B (2:57)

Please go to writing.yashamunk.com and sign up. And in fact, we're still running a special promotion, 30% off your first year of membership.

C (3:08)

That makes it about a dollar a week. Go to writing.jaschamonk.com 2022-62026 to claim your special offer.

B (3:27)

Daniel Diermeier, welcome to the podcast.

A (3:29)

Well, good to talk to you.

B (3:31)

So you've been chancellor of Vanderbilt University since 2020, I assume it's been a very calm five and a half years.

A (3:39)

Yeah, it was quite something. I started July 1, 2020, right in the middle of COVID So it has basically been one crisis after the other. And I think we had like maybe one, one and a half years when we were constantly, when we were not constantly dealing with another challenge. But despite all of that, we've had a great five and a half years. University is thriving, but it sure has been interesting times.

B (4:02)

One of the striking things about higher education in the United States is that it's both an incredible story of success and is clearly losing the support and respect of a lot of the American population at the same time. I mean, American universities continue to be world leading. Students still want to come to the United States to study over any other country when they have the opportunity. A huge percentage of Nobel Prize winners come from American institutions. The contribution to cutting edge research is tremendous. The endowments and the facilities that you enjoy at American universities are more luxurious than what you can find in just about any other country in the world. And undergraduate students, I think, are treated to incredible opportunities. And at the same time you look at something like the Gallup poll that asks, generally speaking, you have a lot of trust or some trust or little trust or no trust at all in the higher education sector. Ten years ago most Americans had trust in higher education and today only a little more than a third do. What is your diagnosis as to why that is happening? What's the fundamental reason why so many Americans are losing trust in higher ed?

A (5:11)

Yeah, so this is exactly the situation we find ourselves in. On the one hand, we have this tremendous history of accomplishment and success. I mean, the American universities, as you correctly point out, are still the greatest in the world, both in terms of like their educational achievement, their research achievement, and then also I think sometimes a little bit less realized and less front of, front of, front of mind. Top of mind is their contribution to the innovation economy. I mean, so many of the innovations that have transformed our lives have originated in universities or university played an enormously important role on that all the way down to of course, to AI, now Quantum and all of that. So that's the success story. And the second part, the challenge is, as you correctly point out, it's very important for people to realize that does not start a year ago when Trump took office. So we have had an erosion of trust that goes back years. It's an erosion of trust in universities both from the left and from the right. So the decline happened across the board. It was more pronounced and the decline was steeper on the conservative side. But both on the left and on the right, we have seen significant erosion of trust. The concerns are different from the left and from the right. So if you look at this a little bit deeper, the criticism from the right, from the left is really that we are kind of elitist, if you will, that's about inequality in a large extent. So that we're kind of, you know, we're inequality machines, we're replicating the elite, that we're unaffordable, that is I think, really overblown. And I think that the, when you look at particularly, you know, the world's leading or America's leading universities, that the commitment to financial aid is tremendous.

B (7:11)

I want to hear obviously what the conservative concerns are that I think drive this decline in support. I agree with you that there's a lot of popular misunderstanding about this, that people see the sticker price at American universities, which is now huge and which is often actually the biggest problem for the upper middle class because the really rich people happily pay that much money for their kids to go there. People who make less than $150,000 a year, as you said, for example, can now go to Vanderbilt for free. It's a lot of middle class families, upper middle class families that may end up struggling to pay for their kids education or at least having to save a lot of money to do so. But the real problem I is not about opportunity as about the recreation of a kind of professional managerial class that has outsized influence in American institutions and that really runs the country. I think the smartest objection, and perhaps that's not the most commonly voiced one, but the smartest version of the objection you just talked about is not it's impossible for anybody to go to Vanderbilt, it's too expensive, et cetera. The facts don't bear that out, but it is that Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, all of these institutions scour the country for the most talented people, often find them in really disadvantaged neighborhoods in the inner city, in small, neglected, declining industrial

C (8:30)

towns in the Midwest.

