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The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges
00:43:49
This week, we interviewed two people with leading roles in the rapidly escalating conflict between the Trump administration and American higher education. Today, we speak with Christopher Rufo, who led the conservative critique of, and assault on, critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Mr. Rufo’s vision and campaigning have helped inspire Trump’s wide-ranging crackdown on higher education. Earlier, we talked with Christopher L. Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, about the institution’s path forward in the face of drastic funding cuts, and his vow to protect academic freedom at all costs. You can listen to that conversation here.
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- [00:00]
Chris Ruffo
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Michael Barbaro
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- [00:36]
Claudine Gay
From the New York Times, I'm Michael Balbaro. This is the Daily over the past five years, the activist Christopher Ruffo has spearheaded the conservative critique of and direct assault on critical race theory and dei.
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Chris Ruffo
Ruffo is likely the reason your conservative uncle knows the phrase critical race theory to begin with. He's the reason that Trump became obsessed with it as a buzz term for.
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Claudine Gay
Pretty much anything do with race, organizing remarkably effective campaigns against government offices, corporations, and especially American universities.
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Chris Ruffo
After weeks of intense scrutiny, Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned today. Critics allege she plagiarized some of her academic writings. Chris Ruffo led a coalition of mostly.
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Claudine Gay
Right wing opponents in a plan to.
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Chris Ruffo
Remove Gay as Harvard's president. Ruffo wrote, scalped after Gay was forced.
- [01:34]
Claudine Gay
Out in the process. Rufo has become an influential voice in the ear of the Trump administration as it turns his strategy into a wide ranging government crackdown on higher education.
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Chris Ruffo
The Trump administration canceling $400 million worth of grants and contracts for Columbia University, 175 million at UPenn $9 billion at Harvard, $790 million for Northwestern, and dozens of grants at Princeton University totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.
- [02:11]
Claudine Gay
On Wednesday, we spoke about that crackdown with the president of Princeton University. Today we ask Rufo just how far it will go. It's Friday, April eleven.
- [02:36]
Chris Ruffo
Check, check. You guys hear me?
- [02:38]
Michael Barbaro
Is that Chris? Can he hear me?
- [02:41]
Chris Ruffo
I can hear you.
- [02:42]
Michael Barbaro
Well, Chris, welcome to the Daily. We appreciate you making time for us.
- [02:46]
Chris Ruffo
It's good to be with you.
- [02:47]
Michael Barbaro
I'm curious, Chris, what it's like for you in this moment to watch this activism that I know you've pursued for so many years come to such full fruition under President Trump because in so many ways your vision for how to challenge what universities in this country have become seems to have been adopted by the White House.
- [03:13]
Chris Ruffo
Yeah, I mean, it is been a journey and some of the moments in the past few months have had a surreal feeling. I've been working on these issues for five years at the beginning, it felt like I was the only one fighting. And now, fast forward five years. Some of the ideas that I had cobbled together suddenly become reality. They become policy. They affect billions of dollars in the flow of funds. And so that's a great feeling. I think as an activist, there's really nothing better than seeing the ideas that you fought for against the odds triumph and become reality.
- [03:49]
Michael Barbaro
I mean, just to put a fine point on the specificity with which what you have been advocating for is, is now happening, I was really struck by something you told my colleague Ross Douthit from the opinion side of the times not so long ago. And I'm gonna quote you here, this is what you said. A medium or long term goal of mine is to figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror and have them say, unless we change what we're doing, we're not going to be able to meet our budget for the year. They're going to have to make, you said, really hard decisions. I mean, that is what is now happening to universities under President Trump.
- [04:38]
Chris Ruffo
Well, it could happen to a larger number of universities, but what we're seeing right now is in fact, a prototype of that strategy. And if you take Columbia University as really the first trial of this strategy strategy, we've seen an enormous payoff. And so what I'd like to see and why this is a medium and long term goal is I'd like to see that prototype industrialized and applied to all of the universities as a sector, all of them. And I would like to see, in addition, a modification in about 120 to $150 billion a year from federal taxpayers to universities used as leverage to extract significant reforms and to reduce the size of the sector itself. I think that is what is coming. It's going to come either through the market mechanisms, but I think it could come even faster with good policy.
