[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the 250th episode of the Atlas Society Ask. I'm Lawrence Olivo, senior Project Manager here at the Atlas Society, and I'm excited to have both Atlas Society Senior Fellow Rob Trinsky and Senior Scholar Stephen Hicks here today. Jennifer Grossman has the week off, but our two scholars are here today to discuss academic freedom and how the government uses funding to exert control. Rob? Stephen, thank you for being here today. And I think we're going to start with you today, Stephen, so let's dive right in.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Thanks.
So here we are in 2025, and in the midst of another political higher education, free for all street fight. We have a number of our strongest universities, Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, and many others, fighting for a certain amount of funding that comes almost automatically in recent decades from the government at a relatively new administration that is hostile to some of the uses to which that money has been put.
Donald Trump is our newest president, but he's also inheriting traditions and practices from earlier administrations, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and earlier. What we have is a collision of education and politics, and educational politics in particular. It's not just trench warfare. There are serious principles at stake. And one thing that I think is interesting about this cultural moment is seeing this contradiction of principles, and it's a contradiction of philosophical principles in a fairly deep fashion. So, by contrast, if we think about religion, this is the cultural front that's being fought over right now is the education space. But if we make an analogy to the religion space, and if we think about how we do religion in principle and in practice in, in this nation, the idea here has been that for religion to work, it has to be a do it yourself enterprise. You have to be free to explore, to think for yourself, to make up your own decisions about what the truth is, what it is to be a good person, and that absolutely, you need freedom in order to be able to do so. And that historically and as again, a matter of principle, governments have not got a good track record in making religion work the way it appropriately can be. The problem has been, historically, government putting its thumbs on the scale, or putting a fist in people's face, or even worse, using funding, using the other instruments of government in order to abolish certain religions, in order to compel certain allegiances to various other religions, and so forth. And that has damaged the political process properly conceived. It's also damaged the pursuit of religion properly conceived. And so wisely, at the beginning of this nation, the decision was, we need to separate these two separate spheres and it's so important. That's not only in the Bill of Rights, it's in the very First Amendment to the Bill of Rights, and it's in the First Clause. Clause to the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights. Absolute separation of church and state. Now, if we can grasp that principle, how both healthy politics and healthy religion should be separated from each other, it's not a big leap to say it's not merely an analogy, and it's just a generalization on exactly that same principle. What makes education work? Well, it can't be something that is at the point of a gun or politically enforced, or depending on who is paying the paycheck this particular month. Education is a matter of learning that requires that the student be able to think for himself, think for herself, explore various options, decide what's true, what's important, what it is to be a good person and internalize all of that, hopefully with the guidance of professors who are committed to that process. The issues are complicated. The professors are going to disagree with each other. Professors are not only teachers, they are also, hopefully themselves, researchers and investigators. And a bigger part of what goes on inside education institutions is those professors need to be free to think, explore, debate, argue. And again, that cannot depend on political influence, political coercion as well. So for the exact same reasons that education, sorry, that religion and government should be separated, or religion and politics should be separated, church and state education institutions need to be separated from the political process. So what we have then is a collision. Education fundamentally should be a free enterprise, but government is an institution of coercion at a very high level of principle. Freedom and coercion are going to conflict with each other, and that's a big part of where we are right now. So on the side of the universities, in this case, the high ideals that they subscribe to imperfectly is that we are pursuing important values, knowledge value, moral, proper society, all of the big issues. And we're pursuing research and the transmission of what we've discovered to the next generation. That requires self governance, it requires a certain measure of academic freedom. And we have a general conception of liberal education that we subsigned onto a couple of hundred years ago, and by and large has worked to make some of our universities the greatest universities that have ever existed. On the other side of the divide, we also do have high principles. We do have doctrines of individual rights, constitutional protections, and so on. And we're going to do a significant amount of that democratically, not just generically power to the people, but through voting mechanisms and elected Representatives and so forth. And along the way, we might not agree with the arguments that led to this, but the decision was made that education is a political responsibility. We're going to create politically funded, politically oversighted state educational institutions, and we're also going to make certain amount of governance and funding available to private institutions as well. Now, if we make that principle, and there are high principle arguments that can be made for that, that we're going to, in a democratic context, make education a political responsibility, then part of that principle is a commitment to government oversight, government management of those educational institutions. And you have to sign on to that at some level. You can't say the government can just fund, but fund irresponsibly. The government has a responsibility, a deep responsibility to the people to oversee and make sure that the funds are being spent upon proper educational purposes. And as part of that high principle, we've decided that what counts as proper educational purposes is going to be decided politically to some extent. And the challenge is that we have those two sets of principles coming into collision with each other, because there is a deep contradiction between the two of them. Now, in the case of most of the Ivy Leagues and many of the institutions that are on the block or in the crosshairs, metaphorically speaking, at this point here, some of them are private institutions. And that adds a lovely level of complexity here. But the fact, fact is, and this is part of the political inheritance, that the private institutions, almost without exception, there are some, Some exceptions in the United States have agreed with that characterization that government does have a democratic educational responsibility. And they've accepted the governments, and they've accepted, actually lobbied intensively for significant amounts of government funding, even though they are private institutions. And then what has happened then is an uneasy trying to work out that middle ground of high principles that are in tension with each other and negotiating along the way. Sometimes the high institutions of higher education have had no problem with saying, yes, we're taking the government's money, but we're going to ignore government decisions whenever we disagree with them. And this is, I think, a legitimate part of the current outrage against these institutions of higher learning, who are now pretending in bad faith to a significant extent to be offended that there should be such government oversight. For example, for example, part of the government is the judicial branch, and the Supreme Court has fairly consistently over the last two generations said racism has no place in higher education. That has implicit implications for affirmative action programs. Stop racially discriminating against certain groups. Stop racially discriminating in favor of certain groups that's all been hedged around by various legal niceties and so forth, but fairly consistently. Higher education has thumbed its nose at the Supreme Court government decisions in these cases and just repackaged or introduced some variation because it's consistent, committed to, by and large, seeing racial discrimination as noble and proper in certain cases. So in that case, we'll say, yeah, we'll take your money, but we're going to ignore your decisions. And that's a bad faith response. At the same time, it's fairly regularly gone along with government mandates if it agrees in general with those mandates with respect to, say, Title 9 and Sexism in higher education.
