The Education of Higher Education

Summary

DealBook Summit: The Education of Higher Education

Podcast: DealBook Summit by The New York Times
Date: December 7, 2025
Host: Jodi Kantor, with Andrew Ross Sorkin
Panelists:

• Carmen Twillie Ambar (Oberlin College)
• Sian Beilock (Dartmouth College)
• Jonathan Levin (Stanford University)
• Ron Daniels (Johns Hopkins University)
• John King (SUNY)
• Daniel Diermeier (Vanderbilt University)
• James Harris (University of San Diego)

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Episode Overview

This episode gathers seven prominent leaders from U.S. higher education to discuss the state, challenges, and future of colleges and universities. The conversation, held live at the DealBook Summit, centers on issues such as preparing students for an uncertain job market shaped by AI, addressing concerns about affordability and access, balancing traditional liberal arts with new technical demands, higher education’s role in democracy, and the imperative for diversity of both background and viewpoint.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The State of Higher Education: Opening Perspectives

[00:43–11:11]

• Each panelist introduces themselves and shares an unexpected or underappreciated truth about higher ed:
  • Free Speech & Dialogue (Ambar, Beilock): Facilitation of difficult conversations across differences is vital, and students want exposure to challenging perspectives ([01:28–03:00]).
  • Research as Innovation Engine (Levin, Daniels): Universities are critical drivers of innovation, often in ways unseen or underrecognized by the public ([03:10–05:43]).
  • Access Isn't Uniform (King): The “leafy campus” stereotype doesn’t fit most students; SUNY, for instance, serves 1.3 million students annually, with many adults in commuter colleges ([06:16–07:28]).
  • Historical Context & Advocacy (Diermeier): Drawing on the White Rose resistance, affirming the need for moral courage and community support, especially in times of crisis ([07:37–09:15]).
  • Local Impact & Student Vulnerabilities (Harris): Universities are tightly bound to their communities, including the most vulnerable populations like undocumented students ([09:30–11:11]).

“The question that we're dealing with on college campuses about how to have conversations across difference is just much harder than people think.”
— Carmen Twillie Ambar ([01:49])

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2. Students’ Top Concern: The Job Market and the Challenge of AI

[11:38–16:49]

• Recent Grad Testimonial: Alejandra Diaz Pizarro, Columbia ’25, describes job hunting as “demoralizing,” facing endless resume tweaks for AI filtering, overwhelming competition, and automated rejections ([12:57]).
• Panel Response:
  • Skills Beyond Credentials (Beilock): Dartmouth involves students in internships as part of their education, focusing on both critical thinking and tangible ROI ([14:15–15:36]).
  • Humanity as a Differentiator (Ambar): Liberal arts may be more critical than ever—the “most human part of themselves” will set students apart in an AI-saturated landscape ([16:51–18:22]).
  • Taking Responsibility & Concrete Steps (King):
    1. Colleges must admit if students feel degrees lack job value ([19:10]).
    2. Graduates should consider enhancing their skill set—via micro-credentials, internships, specific courses—not necessarily another degree ([19:10–20:14]).
  • ROI and Institutional Responsibility (Beilock, King): Increasing job preparedness and skill applicability is a collective duty, not just the student’s ([20:14–20:39]).

“We should say sorry, because I think people are right to have some buyer's remorse if they get through a college degree and can't find a job at the end, that's on us.”
— John King ([19:10])

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3. AI in Education: Opportunity, Hype, and Balance

[21:01–30:52]

• Institutional Adaptation (Diermeier): Vanderbilt’s new College of Connected Computing gives all students access to AI education (“lower the boundaries”) regardless of major ([21:40–22:11]).
• Stanford Approach (Levin): Integrates AI like ChatGPT into coursework but maintains checks, such as oral defenses with TAs to ensure students understand work ([23:58–25:55]).
• Domain-Specific Application (Daniels): AI’s true power is realized when merged with deep domain expertise—especially critical in fields like medicine ([28:31–30:52]).
• Guarding Against Overcorrection (Beilock): Universities should lead conversations about what appropriate AI education looks like, not just tech firms ([23:30]).

“It’s not going to be the radiologist that's going to be replaced by an algorithm, but it's going to be the radiologist that knows AI is going to replace the one that doesn't.”
— Daniel Diermeier ([22:51])

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4. Workforce Readiness vs. Lifelong Learning

[31:10–36:11]

• "Not the Right Question" (Ambar): Rather than just job training, universities’ core value is teaching students to analyze complexity and adapt. Still, practical connections with industry are needed ([31:26–33:40]).
• Shifting Investment & Better Counseling (King): Calls for more funding for workforce-aligned programs, and improved, honest counseling about career pathways—especially outside the “default” four-year route ([34:49–36:11]).
• Social Mobility and Access (Harris): Highlights personal journey from homelessness to university leadership, emphasizes the risk that AI will deepen inequality by privileging those with access and support ([36:48–38:45]).

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5. Affordability: Grading the American System

[42:40–49:23]

• Panel Grades:
  • C+/B- (Ambar): Good with lower-income access; middle-class families still struggle. Public investment is imperative ([43:53–46:08]).
  • C/C- (Harris): Historical context shows U.S. higher ed steps up in crises, but local engagement needs work ([46:24–47:54]).
  • "Extraordinary" for some, enormous variance for others (Diermeier): Debt crisis not monolithic—aid at elite privates vs. high-debt, lower-completion sectors ([47:57–49:23]).

“If we believe that what we do really helps our economic ability in this country... this is a public good sometimes dealt with by private institutions. The government has a role to play here.”
— Carmen Twillie Ambar ([45:06])

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6. Democracy, Political Pressure, and Viewpoint Diversity

[49:23–66:36]

• Universities & Democracy (Daniels): U.S. institutions face unprecedented political attacks, but declining public trust predates current administration ([51:47–54:46]).
• Legitimate Critiques? (King): Some truth to charges of ideological uniformity and poor handling of protest/discipline. However, skepticism is centered more on elite institutions ([55:02–56:47]).
• Rebuilding Viewpoint Diversity (Ambar, Daniels, Beilock):
  • Must intentionally recruit from beyond the liberal bubble ([57:35–61:28]).
  • Need more conservative faculty, not just students ([61:29–62:42]).
  • Mission should be research/education, not politics—neutrality and robust discourse are key ([63:17–64:21]).
• DEI Backlash (King, Ambar, Diermeier, Beilock):
  • Supreme Court and political attacks on DEI send exclusion messages; institutions must act to re-establish belonging ([65:06–69:14]).
  • Must return to “first principles” of diversity and inclusion as central to meritocracy ([68:29–69:14]).

“Our mission is education, it's research. We're not political organizations like the RNC or DNC. We're also not social advocates organizations.”
— Sian Beilock ([63:17])

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7. Institutional Adaptations & Multi-faceted Ecosystem

[69:14–80:09]

• Responding to Politics (Levin):
  • Stanford’s resilience is from focusing on core values/mission, making long-term choices rather than reacting to news cycles ([69:44–72:29]).
  • Initiatives on free speech and discourse, cutting red tape, housing a conservative think tank—started before recent culture wars ([71:06–72:29]).
• Appreciating Strengths Across Sectors: Each panelist admires features from other institutions or segments:
  • Loyola of Chicago’s Arrupe program (Harris)
  • Innovation culture at Stanford and similar universities (Diermeier)
  • Social mobility leadership at UC Merced (King)
  • Local economic impact and translational research, e.g. Hopkins, Stanford, Cambridge (Daniels, Levin)
  • Accessibility innovations at community colleges (Ambar)

“We need to figure out how to make that whole ecosystem stronger instead of getting too over focused on one particular segment.”
— Jonathan Levin ([77:00])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The question that we're dealing with on college campuses about how to have conversations across difference is just much harder than people think.”
  — Carmen Twillie Ambar ([01:49])

• “We should say sorry, because ... that's on us.”
  — John King ([19:10])

• “It's not going to be the radiologist that's going to be replaced by an algorithm, but it's going to be the radiologist that knows AI is going to replace the one that doesn't.”
  — Daniel Diermeier ([22:51])

• “Our mission is education, it's research. We're not political organizations ... Our mission is to bring people together with different views.”
  — Sian Beilock ([63:17])

