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“The truth is not a democratic value,” Anthony Kronman says on this week’s podcast. “We don’t decide what the truth is in mathematics or philosophy or history by asking for a show of hands.”

Kronman was dean of Yale Law School from 1994 to 2004, and his new book is “The Assault on American Excellence.” The book laments the politicization of academic life.

“When the egalitarian and democratic values that have an entirely proper place in the political sphere seep into the academy — or maybe I should say are imported wholesale into the academy — they compromise and undermine the objective standards that the search for truth assumes,” Kronman says.

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