Ep 316 | Critical Theory Is Ruining Higher Education | Guest: Ilya Shapiro

Summary

Kibbe on Liberty: Episode 316 | Critical Theory Is Ruining Higher Education with Ilya Shapiro

In Episode 316 of Kibbe on Liberty, host Matt Kibbe engages in a profound conversation with constitutional scholar Ilya Shapiro from the Manhattan Institute. Released on January 22, 2025, this episode delves into the detrimental impact of critical theory on higher education, Shapiro’s personal experiences with cancellation at Georgetown University, and the pervasive influence of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) industrial complex within American law schools and universities at large.

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1. Introduction to the Episode

Matt Kibbe opens the episode by introducing Ilya Shapiro, highlighting Shapiro’s role as a constitutional scholar and his recent book, "The Miseducation of America's Elites". Kibbe sets the stage for a deep dive into Shapiro's experiences with academic cancellation and the broader issues plaguing higher education.

• Matt Kibbe [00:00]:

  "This week I'm speaking with Ilya Shapiro, a constitutional scholar at the Manhattan Institute. He's going to tell the story about his cancellation at Georgetown University. But also the DEI industrial complex that has taken over and corrupted American law schools. And what can be done to unweave that mess?"

2. Shapiro’s Background and Experiences

Shapiro reflects on the shift from virtual engagements during COVID-19 to in-person interactions and book tours, emphasizing the contrast in his professional life before and after his cancellation incident.

• Ilya Shapiro [01:02]:

  "My last book came out during COVID... Now my book tour is actually a tour of physical places and I get to come to studios to talk to people rather than just all do it remote."

3. Encounter with Woke Ideology

Kibbe recounts his first interaction with woke ideology during his time as a Tea Party activist, highlighting a pivotal moment on MSNBC with Don Lemon that revealed the shifting landscape of discourse around race and equality.

• Matt Kibbe [02:14]:

  "When I... said the word colorblind society... Don Lemon interrupted me... and it's like, that's not right, is it?"

This exchange underscores the growing resistance to classical liberal libertarian ideals in mainstream media and academic settings.

4. Evolution and Impact of DEI in Higher Education

Shapiro provides a historical overview of DEI’s rise within higher education, tracing its roots to the 1970s Bakke case and explaining how DEI initiatives have evolved from remediation of past injustices to enforcing diversity and equity of outcomes.

• Ilya Shapiro [04:01]:

  "States do have a compelling interest in educational diversity. And away we went."

He argues that critical theory has resurged with significant potency, profoundly subverting the foundational goals of higher education and legal institutions by undermining concepts like objective truth and due process.

5. Bureaucratic Corruption and Institutional Failures

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the bureaucratic mechanisms that facilitate the DEI agenda, moving beyond ideological battles to highlight systemic issues within university administrations.

• Ilya Shapiro [15:35]:

  "I think most of what the Department of Education does is unconstitutional, should be disbanded..."

Shapiro critiques the bloated administrative structures in universities, particularly focusing on the DEI offices, which he views as self-serving entities that drain resources without delivering tangible benefits to student welfare or educational outcomes.

6. Personal Story of Cancellation at Georgetown

Shapiro shares his harrowing experience of being targeted by cancel culture following a controversial tweet about Supreme Court nominations. This incident not only jeopardized his career but also exposed the inefficacies and partiality within university bureaucracy.

• Ilya Shapiro [09:03]:

  "I tweeted this out... and it is willful misreading and malicious misunderstanding of what I was saying to suggest..."

The ensuing investigation by Georgetown’s DEI office, which lasted four months, ultimately led to his resignation despite the technicality that spared his immediate employment.

7. Consequences and Institutional Response

Shapiro describes the aftermath of his cancellation, including the institutional reluctance to uphold free speech principles and the reliance on DEI policies to suppress dissenting voices.

• Ilya Shapiro [17:55]:

  "Any stakeholder... who not even is offended, but claims offense... puts you back into the star chamber, back into the inquisition."

He criticizes university deans and administrators for their amoral handling of such situations, prioritizing bureaucratic appeasement over genuine commitment to academic freedom and free expression.

8. Broader Implications for Legal Education and Society

The conversation extends to the broader ramifications of critical theory’s dominance in legal education, emphasizing the critical role lawyers play in upholding core American values like equality before the law and due process.

• Ilya Shapiro [42:32]:

  "Process became the process due to you based on where you are in the process. Privilege, hierarchy."

Shapiro warns that the erosion of these foundational principles within law schools threatens the integrity of the legal profession and, by extension, the American legal system.

9. Efforts to Combat the DEI Industrial Complex

Shapiro discusses various strategies and external pressures necessary to dismantle the entrenched DEI bureaucracy, including leveraging market forces, federal oversight, and policy reforms.

• Ilya Shapiro [31:28]:

  "It's like Soviet commissariats... making sure that it's politically correct. And that's gonna be very hard to root out."

He emphasizes the need for a concerted effort from multiple fronts, including legislative action and judicial oversight, to effectively challenge and reverse the DEI agenda’s influence in higher education.

10. Future Outlook and Shapiro’s Advocacy

Concluding the episode, Shapiro shares his optimism about recent developments and his active role in advocating for academic freedom. He hints at upcoming speaking engagements and initiatives aimed at promoting free speech and dismantling DEI-driven policies in universities.

• Ilya Shapiro [45:38]:

  "I doubt I'm going to be shouted down on this tour... knock it off. And my event... ended up being done well."

He remains cautiously optimistic, acknowledging the significant inertia within academic institutions but also recognizing the emerging pushback from various stakeholders advocating for a return to classical liberal values.