• “If you look at the four or five or six of us sitting around this table here, the financial aid support that we provide to our students is absolutely extraordinary ... but there are sectors where we have high debt loads... So the overall sense that this is... there's this overall debt crisis really needs to be segmented.”
  — Daniel Diermeier ([47:57])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introductions & Institutional Realities: [00:43–11:11]
• Graduate Testimonial & Workforce Fears: [12:57–14:12]
• Addressing ROI and Liberal Arts Value: [14:12–16:49]
• AI in the Curriculum—Innovation & Limits: [21:40–30:52]
• Workforce Prep vs. Lifelong Learning: [31:10–36:11]
• Affordability—Grades & Systemic Critique: [42:40–49:23]
• Universities, Politics, and Democracy: [49:23–54:46]
• Viewpoint Diversity & Recruiting Conservatives: [57:22–66:36]
• DEI Backlash and Impact on Students of Color: [65:37–69:14]
• Institutional Resilience in Partisan Times: [69:14–72:29]
• Cross-institutional Admiration & Closing: [73:20–80:09]

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Summary Conclusion

This rich and candid conversation offered a panoramic view of American higher education’s converging crises and opportunities. Presidents and chancellors wrestled with how their institutions could remain relevant, accessible, and just—while upholding the promise of education as a path to both economic mobility and citizenship. Throughout, speakers balanced recognition of their sector’s shortcomings with optimism fueled by ongoing innovations, dedication to diverse dialogue, and a willingness to evolve—if higher education is to endure as a public good.

Transcript

[Jodi Kantor]

This episode was recorded at the 2025 DealBook Summit. This year's Dealbook Summit sponsors include premier sponsor Accenture, associate sponsors U.S. bank Vanguard, Invesco, QQQ, and University of Michigan, supporting sponsor Capital One and contributing sponsor Invest Puerto Rico.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

This is Andrew Osorkin with the New York Times. You're about to listen to some fascinating breakout conversations from our annual Dealbook Summit, recorded on Dec in New York City. You'll hear experts, stakeholders, and leaders discuss vital topics that are shaping the business world and the world at large.

[Jodi Kantor]

Hello and welcome to the Dealbook Task Force on Higher Education. We are thrilled and feel very lucky to have seven leaders of institutions of higher learning here today. I'm going to ask you to introduce yourselves in a somewhat unusual way. I'll state your name, which institution you're from, and then would you please tell us something about higher education right now that we might not know? It could be a big truth. It could be a little anecdote. We just want to begin to hear a little of the information you're going to be offering today. So first we have Carmen Twilly Ambar, who is the president of Oberlin College.

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

Welcome. Thanks. Glad to be here. So right after October 7, at the height of the protests that were happening on college campuses, I was meeting with groups of students and they were engaged in some chants that many people found offensive. And I remember sitting with those groups of students and asking them, is this a dog whistle that maybe you can't hear? And it was after that conversation that those chants really subsided on our campus and disappeared. And I think this question that we're dealing with on college campuses about how to have conversations across difference is just much harder than people think it is. And being a part of a process where we try to practice it has been really helpful in my time at Oberlin.

[Jodi Kantor]

Wonderful. Thank you, President Bilock. We have Sian Beilock, the president of Dartmouth University. Welcome. We're excited to hear from you.

[Sian Beilock]

Thank you. It's great to be here and building off what Carmen said. I often think that people don't hear enough. How much young people on our campuses want to hear different perspectives, want to be pushed at. And I know at Dartmouth, we surveyed our incoming students, and 66% of them said they came to Dartmouth over other institutions precisely because we encourage dialogue across difference. And I think for the most part, our young people are looking for that. They're looking to build those skills and engage and maybe be a little different than the way things are modeled across the right and the left. In our government.

[Jodi Kantor]

Wonderful. And next we have President Jonathan Levin of Stanford University.

[James Harris]

Welcome.

[Jonathan Levin]

Great to be here.

I'm not sure everyone appreciates the fundamental role that universities play in not just creating knowledge, but as the foundation for American innovation and leadership in the world. And even if you take a breakthrough that we're all thinking about today, like the large language models, the AI models, although those came from industry, all of the ideas that underlie them, the models, the neural networks, the gradient descent, the way they're estimated, all of those ideas were developed in academic research, often federally funded, over a period of 30 years and just published openly so that when the data and the computation caught up, people in industry could use them. And that is how most innovation in this country and in fact in the world, happens.

[Jodi Kantor]

Wonderful. Thank you. President Ron Daniels of Johns Hopkins University. Welcome.

[Ron Daniels]

Thank you and delighted to be here. I'm going to pick up on what John said a moment ago is, at least for me, one of the things that I think is misunderstood is this theme of the extent to which we are about education, but we are these powerful engines for research and innovation. And for me, the very direct way in which I'm reminded of that is that I'm a type 1 diabetic. That means for the last 20 years, I've been totally dependent on the administration of insulin through an insulin pump. And for me, this is an irritating condition. But 100 years ago, a diagnosis of diabetes was essentially a death sentence. Kids who got it in their teens or younger had about three months to live, adults who got it later on. For, again, type 1 diabetes, it was about a two year run. And what's remarkable is if you look at the last hundred years of innovations that have taken place.

And changing dramatically the trajectory of my life and the management of this condition, it's all attributed to back to a host of different scientific disciplines. That, of course, starts with the recognition that insulin comes from the pancreas, but then goes quickly to the extraction of insulin, using it as the therapeutic agent, and then ultimately, a host of different technologies that have come from a vast array of different disciplines that have made this, again, a relatively manageable illness.

[Jodi Kantor]

Wonderful. Thank you. So next we have Chancellor John King of the suny, the State University of New York system, also a former US Secretary of Education, and I think, by the way, the winner on this panel in terms of how many students you represent.

How many students are in the.

[John King]

SUNY system, We see about 1.3 million students a year across degree programs annually.

[Jodi Kantor]

Programs.

That is really quite amazing. And we are Grateful to have you share something with us.

[Ron Daniels]

Sure.

[John King]

You know, I just point out maybe that college is different from what people sometimes think of. People think of a leafy campus where students live on campus and they're all 18 to 22. But across our 64 institutions, we do something very different. 30 of our campuses are community colleges, almost all commuter students, although not entirely. About 28% of those students are over 25. And I think about this summer traveling around to our community colleges with our governor because we're doing free community College for adults 25 to 55 in high demand workforce areas like green jobs, advanced manufacturing, health care, IT and cybersecurity. And talking with a mom who was standing with her two daughters who are maybe seven and nine. She'd always wanted to go to college because of things in her life. It didn't work out. She was struggling economically, but now she was going to come to Suffolk Community College, get a two year degree in occupational therapy, get a great job with benefits. And watching her daughters watch her was such a perfect encapsulation of what higher education can and should be for the country.

[Jodi Kantor]

Wonderful. Thank you. We have Chancellor Daniel Diermeyer from Vanderbilt University. Thank you for flying north. And what would you like to share with us?

[Daniel Diermeier]

Well, thank you very much. So I'll add to some of the themes that were touched upon earlier. And so I was in Vanderbilt. We were very honored to receive two awards recently, really for work after October 7th. Both from the Jewish community won the Chabad Lamplighter Award, and the other one was called the White Rose Society, really, for supporting the Jewish community on campus after October 7th. And there was something very personally moving for me in this whole experience. So I'm not from Tennessee originally, as you can tell from my accent. So I was born in Germany. And the White Rose is named after a group of students that in 1942, protest as the Nazis, through leaflets, threw them down from a balcony inside the university and were all arrested and executed. And that's the university. I was a student, so I knew, I knew the stories. I knew the exact place where it happened. So I walked to class every day, basically looking up in the courtyard where these brave students did their work and did the right thing under very, very difficult circumstances. But what was really meaningful, I think, during this, doing these ceremonies and these celebrations was how emotional this was for the Jewish community. So at a moment when, you know, they kind of had one of the worst things happening in Israel, they felt a strong sense of abandonment. And so having this moment where we kind of could see how dialogue can happen on campuses was a very powerful thing for us on campus, but I think more broadly speaking as well.

[Jodi Kantor]

Thank you. Finally, we have President James Harris, president of the University of San Diego. Welcome. Thank you for flying east.

[James Harris]

Thank you very much.

[Jodi Kantor]

And please close out the introductions by sharing something with us.