- [05:35]
Michael Barbaro
Well, I want to better understand, Chris, why it is you've come to see this strategy that you want to have implemented not only on the scale it's already being implemented on, but as you said, on an industrial scale. Why you've come to see this as the right strategy for changing universities in the way you want to see them changed. And I think to do that, we need to understand your motivation for seeing higher education in the way that you do as a set of institutions that have been captured by leftist ideology, bureaucracy, practices and incentives and have spread those throughout American society. So tell Us that story of how you come to see universities in this way.
- [06:19]
Chris Ruffo
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, even in my own personal experience, I entered my university education with a far left mindset and politics.
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Michael Barbaro
Yeah. How far left?
- [06:29]
Chris Ruffo
You know, very far left. You know, I grew up, my kind of formative political education was from my family in Italy. And my family in Italy is all unreconstructed communists. So my first exposure to like political literature was in my aunt's house in Rome and, you know, browsing through her collected works of Lenin. And so, you know, I grew up very committed to left wing politics. You know, getting out of high school, wanting to be in politics, going to Georgetown in D.C. for that reason. But the kind of ideals that I had built up in my head as a young person through my own study and experience and conversations. Once they made contact with the reality of left wing politics in elite university milieu, everything just shattered, it broke apart. And what I found is that in America, left wing politics is an elite venture geared towards social status. It's not a popular venture geared towards the material or psychic well being of the average citizen. And that led to a question saying, all right, well, this doesn't feel right. This seems empty, this seems cynical. And so what I decided was that I wanted to actually get a political education outside the university context, outside the academic context. And what I figured out was that producing documentary films was a good way to actually get out and see the world. So I did that for about 10 years with the idea of really just kind of testing my own ideas and my own questions against reality. And so I decided to make a film about three of America's forgotten cities. Youngstown, Ohio, Memphis, Tennessee and Stockton, California. Really three of the poorest, most violent, most destitute and most forgotten places in America. And this is now, you know, about 10 years ago. And you know, having actually spent, you know, three years in the field in jails and prisons, in public housing projects, in abandoned steel mills, meeting people, understanding how the government operated in those communities. That's when I really had my total crisis of confidence in not just this kind of revolutionary cause play on campus, but actually the fundamental principles of the Great Society itself. And at that point I thought that the idea of the post war left, you know, could not withstand any scrutiny. And I think the reason that you get people retreating to campus is because their policies, you know, can only survive in that hot house environment. And if you actually escape that hot house and you get into the actual real places that were supposed to be helped, you find that those policies can't be defended.
- [09:27]
Michael Barbaro
So just to some, just to summarize, because I want to make sure I'm understanding this, you're seeing what to you feels like a lot of kind of empty virtue signaling on campus when you're a student. And it combines with this experience, making this film that suggests that liberal politics and policies are not helping the lives of many working Americans. And together you're thinking this whole kind of project of the American left is not working and maybe even a little bit. Rotten.
- [09:58]
Chris Ruffo
Yeah, rotten. You know, absolutely corrupted. The entire project of the American government since the mid-1960s has been very self consciously an attempt to recruit the so called best and brightest from the Ivy League universities and to have them cook up, you know, policy ideas that will then be imposed on the rest of the country in the name of equality, in the name of justice, in the name of all of these kind of high values. But what I learned through my experience in higher education and then my experience spending a number of years in American communities, especially poor American communities, is that that project has failed.
- [10:51]
Michael Barbaro
And those you hold responsible, it sounds like, are essentially left leaning leaders and faculty of these colleges. And I just want to, I want to cite something from your book, which I happen to have in front of me.
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Chris Ruffo
Sure.
