← Philosophy For Our Times
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- [00:00]
Eric Kaufman
If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook
- [00:05]
Jay Shapiro
ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering
- [00:11]
Eric Kaufman
the products you need all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies
- [00:15]
Jay Shapiro
to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock so your team always gets the win.
- [00:22]
Jeroen Brook
Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop
- [00:25]
Eric Kaufman
by Granger for the ones who get it done.
- [00:37]
Catherine Liu
Educated public is a public good. That's why there should be public funding
- [00:41]
Jeroen Brook
for Universe I want to say something about leftism just before we get to that, because for the first time in my life, I think I was like, whoa, maybe I'm a leftist. Because that was amazing. I mean, I have that on tape. Other than the we did it Woo Celebrity deathmatch, okay, let other than the Marxism at the end, universal reason, absolutely.
- [01:06]
Podcast Narrator/Daniel or Zeb
Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. My name is Daniel. And I'm Zeb. Today's episode is Crisis in the Academy, a debate addressing the big questions about the global state of universities. Whether they are still sanctuaries of free thought in today's fraught politics, whether students are becoming customers, and what even is the point of higher education if everyone just uses AI for their homework? The value of universities is a very hot topic these days, particularly student loans. So this debate has become all the more timely since it was held at our how the Light Gets in festival in early 2025. We have an impressive lineup of speakers. Jeroen Brook, a political scientist and chairman of the AYD RAND Institute Eric Kaufman, professor of politics at the University of Buckingham and Catherine Liu, professor of film and Media studies at UC Irvine. The talk is hosted by Jay Shapiro, the film producer and podcaster. So without any further ado, we'll hand over to Jay.
- [02:09]
Jay Shapiro
This one's called Crisis in the Academy. Sounds like this. Universities celebrated as sanctuaries of free thought and intellectual rigor have for centuries been seen as the best way to educate and conduct research. But increasingly it is questioned if this is still true. A recent study found 2/3 of academics feel their freedom to teach and study is being reduced. In 2022 alone, over 1000 instances of content warnings or text removals were documented across UK universities. While some academics now criticize PhDs as a scam to get fees and cheap labor from students, and reports suggest most academic papers have an average of just 10 readers, maybe the 10 in this room, I don't know. More than half of people now say going to university is not worth it. Graduate students graduate in debt in the US with averages of over $71,000. And access to similar information is available online, often for free. So should we call time on the age of the university and find new innovative ways to educate people? Should we leave research and innovation to the business sector and free market forces? Or are universities vital to our education and culture and can a radical overhaul return them to their original status if that's what they should be returned to? So, speaking about this, I'm going to ask you to hold your applause until I introduce all three is Jerome Brook, to my right. He's a political scientist and chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute. And he's a bestselling author and host of the Jeroen Brooks Show. I got it right?
- [03:41]
Jeroen Brook
You got it.
- [03:42]
Eric Kaufman
Okay.
- [03:43]
Jay Shapiro
Eric Kaufman on the end is a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham. He's the author of Taboo and Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities. And Catherine Liu is a professor of film and Media studies at the University of California, Irvine. She's the author of Virtue the Case against the Professional Managerial Class. Let's welcome them with applause. Okay, so now, as I always say, let's see if we can earn that applause, which we have. So should we call time on the age of the university and find new innovative ways to educate people? The floor is yours.
- [04:17]
Jeroen Brook
Well, I mean, I think that the university still serves an important function. It certainly can serve a crucial and important function, but it seems like a lot of things in the world in which we live. There is definitely an inflation with regard both to the importance of the university and the number of universities, the number of kids who go to universities. We probably over educate people in terms of university education. There is a prestige associated with going to university that probably is unjustified in terms of what students are actually learning. So I think there certainly is. There should be a rethinking. And I think we're trying. There are various effects among entrepreneurs to find different disruptive technologies, to find alternatives for the university system. Nobody's really found anything that actually works. We're seeing the beginnings of the establishment of new universities that are trying to take a different perspective in the United States. We've got one that made a lot of noise in the US Was the University of Austin in Texas, which is trying to take a slightly different approach to university with more viewpoint diversity, although I think they'll end up not having very much viewpoint diversity. And I think that they're somewhat conventionally right versus the typical university, which is conventionally left. They are just creating a conventionally right university. So their attempts, I think we're still very early in this process of attempting to find alternatives. I think the whole thing is distorted from my perspective, is distorted by the fact that government is very involved in America, both at the state and the federal level. In Europe, certainly at the state level. At the country level, governments are very involved in the funding of universities. We're seeing now a big crisis in funding research, but also the whole idea of tuition, which again is a crisis in the United States. The idea that government provides students with tuition to go. When you offer free service, what do you get over consumption of that service? Anything you offer for free, people consume too much of. So the funding of universities need to be rethought. The purpose of universities, I think, needs to be rethought. But I still want to emphasize that I think there's a crucial role of gaining what you'd call a liberal arts or STEM or whatever and a specialized focused education. There's enormous value in that, just probably not for everyone. And it probably needs to be more exposed to what I'd call market pressures, including the pricing mechanism.