There have been branches of the government that have gone along with affirmative action programs, not the Supreme Court fairly consistently, but gone along with those kinds of racialisms as well.
The draft two generations ago, draft exemptions for higher education and so on. Now we have an administration that is on the other side ideologically of what the mainstream is in much of higher education.
It is, according to its lights, consistently opposed to racism, particularly racism as it comes out in DEI form in. In higher education.
It is consistently against the. The fact that higher education institutions have allowed violence on its campuses, frequently that those institutions have set aside due process with respect to its students and its faculty when convenient or when it fits the ideological mode. And now we have then an unfriendly government in place that's calling them on that and then using the weight of government to do so. So we can then say a certain amount of this is of course, you know, motivated not by government high principle, but by revenge. Right? You guys on the other side of the political fence, then, you know, having the government on your side and compliant higher education institutions, and you've beaten up on people on our side of the ideological fence. Now it's our chance to turn the tables a little bit. But there is always that revenge element in politics. There also are those high principles in place. If we think that racism has no place politically and the job of the government is to enforce that, then it does have a legitimate lever rather with respect to higher education. And higher education has a very mixed to negative track record with respect to those racial issues and various others as well. Now, what I also want to say is I'm going to get to my conclusion in just a minute that I do have an overall sympathy with the position of higher education in this place. But at the same time, I do want to say that they deserve a significant amount of blame for causing these problems here. Part of it is bad faith. They have Been trying to play a double game. They do say we are in favor of academic freedom, self governance and so forth. But they have been consistently in the past generation or so not willing to respect academic freedom, freedom and due process and so forth internally when ideologically convenient for it. As well, there is a significant amount of legitimate analogy to welfare dependency.
We do know that if you take money from another institution that you become dependent upon that in your budgeting, you don't exert as much effort to remain financially independent. So now these institutions of higher education have thought that they could manage the government enough in order to still get the billions of dollars. And now they're finding themselves in a case where they've become dependent if they are charging independence and self governance, but nonetheless still having their hand out for the paycheck. There is a bad faith tension at work there. It's a little bit like, you know, the teenager, 18, 19 years old who's insisting that he's all grown up, he's an adult, he's self government, he's independent, he should still be making all of his decisions, but is still, you know, kind of living at home. Mom is still doing his laundry, dad is still paying his car insurance payments as well. There is a tension in there. If you are going to be serious about self governance and academic freedom, you have to get outside of that kind of bad faith teenager developmental process, really be independent and so forth.
Also, I think there's a certain amount of strategizing that has gone along here that higher education education institutions have said, okay, half the time the regime's government is going to be friendly to us. Half the time it's not going to be. When the regime is friendly to us, we, we can take all of the money and we can just comply and go along with the, with the regulations because we think they're going to be on our side anyway. But then when the regime is unfriendly to us, we can say, oh, high principle, self governance, academic freedom, you should not have any oversight with respect to us, but still give us the money and think that that didn't play that game. And that is a, it's a kind of a bad faith strategy game to play there. We know to the extent that you're playing that game, your adoption of high principle, announcing of high principle is more about PR than genuine commitment. Now my view is there are high principles at stake. I do think that if we are going to have a democratic republic, that to the extent that we have agreed the government is going to spend money on institutions like higher education, and that it is going to enforce rules with respect to sexism, racism and so forth. We can have debates about all of those things, but that it is properly the function then of government to oversee institutions that are in partnership with us on those issues. So I don't think in the short term we can just say there should be a clean separation.
