Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
S8 E3: Sam Abrams: Political diversity and antisemitism on campus
9 Plays1 year ago
Sam Abrams is a Professor of Politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a non-resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and a board member of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). He is the author of multiple books and numerous articles, in outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among many others. He has written several articles over the past decade on the lack of political diversity in higher education and the challenges it causes. More recently, he has written about antisemitism on college campuses. We discuss both of these issues, as well as his views on what universities can do to address them.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Host Overview
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome back to the Free Mind Podcast, where we explore topics in Western history, politics, philosophy, literature, and current events with a laser focus on seeking the truth and an adventurous disregard for ideological and academic fashions.
Guest: Sam Abrams and Background
00:00:25
Speaker
I'm Matt Burgess, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Faculty Fellow of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. My guest today is Sam Abrams. Sam Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a non-resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, and a board member of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE.
00:00:49
Speaker
He is the author of multiple books and numerous articles and outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among many others.
Political Diversity and Campus Antisemitism
00:00:59
Speaker
He has written several articles over the past decade on the lack of political diversity in higher education and the challenges that causes. More recently, he has written about anti-Semitism on college campuses. We discuss both of these issues, as well as his views on what universities can do to address them.
00:01:18
Speaker
Sam Abrams, welcome to the Free Mind podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I wanted to have you on because you've written some interesting pieces over the past few years on the problems with political diversity on campus and especially recently on campus antisemitism, which as we know has been in the news a lot and unfortunately I think is probably going to continue to be in the news for the foreseeable future.
00:01:41
Speaker
Yes, quite a bit. I wish this were not the case. But in my view, the unfortunate turn of events with the campus antisemitism is right in line with the political diversity issues that I've been writing about for shockingly almost a decade now.
00:01:57
Speaker
I want to be clear that when I started writing about this and when I went to graduate school and did the work that I did, I was interested in how do we build meaningful communities spatially?
DEI and Cancel Culture Trends
00:02:07
Speaker
How do we bring people together to solve problems? I was incredibly attracted to the social science PhD because it was an idea.
00:02:16
Speaker
It was a chance to study the various mechanisms, tools, and protocols that we could put into place to make society more cooperative, to make it more efficient, to really harness human potential, to see how enterprise and innovation could work, and what we could do with and without government, with communities, with individual drive, to really push things forward. I didn't really want to write about this sort of stuff. It wasn't my goal or my intention.
00:02:44
Speaker
About a decade ago, I noticed quite a few problems developing at my home institution, which is Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Bronxville is a fairly wealthy bedroom community of New York City.
00:02:58
Speaker
Sarah Lawrence is known as a politically progressive hotbed, if you will. And I often say that when you're at Sarah Lawrence, you see things before they spread nationally. And I noticed at Sarah Lawrence before the ideas of DEI, before cancel culture was so commonplace, it happening there. And I said, wait a minute, something is stranger.
Decline of Open Debate in Academia
00:03:20
Speaker
And I started writing about it.
00:03:22
Speaker
For the first couple of years people thought that this work was extreme as I said to them back then I took no pleasure in writing it, but it's what I see and Sadly everything that I wrote now has been fairly accepted and it's viewed as common knowledge regrettably So, let me dig into that a little bit What did you see 10 years ago at Sarah Lawrence or even longer ago? When kind of when did it's more the first warning signs? I
00:03:48
Speaker
Yeah, so there were quite a few, actually, and it broke my heart. I came from a Jewish household, and in my household, we argued all the time. Now, when we argued, I want to be clear that nobody's feelings were hurt. It was not viewed as an attack on anybody, but when we would have family gatherings and gatherings around holidays, and if I'd visit my synagogue,
00:04:12
Speaker
or even my high school, which was a Jewish high school, again, we argued. And it was, well, why do you believe this? Why do you believe that? How do we resolve this point? How do we make sense of questions A, B, and C? What viewpoints do we like? What viewpoints do we not like? And why? I loved it. I thought it was thrilling. I, again, went into the academy because they had a very similar sort of view, a similar mantra, asking questions, recognizing that when you challenge someone, it's not about their personhood.
00:04:39
Speaker
It's just about their ideas. We're not going after the individual that way. We're going after the idea. And one of the things that was very attractive to me about Sarah Lawrence College when I joined the faculty there
00:04:52
Speaker
was that it is a leader in progressive education, and progressive in this case does not refer to the ideology whatsoever. It refers to the way in which we teach, which is we are very interested in getting to know everyone in the room. We're very interested in getting to know who they are, what makes them tick, where they come from. We don't have huge numbers of lectures. We do small seminars, and the idea there
00:05:15
Speaker
is that we sit around a circular table, something that's fairly common nowadays but wasn't 40 or 50 years ago, and we discuss things, we debate things, we have dialogue, and we try to come to an understanding in search of the truth. That's very appealing to me and was a wonderful thing about the college. I noticed quite a few years ago that this was not happening. This was not happening at all.
00:05:38
Speaker
students would come in and they were clearly afraid to speak based on who they were, not their ideas. People would begin to do what we see all the time as a person of A, B, and C, or X, Y, and Z, often immutable characteristics. They would talk about their race, their ethnicity, their gender, their sexual preference, various things to say, well, as a person of this and this background, I can say this, and by the way, you can't say that.
00:06:06
Speaker
And people would begin to say things like, well, I'm just going to ignore this idea, this book, this writer, this person may be making this up. This is an older white man from Harvard who happens to be Jewish. There's no way I can listen to this view.
00:06:21
Speaker
There's no way I accept this view. It's just not legitimate. They don't understand my truth. My position on that is it's not about my truth. It's about what does the data say and what do we understand? Everyone has their own truths and I would be a terrible teacher if I disregarded everyone's individual truths. That's certainly a valid perspective.
00:06:42
Speaker
But it is one perspective among many. And we began to discover, or I began to discover, that this was happening all the time. People were afraid to speak. They were afraid of being labeled difficult. They were afraid of being labeled homophobic, misogynistic. They were afraid of being labeled a racist.
00:07:00
Speaker
And suddenly, the dialogue and discourse which was so attractive at Sarah Lawrence began to stop. Concurrently, I noticed that we had more and more administrators floating
Administrative Influence on Campus Culture
00:07:10
Speaker
around. I'd be getting emails from them constantly. They weren't singling me out, but just emails that were unending. And suddenly, they're having all these events, events that are
00:07:19
Speaker
not open to all, but are segregating the campus community and saying things like, here's what you again can and can't say. And by the way, these events are saying, this group has been harmed. This group is entitled to things. That all began to bother me quite a bit. And I started looking into it, documenting it, and really began writing about this. Again, not because I wanted to, but our education system is critically important to me. I think it's the backbone of our nation in terms of
00:07:48
Speaker
how we innovate, how we come together with new ideas. And then on a personal level, it was very important to me because as a Jewish guy who loved the idea of an argument and a healthy and hearty debate, I'm watching this stuff disappear. And that's where this all started. Fascinating. It sounds like your experience matches a little bit of what Jonathan Haidt talks about when he says what he calls safetyism seemed to have come from the students first.
00:08:18
Speaker
And then the administrative bureaucracy almost was initially a response to it. Is that your experience? And then how do you reconcile that with a different, but maybe not mutually exclusive story from folks like Chris Rufo that say that this is the end result of a long march through the institutions that started in the sixties in social science and humanities departments. And this is always where it was headed.
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah, so I think Chris is right. I think John is wrong on this quite a bit. I think Chris Rufo was absolutely right that this was a movement that was started in the 60s, critical race theory and other ideas that really began to gain a lot of steam and momentum during the Obama administration.
00:09:02
Speaker
The safety is and I don't think came from the students. It's very, very hard to prove this one way or the other. So it's just my perspective. I can't say anything for sure. That would be a mistake. I spent a lot of time trying to prove causal mechanisms. I don't have one for this for sure. My sense is that this didn't come from students. Kids are curious.
00:09:22
Speaker
students like to be challenged. Maybe one or two didn't, but this comes from what I documented before a lot of these other folks became national spokespeople.
Student Safetyism and Administrative Bias
00:09:34
Speaker
This came from an administrative overclass, a class of folks that, during the Obama administration in particular, began to multiply on campus with great numbers and began to say, here's what we need to do, and here's how we're going to do it.
