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This episode is brought to you by Claude by Anthropic. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at Goodenough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter and finds connections you might have missed for problems worth solving. Get started at Claude AI Spotify
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welcome
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to the Quillette podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan K. And by Iona Italia. Quilet is where freethought lives. We are an independent, grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and peerless commentary. You are about to hear a free preview of this week's episode. To hear the full episode and to get access to all our podcasts and articles, Visit us@quillet.com and click the subscribe button. This week's podcast is something of a throwback episode, both for Colette and for me personally. We're going to be talking about the problem of declining trust in American higher education, a topic that's been central to Colette's journalistic mission since our founding and which dominated a lot of the blockbuster essays and exposes that first put Quillette on the map during the late 2010s. But as noted, it's also a throwback for me personally, as today's podcast is centered on a new report from Yale University, where I went to law school in the 1990s. In April 2025, the president of Yale University, Maury D. McInnis, mandated a 10 scholar committee to address the question of why so many Americans no longer seem to trust universities such as Yale itself, and that committee published its report last month. With me to discuss the report's contents is one of the committee's members, professor of Law Sarat Sanga, who serves as co director of the Yale Law School center for the Study of Corporate Law. And just to be clear, Professor Sangha joined the faculty of the law school just a few years ago, long after I graduated. The report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which Professor Sangha and his fellow committee members finalized on April 10, is a public document. You can read it yourself on the Yale University website, and it's a remarkably candid piece of work, full of observations that will please and perhaps displease both sides of the culture war. On one hand, the authors absolutely do not suggest that the only problem plaguing Yale and other prestigious schools is a smear campaign launched by Donald Trump and his political allies. In fact, Trump's name doesn't appear in the report at all, except except incidentally in the titles of articles listed in the source notes. On the other hand, if you're expecting the report to be a full throated denunciation of wokeness or progressive academic monoculture from start to finish, no, that's not what it is. Yes, the authors are forthright in noting that political views at places such as Yale are not statistically representative of the United States as a whole. But they also believe that this is just one reason, and perhaps not even the main reason, for the declining status of higher education among the broad American public. The authors note that American universities annually receive billions of dollars in financial support of one kind or another from government sources, a wealth transfer that is supposed to produce important research and quality teaching, but which many Americans now see as a kind of subsidy that paid so that the sons and daughters of privileged families can become even more privileged. Great inflation and sky high tuitions have also negatively affected the image of universities, which are perceived by some as bastions of the super rich, whose progressive educators and students hypocritically denounce America's hierarchical and unequal nature even as they profit from it. The antisemitism and anti Israel encampments that sprouted on campuses beginning in late 2023 only made things worse in this regard. And, by the way, on this score, I learned during the interview that Professor Senga was actually on the campus of Columbia University in May 2025 when New York City police were called in to disperse and arrest violent protesters who'd taken over parts of a university library in the name of Palestinian rights. In his conversation with me, Professor Senga told me that repairing the reputation of universities and colleges and has to start with recognition that the American public is owed something in return for the billions of public dollars that are funneled into higher education, and that this payback has to constitute more than just political lectures about social justice and other lofty progressive themes. Now I'm editorializing a little bit in my own voice. Professor Senga's own advice isn't really political in nature, I should note. Rather, his themes are practical and institutional, the same kind of advice that you'd give to, say, a corporation or activist organization that's lost its way over the years by losing track of its mission. As Professor Sanga sees it, the role of the university is to promote excellence in teaching and research, not to save humanity or preach transformative ideologies. Which isn't to say that humanity doesn't need saving or that some transformative ideologies aren't worth promoting. It's just that, as he puts it, organizations typically function best when they operate within defined mandates that accord with their core competencies. Please enjoy my interview with Yale Law School professor Sarat Sanga, a co author of the newly released report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education.
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I didn't realize this. When people rank higher education institutions by trust, the highest trust institutions are often their local community colleges, and then after that comes big public universities, and then the lowest trust is private institutions, including Ivy League. Sounds unfortunately like Ivy League is kind of the bottom of the barrel in terms of trust. Have they dug down into why that's the case?