At the same time, I do want to say that as a philosopher, as people are thinking about the longer game, recognizing the situation that we are in, that it is a collision of principles that we should have to identify in that contradiction if we want genuine education freedom, genuine education self governance and so on, that this is a, this is an effective teaching moment to teach that those two are in fact, in principle with, in contract, sorry, in conflict with each other, and try to manage the current debac in the direction of highlighting awareness of that. But then, of course, we have to make a second best principle in the shorter term. Either in this case, when there's a collision here, we have to say we're more in favor of the higher education institutions retaining some measure of independence and self government and resisting the further incursion of government oversight, or we have to decide to say that in this case we are going to go along with government oversight and let it have more control over what's going on inside the academic institutions, using its normal powers and so forth. In this case, where we have to make a cruel choice in this second best situation, I think the greater danger is more government power. All of history, in all of areas, the domains, religion, the economy, art, science and so forth, shows that going further down the road of increasing government power always is more damaging in the long run. So I would say in this case here that I would side with rhetorically in terms of political public relations and in terms of making the arguments for academic freedom, independence and resisting another ratcheting up of the level of government oversight on the side of the institutions of higher education in this place, in this time, and then working with those institutions, institutions to make them realize that they really need to be more sincere, more principled, more consistent in living up to their announced high deals of academic freedom, independent government and finding a way to work with them to get themselves weaned off of the government teat, so to speak, and become fully grown up, autonomous educational institutions. I'll pause there.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: Okay, thanks, Stephen.
[00:18:33] Speaker C: Rob all right, so I wanted to something, something, something that somebody mentioned in the comments here with somebody talking about the. The American education models based on a German model, where it's all about obedience. And actually that, that's way more true of the lower levels of education, of, of high schools and high school education. And below that it was influenced by the German model where you know, it's like, oh, people described as like a factory model where you, you go in and to have ideas installed into your head which you will repeat back sort of unthinkingly. And that very obedience and authority based German model much more so for lower levels of education than for higher education. And also Stephen mentioned the role of government. Again, government is much more dominant, much more controlling on the lower level levels of education, you know, from kindergarten through high school than it is in the universities. And by an astounding coincidence are the, the schools that are most controlled by the government most on this obedience model, the, the high schools and below America's schools generally do, do pretty badly compared to schools in the rest of the world. But on the college level, at the university level, where the government's been traditionally much less involved, much less dominant and where there's much less of a, of a, that German authority based model, our universities are the envy of the world. So there's a, almost like collaboration there that the more it's about obedience and about government dictating everything, the worse it gets education gets and the more it's about academic freedom and free inquiry, the better our education gets. And that's, you know, why I just saw something that in, in the context of this whole tariff war, somebody's saying one of America's biggest exports in the world is one of our biggest exports to the rest of the world is higher education. That, you know, somebody calculated how much money other people from other countries spend to send their kids to American colleges. And it's more than they spend on a bunch of other things. We exports more than they spend on corn, it's more than they spend on I think natural, maybe I don't think it's natural gas, but there's a whole list of commodities they gave that you know, are less, are smaller exports than higher education. So the, the point is to say that our higher education system is, was actually quite good. However, so I want to get concrete about what's going on with the current controversy. So I want to talk about what's the reason the Trump administration is using as an excuse to say we can dictate terms to higher education. And what they're using is anti Semitism and this is why they're targeting Columbia. They targeted Colombia first because Colombia was this sort of epicenter for protests against Israel and some of those protests included some really, you know, unambiguously bad stuff, like people cheering for the October 7 attacks on Israel, people coming out openly in favor of Hamas. Yes, this has been happening at some of these protests. And so, and, and some of them, and a lot of those protests came out. You know, there's a difference here. But there are protests that were complaints against Israel's tactics and strategy in the war in Gaza, which it's legitimate to complain about that I complain about aspects of it.
At the same time, there were also some people who were basically promoting outright antisemitism that all Jews are to blame. And they were, you know, targeting or threatening Jews that were on campus. And there were some scandals there where it seemed like the universities were not doing enough or saying enough to, to protect the Jewish students on campus from, from racial animus or religious animus that was coming from the, the situation in Gaza. So this is the excuse, and they're doing this under the rubric of we want to make sure that, you know, we're, we're protecting against anti Semitism on campus. But I call it an excuse because it really is an excuse. The demands they're making are way, way, way broader, have nothing to do with anti Semitism. Now, I'll also put off to the side that, you know, there have been a couple of cases and I've, I've, I can give you links for this, but there's, I've been a couple of cases of the administrative, the Trump administration itself hiring people who are outright anti Semite. So you, you know, there's, there's a little hypocrisy there too. This is the excuse they're using because there's a long standing conservative feud that the, the university is lean left, they're full of leftists, they're full of people who vote Democrat, and therefore we want to clamp down and we want to oppose and force them to be more accepting to people of our ideology. And so that brings us to the second big concrete fact I want to introduce into this, which is this is the letter that the Trump administration sent to Harvard. And the, the key passage that I pulled out from it is this, I'm just going to read it to you. This is the demand that the, the, that the President of the United States is making against Harvard. And he's saying, By August 2025, the university shall commission an external party which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith to audit the student body, faculty, staff and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each Department, field or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.
Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity. Every teaching unit found to like viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity. Now a critic demanding, you know, we're going to, so let me break down the elements of that. They say we're going to appoint, you have to appoint somebody that's acceptable to us, acceptable to the government. So essentially somebody who is representing the government's viewpoint and representing its power, who is then going to tell you who you have to hire and what students you have to bit. And, and we're going to do that in order to, to force you not just to have a few token people here and there, but you have to hire a critical mass and they have to have viewpoint diversity. Now I want, it's basically an attempt to assert control over hiring in order to say what ideology of people you have to hire to, to come into the university and what ideology of students you have to admit. And it's a way, you know, given the context here, is that, you know, the student, the universities tend to lean very far left and so do the university students tend to lean very far left. This is basically affirmative action for conservatives. It's saying you have to hire more conservative professors, you have to hire more or admit more conservative students to the elite universities. So this is, you can tell that there's kind of a handout aspect here of like, you know, we feel that we conservatives have been shut out of the elite institutions. So we want you to appoint somebody who will require you to hire more of us and to admit more of us, more people who agree with us. So this is a very overt ideological control of the institution.
And I would mention briefly just this idea of viewpoint diversity because it's very slippery notion because, you know, does this mean that the Harvard does not, I look this up. Harvard does not have a geography department. They do have a Harvard center for Geographic Analysis. But my point is if you have viewpoint diversity, does that mean their Geography center has to hire flat earthers? Now that's diversity of opinions. Does it mean that your medical, Harvard Medical School has to hire anti vaccine people? That would be viewpoint diversity. Right? So it's clear that they don't actually mean it on all that. What they mean it is they're really concerned about in the humanities, in economics, in political science, in English and philosophy, etc, you have to hire people who are conservative in their ideology.
And by the way, that's the last fact I want to factual basis of this, I want to, I want to bring in this for the, for the context on this is that the interesting thing is that the, the funding, they are largely the funding they're threatening to cut off. The federal government funding they're threatening to cut off is not going to gender studies. The federal government has, you know, there's the National Endowment for the Humanities. They have some things they give out in the humanities departments. There's not a lot of actual federal dollars going to fund, you know, a class on 57 genders. That's not where the federal money is going into the universities. It's going into science funding. So that's what's really hitting the universities is it's. The federal government is a major funder of scientific research, medical research, things like that. And that's what they're largely what they're threatening to cut off in order to. So they're sort of going after the sciences in order to get at the humanities because they're clearly, you know, they're not that interested in crippling scientific research at these places, but they know that that's the leverage they have. And if we cut off this funding, then we can get you to make concessions about hiring more, you know, conservative nationalists, philosophers or political scientists or whatever. Maybe you have a special chair to Curtis Yarvin or something like that. All right, so I want to back up a little bit though, on the history of how we got here, which is this is really going back to the beginnings of modern sort of 20th century liberalism.
You're going back to 100 years, a little over 100 years. There was this massive expansion of the state and of government power on the idea that, oh, we need to be regulating the economy, we need to have more government funding for all these good, good or supposedly good causes.
And at the same time, though, the old, the, the sort of 20th century liberals, they were liberals, they called themselves liberals, they said we're for freedom. So we're going to have the government have all this extra power and money going out there. But we're, we're not going to threaten freedom of speech. We're going to, we're going to have that extra government power without having it be dictatorial or oppressive. And that's the real sort of like century, century and a half long dilemma that we're always dealing with here, which is how do you have government get so big and powerful and have so much money going out without Having it, having government control everything without having government be a dictatorship. And there's always been that danger. So they, for example, one of the things they did, so they create the fcc, which has this ability to. To. To controls broadcasting. And they actually license radio and television broadcasters. And they have a condition. They're saying that we have to decide that your license is in the public interest. Now, that's something that is dictatorial in its potential. If ever there was something saying you have a government official who is empowered to say whether your ability to broadcast ideas is in the public interest, and they can cut that off. And that's actually becoming an issue now, the way they came up with that as well. Okay, we're going to have that be. We're going to. The Federal Communications Commission has this power, but we're going to have a bipartisan board that's independent of the president, so the president can't give them orders. And, you know, it's going to have it by law that has to have a certain number of Democrats and a certain number of Republicans by law or custom.
And so it's going to have that independence that insulates it from somebody trying to abuse that political power. And that hasn't always worked out. It hasn't always been that insulated. But in theory, that's the way they've tried to do it. So we have this immense government power, is this immense potential for abuse of that government power to take away freedom of speech. But at the same time, we have institutions and, and customs that are meant, and laws that are meant to limit that power and make sure it doesn't become oppressive. And it's a highly imperfect system. And what we're seeing is sort of that the chickens are coming home to roost on that, that those attempts are. Are failing. So one example, a lot of this intensified in the middle of the 20th century. So I did a little looking up on this. In 1958, they passed the law that created the Kennedy center, which is the sort of cultural center, Kennedy center for the performing arts in D.C. cultural center. That's going to be a center of culture where the government is providing funding for, for artists and for plays and for operas, etc.
And in 1965, they created the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities.