00:09:50
Speaker
And they conditioned the students into seeing the world in a very particular way. That really led to the safetyism that John talks about here. But I'm not convinced this is a student thing. I still don't think it's a student thing. There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal just over the weekend by a prof at the Kennedy School at Harvard, who even likes to point out a point that I've made now for almost a decade, which is there are some students
00:10:13
Speaker
that really like to wrap themselves around the safetyism blanket, if you will. But that's a very small number. The fact is most of our students want to hear ideas. Most of our students don't mind having their views challenged. However, when you have an administrative apparatus that
00:10:29
Speaker
you know has bias response team students are petrified to speak the fact of the matter is that data shows over and over and over again that students like diversity again like their views challenge they like to work through and understand difference i'm i've seen that for years.
00:10:46
Speaker
Even at Sarah Lawrence, where I've been demonized by the administration, my courses are always over enrolled and people are trying to get in because I think they're curious. They want to know what are these great debates? What are these differences? What do we need to understand that we're not hearing? So I don't think this is coming from students. It may be coming from a number of students, but certainly not the majority whatsoever.
00:11:08
Speaker
I actually think most of our students are okay. I think this is really what happens when you have an administrative overclass, which, as we know, has been documented at many schools, to now far exceed the number of other administrators and, in some cases, the number of students. Studies have come out about Yale and Stanford, for instance, showing that you have, in some cases, a greater than one to one.
00:11:30
Speaker
an administrator to student ratio, for instance. So I think this is an administrative thing. I think Chris Rufo's characterization is probably correct.
00:11:39
Speaker
Thanks. Just to quickly steel man height, I think what he would say is not that the students came without a nowhere,
Loss of Trust in Universities
00:11:45
Speaker
but that the parenting norms interacted with things like their K-12 education, which was heavily influenced by the stuff that Chris Rujos talks about, and then things like Tumblr, you know, Tumblr politics, which is where some of the stuff came in. But moving on to another thing,
00:12:02
Speaker
Obviously, we could spend several hours talking about what the problem is. So I'm just going to focus on a couple of different elements of it and see how concisely we can characterize it. So one of the symptoms of the problem that's been in the news a lot recently is that universities have lost trust at an extraordinarily fast rate in the last 10 years, especially among Republicans, but also especially among independents.
00:12:33
Speaker
I'm often surprised by how many people I meet in academia that are bewildered by the causes of that. So here's some statistics that I think pretty plainly explain that trust loss.
00:12:47
Speaker
So Eric Kaufman did a study that found roughly 70% of right-leaning academics reported a hostile climate, roughly 40% reported having been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their beliefs, and roughly 3% of political donations
00:13:04
Speaker
among professors went to Republicans. And it's like, oh my God, I can't believe they don't trust us. Maybe it's because Fox News is mean, right? So when I've made that point, sometimes the response I get is ironically what folks in the DEI world would call gaslighting, right? So for example, somebody recently who's in, you know, who's in an administrative faculty affairs position recently said,
00:13:31
Speaker
Oh, I don't think that's true about the discipline or threatened with discipline. You have written about how it's been true for you. So I was wondering if you could give an example of what that looks like. You mean threats of discipline or why? Yeah, just being threatened for your beliefs. And also, do you think that the statistics I just quoted, do they surprise you? Do they seem like they're accurate? Do they seem way off base?
Challenges Faced by Abrams for Diverse Views
00:14:01
Speaker
No, I think what people don't understand about academics or the academy is that there are lots of subtle cues everywhere. When you pick a school, except for a handful of professors, most faculty actually are there for life. The constant moving around is not as common as a lot of people think. If you look at Harvard,
00:14:22
Speaker
or NYU, they always are announcing, this so-and-so professor is joining us from this place or that place. But we're really looking at a small number of people. Most people come to these schools and want to make a life. They're excited to join the community. They're excited to have families in some cases, not in all, but in some.
00:14:39
Speaker
And they're looking forward to spending their careers teaching, doing research, and living what I hope is a fulfilling life. And the reason I mention this is that the punishments can be very severe and very real, and at fire, and I'm on the board of fire, at fire we try to capture a sense of those threats.
00:15:03
Speaker
a database called Scholars Under Fire, which actually tries to document all of these things. Those threats can be very real, where the DEI offices or administrative offices or deans regularly write about, here's what you're doing wrong, here's what you
00:15:20
Speaker
You need to do, here's the punishment, here are the consequences. We have all of that. And then there's quite a bit of subtlety that's involved too. You don't want to be a pariah. You don't want to be a scab. You want to have a meaningful relationship. At a place like Sarah Lawrence, I have been a pariah sadly now for years.
00:15:39
Speaker
It's very unpleasant to be there. It's very unpleasant to be around a faculty who goes out of their way to say hateful, hurtful things to you all the time. And they're very careful about it. So my colleagues regularly won't come out and say something overtly anti-Semitic directly to my face. They're smart enough not to do that. They know not to do that. But what they will do is they'll come right up to the line.
00:16:06
Speaker
talk about white male privilege, they love to do that. They'll come up right to the line and talk about, and they'll say things like Israeli apartheid, and they'll use the word genocide, they'll use the word occupation. They're using words and saying things, again, that can come right up to the line, that they can then defend, and they do it on an almost regular basis. I go out of my way now to try not to have to engage with these folks, although I do have to, obviously, at some point.
00:16:32
Speaker
because we are still a community. But they actively go about doing that sort of stuff. And they do it with smug smiles on their faces. They love doing that. I remember after I published a piece in the New York Times,
00:16:48
Speaker
It felt like I was back in some middle school movie. I never actually experienced this in middle school, but you see these things. I'll call it the hallway walk, where you walk down the hallway and everyone is turning and staring at you. I think they use that in the Spider-Man movies. Sorry to interrupt you, but can you quickly clarify what your piece was about? I think I know, but for those who don't know, and just for context. Yeah, absolutely. Sure. Please feel free to see all of my work at my web page at the American Enterprise Institute, because I really try to produce a large volume documenting this stuff.
00:17:18
Speaker
The piece I'm referring to is a piece in the New York Times a number of years ago, where I basically called out for the first time, and this is what sort of launched a thousand ships, if you will, nationally, our administrative apparatus at Sarah Lawrence, who basically was having racially segregated programming, saying, this programming is to help this community exclusively, others are not welcome.
00:17:39
Speaker
And I just said that's not what we do. That's not the goal of higher education. Our goal as teachers is to elevate, to lift up all of our students, to meet every student at his or her need level, their need level. The idea is to treat everyone with respect, listen to the individual stories and say, how do we work with our students? How do we make them better? How do we help them thrive and understand their needs?
00:18:02
Speaker
We don't stigmatize them, we don't balkanize them, and we certainly don't reduce them to such simple labels. To me, that is a disaster, and lots of people have heard about this. At Sarah Lawrence, we were actively practicing those sorts of things, which I think is a turn against what real progressive education is. So I wrote about it, I documented it, and there was a firestorm. After that, I had many threats against me, my family, my office was ransacked.
00:18:29
Speaker
More than that, the ostracization emerged very, very quickly. So again, going back to that Spiderman hallway scene, you walk on campus and suddenly you say, hey, and people turn away. If you see a group of faculty somewhere outside or whatever and you want to come up and join the conversation or say hello, it's amazing how they stop talking, they shut down, they turn away from you. This happens very quickly.
00:18:53
Speaker
It was very strange. Now, what I like to tell people is that Sarah Lawrence is right next to New York. I live in New York. I don't live in Bronxville. So for someone like me, this was something that could be managed. I don't live in a small bubble the way a lot of other schools are. The sad reality is that for many other schools, whether it's a big university or a small college in New England, the fact is that
00:19:20
Speaker
you are in a small, tight-knit community. If you become an ostracized pariah, you're not going to be able to function particularly well. In New York, I can tell you I've maybe run into a colleague once or twice in the last decade, somehow randomly on the street. So I have a social network well outside the immediate Sarah Lawrence community, but many don't. So the consequences of speaking out and being on the wrong side of an argument can be very, very painful, very, very, very difficult for many people.