11. Closing Remarks

Matt Kibbe wraps up the episode by acknowledging Shapiro’s contributions and encouraging listeners to engage with his work, reinforcing the episode's central themes of intellectual freedom and resistance against ideological overreach in academia.

• Matt Kibbe [50:08]:

  "So give me a shameless plug for the work that you do at Manhattan and maybe something else that's of particular interest right now that your colleagues have done."

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Notable Quotes

• Ilya Shapiro [04:33]:

  "The way that diversity preferences evolved... based on one justice's vote, Lewis Powell…”

• Matt Kibbe [07:42]:

  "I don't know what Shakespeare would think about that."

• Ilya Shapiro [15:35]:

  "It's, you know, it's all of these institutional failures and it's, you know, it's not a thorny problem of public policy or theory."

• Ilya Shapiro [31:28]:

  "It's like Soviet commissariats... making sure that it's politically correct."

• Ilya Shapiro [42:32]:

  "Process became the process due to you based on where you are in the process. Privilege, hierarchy."

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Conclusion

This episode of Kibbe on Liberty offers a compelling exploration of the pervasive influence of critical theory and DEI agendas in higher education, illustrated through Ilya Shapiro’s personal trials and broader institutional critiques. Shapiro’s insights highlight the urgent need for restructuring academic policies and administrative practices to restore academic freedom, uphold constitutional values, and ensure that higher education serves its foundational purpose of fostering free and open inquiry.

For those interested in further exploring these themes, Ilya Shapiro’s book, "The Miseducation of America's Elites," provides an in-depth analysis of the issues discussed in this episode.

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Listen to Episode 316: Kibbe on Liberty

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Transcript

[Matt Kibbe]

Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. This week I'm speaking with Ilya Shapiro, a constitutional scholar at the Manhattan Institute. He's going to tell the story about his cancellation at Georgetown University. But also the DEI industrial complex that has taken over and corrupted American law schools. And what can be done to unweave that mess? Check it out. Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. Ilya, how's it going?

[Ilya Shapiro]

It's very different than the last time around. My last book came out during COVID It was all a bunch of zooms everywhere. Now my book tour is actually a tour of physical places and I get to come to studios to talk to people rather than just all do it remote.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, I looked it up because it had been a while. It was late 2020, I think, and before the incident, which we'll probably talk about today. But you have a brand new book called the Miseducation of America's Elites. And I was reading this and I was thinking of the first time that I discovered this. And I didn't know the word yet, but this woke ideology for the very first time. I was still a Tea Party activist. And I foolishly went on msnbc and the host was Don Lemon, before he was the famous or infamous Don Lemon and the head of the naacp. And the subject of the debate was whether or not me, myself and the Tea Party was racist.

[Ilya Shapiro]

So when did you stop beating your wife?

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, I mean, I would always, if I thought it was going to be a fair fight, I would always walk into the lion's den and do this stuff. And I said I used the word colorblind society. And I was trying to represent what I would consider a classical liberal libertarian philosophy. And Don Lemon interrupted me. He's like, that's not right, is it? And then I proceed to quote Martin Luther King without attribution. Well, I'm talking about judging people based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. And head of the NAACP is sort of stewing because he knows exactly who I'm quoting. But I don't think Don Lemon did.

[Ilya Shapiro]

Ha.

[Matt Kibbe]

I really don't. Because there's been a shift away from this idea of colorblindness before the law and equal treatment and all that.

[Ilya Shapiro]

I cover that story a little bit.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, something like that.

[Ilya Shapiro]

That diversity conceit. Yeah, the. The way that at least for purposes of higher education admissions or hiring in corporate hr, the, the use of racial preferences evolved from thinking about it through kind of old school social justice terms, remediation of past wrongs to this, this diversity and equity equal outcomes, which from a legal architecture perspective is based on one justice's vote, Lewis Powell, in the Bakke case in the late 70s where there were four justices who wanted to do away with the use of race altogether, four who said, yes, you can use it to remedy past wrongs. And that one, Lewis Powell said, well, states do have a compelling interest in educational diversity. And away we went.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, so that when you get into the seeds of cancel culture and woke ideology and DEI and how it's fundamentally corrupted universities and specifically law schools within universities, and that is the theme of the book, I think, what are the roots? Because when Don Lemon said that to me, I thought we were going to have immediate consensus and agreement and I suddenly realized, oh, something's fundamentally different. When did that happen?

[Ilya Shapiro]

So that's the ideological piece, which is important, certainly, you know, and to be clear, what you just put your finger on and the theme running through my book is that this is not the decades old conservative lament about hippies taking over the faculty lounge at Berkeley. In fact, those Berkeley hippies, the free speech movement and all, would be considered retrograde by these, you know, postmodern left wing critical theory activists and what have you. Because the idea of free speech, that's an aspect of white supremacy or white what have you, much like due process and equal protection, all of these classical liberal values, the basis for everything from, well, higher education institutions, truth seeking, open inquiry to, you know, the ACLU or civil libertarian organizations, all of that, according to this, whether you call it postmodern, whatever, but the theory is all existing institutions, because they're imbued with irrevocably, these racist, sexist, other illegitimate structures need to be blown up and then rebuilt in a year zero French Revolution style to reflect intersectional matrices and privilege hierarchies. And so your rights and your freedoms depend on where you are in the privileged structure and so forth. It's really bizarre. But it's also, once it began to be taken seriously, frightful, and it's fairly recent, that it began to be taken seriously. Because when I was in college in the late 90s, in law school in the early 2000s, I'd heard about the crits right critical theory, critical legal studies, but that was some remnant, some niche thing from the 80s, early 90s that had been relegated to sociology departments or what have you, it wasn't really a thing that we concerned ourselves with. Even my colleagues who were on the left, they weren't, you know, know, either try to mollify or push back their Excesses? No, it just wasn't a thing. But then maybe 10 or 15 years later, certainly 2014, which is also an inflection point for Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. The coddling of the American mind, social media explosion, addling brains, all these sorts of things. We have the reintroduction of critical theory, which, as I call it in one of my chapters, it returned with a vengeance. And that really subverts higher education, this pursuit of open inquiry, development of human knowledge, but especially law schools, legal education. Because if you don't believe in objective truth, if you don't believe in due process, equality under the law, free speech, everyone should be treated equally by a neutral arbiter. If, you know, forget constitutional law or civil rights, if property law, contracts, securities, all of that is illegitimate, well, then what are we even doing here? And so it's really scary because. Not because, you know, lawyers are special in some normative way, moral way, but law schools turn out, especially elite law schools, turn out the gatekeepers of our legal and political institutions.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah. Like it or not, we need lawyers. Not to be bad.