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C
This is something that I don't think is unique to higher education, but to all kinds of institutions. So take government. I guess I'm speculating here a bit, but I would imagine that the federal government has lowest confidence, followed by state and then local, and then the hyperlocal, like, you know, neighborhood organization, board and
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B
stuff like that, right?
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C
So even if, if only because they're just so much more accessible, they. They touch so many people's lives. So clearly in the case of higher education, Ivy League or Ivy plus institutions are very inaccessible in many ways, right? Whereas I went to University of Michigan, there might have been five or six thousand people in my class, which is multiple times what a place like Yale, which I work at now, and produce the report multiple times, the public that is served. So it may just be, it's very inaccessibility. Of course, with all that wealth and power comes a lot of responsibility, as they say, and really high expectations.
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B
There are people who do trust elite institutions and elite schools, which tend to be other elites. So it's been a while since I graduated from law school, but it was well known that if you were looking for a circuit court clerkship or something like that, that this or that judge would only hire people from like Harvard, Yale and Stanford or and like maybe NYU and Georgetown and I don't know, a few others. And I'm guessing that's still the case that, you know, the elite law firms, the circuit court judges, certain kinds of consulting firms, presumably they still have trust in Ivy League schools and in that kind of diploma. Is that still the case or has even that ebbed in the last couple of decades?
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C
I mean, we've seen examples that are sort of spectacular examples of judges saying, I won't take another clerk from a school X where school X might actually be Yellow School. Those are political statements, but I Guess your, your, your question is more who still believes in us? Is there anyone left?
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The elites still believe in it, apparently, certainly.
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C
But that, as we've seen, is just not enough. Like the whole, the whole, like, just take the proverbial step back. We style ourselves as a private institution, but like any other elite school, we take enormous amounts of money from the federal government, and so it's upwards of $1 billion a year, so.
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B
Which Trump has tried to leverage in order to do all kinds of things.
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C
Exactly. But if you, if you just sort of step back a few decades, this is one of the most successful public private partners partnerships in history. The deal is public, provides enormous amounts of money with some strings attached, but for the most part, we're left alone to govern ourselves. And that's kind of what academic freedom means. So there's two sides of the, of the pact. And when you say that perhaps, you know, we still believe in ourselves or our fellow elites believe in us, like, clearly that's not enough when the deal was that we're going to uphold an end of a bargain, which is the public essentially asking us to justify all this autonomy and resources that they, that they offer us. So, you know, even if you can find these pockets of elites that still believe in the project, that's not where the money comes from and it's also not where the service is out.
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B
Been a long time, but, you know, I went to Yale Law School back in the day. This is the 90s. And I remember even back then there was this tension which you hit at in the report. You, you, you talk about some of these contradictions in the mission of a university where, and it's hyper selective, but it's also supposed to be like, very inclusive. And I remember even when I went to law school in the 90s, there was this unresolved tension that we were all extremely proud of ourselves for going to the school. And, you know, it's like the best and the brightest and congratulating ourselves. But at the same time, there was this rhetoric about how. Well, of course, you know, we're going to make the world a better place and we're going to interrogate hierarchies. And I remember it wasn't especially coherent. On one hand, we were very proud of how selective it was, and the institution itself wasn't shy about talking about how selective it was. But at the same time there was this kind of idea. But while in an ideal world it'd be much more egalitarian and the whole concept of selectivity would sort of like wither away and it never really resolved itself. And I'm wondering if on one hand you're talking about public trusts, but on the other hand, I imagine there's a lot of anxiety among students who get in because the flip side of a lack of public trust is people who are in the university realizing that the public doesn't necessarily trust how they got into this institution, the benefits that are going to come from it now that I'm here, like, do I have some kind of duty to abandon institutions like this and in the name of social justice? And maybe they're kind of embarrassed that there was this meritocracy they somehow conquered. You know, we're supposed to be suspicious of meritocracies these days.
