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Wall Street Week Special: Bard College President on Trump’s College Crackdown
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Welcome to a special edition of the Wall Street Week podcast. I'm David Westin. President Trump's epic battle with some of America's most prestigious universities has been a long time in the making, like over 200 years in the making. And it all started on the other side of the Atlantic. America's move to merge scholarship with scientific research was inspired by Humboldt University in then Prussian Berlin at the beginning of the 19th century. A Yale graduate named Daniel Coit Gilman saw for himself the possibilities when he traveled to Berlin in the 1850s on a European tour. It took him a while to start something similar in the United States, but he finally got his chance when he was tapped to be the founding president of a new college in Baltimore in 1876, making Johns Hopkins the alma mater of our company. Founder and majority owner Michael Bloomberg the first true American research university. Over time, others followed suit, with mit, taking the idea in a somewhat different direction for what it called applied research in the early 1900s, funded not by the wealth of a private donor like Mr. Johns Hopkins, but by some of the large corporations of the day, such as General Electric and AT&T. It wasn't until World War II that the Federal government really got involved. Then along came fdr, who reached out to the universities to help him win the war. Roosevelt put the dean of MIT's engineering school, Vannevar Bush, in charge of the effort that partnership gave the world innovations like radar and the atomic bomb that did just what the President had envisioned. It helped determine who won the war. Having seen what the government academia team could do together, Vannevar Bush developed a post war plan for ongoing federal government funding of university research.
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And.
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And what began as $253 million in grants in 1953 turned into some $60 billion as of 2023. Leon Botstein has more perspective than most on the history of academia's relationship with the government and what's at stake for the United States and the world. The son of Polish Jewish physicists who fled the Nazis, he was born in Zurich and immigrated to the United States at the age of two. After studying both history and music, he went on to become the youngest college president in US history at the tender age of 23. Five years later, in 1975, he was named president of Bard, a position he has held for 50 years. So who better to ask about the state of American universities today in light of the challenges? So give us your assessment of the relationship between the federal government in the United States and and universities and colleges right now.
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Well, right now it's in a kind of disintegration mode. The pattern which has been that the university and the government have collaborated on research agendas. It was really reached a high point during the Sputnik and the space exploration age. But it has a long history, dating back to the Manhattan Project to the making of the atomic bomb. The making of the atomic bomb was the decisive historic event. America could not have done it without the universities, and the universities could not have done it without the government. And it was a collaboration which ended tragically, but also brilliantly and brought in the atomic age. And since then, America has been the premier place for higher education for two reasons. One, it has the most imaginative and open and free environment for research. There's a lot of academic freedom, and there's no hierarchy. There's no top professor telling the young professor what to do in the sciences, quite as there is in the old European tradition, which has been imitated both by the Russians and by the Chinese. And there isn't a constraint. And also new departments can be created, new fields can be created. There's a lot of flexibility in problem solving, which has placed American science in the forefront. And with the forefront of American science comes its dominance in technology and in economics. So you have a collaboration which has worked wonderfully. For reasons that I do not understand, the Trump administration has decided to break this up to unravel this, the claim is that the universities are woke. Well, universities have always had majority opinions. You know, the universities were in the forefront of the America first movement which opposed America's entrance in World War II. Every generation has had its political incarnation on the university. But the point is that this claim of wokeness is wildly exaggerated. And furthermore, there is the illusion that the real problem here is the failure to protect Jewish students and Jewish staff and faculty. I'm a Jew, an active member of the Jewish community, and I think this is also wildly exaggerated. And anti Semitism has been part of American culture. It's been part of university culture. However, the university has been the most open and responsive to the aspirations of the Jewish community. The idea that the university is anti Semitic is ironic and not actually true. So for reasons that are political, there is a destructive intent to demolish what has been for decades America's signal competitive edge throughout the world.
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When we talk about colleges and universities in the United States, the country is blessed with a wide range of institutions. Are the challenges you identify right now across the board, or are they more targeted on what I would call the elite institutions?