B (8:31)

And they give people from there these Wonderful opportunities, which they richly deserve. And then they just turn them into members of a professional managerial class who live in New York and Boston and

C (8:44)

LA, and perhaps Chicago, perhaps in Tennessee,

B (8:49)

who go back home twice a year,

C (8:52)

once for Thanksgiving and once for Christmas, and you just lose touch with the rest of the population.

B (8:57)

And contrast that with the German university

C (9:00)

system where we're both from, which I think has many deep challenges. I came to England and the United States for my studies for a reason. But where most people go to the local universities, stay much more involved in the local community, live in an ordinary neighborhood rather than on campus. And perhaps, therefore, the universities don't create this kind of professional managerial overclass in the same way. And perhaps the fundamental objection that a lot of people have against the experts, the elites, against science, against the universities today is not that little Joey is so talented and he can't get a good education. It's perhaps little Joey who's really talented, gets a great education, goes off to be a Master of the Universe in New York.

B (9:43)

But the people who don't are ill

C (9:46)

ruled by that class which is produced by the leading universities in the country.

A (9:50)

I think that's really two points you make here, and it's kind of worth kind of unpacking that a little bit. I think one point is that every country has a means of kind of recruiting and then educating the people that run the country, fundamentally. And in the United States, that's the university, and especially a residential university. So just as you say, the model is, you know, you leave home and you go to these places, you know, usually far away from home, it's residential. You don't live at home like in the European university. But it has, of course, huge advantages. You meet people from all sorts of life, you meet people from different regions, you interact with people that you never would interact with in your home environment. So I think that has a lot. That has a lot going for it. If you always stay in the milieu, if you will, that you grew up with, you just don't have that. And that, I think, is something that's a loss. The second point I think you're making is that they're basically, these universities are a pipeline towards these kind of regional centers, New York, Louisiana and so forth. And that is so. Yes, so historically, I think there was number one. I mean, you look at Vanderbilt's history, right? You can see the entire development there. First, for the first 120, 125 years, we were basically a great regional university. Our nickname was always the Harvard of the South. So this was for people that lived in the south, wanted to get a great education. But the understanding was they would go there, get a great education, maybe meet their life partner, get married, you know, come back and stay in the community. There were many universities like that. We were like that. Northwestern was like that, Emory was like that, Rice was like that. And then about 25 years ago, we all decided that we're going to compete nationally. And not everyone did, but most of us did. And then what happened is exactly as you described it. So we had, we became national universities and we would recruit from across the country, but people would tend to, to go back to where they came from. So they may came from New York and then others that had an opportunity would go to New York, Boston and Chicago, whatever. But that's changing now and it's changing the last five years. And that is driven by macro forces that are, I think exemplified by what's happening in universities, but not necessarily driven, which is the move of talent from the traditional centers like the coast or the Midwest to the South. So Texas is booming, Nashville, Tennessee is booming, Florida is booming. You know, those places are now magnets for talents and we see this from students as well. So, you know, public universities are in the, in the south, are absolutely busting at the seams. And we're seeing more people now that go to Nashville. You know, they still may want to go wherever they want to go. Right. But many of them see opportunities in Dallas, you know, in Nashville, in Florida, in Miami. So the dynamism of the south starting in Texas and ending in Florida, I think is really changing that narrative.

B (13:04)

So, you know, we're recording this in early January. I'm sitting in New York and we had some worry about the sound quality of your recording because the air conditioning is humming in the background. So I see the appeal of moving to Nashville and having visited Vanderbilt a couple of times. I know it's a wonderful university. But let me restate the point one more time in a different way. I think part of this is a question about regional versus national universities. And you're right to point about transformation as a very important factor and one that's perhaps a double edged sword. I think part of this is about each system having its own way to select an elite. And that's always going to have its own advantages and disadvantages. But I do think that the mode of selection also shapes the nature of the elite. You know, when I look at Germany, I think one of the good things about the German elite is that it's quite rooted in different parts of the country is that it's not very. It's not very far removed from, certainly when you talk about the elite, from the middle class, from the upper middle class, perhaps not from the proletariat, but from really quite ordinary people. Part of that is about industrial structure, right? I mean, the biggest German media conglomerate is. Is based in Gutersloe, a city which many American listeners with podcasts perhaps have never heard of. It's unimaginable for the biggest American media conglomerate to be based in a similarly insignificant town. But part of it is about the universities. People often don't move from their hometown for it. They stay in those local communities. Now, don't get me wrong, I think all of that has tremendous disadvantages. I think the German political, cultural, and so on elite is often quite provincial, is often insufficiently ambitious. And that has gotten the country into a world of trouble across a number of dimensions. But it does also have this advantage that I think when I talk to really the people who are in charge in Germany, in a variety of ways, they feel like they live more or less in the same world as their fellow citizens. And in America, it just strikes me that I've been living in this country for 20 years, and perhaps it just