00:19:51
Speaker
So in that case, yes or no, correct me if the following is inaccurate. Writing a New York Times op-ed is not against the rules of Sarah Lawrence, correct? Of course not. Why would it be? Now, just so you know, the college tried to threaten me for doing that. That's where I'm going, but just give me a second. Yes, I can write anything I want. Physically ransacking somebody's office and threatening them is against the rules of Sarah Lawrence, is it not?
00:20:18
Speaker
There's no line that says physically ransacking or threatening, but yes, I would think so based on the principles of mutual respect and basic behavioral guidelines. How did the university react to your non-policy violation?
00:20:34
Speaker
and others' policy violations. They barely did. That's the problem. They didn't want to do anything. Colleges and universities do this. They try to think that if they turn inward, things will blow over and things will just go away. Harvard is trying to do that right now over the anti-Semitism mess there by not responding to subpoenas, not turning over documents. After the October 7th massacre, Sarah Lawrence
00:21:00
Speaker
You know did not release a statement now the statement could have actually been neutral then it could have been enough of a neutral statement saying a tragedy has occurred or a tragedy is uncur occurring in in The Middle East, you know, we're here to provide support for whatever your beliefs may be were supportive community They could have taken a neutral position on that they didn't have to come out and criticize Hamas and support Israel if they didn't want to they could have been institution institutionally neutral and
00:21:26
Speaker
which I think they should have been. I think most schools, if not all schools, should be institutionally neutral. But they said nothing, and students were struggling. Nothing happened. I wrote a scathing critique that gained a lot of attention. And then finally, the school released a statement many days later. It was too little too late. With me, they barely did anything. The president called me into her office.
00:21:50
Speaker
I wanted to know why I wrote it. I said it's pretty obvious why I wrote it. I demanded that I clear all of my writings with her going forward. I said that's never going to happen and not how this works. She herself is not an academic in any meaningful way anymore. She may have been a number of years ago, but she's been an administrator for so many years. I wouldn't say she's an academic at this point. She certainly has never taught at the college. Other presidents have taught. She's never done the work, incidentally.
00:22:18
Speaker
But basically saying, look, I want you to clear everything with me going forward. And my position was, no, that's a violation of academic freedom. And we don't do that here. Sarah Lawrence, incidentally, is a private institution. It doesn't have
00:22:33
Speaker
certain protections for free speech, you know, constitutionally, but we do have a number of operating documents and principles that give us the same ideas of free speech and mutual respect. Incidentally, you know, when writing these sorts of things, I haven't called out individuals. I haven't named names. The goal is not to shame any individual or call any individual out. That would be awful.
00:22:56
Speaker
The idea here was to say we have a problem and we're better than that and our students deserve more than to just be, you know, their sexuality, gender, or race. They are fully formed people and they are entitled to being respected as such. But no, they did nothing to protect me and they claim they did some form of investigation, although I had never heard a word afterward.
00:23:21
Speaker
Okay, I want to get to antisemitism in a second, but first I want to try to get you to steel man or maybe isolate what are the problematic elements of these campus trends and what aren't.
Addressing Inequalities in Academia
00:23:38
Speaker
And I'll frame it in terms of Yasha Monk's book, The Identity Synthesis that came out recently. Fries basically says, look,
00:23:46
Speaker
This ideology that reduces people to their immutable characteristics that explicitly and I think often flagrantly illegally discriminates on the basis of those characteristics that teaches people frankly to hate each other sometimes on the basis of those characteristics, all of which we'll get to in the context of the anti-Semitism.
00:24:08
Speaker
All of that, he says, does respond to real issues. Racial inequality in the United States is a pretty well-documented empirical fact in many domains. The history of it is very well-documented and certainly has large elements of injustice over the past several hundred years.
00:24:31
Speaker
To what extent do you see, now, now, you know, Mount says that, you know, this is a trap, right? This is, this is why these, these simplistic tribal ideologies draw people in, but they don't actually help because they divide people and they don't solve the problems and they, et cetera, et cetera. But let me just ask you this. What are constructive ways in your view that universities could address these real issues of inequality?
00:24:56
Speaker
But that's an enormous question, right? I'm going to ask you to narrow that down a little bit. You mean as a question of policy, as a question of how to handle students? What are we talking about here? I mean, there's so many facets to it. If we're talking about- Yeah, I agree. It's a huge question. Yeah, and it's not well defined. That's the problem here. So I can spitball a few things. So if the question is inequality in terms of where the folks are coming from who are coming onto campus,
00:25:23
Speaker
Schools are putting into place a number of very good mechanisms to manage that. When I ended up at Harvard for graduate school, there were a number of events that we were sort of expected to go to or were socially expected to go to. And I remember someone had said, well, grab your tux and come to the event on Friday night. And I just said,
00:25:47
Speaker
Tux i don't have a tax i didn't come from that i didn't have the means for that i certainly didn't own one lot of people turns out owns them i went into i want to rent one and i was over a hundred bucks at the time and i remember feeling very very uncomfortable effect quite humiliated because i didn't have that in my budget i was trying to manage quite a bit cambridge was very expensive things were challenged
00:26:11
Speaker
Schools recognize this. I'm not looking, by the way, for sympathy. I'm saying that I can empathize with some of this, and certainly my narrative is different and far less problematic in terms of some of the struggles I've had to deal with, which are, again, much less than many others that you hear about. So one of the things that places like Harvard are doing, which I think are quite commendable to deal with inequality, is to make college free for quite a few folks. If you come from a certain background and have a certain income,
00:26:40
Speaker
or family income, college becomes free, but it's more than just college becomes free. When you get there, the school actually will provide funding for things like tuxedos, books, and so on. I think that's a huge step in the right direction. Colleges are beginning to take note that inequality isn't just racial, it's cultural, it's regional, and one of the big issues that a lot of folks don't want to talk about are the urban-rural divides and what do you do
00:27:10
Speaker
have folks who are not from the right background necessarily to immediately integrate with the so-called elite. Colleges are working to provide support for folks in rural areas in terms of guidance and counseling and so on to say, okay, here's what the school is like. Here's what we need to know, what we don't need to know.
00:27:28
Speaker
I think these are all very good steps to deal with inequality, but there's always going to be some inherent inequality that we can't deal with. Lots of folks choose to go to certain schools because that's what they can afford. My father famously told me that he couldn't afford to go to Princeton. He ended up going to Temple University. It's what he could afford, and it's what he did. There's no shame in any of that whatsoever. Temple's a great place.
00:27:57
Speaker
So I think schools are very aware of this, and I think schools are very conscientious of it, and schools want diversity, all forms of diversity, and they're gradually getting there. The schools have been slow to get to this point, but I think they're actively working to address it.
00:28:11
Speaker
So let me just ask about one specific thing that you've brought up a couple of times. And that's what people call affinity groups, right? And I think the pejorative way to describe that would be they're separating people up by race. They're kind of, you know, is this a new good idea from 2023 or an old bad idea from 1950, right? But on the other hand, if I wanted to steel man that point of view,
00:28:38
Speaker
I'm reminded a little bit of something you just talked about in the, your tuxedo experience, right? There are definitely times when, and I.
00:28:48
Speaker
I think I agree and probably with, with, with you that, that it's not, of course, it's not just about race. It's also about class. It's about certainly about politics. It is a fact of human nature that it can be hard to feel like you're the odd one out, right? I think that anybody who's, you know, right of center on campus experiences this.
Affinity Groups and Identity Politics
00:29:08
Speaker
And to be fair, there are, and maybe this is kind of the answer to my question.
00:29:12
Speaker
There are spaces on some campuses. The Benson Center, which hosts this podcast, I think is something like this space at our campus. The Benson Center isn't an affinity group. We're for everybody. We're not just for conservatives. I'm a moderate Canadian. I'm not even a conservative.
00:29:33
Speaker
But I think it would be fair to say, and I think somebody who was responding to a critique of affinity groups would say, that is the Benson Center not some form of affinity group? And do you not need some places where people who feel like the odd one out can feel more like they're with
00:29:55
Speaker
you know, people who understand them. And if so, how do you do that without balkanizing and reducing people to things like their skin color, their genitals, their sexual preference, et cetera? Sure. So I love affinity groups and I love affinity centers. It's really a question of how we deal with them and let every college and university and campus manage them. So, uh, you know, we have
00:30:16
Speaker
decades of research that talk about homophily, fancy social science word for birds of a feather flock together. I couldn't agree with you more that it's about a balance, right? Certainly some groups, almost every group, people have certain ways of identifying.