[James Harris]

Thank you. I'd like to start with. I'll share a story. Story of something that happened about six weeks ago. So I'm at my home and I receive a text from a student that I was familiar with that was in a class that I taught during her four years at USD. And she had graduated last spring, and she's now in graduate school at the university. She happens to be an undocumented student. So I received a text from her saying, I'm being held against my own will and I need help. And this came out of nowhere. It's a Saturday night. I'm with my family. So my son drove me downtown. I'm going to the place where she was trying to apply for a job to work behind the scenes at a restaurant. And she felt that she was being held against her will. She also had called a parent of a friend. And we all converged at the same time at this restaurant to go in to talk to the owner. So the student was terrified, wanted to know what was going to happen. We had a release. I actually, on my way down, I'm calling my legal counsel, I'm calling the head of our immigration clinic at the law school at the university, trying to get advice on. And she couldn't be held against her own will. I tell that story. And she was. And she's back in school, she's doing well, and nothing came of the event for her personally. I tell that story because sometimes while we're all universities that have international presence and we have a campus in Madrid and students from all over the world on our campus. Much of our work is local. And you have to put it in the local context. And in the local context in San Diego, we're 20 minutes from the San Ysidro entrance to the United States. It's the most active border entry point in the Western Hemisphere. And so you can't separate what's going on with immigration policy and other things from what we do as a university. So I just wanted to share that story.

[Jodi Kantor]

Thank you. And I'll introduce myself. I'm Jodi Kanter. I'm an investigative reporter at the New York Times. My day job is to focus on the Supreme Court, but I have to say that I am a Little obsessed with the issues we're going to discuss today. Not only because I am a tuition paying parent and college student, but because last spring a group of students at Columbia, which as you know, was having a lot of trouble.

A group of students asked me what I thought was one of the hardest and best questions I had ever heard in my life. They said, in this crazy atmosphere, how are we supposed to discover our life's work? And I thought it was such a good question that I actually wrote an entire book about it which is coming out this spring. It's called how to Start.

And as you know, we're just going to hear more and more about this in coming months because the entry level employment market is so tough. And that's what I wanted to begin with today in our prep work for this discussion. When we asked you what are the concerns on students minds, almost all of you said that this was number one, number two, number three, am I going to have a job after graduation? Is it going to be a good job? Now I know that there are people listening and watching who may not be as familiar as we are about the situation on the ground. So I asked a recent graduate to describe for us what it is like to look for a job in this moment. This is what she said. This is, by the way, Alejandra Diaz Pizarro, Columbia class of 2025.

She not only talked about the fact that these positions are under threat from AI, that there are these constant anecdotes about 600 people applying for one internship position, but she described the feeling of it. She said, the main way I describe it is demoralizing. It's spending days infinitely tweaking your resume so that whatever AI screening bot is doing the first round culling won't immediately toss yours out. Even talking to a real person on the other end feels like an achievement. It feels like tossing your materials out into a void, pressing send on applications, the majority of which you'll never hear back from while hearing from the news, from the adults around you, and from your peers just how bad the job market is. So my question for this group is, what can we say right here and right now to these demoralized seniors and recent graduates who are applying for jobs in such a frustrating atmosphere?

[Sian Beilock]

Well, I'm happy to start.

[Jodi Kantor]

Please do. Thank you.

[Sian Beilock]

The academic field of AI actually started at Dartmouth. The term was coined there in 1956 in a summer conference. And we'll be celebrating 70 years of, of developing that term and the field that followed. And I really think there's an exciting future here. But it is about helping students hone the skills on a college campus that are not just about thinking critically, but also talking specifically about ROI and return on investment. I think schools don't always do that as much as they can. And what I would say is that it's not about only thinking about jobs as you're graduating or once you are out in the workplace. But I think colleges and universities have a responsibility to help our students early on think about how their skills will translate and to overlay the critical thinking that we know is so important on these new models. At Dartmouth, we do that by our students spend two of their four, two quarters of their four years actually in internships and working and having experiences rather than just being on campus all four years. We think this is really important for giving them a leg up for thinking about where they go in the job market. And I will say that our students have had the same rate of success over the last two years of finding jobs as they have over the last 10 years.

[Jodi Kantor]

I saw a quote from you that I thought really defined the challenge. Well, you said previous generations didn't have to worry about their job being taken over by a robot. But this generation is. It is a bigger question than what am I going to be when I grow up? Will you unpack that statement for us a little bit? What did you mean about the bigger question?

[Sian Beilock]

Yeah, I think we often think about one job or one entity. One thing we're going to land in. And what we are talking to students about from day one is what are their passions? How do they think about learning skills that can change in a changing job market? And that's really what we're teaching students. We're teaching students to ask the right questions, to push on technology but be able to change as the technology changes. And that is what essentially a liberal arts education gets you. It teaches you how to think, not what to think.

[Jodi Kantor]

I appreciate hearing the effort that Dartmouth is putting into this, but I also just really want to be attentive to the fact that these students are feeling very vulnerable right here and right now. Is there anything anybody can say.

To them directly?

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

I think what we can talk to them about. So we're doing a year of AI exploration on Oberlin's campus, and we had this really interesting moment where people have concerns about it. They are worried about this ethics. They are worried about environmental issues, and they're worried about this job taking jobs away. And someone on one of our panels said liberal arts colleges may be more relevant now than they've ever been. Because what we have to encourage our students to do is to lean into the most human part of themselves. That that's what's required in this moment. And that's why we want our students to be philosophers and think about creativity and writing and music and art, like all of those pieces are a part of how you can, yes, work with this technological advancement that is concerning. But how do you lean into your humanity in a way that makes sure that when you're thinking about how AI is impacting your job choice or what you're thinking about, that you're bringing something else that's different to the table? And, you know, I think our students are saying, wait a minute. That's at the core of who we are. We're learning how to analyze complexity, critical thinking, cultural complexity, all those things that we've always done. But what does it mean to lean into your humanness? And students are concerned about jobs? Absolutely. I still believe they want lives of purpose and meaning as well. And if that's. I hope that that's true. That's why we do the work that we do. And this question of what it means to be human and how to lean in in that moment, I think is the place for our students to be hopeful.

[Jodi Kantor]

So that's helpful, but I want to keep pushing on this because people are really hurting out there for this student who has graduated from an excellent university like the ones you preside over, and who is saying, I have applied for 500 jobs in the last year and I have barely gotten a bite, and I'm being interviewed by AI I can't even get to the place where I'm meeting a human being in these job application processes. Do you have any concrete advice that can help them?

[John King]

Two things.

[Jodi Kantor]

One, oh, and by the way, I think we should find a way to identify who's speaking. So I will say thank you very much, President King, Chancellor King, for answering the question.

[John King]

Two things, I would say. One is we should say sorry, because I think people are right to have some buyer's remorse if they get through a college degree and can't find a job at the end, that's on us. We as institutions have to figure out how to do a better job ensuring that students leave with a set of skills and credentials that are going to get them a good job. That's a fair expectation of us. The second, maybe concrete advice I would say is they may want to think about adding to their skill set, and that may not necessarily mean going back for a graduate degree. It could mean going for a micro credential. It could mean going back to take some specific courses. It may mean working with their career services office at their campus to find an internship which isn't going to pay them, but over time will gain. They'll gain some skills that might get them a good job. But I think we have to be honest that for too many students, they are graduating with a degree that doesn't have meaningful value in the marketplace of jobs, and that's bad.

[Sian Beilock]

And I think that's what I was talking about with roi, that we as colleges and universities have a responsibility to our students, to the American people, to make sure that our students are coming out, learning how to think, but also are able to use those credentials to increase their prospects, to think about what they will do. And I don't think colleges and universities have owned up to that responsibility in past years, and it's something we need to do now.

[Jodi Kantor]

So to exactly what you both just said, this is a generation that climbed the double peaks of Mount College. To figure out how to get in and then to figure out how to pay for it is really a huge achievement. It becomes, in a way, like a sort of life purpose, a driving force unto itself.

It does feel a little bit like our longstanding bargain in this country, which is education plus hard work equals something really good like that is faltering a little bit. Not entirely. We don't want to write it out off. We know there are a lot of success stories, but for me, it feels more fragile than at any other point I've ever seen.

Is it your job to tackle that challenge? What share of responsibility do you take in that moment? And what do you think institutions of higher learning can do? Go ahead, Chancellor Diermark.