[Ilya Shapiro]

That's a good way of putting it.

[Matt Kibbe]

I don't know what Shakespeare would think about that.

[Ilya Shapiro]

Well, that's the other. Well, that's kind of a classic misunderstanding of, you know, he put that line, the first thing we do is kill all the lawyers in the mouth of a bad guy. So it wasn't that he was actually arguing that or even making, like, a lawyer joke, as we would now call it. He would say, of course. That's the bad guy. He would argue for that. In fact, the epigram for my book, the Miseducation of America's Elites is from the movie man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt. Right. If the devil cuts down. Yes, I'd be in favor of cutting down all the laws just to get to the devil. Well, Roper, what if all the laws in England are cut down and the devil turns around on you? Where are you then?

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, so I want to get back to sort of the institutional corruptions and what's going on at the American Bar association or what's going on in corporate law offices and all that stuff. You write about all this stuff, but obviously the writing of this book was cathartic for you because you were, in fact, a victim of this entire cancel culture infrastructure after the last time we talked. And I want you to tell that story and explain, you know, explain what happened, but also sort of the feckless bureaucracy that just dragged you through the mud.

[Ilya Shapiro]

Yeah. And we'll get to the bureaucracy. That's an important theme everyone talks about looks at the ideological part because that's sexy and in the news. But the bureaucracy is a huge aspect of this illiberal takeover. Right. So I had been at cato for almost 15 years and that's when my last book came out and wasn't necessarily looking to leave, but this opportunity presented itself from Randy Barnett, who I'm sure.

[Matt Kibbe]

You know, he's been on the show several times.

[Ilya Shapiro]

There you go. I've known him for a long time.

[Matt Kibbe]

Great constitutional scholar, kind of a rock star in the, the godfather of the.

[Ilya Shapiro]

Constitutional challenge to Obamacare, which is when I really got to know him personally because we worked together a lot on developing that, that theory. And we won on the Commerce clause and Necessary and Proper clause. I don't know who was in charge of the taxing power and coaxing Chief Justice Roberts. But anyway, that's a story for another time. So we were having dinner one night in, I guess it would have been October of 21, and he decides to offer me a job to direct his center at Georgetown, the Center for the Constitution, which as we've learned is an important center because the rest of the law school is the center against the Constitution. And he spends a lot of time in Florida these days. So it's good to have someone on the ground running these things. And I would have an inward looking focus in terms of teaching and programs at Georgetown, as well as outward proselytizing originalism on in media and writing articles. And so it's a different sort of way to impact the world of ideas that had been that I'd been doing in my career. So fast forward a couple of months, about four days before I was due to start my job. This was late January of 2022. At this point, Justice Breyer announces his retirement and you know, judicial politics, nominations, Supreme Court. That was the subject of my last book. That's my bread and butter. So I was doing a lot of media that day. I happened to be in Austin, Texas. So that night I got to my hotel room. If I had been home, none of this probably would have happened. But you know, I had nothing to do. I was doom scrolling Twitter late at night in my hotel room before going.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yes, as we do.

[Ilya Shapiro]

As we do. Not a good practice, not a good practice. And the upshot of all of my commentary and analysis of that day of, you know, who's gonna succeed Breyer? What's Biden gonna do? I was getting more and more upset that Joe Biden did indeed Hew to his campaign promise to appoint a black woman. And I thought, well, there's nothing wrong with a black woman, but, you know, why don't we just get the best candidate? And so I thought, well, if I were a Democratic progressive president, whom would I appoint? And I thought, the chief Judge of the D.C. circuit, the second most powerful court in the country, happens to be an Indian American immigrant. His name is Sri Srinivasan. Excellent judge. Got all his progressive bona fides, but not quite all of the intersectional bona fides. And so I tweeted this out, and I said, and therefore, because he's disqualified for these improper reasons, intersectional reasons, we are going to end up with a lesser black woman. And it's that inartful phrasing, which I admitted the next day. I was like, who among us has not phrased a bad tweet? At some point I thought, okay, well, that could have been phrased better. And I apologized for doing that. But it is willful misreading and malicious misunderstanding of what I was saying to suggest that, you know, I was saying that no black woman could ever be qualified for the court, or all black women are lesser humans or something like that. Just. Just a ridiculous kind of perception. But that's what my ideological enemies on Twitter and in the academy ran with to try to stop me from taking.

[Matt Kibbe]

You had one particular guy that loved to troll you that. That sort of started the fight.

