It’s a busy time for the world’s most famous defender of Enlightenment liberalism. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, a co-founder of his university’s Council on Academic Freedom, has spent much of the past decade fighting threats to academic free speech from cancel culture and the “woke” left.
Now, American universities find themselves challenged by the Trump administration’s campaign to defund research. “I’m kind of pinned between those two trends,” Pinker tells me when we meet in central London. Which poses the greater threat? There’s no question. “Trump has an army … whereas the Department of Romance Languages — there’s only so much damage they can do.”