00:30:32
Speaker
And there are some times you just want to be with a group of a certain type of person with a certain type of characteristic and other times you don't. And it's about striking that balance, right? So there is absolutely nothing wrong, in my view, with having an LGBTQA plus center. Absolutely. There's nothing wrong with a Jewish center. There's nothing wrong with a black center.
00:30:51
Speaker
There's nothing wrong with a women's center. They should exist. They need to exist. All these groups have, you know, and how you, and you can, by the way, be a member of multiple groups. You know, you can, you know, the way I just described, you know, you could actually, a person could be a member of all of those groups that I just said and feel comfortable in all of them if they so choose.
00:31:12
Speaker
So, no, these are wonderful things. These are important things. The question is how do they, what sort of language do they use? How open are they? How welcoming are they? I've been to a number of places where you're really not welcome and they make that very well known. Over and over and over again, we're seeing on social media groups that say no Jews welcome. That's a problem. You can't really do that. You know, if you're at a Hillel, you know, Hillel is a Jewish organization.
00:31:37
Speaker
When I was an undergrad, some of my favorite events, though, were when we would do big parties and big events for the campus at large. When I was a first year, I organized a big Passover Seder. It was a celebration of freedom in the spring. It had a little bit of Jewish undertones to it, but I'm pretty sure the bulk of the folks who attended were not Jewish and were there to celebrate and learn.
00:32:00
Speaker
It was a great experience and one that I'll never forget. Affinity centers are good. They serve a purpose. The problem is that when they are taken over by a progressive, and I'll just use the word woke, I don't tend to like that word, but I think for your listeners, I think it makes sense.
00:32:17
Speaker
woke ideologues who basically try to balkanize and stigmatize and getaways. I think that is when these things become problematic and dangerous. I think when we segregate students by various immutable characteristics in housing, I think when you have racially based housing, that can become dangerous and a problem to a degree. But should a person of color have a
00:32:42
Speaker
center? Absolutely. Why not? The question is, are they going there and are they being told dangerous things? Are they going to these places and are they becoming radicalized? Are they going to these places and not trying to find connections outside their affinity group? All these different groups have their own narratives, their own stories, and they can connect in ways that other folks may not be able to connect. They serve great functions. But again, it's a matter of how we're using these groups.
00:33:10
Speaker
and the messaging and the ideas coming out of these groups. Would it be fair to summarize the balance in terms of what Amy Chua would call a supergroup identity? So the idea that in America in particular or any multicultural diverse society, we need to make some room for people to have
00:33:33
Speaker
strong subgroup identities, but it's dangerous and corrosive to the society if they get to be so strong that they become more important than our shared identity as Americans. Is that kind of what you're getting at? I am, and other people have made this argument for a long time. Bob Putnam makes this argument, too, at the end of Bowling Alone. Yes, I think Amy is exactly right.
00:33:57
Speaker
Yes, of course we need room for the individual difference, but we also need to remember that we are part of a larger collective whole with collective values and collective ideas. So I think that's exactly right. Now human nature, as far as I understand it, and our probably innate instinct for tribalism,
00:34:16
Speaker
is such that there can be a very fine line between loving your in-group and hating your out-group. And I think we've been talking about how that manifests on the left, but you could argue that you can also see it on the right. For example, some of Donald Trump's rhetoric sometimes crosses the line into being xenophobic. And yet I remember one moment in a debate, I think in 2016 when he was pressed on this and he said,
00:34:39
Speaker
I don't hate immigrants, I love Americans. That was a perfect illustration of how there's a fine line between loving your in-group and hating your out-group. But certainly, condoning group-based hatred at an institutional level, history shows repeatedly is very, very dangerous. So now let's get to the anti-Semitism topic. When did you, you know, you talk about how
00:35:04
Speaker
being on a progressive campus means that you saw some of these things before they exploded nationally. When did you first start to see things that you perceived as anti-Semitic in your local milieu?
Personal Experiences of Antisemitism
00:35:19
Speaker
Within the first couple of days. There was no question about it. I came in as a somewhat observant Jewish guy. And what year was this? Oh man, this would have been,
00:35:34
Speaker
Let me see if I can get it right. 2008, 2009-ish, around then. You know, someone can look it up, too. I hope the listeners don't say, oh, we got it wrong, but well, you know, around 2008, 2009, 2010, in that area then. And, you know, I'll never forget. So I am an observant Jewish guy, not an extremely religious guy insofar as I'm an Orthodox. I identify as Orthodox.
00:36:03
Speaker
Holidays are important to me. Friday night Sabbath and Saturday Sabbath practice is very important to me. I can explain that if you like, but it's something I do. And it was made clear to me very quickly that when I joined the college, especially at the start of the academic year, which is incidentally also when Jewish holidays take place.
00:36:26
Speaker
that the school doesn't care about any of this. They say that they care about diversity and religious diversity as part of it, but they make no accommodation for that. They don't post, for instance, on the calendar that during the Jewish high holiday of Rosh Hashanah,
00:36:41
Speaker
that the school is closed in any way. Almost every New York City school does, by the way, in contrast. And it's not just for Jews. For most faiths, any faiths, this should be the case. There are a couple of high holy days that a number of folks observe. Schools should shut down to be respectful, in my view, of all of these things. There's always other times to
00:37:02
Speaker
to have classes. And I remember saying to my colleagues at the time, because I was told, you don't want to make too much noise with the administration when you're starting. I remember I had to go into work on Saturday. I said, that's just not what I do. What are you talking about here?
00:37:22
Speaker
And he said, and my colleagues said, we don't care. The deal is, is you work on Saturday, period. That's it. You don't complain. And if you expect to be here more than a year, you need to just show up and do your work. I remember feeling disgusting. I remember pushing back a little bit and saying, well, it doesn't make any sense. And that's then where the antisemitism came out, where they basically said,
00:37:44
Speaker
Things like we don't really care what you know jewish people think you know this is it you know this is arcane bizarre practice the sort of stuff was deeply uncomfortable then you know the high holidays come around the two most important holidays for jews are the new year holiday and yumki poor holiday the day of
00:38:04
Speaker
Atonement when you're supposed to use those of contemplate those days as contemplation in synagogue and prayer and so on and I remember I was told you know, you can't move things around you just can't do that, you know, the school school is open you need to be here and I was sick to my stomach that day. I threw up a number of times. I felt like the world was spinning and Basically, I was told if you say anything, you know, you're out and
00:38:31
Speaker
You shut your mouth, you don't complain, and if you don't show up, you've done a disservice to your students and to the community. If you don't show up, you're obviously not tenurable. If you don't show up, you obviously don't belong here. So the idea was I better work on my holy days or I have no job.
00:38:49
Speaker
And as you know with tenure, there are ways you can put your thumb on the scale and people can figure out ways to help you get tenure, but there are also ways that they can help you get forced out without tenure. And that's why I just encountered it. And that was within the first couple of months. Let me just ask one quick follow-up question about that. Sure. To what extent do you think that that experience was specifically about antisemitism versus about
00:39:17
Speaker
anti-religion or kind of militant secularism, which I have seen in some universities, you know, my PhD, I'm an economist now, but my PhD was actually in ecology and evolution, which has a lot of anti-religious undercurrents in some of the community. Like if you had been a Muslim asking for similar accommodations for Ramadan, do you think that it would have been different? Yes, I do.
00:39:45
Speaker
i do because i've seen the school bent over back but backward for other forms of difference as they should by the way because if you're a muslim meeting accommodations from about you should be given accommodations from about there's no question in my mind that that is a truism uh... the issue as it was uh... you know again i can't prove any of this with smoking and i have no silver bullet here for you of course but uh... no i believe it was very much uh... because of me being jewish uh... and there were a lot of uh...
00:40:13
Speaker
other Jews who have since retired and later said things like, it's so toxic for Jews here that you put your head down and hope they don't pay any attention to you.