[Ilya Shapiro]

He is. He's a Georgetown alum. He's Slate's legal correspondent, Mark Joseph Stern. And everything that happened to me, I wouldn't wish on anyone other than him. Yeah, it was, you know, surreal in very many ways. Over this tweet, I felt like my career was completely crumbling. Everything I had worked towards for decades, the sacrifices of my parents in taking me out of the Soviet Union and scrimping and saving and, you know, the immigrants journey and all of that, all the hard work. You know, my family, you know, I had two little kids. I now have four. We ended up having twins during that cancellation year. Our cancellation babies. They're now two, you know, your life, my professional life was flashing before my eyes over a tweet where clearly I was, you know, it's. It was. It was again, just God awful. I called it the four days of hell. Until Dean Trainor, Bill Trainor of Georgetown, decided that I wouldn't be fired on the spot or my contract rescinded, nor would he vindicate my free speech rights or something like that, while saying, you know, I disagree, but he no no, nothing like that. Instead it was a very kind of hand wringing, mealy mouth, very deanly result of punting this to the DEI office and the HR office to investigate me. What is there to investigate? Very short tweet, very short policy. Whether you're talking about free expression or harassment, discrimination. But this so called investigation ended up lasting four months. So it's four days of hell followed by four months of purgatory and farce at the end of which somebody at the high paid law firm that Georgetown hired to advise them on this, Wilmer Hale looked at a calendar and realized oh, he wasn't yet an employee when he tweeted so he's not even subject to these policies. So I was not quite vindicated, but I was reinstated on that technicality.

[Matt Kibbe]

How many hours did they build to come to that conclusion?

[Ilya Shapiro]

I am guessing that they spent probably a million dollars. That's my guess.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah. Yeah. So take a quick step back and just point out that Georgetown at one point had had sort of the. I think I'm getting this right. Sort of a gold standard free speech standard. Most universities, their policy on paper or.

[Ilya Shapiro]

On pixels is excellent. Due in part to the excellent work of fire the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Most speech codes around the country are gone and we have speech protective kind of first amendment aligned policies but they're observed in the breach and there's a failure of enforcement to be sure.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah. And that gets back to. So we've touched on the ideology. I want to get into the bureaucracy.

[Ilya Shapiro]

Let me conclude the story because I'm not now at Georgetown. And in fact once I was reinstated on that technical victory, I celebrated that. But then I got the fine print. I got the 10 page report from the DEI office which at Georgetown has called the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action IDEA and this report, it was clear that it had been lawyered by the outside lawyers because it was all ready to convict me and fire me and castrate me and all the rest of it. But. But ultimately because of this technical resolution they didn't have a conclusion. But what it did say was if I ever said or wrote anything that caused similar offense, then I would be creating a hostile educational environment. Never mind what the free expression policy says. And I realized with advice of counsel and Randy Barnett and my wife, who's a better lawyer than any of us, that this was untenable. I could not do the job that I was hired to do. And so I decided, I realized I needed to resign. And as one does, I published my resignation Letter in the Wall Street Journal and then announced my next move to the Manhattan Institute, which I had organized over the course of that weekend. They were very gracious and I'm grateful to Raihan Salon for putting all that together. I've known him for a while and now he's the dynamic president of mi. Put that together for me. And so when I announced my resignation, I was able to announce my move on Tucker Carlson show on Fox again, as one does, and then start controlling the media narrative and using this platform I've been given to shine the light on the rot in academia.

[Matt Kibbe]

The Free Life Portrait of an Artist is the new documentary by Free the People, the story of Cuban born artist Carlos Luna who fled socialism under Castro to find his free life in America. You can watch it [e-mail] cival.com throughout the month of December for free at civil.com check it out. The phrase you used and this, this sounds like something that was actually in the contract that they put before you. The potential of causing offense. Is that a legal term?

[Ilya Shapiro]

Well, it's subjective.

[Matt Kibbe]

It's radically subjective.

[Ilya Shapiro]

That's the thing, you know, any stakeholder student, professor, staff member, alumnus, whatever, who not even is offended, but claims offense, feigns offense, gets me back into the star chamber, back into the inquisition. So that's no way, you know, given that I would be teaching sensitive constitutional subjects. You know, that year affirmative action was before the Supreme Court and I was writing op EDS and I was commenting on tv. Well, I could certainly say something that would offend people like that it's unconstitutional to use to judge people based on race. As, by the way, 76% of the American people agreed in Joe Biden's Supreme Court nomination situation, at least according to that rabid right wing outlet ABC News. But anyway, if I said something like that or if I teach, it was teaching a case about the graphic designer who didn't want to create a website for, for a same sex wedding. You could see how this would create, quote, unquote, offense. Yeah, so that's why I had to quit.

[Matt Kibbe]

And that's, I mean, you document a lot of this in the book. There's a, there's a culture of intimidation for those few free thinking professors that are actually left on university campuses because the standard by which you could get fired is fundamentally arbitrary.

[Ilya Shapiro]

That's exactly it.

[Matt Kibbe]

And subject to apparatchiks who know how to manipulate, create the impression that the students are mad or that nameless activists on Twitter are mad. There's tactics here. There's some Alinskyite tactics that are quite obvious when you watch them.

