
at every point in my life. And every time I go through some
major life transition, every time I grieve something or every
time I I transform because I'm an experience that always leads
to a story. It's a set of questions that I
now find myself grappling with. And the only way I can write
myself towards an answer is by constructing a tail around it.
And I find, but I never really write my way to an answer.
I just write myself to more questions.
But at least the act of investing different characters
with different ideologies and and splitting my own psyche that
is at war with itself into different people who will have
those arguments out loud on the page, I I find that really
helpful for figuring out the world for myself.
Does it help you get to your own position on what you think about
these things? It I think.
What do you already know that when you're writing?
I almost I I always start writing with a question.
I never really know what I think until I start throwing
characters and scenarios. And again, I don't think it.
I don't think it makes any of the questions clearer to me, it
just helps me understand the depth of them.
So Yellow Face, which obviously got an awful lot of publicity
and debate and sparked a lot of debate.
It's quite different really to your other books, isn't it?
And it was conceived differently as well.
Why do you think that happened that way and how do you feel
about it when you look at your body of work I.
Think all my books are quite different from each other, with
the exception of the Poppy Wars trilogy.
Everything I hope reads like it could have been written by an
entirely different author. And I think that's just because
nobody stays the same person between the ages of 19 and 29.
You go through so many life changes.
I graduated college, I moved to England, I moved back to the USI
got married, I started my PhD program, I started teaching and.
And all of these transitions led me to have a totally different
set of ethical and aesthetic interests.
So. So I don't actually find
Yellowface that unique in that way.
It was a major departure in that it was my first novel written in
a more contemporary setting and about the Internet.
And the obvious answer for that is I was living on the Internet
in 2021, which is when I started drafting that book.
I think a lot of us were living on the Internet because that
was, that was lockdown era, that was.
Do you see it as your COVID novel?
It's absolutely my COVID novel, and it's responding specifically
to this moment in time when we were all so chronically online.
It's like we lived in that bubble of we we lived in the
tweet. And another book that I think
really captures this is Patricia Lockwood's.
No one is talking about this, so I recommend that every chance I
get. But for me, it was a way of
grappling with how being chronicling on that lion had
altered my brain chemistry. I I was thinking in the language
of the tweet, right? I found that my attention span
was completely corroded. I had all these grand ambitions
for going into lockdown. I thought, I'm going to read all
the classics, I'm going to teach myself 5 languages.
I have no social obligations. So I'm, I'm going to gain all
these skills. And instead I just looked at
memes all day and I found like that that 280 word limits and
the, the rhetorical devices of the viral tweets like really
became ingrained in how I thought because there's actually
such an art to the viral tweet. You have to present an issue,
you have to take inflammatory side on it, you have to deliver
a punchline and you have to provoke further engagement all
in a fraction of a second. So it's a very successful form
of writing and it's one that I try to replicate in almost every
sentence of Yellowface. It is, however, a form of
writing I find myself totally allergic to now.
So there will never be a sequel to Yellowface I'm I'm done with
the chronically online period of my life.
When it comes to the the the basic arguments in yellowface,
have have your views changed at all?
I mean, you're a free speech purist I suppose.
So you I presume you don't think there are things that anybody
shouldn't write about? I I think my views on this are
pretty consistent. As a scholar and as a writer.
I think there should be nothing untouchable in the classroom or
in the creative space. I think the moment you start
like whether out of authoritarian censorship or
well-intentioned some cultural guidelines, the moment you start
creating rules about who gets to talk about what, or what the
appropriate ways to talk about issues are, then you're lost.
Because these rules are always arbitrary.
They always serve some kind of ideology and they they just
preclude like all sorts of daring experimentation and risk
taking that that we need authors to embark on.
And I think, you know, it's absolutely possible to tackle a
project and fall flat on your face and, and do it terribly
right and and to do it offensively and lazily.
But if an artist does that, it's on the merits of the work it's
on. It's it's because they didn't do
it well, not because they never should have attempted in SO.
We shouldn't worry about cultural appropriation.
I think there's it's absolutely grounds for critique of cultural
appropriation, but not in the sense that you could say these
topics are untouchable from anyone who hasn't had that lived
experience or comes from this community.
Because then then you exclude the possibility that people do
their research, that they collaborate, that they listen to
each other. And art is all about trying to
escape your own subjectivity. If you could only do work that
you had personal experience with, then we would all be
writing autobiographies. And I think that would be so
boring. Did did writing The Other Face
have also have anything to do with the conversation around
China at the time during the pandemic and the attacks that
were going on on Chinese people in America?
And you know that, that whole conversation.
