Niall Ferguson - The Constitution of Academic Liberty

Join us for the Pharos Summer Lecture at Oxford Town Hall at 5pm on Thursday 30 May.

'In La Trahison des Clercs, Julien Benda accused the intellectuals of his time of dabbling in “the racial passions, class passions, and national passions... owing to which men rise up against other men.” Today’s academic leaders would never recognize themselves as the heirs of those Benda condemned, insisting that they are on the left, whereas Benda’s targets were on the right. And yet, as Victor Klemperer came to understand after 1945, totalitarianism comes in two flavors, though the ingredients are the same.'

In the Pharos Summer Lecture, Prof Niall Ferguson delves into the changes he has observed during his thirty-year career as an academic, especially during the past decade. He will reflect on the state of academia in the throes of 'culture wars', the crisis of leadership in US universities after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, and why the situation in the UK - and in Oxford especially - is different.

Niall Ferguson is a distinguished historian, whose career has taken him to Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, NYU, LSE, and the Hoover Institution. He is now a Founding Fellow of the Pharos Foundation. The author of sixteen books, his most recent work is Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, which wasa published by Allen Lane in 2021. He is also the authorised biographer of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which was published in 2015.

https://pharos.foundation/

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