On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

As I travel around the United States for invited lectures, I notice the same shift everywhere. The lectern has been moved from center stage to extreme stage left, so that the human lecturer does not block the students’ view of the huge, wall-sized screen where slides are to be projected. People pay me to speak, then bargain down the time of my lecture, then ask me for my slides (which I never have). The daring impulse of inviting a stranger to lecture gives way to increasing fear that something might actually be said. We are being tamed by the machine, dulled to one another. The American university class is yielding to the screen, to the cave, to the death principle. Let us all pretend that something is happening while another hour passes, do that for four years, get the piece of paper, and move on to a world of further fakery. The university should enliven, and at its best it still does; certainly there is no substitute for it. But teaching is about the Leib, not the machine.