Yeah, absolutely. I think there was a big uptick
in anti Asian and anti Chinese sentiment and it was startling
to see the speed at which these sort of 19th century really
tropes about Chinese people, you know, being disease ridden and
filthy and and ugly immigrants who are just bringing
pestilence. It was it was starting to see
how quickly they became recycled and reused in a 21st century
context. So that was certainly on my mind
when I was writing the book. And, and how, how do you, how do
you feel about your identity now given what you fear about
America? I mean, are you, are you, you
know, are you happy to be American?
I, I think I am back when the election was happening and
really the, in the weeks after the results came in, a lot of
people were talking about fleeing the country and mostly
in jest, you know, this fantasy of, oh, maybe we really should
get out. And, you know, the thought
crossed my mind. But over the last few months, I
felt more American than ever before.
I quite, I feel quite possessive and territorial of this country
because this is my home too. And if everybody who's
privileged enough to leave just leaves, then there's nobody left
to defend the people who can't. I also something that really
affected me was in August, I, I did this cross country tour for
Catavasis and my publicist pretty deliberately sent me to
cities that I typically don't have or yeah, haven't done a lot
of events in that people don't always send authors to because
their stereotype does not having a large reading culture.
So I was in the South and in the Midwest and a lot of American
cities that I think it culturally overlooked.
And I was talking to packed crowds of really dedicated,
dedicated and enthusiastic leaders.
So talking to those people and seeing the kind of love and
enthusiasm for for difference and eagerness to share with
cultural diversity and people and, and you know, the, the care
that comes from that, seeing that all over the US made me
realize, you know, like that's, that's America too.
And I feel very much the part of that and and yeah, it's not the
part of America that's in power right now, but it's not gone and
identify with that very closely. So can you tell me about the new
book Catabasis? So Catabasis is a return to
fantasy for me. It's about two PhD students,
Alice and Peter, who decide to journey to hell to rescue their
advisor who's died in a freak magic accident, and they are
trying to rescue his soul from eternal damnation so that he can
write them recommendation letters so that they can get
jobs on the very competitive job market for tenant track
positions and magic. Who's that book for?
Who who? Who's going to love it?
I think it's for anybody who who loves logic puzzles.
I think a core tenet of the book is paradoxes of rational
decision making. How can you make a set of
decisions that you thought were strictly going to leave you
better off and suddenly look around and find yourself at the
bottom of a pit? Which I think is a good metaphor
for being a PhD student. So I, so I think it appeals most
directly to to somebody who loves logic and has the
experience of embarking on an academic journey for the love of
the material, for the, the love of that subject, only to have
that dream kind of crushed out of them at every turn because of
all the bureaucratic idiocy that pervades the modern Academy,
which we've talked about a little bit.
And I think there's so many people holding on to that dream
that there can be the space where you just get to research,
you just get to share your findings with the world.
You just get to celebrate the that discovery and the process
of discovery. But the problem is that almost
everything about the modern Academy is designed to crush
that spark. I mean, you obviously pack an
awful lot into your life. You're able to write and teach
and do a PhD, although you're not teaching at the moment.
Do you think you will continue that kind of balance in your
life? I mean, you're obviously
passionate about higher education and university.
Did you want to go back to teaching as you continue with
your books in the future after your PhD?
I'm a teacher. I, I think I would be really
unhappy writing full time. I've gotten a taste of what that
feels like this year because it's it's the first year in a
long time in which I'm not taking classes or teaching
classes. I have no department to go into.
I, I moved to Boston to, to live with my husband.
So I'm a couple of hours away from my institution and it's
driving me crazy. It's writing is already such a
solid system, sick activity. It, it feels selfish in a lot of
ways. And I, I need that
counterbalance of being able to step into the classroom and
working with other people and helping others articulate their
own ideas and becoming more competent thinkers.
And I in whatever form I, I need that in some way in my life.
So yeah, I, you know, the job Mark is terrible right now.
There may not be institutions of higher education come 5-10
years, but. I'm I'm exaggerating but but if
there are and the positions are available, then I plan to be a
professor do. You think it is existential?
Really. I mean, do you worry that it is?
I think, well, I think some form of the Academy will always
persist in some way. It, it is a luxury good and
people like luxury goods. So I think there always will be
this amusement park experience where wealthy families can send
their kids to get the full college experience.
I I think that's not going away, but I think the Academy as this
like temple of academic freedom, of pure discovery and something
that really shares its knowledge with the world instead of
keeping it within locked gates, I think that is existentially at
risk. Rebecca Kwang, thank you very
much indeed. Thank you for coming in.
It's been a pleasure to talk to you.
And that's it. You can watch all of these
interviews on the Channel 4 News YouTube channel.
Until next time, bye bye.