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.