C (15:15)

says bad things about me.

B (15:16)

But I barely know anybody who didn't go to college.

C (15:18)

I barely know anybody who didn't go to a top 25 university. I barely know anybody who doesn't have a master's degree. And that's because when I arrived here,

B (15:27)

I was doing a PhD at Harvard and I was living in a complete bubble of people. Now, when you look at the social

C (15:32)

backgrounds, the ethnic background, at the national backgrounds, it's a very diverse set of people. When you look at what the educational trajectory was, they were all the best in the high school.

B (15:42)

They all went off to good colleges,

C (15:44)

they all got into good grad programs. They all, to varying extents, are very successful today. They all make six figures today, unless they made very deliberate choices that precluded them from doing that. And so it's just very easy for the American elite, even in a broad sense, to just become very, very far removed from the average population. On the plus side, they're surrounded by the brightest minds from an early age, and there's much more ambition. And they end up founding AI companies and getting Nobel prizes and feeling at the age of 28 that they can go and do something in the world in a way that I think is very rare for people in Europe. Sadly, when I look at the Level of ambition of students in America, it's much higher than a lot of students in Europe. There's lots of good things about it, but it does have this bad thing. But it's sort of separates this professional managerial class and not just the top 10,000 people, the top 5 million people, 2 million people in the country from the rest of the population in a much more extreme way than is the case in a place like Germany. Do you think that's a fair complaint or am I getting something wrong?

A (16:48)

I think it's an interesting perspective and I think it is like. I think it's very much worth thinking about. Right. So I would say I think one thing is it's always helpful to kind of contextualize this a little bit historically. Right. Because one of the. And this is different from the European countries. You know, America is a vast country where people, you know, it's an immigration country where people come from all sorts of parts of the world. And there is a really important value in bringing people from different parts of the country together to get to know each other as friends and members of one community. That is a very valuable thing. And especially post, you know, post Civil War, when really so many of the public universities were founded and many of the, not all of them, but many of the, of the great research universities that, you know, all, you know, we, Stanford Hopkins were all founded after the, after the Civil War. So Vanderbilt's mission statement, when Vanderbilt, when Cornelius Vanderbilt founded us, said the goal was to found a great university that brings together the divided. All the parts of a divided country. That was the idea. So I think the historical mission of the American university to do just that has been enormously successful. So that's the kind of, that's, if you will, the different backgrounds, culturally, regionally and so forth. What you're pointing out is a very important. Is something very important where I think what people now call kind of the college divide or the degree dividend is that the cultural differences in this country correlate now largely or to a much larger extent than before with whether you have a college degree or not. That is both academic, that is both kind of economic opportunity and success, but more importantly, I think values on value. So the value divide that you have and the kind of political dividend now cuts through that. And that is clearly manifesting itself politically, it manifesting itself in this backlash and university in a different way. Now what do you do about that? Right? I mean, one way to do it. But we don't want to give up, I think the model that this is a place where we bring together these sexually talented individuals from across the country from very different backgrounds, and we help them not only to get a great education, but we want to prepare them for a role as citizens in a democratic and free society, right. Where they can interact with people from different backgrounds, so forth. But we cannot lose the connection with people that did not go to these places. So now I'll give you something that may sound completely off, but it's an important. I actually do think this is important. So one thing that we do, you know, we do very intentionally is we are very much connected with our community and that is both through an innovation side. You know, we have this. We have a, you know, we were connected with our medical center that provides medical. So there's. We are in the community as a force for good. That's number one. And one important way in which the community really connects with us is to college athletics. So there is a shared kind of. I wrote a little piece on that, on football, college football. Very odd always for Europeans to even think about it that way. But the communal aspect of sharing shared experience like that is a powerful thing. Bottom line, no matter what we do, whether we do it with community engagement, whether we do it through athletics, whether through the arts, that bond with the community needs to be strengthened. And then the last thing I should say, we have to be super careful that the values that are more common in rural communities, in communities that are not in the kind of like, you know, kind of knowledge centers, are represented and discussed and respected inside university at all. So I think a particularly toxic component of this is contempt for people that have different beliefs than oneself. That's fueling, I think, a lot of the anger and the backlash against universities. But that is a job that we need to do inside the university. It's not just driven of kind of where we recruit locally or nationally.