[Ilya Shapiro]

And I was quite fortunate that I'm at a position or a stage in my life and I have a platform that, you know, the Wall Street Journal editorial page came to bat for me. It's the National Review. I joked with Rich Lowry that he required each of his writers to do at least one piece about my case at some point. You know, Barry Weiss, I mean, lots of people came out in my support, including in back channels to the dean, including a couple of members of the board of visitors of the law school. So, you know, I was fortunate in that I'm not a celebrity. Like, you know, I don't have FU money that I can just, you know, walk away and none of it matters, like Joe Rogan or something like this or Whoopi Goldberg, who got, you know, canceled briefly for it was actually ignorance, not anti Semitism, but anyway. But I could push back and I could kind of do the jujitsu back a little bit, which is why I wasn't fired during those initial four days of hell. But it really shows the spinelessness and the lack of courage, the lack of will to enforce your own rules on behalf of all of these educational grandees. Deans, presidents, provosts, etc. It's not that whether Dean Treanor or Heather Gerken at Yale, who I talk about in the book, or others are woke radicals, no, they're bureaucratic players. They try to attack left and right and up and down to climb the greasy pole. And so it's not that Dean Treanor was being immoral, he was being amoral. And even in the end, he said, well, you know, we have these competing grand values of equity and free speech. And that's why this case was so hard. And like, well, you know, not really. I mean, are you treating people fairly? Was I actually harassing someone? Maybe I was harassing Joe Biden, I don't know. But certainly, anyway, it's all of these institutional failures and it's, you know, it's not a thorny problem of public policy or, or theory. The rules are there. And when university officials actually enforce them, they get lauded at such a low bar. The Chancellor of Vanderbilt, for example, David Dearmire, has become a darling just for kicking students out of his office who had occupied it during the anti Semitic encampments and all of that. But it's not rocket science. You see the difference between Ben Sasse, when he was president of University of Florida, his handling of the protests and encampments after October 7 versus Manoush Shafik at Colombia. Again, the rules are clear. It's not a matter of oh, all of a sudden we need to develop new sorts of protocols or what have you. It's just do your job. But that is, there's been a huge institutional failure there.

[Matt Kibbe]

So last October I went to a conference that, that was organized by Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford University. I think it was their public health center or whatever it was. And he, for very different reasons had a cancel mob go after him.

[Ilya Shapiro]

And Matt, just to be clear, so that your viewers and listeners understand this, this is not just about cancel culture. That is the visible stuff that happens kind of above the waterline, the tip of the iceberg. The speaker shout downs, people jobs being threatened. When it's prominent enough, it makes national news. But that's only what is visible. Much more damaging is the people who self censor, the people who, you know, what's taught and not taught, the chill on speech and expression. People who don't have my kind of platform, who are investigated for all sorts of frivolous things. Yeah, with no necessarily, it's not necessarily even with a conservative, libertarian, progressive valence, you know, huge lot of corruption of the educational enterprise as we've seen. Well, it's come more to the fore since October 7th than the disastrous testimony of the university presidents. But you know, real problems going on in these institutions.

[Matt Kibbe]

So you probably know Jay Bhattacharya's story. Like he came out with a study first a Wall Street Journal op ed followed by a study. And he was a very successful, celebrated, respected epidemiologist who had been writing these types of papers all his life. But he wrote the wrong thing. There was this orchestrated campaign on Stanford University to demonize him, to question his ethics. Ultimately they tried to fire him. He somehow survived all that. But fast forward to last October. He was able to organize an event that actually featured different perspectives on lockdowns, on mandates, on the origins of the virus. Things that you would expect public health academics to debate starting on day one. And I didn't appreciate it at the time, but he had the new Stanford University president. I'm not sure I understand the difference between a dean and a president. Is it the same thing?

[Ilya Shapiro]

The president is the head of the whole institution and the dean is of a particular school, whether the undergraduate college or the law school or whatever. Sometimes you also have chancellors and that's in a multi campus university that oversees all the different presidents. And the provost, just to complete the nomenclature is kind of the coo so the president is CEO, the provost kind of operationalized.

[Matt Kibbe]

Okay. So it was a big deal. And all of these same forces that tried to cancel J in the first place tried to shut down this radical idea that you would have a diversity of views about perhaps one of the most important subjects that a public health institution could have a debate about.

[Ilya Shapiro]

And recently the Stanford faculty decided not to rescind its condemnation of Jay's colleague Scott Atlas as well.

[Matt Kibbe]

That is correct. And something similar happened at Harvard with Martin Koldorff, who was essentially fired, pushed out, and they refused to un. Condemn him for these.

[Ilya Shapiro]

I mean, this in the science world is literally a Galileo type moment.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, yeah. So they had the new university president who not only refused to cancel the event, but he actually spoke at it. And he didn't say anything particularly dramatic, except his mere presence apparently was almost revolutionary at one of these prestigious universities because it had become sort of like, you're right, it's not cancel culture. It's groupthink. You're only allowed to think and act and talk one way, and that's to be determined by someone other than you.

[Ilya Shapiro]

We tolerate everyone as long as you agree with us.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, yeah. So you were getting into the bureaucracy of this. And I'm fascinated by this as an economist because I like to process the entire world through economic incentives and certainly public choice theory.

[Ilya Shapiro]

Well, you're familiar with Mansur Olson, the great political economist who said that the growth of bureaucracy leads to the decline of nations. He has a wittier way of saying it. But the point is when you have the deep state, if you will, or this kind of perpetual motion machine that's not controlled, not accountable, that is, you know, that doomed Rome, even that kind of administrative bloat.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah. And you're surely everybody watching this is probably familiar with the charts of the skyrocketing cost of higher education and how so much of that growth is eaten up by administrative staff. Why is that happening? Is it just the natural growth of bureaucracy?

