← Front Burner
Front Burner
Princeton president on the future of university
00:38:22
<p>Today on the show, the President of Princeton University, Christopher Eisgruber, joins us. </p><p><br></p><p>He makes a defense of the role of post secondary institutions at a time when they are at the centre of a culture war and the target of an incredibly hostile White House that casts universities and professors as the enemy.</p><p><br></p><p>He discusses the limits of free speech, his views on civility, artificial intelligence and more.</p><p><br></p><p>For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts</a></p>
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This summer, don't squeeze in. Spread out. Find homes big enough for your whole guest list on vrbo. That's vacation rentals done. Right? Book your stay now.
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This is a cbc podcast.
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Hi, everyone. I'm jamie poisson. Today on the show, the president of Princeton, Christopher Eisgruber, joins us. He has this book out called Terms of How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, which at its core is a defense of the role of post secondary institutions at a time when they are at the center of a culture war and a target of an incredibly hostile White House that casts universities and professors as the enemy. We're going to discuss the limits of free speech, his views on civility, AI and more. Foreign. It's great to have you on the show. Thanks for being here, Jamie.
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B
It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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A
So your book will be central to much of our discussion today. While very relevant given this political moment, it was actually handed in before the start of Trump's second term and before his campaign against institutions of higher education really set its course. Before we get into that, why don't you talk to me a little bit about what life has been like as the president of a major American university one year into Trump's second term as president.
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B
So I think, Jamie, the old line, kind of the best of times and the worst of times about this, on the one hand, when I look at what's happening on my own campus right now, I am thrilled by the quality of the students that we have. I'm thrilled by the quality of the education we're able to offer and by the research that's going on. And there's a strong sense of mission and community on the campus. At the same time, we're dealing with a turbulent period right now when the historic partnership between American universities and the American government is under threat in ways that we haven't seen in seven decades. Right. That partnership is built on simultaneous commitments to funding research that has benefited, I would say, the world and my country, and on protecting academic freedom at the same time. And there have always been people who have criticized academic freedom. But that partnership and the commitment to both of those fundamental pillars of what universities do has held up over the past year that's been at risk. And so those of us who lead universities have been working very hard to ensure that that partnership can continue into the Future.
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In a 1972 phone conversation, President Richard Nixon said, quote, the professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy.
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The professors are the enemy. Write that in the blackboard 100 times.
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Nearly 50 years later, in a 2021 speech titled The Universities are the Enemy, J.D. vance has argued that conservatives should, quote,
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honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.
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So here you have a president and a vice president separated by a half century, articulating very similar and hostile views of the American university. And what do you think universities have come to represent in the American political imagination? And why have they been, and become once again such central targets of conservative backlash?
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B
So I would say, you know, the American political imagination isn't one thing, it's a, it's a fractured and multivalent thing. And so people think of universities differently and even particular individuals like our vice president, who you mentioned, who's a product of Yale Law School, for example, and the Ohio State University, can have multiple views about universities at the same time. There's always been this tension, at least within American history, and I think within democracies more broadly, about what it means to have institutions that are in various ways elite and intellectual within a broader popular and sometimes populist democracy. And those tensions, you, you mentioned A quote from 1972, I think it is from, from Richard Nixon and, and a quote then again from the Vice President Vance. Today, particularly when our country is going through turbulent times, some of those tensions come out more vividly. But I think there's a, a mixture at all times, maybe within democracies generally, certainly within the United States, between suspicion of these, these institutions that can seem so different from the rest of society and pride in them and what they can accomplish and what they stand for.
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The Trump administration has depicted American universities as sites of liberal or really even radical left wing indoctrination.
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Our universities in many cases have become incubators for extremism. They become the equivalent of, of madrasas for jihadism. One of the things that I've been talking about is doing some vetting on how the courses are being taught and to make sure that we have equal and diverse viewpoints. I mean, when Harvard will, through its own Harvard Crimson, say that only 3% of the faculty are conservative, I don't think we have diversity of viewpoints in
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A
that case, that these institutions train the country's elite in versions of history, economics, politics that are kind of hostile to the United States and its institutions. That's really how they frame it. And how would you respond to that accusation?
