HOW TO PREPARE FOR YOUR ADMISSIONS INTERVIEW
We are asking each applicant who has been invited to interview to read the letter carefully and watch the video in full.
Your academic journey starts now. Have fun!
.jpg)
Dear applicant,
​
Please read this carefully before your interview
​​
My name is Robin Koerner, and I am the John Locke Institute’s Director of Heterodoxy.
The fact that the Institute has a position with that title should tell you much about what we look for and nurture in our students.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, heterodoxy refers to “beliefs, ideas, or activities that are different to and oppose generally accepted beliefs or standards”.
Most young people today live and learn in an environment in which they feel under much more pressure to conform, intellectually and morally, to “generally accepted beliefs or standards”, than I felt when I was your age.
In most of the world (and especially the Anglophone world), not only do educators tend to be more politically homogeneous than they were a generation or two ago: also, the media tend to represent certain views in ways that suggest that dissenters are somehow inferior or unworthy. In such a world, the rush to judgement of people for their ideas too often replaces the careful judgement of ideas themselves, independently of the people who have them.
Ironically, such refusal to take ideas on their merits and the sorting of people into the worthy and the unworthy are commonly defended by appeals to tolerance and equity. The result – if not the purpose – is to stifle thought, speech and the pursuit of truth.
All of that is bad enough - but things are made even worse for a generation that largely lives, and conducts its relationships, on social media. Several students have told me that they have a constant worry of being “piled on” for saying the wrong thing or of one day being refused a university place or a job on account of a heterodox statement that the Internet will preserve for ever.
The John Locke Institute has an informal motto: “Listen generously. Think bravely.” Many other institutions, unfortunately, promote the very opposite – judgmental listening and timid thinking. In so doing, they limit, if not punish, intellectual curiosity, honesty, and the pushing of ideas as far as they will go – which are the very things on which the finding of truth depends.
It should not take as much courage as it does today to say what you believe. It should not take as much courage as it does today to share a thought just because it is interesting and might be worth exploring (whether you end up agreeing with it or not). At the John Locke Institute, you are not only able to do those things: you are positively encouraged and helped to do them.
The word “education” comes from the Latin educare, which means “to lead out of”. We exist to help you develop your ideas in part by leading out of you whatever is already in your mind, to examine it, to subject it to evidence and counter-evidence, rigorous argument and counter-argument.
As the Institute’s Director of Heterodoxy, I have the pleasure of helping students “try out” ideas that just might (or might not) have some truth in them; to tell the truth as they honestly see it; to seek the truth in collaboration with others who might disagree with them; and sometimes, as a result, to discover a new truth. In a way, that is what all of our programmes are for. It is also what our interviews are for: they are an opportunity for you to be heterodox. And since our interviewers’ job is to provoke you to think, it is an opportunity for us to be heterodox, too!
If what I have just described feels to you like an exciting challenge, then I’m confident you will enjoy our summer school – and, I hope, the interview. My colleagues and I are looking forward to meeting you!
Best wishes,
​​​​​​
​
Robin Koerner
Director of Heterodoxy
​
Oxford +44 (0)1865 566166 • www.JohnLocke.com • Princeton +1 (609) 608-0543

If you are unable to open the video on your browser, try watching it by clicking here.