[Ilya Shapiro]

Is it just now bureaucracy starting probably about 25 years ago or so, maybe a little before that, started growing faster than anything to the point where now in every institution there are more non teaching staff, there are faculty members, some places there are more bureaucrats, educrats I call them, than students. You know, the joke is 100 years ago at Yale, every student came with his personal butler. Now maybe all these, you know, educational civil servants are going to be butlers or something, I don't know. But it's, it's, it's bizarre and it started off not necessarily with an ideological valence. It was more, especially at the elite, places that had more money than what they need to do what they knew to do with, well, we need student services and hand holding support and therapy. This and you know, the stress of exams and this kind of began the rise of safetyism and therapizing everything. And the idea of harm, you know, when you're offended, that's harmful. We can't have that. Safe spaces that evolved not from so much the postmodern critical theory as from this kind of student services therapying bureaucracy, part component, as Greg Lukianoff wrote, it's kind of has taken from the world of cognitive behavioral therapy and began that and then the kind of the space race to compete with lazy rivers and climbing walls and all of these, you know, four year country club type things. Now again, this is not the experience of most higher education students in the country, which are, you know, commuter schools or state schools or what have you. But like the elite that produces most of the next generation of our institutional leaders. And about 10 years ago or so most of that bureaucratic growth started being in the DEI space because of Ferguson, because of Trump's election. All these inflection points that we've seen, the Ibram Kendi style, you know, if you're not with us promoting equality of outcome, then you're an inveterate racist. No, no, better than Bull Connor and the kkk, that, that sort of attitude. And there's just been an explosion of that. University of Michigan spends north of $31 million a year on DEI. They have something like 240 full time and then an equal number part time staff. Imagine spending that money, those resources on actually helping underprivileged kids or scholarships or you know, tutoring, support, whatever, right? Instead we get what are literally value subtracting entities. And by that I mean they fail on their own terms. If you look at campus surveys, climate surveys of do you feel welcome on campus? Do you feel comfortable with racial, ethnic diversity, those things, if anything, I'm not a statistician, but they're certainly not correlated with the size of your DI office. And I've seen some articles saying that they're inversely correlated with the size of your DEI offices. So this bureaucracy, which again is separate from what concerns we have with ideological bias in faculty hiring and what's taught and what's not taught, that's a separate issue. Important, but separate. This is people who are not academics, are not scholars, left wing or anything, they are professional HR bureaucrats. They have their own professional association, the Consortium of Higher Education Diversity Officers, which has thousands of members. I mean, this is a real industry, a real special interest. And of course, educational bureaucrats, like public sector bureaucrats, their incentive is to grow their budgets and their authority. And so of course they're going to have investigations. Of course they're going to say, well, we need more money to have more trainings and orientations and all the rest of it.

[Matt Kibbe]

I'm sure this happened in the Obama administration as well, but it seems like the Biden administration has very much fed the growth of that bureaucracy by mandating certain things, particularly like their perversion of Title IX and things like that, which.

[Ilya Shapiro]

As we're recording this, was just blocked nationwide by the latest district judge. I mean, there have been a series of rulings that only affected certain parts of the country or certain schools. But as we're recording this, the Title 9 reforms, you know, related to gender and what have you, all of that completely blocked. So that, that's going nowhere. Thankfully. I filed some briefs supporting those challenges. But, yeah, the Biden administration's whole of government dei, a series of executive orders essentially saying every government agency has to have a DEI plan, has to have a DEI officer. I mean, it's, it's like Soviet commissariats, where whether you're dealing with, you know, oceanic sciences or T bills, you have to have a commissar there looking over your shoulder, making sure that it's politically correct. And that's gonna be very hard to root out. I hope that the Trump transition, I've had two months already. I hope they're preparing to start rooting that out because. Because it's not just kind of high level things that again, everybody sees. There's all of this bureaucratic work that needs to be undone.

[Matt Kibbe]

So he gave a talk, a very Trumpy talk. So it's not totally clear what he has in mind, but he said something, I think it was November 15th, because I looked it up, that he was going to abolish WOKE and tie it to federal funding. Is he, is he basically saying, I'm going to just roll back all of these Biden administrative executive orders?

[Ilya Shapiro]

I would hope it goes beyond that, because if all that this second Trump administration does is roll back what Biden did in this area and bring us back to January 2021, that's not enough because it was already bad at that point. What has to be done further is to actually threaten the funding and sometimes pull it back of these schools that violate civil rights of all kind, whether it's relating to free speech, whether with respect to access to educational opportunities, if you're Jewish, with respect to a whole host of things. And you don't need legislation, new legislation for this. It's already on the books. There's already plenty of strings attached to federal funding. Now, I think most of what the Department of Education does is unconstitutional, constitutional, should be disbanded, its civil rights enforcement authority collapsed into the Justice Department's purvey. But if we have all of this monstrous federal monetary and regulatory apple apparatus, then it has to actually enforce the federal law, whether that be with respect to accounting standards, to prevent waste and fraud, anti discrimination in hiring student, civil rights or anything else. But instead, what you're seeing the last few weeks as Biden's out the door, he's trying to seal up these sweetheart settlements with all these institutions where very valid complaints have been filed, whether with respect to post October 7th stuff or otherwise. And it's gonna be a real battle, you know, and I'm, you know, we can get to this. I'm for all of the above. That's, you know, part of the thing. There is a role for the federal government to play there, and that is it. Whether whether investigation and oversight by Congress, as the House Education Committee has been doing very well. I testified before them a couple of years ago on free speech issues or especially the Office of Civil Rights at Education in conjunction with civil rights justice getting together and actually having, you know, serious consequences for this malevolence.