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B
Yeah, what I would say is I think allegations of indoctrination, which aren't new. Right. You can go back to William F. Buckley writing in the 1950s and talking about indoctrination from the left wing at Yale in the 1940s, which was not a particularly left wing place. Some of these tropes are old within American politics and can exploit divisions that exist. There's no evidence for indoctrination. Faculty members may have political views that are different from what the mainstream political views are. But when you survey students and ask them whether or not they are able to express competing views and whether they feel like their professors are giving them a fair treatment of the material that they are seeing, students answer very affirmatively to that. There's a poll out recently from the Lumina foundation and Gallup, the public opinion pollsters called College Reality Check, where they match up some of these findings in general public opinion polls, what outsiders say about universities and then what the students say. And students consistently say that they feel like professors across American universities allow them to have fair conversations. And as I said earlier, Jamie, get different statements from people, even those who are critics of universities. The, you know, President Trump produced a letter talking about the importance of the partnership between the American government and American universities and saying that he wanted to usher in a new golden age of research. So universities are places where you get a lot of independent thought. They are places where students and faculty are free to protest. When you get divisions within society, they're going to be places that, that produce provocative speech. It's not surprising that people react to that speech. I guess the last thing I'll say about this is you're right to call attention to these statements and these, these quotations. Another part of what we have to understand and what is a pretty complicated picture is at the same time we see some of this pride and support. We have also seen in ways that the quotes you just mentioned reflect a long term campaign against American universities that's designed to take what I think are sometimes idiosyncratic events and use them to delegitimate or attack these universities, try to pressure them to change in particular directions.
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A
You mentioned earlier that JD Vance is a product of Yale. I'm also thinking about Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz and even Donald Trump. These guys are all products of the Ivy League system, right. And yet they are kind of at the vanguard of this movement that you are describing and like leaders in this campaign against these same institutions that helped produce them. And how is it the case that these men who personally benefited from these elite academic institutions are now, you know, so, so vocally against them? Like what, what do you think is going on there?
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Well, I, you know, some of this would, would require me to speculate about people where I don't know them well enough to, to be able to do that confidently. What I would say in all of those cases is I, I think in different ways there is appreciation for what it is that universities can do. There's a desire for universities to be different at the same time. So a lot of the conversation at, in the United States today is around issues about political balance or what people will sometimes call viewpoint diversity within the United States. So I think what all four of the people that you mentioned might say is that they recognize the importance of having high quality universities in the United States. But what they're trying to do is to change those universities to, to make them different in, in some way. My concern is that although we should always be having debates about what the best way is to run a university and how universities can improve themselves, those debates have to be respectful of academic freedom and they have to be respectful of the focus that universities require on what's true as a, as a matter of scholarship and on the freedom of thought. And that that gets compromised if people try to push in one political direction or another. What if a marginal gain unlocked greater performance? What if an insight in data could change everything? At Aramco, our focus on detail helps us deliver reliable energy to millions across the world. Because margins aren't marginal. They're where we can truly push the limits of what's possible. Aramco, an integrated energy and chemicals company. Learn more@aramco.com
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not so friendly reminder that no one who's actually good at their job is the office bully, like at all. But we can handle that. For all of the no fluff advice for getting ahead in your career without losing your mind, listen to Clock in with Emily Durham. Wherever you get your podcasts, I want to move to campus protests with you. Probably the most famous contemporary example of campus protests over the last few years has been in relation to the ongoing war in Gaza. In 2024, tens of thousands of students on campuses all over the world, in places like the US also here in Canada, engaged in these months long protest movements aimed at bringing their schools to disinvest from the state of Israel, who they believed to be overseeing a program of genocide. In Gaza,
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just outside the gates of Columbia University, massive protests filling the streets. Police moved in after dark to arrest demonstrators at New York University. There were arrests at Yale University too. Dozens of them. We, the students of Princeton for the Liberation of Palestine, know what is right. History will be on our side. We shall not be moved. We will not stop. We will not rest. Princeton Must disclose and divest.
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A
The encampment at Princeton marked the longest sit in in the school's nearly 300 year history. I know it included student arrests and some controversy, but just what was your thinking as this was all unfolding?