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Michael Barbaro
In your book you describe numerically just how liberal, just how left leaning the faculty have become at many of the biggest universities in the country. And you focus on the social sciences. And the data point that I found worth mentioning here is that the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty has reached, according to this research report, 8 to 1 in Political Science, 17, 1 in History, 44, 1 in Sociology, 48 to 1 in English and 108 to 0 in Communications and interdisciplinary studies, which you note includes race and gender studies. That's what you're talking about.
- [11:51]
Chris Ruffo
Yeah, yeah, I think those are really good snapshot statistics. And conservative academics have been talking about some of these broader trends for many decades. The long march through the institutions, the capture of the humanities, the extreme left wing bias of university departments. What I think happened that was a decisive change was really in 2020, following the death of George Floyd. And all of a sudden those ideas and that structure, that language, those symbols, those narratives, those arguments, they escaped the laboratory of academia and were then imposed throughout society via all of the surrounding institutions. And so it was in your kids school curriculum, it was in your works, HR training, it was in your television news program. And you have this sudden coherence of a replacement narrative about America, about our history, about our people, about Our culture, about our politics. And so when you have this kind of ideology that had been again, cooking in the universities for a long time, Americans could kind of ignore it. So. Well, that's just, you know, the faculty at, you know, X, Y and Z University, that's just in, you know, some obscure academic texts. But once it propagated and had become really ubiquitous within America's institutions, that's when things shifted for most people. That's when there was an opening for some actual reform and change and discussion beyond what had become kind of a ghettoized discussion in, you know, the kind of intellectual right, we were able to actually bring these ideas and critiques into the mainstream in a way that had never been possible before.
- [13:41]
Michael Barbaro
So at this moment in your mind, where something that was living in universities spills out and becomes excessive, there's an opportunity for folks like you to name it, call it out and try to fight it. And of course, I just want to pause here to ask in your mind, was there anything about that that was organic and just an unnatural outpouring of grief and frustration over what had happened to George Floyd and about the history of racism in the United States that lay behind that?
- [14:20]
Chris Ruffo
Yeah, I mean, of course. Right? I mean, you know, cancer is organic, obviously. Like, these are all human processes. So if you asked people did they feel that way, especially at the time, I think most of the people who were, you know, showing up for protests would say yes. And, you know, the truth is that you have a kernel of truth in a lot of these protests. You have what I think are some honest emotions at the heart of these protests. But none of these kind of elite left wing initiatives come close to even identifying or offering even a plausible remedy for those problems.
- [14:58]
Michael Barbaro
And as you've said, so much of this for you goes back to the university, the incubation center, in your words, for these ideas. What exactly are these universities doing wrong besides the virtue signaling and you're telling that you saw in 2020?
- [15:17]
Chris Ruffo
You know, take Harvard. Harvard's DEI departments have been engaged in a level of race based hostility, scapegoating, demonization, that in my view, constitute a violation of federal civil rights law.
- [15:34]
Michael Barbaro
What's an example of that? Just so people can understand what it is you think has happened here.
- [15:39]
Chris Ruffo
Sure. You have discriminatory admissions. So at Harvard, penalizing. At Harvard, yeah. You have, you know, penalizing individuals because of their ancestry and you have them doing that in a systematic way. You have discriminatory hiring and promotions, hiring and promoting people on the basis of race and punishing members of certain racial groups simply because of who their parents were. And you also have the ideological component coming from the DEI departments, coming from HR that you know, speak of, you know, so called whiteness as a pathology, as a kind of mark, as kind of stigmata that is not just at Harvard, but at many universities. Then the question is, well, how have they been getting away with it for so long? And the answer is that they'd never been held to account before. They paid no price for this kind of racialist discrimination. And so they continued to do so.
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Michael Barbaro
I just want to be clear because some of this is fiercely debated, some of this is still in the courts, but you land on this very specific solution to address what you see as the excesses of the American left, which is to use the federal money that these universities depend on as a cudgel to force them to change. Why do you settle on that tactic?