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C
These institutions, I mean, they run on trust. So you take admissions, which you just touched upon, right? Do I deserve to get in? Is kind of a question one might ask, or maybe the entitled might ask, how come I didn't get in sooner, right? And I think, you know, we have a situation here with super high stakes, increasingly gatekeepers to elite professions and positions, enormous public subsidies and. And a kind of black box, right? That's what the holistic admissions approach is all about. Now, it can in principle produce amazing results because there's more to life than passing an entrance examination or getting the highest SAT score, right? So someone who got a 1600 may have, or let's say 1550, you know, still super elite levels may have just a different kind of thing to offer to the university ecosystem than someone who gets a 1600. And so that sort of discretion that we, that the university enjoys in admitting people, selecting people, that too is based on trust that we're going to. The idea is that we're going to let you do this, provided it seems as if you're selecting based on those kind of ineffable qualities or something that's beyond test scores and grades that can actually produce public benefits. So things like produce, you know, you know, whatever you want to call it, resilience or leadership or a sense of public spiritedness or people who go into public service jobs and the like. But anyone, you know, observing from afar, and this isn't so much an indictment of those who go into things like consulting or finance and the like, it's just this is what is observed. And the public can kind of rightly wonder, like, what is it exactly that we're subsidizing here? Are we just giving people who already have advantage and privilege just a little bit more of that, you know, now that's just the Student side of things. But the same argument can be applied to anything else. Basically, that the university produces, whether it's admissions decisions or grades or research output. Right. Each one, you can apply the same question, like, where are my public benefits? But part of your question, or the angst that you offered through your prompt, one way to sort of reset or just kind of get out of that frame is just to take seriously the question or the idea that the public has put a tremendous amount of trust in us to do a particular kind of job of teaching, teaching the children that they send to us and the young adults as. As well as producing the best possible and objective research possible. I think it's just about taking those obligations seriously rather than constantly kind of asking ourselves, do I deserve to be here?
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B
When I went to law school, you know, there was that kind of unspoken, holistic process where, you know, we all had good marks, but, you know, some guy had, like, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and some other guy had, like, started on his hands. Yeah, on his hands. And then, you know, the Joe, you know, he played. Played the cello for all the Sherpas and got a standing ovation despite the low oxygen levels. Like, you know, this. These are jokes, but when I went to law school, there were a lot of people like that. Like, there were people who did amazing things, who start. Who had started companies and who. And we all thought the admission system was great because we'd all been admitted.
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C
So of course it's great.
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B
But this tension, which kind of still exists, it's the background cultural assumption that there is an elite in society and society gets better if the leadership skills of these people who have elite potential, if that potential is developed by putting them in the same room with other people who also climbed Mount Kilimanjaro or did some equally amazing thing, and they could all brainstorm and start companies and produce novel legal doctrines that will make America a more just place. And I think the difference then and now is that baseline assumption that there are elites in society and that they deserve their own spaces. And Yale Law School happened to be one of them. That that's broken down. And it's broken down in two ways. It's. Conservatives have attacked it because elite is, you know, it's a term of abuse now. It's like, well, the elites think this, the elites think that. But it's also, to some extent, a term of abuse among progressives who, many of them who are elite themselves, who are kind of ashamed at the idea of there being elite, and they still want their Kids to go to Colgate and Haverford and Smith and go on to law school in the Ivy League. But there's a kind of silent shame about it and nothing you have in your report could ever, like you don't have the tools to resolve this. Like it's something very fundamental about what happens to a society which starts to doubt its own premises about the validity of its ruling class.
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C
I see a renewed sensitivity to these questions. Right. This is just the, the unequal society that we live in. And now, you know, I think the question is constructively, how do you move forward? Do you just kind of go into this tailspin of like that, you know, that you're imagining a student might go into, or, or do you attempt to make good on the deal that we have with the public, namely resources in exchange for training. Yes, elites to then go and live ethical and productive lives.
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B
Elite institutions. Now the fudge factor they now introduce is that they still exist as machines for the elites. And if they're companies, they're profit making machines for shareholders. But then they have these very lofty mission statements or posters on the wall about ESG and making the world a better place. At Yale University, you actually advocated for a kind of stripped down mission statement. So instead of being a university for the wealthy and privileged, and then your mission statement is, we're going to make the world a better place and advance social justice. The mission statement that you had in your recommendations was, one of your recommendations was really stripped down and went to the pedagogical mission of the university. Can you talk a little bit about that?