In I think it's 67 they created the 67. And 70, I think it was 67 was the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In 70 was National Public Radio. So you see, there's all these things they were doing to say, let's get government into the business of funding the arts and funding culture. And it created this dilemma and it really did it. In the 50s and 60s. They really got heavily into that and they created this dilemma of how do we do that without having a government orthodoxy then that is then being funded. And so a couple things they did. So I came across this when there was this. Trump has put in a, an executive order mandating classical architecture as the official style for all federal architecture. And what he was doing there is he was actually overriding something called the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture. It was written in 1962 by.
Well, Daniel Patrick Moynihan is a name I would know. He was a senator for a long time. He was a major sort of one of these classical kind of 20th century liberals, you know, big government. But we're going to have respect for freedom of speech and, and an intellectual freedom.
He's unknown. Young people today won't know him. But he was a major figure in the late 20th century.
And he wrote this as an aid to President Kennedy in 1962. He wrote these, these guidelines for architecture. And they were getting concerned. The government's building all these buildings. We don't want to be dictating an architectural style. So he wrote, and this is what the guidelines say, quote, the development of an official style must be avoided. Design must flow from the architectural profession to the government and not vice versa.
And that sort of. It was the prince of the guiding principle behind a lot of this. The government's going to come in and spend a lot of money, but the idea, the ideas about architecture and about everything else should be coming up from spontaneously, from the people not being dictated by the government.
Now, you see the problem with this, though, because when the government goes in to say, well, who should we fund? Who should we give money to? Who's. Who has interesting new ideas and who is a crackpot. Well, they're going to go to people who are established figures, people with reputations, and those established figures are going to obviously recommend that they give funding and money to, to people who share the ideas of the established figures. And that's the problem that you're creating. So one last thing I'm going to give out here is Ayn Rand actually wrote about this back in an article, I think, from 1971 called the Establishment of an establishment. Now, the term the establishment, you know, you used to go this, the establishment man, this sort of hippie thing. But the original term, reversion, use of the word establishment, was actually referring to religious establishment, an established religion. And that was A situation specifically where the government would tax you in order to provide funding to an official church. And that's what it, that's what the establishment was in its original term. And so this is sort of reverberating through the centuries to okay, now we don't have a religious establishment, we don't have an official church, but now we have government providing support for universities, for, for people to write novels, for people to create art. Universities providing or government providing support for the secular equivalent of religion, you know, of the, the realm of art and ideas.
And so Ayn Rand was addressing that, the idea that all these new things we were doing to fund the arts were establishing an establishment. And I think she summed up early prescient. She summed up the dilemma we're facing today. She was responding in this article to a congressman by the name of Gallagher who was complaining about a grant had been given to B.F. skinner, who a behaviorist psychologist. His ideas are not well accepted today, but he was, it was a very left wing kind of ideas. And it turns out he gotten grants for his theories of psychology from the government, substantial grant from the government.
And this guy Gallagher was, was calling attention to that and saying this is a problem.
So here's her response to him. Said Mr. Gallagher stated he believes that in Dr. Skinner's right to advocate his ideas that she's quoting from him, quote, but I qu. What I question is whether he should be subsidized by the federal government, especially since in my judgment he is advancing ideas which threaten the future of our system of government by denigrating the American traditions of individualism, human dignity and self reliance.
And she agrees with that. She says, however, he should have stopped there because then she's. Gallagher goes on to say that he's going to propose, quote, a select committee on Privacy, Human values and democratic institutions designed to deal specifically with the type of threats to our Constitution, our Congress and our constituents, which are contained in the thoughts of B.F. skinner. To get this, he's forming a special government committee to investigate the ideas of a guy he doesn't like. All right, so this is, this is the problem. And so Ayn Rand concludes nothing could be as dangerous a threat to our institutions as a proposal to establish a government committee to deal with anti democratic thoughts or B.F. skinner's thoughts, or anyone's thoughts. And that's kind of where I, you know, following Ayn Rand's lead there, that's where I fall down too, that I think we're in this trap of our own creation going back to the idea we wanted to expand government, have it fund ideas and art and have this great Society because a lot of that came out of the Great Society movement.
And we want to have that money. We also want to have intellectual freedom. And now we have, you know, that money sometimes went to support really truly legitimately bad ideas. And now we have somebody coming in saying, well, I'm going to stop that by committing by, by, by exerting control to make sure they support ideas I like instead of the ideas of the other guy. And that's taking a bad situation and making it worse. And that's my conclusion.
[00:36:40] Speaker A: Perfect. Thanks Rob. Stephen, do you want to follow up on that or.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: I'm in broad agreement with, with Rob's analysis and I think we reached the same conclusion, but I think there's a, a steel man version of the Trump approach, or more broadly an anti current regime in higher education approach that we need to highlight that is not primarily an issue of. We need to make space for flat earthers and Christian nationalists of various extreme sorts and so on. So I think one argument, and I think this is the one that has the most cultural appeal, doesn't start with politics. It starts with education.
That if we ask ourselves what is a genuine education, most people, whatever their politics are, whatever their education is going to say, well, it requires people learning lots of facts about the world, learning how to think about or for themselves, how to become self governing citizens. And we know that there are lots of controversial issues and things that are very complicated and even the experts disagree with us.