- [17:09]
Chris Ruffo
For a simple reason. Because money talks and because fear is a great motivator. Nice words, pleasing sounds, promises to change. All of those very pleasant and non confrontational proposals regarding academia have not worked. But what we've seen in dramatic fashion in recent months is that the other approach actually works much better. And so look, reforming institutions, you have to deal with three things. The raw material of politics is money, power and status. And so as I run campaigns, for example, the successful campaign to oust the president of Harvard University at the beginning of last year, that's what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about how can we take away their money, how can we take away their power, how can we take away their status to the point that we're causing so much pain to the decision makers, in this case the members of the Harvard Corporation, so that they have to change.
- [18:27]
Michael Barbaro
We'll be right back.
- [18:31]
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- [19:34]
Michael Barbaro
Well, I think that brings us to how the Trump administration is pursuing this playbook of yours, the Rufo playbook. So far, Trump has withheld $400 million from Columbia University, 500 million from Brown, 9 billion in funding from Harvard, several hundred million from Princeton. And the White House has so far framed this as being about anti Semitism and to a degree, about DEI on campus. And it's made very specific demands of these universities for how students are to be disciplined, how campus rules are to be enforced, how certain departments, for example Middle Eastern studies programs, are to be run. But the context and the motivation seems to be bigger. It's everything that you have been talking about here and the President has talked about it, even all the way back during the campaign when he said he wanted to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left. So what's an ideal outcome of holding up this money in your mind? What should a university look like? What could it look like when the Trump administration says all those hundreds of millions, in some cases billions of dollars that you are relying on, we're holding it back unless you change your culture, your practices, in some case your curriculum.
- [20:50]
Chris Ruffo
Yeah. So there's a short term answer and there's a long term answer. In the short term, I'd like to see the abolition of discriminatory DEI programs. I'd like to see colorblind admissions and a requirement that the universities publish disaggregated admissions and class rank data at the end of each year so that you.
- [21:11]
Michael Barbaro
Can see it for yourself.
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Chris Ruffo
Yeah. So that American taxpayers can have at least a proxy to determine whether or not universities are in the ballpark of colorblind admissions. I'd like to see an overhaul of university hiring so that you have more philosophical balance on the faculty and you have an end to, again, kind of illegal discrimination in hiring and promotions. I think also standards of civil discourse. So, for example, there should be significant federal financial penalties for any university that allows masked protesters to take over campus spaces, to any university that allows building occupations, illegal encampments, the disruption of the educational program or violence, as we've seen, for example, in the wake of the Hamas terror attack against Israel, deep platformings and shouting down speakers, that kind of thing. There should be strict penalties for that because we can't have a good university system without basic standards of civil discourse.
- [22:15]
Michael Barbaro
And in this version of a university, would anything on the curriculum be off limits or would you be open to leaving that? And would the Trump administration be open to leaving that to the universities? I mean, could there be a critical race theory class, critical identities studies class, critical ethnic studies class? I mention those because you have talked about those as being very problematic.
- [22:40]
Chris Ruffo
Yeah, I mean, look, universities are ultimately going to have to decide what they put into the course catalog. I don't think that the federal government should be micromanaging academic offerings to that extent. I think that's counterproductive. I think it's getting too far into the weeds.
- [22:56]
Michael Barbaro
That's where you draw the line in terms of academic freedom. The universities need to have that.
- [23:00]
Chris Ruffo
So it's a little bit nuanced. So what I would say from the federal government perspective, the most successful policy reform areas are on university administration. That's where we have the most public support. That's where we have the most legal authority. That's where we have really the most kind of defensible territory for engaging in these reforms. That said, I think universities have to reform the structure of their departments. They have to reform their course offerings. And you know, as a trustee at the New College of Florida, which is one of the public universities in the state of Florida, right.
- [23:38]
Michael Barbaro
Governor Ron DeSantis asked you to be on the board.