B (21:16)

So that brings us naturally to the next topic, which is that we were talking about or analyzing why it is that some of the left have been critical of universities and what their fundamental complaint is. As you were saying, there has been a decline in left wing support for universities, but there's even steeper decline among

C (21:33)

conservatives in the United States.

B (21:35)

What is the nature of a complaint about American universities from the right?

A (21:41)

Yes. So I mean, one simple way to say this, the left thinks we're inequality machines. The right thinks we're woke factories. Okay. And then everybody thinks we are unaffordable and badly run. Okay. Kind of bureaucratic and overhead and all of that, okay. So that I think is in a

B (22:00)

nutshell, just on the side of a bureaucracy. Having been a member of many institutions in Europe as well as the United States, every institution has too much bureaucracy. American universities are in certain ways inefficient and bureaucratic. My God, are they more efficient and less bureaucratic than any European university I have ever been in touch with in any way. So I'll give full slump prose on that, but let's move on from that.

A (22:22)

I think that's true, but we can do a lot better too. I think we're like, we can lean in more. This is, I think, an underappreciated component of the whole debate that requires a lot of thought and intentionality and sometimes doesn't happen. And it's sometimes, I think these things, you know, people that work in universities feel that's kind of beneath them, you know, to worry about, like how facilities is operating. But that's, I think that's, that's a managerial problem and, you know, with intent and better management practices can be fixed. The woke thing is really interesting. Okay. And so the complaint is basically, and this is not an overstatement that, and we saw this very clearly during particularly the endowment tax. So just as a little reminder, right after the Trump administration took office, there was a talk about endowment tax, basically, you know, an excise tax that would particularly hit wealthy private universities. There was a lot of, a lot of conversation on that. I spent a huge amount in Washington talking to members of Congress on that, members of the administration. The original proposals were very harsh and really have a significant impact on the philanthropic support, on the support that we can provide for student aid and faculty and so forth. They were intended to be punitive. I mean, it was clear this was not a tax that would raise a lot of revenue. It was intended to punish penalized universities that had drifted towards a political bias, if you will, that people didn't like.

B (24:01)

Well, one of the striking things about it was that at least in one version of a proposed bill, it would take effect just about, if you had about $100 million more than Notre Dame University, because they didn't want Notre Dame to be taxed. So they put it just above not.

A (24:14)

Well, that's, you know, that's the political process. Right. So there are exemptions, you know, that's like, that's what goes. Notre Dame is now subject to the, to the endowment tax, and so are we, but at a lower level. But, you know, if you are like, you know, the most well endowed universities, it's pretty, you know, it's A material thing that has a direct impact on what you can do. The reason I'm mentioning this is that what you're doing there is, you know, when people tax endowments, right. Endowments are used for financial aid and to support faculty research, and they are basically the accumulated stock of philanthropic support of generations. So you're basically taxing philanthropy that supports these universities. That's a pretty extraordinary thing to do. And it is. I think it was a wake up call for all of us. But even more striking is what people would say, okay, so when you meet with senators, or when you meet with members of Congress, more generally, members of the House, their staff, there were astonishing things that people said. And people on the right would basically say something like this one. This is almost a reflection of the conversation we just had. We know you're educating the leader of this country, and we don't like what's coming out on the other side. So we're giving you billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars in research funding and student aid, and you're creating graduates that hate America. That's the statement. Okay, and we will use.

