During a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe Rogan took aim at the ideological direction of higher education in the United States, arguing that universities have become overwhelmingly left-leaning and are failing students by shutting out conservative voices.
Speaking with British MP Rupert Lowe on episode #2524, Rogan argued that the lack of political diversity in academia is a serious problem, particularly in fields like sociology and psychology.
“That to me is one of the real problems with not allowing conservative voices in universities,” he said. “Surely there’s got to be some historians out there that are conservative and they would have a different perspective, and it might be good to have diversity of opinion as well as diversity of national origin, as well as diversity of gender, as well as diversity of s3xual orientation. Yeah, all that stuff’s great, but also diversity of opinion.”
Rogan argued that the only way to test whether any idea holds up is to have it challenged directly.
He stated, “The only way to know whether or not this person is making sense is to have someone who completely disagrees that has a better point go up against them, and you watch them duke it out.”
Rogan added that universities are failing their students when they shut that process down. He noted, “As soon as you silence all that because students don’t feel safe, or because, you know, this is promoting X, Y, and Z, this person’s a N*zi… as soon as you do that, you ruin the whole thing that a university is supposed to be doing.”
He contended that universities should be preparing young people for the real world, not insulating them from competing ideas.
“The idea that that was ever accepted to be shut down in this country, especially in America, is a massive failure of the education system. Just massive,” Rogan said. “If you think that someone has bad points, come up with better points and let them duke it out. And don’t pull fire alarms and don’t silence them and don’t scream and protest and throw things at them. Communicate.”
Rogan went further in identifying those who refuse to engage with opposing viewpoints as a deeper problem.
“If you’re one of those people that says, ‘No, you can’t talk to N*zis, shun them, shun,’ they are the enemy of thinking. They are the enemy of progress,” he stated. “They are the enemy of finding out what’s right and what’s wrong. And the only way we find that out is we communicate.”
Rogan also described what he sees as a pipeline from left-leaning professors to a generation of politically captured graduates.
He stated, “Send them off to college and they’re very impressionable and they’re going to get talked down to by a professor who’s a communist who’s never had a real job in his life, and he seems so smart and he’s very smug and he insults you if you disagree with him.”
Lowe agreed, noting that in Britain the education system has been similarly shaped by what both men described as a collectivist agenda designed to discourage independent thought.