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Chris Ruffo
That's right. And so we did these administrative reforms. You know, we fired the president, we got rid of the provost, we turned over the whole administration, we abolished the DEI department, we implemented a policy of colorblind equality. All of those reforms, I think, are much needed. But we went further than that, and I think with good reason. And we looked at our course offerings, we looked at our departments, and we did a systematic study to just say, hey, which programs and departments are offering students a good value? Which programs and departments are oriented towards truth rather than ideology? And we concluded that our gender studies program did not meet any of those basic thresholds. And so we abolished the department, which established a new precedent. And so I'd like to see some targeted defunding of compromised and non scholarly academic departments, projects, research grants. We've seen that happening through doge, and I'd like to see that become systematized throughout, you know, the federal government.
- [24:49]
Michael Barbaro
You no doubt know that the leaders of a lot of colleges, especially private colleges, they do not share your goal and they fiercely believe that it would do serious damage to their institutions. And we just spoke with the president of Princeton University, Chris Eisgruber. And when presented with the challenges that he has been by the President, including the threat of hundreds of millions of dollars, he said very clearly to my colleague Rachel Abrams, he will not be making any concessions to the White House. He was very clear about that. And he cited a few reasons. And one of them was the subject we just spoke about academic freedom, his belief that academics, academic researchers, administrators at the university, they should not have terms dictated to them by the government. That that's a principle, a very high level principle central to the operation of a university. Now, I know you just distinguished between the government calling the shots on what class gets taught or which department exists and the administration. But I think his point would cut through that distinction and he would simply say the government should not be telling us how to function.
- [26:04]
Chris Ruffo
I mean, Princeton has decided to take hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, but that taxpayer money comes with basic terms and conditions, basic rights and responsibilities. And so the federal government is well within its right to say, we're not going to keep cutting you a blank check unless you meet certain basic standards and requirements that are necessary for the good stewardship of these public dollars. And so Princeton had a choice many years ago to accept government money with the inevitable reciprocal responsibilities, or to refuse government money and to maintain its academic independence and its academic freedom. Hillsdale College, where I'm a distinguished fellow, decided to reject public funding so that it could maintain its institutional independence. Princeton is at liberty to make the same choice, to refuse taxpayer money and then to not have to negotiate with the taxpayers through the democratically elected administration to come to mutually beneficial and mutually agreeable terms.
- [27:20]
Michael Barbaro
Well, can we talk about that money for a minute? Because the universities, when they receive that money, understood it to be intended for research and endeavors in the name of the public good. None of them, I think, would say that they were given the binary choice that you just outlined.
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Chris Ruffo
Well, they were all given the binary choice. They all can accept public funds or they can not accept public funds. And they still have that choice available, forego public funding and gain more academic independence. But the President of Princeton wants to have it both ways. He wants to have all of the entitlements without any of the responsibilities. And so that's the mark of someone that is not looking at this in a mature way, but looking at this, I think, in a very greedy and very self serving way. I think the President and the Secretary of Education should be fully ready to say if you don't want to make a deal, as you actually said, for the public good, I hope that the administration is ready to terminate that funding not just on a temporary basis, but on a permanent basis. I think that's when you get a cascade effect. You're going to see other institutions recalculating in a very healthy way.
- [28:37]
Michael Barbaro
Well, the other argument that Princeton's president made revolved around the idea of what the political complexity and complexion of a university is supposed to be. And the president of Princeton concedes that universities like his can and should do better when it comes to making conservatives feel more welcomed and should become, in his words, a place where conservatives feel they can speak up and where important conservative arguments can be heard. But, and this is really interesting, and I want to get your reaction to it, he said that that is very different. Making sure that there is a place for diversity of views on campus. That is very different than saying that a university should reflect the political ideology of the country. And he says we shouldn't actually try to do that. We're not a Sunday morning talk show, is what he said, trying to achieve ideological balance. And he went on to say there are political divisions about things like climate and vaccines right now, but there is no obligation on the part of universities to reflect what is the political division of opinion on those subjects. So what do you say to that?