- [06:57]
Jay Shapiro
Okay, great. So I think just as a piece to put on the table early, this thing's called crisis in the university or in the academy. I think there's a lot of crises and we're going to hear different angles on many of them and we'll see how we can time together. Eric, you're next.
- [07:10]
Eric Kaufman
Right? Yeah. I think there really are two major crises. I mean, one is to do with administrative bloat and cost, which I'm not going to talk that much about, but I think is a major driver of fee inflation. The one I'm going to talk about more is what I think of as a cultural or intellectual crisis in the university. And this is really, if we want to explain what's happening in the US now with Trump's war on Harvard, for example, in Colombia, we have to understand this backdrop. And here I think what's occurred is a decline in viewpoint diversity, which means that the universities have become more left wing, more monolithically left wing. And I'll just give you some numbers on this. If you take the United States in as late as the 1980s, it was only one and a half on the left to one on the right. If we include the STEM fields and all universities down to two year colleges, one and a half to one, that's now at seven to one, left to right. And in fact, if we take a place and if we look at the Ivy leagues, if you look at donations data, it's 96, roughly 96% Democrat, 4% Republican. And that was before already, before Trump, these trends were well established. What happens when you get essentially nobody on the other side? If everybody more or less agrees, that leads to two things. John Ellis, in his book the Breakdown of Higher Education, talks about the fact that when you get a conformist atmosphere, the incentive is no longer to find an accommodation or a synthesis in the middle, but rather to exemplify the values that everyone holds in an extreme way. And so, for example, the Cass Sunstein has done work on judicial panels, three judge panels, where when you have two judges that are Republican and one that's Democrat, yes, the Republicans win, will often get the victory, but it'll be a more moderated judgment than when you have three Republican judges on those panels. The judgments are more extreme. And similarly, in academia, when everybody is of the same political stripe, then you get a very extreme type of politics that comes in. And that has really emerged strongly in the last few decades in this. I mean, just. And this is not just the United States. In this country, the Russell Group universities, most of them, have something called mandatory diversity statements that people have to fill out when they apply for a job. And this is essentially a political litmus test. Do you support the cultural left or not? That's all it is. Last point to make will be that peer pressure becomes enormous when you've got a monoculture. So in this country, only one in five Brexit supporting academics say they would reveal that to a colleague. And these kinds of pressures just shut down different points of view. And that's one of the. And once universities become partisan, they then become targets of the opposing party whom they dislike. And this is what we've seen with the partisanship of the American university. They're now in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, and a lot of negative things are happening because of that.
- [10:03]
Jay Shapiro
Great. Katherine. We have two current academics on stage, if you found in their bios, and then one who was in it about 25 years ago, but is often on college campuses. Catherine told me she feels like she's on the front lines of a lot of these conversations recently. So what's your opening volley?