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C
You know, let's wind back the clock a little bit. We were established in 1701 from the colonial Connecticut legislature basically to be a school for the clergy, to educate the clergy and civil servants. Then 40 something years later, our charters renewed and expanded to essentially promote all good literature is how they would refer to the arts and sciences and all of human learning. So from day one, we had an educational mission that was based on promoting knowledge one way or another. There was a custodial mission of maintaining the archives and the like. The version of the mission statement that the committee report recommended, I would say returning to, is the version that's been in the faculty handbook for decades.
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B
I'm going to say it out loud here. Yale University's mission is to create, disseminate and preserve knowledge through research and teaching. That's a really basic, admirably basic. It's kind of like, you know, Joe's plumbing mission is to create, disseminate and preserve the Flow of water and waste through pipes and joints. It's really brass tacks, not lofty.
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C
Would you want your plumber to say, I'm going to come into your house and make the world a better place?
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No.
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C
Or I'm going to keep your water flowing. And it's not just a question of like the transaction, although that is a part of it, that kind of reduces it to this commercial transaction. But there's still, I think, like I've called it, it's a bargain. It's a pact with the public that you're. That we will receive this enormous privilege, this enormous resources in exchange, we promise to do this specific thing. Right? The public is not asking universities to make the world a better place. In fact, the problem with a mission statement that says something like improving the world today, which is what Yale's 2016 rewrite of the mission was, is that it isn't a constraint, right? And almost virtually anything that a university could propose could fall under that, provided it has some positive welfare benefit. We could start writing checks to people, basically anybody. We could lower tuition, we could raise tuition and like and you know, redistribute the gains. We can expand in one area and student services and dining services, right? There isn't, there isn't a sense in which there is, we have, dare I call it, a mission or some kind of mandate or constraint. Now in olden times, which is to say when we were established, and in fact the charter is still good law in theory, the Connecticut attorney general could enforce it. It's just that it's capacious enough to include a lot of things. These charters, I mean, centuries ago, we take it really seriously, they included essentially the lawful acts that you could engage in. And originally it was teaching essentially this idea of a mission statement. I think, you know, maybe we can go on a little historical tangent here, but this is emerging in the 20th century when with general incorporation laws, which are basically the situation where to form a, to charter a school or a business, you don't need to ask the legislature, you can just do it yourself. And now the corporation or the school can engage in any lawful act, right? Which is to say there's no constraint on the kind of things it can do. And so in order to like adopt an identity, nonprofits and institutions would construct these mission statements and mandates to kind of mimic the purpose statements that were in charters that are centuries old.
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B
Just saying we think of it as hyper modern, but in fact, it's actually quite old fashioned in some ways.
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C
It's quite old fashioned in Fact, you know, if we take this tripartite mission, as you've put it, which is to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge, that statement has been made by Yale through its presidents, through its bylaws and charter in one form or another for three centuries. Even the last three presidents, in order, Rick Levin, Peter Salovey, and now Mari McInnes, all three, in their inaugural address, have basically stated that verbatim and called it our mission in one way or another. So, you know, the way that at least I would think about this recommendation is to kind of remind ourselves what we're doing here. Right? We should all be acting ethically, but I would say teaching well is our ethic or researching well, and is our ethic. Right. And to do that properly and to really take it seriously means we got to stay focused. Because I think one of the lessons of wealthy institutions, or maybe even just wealthy groups generally, is that over time there's this accumulated pressure to just sort of do more and more with that wealth to branch out, ever to grow. And, you know, if you're serving more students, terrific, right? But you could imagine you. You start off as a university, and before long you're. You're producing all kinds of other things that had nothing to do with the core mission. And that just kind of invites all this contestation, which I think is feeding into deeply the sense that universities have lost their way. They're not doing the thing that the public has asked them to do, which is the knowledge mission.
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B
I call this the McPizza problem, because when I was a teenager, I worked at McDonald's, which was when McDonald's briefly introduced the McPizza. The idea is, well, we're just going to serve people everything they want, and if they want pizza, we're. And then. But they quickly realized if you try and serve every kind of food, that's not. That's not the way to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Too bad we didn't have this conversation earlier. You could put that in the report.
