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S10 E5: Daniel Jacobson: where higher education is headed, and farewell from Matt
49 Plays4 months ago
Dan Jacobson is Bruce D. Benson Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. This is my (Matt’s) last episode as host of the Free Mind Podcast, pre-recorded with Dan before I moved to the University of Wyoming this past summer. I am extremely grateful for my time as a faculty fellow of the Benson Center and I have enormous respect for the center’s work bringing viewpoint diversity to higher education. So, I wanted to end my run as host by talking to Dan about where higher education is headed. Thank you all for listening over the past two years, and don’t go anywhere. The Free Mind podcast will continue with a new host in the new year.
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Transition
00:00:08
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 adventurous disregard for ideological and academic fashions. I'm Matt Burgess.
Guest Introduction: Dan Jacobson
00:00:27
Speaker
My guest today is Dan Jacobson.
00:00:31
Speaker
Dan Jacobson is Bruce D. Benson Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. This is my last episode as host of the Free Mind podcast, which I pre-recorded with Dan before I moved to the University of Wyoming this past summer.
00:00:52
Speaker
I'm extremely grateful for my time as a faculty fellow of the Benson Center, and I have enormous respect for the center's work, bringing viewpoint diversity to higher education. So I wanted to end my run as host by talking to Dan about where higher education is headed. Thank you all for listening over the past two years, and don't go anywhere.
Focus on Higher Education's Future
00:01:13
Speaker
The Free Mind podcast will continue with a new host in the new year. Dan Jacobson, welcome to the Free Mind podcast. Thanks, Matt. Good to be here.
00:01:23
Speaker
So this is going to be my last episode as host of the Free Mind podcast. And so I wanted to end with you, since you're the director of the Benson Center, but also you're someone who has thought a lot about higher education reform and heterodoxy. And I'm hoping that in this episode, we can squarely address the question that underlies a lot of what we do in our center and the podcast, which is where does academia go from here? But first, we're pre-recording.
00:01:51
Speaker
And so I want to give the audience the lay of the land in case something dramatic changes between now and December when the last episode is scheduled to air, uh, so that it's clear what we don't know that may be known when this airs.
Current Events and Campus Trends
00:02:05
Speaker
So it's July, 2024, uh, shortly after the assassination attempt on former president Trump, but before the election. So we don't know who won the election and we don't know if Biden, uh, made it onto the democratic ticket in the end or not.
00:02:19
Speaker
And then some trends that I think are relevant for framing our conversation. My reading of the data is that cancel culture, if you define it as people being formally punished by their employers for political views or speech, has receded somewhat from its high in 2020 to 2021. However, self-silencing, Paul suggests, is still pretty high and hasn't come down that much from his peak in 2020, self-silencing on campuses and political topics.
00:02:49
Speaker
Liberal monoculture is still pervasive among faculty and graduate students in most disciplines demographically. And among faculty, this will take decades to change, even if we decide we want to just because faculty turns over slowly.
00:03:02
Speaker
The Biden administration recently reversed the Trump administration's Title IX reforms, which were aimed at increasing due process. And they more or less, the Biden administration more or less went back to where things were under the Obama administration, in particular, reinstating the single investigator model and the preponderance of evidence standard of proof, basically 50% plus one likelihood and you can convict somebody of a sexual misconduct.
00:03:28
Speaker
October 7 happened several months ago, and since then it seems like there's a growing swell of public opinion against universities. So a recent Gallup poll found that trust in universities has hit yet another new low. But what's interesting this time is that
00:03:45
Speaker
The public's distaste for what they see as the university's left politics is now the number one reason why they don't trust universities passing, worrying that their costs are too high, and being concerned that there's not enough job training, which are both still, you know, those are the two and three concerns, but I believe it's new that the politics have passed as number one.
Policy Changes and Public Opinion
00:04:08
Speaker
There have been some tangible policy changes. You know, there's been universities adopting institutional neutrality, getting rid of DEI statements. There's more legal scrutiny on race-conscious admissions post SFFA, very Harvard, and more public scrutiny on race-conscious hiring. I think it remains to be seen how much that's going to make it through the legal system. There's been some backlash against
00:04:28
Speaker
what I would say are publicly well understood to be tokenized hires. So President Claudine Gave Harvard, who was hired as president of Harvard with 10 papers and no books, which some people pointed out in political science, doesn't get you tenure at many schools.
00:04:46
Speaker
And there's backlash against her missteps in addition to the circumstances in which she was hired. There have been legislative actions targeting DEI programs and offices. Corporate HR has been moving away from DEI. And recently, I think the largest HR firm in the country said they're dropping the E from DEI because of the controversies around the notion that equity means equal outcomes and therefore discrimination.
00:05:08
Speaker
And there's new centers popping up devoted to heterodoxy, intellectual pluralism, civic discourse. The two largest that I know of are the Hamilton Center at University of Florida and the School of Civic Life and Leadership at University of North Carolina, both of which are being given more than 10 faculty lines, I believe, to bolster this cause.
Heterodox Thought in Academia
00:05:28
Speaker
So have I gotten any of that wrong and have I missed anything important in terms of setting the scene? I think you set the scene well.
00:05:37
Speaker
I will say that I think the last thing that you mentioned, the new centers for heterodox thought is unequivocally a good development that I think will have real positive impact. So can you expand on that?
00:06:00
Speaker
Yeah, so expand on that. Why did you focus on that as something that makes you particularly optimistic? Because I don't believe in, because I'm skeptical about all of the other stuff. Okay, well now we have lots to talk about. I was trying to set that up. That is, I do see that last, this development as positive, but I also see it as quite small. Because even though these centers, as you said, you know, 10 lines, well, 10 lines is something.
00:06:29
Speaker
plenty of several Benson Center alums or people who've gone through programs here or workshops here have ended up at Hamilton or University of Austin or some of those places. So I see that as an unalloyed good, but a few dozen lines is small beer.