So if I were designing an ideal school or an ideal university, what would it look like? And then I say something like, well, it would include all of these complicated issues about which there's lots and lots of disagreement. And I would make sure that my teachers and my professors are representative of all of the major views on all of the controversial issues that are, are out there. So you know, just take my field of philosophy for a minute and we would hire, you know, Nietzscheans and Kantians and Aristotelians and Objectivists, right. And so forth. We would genuinely have ideological diversity in the education space. There's something definitely wrong that's just at the level of education analysis, with one sided reading lists, biased professors and teachers who are indoctrinating rather than educating according to that model. Now if you take that just initially not at all politicized as an understanding of what real education should look like, that's what we should be striving for, then you look at the actual practice of education and you see, in just focusing ourselves on higher education institutions, for now that's not happening. It seems like significantly we are getting one sided reading lists, we have ideologically imbalanced faculty. There are lots and lots of controversial issues that are not being addressed or they are presented as settled and done and so forth and teachers and students are not being taught to think for themselves, they are afraid, etc. Etc. So we have a concept of what education should look like. We look at the actual education instit institutions and we see that that's not happening. That's a problem that needs to be fixed. Now the question then is how are we going to fix it? And then the answer seems to be, well, it doesn't seem like, so to speak, the internal marketplace of education has solved the problem. And by the way, and this is the important thing, we have signed on for a century or more to the idea that there should be government oversight, government support, support government management of the education space. Now that then comes in as the second stage of the, of the analysis, trying to come up with a solution given two previous failures, the failure of getting this genuine education going on and the failure of this internal marketplace of ideas. So it seems like then a second best solution from this position is to say, well, let's have the government step in and manage and put some pressure on and use it in order to get education to be where it should be. And it strikes me that's a more steel man version of the argument. Now that might then say that we do have to ask the question, well, does this mean that we should have flat earthers? Right. And that's going to be a question that we're going to be, we're going to be considered, but probably not. Does it really mean that we're going to have, you know, creationists all over the place and so. Well, probably not. And then part of it then is just going to be, say we're striving for ideological diversity, so we're going to insist that you have it and you are going to have to answer all of those questions and draw the line someplace. But it's not going to be drawn where you're drawing it right now. And we're going to make sure that that happens. And it strikes me that that is a big part of the internal to the administration support for the proposals here as well as in the broader population. Population as well. Now it's also true that all political movements and all government actions in particular are coalitions of various sorts. So there are genuinely people who are committed to genuine intellectual diversity and who think, well, okay, we have to use the government to achieve genuine intellectual diversity, but they're still committed to genuine intellectual diversity and they are now in bed with people who. I don't really actually care about intellectual intellectual diversity. I just want to make my views, which are currently fringe views, have a seat at the table. And I'm willing to use political, or join a political coalition in order to increase my chances of getting. So. So I think that is what we're having to face about it. And our retention is going to be better directed not to. Well, we have to worry about the flat earthers and the extreme Christian nationalists and so forth. We have to point our attention to this issue of the, the proper limits of government authority in the education space. That's where the rubber needs to meet the road.
[00:42:24] Speaker C: Yeah. So I want to add something to that, which is that one thing I'm aware about. So, yeah, I agree. This, this idea of intellectual, now intellectual viewpoint diversity is kind of a weird, slippery, vague notion. But the idea that you should be taking all major, you know, ideas seriously, all you, you obviously have to cut the line of what's a respectable idea versus what's, what's a fringe crackpot thing. Those judgment calls always have to be made. But you're right, you, where they're being made right now is generally anything that I don't like.
The old rule is free speech for me and not, but not for thee is, is very much applies on and, and it applies equally to both sides. Right. But what I want to talk about that when you said there's also the, the Christian nationalist. So a major influence on the Trump administration is this nationalist viewpoint. And so a couple years ago, I, I, a year or two ago, I, I reviewed a book by Patrick Deneen, who's a political scientist at Notre Dame, I think, who's one of these Catholic intellectuals who once, who, who's against, basically against separation of church and state. And very much this sort of a leader of the, the nationalist conservative movement and his whole program in. He wrote a book called Regime Change, and his whole program is we have to change the fundamental regime, the basic nature of our government. And the way we do that is we get rid of the existing elite, we kick out the existing elite and create a new elite, a new nationalist elite. And I think that is one of the major influences behind this is the idea that, you know, let's go to Harvard and let's say they have to hire new people and who will they hire? Well, they'll Hire Patrick Deneen or Patrick Deneen's friends or people who are acceptable to that, to that end side of things. So this is, there is an element there of a power grab by a specific group of people with a specific ideology. But I want to back up and talk about this idea of yes, the, the, there has been an establishment and a somewhat closed minded establishment, especially when it comes to politics, but also when it comes to philosophy and things like that that they have, you know, they, they tend to be narrow and shut out ideas that are, are foreign to them. Now I think partly that's always been the case. Right. So if you were an atheist 100, 150 years ago, you would have had a much harder time getting a hearing or getting on faculty or staff at a university even probably 70 or 80 years ago than you will today.
Because you know that's the intellectual fashions have changed in, in that way.