- [29:57]
Chris Ruffo
Well, so actually would agree in part that yes, obviously it is not practicable and probably not desirable for universities to say, hey, we're going to have kind of an ideological quota, to have balance, to have every point of view represented, to have every religious. I mean, I would like to have a greater kind of philosophical balance. But what I'm not calling for is like a one to one parody or that it has to reflect the particular, you know, political ideologies of the public. I don't think that that is the best way to do it. So that's why I say I agree in part. But what I don't agree on the lesson of the last few years is that the universities have not developed a sufficient and robust internal controls, internal critics, internal challenges. And even at Princeton, for example, I actually know quite a few members of the Princeton faculty, some of whom are conservatives, who are essentially in hiding because the culture and the administration and the system of rewards and punishments are so openly and irrationally hostile to anyone that contradicts this kind of elite left wing consensus that they don't even feel, you know, comfortable stating their opinions in public. And so that's not a university, that's not academic freedom, that's not a culture of civil debate. And so I don't Take his word for it. Either he doesn't know what's happening on his own campus, which is bad, or he does know and he's using this kind of misdirection, positing elite left wing ideals while doing the kind of cynical work of institutional management.
- [31:46]
Michael Barbaro
So, Chris, I want to understand the practical implications of, at the beginning of our conversation, what you call this industrialized effort to freeze, hold up so much money at these universities. If someone like the president of Princeton decides at the end of the day they're not going to make concessions to the administration, then this money doesn't go to what it was designated for. And in many cases, that is scientific research. And the president of Princeton spoke about this when he talked about the impact of these dollars not reaching their designated endpoint. He wasn't talking about the social sciences, where so many of the liberal ideas that you're talking about would seem to have a natural home, but the hard science sciences, right, Cancer research, medical research.
- [32:32]
Chris Ruffo
But again, this shows the remarkable level of egotism and entitlement. What do you mean he's taking money from taxpayers? You have a reciprocal obligation to taxpayers. This idea that I can enter into contract with you, you can pay me hundreds of millions of dollars, and then I say I'm not going to do anything in a reciprocal manner to meet my basic responsibilities is not academic independence. You know, that's kind of an academic entitlement. And what I would say also is this. The political right has figured out how to use leverage effectively. The president of Harvard is gone, the president of Penn is gone, the president of Columbia is gone. That's a pretty good track record. That's three for three. You know, that's a hat trick right off the bat.
- [33:24]
Michael Barbaro
Is that, is that a, is that a threat? I mean, serious.
- [33:28]
Chris Ruffo
That's up for interpretation. But what I would say is that if it's not a threat, and it could be, it's just a demonstration of the facts. And the facts are that the political right has a greater understanding of institutional politics than at any time in the past half century. And we've demonstrated willingness to not only talk about, but to use power to advance the public good. And we're not gonna be intimidated or hamstrung or led around.
- [34:04]
Michael Barbaro
How do you make sure that you're not abusing that power? I mean, I know that what you may be about to say is that in your mind, universities have abused their influence in the culture when it comes to left wing ideas. How do you know or make sure that you. Chris Ruffo with the tremendous power that you have achieved as an activist in this era are not abusing yours and letting your instincts, your personal peak, your ego. And I don't say that to be mean, dictate who lives and dies as the leader of these universities.
- [34:39]
Chris Ruffo
Well, the idea that I'm an equal power to, you know, the universities, which have collectively hundreds of billions of dollars in assets under management, they have, you know, lawyers and PR firms and lobbyists and other agents.
- [34:55]
Michael Barbaro
But you just described the power that you have discovered to rebalance those dynamics.