00:06:54
Speaker
compared to the layout of academia at large. And my cynicism or pessimism or skepticism about many of the earlier things that you laid out swamps that in the big picture.
00:07:12
Speaker
Now, how much of that pessimism then is unavoidable?
Challenges in Faculty Demographics
00:07:15
Speaker
So I recently wrote, as we discussed, a Chronicle of Higher Education article about diversity hiring, focusing on demographic diversity, not political diversity. But one of the points that I made was that even if you decided that changing the, in that case, race and gender demographics of the faculty was the most important thing you could be doing,
00:07:37
Speaker
it would take decades, presuming that you weren't willing to fire people on the basis of race, right? If you just kind of have to wait for people to retire and hire once every two, three years as a department, it's gonna take a long, long decades at least to change the demographics in any way meaningfully. And I would think that that same basic mathematical argument applies to the politics of the faculty too, does it not?
00:08:04
Speaker
Absolutely. When I said that I was skeptical or pessimistic, I didn't mean to be saying that I take issue with the way that you laid things out. I think the way you laid things out at the beginning of the podcast was exactly right. I am skeptical and maybe more skeptical than you are, I'm not sure, about the impact of most of the other things. I mean, for some of the reasons that you touched on, one of them being this last one, I absolutely agree with you.
00:08:33
Speaker
that if you're not going to just fire people of disfavored ethnicity, say, which of course isn't going to happen, then yes, there are especially with the shrinking demographic of people entering college, you're just not going to have, there's not going to be enough money and there aren't going to be enough hires to make this
00:09:02
Speaker
to me at work in anything but a gradualist manner. The trouble is that the people who are most keen on achieving that kind of diversity or equity representation are not gradualists. So let me try to frame the question the following way.
Reforming University Policy and Culture
00:09:30
Speaker
in terms of optimism or pessimism about the outlook. You can think of the political culture of the university in three layers. There's the beliefs, the private beliefs of the people in the universities that's related to the demographic and political demographics certainly make up. I think we agree that it's impossible to change that quickly, even if we wanted to.
00:09:58
Speaker
And to be clear, just like I said in my chronic, or I guess I didn't directly say, but I implied in my Chronicle piece, I would not be in favor of saying we can only hire conservatives for the next two decades in political science departments, even if that's what it would take to get us back to something that more closely resembles balance, just like I would not be in favor of
00:10:19
Speaker
saying we should only hire non-white faculty for three decades to get us closer to demographic balance. And we couldn't do it. I presume you'd be against it even if we could hire reasonably qualified conservatives. You wouldn't want to put a moratorium on non-conservative hires in academia. Neither would I. That's correct. But as you point out, we couldn't do that if they wanted to.
00:10:45
Speaker
because of a lack of conservatives who are remotely qualified. And also policy and law, right? The First Amendment. Also policy and law. Those things stand in the way of all sorts of diversity goals. Okay, so let me get back to the three layers I was going to try on you. So there's demographics,
00:11:12
Speaker
There's culture and there's policy. My hypothesis is that policy is actually the easiest of those three to change. And that's where we're already seeing a lot of evidence for change. So for example, race-conscious admissions was wiped out in theory with a stroke of a pen. Now, one of the things that we're seeing stories start to come out
00:11:36
Speaker
with this year, which I think was the first year since that court decision, is that have race conscious admissions gone away in practice? And maybe not, right? We don't know, but there's at least some anecdotal evidence that people are still trying their darnedest to do it. And that's certainly what we saw in the University of California system post Proposition 209. So I really want to speak on this. You can go on, it's a complex question, but I definitely want to tag this to come back.
00:12:02
Speaker
because I came here from the University of Michigan and Michigan, like California, had the same sort of popular referendum that made discrimination on the basis of or use of race and gender in hiring or admissions illegal. And I know what they did at the University of Michigan while I was there. So that grounds an awful lot my skepticism about
00:12:26
Speaker
No, totally. I can say the same thing about California. I won't recount them just in the interest of time, but if you want to go read my Chronicle of Higher Education piece, I recount specific instances in which I was told that jobs I was interviewing for at University of California schools were discriminating on the base of sex.
00:12:46
Speaker
And also, I mean, one of the things that I have found frustrating about the debate around should we use DEI statements is that everybody's talking about whether or not their political, their enforced political speech, and no one's talking about their original purpose under which they were created, which was to get around discrimination laws at the University of California. Nobody seems to remember that.
00:13:09
Speaker
There are a lot of things people don't remember. People don't remember why diversity was introduced into admissions decisions in the Ivy League about 100 years ago. Right. Explicitly as stated by various presidents of Harvard University and others to keep the number of Jews on campus as undergraduates sufficiently low, to keep it from being too high.
00:13:37
Speaker
That was a point of diversity. Right. And today we're seeing the same thing often, you know, just as uncomfortably explicitly with agents, right? Now, we could have a whole podcast on word action and the ethics of it, but I think the example does illustrate the point that culture and policies don't necessarily go together. You know, you need to
00:14:04
Speaker
In some ways, if you're changing a policy in a way that goes against an established culture, like I would argue is the case for affirmative action, where academia is very committed for whatever reason to affirmative action, it's probably not enough to just ban it by fiat to kind of actually change it. And I think the same thing applies to free expression. The same thing applies probably to institutional neutrality to the extent that universities are adopting that.
00:14:34
Speaker
So I'm deeply cynical about the newfound, since October, commitments to institutional neutrality that we hear mouthed by.
Skepticism about Institutional Neutrality
00:14:48
Speaker
I'm especially skeptical about it from Ivy League institutions and other elite institutions, but I'm skeptical across the board in academia on this, on analogous grounds. So, I mean, I like your division, your tripartite division,
00:15:04
Speaker
But if I was going to push back on one thing, it's about how easy policy changes. I mean, all you said was that it was the easiest of them or the least difficult of them. Which doesn't mean it's easy. Which doesn't mean it's easy, fair enough. But it took the Supreme Court to change affirmative action policy. And frankly, I'm not yet convinced that even that
00:15:33
Speaker
will do. In fact, I'm convinced that it won't. Similarly, I don't believe that the newfound commitments to university neutrality are sincere.