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C
It could have been one case study. Qed, yeah.
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A
Okay.
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B
So at Colette, we spent a lot of time talking about free speech and culture war stuff and what used to be called wokeness. From reading your report, I got the sense, yeah, those are issues, but it's not. It's not even the biggest issue. And it's certainly not the only issue that's eroding trust. Is it fair to say that what gets the most ink, certainly places like Kolat is not top of mind when it comes to trust issues. That financial issues and maybe we can talk about great inflation, that those actually just have greater purchase on the complaints of people.
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C
First of all, I will speak your ear off about great inflation. So I can't wait to talk about that.
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B
I learned that the median mark at Yale is now an A.
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C
That's right.
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B
That's crazy.
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C
Well, define. Define crazy.
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B
Unless they change things. A is the first letter, right? So, okay, so it's like this is a down market analogy, but, you know, if you're going bowling and you know the median frame is a strike, like it's. That doesn't make sense unless you're an amazing bowler.
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C
What's going on is a question you can ask. It certainly doesn't resemble the grading system that you remember, perhaps, or something that seems traditional. So what's really going on is that I think it's safe to say even people who might claim to be defending the status quo are not defending the status quo, because what the status quo is is it's a very strong and sharp upward trajectory. This is what is meant by inflation. And really more interesting than inflation is the compression that there's more and more of the top grades being given. So that's one thing. It effectively means that the top, in this case, 50% or more, aren't differentiated. But you ask yourself, is it possible to do better than an A as currently given in a freshman English seminar at Yale? Is there no higher achievement than that? I mean, of course there is. So the idea that it can't get any better is already okay, that's one thing. The other thing is comparability, because there are some departments, and I know Yale's example well, but, you know, other schools that, that have these dynamics, have a similar phenomenon whereby one department might award 50% of its students or 50% of its grades would be in the A range. And then, you know, you walk across the street and that department is giving essentially 100%. There are some programs and departments that offer where Every class is 100% A or A minus, but then you scratch your head and you're like, well, are they just getting better students or are they using different standards? It's almost surely the latter. That an A in one class does not mean the A in another. And yet the university is treating it as if it is because they're all getting reduced to 4.0 in the GPA scale and kind of mixed together. So. So somewhere in this. I think the only reasonable way to describe the current situation is just as incoherent. Right? And this is one of the Most public, it is a core mission activity evaluation. It's like it's the most public speech act that the university engages in and the formal transcript, A, A minus, B plus and the like. And so it's a great example of we are collectively saying one thing, but actually just doing another thing. And it's not even clear what we're doing. Precisely. So this is where I think it's like a perfect example of loss in trust that the actual system that we claim to be the part of our core mission, it's not about funding. We don't need donor or federal permission to grade properly. This is something that's completely within our own powers.
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B
Spoiler alert. One of your recommendations is that you think the average should be 3.0 GPA, right? If there's a bell curve, if there's a mean, it should be at 3.0, which implementing that would require. I mean, I guess some professors would regard that as heavy handed because you'd be kind of telling them you have to grade on a curve. I'm guessing you'd face resistance.
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C
You know, over the centuries we've had many different evaluation systems. Okay. So it's not as if it's all. It's been the same since time.
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B
It used to be based on moral rectitude. Back in the 18th century, it used
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C
to be based on rural rectitude. I understand in the, in the 18th century, Harvard would rank students according to social rank. I don't think I'm making that up. I think that it was just like a exogenous factor of your life. So you're right that there's a recommendation made in there to you called it a curve. But let me just say exactly what the recommendation and that is that at the course or possibly departmental level, the average grade is B.
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B
Okay.
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C
It's not a curve per se, in the sense that some other schools are suggesting. Like Harvard suggested a 20% cap on A's. There's no restriction on the distribution of grades.
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B
So one guy can get an F and then four other guys get A's.