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Well, they're not at the elite institutions, they are at the research one universities. So you're right. America has a kind of patchwork quilt of many different kinds of institutions, much more varied than other developed societies in the west particularly. And so you have public research universities as well as private research research universities. Then you have smaller universities that aren't quite as research heavy. And then you have purely undergraduate institutions. Then you have community colleges. So you have a really wide variety of institutions that serve different constituencies. There's one thing that these institutions all have in common. America suffers from an antiquated financing scheme for its universities. Our great public university system was really created during the presidency of Lincoln with the Morrill act and the creation of the great state universities. After all, the majority of Americans go to public institutions, not private institutions. We always talk about Harvard, Yale, Princeton, but they're not the real place where Americans get educated. They get educated in public institutions, many of which are terrific. And the state universities in the Midwest and in the south and the west are first class places. I don't know why. Both the public and the news media, and now the White House has an obsession with these marginal, in a way, statistically, institutions. The whole issue about admissions and discrimination applies to, to a handful of institutions. Most of us are in the business of recruiting students, of welcoming students to us, not selecting, not making a cut. We're not a sort of a world series Baseball team. There are a couple of teams that are in that kind of world, but most institutions are not. And the best of our students, institutions in this country don't necessarily go to these elite institutions. There's a myth that somehow your career will be better if you go to one of these institutions. That isn't the case. And so it is an odd situation in which there is an unnatural focus on a very small portion of institutions. However, they reflect a problem that affects all research universities. The cutting of overhead, the dismantling of everything from USAID to cutting the funding for medical research, and generally the cutting of funds to bring graduate students and postdocs. America has been a net importer. It also ties in with this anti immigrant policy, which is completely ridiculous factually. Without the great immigration from Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, America would not have emerged after the Second World War as the leader in the world in higher education. We owe our greatness to the migration of scholars and scientists and engineers who came to this country fleeing oppression. Now we are flirting with autocracy, the very thing that great scientists and scholars fled. It's a reversal of roles. And so it is. It's a problem that involves every institution because it is fundamentally about censorship and freedom. What the government is doing is using money, which as a weapon and you know, scientific research, learning, universities, libraries can't exist without support. It's impossible. You know, we think of Harvard as a very rich university, the richest. So it has some endowment that's larger than 50 billion. But you and I can name several individuals who've earned, earned a wealth level more than 50 billion in less than 20 years. And that university has been around since 1636. Who says it's rich now they're responsible for their own arrogance of saying they're rich. They're not rich. They can't survive as a research university without the collaboration of the government. They may be a private institution, but they're dependent on the government. Then you take a punishment. Public university, which isn't always public, Berkeley is very, very dependent on private support. So is the University of Michigan. But they're state institutions and the state built their facilities by and large. So they too are very dependent on the public. So that financial relationship has always come with a respect for their freedom and independence. What do they do their research on? What kind of problems? Now certainly the government's interested in practical results, whether it's vaccines, new technology, no faster computing, chips, all that, all the things we talk about in the modern world. AI it's all university dependent. Without the world of the university, we wouldn't be where we are now. Why a president and a government wants to destroy that is absolutely unclear to me. Especially under the slogan of making America great again. If America was and is great, one of the sources of its greatness is its university system, its knowledge production and the connection to the economy. The universities have done a terrible job in talking to the general public. They haven't made their case clear. The people who live in the Boston area or the New York area or think, well, Columbia is some elite place. Well, a high portion of the quality of their medical care derives from those universities. The public doesn't really quite realize that God forbid they should have a terrible illness, God forbid there should be an accident. Where is the best place for them to be treated? In great university hospitals. Where do the great university hospitals get all their technology, all their drugs, all their diagnostic equipment, the mri, the CAT scans? All from the research labs of universities. But these institutions have believed their own rhetoric. You know, they've drunk their own Kool Aid, you know, they smelt their own perfume. You know, they said, we're rich, we're invulnerable, you know, we, you know, we're independent, when in fact they're dependent. Now, the liberal arts colleges, the kind of institution that I am responsible for, are not research heavy. So we're not as impacted by the current attack on funding. But the federal government is crucial to financial aid. All of our universities, public and private, are hampered by an antiquated system of financing. The in state tuitions of state universities are too high, much too high for country bar wealth. This is not a welfare giveaway. The more education you have, the more you earn and that returns in tax revenue. The fact is we push the cost of higher education on the consumer. And that is completely irrational. It's an investment in the country, it's an investment in our own people, and that investment pays off. So it is simply a problem for all of us because if the attack continues, it'll turn to squeezing out the financial aid options which aren't strong enough, the loan options, loan forgiveness options. And then we come back to the immigration question. Much of our graduate infrastructure in science is based on students from abroad. Students who come to get their PhDs in chemistry, biology, physics, information science from abroad. We don't produce enough of our own scientists through our own educational system. And the universities bear some responsibility for that. They've sort of given that task off to schools of education. But the physicists of America, the chemists of America. The biologists of America are not training high school teachers and middle school teachers and elementary school teachers. So through the pipeline of our schools, we don't produce enough students with the determination and hard work that's required to make a career in science and technology and biomedical sciences.
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You mentioned that the federal government right now is using money, as I think you said, a weapon, but call a weapon or a lever, whichever you want to call it. Have the universities to some extent given some of that leverage to the government by being too dependent upon federal funds?