[Matt Kibbe]

Regular viewers of Kibbe on Liberty already know how obsessed I have been with the pandemic industrial complex and all of the stupid, authoritarian and downright evil things that the government did to us during COVID 19. Well, I'm proud to announce a new investigative series that looks to get to the bottom of all of that. It's called the COVID up and I'm producing it in cooperation with BlazeTV. The only place you're going to see this is BlazeTV. So go to Fauci Coverup and use the code FAUCILIDE for $30 off your annual subscription. Do it now. The truth is out there. I'm sort of. This may be naive to hope that we can get this far, but I'm Team Doge and I'd like to see the Department of Education go away completely. And for that, that money to get back to students somehow, but maybe that's.

[Ilya Shapiro]

That, I think would take new legislation. But yes, ultimately that should be the goal.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah.

[Ilya Shapiro]

Again, the Department of Education has been around, well, since Jimmy Carter, who just had his Funeral in Washington. So nearly 50 years. And it's not like any criterion of educational success has improved in that time. People say, you know, our schools are bad and you want to get rid of the Department of Education. I'm like, yeah, you got the causation backwards there.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, yeah, I feel like 100% failure. 100% failure. So back to like, I'm trying to look at all these institutions that you talk about in your book and you talk about, oh, the ABA you mentioned.

[Ilya Shapiro]

Let me get in a beat on that. The ABA is the sole accreditor of law schools, which is bizarre. There actually is some competition. There could certainly be more. There is some competition among accreditors of undergraduate institutions with law schools. That is not the case. And the ABA is very guilty of a lot of things, adopting all sorts of standards that propagate dei, just terrible things that are against the interest of conveying legal education, training lawyers, not to mention some of its extracurricular activities and direct involvement in politics and whatever else. And so it would be very simple and straightforward for the Education Department to say, okay, you no longer have a monopoly over law school accreditation. It would have to work in conjunction with state bars. I'm sure there are a lot of state bars that would be the state supreme court that could say, okay, we'll will entertain other accreditors. Or, you know, California, ironically, you can practice law in California without going in ABA accredited law school just in California. If there were truly competitive market for accreditors, you could probably have a compact of different states, state bars that, you know, you could practice in different places and completely sideline the aba.

[Matt Kibbe]

Would it take just one state that.

[Ilya Shapiro]

I mean, it depends which state. Yeah, If Florida were to do it, I think that would be significant. I think that would shift the earth.

[Matt Kibbe]

Needs to be enough universities and enough lawyers. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of lawyers in Florida. Yeah, yeah. What about these mega firms that primarily service corporate clients? And you have a chapter on this, but you have like. And maybe corporate CEOs are just as feckless as deans of law schools when it comes to standing up to the intimidation and the protesting at shareholder meetings and all the stuff that has apparently forced them into complying with massive DEI bureaucracy. So is it the law firms or is it the corporations? Is it where's the chicken and where's the eggs?

[Ilya Shapiro]

It seems like they are. And they aren't as feckless as deans because we are now seeing a pullback of DEI in the corporate space. Why is that? Because of the cultural vibe shift and whatever. We're not really seeing that in academia because in the real world, in society writ large, enough people have realized, yeah, that's not right, that emperor has no clothes. And enough people now feel comfortable enough saying that rather than just keeping their head down and trying to keep out of the cancellation crossfire. So there are some very healthy developments in the real world, in the corporate world. In academia, there's not really that pushback effect. And the market forces don't act as directly. And so you need what economists would call exogenous shocks, be that from employers. A bunch of major law firms got together about a month after October 7th and said to the deans of the country, what are you doing? Why are you producing all of these supporters of Hamas that reject everything we stand for, whether you're progressive, conservative or anything in between, this is unacceptable. You need to do a better job or we're not going to hire students that yell at federal judges as they did at Stanford. We hope your daughter gets raped. You know, employers have a lot of sway that way. Or judges. There's about 14 federal judges out of a total of 870 who announced they would not hire clerks from Yale and Stanford. And then that got expanded to Columbia. It's having an effect. The dean of Yale has hired Keith Whittington away from Princeton, giving him a bunch of money to do free speech and academic freedom and open inquiry type work, as well as hiring a junior faculty member who had clerked for, for Alito. Can you imagine? I believe the same term that Dobbs was decided, the overturning of Roe v. Wade. I mean, don't get my knickers in a twist. So I think market forces obviously have an effect on the private sector, but other kind of external forces can have an effect in higher ed. And to mix metaphors, a lot of these institutions, a lot of these illiberal institutions are Potemkin villages guarded by paper tigers. So it doesn't take very much. For example, my now colleague at the Manhattan Institute, John Saylor, who's an investigative reporter, two years ago did a FOIA request of Texas Tech, which is a public school in Lubbock, Texas, and found that they were hiring biologists based on diversity statements and just published an op ed in the Wall Street Journal about this. The very next day, the president or chancellor of Texas Tech said, this is inappropriate. We're not going to be doing this anymore. Same thing later that year when the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin system testified before the legislature. So it doesn't take very much that gives me some hope. So I'm, I wouldn't say I'm optimistic, but I'm less pessimistic than I was when I left Georgetown 2 1/2 years ago.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah. And you sort of close the book with an observation about whether we like it or not. Lawyers matter, too. Lawyers lives matter. I guess I don't know if I'm allowed to say that, but I just did. But these core principles, at some point, equality became equity. At some point, your qualifications were due.

[Ilya Shapiro]

Process became the process due to you based on where you are in the process. Privilege, hierarchy.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah. And diversity trumped achievement and experience. But it strikes me that I was going back to my Don Lemon story. I just thought that those were core American values that sort of transcended ideology and politics. But everything's corrupted. But there does seem to be a pendulum swing back, and part of it maybe is the reelection of Trump. You see a lot of Democratic apparatchiks sort of saying, yeah, maybe we went too far with this woke stuff.