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C
You can put it this way. Suppose your class only gives A's and A minuses, right? You can achieve that same distribution of two grades by just making it B minus and B plus, which is to say it's a, a normalization of the, of the, of the, of the grading practices. So that when we ultimately combine it into the single number of gpa, it's actually like a, you know, a legitimate comparison. That your, your, your B plus in English means The same thing as a B plus and, and economics, if I
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B
understand the report correctly. This has to be done to some extent on a top down level in a uniform way. Because you say in the report that right now you don't, I don't think you use the term, but it's kind of like a tragedy of the commons where no professor wants to be the one who's saying, you know what, screw it, I'm going to be the one who has a 3.0 average mark in my class because I'm bringing back meritocracy, you know, all on my own. And then people avoid that guy's class like the plague because they go and rate my professors or whatever the Ivy League version of rate my professors is. So the only way the reform you're talking about would work is if it was all done at once. And you don't even think it's a good idea, fractional scholars to do it on their own initiative. Right?
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C
I think it's a bad idea for one person to grade differently. I mean, this is the whole problem that every, you know, a Jonathan A means something different than a Sarate and then we combine them in GPA and present it as the same thing.
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B
Right.
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C
So that's just an incoherent language to adopt. Now when you say something like it's a top down, you know, this is something that I try to remind some of my colleagues or even skeptical folks that the grading system is top down. Like we have this shared letter grade system. GPA is a single number that the registrar produces. Right. These are centralized top down practices. You could imagine an alternative world where we do not share the same letter grade system where we just offer like qualitative assessments or we even explain our own rank grading system and. Right. And maybe that would be a more just and higher information world. It might be hard to summarize. Right. But you know, throw it into an LLM and maybe it'll summarize it for you. That's another possibility.
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B
Yeah, that'd be weird though.
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C
You call that weird? I just call it more information as opposed to whatever is going on now. You know, some classes give, some professors give 15% ACE, others give 100% ACE. And I got to think that the distribution of students can't be that different between these twos and the performances and all those things. So that's just to say this idea that it's top down. We already adopt top down practice. That's the whole point of having a transcript that's so formally consolidated when you
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B
Started talking about this, I thought you were going to reject the top down label. You're leaning into it. You're saying it's already top down. It might as well be top down in a way that makes the system meaningful and coherent.
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C
Let me throw another problem your way, and that is that there is tremendous pressure to inflate. And by, by pressure to inflate, I mean faculty express pressure to give grades higher than what they think the students deserve.
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B
Part of this is customer satisfaction. I saw the figure in here that excluding travel costs, it costs the average undergraduate, if they don't get aid, $95,000 to attend Yale. And I'm guessing the numbers are similar for Stanford and other high level schools. Like 95,000 buys you a new Porsche or Lexus, you're getting that product. Part of it is just the customer is always right. Like is that part of it?
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C
There's pressure to do this. So from the faculties or instructional faculty, especially non tenure faculty's point of view, they feel tremendous pressure to do that. Otherwise they get bad evaluations. They might, their renewal might be in jeopardy. So I think that fact alone, I mean separate from like, are we actually evaluating our students in a coherent way, you know, that kind of pressure, which is real and profound, I think is enough to make us think, look at me, we should stop for a minute and try to design a system like the current system is just not designed, is the problem. Now to kind of, to go back to your question, though, I think there's a hint in that question of a kind of frame that I would resist. And that is the idea of, yes, I suppose there's this customer satisfaction frame, but that's also very close to the idea that we're grading, that the current practice is, it's too lenient and we need to be more strict on our students.
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B
That's how I see it.
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C
And that makes sense. That makes sense. It does make sense. But how can I put this? So it's something like 95% of all grades are A, A minus and B plus. Okay? So you can say, oh, look how lenient it is. Right? But like just strip away the nominal features of them. There's just three ranks and almost all of them are the first two. So now you can imagine like the catastrophic effect of being in the third one.
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B
Right.
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C
Which over time is getting smaller and smaller and therefore identifying an ever more, more and more like left portion of the tail.
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B
It's basically an F is what you're saying.
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C
Well, an F is still an F. Okay. And, but it's basically, it's basically what? It, it's, it's hard to even say what it's like. It's a scarlet letter. Right, let's. Except the scarlet letter was A. In this case, it's a B plus. Right.
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B
Okay.