00:40:23
Speaker
So no, I'm pretty sure it was an anti-Semitic thing, not just a rampant secularism thing. And I know the difference largely because I encountered the rampant secularism when I was doing my PhD, and I understood that difference. I didn't love the rampant secularism, but I totally understand where they're coming from ideologically there. This was not that. This was anti-Semitism. And again, it's very hard to say what exactly is it, how do you know for sure.
00:40:46
Speaker
Again, these are slippery slopes, but it was pretty clear that that's what was going on. Also, in my first couple of months, swastikas had been painted on my doors on a number of occasions, and faculty basically said, you clear it up, you say nothing, you don't report it, and you go away. So yeah, I'm pretty sure it's antisemitism.
00:41:04
Speaker
So the anti-Semitism that we've seen explode across the country on college canvases in the last few months has been pretty clearly and explicitly tied to the oppressor oppressed narrative, right? So people decided that Jews are an oppressor group and you can
00:41:21
Speaker
It's impossible to be racist against an oppressor group and vice versa. Yes, if you are an oppressor group and if you're oppressed and there's an oppressor group, literally you can say do anything and it is acceptable because it is a form of resistance and there are no rules.
00:41:47
Speaker
Internationally and historically, we have seen how far this can go. For example, the Hutus and the Tutsis, the genocide in Rwanda, the Tutsis were seen as an oppressor group that was favored by the colonists and they were the victims of genocide, the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam after the war. Even today, there's a quite alarming development in South Africa right now
00:42:13
Speaker
where there's a candidate named Julius Malema who's running in the upcoming election. I don't think he's in the lead, but I think he's, he's closer than many would say is comfortable. And he said things like, I'm not going to call for the slaughter of white people, at least for now. And then when he's pressed on, you know, would you, are you saying, would you ever do it? He basically says maybe, uh, when people say, you know, why are,
00:42:39
Speaker
You know, do you understand why people are concerned about that? He'll say, well, they're cry babies, right? I saw him say that in an interview. So that's sort of how far it can go. Tell me a little bit about, you know, the before and after October the 7th. To what extent have you seen, you know, explicit kind of hatred against Jews and how has it changed since October 7th?
00:43:08
Speaker
i mean it's everywhere there's nothing new uh... unfortunately about this the october seventh moment though i think galvanized uh... the support and basically occurred and what i'm grateful for and i've written quite a bit about this and i actually just published a piece yesterday about how far some of this dangerous stuff can go uh... is the fact that it is now no longer
00:43:30
Speaker
underground, it's no longer as subtle. People have now been emboldened and feel comfortable bringing that anti-Semitism out of the shadows and are just very explicit and open about it. The good news with that is at least you see where it is, you know what it is, and maybe we can move forward from it, maybe we can educate, maybe there's some grounds to improve. Sarah Lawrence is hardly representative of anything in this case.
00:44:00
Speaker
I have long known, but without proof, what people think about Jews and what people think about me as a Jew, for instance. But the faculty have been very careful in certain acts and deeds and protesting things and participating in rallies and so on.
00:44:19
Speaker
Many of them now are overtly doing that work. So now, at least, like I said, it's very transparent and very clear what people are thinking. In many respects, it was the shot heard around the world where, after Hamas parachuted in, people felt emboldened. And this stuff, again, is now no longer on the sidelines. Students, faculty, administrators, community members, all of them now feel that something happened, something changed, and now they can
00:44:47
Speaker
unload what their real feelings are and what their ideas are and instead of having people sit in your classroom knowing that they hate you, which was obviously something that I'd seen for years and students have reported this to me for years, now the same students who would sit next to you and give you funny looks, at least they're very open about saying they hate you for no apparent reason and so on. In some regards, I think that's a positive. At least we now know what it is and we can hopefully build off of that.
00:45:17
Speaker
So let me ask you specifically, I want to get into the weeds a little bit of sort of where you think the line is,
Defining Antisemitism and Free Speech
00:45:26
Speaker
right? Because there are some obvious.
00:45:28
Speaker
clear cases that I think almost any reasonable person would agree with, like the professor that was saying that he found the October 7th attack exhilarating. I think that was at Cornell. Yes, John Rickford's son, a man who grew up at Stanford with me, a guy who lived in a bubble of extreme privilege, by the way. Parents were professors at Stanford, tenured professors.
00:45:53
Speaker
who, you know, had their housing covered by the university, a guy who was completely warped by being around some crazy left-of-center professors at Stanford who, you know, has never lived in the real world. Okay, so I mean, that's an obvious example that I think would make 95% of Americans at least sick to their stomach, right? Similarly, the UC Davis professor who, you know, indirectly called for violence against Jewish journalists, things like that. Then on the other side,
00:46:24
Speaker
I would say that in my experience, I've seen a lot of people that I personally, now I'm not a Jew, so maybe I don't perceive this fully, but I've seen a lot of people both in private and in public who I would not consider anti-Semitic or hateful.
00:46:44
Speaker
make very pointed criticisms of, say, the settlements in the West Bank, or the way that Israel is running the war, or just express extreme dismay and anger at the enormous amount of human suffering in Gaza right now. I mean, would you agree that that's okay and you can do that and not be an anti-Semite? Absolutely. Sure.
00:47:10
Speaker
So where is the line? It's hard to say. I knew you were going to go for that. It's hard to say. It's like the old pornography definition for the Supreme Court, where you know it when you sort of see it. It's hard to say. Just as folks who are of color like to say, you don't get to tell me what feels racist.
00:47:30
Speaker
The same thing here where you don't get to tell me what is anti-Semitic. And I don't want to say that in an aggressive way to you at all, because that's not what I'm intending to say. No, criticizing Israel is absolutely fair. Criticizing the war effort, that's a challenge for me a little bit, only because I don't have full information about what's going on. On the war, there are differing points of view. Some people think the Israeli armies
00:47:59
Speaker
going out and being aggressively genocidal. I can't believe that based on what I know, but I also want to say I'm not there and don't know for sure. I'm criticizing my understanding also that the army intends to be as humane and as humanly possible. I don't know. I'm very comfortable saying I don't know the on the ground truth. If your default is that by definition these folks
00:48:21
Speaker
are going to be genocidal killers and trying to kill babies. Yeah, I think that's an anti-Semitic statement because I don't think any of us are knowledgeable enough to have a full informed view about what's going on over there. However, criticizing Israel, yeah, you can do that. Criticizing the government, absolutely. They're certainly imperfect and many Jewish folks have a lot of trouble with the way Israel is behaving and many folks have problems with
00:48:47
Speaker
the government and so on. Yeah, that's not anti-Semitic. Saying Israel doesn't have a right to exist, then you become overtly anti-Semitic. Calling for its destruction, you can't do that necessarily either. But it's a fine line on that. But calling into question, and most importantly, questioning things, I don't have a problem with. And saying, well, so do we really know what's going on and what could be considered problematic? Asking things into question is certainly never a problem.
00:49:14
Speaker
of the expressions that often occur on campuses that I think Jewish students and faculty very understandably and almost always rightly perceived to be at least somewhat hateful. So things like the people saying from the river to the sea, which means from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, I think it's often
00:49:39
Speaker
understandably interpreted as a call for the elimination of Israel or people chanting intifada, right, which brings to mind, you know, raves of suicide bombings, again, you know, in Jerusalem, things like that. What fraction of the people that engage in these types of things are motivated by hatred versus ignorance? And for example, there was, I believe it was Constantine Kisan in the UK did an interesting video where he went to one of these rallies
00:50:08
Speaker
and asked a bunch of protestors who were chanting from the river to the sea, what river and what sea they were talking about and how much they didn't know. How much it is that versus kind of genuine, deeply held hatred.