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Well, part of my thing was these episodes are really hard to go through. Right. And particularly under circumstances, as one of my counterparts put it. To some extent you have students protesting against one another, which isn't always the case. That's not true if the issue is say, climate change or I would say even South Africa. But on our campus, and I think most university campuses, you had students on both sides of issues about Gaza and Israel and very engaged. And that made on any of these university campuses the management of the situation even more difficult than it would otherwise be. My strong view about this is you have to have principles about what kind of speech you allow and, and a very strong set of time, place and manner principles and there's room for choice. There are differences between what that's going to be in Canada and what's it going to be in the United States in terms of our different constitutional laws. And at a private university like mine, there is going to be a fair amount of discretion that a university might have and how it sets our, our rules. In our case, we've adopted rules that are very similar to those in the US Constitution, which is we don't prohibit speech in general on the basis of its content. So our policies explicitly say that even speech which is offensive or wrongheaded is speech that in general we are going to tolerate. The answer to bad speech if people think it's bad, if they disagree, is more speech, not censorship. On the other hand, we also have clear rules about whether or not you can pitch a tent somewhere, whether you can take over building, whether or not you can use spray paint to make your point. And over the course of what was a difficult year in 2023, 24, what we did was to be scrupulously faithful on the one hand to our, our free speech policies. There were fol telling me they wanted me to censor what students were saying in pro Gaza protest because they found the speech offensive. And I said that's not our rule, it's not the American constitutional approach. And, and we're not going to censor because the speech is offensive. On the other hand, when students began pitching tents, that was a violation of our rules. And I think when you have time, place and manner rules, you have to enforce them. So you mentioned an encampment. It didn't technically have tents the students weren't allowed to sleep out overnight. They were, they were rotating. And it was a long term protest, but it was different from an encampment where you had tents and then at one point, students tried to take over a building. And again, we immediately arrested at that point. Because I think the way you sustain a community where people who disagree as they did about this issue can have the conversations that need to be had is on the one hand, you have to allow people to express their opinions even when they're very controversial. And on the other hand, you have to enforce your time, place and manner rules.
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I wonder if I could ask you to articulate a little bit more what the boundaries are for Princeton when it comes to free speech. Like white supremacists, someone like Nick Fuentes, would he be allowed to come and speak on campus? Or is that a line too far?
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He would be allowed to speak on the campus. Look, we're not a public university, so it's not as though anybody has a, has a right to say, hey, I just want a venue over there. But we are a place that gives our, our students and our faculty tremendous freedom to decide whom it is they want to invite to the campus. I hope they will use that, and we encourage them to use that freedom wisely and judiciously. I, I don't think that just because a speaker is provocative that makes them a good person to invite to the campus. But we have had very provocative speakers on both sides, for example, of the Israel Palestine dispute invited to our campus. And what we do under those circumstances, if there's an invitation, is we work with the group to make sure that the person can speak securely. We work to make sure that if people want to protest without disrupting the event, that they are able to do that. But we don't have a set of lines that say, well, this kind of speech is unacceptable on the campus. I don't want that right to become the censor. I don't want the responsibility of becoming the censor. There are a lot of views that might have been expressed around the Israel Gaza issue that I might have found offensive, that I know alumni and others on both sides found offensive. It's important to have those conversations go on if people want to hear from a particular speaker.
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I was curious to ask you about another major flashpoint at Princeton that revolved around the man responsible for the creation of the university as it exists today. And that is none other than Woodrow Wilson. Now, Wilson was president of the university
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before becoming the governor of New Jersey
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and then president of the United states.
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And in 1913, he supported segregation, barred black students from Princeton, and spoke approvingly of the Ku Klux Klan.
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Wilson's name had long graced Princeton School of Public and International affairs, very famous school, and was removed in 2020 following years of persistent protests and advocacy from both students and also very high profile faculty at your university.
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The board of trustees decision came down late yesterday, citing Wilson's racist views and policies. The school says he segregated the federal civil service after it had been racially integrated for decades.
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And during his term at Princeton, not a single black student was admitted. I know in 2015, there was actually a sit in in your personal office where a dozen or so students occupied your office for something like 30 hours. And can you talk to me a little bit about the Woodrow Wilson issue and how you're thinking on this question, evolved and what lessons you took from, from this moment?