- [10:17]
Catherine Liu
So, first of all, I'm going to say that let's differentiate between left and liberals. I feel very uncomfortable at my university because I'm not a liberal, I'm a leftist, and I don't Come out and say that very often. And I feel very constrained by liberal ideology, which is the dominant hegemon of the past hundred years and its days are numbered. One, two. I'd like to say that the introduction is absolutely wrong with regard to the American university. It has not been a site of freedom and research for hundreds of years, maybe 150 years, maybe. But Yale, Princeton and Harvard were sleepy seminaries where you sent your not very bright son who couldn't inherit your fortune to become a pastor and preach the word of God in godforsaken areas of the American western beyond Appalachia. So it was about, in the late 19th century, only American universities decided to emulate the German model, which they thought was more based, research based and less constrained by religious belief. So let's just like put that out there. Universities were never sites of academic freedom of speech, number one. Number two, today, one of the reasons that it had to be transformed or people have felt that it should be transformed is because of the progressive movement in the United States which wanted to expand the polity to working class ethnic minorities so that they could be educated enough to be citizens. So before, how did people get educated? Before, universities sort of institutionalized the kinds of general education that the citizen, usually male, all male, and it was 1922 when women were able to vote. But in order to be a member of a participatory democracy, you had to have a general education. And you know, this general education should not be market facing or applied knowledge, but a general humanistic education. And that I think we failed at in the university, one from the right, because everyone wants vocational applied education. The numbers of English majors at Harvard and Stanford are now in the two digits. At my university at UC Irvine, which is very prestigious for the humanities, when I first arrived in 2004, there were 1,100 English majors. Today there are 500 English majors. And so there's a. I think that there are many reasons for this. The market pressure, economic anxiety from outside and from within, you know, and I think I would agree, we would agree. I would agree with my more conservative colleagues on their critique is that a lot of humanities education is ideological indoctrination. Not in leftism, but in liberalism. And one of the things I think that could be done to revive the crisis in the humanities, which is a crisis of demand. Like if, if your numbers go down like that, it will go to zero. No one will know anything about literature. No one will read, Sorry, I'm going too far. No one will read anymore. And everyone will be coding and then AI will learn how to code. So that's a huge crisis. The other thing that we say about this exaggerated demand for the credential is that in 1900, 3% of Americans were professionals in the workforce and 25% worked in agriculture. Today those numbers have reversed themselves. So in order allegedly to get a white collar job, you need to have this professional credential. And there's an inflation of credentialism. So I agree with my colleagues here who are at least in some of the framing of the problem that you're on phrase that we should have public forms of education. So the platforms like YouTube have people like Jordan Peterson on them going, you're all taught wrong. I'm going to teach you the right way to think about yourselves because like Odysseus was a hero and young men, you are heroes. And you know, this is. I wish more people read the Odyssey. So you have this kind of like platform, platform disruption. And the University of Austin too against institutions that are worth billions of dollars, have billions of dollars in endowments, billions of dollars in revenue, billions of dollars in budgets. Is this really the best way to have like the death match between public facing platforms that are for profit and this like incredibly inert, Titanic like thing that is encouraging, I think intellectual conformity.
- [15:07]
Jay Shapiro
Perfect. Great work on your Jordan Peterson impression.
- [15:10]
Catherine Liu
That was bad.
- [15:11]
Jeroen Brook
I think we all.
- [15:12]
Catherine Liu
I do this because back to New York, New York East.
- [15:16]
Jay Shapiro
No, it's like Kermit the Frog. Anyway, let's.
- [15:20]
Eric Kaufman
As a Canadian, I object to that.
- [15:24]
Catherine Liu
So now nobody's reading anymore.
- [15:28]
Jay Shapiro
So now we have identity politics of the Canadians on the stage. But Yaron whispered a really important question in my ear that I'm going to get to. I promise that I'm going to pose to Katherine, but to our first theme and you brought it to us perfectly. Because the first theme, the question as asked is are universities still effective in conducting research and educating students? But I think what it's really asking, I'm going to give it to you first, is more of a philosophical question. So what is the proper role as you personally view the university universities be doing or serving or you know, are we producing economic agents for a neoliberal model or is that what should they be doing in your view?
- [16:06]
Eric Kaufman
Well, I mean, I think I'm kind of in between my fellow speakers in the sense that I do see a role for public funding. I do see a role for, you know, essentially people learning about things they wouldn't otherwise learn about. And so it does develop the character of the individual. But at the same time, of course, there is also, if you're expecting taxpayers to pay for this instead of hospital beds, clearly they're going to want something concrete in return. So I think there's also a vocational aspect to it. I mean, my biggest gripe, as you probably imagine, is I think that particularly in the social sciences and the humanities, the politicization of these topics means it's a bit like a ski hill where you can ski on the piste but you're not allowed over there and you're not allowed over there. So, oh, we can't really look too much at the biological origins of human behavior. That's a little bit. No, we don't want to touch that. And inequality, well, you're allowed one explanation for say, race inequality. That's called systemic racism or sex inequality. It's called patriarchy. You're not allowed to bring in other factors like, you know, family structure and other things like. So it's very walled off. And the topics, you know, sociology. Now Musa Al Gharbi, who recently wrote a book, I mean, he's done an analysis, about 85% of sociology is looking at inequality. I mean, yes, inequality is important, but 85% of the entire effort of a field on, I don't know, it just seems like it's gone very much so we need to have a rebalancing, we still need to study those topics and we still need to have left wing viewpoints, but we need to have a balance. And I don't know quite how we're going to keep, just before I leave
- [17:36]
Jay Shapiro
from you, but in your view, just on the proper role, then as simply as you could do it, student comes into the machine. I don't want to call it that really. But what do they come out as, in your view and your sort of, what do you think they should be equipped for mentally or economically? I want to pin on that.