00:50:21
Speaker
Yeah, so I can't answer that. I really can't answer that because I don't know. We're trying to figure it out. Lots of us are trying to figure out this sort of work. But right now, polling younger folks, younger people are being polled so often. The fatigue, the cost, the difficulty in getting reasonable data right now has become very, very challenging. I suspect a lot of it is just, quite frankly, ignorance. And that's the whole point of college, and quite frankly, K-12, which is to
00:50:49
Speaker
you know, mitigate this sort of ignorance. I think it's a disaster that we're so darn ignorant. And it goes in every direction, by the way. It's not just one group that's ignorant of history. But this is why I've been an advocate for years of making sure that we have more history and more civics courses in this country, because we need them, because we are woefully misinformed and uninformed. I can't even begin to give you a guess of how that breakdown
00:51:15
Speaker
Now, that being said, what I would add is that there is a mob-like rule that has taken over quite a bit of college and university life right now, and that is what scares me as well, to add in a layer here, which is
00:51:32
Speaker
Students understand that they don't want to be viewed as pariahs. Students understand that unfortunately their footprints can linger for decades now. When I was in college, I liked to tell the story that occasionally some dorm mates and I would end up singing in the shower. It was kind of fun. There's no video of this, right? This is great. There's no video. I'd rather not have recorded videos of
00:51:56
Speaker
singing Come Sail Away by Styx with, you know, in my stall with some other guys in their own stalls. And that's a good thing. I'm smiling here because, you know, college, you can make mistakes. You can do goofy, fun things. Not everything needs to haunt you. And, you know, I don't need a video of that. And again, nothing was inappropriate with it, but I'd rather not have that circulating just because it's probably embarrassing but fun at the time. Students know that it's very hard to live their lives now without some form of record.
00:52:22
Speaker
I'll be maintained about everything they say and do they know that if there's a block in their hallway. In making this up in indianapolis you know it could be broadcast all over los angeles within seconds they know that so they're careful they're not able to speak freely they don't want the attention we know that from study after study that students really are very afraid of that they're afraid of cancel culture.
00:52:43
Speaker
A number of, about two, three years ago, there was a protest at Sarah Lawrence about me. I wasn't even there. And, again, if you tell, was there. And, you know, the next day, he spoke with a number of students who participated in the protest against me.
00:53:00
Speaker
And he asked them, why did you do this? What are you doing here? And a number of the students replied something along the lines of, well, we don't necessarily fully understand what's going on. We don't fully agree with the tactics, the language, the disrespectful behavior the leads were. But they also knew that they didn't want to be left out. They wanted to be part of the crew, part of the team, and so on. And I suspect that is a major part of what's going on.
00:53:30
Speaker
as well where, you know, all right, I guess I'll sort of stick in the back and go with you.
00:53:35
Speaker
I mean, I'm sure we're seeing a big part of that, but it's very hard to tell you if it's ignorance versus activism. I'm confident that, you know, there are a handful of very well-informed activists, and then you have ignorant folks following, but, you know, do I know, is it 20%, 30% to 70? I don't know that. I don't think anyone knows that. I think we'd all love to hear that. Certainly. Yeah, well, but to your point about how mobs work,
00:54:04
Speaker
sometimes it doesn't even matter, right? That there are many, in fact, probably most of the greatest atrocities committed throughout history involve a small number of people who really believe it and then a bunch of other people who go along with it, right? Yeah, and there's a book. The Holocaust. Yes, and Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners. I know it's very controversial, but you see it. And one of the things when you do sociology and psychology work, which I've done for years, is it's that story over and over and over again.
00:54:34
Speaker
You have things like the bystander experiments and the shock based therapy experiments. This stuff is far too common and the dynamic reveals itself over and over and over again. We're seeing it here, no question about it. It doesn't mean it's not dangerous and it doesn't mean people aren't getting harmed.
00:54:51
Speaker
Yes, we may be able to explain it, but the consequences are very serious and real for a large subset of students who are on the receiving end. A couple more questions kind of related to where
Cancel Culture and Protest Dynamics
00:55:02
Speaker
do we go from here? What do we do about it? So first, I want to start with the observation that some people would say that cancel culture has in a strange way come full circle, right? So 2018 when the Me Too movement was taking off, for example,
00:55:17
Speaker
You know, there was some genuinely really bad behavior, like Harvey Weinstein, right? That people were cracking down on. And then there were also, you know, some people who were saying, hey, wait a minute, you know, just because Harvey Weinstein is bad and there are other bad actors like that doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, any discipline
00:55:37
Speaker
that has, in academia, that has less than 50% women is, you know, ipso facto rife with sexism, right? And people would get ostracized for saying things like that. You hear people who are, you know, sympathetic to the Palestinian cause say similar kinds of things, right? Yeah, sure. There are some really bad hateful anti-Semitic stuff that's come to the surface since October 7th. But it feels like, you know, to some people that
00:56:07
Speaker
that now they're the targets of canceled culture. And maybe there are some things that are not outside the Elbertson window that are getting policed. And then there are also some examples that are pretty clear, like Greg Luhyanov, who runs fire, wrote an op-ed recently, I think, in the Free Press, where he says, expel the Berkeley students who are violently breaking windows and disrupting
00:56:34
Speaker
Jewish events. So where's the line? Where if you were a canvas administrator, what's in bounds and what's out of bounds in terms of advocacy or speech or anything like that on this issue? Well, I agree with Greg completely on this because I think he's right on this. You can protest, so take the Berkeley situation, you can have a
00:57:00
Speaker
protest. You can have a counter event. You can disagree with this person. You can't disrupt this person. We don't have a right to the heckler's veto in this country. You do not have the right to shut down someone you don't want to hear. It's just that simple. That's not how universities work. That's not how the First Amendment works. That's not how the public sphere works. Greg and Eduardo, who was his co-author on that, are absolutely right.
00:57:25
Speaker
And it's very important. And then he's absolutely right that you can condemn people who are trying to do this. The schools can issue as many statements as they want, but they're toothless. And this is where Carol Christ and the other folks at Berkeley and the UC system need to actually show some spine, which is even worse than shutting it down through protests and through shouting downs.
00:57:48
Speaker
But now engaging in violence and physical threats of students, not OK. You cannot do that. There's a very clear line on that. Speech is protected. Violence around it is not. And if Berkeley actually steps up and expels these students, they will make a very strong and appropriate statement to the world about speech, how it works, and what should happen.
00:58:12
Speaker
And they need to be dismissed from the school. You don't have a right to threaten and destroy property and people who are in attendance, and you don't have that heckler's veto. That's not how free speech works. You may not like what the speaker has to say. There's no question about that.
00:58:30
Speaker
But you can't silence that speech. Just let the speaker speak and you can ask questions. You can respond. You can, again, have an alternative event. But what they did crossed every line and principle of free speech that we have.
00:58:47
Speaker
I want to call out my own camps in a good way. Yes, please. I want to call my own camps in a good way. We had Yoram Hazoni give a talk called something like the case for Israeli nationalism, as you can imagine in this moment. Controversial. Did draw some protesters. I'm not a big fan of Yoram Hazoni, just so you know. That's the dirty secret. I'm not this big pro-Israel guy that way at all. I don't like a lot of what he has to say. But anyway, he can say it.
00:59:16
Speaker
I've just envisioned them too. The thing I was going to call my campus out positively for was that there were
00:59:22
Speaker
some protesters who tried to shut down the event and they were escorted out by the campus police quickly. And the event went on. And then also the other thing I'll call up positively, there were other protesters. I don't know if they were planning to disrupt originally, but they decided to sit quietly and listen. And some of them went up to the speaker afterwards and had a really respectful, productive exchange. And so I was really impressed by that too.
00:59:49
Speaker
And you should be. I mean, that's exactly the point. And the thing is, and here's the thing. Obviously, if the speaker has to be somewhere immediately afterwards, they cannot engage, right? But generally, speakers should build in time. And when you have an event at a university, I also think, let's say the remarks are scheduled for an hour.
01:00:08
Speaker
You should absolutely build in some flex time toward the end, in my view, to allow a speaker to engage further with the students or the community. I have never been a big fan of when they have to just leave immediately. The fact is, has only not engaged.