- [35:01]
Chris Ruffo
That's right. But it's a power, again, from leverage. And so keep the context in mind is important. But the second question is, how do I know that I'm not abusing that power? It's a great question. It's an important question. But what I always have done and I'm continuing to do is I'm always measuring the work that I do first against conscience, right? To make sure that my own kind of moral intuitions, my own moral sense keeps me in check. But because we live in a democratic society, we have a constitutional republic, I also want to make sure that the policies that I'm advancing also have broad support from the American people. And so the president won the election. He has the Democratic mandate. These ideas have broad public support, and I think they meet the test of conscience.
- [35:52]
Michael Barbaro
Got it. Chris, I want you to contemplate a scenario here where these universities decide to try to live without this federal money, which in some cases is significant when it comes to their operating budgets. And let's say they walk away from some of the research that we have been talking about, or they borrow a lot of money. I think Harvard is starting to contemplate that. Is that a scenario where you end up losing your only real leverage over them? And would that mean that you have failed to achieve your original goal of having changed these universities? You'll have changed them because they'll be smaller, they'll be doing less research, but you haven't necessarily changed them in the way that you intended. Would that be a failure? What would that be?
- [36:42]
Chris Ruffo
I mean, no, I think that would also be a success. And that's what's. I think very.
- [36:46]
Michael Barbaro
But how would that be a success?
- [36:47]
Chris Ruffo
Because right now the calculation for university presidents is in the back of their minds. They're thinking the administration might fold. But if the administration doesn't fold, I think we are entering a more serious politics. And so if, let's say, Princeton very rashly says we're not going to reform our institution, we're not going to implement these much needed policies. No more federal funding. I'm fine with that. That's their decision. That's fine. But I also wouldn't see that as a loss of all of the leverage points. The finances are one leverage point. But as I told you earlier, money, power and status are the three predominant raw materials in this kind of activism. And we would still have other ways to pressure these places and to push through reforms.
- [37:37]
Michael Barbaro
But there would be this other casualty, right? Less cancer research, less obesity research, less scientific breakthrough and innovation.
- [37:49]
Chris Ruffo
I don't think that's accurate. Look, Princeton could raise private dollars to pay for whatever research they're doing.
- [37:56]
Michael Barbaro
They would tell you that those private dollars are not readily available. There's no substitute for the government's power to foster innovation. I mean, the NIH through universities, I'm sure you know this has opened an unbelievable amount of space for medical innovation, for quantum computing, for AI.
- [38:19]
Chris Ruffo
Yeah, but look, I mean, the federal government is not obligated to fund a university that refuses to protect students from violence, that refuses to adopt common sense and broadly popular reforms. And so it's up to Princeton. And if the President is willing to sacrifice these research programs, you know, the blame lies would lie squarely with him. And so he's going to try to play chicken. But I actually think that the reality of his position is much less powerful than his initial rhetoric.
- [38:51]
Michael Barbaro
I wonder how much time you've spent thinking about the Pandora's box that may have been opened here at your urging and with your playbook here. I mean, the government now taking such a direct role in trying to influence the course of higher education for all the reasons you've just explained, it's top down, right? And one of the things that I detect in all of your activism and all of your writings is that you strongly dislike top down dictating of terms. So what happens if the next president is not a conservative and he doesn't take his advice from Chris Ruffo, but from an activist on an entirely different end of the political spectrum who then turns around and says no federal dollars for universities unless you become less like this, more like that? I don't think we even need to specify what it is, because these universities became what they became through whether you like it or not, and I know you don't like it, a fairly organic process, not through the hand of the.
- [39:51]
Chris Ruffo
Hand of the federal government. The premise of your argument is a myth. No, the fact is that progressives within the federal bureaucracy, regardless of Democrat or Republican being in the White House have been advancing left wing racialist ideologies and DEI programs for decades. And so I don't have any doubt in my mind that what we're doing is the right course of action. It's defensible intellectually. And certainly I think it is actually a minimal and very restrained response to a longstanding problem.
- [40:25]
Michael Barbaro
You think, just to find the word restraint, because I think many people inside these universities don't see it as restrained. They see it as not incremental, but kind of an earthquake.