00:15:52
Speaker
even if they were sincere, I don't think that they would solve the problems. They would solve some problems, but not the biggest problems. Okay, so let's just take a quick step back and define what policies do we want. And for me, I always start with the Chicago trifecta.
00:16:10
Speaker
So, freedom of expression, institutional political neutrality, you know, we're the home and sponsor of critics, we're not ourselves the critic. So, half people with all kinds of different political views on the faculty and students say whatever they want, but the university itself doesn't have positions except those that are vital that it's functioning, like they can go to the legislature and say, we should have more funding.
00:16:34
Speaker
Uh, and then the shills report, which, you know, the gist of it is we hire on merit. We don't hire in the basis of race, gender, politics, or anything else other than, you know, merit defined as excellence in research, teaching, and service.
Needed Policy Changes in Academia
00:16:49
Speaker
Do you agree that those are the gold standard policies? And is there any, anything else that you would add to that list? I agree that, um, I support all of them. There isn't.
00:17:04
Speaker
It's not that I can add anything practical to the list, but what I can say is I think that even if we had a sincere and effective implementation of all three, that still the deepest problems in academia would remain because I see those problems as arising from institutional or ideological capture.
00:17:33
Speaker
And the fact is that conservatives, and I use that, I hesitated before using that word because I don't just mean conservatives. I mean classical liberals, I mean libertarians, I mean anybody who's remotely centric. Anyone to the right of AOC is the way I was joking about it. That's how I would say it too. So centrists as well.
00:18:02
Speaker
They are so grossly underrepresented in at least most fields, almost all fields in academia, that even a sincere commitment to academic freedom and institutional neutrality just wouldn't turn the enormous battleship of academia around on demographic grounds. There would still be whole departments, even whole fields.
00:18:31
Speaker
in which there's basically an orthodoxy from which you can't stray. In some cases, because the fields are defined themselves in non-neutral ways. Right. This is what people call the activist disciplines, the ones that are downstream from critical studies, critical race theory, women's and gender studies.
00:18:58
Speaker
Okay. I do want to, I do want to stick with my layers. Yes. Uh, but I'm glad that you laid out the problem. Basically the, you know, the, the, it sounds like what you're saying is the, the not just left, but hard left culture is so embedded in many disciplines and some whole universities.
00:19:23
Speaker
that, I'm trying to remember his name, but there's an emeritus professor who I saw.
00:19:29
Speaker
give a talk, I want to say at the Hoover Institution, but don't quote me on that, who basically said he was pessimistic because there's qualities that make somebody a good scholar, and there's qualities that make somebody a good activist, and they're very different, and we've prioritized activist qualities for so long that we're not going to fix things until we replace the activists with the scholars, and that at the very least takes a lot of time and raises a bunch of other questions that we've just been discussing.
00:20:00
Speaker
Is that a crude approximation of your pessimism? That's part of it. Uh, that's not the, that's not the end of it. I, uh, because I don't think, because I think that something similar is happening, happens before students even get to college.
Impact of Early Education on Universities
00:20:18
Speaker
Right. So, so there are what I, what I think are misleading, uh, studies even turned out by places like Edwardox Academy,
00:20:29
Speaker
And I'm sure you've seen some of them. I know which study you're talking about. Yeah, the one that says we're not successfully indoctrinating anybody, the politics stay pretty stable. And I think you're basically saying we're not looking early enough. Okay, put a pin in K-12 because we're going to come back to that. All right.
00:20:45
Speaker
All right, so I'm going to give you the case that the glass is half full. Now, to be clear, it's only half full, okay? So I'm not giving you an unbridled case for rachamism, but let me just kind of go through the layers. Imagine that you wanted to, as a problem, imagine you wanted to embed the Chicago trifecta as policies and practices throughout the academy.
00:21:08
Speaker
I do. I do too. Easily. I imagine that process starting with policies and moving from policies to practices and maybe to the extent that there's some people currently in the academy that are so offended by the Chicago Trifecta that they wouldn't want to be part of it. The academy, if it had that, then maybe you get to demographics. As a matter of policy, I actually think adopting the Chicago Trifecta
00:21:38
Speaker
nationally or something close to it isn't that far as far as it reaches people think. So I think there's a reading of civil rights law that basically requires the Schills report. And someday a government, probably a Republican government and or a court will say that, that you can't hire on the basis of race, gender, or politics.
00:22:03
Speaker
I think that the First Amendment clearly requires all public universities to have free expression. That's well established already. And maybe even there's a case
00:22:16
Speaker
As far as I understand, the law, you know, private universities are held to their own contracts, which mostly do have free expression. So again, you're pretty close there. And then maybe even a way to thread the needle with given how much federal grants universities get that were, you know, wouldn't be hard for a government to say, if you're not upholding free expression, we're not going to give you federal funding. And in my experience, universities buckle very quickly when federal funding is on the line.
00:22:46
Speaker
And then institutional neutrality is kind of similar. I'm not aware of any law that for sure says unambiguously that we need to have institutional neutrality, but certainly for public universities, there's maybe an argument through the First Amendment that anything short of that could be compelled speech depending on how it's done. And it's also not hard to imagine the government, again, in the near term, probably a Republican one saying, if you don't have institutional neutrality, you're not getting our money.
00:23:21
Speaker
win any particular election, I think one thing that's a wind in the sails of anybody who would push them or the Democrats or anybody to adopt these kinds of policies is my understanding is that all three of those policies are super popular among the public, at least once they understand them, unambiguously so for non-discrimination and for free expression. Institutional neutrality, you might have to explain it more carefully, but I would be shocked if that one was also not popular.