[Daniel Diermeier]

I think absolutely we need to take this responsibility on. And what we have been seeing is that our students have totally leaned in into this new technology. So we haven't seen this kind of like this worry so much. But we had to also create the environment where that's possible. So we created a first new college in 40 years called college of Connected Computing, which makes it basically possible for all of our students to acquire these skills, whether you're an engineering graduate or whether an English major. And what we've seen is that the students.

That are very much driven by what they want to do in life take these technologies on very naturally. But you need to make it easy. You need to lower the boundaries, and you may basically reach them where they are. That has worked really well. So we have this kind of interesting paradox. We have, on the one hand, the students love AI, the faculty love AI. They are the typical first adopters. The parents are all freaked out. And so I think the sense is that it needs to be. You need to metabolize it. As a university and as individuals, it's not so much the case. I think that we're going to have a radiologist that's going to be replaced by an algorithm, but it's going to be the radiologist that knows AI is going to replace the one that doesn't. And so to me, that's what we need to do.

[Jodi Kantor]

Is there any danger of overweighting AI in the educational experience in the sense that everybody sitting here is old enough to have lived through a lot of fads and a lot of eras of this is going to be the next big thing. And as we know, the AI experts themselves are fighting about how consequential this technology is going to be. Are any of you worried about a rush towards AI education that could end up looking overdone in a few years?

[Sian Beilock]

I am. I will just say that I think that this is where it's not just the technology companies that should be charged with thinking about what education looks like. It's gotta be the universities working with those companies. So Dartmouth just announced a partnership with Anthropic and aws, and we want a partner to think about what education looks like. It's our experts, our faculty who should be pushing this, not just the AI companies.

[Jodi Kantor]

And President Levine, I think you had something to say.

[Jonathan Levin]

I think if you look at the way that teaching is going right now, it's going simultaneously in two directions. One is to basically embrace and bring in AI tools into teaching, and the other is to do the exact opposite. So I'll give you an example from. At Stanford, the single most popular class is Introduction to Computer Science. Almost every student takes Introduction to Computer Science. In fact, we offer it for free as an online class. And tens of thousands of people take the class. That class, they've changed the assignments in that class to incorporate using ChatGPT. So, for example, the first assignment used to be, you learn how to write a program. Say your name, enter your name. And then it says Jody Cantor. And it says, your name is Jody Kantor. Now it says, enter your name. What do you have in your refrigerator? Type that in. And then it says, here's a recipe you can make for dinner tonight. It's the first day of Computer Science. Now, of course, they can't do that whole AI, but they can call ChatGPT to plug that in the students love it. First day of coding, all of a sudden you're like, creating things you're building. It's incredible. And now in that class, when you turn in your assignment, you have to spend 15 minutes with the TA explaining it orally.

To the TA, because otherwise it's too tempting to just have ChatGPT do the assignments. And I think that's actually the way as we. We're still the very early days of this new technology, but I think we were going to figure out how to both do what Daniel is saying, which is to teach students to be really well equipped to use these tools and what Sian just said, which is to teach students to be human, to be good at the human things that don't involve technology, that involve communication and empathy and human relationships.

[Jodi Kantor]

How do you look back at the popularity of the computer science degree on the Stanford campus and elsewhere? You were sort of the epicenter of the idea that you had to learn computer science to be a literate and productive and successful person in the working world. This idea was everywhere for a long time, and now it's falling away. What are your reflections on that?

[Jonathan Levin]

I think what we saw. Stanford is sort of in the epicenter of technology because we're the university that gave birth to Silicon Valley. And in fact, the faculty member that Sian mentioned who coined the term artificial intelligence for that Dartmouth summer workshop came to Stanford and started the Stanford AI Lab.

[Jodi Kantor]

I'm getting a little academic competition between the different institutions. Right. Who can claim this person?

[Jonathan Levin]

Well, one of the lessons you learn in academics is that credit can sum to more than one.

[Ron Daniels]

Excellent.

[Jonathan Levin]

One of the most important lessons on a university campus.

[Jodi Kantor]

We have multiple bylines on some of our stories, as you know, so computer science.

[Jonathan Levin]

So our computer science major became very popular about 15 years ago, to the point that about 20% of our students major in computer science, but 40% of our students major in engineering. And we have always felt that Stanford, we weren't trying to be mit. We were trying to be MIT plus Harvard, basically.

But it wasn't a problem that students were majoring in computer science. We just didn't want them to lose sight of all the other things you could learn at university. We wanted them to also take music and social sciences and humanities. And so we've tried to structure our curriculum in a way that no matter what you major in, I think many of our universities do this. You can explore broadly while you go deep in a certain number of areas. And I think that's a distinctive strength of American Educational institutions relative to our international peers, which are the education is much narrower internationally and US Institutions let students explore and also go deep. And that's something we should be proud of, actually, in terms of what we've created here in this country.

[Jodi Kantor]

President Daniels, you also preside over a STEM powerhouse. How do you get the balance right between AI or computer science or whatever the hot focus of the moment is, versus knowing that these things are not always enduring. And there are a lot of computer science majors right now who are out of work.

[Ron Daniels]

Well, to start, I think the way we've approached it is to say that AI is a critical technology. We know it's going to get better, more capable.

And that's something that we're investing in very, very deliberately. At Hopkins, we have a new institute for Data Science and AI where we'll recruit about 110 new faculty to focus on first and foremost developing the capacities of the core AI technologies. But significantly, and I think this threads back to an earlier question you asked, it's going to radiate it out to every part of the university.

Here. The key insight is that the power, I think, of where we go with AI really turns on domain specific expertise. And so that you can have core AI technology and you want students and faculty obviously to be comfortable and familiar with those capabilities. But what really matters is how do you use them in a host of different areas to solve a host of different problems. And so for us at least, the power of this play is the connectivity between what we'll do with AI and then how you'll use it. For instance, in the case of medicine, precision medicine, and there what's really important is although you want your physician, scientist, for instance, to understand the role of AI, fundamentally what matters is their domain expertise, how they understand illness, how they can help ask the questions to start, discern the patterns of various types of diseases and syndromes that again require the use of AI. This is something that I think no part of the university ultimately will be immune from the impact of AI. But it's not like everything just becomes AI. The domains really matter and that expertise really matters. And ultimately what we're looking to do is to train students, to educate students who have the capacity to go deep in a domain and understand that AI is a tool that's available to them and exploring that domain.

[Jodi Kantor]

Show of hands quickly. I am curious.

Does. Does the American system of higher education, and especially elite universities like your own and colleges, include enough workplace training?

If you're a yes, will you put your hand up?

[Daniel Diermeier]

Well, there's so much heterogeneity. It's really difficult to make a general statement on that, I think.

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

So I'm not sure. Respect. I'm not sure that's the right question.

[Jodi Kantor]

Great, what is then?

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

Well, because. Because what we're doing is we. Disciplinary expertise is going to dissipate quickly. Right. And so, you know, and this question of AI is an important part of it. You know, what's the new technology that'll be down the line? Who knows?

[Jodi Kantor]

Right.

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

I'm not sure a question about whether we're leaning in too much.

[Jodi Kantor]

Right.

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

So part of what we're trying to prepare them for is the multiple transformations that they'll have in their lives and the ability to be able to analyze complexity in a way that allows you 10 years from now when something's totally new. So it's not so much about kind of workforce development and training, although I think disciplinary expertise is important. It's really about, can we help you analyze complexity and be able to transform that complex thinking to all areas? It doesn't mean that we don't need to do a better job of connecting with industry. Doesn't mean that we don't need to do a better job of thinking about kind of the pipeline to work and career. I think those are fair critiques of liberal arts colleges and whether we do that as well as we should. But I oftentimes say to families, we want to teach you how to analyze complexity that's going to serve you throughout your life. The disciplinary expertise that we might give you in those first two or three years, we know that's going away, and so we can give you some help. We need to boost you into your career in the right way. We need to get you in the right pipeline. I'm so concerned about the student you've been talking about that's concerned about how they find the deeply, oh, my God, let's help the student. But it's also true that we've had times like these before. Not these specific times, but times where the job market was tight, where it was difficult to get a job, where it was challenging to find what your career would be. I remember when I was graduating from law school, there were no law jobs, that sort of thing. And so do we give them the skill set to be able to transform their way of thinking to different disciplines in different spaces and places? That's what I think we owe families and parents so that at the end of the day they can feel. And some of you know I have triplets, right? They're 18 year old triplets in their first year in college. So I feel it. I have a focused group of three right there who have all these deep concerns. And what I want to make sure they can do is they can analyze complexity in a way that they can find their next role even as there seems like chaos amok in the economy or whatever the other issue is of the day.