- [40:38]
Chris Ruffo
You know, I would certainly like to see much more dramatic action. I would like to see, you know, if they are anticipating this as a shock. I could easily imagine, you know, 10 times, 20 times, you know, 50 times more dramatic action that is, you know, within the realm of possibility.
- [40:56]
Michael Barbaro
Like what?
- [40:57]
Chris Ruffo
I won't telegraph that we'll see. I think, you know, one thing I've learned is that you, you want to keep the larger ideas close to the chest and you want to work incrementally up to them. And so we're doing some AB testing, we're doing some prototyping, and as those things gain traction, I think it'll open up new lines of action. But what we're doing is really a counter revolution. It's a revolution against revolution. And so I think we are the responsible party in this. But responsible doesn't mean weak. It doesn't mean self effacing. It doesn't mean playing nice. I think that actually we are a counter radical force in American life that paradoxically has to use what many see as radical techniques. But what I want to restore is the university oriented toward truth and a university that contributes to the public good. That's really what I want to see. That's what I've always wanted to see. And I think that for the first time in many years, that's a possibility that we'll get closer to.
- [42:07]
Claudine Gay
Well, Chris, thank you very much.
- [42:09]
Michael Barbaro
Appreciate it.
- [42:10]
Chris Ruffo
Thanks for having me.
- [42:26]
Claudine Gay
On Thursday, the Times reported that the White House is considering its biggest intervention so far into higher education, a consent decree that seeks to have a judge enforce any deal that Trump reaches with Columbia University. Such an arrangement could ensure that the Trump administration has a hand in Colombia's dealings for years to come.
- [43:04]
Michael Barbaro
We'll be right back.
- [43:20]
Eric Krupke
Over 70 million workers in the United States are stars. That's workers skilled through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree. Stars have gained valuable skills through alternative routes like military service, on the job, experience, and more, but are held back by the paper ceiling because they don't have a bachelor's degree. It's time for a Skills first hiring approach. Help tear the paper ceiling and create opportunity for millions of skilled workers. Learn more@tearthepaper ceiling.org brought to you by opportunityatwork and the ad council there is a growing expense eating into your company's profits. Your cloud computing bill. What if you could cut your cloud bill in half and improve performance? Well, if you act by May 31, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can help you do just that. OCI is the next generation cloud designed for every workload where you can run any application or AI project faster and more securely for less. This half off offer is only for new US Customers with a minimum financial commitment. See if you qualify@oracle.com NYT.
- [44:22]
Claudine Gay
Here'S what else you need to know today. In a major ruling against the Trump White House, the U.S. supreme Court has instructed the administration to take steps to return a migrant that it had wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Despite its error in deporting the man, the White House has claimed that federal courts have no power to tell it to retrieve him, a claim that the Supreme Court has now rejected. And the stock market once again nosedived on Thursday as investors grew weary of President Trump's aggressive new tariffs against China, which have reached 145%. The losses in the market erased the epic rebound that stocks made on Wednesday when Trump announced that he would pause most of the tariffs. But with tariffs on China soaring, The S&P 500 fell 3.5%, the Dow Jones fell 2.5%, and the Nasdaq fell 4.3%. China has said that it wants to make a deal with Trump on tariffs, but not under duress. Today's episode was produced by Eric Krupke and Asta Chaturvedi. It was edited by Michael Benoit, contains research assistance from Susan Lee, original music from Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Arthur theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderlane. That's it for the Daily I'm Michael Balbaro. See you on Monday.
- [46:27]
Eric Krupke
Over 70 million workers in the United States are stars. That's workers skilled through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree. Stars have gained valuable skills through alternative routes, like military service, on the job experience and more, but are held back by the paper ceiling because they don't have a bachelor's degree. It's time for a skills first hiring approach. Help tear the paper ceiling and create opportunity for millions of skilled workers. Learn more at tearthepaper ceiling.org brought to you by OpportunityAtWork and the Ad Council.