B (25:47)

And is there truth to that statement?

A (25:49)

Well, I'll say something about that in a minute. And then the second thing is, and then they said, and we will use all tools in our disposal to make sure that that changes. That then ended, of course, the leverage that Congress and the administration have is on taxes, research, funding, all that stuff. The kind of post October 7th drama with Harvard and all of that, that's all driven by that concern. Okay, so now I think hate America is clearly an exaggeration for rhetorical purpose. But that's what people said. But the problem, the way I see it, is this political drift of universities is a reality, has been happening for years and manifesting itself in multiple, in multiple ways. There's almost kind of like a, you know, like a novel here, like chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. Right. But the debate over free speech, which really started, I would say, in earnest around 2015, something like that, that's when speakers were canceled. That's when we had speech codes, all of that. You remember the Halloween costume controversy at Yale? There was one chapter, I remember it well.

B (27:06)

Erica Christakis.

A (27:08)

Yes, of course, the Christakis, you know, and then the next big chapter, of course, was October 7th and the debate over institutional neutrality. Then there's the next chapter is dei. And now the newest thing, which is really the most important one, is what happens in the classroom. And you may have seen that. So the concern now is that there is political bias, ideological capture, lack of viewpoint, diversity. These are all different ways to talk about a phenomenon and they have different meanings and they need to be carefully parsed. But that's what's happening in the classroom, it's happening in research publications, it's happening in professional association. It's pervasive. And the root cause of that is that I think that's the way, at least I think it makes the most sense, is the concern is that we are subverting scholarly standards, scholarly and educational scholars, to a political ideology. That's the big problem. And that manifests itself now in different ways. Free speech constraints, institutional neutrality, dei and so forth. But the problem is that there is a. A group among students, but also, very importantly, faculty that have a particular political point of view and that's pushing a lot of these things. And the flip side of that, presidents and boards have not reacted to that at all, I would say, or not all of them, and not coherently enough.

B (28:52)

Over the last weeks there's been a big debate about faculty recruitment and discrimination in faculty recruitment inspired by an article in Compact magazine. And it's certainly true, when I talk to friends of mine, that they have either experienced in hiring committees explicitly illegal justifications for how to proceed, justifications, by the way, that would have been illegal even before the recent Supreme Court ruling about affirmative action, as well as when talking to friends of mine who've been told explicitly that they were not chosen based on their race or sometimes their gender, that they shouldn't apply to some position because it wasn't realistic that they would ever be hired based on their race and their gender. This feels to me like one of the kind of dogs that hasn't quite barked yet in the broader public debate about universities, in part because so many people who probably could sue are worried that they're going to be completely sort of blackballed from academia and therefore have not done so. It seems to me likely that this is going to move not to the center of the debate, but more centrally into the debate in the next years in one way or another.

C (30:04)

What is your view on this?

B (30:06)

Do you think there has been large scale illegal discrimination on the basis of race and gender in faculty hiring at American universities. And is this going to move more to the center of some of the debate around higher education?

A (30:22)

We just can't have that. I mean, that's the long and the short of it, as you point out, even if you are a strong supporter for race conscious admissions, that's about student admission, that's not about faculty Hiring, faculty hiring based on race or protected category issues was illegal all the time, okay? So you just can't have that. It's illegal. You can't do it. And when you find the evidence of that, you have to stop it. It's that simple. So now how broad and how widespread that was, that's very difficult to say. My worry is that some universities just basically kind of took a kind of casual approach to that in terms of, and in part because maybe they support it deep down. And then maybe also a problem is university faculty hiring is very decentralized, you know. But I got to tell you, if you put like a, you know, if you force diversity statements or you put like a DEI representative on search committees, you know, you shouldn't be surprised that this is happening. I mean, people understand the cues and they act accordingly. And so all of that, I hope, is blatantly illegal. Behavior is like part of the past and it's good that we are talking about it, but we can't have it. It's just that simple. The same is true on like, by the way, unlike, you know, discriminating, hiring, a political viewpoint, same thing. People, faculty need to be hired based on their scholarly expertise, full stop. And that's it. So I've been pretty vocal on that in the past. I think this is a very, it's an important thing. I don't know how widespread it is, but we'll have to tackle it whenever it occurs.