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B
Yeah. So this was another very hard passage for me and, and for the university. I think one thing that people listening to the podcast need to understand about Wilson and Princeton was, as you said, he was kind of a, a second founder for the university, had been around a long time, but he created the modern Princeton University and actually moved it forward in many progressive ways. And for a long time at Princeton, up until these protests, we basically talked about him like he was a secular saint. He had been a distinguished professor at the university, had been its president. He took it from a sleepy college into a research university, became governor of New New Jersey and President of the United States. So we invoked him often and always favorably. I think relatively few people knew on the campus about his racism and people didn't discuss it. And so in 2015, students occupied my office around a variety of issues. But these were students who said, look, this is honoring this man in the way that we do, doesn't create the kind of community that we should have at Princeton, and isn't faithful to our ideals because he's being held out as an exemplar of statesmanship when, when he's a racist and, and that's not an appropriate thing to be doing. That was a tough thing to hear. It was a tough thing to deal with. I think despite his racism, Woodrow Wilson did more than I'll ever do to improve Princeton University and probably more than any other president did. But his racism was awful and really had serious consequences for the country as well as for the, the university. So as a result of those protests, we set up a trustee committee that heard from people throughout the Princeton community. They held various town halls they solicited letters from a range of historians around the country who wrote eight page letters basically talking about Wilson and what they thought his legacy meant. That first committee made a recommendation that we talk differently about Wilson, that we erect a memorial that specifically addressed his racism on campus, but that we not change the names. And it wasn't until several years later, as you rightly said, after more protests and after the George Floyd murder in Minnesota, that, that we, we decided, well, given the gravity of what Wilson had done, we really do need to remove the, the name. Part of what I learned from that, I learned a lot of things, first of all about Wilson, I have to say I didn't know all about, of his history and his racism. I learned things that were really important about what it was to be a black member of our community and the fact that lots of people on our campus were suppressing this objection that they had to a kind of hero that, that we were holding out on the campus. I also learned some of the things about what, what it is you have to do when you're managing a protest. So I think we eventually reached the right decision when we removed Wilson's name. But there are some people who will always see it as illegitimate because the beginnings of the process that I just described took place when students were occupying my office. And we agreed to start some of these committees before they left the office. And there are people who are saying, well, you were just yielding to bullying and pressure from those students. And what I would advise now is you've got to end the protest and you've got to enforce your time, place and manner rules before you decide what it is you're going to do about the substantive issue. Partly because that issue has to be one where everybody in the community can feel like they are able to participate in it and in discussing it on fair terms. And if you're doing it as part of a deal with students, it looks like you're being motivated by something other than the reasons that should drive the, the decisions.
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When you think about the university today as an institution, I wonder what role you see it occupying or the most important role you see it occupying. And I asked you this in part because at your commencement speech last year, you framed universities as existing within what you call this Socratic spirit. It is the university that creates discontent
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with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university like Socrates will be upsetting.
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He went on to say, Socrates was
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so upsetting, so colorful, so provocative, so decidedly not neutral, that the Athenians sentenced him to Death for disrespecting their most sacred beliefs.
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And I guess my question is, you know, is it your belief that the university should be an insurgent force or the bearer of status quo? Should it be a vehicle for social change in progress, a bull work against it? Like, what role do you see it as necessary to play today?
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B
So let me. I'll give you a quick answer and then let me expand a little bit. I. The university has to be a place where people are free to speak their minds and where people pursue the truth even when it's politically unpopular. And I think that will make the university a kind of critic of the existing society because it's not the university's job to say things that are comfortable or patriotic or for that matter, to be a social activist and side with one or another faction. It's the university's place to be a seedbed for independent thought and for truth seeking and for the advancement of knowledge. And if you're doing that well, you're going to upset people sometimes because people cherish their beliefs and the university is going to be challenging those beliefs. What I want to say by a little bit of context is I think the beginning of the quote you read is indeed something I read during my speech, but it comes out of this University of Chicago report called the Calvin report from the 1960s where the university of Chicago set up a committee. At that point they were being pressed to take stands around the Vietnam War in South Africa and, and a lot of political conservatives, among others, not, not exclusively, but among others like to cite this Calvin report because it's the source of the idea of institutional neutrality. And it does say something about universities being institutionally neutral. I don't love the term neutrality, but I'll put that aside for the moment. What they don't quote are the parts that I then quoted in this speech. And I said, look, yes, they said that the university should be the sponsor of critics. The university as an institution should not itself be the critics. But they went on to say it will be by its nature the place that is an engine of social criticism. And this is a direct quote from the Chicago report. Great universities like Socrates will be upsetting. And in that speech, I said that's what they said about the neutral institution of the university, upsetting like Socrates. And we just have to remember how upsetting Socrates was. So I think what that example shows, Jamie, is just if you're being a great university and you're pursuing truth, which is what Socrates did, asking questions in a way that made people uncomfortable and that disregarded social norms because pushing ahead with the argument was so important. You will be a place that is at times upsetting. So I do think universities, because they play this function. I think you used a phrase like engines of progress. They will be that. Because I think truth takes us forward even when it's uncomfortable. I think universities will also be places of social criticism. I think they will also be places that preserve the value of our heritage in various ways. That is, we can get too taken with progress at times and forget things where. Where maybe people had it right in the past and. And we've got caught up in something. And universities should be all of those things. But the defining goal should. Should be this commitment to ask the uncomfortable questions and to pursue truth and scholarship where it leads, not where either social convention or the powerful want to take it.