[Jodi Kantor]

So that is a very compelling answer. And I still want to ask if, if anybody wants to argue the other side for two reasons. One is I don't know whether we've seen times like this before or not. I don't know. I mean as a reporter I am like your scientists, I'm like your historians. I'm seeking open, I'm asking open minded questions and trying to seek evidence based answers.

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

But when I say times like these, I mean times where students and people were concerned about whether there was a.

[John King]

Job for them for sure.

[Jodi Kantor]

But the question which I am not prepared to answer because we don't have the information yet is, is this a dip in the job market that as you say, we've experienced many times before, or is this a transformation of white collar work that is going to end up not only leaving a ton of people jobless, but truly challenge the nature of the way we think of higher education? And then the other reason I want to ask is because I found your answer very compelling. But I'm curious to, to know whether there is anybody in this group who thinks yes, we need to do much more concrete workforce education.

[John King]

We do. And we need to shift how we invest. We have systems that do this. So at SUNY 64 institutions, we have R1 research institutions, stony Brook, University of Buffalo, Binghamton. We also have traditional liberal arts colleges like a SUNY Geneseo, but we also have ag and tech campuses and we have our community colleges. And at many of our four year institutions we are preparing New York's teachers, New York's nurses, New York's vet techs. And if you graduate from a nursing program in New York, you are getting a good job at the end. So I think we do have to put more dollars into programs that connect to the jobs that are available. And we also have to do a better job on college counseling. We've said to students the default is just go to a four year institution. It'll work out, it'll be great. And maybe we should spend more time helping students think about, well, what do you really want to do? What do you enjoy? We have a maritime college. Students graduate into jobs in commercial shipping or they Go into the Navy or the Coast Guard. Those students who are going to commercial shipping, they're often going into entry level jobs. Six figures or approaching six figures. It's amazing. Now you have to love being on a ship, right? And then somebody has to talk to you about that possibility. So I do think we have to think differently about the future of our economy maybe than we have over the last few days.

[Jodi Kantor]

I want to just make sure we get to President Harris for one second. I'll come back to you. I want to ask you a very special question that is very much about your own journey. I was struck to learn that you are really from a background of true poverty, faced obstacles that but very few of us have. Will you tell us a little bit about that story and how it leads you to view this challenge? And the specific thing I'm interested in is would your journey from homelessness to being the president of a university be possible today?

[James Harris]

I'd like to think it would be possible today. My own personal story is that my mother lived in poverty, was homeless herself at one point when I was in college and I was first generation, first in my family, go to college.

Ended up in a homeless situation myself for about two months. And it was, it changed the trajectory of my life in that it helped me understand and I think the reason I became a college president is to help students from low income and poverty be able to have access. What I worry about with AI is that there's going to be again that separation that we've seen with computing and others that there are going to be those who have access to high quality education, are prepared to take on the challenges of AI and a whole other generation is going to be left behind. And I think all of our institutions try to focus and at USD we try to focus on low income students and providing access to them, make sure that they have opportunities. So we have this wonderful opportunity as a liberal arts university, we're the number two in the country for study abroad, for example. We don't want a low income student just because they have to work two jobs not to be able to have access to have that experience in Madrid or New Zealand or wherever it might be. So I think my own personal experience has led me to believe that we need to make sure that that's accessible to everybody. So when you talk about the AI revolution and where we're heading, does everyone have access? Does everyone have the opportunity to learn, to be prepared for that? I think a liberal arts education prepares you the best for it. I loved when she asked you the question. She said, I don't think that's the right question. That's what we need our students to be prepared for in the future, to ask the right questions, to be prepared in literature and English, to be able to understand. Language models now are going to change and go to English in terms of AI. So if you're not asking the right question, if you don't know how to use the language, the English language, to ask those questions and to think about the critical issues, then you're not prepared. Well, that's where I think we need to focus and continue to develop. They'll be better off in the long run with AI. They're not going to lose their job because AI takes it. It's because somebody else understands how to apply their discipline with AI.

[Daniel Diermeier]

Can I add something to that? Because I think that's a very important question and I'll just put it in the context of an anecdote.

So, you know, we have a residential college system and I always walk around and welcome the students when they come in. And in this particular case I went into one room where I knew the family and the son was like, you know, kind of from a really very, very wealthy family, was one of the, one of the students that would be in that room. And then outside there was another student who was, you know, single family, single mom, toughest neighborhood in Chicago. Posse foundation, which is a wonderful program that helps first generation students. And they would now be roommates at Vanderbilt. In that particular residential college. What's not appreciated is when they graduate, they will have the same opportunities in life. So one of the things that we all do as universities is we are creating opportunities especially for students that didn't have them. And I think that's a wonderful thing that we do as universities underappreciated, we're often accused of kind of like perpetuating inequality. But once you're in and once you graduate, the opportunities are no longer correlated with your family income. And that's, I think, is a tremendous, a tremendous thing that we all do together and has really a tremendous impact on creating opportunities for students, especially from first generation backgrounds.

[Ron Daniels]

I think it's important just to pick up on Daniel's point is earlier you referred to the idea of a compact between universities and I assume the American citizenry. And I think it's important to emphasize, at least as we understand this challenge of what happens upon graduation is that one thing that has changed quite dramatically over the last 20 years that I've been involved in American higher education has been the extent to which there's much more intentionality in terms of thinking about access financial aid support for students from across the socioeconomic spectrum. For a lot of us now, one of the key brags is what percentage you're entering class is Pell eligible. And in the case of Hopkins, over a 15 year period, we've seen that go from something like 10% of the class to 24% of the class, meaning these are kids from families from $60,000 of household income or less. And what's equally, I think, important to see, even over the last several years, the concern that we have barbell populations. A lot of kids from low income families and from.

High income families who are paying full tuition. And have we lost the middle class in this story? What's been really striking is the extent to which we're now taking that very seriously and simplifying our financial aid programs. And again, focusing on access by the middle class. In the case of Hopkins, we can now say for any student who comes from a family with a household income of less than $200,000, you'll come tuition free. That's 84% of American households are captured in that. So I think as we think about this moment of what happens at graduation, I think it is important to emphasize the progress that's been made. And it's not just at Johns Hopkins, it's across all of our institutions. We've become much more mindful about this access issue. So this doesn't in any way attenuate the responsibility for what happens at graduation. And are you resilient? Are you capable of getting the first job, the second job, and ultimately having a life of meaning, but a life that gives you some degree of material comfort. But I think at least we have to acknowledge that that question now gets asked in a context where the students who are worried about the job market are also, for those from challenged economic backgrounds, not worried about massive debt loads and how they're going to service them, because in many cases they've come on.

[Jodi Kantor]

Full ride scholarships to that point. Let's go quickly around the table and I would like to hear each of you give the American system, let's call it a grade or an assessment. You can choose whether you give letter grades or written evaluations to the issue, to where we are collectively, not just at your institutions, on the issue of affordability. Because, I mean, this is a titanic struggle of our era, right? I mean, how long have we been talking about student debt, the student loan system, interest rates, how much we are asking to take students to Take on efforts like yours to relieve some of this burden. If I'm going to ask you to look at the system.

As a whole and not just represent.

Your own institutions. How are we doing? How would you grade the system and what areas do we most need to work on? Do you want to start us off, President Ambar? Just go around the table.

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

We grade inflation. Who are we comparing it to?

[Jodi Kantor]

Which one is it?

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

I would give us a C plus, B minus. I think that we, you know, we've done a pretty good job with lower income students. I appreciate the point about middle class students. We haven't done as good a job there. We've worked hard at Obelman to try to manage, you know, that piece. I think we also have to admit that.

Some of our institutions have a high cost model that is about small class sizes and this very intimate experiences. But that's a very different experience than students at a community college. And there are probably of the 18 million undergraduates and graduate students, there's 47% of them are in community colleges. So I think that when we think about affordability, we just have to remember it's a vast system. There are certain institutions that are represented here, but there are other types of institutions as well. So I wouldn't give us the top grade, but I think we have invested a lot. I think the part of the question that we need to add to it is what is the role that the federal government has in supporting this work that we do? So when we talk about this collaborative endeavor that we're in together.