- [17:52]
Eric Kaufman
Well, in the ideal world they'd learn some, I hate to use these buzzwords, which, yes, transferable skills. Okay, fine. I'm not opposed to, you know, they have to acquire some of these skills, whether that be literacy, numeracy, et cetera, about the world. So I would like to see them get a bit smarter, but equally, I think, be exposed to things they wouldn't normally be exposed to and therefore become a fuller adulthood.
- [18:15]
Jay Shapiro
Okay, yeah, I'm gonna go with you with this one. And I think you can actually, in your answer, ask Catherine the question you whispered because I think it's on topic. Yeah, yeah. So respond to that. What is the proper role.
- [18:25]
Jeroen Brook
What should. I don't disagree. I think the proper role is to give people who want it a broad education in a variety of different fields that are difficult to get elsewhere. But I also think that it's wrong to look at universities as one monolithic. Even today Harvard is very different than Iowa State, right? They're not producing the same thing, or maybe that's a bad example, but you know, the product is not the same. So I think that in a more rational world, if you will, I think universities would segment into. They would teach different things in terms of the focus on what they would contribute to their customers. And I think we should view students as customers. And this is why I'm against public funding of universities of any kind. Because I think then the market would segment and you would actually get real benefits and people would get at schools that specialized in the humanities, they would get this broad educational view. But even today, if you want to just do stem, you can go and just do STEM and not be exposed to the Odyssey at all. I think that's a shame. I'd like to see people getting the broad education, this basic humanities. I think it would be great if they got in high school, but given that they're not getting it there and this idea that they should learn how to read, write and so on, wouldn't it be nice if they already knew that in grammar school, never mind before they get it. So we've got a whole educational system to fix. This is just at the top. And look, I think there's a real problem of viewpoint diversity and it's not easy to fix, partially because people self select, that is people who have non leftist or liberal ideas. And my question is going to be what is the difference according to your perspective? Because you're saying you're a leftist but not a liberal. And I'm not sure what that means exactly. But the reality is that the people who are not leftists or liberals are self selected out of academia. And part of that is because they feel unwelcome there. But I think even before that, the reality is that a lot of people, the left is so dominated in our intellectual lives. For the last 150 years, really since the progressive era, the left has been at the forefront, left liberal, however you want to call it, at the forefront of intellectual activity. I think most people underwrite, have not felt comfortable there. Most people who are not left right, left liberal have chosen other careers, have gone in other directions and the whole world of think tanks was created really as an outlet for conservatives and libertarians who felt uncomfortable in the academia, but there are not that many of them even there. That is, if you add all those up, it's still not going to compensate for your 9 to 1 ratio. Right. So the question is, why are people on the conservative side not engaged in the kind of intellectual debates, not engaged in the kind of debates that the left and the leftists and the liberals are? And I think I have an explanation for that, but maybe we'll get to that. But it's partially the burden on people who have a different opinion to engage. Right. If you're not going to go and try, then you shouldn't be surprised that your viewpoint is not represented. You never brought it to the table.
- [21:53]
Jay Shapiro
Students as customers. Difference of left and liberal.
- [21:55]
Catherine Liu
Okay, well, I'll talk about students and customers later because I think that it hinges on this term uncomfortable. Like if you're made uncomfortable, you want to not take this course. And I think that's the wrong thing to do. Education make us all uncomfortable, number one. And customer service. I am not a customer service provider. I am not a service worker. Although many of. Although my institutions are me, the institutions where I work are trying to frame it at that. So they would agree with you, you know, you're a service provider. I am not. Okay, so here's the difference between the lefts and liberals. A real leftist believes in universal values and the importance of history and culture as a basis of knowledge, with which we critique the social, the political and economic forms that we live in. Liberals believe that the present is the best world possible and that all we need to do is include everyone's points of views and feelings and we desire. I am totally against that. I think that the whole idea of universal reason, which for better or worse, is an ideal. I've talked about this before. That came up during the French Enlightenment, especially with regard to the work of Descartes and then Voltaire and to some, not Rousseau, he's different, Not Rousseau. But this idea that we each have capacity for reason and that scientific experimentation means the method that I use and the method that you use will help us arrive at the same conclusions. And that tests and experiments would allow me to see my error, that, for better or worse, was forged in France in the late 17th century. So what I wanted to. What I think that liberals would do is like, oh, that's just heteropatriarchy. That's Eurocentrism. We should overturn that. That there's indigenous cosmology. And when my students, who are all like 95% liberal say, well, what do you think about native cosmologies? And I know that there are a lot of people here who are invested in Jungian things like that. I'll say that's myth, and myth is irrational. It can be very beautiful. But we are in a university. We want to understand the place of myth, but we use reason. So this is the difference between the leftists and the liberals. And the reason is that the universal mode of production in the world is industrial mode of production. No one's going to escape that industrialization, modernization has to do with standardization of forms and modes of consumption and modes of progress. So how we cannot escape to a kind of primitivism, we have to move forward, not backward. That is the difference between me and my liberal colleagues. And they would hate me for saying this because they like to fetishize the primitive. I do not. Because I really think that the only way forward is through reason and through Marxist reason. The other thing I was going to say was. And so the other thing that I wanted to say was your. Okay, sorry, that. Oh, now I've lost my vote.