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A
I want to ask you specifically about AI. There is no shortage of anecdotes coming out of universities of students using AI to write their essays, to do their research, using it as a crutch or a shortcut, taking photos of exams and pasting them into LLMs. I'm not saying that's happening at Princeton, but, I mean, I'm certainly reading anecdotes of it. I've read online that faculty at Princeton have been encouraged to experiment with generative AI tools in the classroom. You're at the forefront of this. You know, I wonder what you believe the place of AI to be in classrooms and on campus.
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B
Yeah, it's a complicated question. I don't think there's one place to it. But let me address some of the things that you. You said. So I. I think all of us who are educators are worried about the use of AI for cheating, and our students are worried about that. So just a couple of days ago, actually, we made a change at Princeton, where we have an honor code, and we'll continue to have an honor code. Students are required and have been required for more than a century to pledge that any work that they submit is their own. That's not changing. But it used to be that exams were unprocered at Princeton. There was nobody supervising the exam because we just counted on the students to report any wrongdoing. The student Honor committee actually requested that we change that policy because they said it's just getting too hard to do that, given the combination of the temptations that exist and all the different ways that students can get that. That information. So I do think we're going to have to make changes in the way we do assessments at Princeton. We're using many more old fashioned in class assessments in addition to things that are required outside of class. On the other hand, I also think we need to recognize that AI for all of us is going to help us to learn more. Right. So, you know, I fundamentally, I'm an optimist at a university that is a knowledge seeking institution about tools that help us to ask questions we could never ask before and learn things we could never learn before. And that that's true in the humanities. There are palimpsest, rolled papyri and transcripts of ancient languages that in the past we couldn't read because you couldn't even unfurl these, these, these scrolls. And we couldn't translate because the languages are so obscure. Artificial intelligence helps us with both. The combination of X ray technology and artificial intelligence helps us with both and enables us to get new insight into ancient cultures. The things that are happening in biology, for example, where we're going to be able to analyze the genetic code and other kinds of information in order to produce cures to diseases and figure out how to treat cancer, are really extraordinary. So AI is going to leverage what we're able to do otherwise. But I think we have to think creatively as educators and as citizens about how it is we retain and preserve our judgment when AI is doing so much for us and when it's so convenient and so easy to reach. So the challenge is about how do you assess students in the classroom and you know, can they use AI on an assignment? We will figure those things out. The challenge about how do you encourage people to engage in immersive reading at a time when you can easily and at the snap of a finger basically get a summary of a book. That's a profound challenge because that immersive state, the sort of reflection and contemplation that we do as readers, I think that's indispensable to the judgment that we need to bring when we figure out how we use AI. So there are fundamental challenges there. As an educator, I guess I'm perennially an optimist, right? There are problems, we attack them. We figure out how to understand them. These are new problems. They're interesting. I believe we will figure it out, but that's not a foregone conclusion.
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A
I wanted to ask you about the concept of civility, which is something that we talk about quite often in our team. And I'd like to talk for a moment about your relationship to the concept of civility, a word we often hear in our politics today. I know that you have advocated for what you refer to as civility rules. Now, I think the popular conception of this idea is essentially that we find ways to embrace dissenting views and talk to one another with more kindness and respect. Barack Obama, for example, has been a huge proponent of this.
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B
Just basic civility and courtesy works when we don't just disagree with people, but we start demonizing them, making wild, crazy allegations about them. That creates a dangerous climate.
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A
But I wonder, does civility have its limits to you? In a period of budding fascism or authoritarianism, for example, does a focus on civility or tone or politeness impede your capacity to diagnose and then materially address the threat at hand?