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C
And the, the, the anxiety of a B plus, I wouldn't underestimate it. It is profound. Right. So students are, excuse the French, working their asses off to get, to make sure that they get that A, and then having worked their ass off, like, still are not able to distinguish themselves in any way. And so then they'll go, they'll search for other avenues of distinction, whether it's student clubs.
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B
So you're saying there's almost like more anxiety with great inflation than there would be?
- [35:02]
C
Absolutely.
- [35:02]
B
That's interesting.
- [35:03]
C
You know, so I just wrote an op ed about this with economist at Princeton Owen Zadar, and we put it in the Princeton student newspaper for this very reason. The title of the op ed was great inflation is making you miserable. Okay. And what we're trying to do is not just for its own contrarian sake, but I think because it's true. Invert the usual argument that, oh, we inflate grades in order to support students mental health because they're too delicate to get a B or a B minus. I think that whole thing just inverts the reality of it. The runaway inflation creates increasing compression over time. And so over time you get a B in one of the core classes of your major. That might literally rule out grad school.
- [35:50]
B
So you're saying people aren't stupid. They know what a b means in 2020.
- [35:54]
C
They know what it means. It's just that it's becoming incoherent in the sense that it doesn't mean the same thing in each class. And more to the point, there are ways to design this system that maintains the rigor, perhaps increases it, but just alleviates the absurdity of, you know, small differences going from A to minus to B plus leading to these catastrophic or at least perceived, if not actual career and life consequences. Right. So the usual, I mean, just to put a bow on this, the usual frame that we're too lenient and we need to get, you know, these students have it too easy, I think. Have you. I think people who say that just have not met an undergraduate recently, like they just, they are under this tremendous level of stress that comes not just from the grading system, but from so many other features that we have, we, the faculty and universities have so poorly designed for them.
- [36:49]
B
How much of this in terms of the dynamic among academics goes to democratization of information and social media and such. And I'm thinking of, you know, maybe 20, 30 years ago, when members of a department, the hiring committee or whatnot, we're sitting around saying, well, should we rehire this professor? Well, let's look at his research. Oh, he published in this journal. Yeah, it's not such a great journal, but, you know, he's got a book coming out, but it's not an academic press. But then now we're in an era where someone's in the meeting and they're saying, hey, guys, if you check this guy's rate my professors page, apparently he eats at his desk during lectures, and it's disgusting. And like, all of a sudden you've got this information.
- [37:32]
C
Wait, are you reading from my page?
- [37:34]
B
No, I'm not, but I'm reading from the page in my mind. If I were a professor, they'd be like, he's always late. What I'm saying is there's information that comes from the students. And often, like, often it's anonymous. And so they're not speaking in the academic idiom. They're often just saying, I find his classes boring. Or I find, you know, he's rude, or, you know, his office hours are posted Monday, Wednesday, Friday. But I go there and he's not there. How much of the disruption of the way academics see themselves comes from these. These electronic sources of information, often anonymized, which just didn't exist 20 or 30 years ago? It used to be this august discussion among academics in terms of how they evaluated how they presented the institution. You know, they could market the institution on their own terms. But now if there's a scandal and it's breaking on social media involving one of your colleagues, University is playing catch up. It's actually responding to stuff that comes out on social media and that it just didn't exist a couple of decades ago. Is that a factor in the lack of trust of social media?