00:23:44
Speaker
And I think whether or not the Republicans
00:23:48
Speaker
So I guess I do see a plausible near to medium term path to having every university in the country having those policies. And then in terms of the culture, where I would say you could also make a glass half full argument is that some kind of accountability, like there's this debate right now among heterodox people of should the government intervene in
00:24:14
Speaker
university affairs or not, where, you know, there's people on the one side who say that any intervention is a threat to academic freedom. Even if we like this specific one, there's people who say that, well, universities are never going to fix themselves. So we have to do it. And also the public is the stakeholder for all this money that the public money that universities are getting. And then there's people who were kind of in between. I don't love this analogy, this analogy, but I haven't thought of a better one. And it's kind of like, you know,
00:24:40
Speaker
Government intervention in academia is like chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is not good for the human body, but you need it when you have cancer. And so maybe government intervention in university isn't good for the university. I'll say equal in a vacuum, but maybe when universities are so far away from being able to reform themselves.
00:24:59
Speaker
We need it. But there's, I think, a middle ground that I wanted to try out on you, which I think is where I maybe see the glass half full, is I don't think it's a big infringement on academic freedom. For governments to say to universities, you have to follow your own policies and if you don't, we'll punish you.
Government Role in University Policies
00:25:18
Speaker
And if you combine that with the world I was just imagining a second ago where it's not that hard to imagine every university having to have the Chicago trifecta as their policy soon, you can actually get it pretty close. We don't have to go into specific local examples, but a lot of, I think,
00:25:37
Speaker
most damaging headlines come from either them enforcing a policy that they've made up on the fly that doesn't actually exist anywhere, or not enforcing a policy that does exist. Free expression and nondiscrimination being perfect examples of those policies exist at almost every university anyway. And as we know, in the last 10 years, they've been broken all the time. So how am I doing? Could we have some kind of a government oversight
00:26:06
Speaker
even through congressional investigations at first. You don't want to add too much bureaucracy. You don't want to add kind of a free, well, I don't know, maybe you do, to enforce it at the college level. But how far do you think we can get with requiring the Chicago trifecta and enforcing it? Good. Okay, so I think the crucial word when it comes to policy that you used was adopt. And I don't disagree with you.
00:26:33
Speaker
with your glass half full description, but I want to call attention to an ambiguity in the word adopt. On the one hand, there's espouse, claim that we are now operating under these principles. Sometimes that's what it takes to adopt a principle is to espouse it, to make it policy.
00:27:04
Speaker
official policy. Sometimes, though, what people mean by adopt is actually to enforce the policy. And enforcement is the crucial thing here, because we've seen, we've seen simply institutions have a newfound respect for institutional neutrality, at least announce it.
00:27:29
Speaker
But I wanna say I don't believe that they've adopted institutional neutrality, even if they make it their official policy. And I don't believe that it will be unless it's enforced by law, so through government intervention. So let me come back to the question though that I posed at the end, which is that if, so you can, I agree with your distinction between espousing and adopting.
00:27:58
Speaker
But if universities espouse these policies in ways that involve them writing them down in places that might be legally binding without some new government policy, does that not open the door for government enforcement, but not government enforcement via new policies that might threaten academic freedom? It opens the door. There has to be the will to go through the door.
00:28:27
Speaker
So it's kind of nice that we're recording this in the summer and it's going to be released in December because I have a prediction for December. Oh, what's your prediction? So my prediction is, this is a prediction that I made last week. It's not so much time stamped, but it's that new found enthusiasm for institutional neutrality will be forgotten
00:28:55
Speaker
as soon as the issue at hand is one that doesn't divide the left. Right. Say if Donald Trump wins the election. Exactly. So I think in November, perhaps, or before December for some other issue that we can't anticipate.
00:29:17
Speaker
I expect that that will be soon enough that we'll see that some of these institutions that have claimed to adopt institutional neutrality have run away from it just as quickly as they pretended to adopt it. And I do think that there's pretense in a lot of these cases when you see universities
00:29:41
Speaker
So I'm now thinking about the congressional testimony from presidents of Ivy League universities that were ranked last and second to last by fire for freedom of speech on campuses. And that's Harvard and Penn, I believe, right? Harvard and Penn, yes. And then when you hear them fall back on a First Amendment defense for why it is that they're allowing
00:30:06
Speaker
people to espouse violence against Jews on campus and to harass Jews on campus, it's hard not to think that their commitment to freedom of speech is wholly cynical. It's hard for me. So I don't. So the bottom line here is I do think that it's going to take
00:30:29
Speaker
enforcement. It's going to take some punishment and that can only be done through the courts or through the state action more generally. And although I share the skepticism about government intervention in higher education, I think it is necessary. And one reason that it's necessary is that it's the fact that so many institutions have
00:31:00
Speaker
as you noted, policies already on the books. And if they adopted the Chicago trio, then they would have more of them, which they simply don't live up to. They don't even, in some cases, pretend to live up to. And they're not going to when they have such deep pockets as the elite institutions do, unless they are in fear of
00:31:27
Speaker
something worse than just losing at the Supreme Court, because they're willing to spend some of their huge endowments defending their procedures in court. They need to be threatened with punishment of, you know, the sorts of government action that was taken against racially segregated schools a few decades ago. Okay, so let's get specific. So suppose that former President Trump wins reelection,
00:31:55
Speaker
And supposedly he appoints Secretary of Education, Christopher Rufo. Yes. And Secretary of Education, Christopher Rufo calls you as the head of one of these heterodox centers in the country, one of the, I would argue, most well-known prominent ones. You got called to the White House and he says, Dan Jacobson, we want to use the power of government to reform higher ed. What should we do?