- [25:16]
Jay Shapiro
Okay, no, no, no, I want to bring. I know you. It was directed to you, but I know your definition of woke. And a lot of that was. I just wanted people to understand what just happened. That a leftist on stage, I think was very much in line with yours, who was very much not a leftist. So give your definition of woke and see if you guys can parse it, if it's even different, because I think this is fascinating.
- [25:35]
Eric Kaufman
Well, I wish we had old leftists, you know, materialist leftists instead of what we've got in the university. So, yeah, that would be refreshing or. But yeah, woke, I think what we're talking about with woke is.
- [25:47]
Jay Shapiro
Can you give your definition of.
- [25:48]
Eric Kaufman
The definition of woke is really making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual minorities.
- [25:53]
Jay Shapiro
That is before you go, because it was so close to hers. But that word sacred is the word, right? And so.
- [25:58]
Eric Kaufman
So this is the fetishization and the sort of obsession. What that means then is something like you will then have. If you've got egalitarianism, it'll be, well, we must have a fixed proportion, perfectly equal representation of black students at Harvard or indigenous perspectives. And so it's that emphasis on identity rather than class, perhaps. And so this is really, I think the new left is really the force that we're looking at in universities. And one of the reasons for cancel culture, for example, it's all around culture and it's all around this idea that you. This therapeutic idea that you have emotionally traumatized or harmed somebody because of their identity, and that's why we can't give you free speech or you can't pursue this particular kind of research because you might emotionally harm somebody. And that does. I guess I would define that as a kind of leftism, more New Left than Old Left in origins.
- [26:52]
Jay Shapiro
And you call it liberalism.
- [26:53]
Catherine Liu
Yeah, yeah. But you could call it New Left. And I'd say that I am an Old Left person or defend the Old left.
- [27:03]
Jay Shapiro
This brings us to. I want to come back to you, Jeroen, because this brings me sort of to my next theme, which is about the economic model. Because I think what's interesting is, I think what you just heard was a bit of agreement on maybe ideological capture, ideological drift on that particular. Do you want to hit it now?
- [27:18]
Catherine Liu
Before I hit the theme, I remember what I wanted to say, your hon, which was that an educated public is a public good. That's why there should be public funding for universities.
- [27:33]
Jay Shapiro
So the next theme is on, I think, the sort of economic models that might be driving some of this. The huge drift in endowments and where the money's coming from. You think students as customers is kind of the right framework? Well, they certainly are paying a lot for their service right now. And Eric, we could get to you. They wrote a letter, but they didn't like you very much. How do you feel about that? Because it feels like you're like, oh, the customer is always right in the Ayn Rand Institute in some way. Is that.
- [28:03]
Jeroen Brook
No, the customer's often wrong. That's not the point. But I want to say something about leftism just before we get to that, because for the first time in my life, I think I was like, whoa, maybe I'm a leftist. Because that was amazing. I mean, I have that on tape.
- [28:22]
Catherine Liu
Other than the we did it Woo celebrity death match. Okay.
- [28:26]
Jeroen Brook
Other than the Marxism at the end. Universal reason. Absolutely. That should be. And if we could return the universities to the ideas of universal reason and reason as the means by which we determine truth and determine what is right and what is wrong and what is true and what is not, and we focus on universal principles and universal principles that are true. Wow, that would be a huge intellectual achievement and reorient the university completely.
- [28:56]
Jay Shapiro
Do you think the market can tell us a lot of those tricks? And that might be where.