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Yeah, it's a good question. I'm not sure that there's an alternative. The scale of research requires that you get the money from a large source. Now, the large sources are the government, the other are companies. Now, it's a very, very delicate issue about having, let's say big pharma or big industrialists fund research. They have historically, chemical companies, all kinds of companies, have invested in research that's related to their business. And that can be good, but it can also be corrupting. The tobacco industry, for example, in its beginning of its fight against the argument that smoking is related to cancer, was willing to fund research where they already expected a certain kind of outcome, and that's not good. So one has to be very careful about the industry research relationship. The third are private individuals. And although we have the most unbelievable inequality of wealth and we have a fantastic number of very rich people, billionaires, not all of them are philanthropic. And we're very grateful for the few that are. But you can't rely to fund this on individuals. On private philanthropy, you need large sums of money. And the only two sources are to some extent industry, and the other is the public sector, taxpayer support. And taxpayer support is justified because as I said earlier, it returns to the wealth of the nation, the taxable wealth of the nation. Nation education is crucial, crucial now to economy. There is no we are in a knowledge economy century.
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From your perspective, which includes remarkable experience leading distinguished university, where does this go? It's impossible to know. But as you look out, what do you think the future path is?
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I think the future path is to persuade the public and also our elected officials that supporting universities and higher education is in the nation's interest. If you're a patriot, which I am, I'm an immigrant. This country gave me and my family, my parents and my siblings, an opportunity they could not find anywhere else in the world. So there's a deep loyalty to what this country represents. It's represented by the Statue of Liberty. It's represented by The Constitution. It's represented by its long history of welcoming refugees and people seeking freedom. So it seems to me that you need to persuade the public and the elected officials that this is not the place for partisan politics. This is not the place to fight culture wars. Culture wars have always existed. It's like fashion, you know, big shoulders on your suits, narrow shoulders on your suits. It is always the case that universities have young people, and young people are fiery and they're committed to ideas. They're not always right, and they're not always as capable of seeing the gray, the ambiguous, the complexities. And you have to have patience. And we're not in the punishment business, we're in the teaching business. So whether it's the Vietnam protests or it's protests about any publishing issue, the environment, civil rights, whatever you want, the fact is that the energy of young people is an opportunity to teach. And this has been wildly politicized. And I think the universities have been lax in providing leadership. But you have to remember that universities have become giant corporations and they need corporate leaders. And how do we define corporate leaders? People who don't have opinions of their own, but say yes to everyone in a little different way and engage in compromise. The truth isn't always in compromise. The truth isn't always in yes, you're right. Yes, you're right, yes, you're right. And creating some kind of bland soup out of a variety of opinions. It's about striking out and showing leadership. And in order to become a university or college president, you have to demonstrate throughout your career your willingness to abandon any principle you might have held. Because if you actually compete for the job with real opinions, you won't get it. So we have a lot of managers, and we don't need managers, we need leaders. And those leaders are hard to find because in the current Internet environment, a university or college president is a semi public person. And it is unimaginable the vitriolic, hostile environment that the Internet creates for any public, public official. The sad thing about the Internet, which is a great advance, is that it has unleashed the darkest side of human nature. People will write things, send you things, use language they would never use in person, they would never use even on the telephone. So there's a kind of isolation which creates a kind of road rage that gets funneled into the Internet. And that's what you're overwhelmed with, and people are frightened by it. And if you speak out, you'll get 10 times what you said in hate mail. No matter what you say has nothing to do with the substance of it. So who wants this job? We complain how poor our politicians are. I mean, the idea, this is not a criticism, that a man of business without any public experience, without an education that really fits to lead a complex nation, without a long history of public service as the President of the United States, is an indication of how few very good people want the job. And the job is decreasingly attractive. And you know, if you're a judge and now you have to make a decision on some executive order from the president and you act against the president, you're a target. And what person with a family, with some measure of sanity wants to put themselves in the line of fire? So we are eroding democracy by diminishing the attraction of public service as a career. So the fact is that the university needs more leadership, and leadership that is principled. And it seems to me that the people that choose the president, which is not only the governing board, but the faculty, have to be more willing to take risks in finding leaders that stand for something. What I believe they should stand for is excellence in research, freedom of inquiry, and respect for every individual. When we give a diplomat every university, every college in the country, what's on that diploma, Just your name, nothing about your identity. You're not a member of a group. You're just John Smith, Jane Smith. You're an individual, that unique person that you are. That's your degree, that's your accomplishment. We don't teach groups, we teach individuals. And we need to treat all of them fairly. That's why in the old days in the movies, you see people in universities with gowns. Why were there gowns? To camouflage their origins, their mode of dress. Everybody was a learner, even the faculty. So that ideal of a place where the individual individuals treated as an individual, but not as a representative of some political group, some ethnic group, some way we segregate ourselves from another. That ideal of university is what has to be defended. The quality of teaching, quality of research. And that has to be supported by the government, not eroded by the government, not co opted by the government. And one of the things that history teaches us is when autocrats take control of universities and dictate who should teach there, what they should teach, what curriculum is allowed, what is not allowed, the quality of the work, of the scholarship goes down. This kind of autocratic intervention spells the death of a American. Excellence in the university.
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That does it for us. Here at Wall Street Week, I'm David Westin. See you next week for more stories of capitalism.
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