We are an industry. That is the tide. We are lifting lots of the ship. And so this obligation that I think that the federal government has in supporting our institutions, not just public ones, private ones as well, because. Because we all are serving the system, is really critical. And so when we talk about Pell eligibility, when we talk about low interest loans, all of this debate that we're having about higher education and whether the federal government should invest and, oh, by the way, competition, you know, so that we can compete internationally for research dollars and others, you know, there is a role for us to play. For sure, there is a role for the federal government to play as well. If we believe that what we do really helps our economic ability in this country, really helps our competitiveness. And so I think that we can't leave it to just the colleges as you all need to figure out this affordability thing. This is a public good sometimes dealt with by private institutions. The government has a role to play here and we have to be in A combat together. If we believe that this is something that's good for society.

[Sian Beilock]

Thank you.

[Jodi Kantor]

And by the way, I like that.

Your sort of mental institution is one in which a C is still a middle. Great.

That's nice for us old people to hear. Okay, President, I think you.

[James Harris]

I just want to piggyback on this. I think it's hard to separate and give a grade to higher education without giving a grade to our nation and what's important for social mobility in our nation. You look at the history of higher education in America, you go all the way back to the Civil War. In the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signs the Moral Land Grant act, which opens up an entire area for agricultural study, mechanical studies. 20 years later, you have HBCuser, created by the second Morrill land grant. World War II. 9 million veterans are coming back. There's going to be high unemployment. The federal government, under Dwight, or under the administration at that time with Truman, they look to higher education to solve the problem. Sputnik goes up, we have a scientific crisis in the United States. What happens? We create a national defense fund to help create more scientists to fund engineering across the country. Pell Grant comes in the 1960s, in the time the civil rights. So every time there was an issue that the United States had to solve, higher education was somewhere in that solution. Just three years ago, our current vice president said, higher education is the problem. And so there is this public trust that we've lost. But it's about the public good. It's about giving back. And I think we can recapture that by demonstrating what we do in our local communities and how we help our local communities thrive. It's the economy. It's helping the nonprofit sector as well as helping K12 education. So when I give us a grade as a sector, perhaps on looking to our local communities, I'd say it's a C, maybe a C minus. And we haven't done as much as we should. Many of the schools around this table have done quite a bit in their local communities. It makes a difference, but that's not the norm in higher education.

[Jodi Kantor]

Okay, great. Anybody else want to offer?

[Daniel Diermeier]

I just think it's very difficult to talk about this in general. So if you look at the four or five or six of us sitting around this table here, the financial aid support that we provide to our students is absolutely extraordinary. So what Ron was talking about, I mean, it's just like it's important to kind of let that sit there, is that you have three or four, four out of five Americans can go to a great university, get a phenomenal education for free, no debt, nothing. They leave without having no debt whatsoever. And their financial aid is matching their. The financial aid of rebrands is matching their financial aid. There's a tremendous commitment, and it's supported by literally hundreds of millions of dollars every year. That comes from alums that give back the endowment and so forth. That is an enormous contribution. And then there's sectors where we have high debt loads, where students don't finish their degree. They don't really reap all the benefits from the education. So it's, I think the overall sense that this is. There's this overall debt crisis really needs to be segmented by different parts of the university system. And it's. And it's very important to understand that, because if we're not understanding that properly, we're making bad policy choices. So we all had this battle over the endowment tax. Many of us were part of that. The endowment is used for financial aid. So those are, I think, the overall perception, the lack of trust that you're talking about. It's really important to be precise about that and not have these kind of overgeneralizations.

[Jodi Kantor]

So let's actually move into some more material about the president, the administration, its relationship to higher education. I want to start with you, President Daniels, because you wrote a book in 2021 called what Universities Owe Democracy. First of all, that's some pretty prescient work.

And what you said is, I'm just going to read you a couple of your own lines.

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

Hope you still agree.

[Jodi Kantor]

I mean, I so dread this one.

Our institutions of higher education can be neither indifferent nor passive in the face of democratic backsliding. And then I won't read the whole paragraph, but the next paragraph is about you take an international perspective and you talk about what happened in Hungary with Viktor Orban and Central University, and you talk about Turkey and executive decrees to arrest or fire thousands of academics. You talk about Brazil and slashing university budgets and Bolsonaro threatening to abolish programs deemed too leftist. Most recently in Afghanistan. The American University of Afghanistan was among the first institutions to face the wrath of the Taliban. So if I understand your point correctly, what you were trying to open people's eyes to is that there is a connection between our universities and democracy, and universities are guardians of democracy. Here we are. We're not in the first inning of the second Trump administration. We're somewhere in the middle. A lot has happened that I am going to take for granted that anyone who listens to a New York Times panel understands, where are we now, especially when we're looking in the context of those international examples. How worried are you that the Trump administration's actions towards higher education constitute a threat to democracy?

[Ron Daniels]

It's clearly a very challenging moment for higher education.

We've seen the various attacks on a number of different institutions which have resulted in pretty draconian, indeed unprecedented action.

Around suspension of federal payments, other kinds of actions taken. Some of those actions have been very specific. In other cases, we've seen a very significant.

Set of changes to the way in which, for instance, the Research Compact is understood that for 80 years has governed American higher education in which we have earned funds from the federal government and then spent them on research that is designed to advance the public interest.

So in all these ways, I think we're facing what is at least, I think for many of us, a pretty unprecedented attack. And of course, to the extent that you look at these other precedents where you see attacks on universities as part and parcel of a more general attack on liberal democracy, this is serious. Having said that, I think it's important to underscore the problem that we face as leaders of American universities is that the attacks on higher education and the diminished trust in higher education didn't start with this administration. If you look at the.

Stat that is cited most frequently, which is the shift in the Gallup poll numbers in terms of the percentages of Americans who have trust in higher education, in 2014, about 56% of the American public express confidence trust in higher education. Several years later, that drops to 37%. But significantly, and this is something that we have to own, is that that drop in trust is not restricted just to Republicans. It's Republicans and Dems. And so, yes, we are seeing a pretty serious set of attacks and challenges coming from this administration towards American higher education. But I think it's tapping into something that has a resonance with the American public. And I think that requires at least as we think about the nature of these tax, that.

We can see them as unfair, as exaggerated, as shrill, as ill founded, all of those things. But at the same time, I think we have to look and see, are there kernels of truth in some of the criticisms that are fueling this attack, that require us to take note of them and just shift the way in which we are conducting ourselves within the university?

[Jodi Kantor]

Well, on that note, I wanted to ask you, Chancellor King, because you are a former US Secretary of Education appointed by a Democrat, do you find anything correct in the Trump administration's critique of higher Ed.

[John King]

Yeah, look, I think the notion that particularly the most well resourced, most selective institutions tended to be ideologically uniform and lack viewpoint diversity, that's a fair, I think, critique. The idea that some campuses were allowed, were too lenient in the early days of the post.

10-7- protests and allowed students to.

Abuse their peers as part of their protests. Yeah, that's a fair critique. And those critiques, I think, kind of blended with a general public distrust of institutions and were very effective cudgel for the administration. I do think the sector is responding in thoughtful ways. People are adopting content neutral time, place and manner restrictions and making clear this is how you protest appropriately. And this is where it crosses a line. People are, we certainly are at SUNY leaning into Title 6 enforcement and making sure we protect students against discrimination.

That said, I think there's a larger challenge in that. And people look at the most elite institutions with intense skepticism because in part they think they just do class reproduction, that they are a place where the elite come and reproduce themselves. But if you ask people about their local community college, their regional public, even their state flagship, they're pretty enthusiastic about them. But they are skeptical about these institutions that feel very far away from them. And that's something the sector has to grapple with.

[Jodi Kantor]

It was interesting in reading some of the pre conversations and preparations for this panel. Pretty much everybody here said that more viewpoint diversity is very important on American campuses. But I'm wondering is, how do you get conservative students back to largely liberal campuses? I mean, my daughter goes to a university that used to have a real conservative intellectual community and it's faded. I mean, it is barely there anymore. I mean, President Ambar, you are a very good person to ask.

Do you want a significant conservative population at Oberlin College of all places? And how would you actually convince those kids to show up on your campus?