- [29:00]
Jeroen Brook
Look, I don't think markets tell us the truth. Markets tell us what people value at any given point in time. And a lot of times people value crap and Part of the role of universities, I think ultimately is to elevate, is to elevate us and to make us better so that we stop valuing crap, so that the market then becomes a marketplace where we value better things. I'm just saying that we should be able to value crap because that's what freedom means. Freedom means that if some people value crap, they value crap. You know, it's sad, but it's reality. I don't believe in imposing values on people. That is, I believe in judging and saying that's crap and that's good, but not imposing my system of value what I think is good on people. I do believe there is good. I do believe there is truth. And we should strive to that and we should help people achieve that, but not through coercive means, but through voluntary and educational means. And so I do believe students are customers and yes, they should be felt uncomfortable. I mean, I'm a customer. My trainer, you know, my exercise trainer, he makes me feel very uncomfortable, very uncomfortable. And he is a service provider and I hire him to make me feel uncomfortable. If I could do it myself, if I could impose the pain that's involved in exercise by myself, I would do it. But I'm willing to pay somebody to do it because I can't force myself to do it myself. The same thing. I think an educator, educators should make you feel uncomfortable. And you as a student should embrace that, should want that, should want the expansion of your horizon, should want the challenge of having your ideas shaken up a little bit, the cognitive dissonance, and you should be willing to pay for it. And I think that is the sense in which, you know, you are a customer. And the economic model today is very perverse. Is very perverse. Because part of the problem is you say students pay a lot of money for education. Well, do they really, I mean, are they paying? Do they really think of it as their money? They're taking out loans. The loans are given to them without any consideration of what degree they're getting or without any consideration of their prospects for the future, without any consideration of the quality of the education they're going to get. If they want a loan, they get a loan. The government just provides them with a loan. It never used to be like that. The government didn't provide all the loans for education in the United States. It was a risk based model. And there was a lot more discretion in terms of who got loans and who didn't based on what they were getting, which university, and all of that. I think that's a better model to go back to rather than everybody just getting. Because I think you get this not just price inflation, which we're definitely getting because of government pricing of education, but you also get just inflation of too many people wanting an education they don't really want. They don't know why they're getting. I mean, I generally think kids go to college way too early. I used to tell my undergraduate students, you shouldn't be here. Take a year off, go travel the world, get a life, discover something about the world out there and then come back and then we can have an interesting discussion. But right now, you look bored. You're not really motivated, you're not really interested. Why are you here? Because my parents want me to be here. Because my parents are willing to write a ticket. Because it's expected that I go to college. Because it's the socially conventional thing to do. Well, no, I mean you should go to college or university because you really want to go to university. You should study something because you really want to study it. And we've gone away from those kind of models either.
- [32:39]
Jay Shapiro
You can take this, but the students as customers, and customers sometimes choose crap. I think most of us could, in our minds, fill in the kind of degrees you're thinking of that they are purchasing with certain unemployable. I guess you would say, well, it has little.
- [32:54]
Jeroen Brook
Just unemployable. Look, college is not just about employment. College is about broadening your mind and learning new things and helping you to discover truth about yourself, about the world around you. And a lot of what you study in university today is distancing you from truth, distancing you from reality, and actually doing harm to your own psyche. So it might be challenging, but challenging in a very disoriented, bad direction.
- [33:19]
Jay Shapiro
Who wants to take this? Because I also want to steer to also the economic forces like endowments that have gone through the roof, investing in private corporations that have a say that might be nudging some of this crap.
- [33:30]
Eric Kaufman
Well, yeah, so I think I agree with some of what your honor is saying around that there has to be some kind of price signal and some kind of value in a degree, and maybe that's being occluded. But I equally think higher education is very much not a free market in the sense that it is full of market imperfections. So, for example, if you compare it to podcasts or online media, entering into online media is very cheap, so the barriers to entry are very low, very easy to set up a podcast, set up a new profile, a Platform where you're offering university courses, that's easy. Just put it online. The problem is it's expensive to set up a university. The University of Austin has raised like 200 million. And even the University of Austin's future is not, is in doubt. We don't know if it's going to make it. So it's an enormous cost to set up a new university. And then you've got first mover advantages. Harvard was founded, Oxford was founded hundreds of years ago. It's got alumni, it's got endowments. Those alumni have a stake in making sure the prestige of the degree remains high. They kind of come back for homecoming. The prestige rankings have hardly changed in 50, 100 years. I don't think they're going to change and I don't think it's that easy to enter and shake up this thing like a marketplace. So we have to also think, I think about other solutions other than market ones. But that's not to say I agree with you that low value, low quality degrees should not be subsidized endlessly. And I think that is starting to come apart, particularly in a system like Britain where there's a lot of public subsidizing of the student loan system. I do think there'll be a shakeout at the bottom and there will be a shakeout of low value degrees. I think that's inevitable in an age of budget pressures.