00:32:25
Speaker
What's your response? What's my response? You know, I haven't thought myself into policymaking enough that I would want to be able to answer a future Secretary of Education without giving some more thought to it. Okay, so let me reframe the question. You said that the kinds of consequences you would need to have a strong enough effect
00:32:51
Speaker
to fix things would be similar to what we saw in response to segregation. So can you be specific? What do you mean by that? Well, even private universities, I believe, again, I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that the government was able to leverage power against even private institutions by
00:33:14
Speaker
threatening them with Pell Grant, refusing to give Pell Grants to students who attended, I think it was Bob Jones University, perhaps. So basically federal funding, threatening their federal funding. Yes. Threatening or tax their endowments. There's another suggestion that's come up for a way of punishing universities. Now, the thing is, of course, you can't
00:33:43
Speaker
do that indiscriminately, or you can't do that discriminately, that would be across the board whether people were living up to their principles or not. And it may be hard to undo too. And it may be hard to undo. So I don't claim to have a good answer for what the most effective steps that the government could take
00:34:12
Speaker
to reverse the ideological capture of academia and to blunt its worst manifestations. But I think that has to be done. And I think it can only be done through with a stick, with a threat of punishment. So here's something like what I would answer if I was called into this meeting with Christopher Rufo, Secretary of Education.
00:34:43
Speaker
And that is, there's culture and there's policy, and one is the domain of the government, and I would argue the other is the domain of the market.
Enforcing University Policies
00:34:54
Speaker
So if universities are not following their own policies, if they're not following federal law, then they absolutely should be threatened with pulling their funding. You don't even have to write a new law to do that. And I would say, do not wait for the courts.
00:35:11
Speaker
One, the courts are slow. Two, even if you lose in court, you usually don't get punished, right? Even Department of Education Civil Rights Office, which isn't really a court, you get some slap on the wrist if you promise to do better, right? So some kind of coercive government action on enforcement of universities' own policies and federal law, which comes with a threat of funding.
00:35:39
Speaker
Now, and not waiting for the courts. The other problem with the courts is the plaintiff problem. And I won't go into specifics, but I have had shockingly candid conversations with top level university people who work on equity enforcement, where basically the line is,
00:36:02
Speaker
We know we're not going to get, you know, we can't do anything unless there's a plaintiff and it's like, you're never going to have a plaintiff in some of these cases, right? We, we created a position that's only for people of this demographic and you have to nominate candidates directly. We're not going to post it. Okay. So the person who's going to sue has to not know their, has to know they're eligible for a job that was never posted. They didn't know they were eligible for, and they have to be willing to wreck their career suing over it. And they might still lose as we saw recently, uh, at UC Santa Cruz.
00:36:31
Speaker
and Texas A&M, I believe, because they may not be able to prove they actually were eligible or able to apply for the job and therefore don't have standing to sue even if their rights were violated. So forget about the courts. Okay, but beyond that, beyond that, I would advise caution.
00:36:48
Speaker
for the academic freedom reasons, and also because I think I have more faith in markets than some people do, which is kind of ironic as a moderate to say that I have more faith in markets than conservatives do, but that's the world we live in. And basically, if you look at October 7th, sure, it started these congressional investigations and bad press.
00:37:14
Speaker
But the main thing it did that had teeth was it pissed off donors, it pissed off parents, it pissed off prospective students.
Market Forces in University Reform
00:37:23
Speaker
In some cases like Harvard, it'll be a blip on their financial bottom line. But in other cases like Emerson College, I think they announced recently that they're going to have to lay off faculty because they've had such a big hit to their enrollment over their response to the protest.
00:37:40
Speaker
So there's an administrator who's sitting in Emerson College somewhere and probably other colleges who was too cowardly to do anything when the anti-Semitism popped up and now feels like a big idiot for not seeing the even bigger stick waiting for them being held by the market.
00:37:57
Speaker
And you see other things in terms of prestige, right? People are starting to talk about the new IVs. That includes the University of Florida. People are starting to talk about how they don't want to hire students who come out of Harvard anymore. I think you're going to see the same thing with certain disciplines. And so is there not a large role for the market and free choice in sorting some of these things out? Like at some point, are university leaders not going to be scared of losing their students?
00:38:27
Speaker
and temper some of this stuff? I hope so, but I'm skeptical about the advocacy. Why? Not because I disagree with you about the problems with the court system. I do. I agree with you, with everything that you said there. But here's why I'm skeptical, because despite
00:38:51
Speaker
October 7th, despite all of the bad press that Harvard got, for instance, despite the donor revolt, they're not actually prosecuting people who violated their own principles and the law. There's a fairly clean cut distinction between the sort of protest that is
00:39:20
Speaker
that is protected by the First Amendment, ironically, despite the best efforts of some people at these very institutions to curtail it. And things that are not protected by the First Amendment, such as taking over campus buildings.
00:39:47
Speaker
Right. Violence. Right. Well, yeah. Violence, you know, always every word these days, you know, gets extended in such literal physical violence, literal physical violence, blocking people or the or the threat thereof, blocking Jews from access to campus on UCLA, taking over administration buildings.
00:40:15
Speaker
In order for me to believe that that's going to be effective, I will need to see the enforcement of the law and university policy against, in particular, students whose viewpoints reflect the viewpoints of the
00:40:45
Speaker
vast majority of the faculty, which is to say hard left. Well, first of all, let me state the following in case, lest any listeners be inclined to think otherwise, let me just state clearly and correct me if I'm mischaracterizing your view that
00:41:07
Speaker
That our view is that free speech absolutely applies, including of course to the Gaza protesters. And so they're welcome to say whatever hateful bile they want, you know, they're welcome to be as ignorant of the history as they want. But they are not welcome to.
00:41:23
Speaker
break the law or policies in ways that go beyond free speech. So they're not free to vandalize buildings. They're not free to block people from public spaces, certainly not block people from public spaces on the basis of their ancestry or perceived ancestry. They're not allowed to hold classes in occupied spaces that only certain students have access to, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we're talking about punishing that, not people who say things that you and I might object to.
00:41:52
Speaker
Correct. I've already declared my in principle commitment to academic freedom and freedom of speech, and I'm not going back on that. The thing about a genuine
00:42:14
Speaker
freedom of speech regime, as opposed to cancel culture more broadly, if you're really going to have a freedom of speech policy like that, analogous to that of the First Amendment, then it has to apply to every opinion, no matter how vile. Not to everything that can be done with words, of course, but to every opinion.