But I think the question is how do you counter that? And I think the, the part of the context here is there was a push. I remember when I first you know, sort of and get went into office universities in the late 80s, early 90s there was this whole discussion about we didn't call it wokeness then we called it political correctness. And Alan Bloom wrote a book called the Closing the American Mind and he was talking about this, this problem.
And so there was this concerted attempt by conservative intellectuals to say no, we need to have a greater presence in the universities. We need to bring back studying the great books and have this wider diversity of ideas. And that process, that program largely failed. And I think there's a number of reasons that failed. One of the reasons I think is internal to conservatism, that all they really had to offer was religion as a basis for their viewpoint. But I think what they're really doing is they're reacting to the failure of their own effort to stand up an ideological, philosophical and educational alternative to, to the left. And you could say partly because oh, they were, they were shut out be the establishment. But also I think it has partly to do with the failure of the conservatives own efforts to create something that would be a, a, a, a, an appealing and strong and intellectually powerful alternative. So having failed to do that then I was saying well look, you know, this is the Patrick Deneen answer answer say well look, we failed to do that. So let's just seize power, let's get political power and let's use that to impose our ideas and make sure that our people get hired and our people get admitted to the elite universities, etc. And I think the Prop 1 part of the. Among the many problems with that is that, you know, aside from the fact that coercion is this blunt instrument, the basic main concern I have is the precedent it sets. Because like a lot of the things the Trump administration is doing right now is they're doing this sort of raw assertion of power.
Like Trump, for example, fired everybody on the board of the Kennedy center and put all his own people on there. It used to be this sort of bipartisan, nonpartisan thing. Put all his own people on there. We're going to take the Kennedy center, this national center of culture, put our people in control and make sure they're setting the rules. The reason nobody's ever done that before is not because they didn't have the guts. It was because they were concerned about, well, what happens in the next election, what happens when the other side gets back into power and they kick all of our people out and put their own people in on all these things and they control everything. And so we've had the tradition of things are nonpartisan or bipartisan so that no one side gets completely shut out at any one time. And so I like to say that, you know, our, our system, the Constitution doesn't work on the honor system, it works on mutually assured destruction, that you don't seize absolutely every bit as much power as you possibly can because you're afraid of what will happen, you know, the next election when the other party gets in power. What if they did the same to you? So we all sort of restrain ourselves because we know that, you know, you have to be able to survive through the. The public changing its mind and voting for the other party. And a lot of what the Trump administration is doing right now is saying, tack with that, throw out all limits, seize as much power as you could possibly take on the assumption that we'll never lose the other election, power will never switch back. That is a, either they're going to, you know, either to make that work, you either have to plan to have an actual literal dictatorship where there are no elections, or you're really creating a precedent where, you know, unrealistically speaking, you are going to lose elections. Another somebody else is going to get into the presidency, and you have to look at what are the precedents that you are creating. And if the precedent you're creating is the government can come in and dictate what id, who's hired and who's admitted and, and what ideas are allowed and not allowed in the universities, that's a very dangerous precedent to set if it's ever going to be in the hands of, you know, President Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, or I'm sure we can find somebody much worse than her. You know, Bernie's, Bernie's, Bernie Sanders is too old now.
But you know what if somebody like that got into power and decided, I'm going to use this, thank you, Donald Trump, for giving me this vast power over the universities.
And now I'm going to use it to impose what I think are the right ideas. And in a way, I just conclude, I think you could say that what's happening right now is the Dem, you know, that, that for a long time, you know, the left or the Democrats were in a position of not necessarily total power, but a certain predominance of power, a certain dominance in a lot of those institutions. And they used it to promote their, their ends. And they have expanded government and its power and its say over everything over so many decades. And in a way, they're getting that lesson that, look, you know that you can get all this power that you want to use to promote your own viewpoints, as do all the good things you want, but that could get into the power of somebody who represents the exact opposite of, of what you stand for and what you want to promote, who will then say, thank you for accumulating all this power. I'm now going to use it against you. And I think, you know, Republicans should be very concerned the Democrats will do the same thing back to them next time the wheel turns around. And, and I think that's the dangerous precedent that's being set here.
[00:50:17] Speaker A: All right, we have about eight minutes left. So with the time that we have left, why don't we get to a few of these questions that came in just as they're relevant to the conversation. I saw we were talking about free speech on campuses earlier, and there's a question from lock, stock and barrel, who asks, or who says public universities are bound to protect First Amendment due to accepting government money, but private institutions don't necessarily need to follow that mandate? Do you think a separation of education from state would give more free speech on universities or less? Or is that too ambiguous, I'm assuming?
[00:50:59] Speaker C: Well, okay, by definition, government being separated is a protection for free speech. You know, the free speech in the political sense is government not dictating things or supporting things. You know, not. Not putting a stub on the scale one way or the other. It can't ban anything, it can't promote anything but what he's saying by, by freedom of speech. We have this sort of cultural conception of freedom of speech, of people being free to say what they want and, and having a latitude to speak even within private institutions. And I agree that in a way, I mean, so for example, somebody mentioned in the, in the comments school choice and in a way school choice. You know, from my experience, most private schools, I, I have kids who've just coming up through private school. Most private schools are either very far religious schools because, you know, private schools attract the people who are outside of the mainstream who want something that's different, different from the public schools. So it's usually people who are way far out to the right or who are very religious. So they're religious schools or they're the hippies. They're the far left people. You know, they go to the Waldorf School or, or the Quaker schools that are tend to go very left.
