Tammy Bruce, independent political commentator and talk show host, is featuring a public podcast with an interview with Dr. Thomas Sowell, noted economist and conservative philosopher.

Their discussion touches upon the political environment on today’s college campuses (click HERE for link to podcast).

Sowell is currently promoting his new book, “Intellectuals and Race”. The author contends that the current state of academia is not conducive to a serious analysis of a subject like race, because “intellectuals offer ideas with no set standards except their appeal to other intellectuals”. Sowell covers the rise of eugenics theories, and how they were used to justify the genocides in World War II, as a cautionary example of pure intellectualism that is unrestrained by critical analysis.

Bruce asks the famed economist about multiculturalism, which Sowell likens to “a cancer on the human body” as the theory holds that all cultures are equally valid. In this context, Sowell and Bruce review the use of English as the language of business and diplomacy, and how intellectuals who hold that non-English speakers should not strive to learn it actually financially hurt the groups they think to help.

“The academic world is the most closed-minded world out there in a free country,” remarked Sowell. “There is no practically other institution you can be in where there is less free speech than in academia.” The author notes that intellectuals propagandize students with conclusions they have already drawn from other intellectuals.

“What we have today is a systematic closing of the American mind,” explained Sowell. There is no intellectual diversity in the academic world.”

As an example of the loss of that diversity, he describes the situation within Cornell University economics department of 1965 (which had an array of opinions on various items) to that of 1969, which had become completely polarized.  Sowell encourages students to go to campuses where their ideas will be challenged, and learn how to engage arguments intellectually.

Sowell is currently the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and a leading representative of the Chicago school of economics. Sowell has a nationally syndicated column dis that appears in such publications as Forbes Magazine, The Wall Street Journal,  Townhall, WorldNetDaily, OneNewsNow and the Jewish World Review.