00:42:42
Speaker
So yes, I agree that we should treat anti-Zionist or even anti-Semitic speech that is just speech on campus the way we would treat pro-Clan speech on campus.
00:43:10
Speaker
that we wouldn't. I mean, that wouldn't happen. But even that level of protection falls short of disrupting speakers or blocking people who want to attend talks to attend them or to hear a speaker. So we see all of these extra legal actions being taken
00:43:40
Speaker
very widely across campuses in this country, and we see very little in the way of actual enforcement of policy. So let me kick out, but are they really punished at the kind of level that they would have to be in order to deter them from doing more of it? I don't think they are. Right. And in some places it's also the prosecutors, right? Like in New York. Yes.
00:44:11
Speaker
Okay. Let me, let me turn my critical gaze to a less comfortable place for heterodox faculty. Okay. And that is on them or, or on not just heterodox faculty. I would say that the large fraction, which maybe isn't a majority in some fields, but my experience has been it often is a majority of upper level administrative types and it is a majority.
00:44:40
Speaker
in most of the fields that are not kind of explicitly activists of what you might call, you know, small L liberal faculty, faculty that, you know, may have very left views, but do broadly believe in free speech, mostly believe in nondiscrimination, maybe with some qualifiers. And I'm not sure what they believe on institutional neutrality, but you know, maybe you're a convinceable on that. And certainly, you know, don't support some of the more extreme stuff that we've been talking about on campuses.
00:45:11
Speaker
My question is, why are those faculty still so afraid? Because my read of the evidence suggests they must be because they are not speaking out in much more of a noticeable way than they were in 2020. And yet, both the reputational consequences and the material consequences of speaking out
00:45:41
Speaker
in defense of these kind of smaller liberal principles against some of the extreme elements on campus. My perception is that those costs and those risks have fallen dramatically, right? And at least in three ways. So one is, cancel culture is definitely in recession and people are, for the most part, sticking to their policies more than they used to and not actually firing people for their beliefs.
00:46:06
Speaker
The popularity of these elements on campus has taken a nosedive, right? I think the pro Hamas rhetoric, the death to America stuff was I think the last straw and also kind of an emperor has no close moment for a lot of people. It's like, oh, actually, you tell people that the world was black and white, oppressed or oppressed, and you should like or hate people based on their mutable characteristics, turns people into
00:46:30
Speaker
you know, raging bigots, right? I feel like the public kind of gets that now in a way that they didn't a couple of years ago, and in a way that I think makes it safer in terms of your public reputation to speak up. You know, I got a bunch of emails from faculty in response to my Chronicle of Higher Ed piece from all over the country, many of them of the flavor of, you know, I wish I had the nerve to write that.
00:46:56
Speaker
And then some of the flavor of, you know, you would have gotten canceled if you written that in 2020. I actually agree with that, that second part. So, so my point is, is like, what are people still so afraid of? You know, like, like if you have, and I'm going to say this in hypothetical terms, cause I don't, I don't, I like talking about phenomenon, not about specific people, but like suppose for argument's sake,
00:47:22
Speaker
you had a Jewish president of a major university who was deeply personally offended by anti-Semitic rhetoric put forward by a department in his university. And you heard from a credible source that he was afraid to criticize that department too sharply. Like, my question is why?
Risks of Expressing Heterodox Views
00:47:42
Speaker
Do you have an answer? I think so. I think I do have an answer. By the way, your Chronicle piece was great, Matt. Thank you.
00:47:52
Speaker
I enjoyed it and I enjoyed that you did it and that you've done as much as you have. I'm not just doing this gratuitously to flatter you, but what makes you so unusual is that you don't seem to be worried about the social consequences from your colleagues.
00:48:21
Speaker
And I'm not and I are I guess my argument is that that that you're correct that I'm not worried. And I'll come back in a second to why I'm not worried. But I think the crux of my earlier question is, I claim that my not being worried is much more rational than people think. And that and I also claim that other people being worried in the context where capitulating to these extreme elements is materially damaging universities bottom lines and enrollments and reputations. I think I think
00:48:50
Speaker
they should be more worried about that. I guess what I'm saying is the rational amount of worry to me seems to be less worry about pissing off radical colleagues than people seem to be and more worried about pissing off everybody else in the public than people seem to be. What am I missing?
00:49:11
Speaker
You might not be missing anything except that rationality only goes so far and is only so effective when it's involved in forward thinking rather than sort of immediate, forward-looking larger consequences rather than immediate smaller ones. But, you know,
00:49:35
Speaker
It's just true that there are social consequences and maybe we differ on whether those things... I won't say they're as bad as they were four years ago when I came into this position and faced a huge campaign.
00:50:05
Speaker
against the against the center but It's it's still the case that people want to go along to get along I think conformism is a really deeply rooted is really deeply rumored rooted in human psychology and That's true. That's especially the case when the loudest people and the people who are willing to make things ugliest are
00:50:34
Speaker
also the most radical. So the incoming president, say, who is personally deeply offended by the actions or statements of some department, would they be rational in looking back at how other people in the administration, in previous administrations, expressed unpopular views were treated?
00:51:04
Speaker
Would they, I'm not sure they'd be irrational about doing it. Would they be, would they be criticizable for caring more about keeping their position and their prestige and their paycheck rather than speaking up for what's right? Perhaps they are criticizable for that. But I do think that for a president to take on, a university president to take on as deeply held
00:51:34
Speaker
and vociferously argued positions as the ones that we're talking about here would come at a great social cost that most people don't want to pay. Okay, I'm really glad you laid it out that way. So let me explain where I agree with your perception and where I disagree with it.