And so, you know, in a way, if you had more vouchers for this is a high school level, more vouchers for private schools, you would actually be get less viewpoint diversity because it would probably be going more to universe to schools that are either ideologically, you know, religious or ideologically on the left.
Ones that are in between are actually not as many as I would like to from as from the perspective of a parent.
So that is an issue that you could actually end up having, you know, because at least the public schools have a sense that we can't go too far one way or the other or we'll get in trouble. They feel the need to have that, that balance. But I do think it's going to be better to.
Once you actually created more private action on this, there would be a marker for people say, look, I just want people like me who just, I just want my kids to get the three Rs. I want them to get a good education. I don't want them to be indoctrinated one way or the other. I think that would happen on the university level as well.
[00:53:05] Speaker A: Okay, Stephen, anything on you?
[00:53:07] Speaker B: Good, let's go on.
[00:53:08] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:53:09] Speaker A: So another question here. This one comes from Candace Morena. She seems to be speaking more to elementary school and high school, but she has. Do you think the culture needs to change to get better quality teachers in primary and secondary schools? Is the saying those who can't do, teach a true issue in education?
[00:53:29] Speaker B: Huh? That's a, that's a, a good.
[00:53:32] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Steven, are you somebody who can't do and teaches instead?
[00:53:35] Speaker B: Yeah, that hurts my feelings.
[00:53:39] Speaker C: You need a safe space No, I.
[00:53:42] Speaker B: Don'T, I don't think that one requires broad culture change. I'm still very gung ho about American culture, broadly speaking. The number of, you know, alert, inquisitive, curious, active minded people, millions and millions of them, who know lots and lots of things and want their kids to get a good education and sports lessons and music lessons and go to all the art museums and so on. I think that still is a huge, huge issue, positive issue, feature of our culture. I think the problem with respect to teacher quality is a higher education phenomenon, primarily inside higher education. It is a scandal that education departments do on average attract students who are not intellectually gifted, in many cases not particularly committed to education.
A lot of them end up, for example, start off as history majors or biology majors or chemistry majors, but then say it's too hard. And so I'm going to change my major to education because they know the reputation is that they're not going to be pushed very intellectually or forced to meet demanding criteria. So I think what has happened is that the increasing professionalization, which really has just meant more time spent in school and more sort of certifications has done a disservice to the certification of teachers in, in the United States. Adding to all of that, that a lot of it has been politicized with the increasing amounts of government control.
There are local levels or state level for the last half century now I think it's been, there's been federal level, so there's all these levels of, of administration, so what? Government oversight and management of education. So I think a lot of teachers don't have freedom. A lot of the ones who are, they do get through the system and they do want to be genuine teachers. They get burned out by the bureaucracy when they are pretty young. They switch over to going, doing something else with their lives, more power to them. And the ones who stay are more likely to be the ones who are just careerist, who are compliance mentality, who don't mind following the recipe. So I think it's not cultural change but rather higher education and higher education policy change that's needed there.
[00:56:23] Speaker C: I just want to add that, you know, I said before that we have the best universities in the world. We do not have the best schools in the world on the lower level. And there's a number of reasons for that. Bad theories of education that have become popular, their government involvement as well. As a, as someone who came out of the public schools, on one hand I found that if you really wanted, if you really wanted to get a Good education you could do was most of the people who were not as committed, who, who didn't go out of the way to do it, who would fall behind very badly. So we tend to have those like two tier thing that happens in low, in, in the below college education that the college bound kids can do okay and the people who aren't as interested, they, they come out learning, learning and, and being very unprepared for the world.
But I'd also add that as a grad, as a graduate of the public schools, despite having done okay myself, I've gone through a lot of trouble to send my kids to private schools because of the higher quality, the higher degree of dedication. So yeah, we definitely need reforms on that. But those reforms have got to come primarily from, you know, changing our ideas about how we teach and change and setting good examples and creating better alternatives, which I think has been done to some extent. I'm a big fan of Montessori schools, which is what I sent my kids to. So I think it's, you know, the idea that you can use politics to change culture is, is I think wrong headed and we should be using culture to change politics.
[00:57:47] Speaker A: Okay, thank you, Stephen. Thank you, Rob. This has been a great hour discussing these ideas but we are at a close unfortunately. But I'm sure we'll do something again like this pretty soon. So thanks again to you both and thank you everyone who joined us today and asked questions. If you enjoyed this video or any of our other material, please consider making a tax deduction. Tax deductible
[email protected] donate and be sure to join us again next week. Jennifer Grossman will be back for an interview with Jennifer say about her book Levi's Unbuttoned. The woke mob took my job but gave me my voice. Thanks again. We'll see you all again next time.