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

It does no service for our students to be talking to people who are exactly like them from, from the same background that they have, from the same political perspective. So we absolutely want all types of students there, more conservative students, more students who have different perspectives. So I spend a lot, I try to go to almost every admissions student event and we talk about the fact.

[Jodi Kantor]

That you go to like every information session.

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

Not information session. The big.

[Jodi Kantor]

I was going to say, I've been on college numbers. You are so nice.

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

No, not there. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. But at the big admissions event, I try to do all of those events and we talk about this issue of dialogue and conversation and the ability to have conversations across difference, what students really want is not so much a conservative, a libertarian, a Democrat. They want to have diverse conversations with people who are unlike them. And talking to students who have conservative perspectives. They want to be engaged in these debates. We're a better country when we have these engaged conversations. So what you're really saying to students and parents and families is that you want to be at a place where you see people who are unlike you, have different perspectives than you do, and conservative students want that. We have a Christian student organization on campus.

[Jodi Kantor]

Sure, but how are you like it is?

I almost hesitate to ask because it sounds laughable. Like, how would we get an Oberlin College that is even 10% Trump voters? Like, is that at all plausible?

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

Well, I think that the question really is, do students come in with an open perspective about how they think about the world? So we let me just be really straightforward because I have young 18 year olds, we talk in these dynamics. Conservative Republican Trump voters. Students don't talk in that same way. They talk about the big intractable issues. They're definitely more interested in solutions that go across political spectrums than we do. So I think we're more caught up in this kind of labeling than students are. What they're really interested in is people who have interesting, compelling ideas that solve the world's most intractable problems.

[Jodi Kantor]

I know, but how many students on your campus have a friend who believes that abortion is morally wrong?

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

I think the students have friends that believe that abortion is morally wrong. I think they have students who have a Christian perspective. I think we have international students that come from a variety of viewpoints. Like, I think that there are lots of conversations about that. I mean, I think the challenge for students is when you're having that conversation, how do you have it in a respectful way that people can have the openness? So, you know, one of the reasons why I believe so deeply in and sustained dialogue is because it asks you to do a couple of things. To have a hard back but a soft front. A hard back is I can keep my perspective, I can keep my viewpoints, but a soft front is I'm open to other people's perspectives and viewpoints. The real question for them is how do you have a conversation with someone where you're not trying to change their mind, you're trying to understand why they have that viewpoint. If we can demonstrate to conservative students, liberal students, whoever it is, that you're going to be able to do that on a college campus, it will feel more like a place that everyone's welcome. I mean it doesn't serve Oberlin to be a place where everybody believes the same thing, or that if you're not a Bernie Sanders supporter, you shouldn't be on campus.

[Sian Beilock]

Right.

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

That doesn't serve us at all. We want to change the world for good. And we want to do that in every sector, in every industry, in every space and place. And having students that only have one political perspective doesn't serve what we want to do in the world.

[Jodi Kantor]

That I understand completely. But I want to ask again, does anybody have a plausible path for increasing the conservative populations at what are not all of your institutions, but most of your institutions lean pretty heavily liberal?

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

Go ahead.

[Ron Daniels]

I think it's two track. It's one, you've got to make it clear to students who come from a conservative background that there's a place for them at the institution. So you have to be quite intentional in the way in which you reach out to those communities who might not have otherwise see themselves as.

Naturally interested in a place like Hopkins. This means that you're recruiting from outside of the coast. And again, we do these things. We have very intentional marketing practices, various events that we hold, trying to attract students in. But the second part of this is I think it's absolutely critical that we're able to model a community where you can really have these discussions and do them in a respectful way. But I think another key component of this is are there faculty who are seriously steeped in conservative traditions, respectful of them, working from those perspectives, bringing that viewpoint into the classroom in a way that just normalizes this kind of conversation and perspective. And I think this is something where again, if you look at.

The data on how higher education skews, I think the one comment that really sticks with me is there's probably the professoriate in American universities is the most liberal leaning profession of any profession within the country. That's an issue, particularly if we want to be salient, legitimate to half of America that doesn't necessarily see themselves in progressive positions. So I think it's intentionality around students, but I think it also has to be married to thinking about the faculty.

[Sian Beilock]

And I would say you have to back up and talk about what the mission of our universities are. And I think we as an industry lost the plot a little bit. Our mission is education, it's research. We're not political organizations like the RNC or dnc. We're also not social advocates organizations. Our mission is to bring people together with different views. Not because we're bean counting Republicans and Democrats, but because the data are very clear that when you have different people with different ideas, you get better outcomes. You don't fall prey to groupthink. You're able to challenge orthodoxies and norms. And you've gotta start at a mission level about what the institution stands for and what it does. And I know a number of us around the table have done this in various ways. At Dartmouth, we have institutional restraint or neutrality where we are saying that we are going to comment and focus on educational issues, but we're not, as an institution going to take a political position because we don't want to quell dialogue on our campus. And the underlying mission and values there are that we're bringing people with different ideas, different perspectives and sending them out with those skills to lead our democracy.

[Daniel Diermeier]

I can, if I just add one more point to that. So I think.

All these are exactly right. But you got to look at some kind of health signals on campus. Right. For example, do you have a robust college Democrats and Republican chapter on campus? Do they have joint events? Do they treat each other with respect? Can they bring speakers to campus where they're not being disruptive or shouted down? So I think there are specific aspects which I think you really have to look at. If you got that right. And then following up a little bit on something that Sian just said.

The ability to have discourse across differences is really critical, but that is not a given. When students come to campus, you have to do active programming so that they're able to do this because they're not prepared by their high schools.

[Jodi Kantor]

How does that intersect with the fact that the Trump administration is putting tremendous pressure on DEI promotion practices? Right. It's become a dirty word in some corridors, both when it comes to hiring, when it comes to admissions. Affirmative action for higher education has been overturned. If we talk about different voices and different life experiences melding together.

How is the anti DEI pressure from this administration actually affecting your students and faculty of color? Does a job applicant who is black have the same chances right now that they did a few years ago?

[Daniel Diermeier]

I think they're totally two separate issues. But one of them, I think that's critical here is that what we want to have is we want to have students and faculty from all sorts of different backgrounds that can together be focused on the mission of the university, whether that's path breaking research or transformative education. And then there are barriers to access, whether they're financial or, for example, students from rural backgrounds may not be as willing to apply to universities. Then you have to remove these barriers. And these barriers can be financial, they can be non financial. So that you have the variety of voices on campus. That's, I think, the way to think about it. I'm a little bit.

This whole point of view is that you have to have kind of these match pairs of different perspectives. I'm a little bit more skeptical on that. I think it's more important that we take out the politicization of the university. That to me, is critical, certainly.

[Jodi Kantor]

But are you confident, can you say with certainty that the backlash against DEI in the last couple of years has not negatively affected your students and faculty of color?

[John King]

Of course it has.

[Jodi Kantor]

Of course it has. So say more.

[John King]

I think for black and Latino students, they are getting a message that higher ed is not for them. And that certainly was the message from the Supreme Court in the SFFA decision. Now the question for higher ed institutions is how will we respond and what strategies will we have to make sure that all students have a sense of belong on campus?

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

I think that concern was real. I think, you know, when the various executive orders were being sort of tumbling out so quickly, lots of people on campus, not just faculty of color and students of color, but lots of people were concerned about whether people were suggesting that people of different races and ethnicities shouldn't show up on our college campuses. And so all the work we're trying to do to make everyone feel welcome and supported is a part of that work. And some of what we have to be fair about is that this administration has declared a vision for the world that's clear, but many of the underlying laws haven't changed. And so, you know, I think that some of our efforts to kind of twist ourselves into a pretzel to conform to how the administration has declared its vision may have gone a little bit too far. And I think we have to ask ourselves some questions about that. I'm sure the disagreements at this table about that.

But I think that those are fair questions about whether everyone feels welcome on a college campus.

[Sian Beilock]

But it goes back to first principles. I think we have to be able to say, what do we do? We're educational institutions. I would think that no one at this table. You can tell me if you disagree, but I would assert very strongly that diversity is not at odds with meritocracy. And the whole idea is to have different people with different perspectives from race, from ideology, all together. And that we shouldn't as institutions be political footballs over rotating when Democrats put in requirements about how we get grants and the kinds of statements we write, or over rotating when the Republicans do The same thing. And that is where higher education will shine, when we can be independent institutions pushing on our values and not falling prey to the ideals of one leadership or another. And that's where I think we have work to do.