00:52:02
Speaker
Well so I agree with it in the sense that I think your portrayal of how people in these positions think about
00:52:11
Speaker
the decision is probably right. And I think if you kind of take an even bigger step back when you're talking about a university president or other kind of senior administrator, I'm sure a lot of them are just generally risk averse because there is kind of an asymmetric tail risk in being a university president. Like name me, like if I asked you to name university presidents that were known for doing something great,
00:52:34
Speaker
Personally, I could fit that list on one hand. Mitch Daniels being one, the University of Chicago president being another, Zimmer. I think the University of Wyoming's President Seidel is on his way to adding himself to that list. But there
00:52:55
Speaker
But if I asked you to name college presidents that have screwed up their reputations and careers by making a mistake, that's a really long list, right? And so they're just generally an asymmetric like, and plus when you're a president, you're kind of at the pinnacle of your career. It's not like you're gonna be promoted, right? Maybe you can be president of an even slightly bigger, more prestigious university, but in a way you have nowhere else up to go and only down to go.
00:53:24
Speaker
So that I think is kind of the rational part. But here's, okay, so let me explain how I think about these risks for myself and then where I think they translate more than people realize to other people kind of in the university system, including I would say some senior administrators. So number one, and this is less to do with rationality and more personality.
00:53:46
Speaker
I didn't go into academia to make money. I went into academia because I really, really believe in the mission.
00:53:59
Speaker
really, really believing in the mission of seeking and conveying to the public truths about society and discovery is so antithetical to bending your knee to some colleagues' ideology and sensitivities that I find the idea, anytime I feel myself doing that, I just feel so icky about myself for doing that.
00:54:24
Speaker
that that ickiness and the anticipation of that ickiness is often a stronger negative signal than the fear of somebody coming after me, which certainly exists and maybe was stronger in 2020 than it is now, et cetera, but exists. I understand that people, you invite some kind of social consequences sometimes. Okay, but the second part, and this is where I think
00:54:54
Speaker
and being completely rational and not just, you know, expressing my personal preferences about integrity to the truth. And that is pretty much all the so-called hot takes that I have reflect enormous majority public opinions and or very clear policies or laws, you know, being on side with them. Yeah. And so,
00:55:22
Speaker
My hypothesis, which I will say so far has been borne out, is that any enemies that I make by stating common sense, well-considered moral opinions that are consistent with federal law, any enemies that I make by doing that are probably enemies that I was gonna make anyway, and maybe enemies that are worth making, number one.
Public Trust and Academic Funding
00:55:47
Speaker
Number two, if you think of your career and the, you know,
00:55:53
Speaker
landscape of intellectuals in a broader view that includes academia, but also includes other things and includes new versions of academia that might one day exist. I think you basically have a huge audience and an untapped market for that, right? Jordan Peterson famously said that he monetized social justice warriors, right? He sells out basketball stadiums on his tour.
00:56:17
Speaker
I don't want to be a firebrand. I don't want to be a full-time culture warrior. But I do think, and your point earlier about Benson Center alums starting to be poached more and more by these new centers that are popping up around civic discourse, I kind of think this is an illustration of what I'm talking about. The public's appetite, relative to the public's appetite for it,
00:56:43
Speaker
you know, heterodox intellectuals willing to have integrity to the truth are undersupplied and over demanded, which means in basic economics, our prices higher opportunities high. And if you're willing to think a little bit outside the box, like maybe, you know, the department that you're in today,
00:57:02
Speaker
doesn't value that and you're making enemies or whatever. And I'm not saying I realized that I'm about to move universities. And so just to be clear, I'm not saying that that's necessarily the case. And for me specifically, but the point is that
00:57:17
Speaker
It does seem like it only opens doors, or it opens more doors than it closes, and it opens doors that you're more interested in going through anyway than the doors that it closes, number one. And the flip side of that, and this is what I think applies to these presidents,
00:57:33
Speaker
is I think the costs of losing the public's trust are way, way, way, way higher than anybody wants to admit. I think Emerson College is experiencing this extremely viscerally in the short term today, but I mean, you know, I sit right now in an institute, you know, whose huge, I think a majority of our funding comes from, you know, basically federal climate science funding, right?
00:58:04
Speaker
I study climate change polarization because I think it's interesting and important, but I would think that anybody in an institute like mine, of which there are many across the country, should also see that federal government doesn't trust academia, it doesn't trust climate science. That's an existential threat every four years, at least, right to your livelihood. What's your take on this? I think it depends. It's true of
00:58:35
Speaker
of people who are stuck being heterodox and unwilling to to dissimulate about them. And that's a group that I include myself in. It's true that for us, there are great costs in not speaking up. And although I don't think we've yet gotten to the point where
00:59:04
Speaker
If I spoke up as director of the Benson Center and was fired from that position, I still would have tenure in the philosophy department, but I came here because the Benson Center, I left Michigan for some political reasons and because I believed in the Benson Center's mission, I wouldn't be here.
00:59:33
Speaker
otherwise. I don't think that I could have a lot of a lot of confidence that one of these still just a handful of centers would scoop me up. And so and I don't think and and and I'm in a pretty good position. That is if I compare myself to some to a junior
01:00:02
Speaker
colleague, heterodox colleague who would have to go out in the market if they lost if they didn't get tenure or a an associate professor who if the climate the social climate got too hostile would have to find work somewhere you know academia we know that the that the job market is terrible for everybody it's not terrible at least at least outside of a few few disciplines for
01:00:30
Speaker
my discipline, the humanities generally, certainly, the job market is so bad for everyone that market forces are mitigated by a bunch of things. You may be right in the long run, but people have to
01:00:54
Speaker
feed their kids and they don't want to uproot their families and they have personal reasons for not wanting to have to move. The exit costs are high enough and the uncertainty that these positive developments, and I started off by saying I think that the new centers are a wholly positive development. They're still so young and there are so few of them that
01:01:26
Speaker
I'm not, it takes someone who is, who is unusually risk averse, unusually perhaps immune to social pressure. You mean risk loving? Yeah. You said risk averse. I think you mean risk loving.