- [35:14]
Catherine Liu
So I was going to say that there is a crisis in employment, there's an economic and political crisis around universities and they're less and less shielded from them. I'll give you an example of something that's happening in California where, you know, strangely enough, we agree about a lot of things, but there is an enormous need for electrical workers because as you know, our electrical grid is in trouble and there's a lot of wilderness in California. And I was talking to a member of the electrical workers union and he says there are jobs postings that are unfilled. They are, they pay $150,000 once you finish your apprenticeship. And young people are not choosing these jobs. You can go in with the high school degree. What has happened in general, and this is, I think about the marcitization of everything, is there's a generalized disrespect for skill, for the craft skill of either teaching, thinking or even being a high level craftsman. And this has happened because of the forces of deindustrialization. This is what I think anyway, that we used to be a country that prided ourselves on making things. We are now A country that prides ourselves on manipulating, manipulating ourselves and manipulating other people and manipulating financial markets. We've moved all the industrial manufacturing jobs to China. And for an ambitious 18 year old with parents, they're not going to be like, I'm going to go become an electrical worker. Even though there's a need for it, it's well paid. And I think it's partially because we've devalued, because we've seen ourselves as customers who, we've devalued the long periods of apprenticeship and the respect for skills. So in graduate seminars now, people don't even have the skills to argue with each other. There have been cases where my students who are leftists get yelled at by their colleague, you know, just screamed at by their peers. So I think that this kind of bullying encourages a kind of intellectual conformity. And I think the three of us would agree about that. That actually is directly working against the kinds of curious, skeptical minds that we would like to cultivate. And I feel like a craftsperson who really knows how to work with his or her hands, who sees their processes of work valued in culture, will respect learning more. But if you live in a cubicle and you're just like manipulating yourself and your ideas and trying to sell all the time and, and you're oppressed by your boss, you're going to look for shortcuts to success. And shortcuts to success are partially why we are in this crisis today. Because the pressures of competition produced by the market produce an incredibly anxious, superficial, highly individualized person who's not capable of being disturbed by ideas without having like a total freak out meltdown.
- [38:29]
Jay Shapiro
You want to jump into this one?
- [38:30]
Jeroen Brook
Yes.
- [38:31]
Jay Shapiro
Okay, jump in.
- [38:32]
Jeroen Brook
Well, I'm just going to, I'm just going to. But economics, so I have to. There's no deindustrialization in the United States. That is a myth. We produce more stuff today than we ever have in terms of actual, actual value produced. We do it with a lot less people, not because of China, but because of automation. And that is a trend that's not going away. So we can fetishize industrial jobs all we want. They're not coming back. They're never coming back. The robots are going to take over those jobs. And we better figure out a model about how to create value and how to create meaning in those cubicles because there are going to be more of them, not fewer of them. Industrialization is again, a fantasy of the past. It wasn't that great to begin with. And again, this is part of the part of the problem. But I agree completely that we disrespect skills, skills, intellectual skills and physical skills. We completely disrespect that we don't have that in our educational system. But I don't think we get the snowflakes that we have today because of that. I think the snowflakes are a consequence of something more fundamental. I think we have elevated in our educational system, starting really with kindergarten, we've elevated emotion above reason. That is, we teach kids to emote. We teach kids that emotions are primary, that thoughts are not objective, that truth is not objective, that reality is not objective. And indeed reason is not a means of knowing reality, but emotions are. We put them in circles and have them debate issues that they're not qualified to debate. They know Nothing about as 5 year olds or 10 year olds or 12 year olds. But they learn. They learn to express emotions above all. And by the time they get to university, they're little emotional bubbles, you know, all they have is emotions. And they've never been taught to use the thing that makes us human, which is our reasoning capacity. They've never been taught that there is such a thing as a truth. All there is is opinion. So yes, they get into circumstances and then don't know how to argue with somebody else because they don't have the tools. Those are tools of reason. All they have is emotion. The yelling is an expression and it's a manifestation of everything they've been taught up until that point. So again, our crisis, our educational crisis is much deeper than academia. It sources academia because we teach the teachers, but it sources academia. But it's a crisis of elevating emotion above reason and rejecting the idea of universal reason.
- [40:58]
Jay Shapiro
So, okay, that's good.
- [41:01]
Catherine Liu
I don't see any kindergarten debates, but I'll agree with you.
- [41:06]
Jay Shapiro
I'm going to come back to you. I have a quote that I wasn't sure if I was going to use it. I'm going to use it because of some of the things you just said comes from Buckminster Fuller, probably is much more of a leftist from 1970 because he recognized you mentioned in there, at least in the States and probably in most of the west, jobs are being created, but fewer people are needed for them. And this has been noticed for a long time. Did I quote that right?