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B
So I think there are limits on civility and its utility in. In various ways. And some of it goes to the question of how do you understand this and you appropriately. I think in sort of sketching the ambiguity and the. The term used various synonyms that included respect, politeness. I think kindness was. Was in there. And there may have been a fourth, like niceness. These are different things, right? There's a reason my book is called terms of Respect, not terms of kindness. For example, I. I think respect is indispensable. If we're going to have conversations within a community, whether it's a university or a polity, where we have differing viewpoints and we want to move forward together, if we want that enterprise to succeed, if we want the enterprise of a learning community or a university to succeed or a polity succeed, we have to be able to find ways to have those conversations constructively. And that requires respect for other people. And it requires that we be able to exchange reasons back and forth. It doesn't require that we're always nice in saying those things. There may be times where we have to say to somebody, look, I think what you just said is racist, and I need you to understand why we were talking about the Wilson arguments either. And that was part of what the students were saying in the course of those arguments. And it's the question of what is racism and when does racism exist? Is something we have to be able to discuss bluntly and candidly. It's also the case that free speech does and must make room for speech that isn't respectful or civil. Right. So I think we need institutions. Your podcast, right. The University of Toronto, Princeton University, various kinds of Democratic chambers, libraries, places that encourage respectful and reasoned discussion. It can't be the only thing in society. It has to be lawful for people to be able to take to the streets with signs and say something else. It's really important that the Supreme Court in the United States has protected people's ability to use, I don't know what blasphemous, obscene language to make points that they feel strongly about. If we want to have conversation and enterprises that aim at knowledge rather than just the passionate expression of opinion in our societies, then we also have to have terms of respect by which people can work through the disagreements that they have and try to get at truth and try to go from opinion to knowledge and fact.
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A
Okay, final question for you, Chris. This has been really wonderful. Thank you. We talked about the campaign against postsecondary institutions from the administration. But I guess what also makes this an existential moment is not just federal imposition, but also genuine trends and attitudes in the public young people who do seem unsure whether a university is worth it at all financially, intellectually. Tuition is a very difficult undertaking. Debt is enormous, and many, many, many people just do not feel any more like these institutions will materially improve their lives. They also have people like the Vice President explicitly telling them not to enroll.
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We have got to get out of the mindset that the only way to live a good life in this country, the only way for our children to succeed, is to go to a four year university where people will learn to hate their country and acquire a lot of debt in the process.
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A
And just what would you say to an 18 year old today who's genuinely unsure whether university remains worthwhile for them?
- [36:25]
B
So first of all, I think it's a decision that every 18 year old has to think about. Right? So I don't want to say that everybody ought to go to, to college. That's not true. Right. One of the things that people have to do is decide is this the right way for me to make progress on the goals that I have for, for my life? And, and some of that means you're, you're going to have to be willing to invest the work to be a student in a serious way, because that's what part of what makes college meaningful for you. And, and so one of the things I want to say is, look, we do need to respect different paths forward, but here's what I want the 18 year old to keep in mind, which is all of the economic evidence right now says that the return on investment, even if we just look straight at economics, and I'm going to go beyond that in a moment, but even if we look just straight at the economics, the return on investment from a college degree in the United States and in Canada is extraordinary for most People, as long as they go to college and they actually get the degree right, they don't go a couple of years and drop out. Despite the high prices and the debt they will take on, the college degree will more than pay for itself in pretty dramatic ways over the course of a lifetime. Indeed, for most people, it will be the best economic investment they make in their lifetime. So people need to keep that in mind. There's a real economic return despite all of this concern that gets expressed in the press. And secondly, I think there's a. There are other good reasons. You look at correlations with health, with community engagement. They are positive around an undergraduate degree. Judith Shapiro, who was the president of Barnard College some years ago, had a line that I really like. She said, you want the inside of your head to be an interesting place to spend the rest of your life. And, you know, that may resonate for some people and not for others, but I think for a lot of us, it's one of the reasons why, like, if I think about why I am so pleased I went to. To college, you get your mind opened up to all sorts of things that are intrinsically valuable to you as you go through your. Your life. So the economic case remains strong. The broader kind of humanistic case remains very strong. Students, I mentioned earlier the Lumina Gallup survey. Students, when they're asked about this, when they've been to college, when you're asking them, not somebody who never went and not somebody who's making a political point. When you ask the students, they are reporting very favorably still on their experiences.
- [38:54]
A
Okay, that feels like a great place for us to end today. Thank you so much for this. Such a pleasure.
- [38:59]
B
Thank you, Jamie. It was a pleasure.
- [39:08]
A
All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.
- [39:24]
B
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