01:00:25
Speaker
That would have been a perfect opportunity to say, you know, he's not engaging. He's weak. What is he afraid of? He should sit here and speak and he should have that dialogue and both sides should be lauded for doing that because that's a sign that it's going exactly the way it should, which is, you know, a dialogue and that both parties are willing to talk. That's why you're at a university. That's what universities are for. That's why, you know, going back to how we started our conversation, I ended up in academia because I loved this
01:00:51
Speaker
growing up in a debate-centric Jewish household. That's what the academy and what universities and higher education is supposed to be about. So let me ask you a quick follow-up question before I get to my last question. Sure. That I think is about maybe a little bit of a trickier line, right? So I personally agree with you and Greg that physical violence, shutting down events, crosses the line and should be
01:01:17
Speaker
stopped and punished to the commensurately with its severity. So, you know, for example, I believe the students that disrupted our event, it was a brief disruption. It was nonviolent. They were escorted out. I think that was the end of it. Personally, I think that's appropriate. The students at Berkeley who were threatening violence and breaking windows, you know, probably should be punished. But let's talk about the claudian gay and the other presidents in Congress on December the fifth. They were asked in this viral moment by representative Elise Stefanik,
01:01:47
Speaker
Does calling for the genocide of Jews constitute violence and harassment on your campus? And they gave basically legalese First Amendment answers. So, you know, if it's targeted, if it's directly inciting violence, then it's punishable and we punish it, but we believe in free speech. And, you know, and so there are some cases where we can't punish it.
01:02:09
Speaker
Now, there's part of that that I don't, we don't have time to get into, which is that, you know, that's not how Harvard has handled other speech, you know, historically, right? Yeah, I mean, so I don't really want to get into that. But let me just ask you, where is the line? Like, where do you see the line? You know, if Harvard had applied that policy consistently historically, would you have had a problem with Claudine Gay's answer to that question? Or is the standard sheet?
01:02:35
Speaker
aligning not quite right now she's she's right that the context does matter ultimately that is actually the correct answer but we have to remember here is that this was not a court and those attorneys who incidentally worked for the former uh... you know who's that they were at the same firm as the former head of the board of overseers that uh... or the corporation to be more precise uh... you know uh... this this is not a court so this was a you know this is a public
01:03:02
Speaker
testimony and she really flubbed it. The reason there was such a problem here is that yes, context does matter, and she was technically right on incitement and so on and so forth. However, the issue is that we know, and everyone at Harvard knew, and as a Harvard community member I'm painfully aware of the fact that the standards are being applied capriciously, erratically, and inconsistently.
01:03:26
Speaker
As most people say, if you had simply turned around and swapped the top subjects and who said them, the college would have been all over the person very, very quickly. If you said it about someone who is LGBTQA+, if you said it about someone who's black or Asian, the entire response, the way the college handled it would have been very different.
01:03:46
Speaker
And I'm almost certain that that would have been the case. So that's why this was such a mess. She really, really flubbed it because she didn't handle things consistently, in my view.
01:04:00
Speaker
Given that at that moment on December the 5th, history, she can't go back and change history. And I don't want to minimize the fact that she personally was intimately involved in some other cases of censorship for much lesser deeds, right? Roland Fryer being an example. But given that the past is the past on December 5th, what should she have said? I'm sorry.
01:04:23
Speaker
I'm sorry this is happening. We really dropped the ball on this. This doesn't line up with what our values are. We will adopt the University of Chicago claiming principles, Calvin principles of neutrality. We will reform how we handle all of this and we will apply it consistently
01:04:44
Speaker
across the board to everybody and we will promote a culture of open inquiry and we're going to do the best we can with that and we will seek the experts to do just that. Would have ended it. She'd have her job and Harvard could have taken a lead on this instead of being dead last in the fire rankings for expression. I think you're probably right that that would have diffused the situation.
01:05:08
Speaker
probably Chris Brunet and Chris Rufo come out with the plagiarism stuff anyway. So I'm not 100% as confident as you are that she still has her job. Well, her whole narrative is absurd. I mean, she and I come from the same department. I mean, her background as an academic is not great. But that's a whole separate matter, right? And yes, the plagiarism stuff could have happened and would have come up. And you're going to see a lot of that.
01:05:37
Speaker
And I get that. And she may or may not have had her job. My bigger issue is she's not in the academic sphere as a serious academic anymore. I don't think anyone cares about that. But as someone who cares about Harvard and what it means, I had said to someone the other day, folks had said, are you going to go to your reunion this year with your family? And a lot of people said they don't want to. My position was, I'm not going to let someone like Claudine Gay take my Harvard away from me. I mean, I love the idea that the
01:06:07
Speaker
motto of harvard is where it has truth uh... and you know there's so many harvard alums who are disgusted by what happened and and don't like it she absolutely could diffuse this very quickly but she's in a bubble just like all of those administrators they're not listening to the right people they're not getting very good counsel and she tried to act like she was being you know uh... cross-examined in some courtroom when that didn't happen she's lost touch in sight of what she's supposed to be as a college per president which is a community leader who actually inspires
01:06:36
Speaker
through her leadership, her words and her deeds, and she's failed to do all of that. Okay, so to close out our conversation, let's zoom back out to the big picture, right? We've talked about how there's no political diversity on campus anymore, how there is often explicit and overt and sometimes violent anti-Semitism, and how both of those things are in some ways related to a hegemonic ideological bubble that
01:07:06
Speaker
that basically runs many campuses, runs many disciplines that promotes this kind of simplistic, neo-Marxist, good versus bad, us versus them worldview. So in terms of what to do about it, obviously that's a huge question, but I want to frame it the following
Reforming Academic Ideological Bubbles
01:07:23
Speaker
way. I would say those who want to reform academia and recognize this problem I just described fall into roughly two camps.
01:07:32
Speaker
There are those who think we solve the problem by recommitting to institutional neutrality, by gradually reforming from the inside, by recognizing that often the problems are caused by made up policies being enforced and real ones not being enforced. You might put fire and heterodox academy to some extent into that category.
01:07:53
Speaker
Then you have another group that I would say is led by people like Chris Rufo, Ron DeSantis, some of the legislatures in various red states who think that it's given that peer review is the overarching governance framework in academia.
01:08:11
Speaker
Self-reform is unlikely enough that we need significant government intervention, particularly given that the government is a massive stakeholder as, you know, literally in public colleges, but also indirectly in the funding of private colleges. And so we need significant government intervention to clear out what they see as, you know, the ROT or, you know, the
01:08:30
Speaker
where we've gone too far and then rededicate campuses to what they see as liberal education grounded in the Western tradition. And maybe within that camp, there are some that more than others that I think see that we need liberal education in Western tradition in a particularly conservative way, right? We want, you know, somebody's values are going to be in, so why not be ours? And then if there's a third camp, maybe there's people in between
01:08:56
Speaker
I apologize that this is a somewhat indelicate analogy, but I've encountered some people who philosophically are aligned with fire and heavy rocks academy, but are nonetheless sympathetic to Chris Rufo. And I would describe their views on Chris Rufo as being analogous to chemotherapy, right? You don't just give healthy people chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is bad for the human body, but you do if they have cancer.
01:09:23
Speaker
So where do you fall in this? A very long question. As soon as you started down that road, I had my answer without having to hear the whole thing. I think they're both going to do what they're going to do. I know that sounds crazy. I've been asked this question now many times over the last year or obviously a version of it.
01:09:43
Speaker
And, you know, I would add there's a third category or third sort of element, which is marketplace competition, right? So, you know, you have the places like University of Austin, Texas, and so on. And in K-12, you have things like Emmet Academy here in New York.
01:09:59
Speaker
which I think is going to be 6 to 12, providing a classical traditional education in Manhattan as an example. And both of these programs are new. I wish them nothing but the best of luck. We'll see how they go. I think we have a marketplace. And here's where my AEI background comes in. I think we have a marketplace. And I think there are a lot of these possible solutions. And I don't know which is going to work, which isn't going to work.
01:10:26
Speaker
I'm optimistic, but not hugely optimistic, that we're seeing faculty finally push back. We're seeing faculty at Yale step up. We're seeing faculty at Harvard step up. Although when they do that, of course, you see an equal number push back in them. Will the colleges and universities write themselves? I hope so. I don't know if they will or if they won't. Should we just hold
01:10:49
Speaker
sell, you know, take over a board and gut it like New College Florida. Don't love that either. We'll see how New College fares over the next couple of years. But I do agree that the state has a compelling interest because these are state institutions and the state has a right to question what the heck is going on in them. You know, the position I've had now for a while is, you know, we have a federal system. There are going to be a bunch of experiments going on. We'll see what happens.