01:01:45
Speaker
I said unusually risk averse. Yeah, that's exactly the opposite of what I meant. Thank you. You're right. No worries. It would take some unusually non-risk averse or a superstar. If you're a superstar, then maybe you can get hired if you fall out of
01:02:14
Speaker
favor. But there's still going to be pushback. And you're right, that is pushback from departments that might hire you. And we know that it doesn't take a majority of the department to be against you. If people are willing to be loud and ugly enough in hiring meetings, even one person
01:02:39
Speaker
can succeed in blackballing a candidate rather in a committee where people have different favorites and they have different motivations and things like that. So I think that there's a lot of, unfortunately, there's a lot of space that mitigates the market pressures you see from society at large, having the kind of implications for academia
01:03:11
Speaker
In the long run, you may well be right. In the medium run, you may well be right. One other thing that I'd say about Emerson and maybe Evergreen State, though I don't know that Evergreen State has really changed anything.
01:03:25
Speaker
But they did, I believe, have to lay people off. So that puts them in that category. But I think that for demographic reasons and for student debt reasons, for reasons that don't have anything to do with the topic of our conversation, things are going to get to be very, very difficult, especially on liberal arts colleges that don't have a large endowment and depend for their
01:03:51
Speaker
To keep the lights on on on tuition. I think a lot of those places are going to go bankrupt and we're going to go bankrupt regardless of the political situation, so it may happen faster if they make horrible stupid politically stupid decisions, but I'm just not sure how how broad that's going to be and
01:04:21
Speaker
and how quickly it's going to
Ideological Influence in K-12 Education
01:04:22
Speaker
happen. I think a lot's going to depend on some accidents, like whether or not some UFO-like figure ends up being in the Department of Education. Right before they abolish it. Well, that's the other thing, is that you abolish it. Yeah, that's right. That was the most point to see, probably the most point to abolish it.
01:04:50
Speaker
Yeah, that was an inside joke. Okay, so I want to move into one last quick topic before you run out of time, and that is K-12. I promised I would come back to K-12. And this is kind of a society-level version of my question about why aren't more faculty speaking up that relates to everyone in society, but especially parents. And so to set up this question, I want to put the following hypothetical to you.
01:05:18
Speaker
Suppose that it came out that the most widely cited textbooks in schools of education were written by literal Nazi sympathizers whose most famous ideas were directly tied to their Nazi sympathizing and who had tried to implement their Nazi sympathizing ideology in the education systems of developing countries to disastrous consequence.
01:05:43
Speaker
would America and especially the left not lose its SHIT and call for even more draconian reforms to schools of education and higher ed far more draconian than the right is calling for today?
01:06:01
Speaker
And of course, the reason why I asked that hypothetical is that if you replace Nazism with communism, which may be killed five times as many people, that is literally the case in today's schools of education. And, you know, with scholars like Paulo Freire, who praised Alan and Mao, who, you know, was the godfather of
01:06:20
Speaker
the praxis, you know, basically Marxist, you know, Marxist praxis. That was a disaster when he tried to implement it in Guinea-Bissau. And literally praises Mao in his most highly cited book and others. So yeah, what would happen? And then the question about parents is like, if I'm right that liberals would go nuts, if this was the case, if it was, you know, Nazi sympathizers, why aren't
01:06:50
Speaker
conservatives going more nuts than they are, and why aren't parents going more nuts than they are? Do they not understand this? Is this a function of the general asymmetry that communism
01:07:08
Speaker
by virtue of being harmful partly, if not more so, through being naive than being overtly malicious is kind of harder to oppose overtly than Nazism, which was maybe a lot more explicit in its malicious intent. Although, to be fair, I would say communism was actually pretty explicit in its malicious intent.
01:07:31
Speaker
Yeah, what's your take on that? Is that analogy apt? If so, what explains the complacency? If not, how is it not apt? I think your analogy is apt. I don't think I just think communism just as a matter of fact is not held in the same kind of disregard as Nazism, whether it should be or not. And I think a good case can be made that it should be, but it isn't.
01:08:00
Speaker
That's point one. Point two is most people are apolitical and they want to believe the best and still something happens that brings it home to them. And perhaps that's happening to more parents now, but perhaps not. Third, that the left has been extremely in the left's long march through the institutions to echo some of your
01:08:30
Speaker
some of what you've just been saying, they have been extremely good at marketing their ideas as being anodyne when in fact they're extremely radical. And they've convinced a lot of people that they are, that they're just well-intentioned, that it's just a matter of being nice to people, that they aren't in the business of
01:08:59
Speaker
of interfering with the relationship between parents and their children. And I think that to a large extent, they have been pulling a scam.
01:09:13
Speaker
Well, the intent to manipulate the parent-child relationship is actually explicit in these texts. Oh, yeah. No, I know, in the text. But I don't think people realize the degree. I don't think they're just not the kind of wonks that you are. They don't realize the degree to which CRT isn't just a matter of not being racist against Black people. It really does involve this kind of
01:09:43
Speaker
crazy decolonialization of everything and into fodder everywhere. And these just overtly racist claims about what it is to be white that are just incredibly, to my ears, just incredibly demeaning of all non-whites in particular. 100%. Okay. I'm going to have to go. You're out of time, but this has been fascinating. We can clearly talk for several more hours. Thanks a lot, Dan Jacobson.
01:10:10
Speaker
for both appearing on the podcast and for giving me the opportunity to host it. And I appreciate the opportunity and I look forward to seeing you all soon in some capacity or other. Well, thanks a lot to you, Matt, for doing the podcast, for all of your contributions to the Benson Center, but not just at Benson Center to see you. You will be missed.
01:10:34
Speaker
And congratulations and congratulations to you. You have my eternal admiration for your courage and outspokenness. Well, thank you very much. And we will, of course, keep in touch and remain lifelong friends. Great. Take care. The Free Mind podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder.
01:10:57
Speaker
You can email us feedback at freemind at colorado.edu or visit us online at colorado.edu slash center slash Benson. You can also find us on social media. Our Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts are all at Benson Center. Our Instagram is at TheBensonCenter and the Facebook is at Bruce D. Benson Center.