[Jodi Kantor]

President Levin, what is Stanford's secret in avoiding the wrath of the Trump administration? So many of your peer institutions have been targeted by the administration. My sense is that Stanford has barely like, perhaps in a very minor way to date. Given that you are, you know, one of the most powerful players on the field, how do you explain that?

[Jonathan Levin]

I think you'd probably have to talk to someone in the administration to hear about how they've thought about different institutions and so forth. But I think what I would say.

[Jodi Kantor]

Are there things you've done to avoid it?

[Jonathan Levin]

Well, I think, you know, when I think about the Stanford or really, you know, all of the universities that are in a similar category, I think.

[Daniel Diermeier]

The.

[Jonathan Levin]

Way I think about it is.

We have a very distinctive mission as institutions. We are the creators of knowledge and innovation in this country and we are the sort of foundation of opportunity and education, educating citizens, leaders.

I think actually it's a mistake for universities as, as Tsian just said, to spend too much time trying to think about exactly how to navigate tech back and forth in political winds. Universities are long lived institutions that will be around for decades and hopefully centuries. And so in thinking about the kind of current political environment, whatever it is, whether it's this administration or the next one or the last one, we're. Our goal is not to be positioned well for an election or not an election. Our goal is to.

Execute on being great places for learning, great places for students to come to be exposed to different ideas, to develop, to go on to great lives and to have the greatest scholars in the world come and create the ideas that are going to benefit society. And so I try to keep, personally my own view is in thinking about the political situation, I try to think about not what's going to be good for the current news cycle, but what is going to look good when we look back in 10 or 50 years about how we execute on things, most of the things that we have done at Stanford, that if someone was to point and say those look like prescient decisions, we started them before the current administration came in. We started our civil discourse initiatives before the current administration came in. We started to try to be more disciplined with our spending and staff growth and bureaucracy and red tape before the mission came in. We've had a conservative think tank in the middle of our campus for Decades. And we opened it up to students to take classes and be research assistants and have summer internships. And it's a great thing for them and it's a great thing for the faculty who are, who are there. And I think those would have been good actually in any political climate. They probably are particularly good in the current one. But I think we would have done them anyway. And we should have done them anyway.

[Jodi Kantor]

Terrific. Okay, so we are running out of time. But to close, I made a request in advance, which is that I'd like to finish with each of you paying a compliment to a different institution, not your own, about something you think that institution is doing really well. And I'm asking you for the following reason, which is I really get that it's almost. It is very tempting to spend all of our time on the problems in higher education. But these are places of flourishing and hope and innovation and magic. And also because higher education is very competitive, I think it's really interesting to hear what you admire and are even a little jealous of at other institutions. So, President Harris, will you start us off?

[James Harris]

But we're a Catholic institution, so jealousy is a sin. I can't.

[Jodi Kantor]

It's an admiring kind of jealousy. It's a reverent jealousy.

[James Harris]

I admire many things that my colleagues here are doing around the table. I'll pick out one institution, it's in Chicago. Loyola of Chicago happens to be a Catholic institution. And about 10 years ago they discovered that they were not having success in drawing a certain population from within Chicago of low income families, weren't having access to Loyola, they weren't going to meet the standards to get in and so forth. So they formed something named after a Catholic saint, Arrupe, where they provided and created essentially a two year system. It's still part of the Loyola University because single, I think in Chicago at that time the graduation rate for two year college students was less than 10%. And so they wanted to see those students have access. And what they did, they created this opportunity for them to have the two years. They go debt free. And so they come to Loyola in their third year with no debt. And now these students are so well prepared that they're actually being picked off by schools around the nation to do this. So I admire the fact that they, they solved a problem, they found a unique solution within their own system. They could do that. And it's really making a difference in Chicago and in society.

[Daniel Diermeier]

I think one of the things that Jonathan said earlier is really important is that we completely under appreciate to what extent the great American universities are the engine of innovation in this country. And when I look at universities that where I say, like, well, they're doing this really well, I think it is some of the university. I was faculty member at stanford in the mid-90s. I remember what happened there, the magic that happened there. And a variety of other universities do that. And what they do is they create a culture where innovation is encouraged by faculty and best students and they're permeable to their environment. So I think what I always love is when universities are part of their community, particularly when they're connected with the innovation ecosystem.

[John King]

Another thing that universities do really well is being engines of social mobility. And so UC Merced, University of California at Merced, I think they're over 60% Pell, over 60% first generation, and they're usually ranked number one or at least in the top five for social mobility. And so in a very competitive spirit, we have some campuses in the SUNY system that are close to that. But I want all of our campuses to deliver that kind of return on investment. Investment for students.

[Jodi Kantor]

Wonderful.

[Ron Daniels]

Daniel. For Johns Hopkins, rooted in on city Baltimore, which has a lot of serious economic challenges. We've suffered very significant deindustrialization, a city of 1.2 million at one time now down about 550,000 people. For us, as we think about our role as an anchor institution, we can't help but look at Palo Alto, to look at Cambridge and to see the extent to which the ecosystem that has evolved there, first and foremost predicated on very strong research universities, but in conjunction with a host of different actors, has done remarkable things in terms of the strength of the communities that have emerged around those institutions. And so for us at Hawthorne, Hopkins were constantly thinking about this challenge. Given that traditionally we've received a lot of federal research funding, how can we use that funding more effectively in terms of our translational activity and ultimately with a view to building more economic strength in the city of which we're part.

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

Great.

[Jonathan Levin]

I think of every, you know, every university, every institution is, has sort of made many choices, often that are designed to be complementary to one another. So if you're going to be an elite research university, you hire a very small number of highly selected faculty, and you typically pair them with a relatively small number of highly selected students. And that's sort of part of the model. And so when I look around, I tend to admire the universities that have just done completely different things than what we did, but they're pieces fit together. So I admire, for example, John's system because it just opens up access to over a million students here. Or Arizona State, which has something like 85,000 students and is not selective at all in terms of who's admitted. And they've made lots of choices that feed into that and allow those universities, those colleges to be incredible engines of upward mobility in this country and have access to and you know, in a way that we can do that for a small set of students that we admit with financial aid, but we can't do that at 10x the scale with the same thing. So I tend to look around at those universities and think it's so good that this country has this diverse array of colleges and universities. We need to figure out how to make that whole ecosystem stronger instead of getting too over focused on one particular segment of the system.

[Sian Beilock]

Well, at a time when college presidents, their longevity is decreasing, I will say. As president of Dartmouth, I am in my third year as president of the Ivy League institution and I'm the third longest serving Ivy president. And so I've seen a lot of change around me. I really admire Ron Daniels and his work at Hopkins and the fact that he's now been there with what, 16.

[Jodi Kantor]

17 years, that is really extraordinary. I remember that freak of nature.

[Sian Beilock]

An important leader in higher education and I think a beacon of the kind of stability that is really important for us to continue to thrive as really such an important part of America and our democracy and social mobility, really.

[Jodi Kantor]

Okay, President Ambar, bring us home.

[Carmen Twillie Ambar]

So I'm going to just choose one of the sectors so, you know, community colleges educate 47% of students. The work that they're doing around prior assessment, learning to get credit for work that you've already done, their ability to have multiple start times, I mean, you know, not these 15 week segments that we are committed to, the ability to get three credits over three weekends. Right. That's really opening up access to lots and lots of people to get a college education. And I think that we need to look to our community colleges colleagues and their work for some of the innovation that we need to adopt at a lot of our institutions. If we want to talk about costs, we want to talk about access, we want to talk about social mobility and we want to do that well across the sector. Our community college colleagues are doing some really great work.

[Jodi Kantor]

Okay, wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us.

We just can't say how much we appreciate it because the stakes of your work are just so important and consequential. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin]

Dealbook Summit is a production of the New York Times. This episode was produced by Evan Roberts, mixing by Kelly Pieklo and Katie McMurran. Original music by Daniel Powell. The rest of the Dealbook Events team includes Julie Zahn, Hilary Coon, Melissa Tripoli, Beth Weinstein, Angela Austin, Haley Hess, Dana Prukowski, Matt Kaiser, Chantal Rainier and Yen Wei Liu. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Nina Lassom, Christina Josa and Maddie Masiel.