Gissurarson: The Failure of Universities in the West

Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, was a guest in Gisli Freyr Valdorsson’s podcast, Thjodmal, on 4 March 2024. He said that Western universities had abandoned their traditional and proper purpose which was to be a platform for science as the free competition of ideas. They were never supposed to be motivational meetings or choirs singing to one tune only. At present, the universities had become bastions of cancel culture and wokeism, having turned their back on critical thought, respect for people with different ideas and the toleration which distinguished between accepting and allowing other opinions. Gissurarson recalled when he and a few friends of his operated in the autumn of 1984 an illegal radio station in protest against the government monopoly of broadcasting. For this he was convicted and proud of it. Gissurarson also gave an account of his activities for the last couple of years, including lectures and books. In 2020 the Brussels think tank New Direction had published his Twenty-Four Conservative-Liberal Thinkers in two volumes, from Snorri Sturluson to Robert Nozick, where the longest chapters were about Friedrich A. von Hayek and Milton Friedman, both of whom Gissurarson knew personally. Now his major research project was the conservative-liberal heritage of the Nordic nations.