- [41:27]
Jeroen Brook
Manufacturing jobs.
- [41:28]
Jay Shapiro
Manufacturing jobs.
- [41:29]
Jeroen Brook
There are plenty of jobs. No shortage of jobs in the world today.
- [41:32]
Jay Shapiro
Because my next question is very low. My next question, which is the last theme about is there an overhaul? But I want to focus on sort of the technological changes, and if universities are even up to the task and kind of the stuff we mentioned with ChatGPT and whatever. But Buckminster Fuller. I want to give this one to you, Katherine. They said this in 1970, and you'll probably hate it, but he said we should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that 1 in 10,000 of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed and at some kind of drudgery, because according to Malthusian, Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors, people making instruments for inspectors to inspect, inspectors. This is the part. And he said this in 1970. Right? The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them to earn a living. I want to bring this one to you because in your answer, you're talking about, you're saying there's jobs out there for them. I'm not sure how many of them feel that way, whether you think the statistics are showing them something different or not. And it goes back to my earlier question of what the role of the university really is in a world where, let's say, Fuller maybe had a point.
- [42:56]
Catherine Liu
Okay, so he's very much of the New Left and thinks that there can be a utopia of just pure leisure time. I think leisure in itself was created as a category because there was work. And the division between work and leisure is something that's completely destroyed because of this thing, because we're working and we're playing games on the same platform, on the same gadget. So that kind of utopianism I can't completely endorse. But it certainly is true that we have the productive capacity to liberate the majority of workers from drudgery to find meaningful work. And I think meaningful work is what is important here. And our jobs, the cubicle jobs especially, and the managerial and professional jobs that I'm talking about, are much more surveilled and managed by a system that wants to extract profit from. From any enterprise. So private equity enters an industry, deskills the workers and heightens the managerial class to create flows and debts that they then extract from the industry and they leave. Like, from sporting clubs like Manchester United to student loan debt, to private hospitals. We see a degeneration of American industry, if you like, or job production because of this management for finance capital. So I don't believe that Buckminster Fuller could not have predicted this development. We have such great production capacity. Why isn't there more meaningful work? If we can give the drudgery to AI, great, but we're not, we're just, we're inventing new forms of drudgery to dominate people. So there's intellectual conformity or within the universities, but there's a degradation of work and its meaning for the general population, from the blue collar to the white collar workers. So my concern is how do we bring back the dignity of work? Your honor and I can debate about whether or not there is industrialization. We can do that, we can pull statistics out of a hat. But I think what I want to say is if we don't have industrial jobs anymore and they were incredibly punishing, how can we find more meaningful work for people who don't go to college?
- [45:24]
Eric Kaufman
For instance, we probably should say something about the impact of AI on universities. You know, students now are, I think 90% of them are using it markers are going to be using can write exams, it can mark exams. So what I mean this is going to have some impact. What impact is that going to have on the university? I think will be quite interesting. And the only last thing I'd say is I do think, I think people need to have work in order to have meaning in a way. So I don't, you know ubi, in some ways maybe it would solve a problem, but on the other hand, I think it'll create social problems we're seeing with a mental health crisis. So I don't think that's a long term solution.
- [45:59]
Jay Shapiro
That's where it will end.
- [46:00]
Jeroen Brook
Give everyone a huge applause.
- [46:03]
Jay Shapiro
This was super fun. Everyone, thanks.
- [46:08]
Podcast Narrator/Daniel or Zeb
Thank you for listening to Philosophy for our times. What do you think? Do we need to change how universities work? And how do you feel about your computer science degrees? Eb Personally I thought it was a fantastic experience, but the world is definitely changing fast. I had the benefit of doing my studies before ChatGPT came out, back when computer science degrees were seen as pretty valuable. But it's not clear if that's still the case in this new AI era. I've actually heard that the best career to go into right now is becoming an electrician because of the number of data centers being built. So maybe there's something to be said about Catherine's point on investing in technical skills. Well, we would love to hear what you think. Please write to us using the email in our show notes, and I promise we do read them. Shout out to Rodney, who wrote us a fascinating email following our recent episode with Ryan Williams and Ian McGilchrist telling us about his theory for what knowledge represents for the Aboriginal Nyunga tribe in Western Australia. Do like and subscribe for more. You can also head over to our website IAI TV for thousands more brilliant debates, talks and interviews from the world's leading thinkers. Bye.
- [47:14]
Eric Kaufman
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Jay Shapiro
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Eric Kaufman
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