- [38:36]
C
You know, this is part of the broader cancel culture phenomenon, which is at this point, I'm sure, perhaps, like me, you just even find a discussion of it tedious. But the idea that one slip can be the end, right, that if you really take that seriously, then it has a profound chilling effect on speech. And, you know, you can put it, you can cloak it in moral terms, but I think just mechanically, it's some. It's a force to be reckoned with, and it requires a certain, like, so much of. So much more, so much of this report it requires a lot of careful institutional design, like putting together systems, building norms, even like the class schedule or the, you know, one of the recommendations we make is a device free classroom, at least by default. I saw that it shouldn't be interpreted as an anti tech statement. On the contrary, it should be interpreted as a reminder that the class like, you know, whereas the outside the classroom, you know, it's a free country and you are, you are bound by the law, but by not much else, I suppose by cultures and customs, but a lot of which we just don't have control over and probably should not be in the business of trying to control. At the same time, the classroom is our territory. It's where we make our distinctive claim that live in person engagement is essential for learning. Right. And or put a more finer point on it, that universities and should exist. Right? Because if the classroom, both the specific room itself as well as the greater concept it stands for, like I would include field sites and libraries and like spaces for quiet reflection, let's say that's all kind of our domain as a university and I think we should, we should jealously guard our jurisdiction over it. You know, we, we set the rules, we set the terms there and we do it in a way that most promotes our teaching mission. And so to say something like on, at least by default, if there's not a good reason, don't use a device. I would say, you know, it's the same, you know, there's all kinds of rules that we don't really have to articulate in the classroom, like wait your turn or speak if someone else is speaking, listen to them carefully. Right. So I would put it in that same kind of order of just kind of. Instead of letting the world rush in and conveniences dictate what we allow or don't allow in the classroom, we're going to ask ourselves, you know, what is going to actually promote learning here? And if a laptop would do that, then by golly, we better use that laptop. Right? And if it won't, then that has no place there. Right? So it's in that spirit that we, we, we, we made that recommendation and not in any kind of like oh AI is or any stance for or against it.
- [41:35]
B
If that makes I, I mentioned that anybody who reads this report and hopes it's just like a long Jeremiah against cancel culture is going to be disappointed because it's just one component of the erosion of trust. However, you do make somewhat glancing reference to the, the infamous Halloween incident from 2015.
- [41:54]
C
Oh my goodness.
- [41:54]
B
Which as I Understand that will haunt
- [41:56]
C
us for the rest of our relations, rest of our lives.
- [41:59]
B
Thank you, YouTube. I mean, it should haunt you because it was horrifying, but it was 11 years ago. Time moves on. How much of this institutional introspection. Because it seems to me Yale has done more of this introspection than other comparable universities. I'm not aware of other comparable institutions creating candid public facing reports like this. How much of the instinct to sit back and say, hey, look what's going on here originally germinated in that moment and in the period that followed it where there were a lot of Yale scholars, obviously Nicola and Erica Christakis were at the center of it. As I mentioned, we've had Nicholas Christakis on this podcast. How much was that incident responsible for? Maybe creating a spirit of self awareness in terms of institutional drift at universities
- [42:50]
C
will never live it down. Right. It makes one wonder, you know, how many other incidents that weren't caught on on camera. Right. And that's true for everything. Whether it's cancel culture, you know, or whatever that was, I guess, cat caught on camera to police brutality, to everyday indecencies. Right.
- [43:12]
B
So.
- [43:12]
C
But it has come to mean something, and I think, I hope a moment that we've kind of reckoned with a little bit.
- [43:21]
B
How much has the encampment phenomenon that followed the 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks? There was the encampments themselves, which produced some harrowing footage. And then there's also the political phenomenon which, whereby Donald Trump and his lieutenants seized on that. That's still continuing in terms of lawsuits and that kind of thing.
- [43:43]
C
Yeah.
- [43:44]
B
How much did that one issue contribute to, at least in the last three years, the distrust in public institutions.
- [43:53]
C
So I was at Columbia, and I'll never forget this. I mean, I was there for a different reason, but it turned out to be the day, that or the evening that the NYPD stormed the building.
- [44:06]
B
That's when they climbed the ladder and
- [44:07]
C
they went in through the climb and they were on. I remember I saw that it was a big truck pulled up and I thought, what the hell is going on here? And they climb up this giant, giant ladder, I think, on the south side of the building and proceed to remove the whole frame of a window and start yanking people out through the window. Really, the thing that stuck in my mind was just the police presence. I'd never seen so many officers in one place. And by the presence, I think there were thousands. They were just saturating the streets all up and down Broadway. And so I did experience it personally. As an observer again there for just an independent reason. It just coincided with that event. But the way the press covered it. Right. The scale of the encampments, the way that they they were there for so long. Right. And in such kind of open and blatant violation of time, place and manner rules. I think that may have been a kind of tipping point.
- [45:08]
A
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B
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A
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B
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