[Ilya Shapiro]

I mean, John Fetterman is having his reverse Bullworth moment to date myself. But it's. Yeah. In society writ large. I'm with Brett Kavanaugh. I live on the sunny side of the sunrise side of the mountain. Cautiously optimistic, but just in higher ed and specifically in legal education and the guardians of the legal profession, there's just so much inertia that we may be past the critical point, such that, you know, time for new institutions again. You know, in the undergraduate world, there's this accreditation problem that we just discussed. But in the collegiate world in general, you have the University of Austin, new institutions spreading up. I'm going to be speaking there later this month. Looking forward to that. Or centers within existing institutions that are dedicated to such white supremacist tropes as excellence and academic rigor and things like this, civics. Oh, my gosh. So that's, you know, green shoots in all of that. But it's, it's, you know, it's going to take. How do you shift the culture? Right. And, you know, there's been a vibe shift politically and whether the, this Trump administration is successful in changing the, you know, steering the ship in terms of legal, regulatory architecture, which then drives certain other things in conjunction with, as I said, external forces, exogenous shocks, donors, trustees. There's, you know, some University of Pennsylvania Wharton alums got a lot of press for saying that this is improper, what we're doing. Bill Ackman at Harvard. Right. All of a sudden been Red pilled in all sorts of ways. So, you know, we're in the eye of the storm. I don't want to paint a rosy picture saying, well, 10 years from now because of my book will have solved all of these issues. But the battle's been joined.

[Matt Kibbe]

So you're about to go on a book tour and I assume you're going to try to speak at university camp. One of the stories you tell in the midst of the fury of your cancellation was getting shouted down in California at a San Francisco university. The shout down thing fascinates me because it seems intolerable on any university campus, but it became regular order. Do you expect to get targeted again?

[Ilya Shapiro]

Well, I'm actually speaking at the same place in February.

[Matt Kibbe]

And if you do get shouted down, will it sell more books?

[Ilya Shapiro]

Probably, is the honest answer. Yeah, but this is what was University of California Hastings, which is in San Francisco. It's since been renamed because it turns out Mr. Hastings did some politically incorrect things. And so now it's University of California, College of Law, San Francisco, UC Law, sf Very bureaucratic name. But anyway, I'll be there next month. Whole new cohort of students, you know, just like Matthew McConaughey and Dazed and Confused or Fast time to Ridgemont High. You know, I get older, but the law students say this stay the same age. So nobody who had protested me three years ago is still on campus. So we'll see what kind of reception there is this time. I don't expect it to happen. You know, you don't really hear it happening very much. I think deans have caught on that it's, it gives you a black eye and you never know which one of these events imbroglios is going to be live streamed directly onto Twitter X and you know, blow up and you don't want that. In fact, that month of March 2022, when I was shouted down at Hastings, when there was a similar shout down at Yale Law School, ironically bringing together lawyers, the left and the right who agreed on little other than the important importance of free speech, they were shouted down. A week later I was due to speak at the University of Michigan and I did. But in the interim, the deans there read the riot act to the student leaders and they said we're not going to be Yale and Hastings. So, you know, knock it off. And my event, which got changed to being kind of a modeling debate between me and a Northwestern professor about, you know, how to a meta debate about how to debate or whatever they changed it to, but it ended up being Being done. Done well. So I. I doubt if I was going to have to put a bet on it. I doubt I'm going to be shouted down on this tour, but. But you never know.

[Matt Kibbe]

And I assume Lawless is available. It hasn't been cancelled by Amazon or anything, as far as you know?

[Ilya Shapiro]

Not yet. Yeah, it's available at wherever you get your fine and not so fine books. Bookstores, Amazon, Walmart, online, lots of places that you can get them.

[Matt Kibbe]

So give me a shameless plug for the work that you do at Manhattan and maybe something else that's of particular interest right now that your colleagues have done.

[Ilya Shapiro]

Sure, sure. It's interesting. Manhattan is a dynamic place, quite apart from whatever ideological differences there are from my previous employer, Cato. It kind of leans into the culture war, Culture War 3.0, which is interesting. And as. As a legal policy guy, something that I've always enjoyed about my career is that I interact with all my colleagues at one time or another because there's a legal dimension to crime and policing, health care, taxes, whatever, has at some point a legal, often constitutional perspective. Education, housing, all of these things. And I've done more model legislation. I think I've participated in three or four types of model legislation. Abolishing DEI offices at public schools. I did that with Chris Ruffo. Anti masking legislation. I just had a piece in the Free Press about how with very minor exceptions, someone who masks in public is up to no good. You know, robbery, kkk, antifa, you know, hoodlums of various kinds. And in general, most Americans live in cities. And MI is the broadly center right think tank looking at the problems of cities to try to resurrect their greatness, if you will, across a host of dimensions to enable people's flourishing. And that's certainly very appealing to me. I work at a bit more of a national level with the Supreme Court practice and amicus briefs. That's partly why I was brought on to give kind of a different aspect to our work. But it's a great group of people, very dynamic, very generous with their time. You can go to manhattan.institute you might not have known that institute is a suffix, but there's no.org.com just Manhattan.instute look up my work or others. I have a substack called Shapiro's Gavel, where not only do you see my legal analysis of Supreme Court cases or latest evidence of DEI perversions, but sometimes you get pictures of my kids or reminiscences about my childhood or other things that I wouldn't necessarily put in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

[Matt Kibbe]

All right. Well, thank you for this.

[Ilya Shapiro]

Thank you.

[Matt Kibbe]

Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about free the people, go to freethepeople.org.