01:11:14
Speaker
But, you know, we also see that there is a huge boom to schools in the south right now, where, you know, you hear about unending numbers of Jewish kids, for instance, saying they're not interested in the Harvards and the Browns, but are much more interested in the, you know, the Two Lanes and the Emeries, because these are much more hospitable climates right now for Jews and open expression.
01:11:38
Speaker
So I don't really tag myself to any one position. That puts me in somewhat of a weird spot. I wish sometimes I wanted to just fall in with one and just be the advocate for them. But I really see this as a great moment of experimentation. I think the country realizes that we have a huge problem here. It starts in K-12 and then obviously continues on to post stuff.
01:12:04
Speaker
But I think it's really a matter of only time will tell. I know that's not a particularly pleasant answer because I'm not taking a hard position.
Market Forces and Academic Reform
01:12:12
Speaker
But I think I'm worried that the schools will not be able to reform themselves as well as they could.
01:12:21
Speaker
But I'm also worried that gutting schools and shutting down some departments also is a bad idea. Not absolute, but in many cases could be very dangerous too. And I'm also optimistic about having classes like UT, excuse me, U Austin in Texas. But again, that's one. Will one school fundamentally alter the entire landscape of higher ed? I don't know, but I wish it the best of luck, of course.
01:12:45
Speaker
Well, maybe to reframe your answer more concretely, you could say that, or not concretely, but more in a way that sounds, I think you're worried that you're coming off as wishy washy or uncommittal, but I think there's actually a way to, to frame your view as basically.
01:13:01
Speaker
You know, tinkering and experimentation and diversity are good for innovation. And free market is good for choosing between winners and losers when there's innovation. And so maybe the fact that some places are doing it one way and others are doing it the other way and students have the freedom to choose where to go is maybe that is the solution.
01:13:22
Speaker
a fair characterization of your view? Yeah, I mean, if we're going to go that way, which we can, we're in a period of creative destruction. It's going to be interesting to see what happens. And people do vote with their feet. There will be forever large numbers of people still applying to the Harvard's, the Princeton's, the Yale's. They are fine. But I can also tell you that many schools are not fine. And even Harvard is actually, they just actually issued a bond
01:13:50
Speaker
call for bond issues because Harvard runs in the red all the time. They have a huge endowment, but most of it's locked up. Their budget is not as tight as it should be. So they're always fundraising to fill budget holes, despite the fact they're quite wealthy. Less wealthy schools can't necessarily fundraise billions of dollars every time they need it. So their budgets are tighter. The result is that they're a little more governed in terms of how they spend their money.
01:14:16
Speaker
But the flip side to that is that they lose a number of students and the school can go into free fall. As someone who teaches at a liberal arts college, if we lose 20 to 30 students, that can put the college in a very bad spot. So I would say there is a marketplace here. And where people choose to enroll and what people are comfortable with will make a difference. I love what so much is about.
01:14:45
Speaker
Yeah, I wonder, I often wonder to what extent these market changes are gonna encourage more faculty to speak up. I remember when I would speak up about these things, when I started, some people would say, you know, you're pre-tenure, why would you do this? And my answer was, one of my answers was, well, we have really good free speech policies here. We have, Boulder has a green light writing from fire. We have political non-discrimination in our policy.
01:15:13
Speaker
So, you know, somebody coming after me for what I say, I can probably handle that. And that's been my experience so far. You know, there is not a direct threat to my job, but if our school becomes a place that people don't want to go to and the government doesn't want to give money to, that is an existential threat to my job. And so, you know, we need to be more worried about that. Now, of course, my other answer was, you know, as an academic and as a person with integrity, I find
01:15:42
Speaker
Bending an intellectual knee to anybody's politics is so humiliating that I'm not willing to do it. Even if it did come with risks. But yeah, I guess I wonder, to what extent do you think that these market forces are going to make people braver because they're going to start to see, well, maybe I should be less worried about being canceled and more worried about this ship sinking. I think that's exactly right.
01:16:10
Speaker
Most faculty care because I don't think they're economists and have your training, right? I think so many of them, though, to be honest, are in such bubbles and ivory towers, they don't fully see it. And I see that all the time in the humanities, with my humanities colleagues, who I love the humanities, but they don't really even... They're just not trained to see markets competition and so on.
01:16:33
Speaker
that way, sadly. But I think you're absolutely right here. But I think your listeners and the world need to understand that many colleges are on the brink, right? And we're dealing with some big demographic changes that many boards understand, which is we're talking about this. They talk about the demographic cliff where if we just look at birth rates and so on, over the next decade or so, enrollments are going to drop in this country anyway.
01:17:01
Speaker
Add onto that that a lot of smart folks are saying, why do I need to be in college? I can learn how to do coding and so on and so forth. And we see lots of university, rather, employers saying, well, if you can do the work, that's what we care about. We don't care about the skills. I, of course, think that having some understanding of humanity and humanistic inquiries is obviously a great value. But a lot of employers are less concerned with all of that at the moment.
01:17:23
Speaker
So we are going to see some enrollment shifts and we're going to see more and more schools disappear. There should be some market forces that and you know, if you have, you know, you have state legislators saying we're not funding this, we're not doing this anymore. That should also scare folks. So I think all of these things collectively are, you know, are going to exert a lot of pressure on higher ed. And there will be some winners and there will be some losers. Again, we
01:17:46
Speaker
Fixate on you know the the elite iv plus group But there are stories well you know the bulk of higher ed takes place outside of that sort of rarefied air if you will And I think those area you know those schools are much more likely to reform because they were going to be facing market pressures Really quickly really quickly to end in a high note. What gives you hope?
01:18:08
Speaker
Oh, what gives me hope. My students, and I hope you see this too, I mean, you know, students have to deal with a lot. I mean, I think about when I was growing up, and like I said with the singing in the shower anecdote, which I like to share, I actually was able to go to college without having everything recorded. I didn't have a cell phone with me. I remember if I needed to call someone, I'd have to find a pay phone or go back to my dorm room and find the right time of day to call when it was cheap.
01:18:32
Speaker
and so on and so forth. These kids have gone through a lot growing up Gen Z, growing up in a world of so much political polarization. These folks did not, almost none of the folks that I teach grew up seeing government as something that could be a force for good. They've only seen a lot of anger. I grew up thinking that the government could actually structure things and be a partner to making this country great. A lot of them don't.
01:18:57
Speaker
The good news to me is that they've made it through all of this. They recognize that there's a lot of misinformation and disinformation. They remain incredibly curious, and I absolutely adore that. I love being able to assign a book and know that the students are going to read that book and then come into class and want to actually talk.
01:19:19
Speaker
about the book. Now, the Sarah Lawrence is a little weird that way because that's what students actually come to the school to do. But I've given many lectures at other schools. And while the students may not read the full book necessarily, I still sense the same enthusiasm, the same excitement, the same desire to actually learn, to question, to grow. And the Gen Zers that are on college campuses today are not as likely. And we see this empirically, but just anecdotally as well.
01:19:48
Speaker
They're not as interested in playing the identity politics game. Those were the millennials, the ones as a so-and-so, so-and-so of this, I believe this, you can't say that. I see this latest generation as rejecting some of that language, rejecting some of those identity politics, and being much more open to trying to form community. People want community, they're searching for community, and I think they're much less likely to want to wall themselves off and silo themselves off.
01:20:15
Speaker
but find commonality in common grounds. And that is why I still get up and go do this every day because it is, you know, the politics at Sarah Lawrence and when I speak at other schools is not pleasant. But I will tell you there is not a seminar I walk out of not feeling charged from because these students ask great questions and still want to do that. And I assume you have the same experience at Boulder.
01:20:41
Speaker
I do. So on that note, on that positive note, Sam Abrams, thank you very much for coming on the Free Mind podcast. For those of you of our listeners who liked what you heard, I strongly encourage you to check out Sam's work on the AEI website. In fact, even if you didn't like what you heard, you should check out Sam's work on the AEI website and sharpen your own views through institutionalized disconfirmation. Thank you very much and we'll see you soon.
01:21:07
Speaker
The Free Mind podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. You can email us feedback at freemind.colorado.edu or visit us online at colorado.edu.center.benson. You can also find us on social media. Our Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts are all at Benson Center.
01:21:33
Speaker
Our Instagram is at The Benson Center and the Facebook is at Bruce D. Benson Center.