B (32:14)

So I'm curious about how you think about this. You were saying that the idea that these universities are producing graduates who hate America is an overstatement for rhetorical purposes. And I certainly co sign that. I can see, however, why conservatives might feel unwelcome on campus for two subtly but importantly different reasons. The first is just that there is a super majority of people on campus who deeply dislike the Republican Party and who probably don't recognize that there is a rich conservative tradition which would be worth taking seriously, even if, like me, you have very fundamental objections to Donald Trump. And this, of course, in some ways comes downstream from some of the things we talked about in the first strand of a conversation. It is just, I think now the case across the professional managerial elite of

C (33:08)

the United States that we have seen this strong.

B (33:13)

Well, across the electorate, that we have

C (33:15)

seen the strong polarization by educational status that the best predictor of whether somebody votes for Democrats or Republicans now is not income. And it's not a bunch of other things. It is how educated you are. And so obviously at the educational institutions that mint that educational lead. You're going to have a super majority

B (33:35)

of people who are on one side

C (33:36)

of a political aisle. And that does, I think, inflect how we think about ourselves and our blind spots in important ways. I remember many years ago now at Harvard Kennedy School being at a dinner in which a speaker had claimed that conservatives have a lot more money than progressives in American politics. And they had basically counted up the budget of all of the explicitly conservative institutions, the Heritage foundation and those kinds of places, as well as the explicitly progressive institutions like Roosevelt Institute. They found that conservative institutions had more money. They said, well, what about this dinner? We're sitting at a nicest restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with 10 endowed professors who all had chairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, all paid for by the lavish means of his institution. It was assumed as a ticket of entry. Unspoken, it was unimaginable that somebody who's sitting there might not support the Democratic Party, might not be on the left side of the political aisle. And of course, all of that in the study had been counted as neutral money because Harvard, of course, is a non partisan 501c free charitable institution. I don't think that this is because of some conspiracy by the president of Harvard or the Chancellor of Vanderbilt. It's not even really a conscious conspiracy by a lot of those professors who by the way, have perfectly reasonable views. These were not radicals. These were mostly center left liberal faculty members.

B (35:02)

But in that milieu, it's just assumed that you're on the left in a way. They would understandably make even a very reasonable moderate conservative feel quite unwelcome, feel like they always have to watch themselves. Right. And then there's a second problem which I think affects a minority of faculty members, though it certainly exists, which is the faculty members who both feel motivated and empowered to use the classroom in order to impose their political views on students. And I certainly see that when I emphasize to students at the beginning of term that I'm going to play devil's advocate. I'm going to push points of view that I feel are undervoiced in the discussion. But I want them to bring the whole selves to the discussion. I want them to actually say what they think. I'm going to grade their papers on the quality of the argument. I don't care whether I agree with the argument or not. I just care that they make the argument as strongly and as cogently as they can. And it takes repeating this point a few times and then seeing me in action in the classroom for a few Weeks for them to start trusting that I actually mean that. And I do hear sometimes from students, oh, you know, I've just gotten accustomed to writing in papers what I can tell my professor believes, because otherwise I might get a bad grade. Now, I don't think that's the case for most faculty members. Right? But it's enough that students experience that a few times early in their education for them to learn the lesson, jump through the hoop, echo what my professors say. Don't rock the boat. The GPA here is a huge problem. There's great inflation. Everybody gets an A or an A for most courses. So one class, would you get a B minus because your professor is pissed off of what you were saying for ideological reasons is really going to push down your gpa. It's just not worth the risk. Are these two complaints fair and legible, too?

A (36:52)

I think the evidence is super strong that certainly among the students and even among faculty is the case. So I think what you call this kind of unspoken consensus, I would think of it as kind of an institutional orthodoxy. Those are the types of things that are just kind of part of being part of an institution. And then you stick out like a sore thumb if you're not part of that. So the important part is that's not destiny. Okay? So you can do things in order to prevent that. But if you're not what you're finding right now, and the evidence is just mounting in terms of survey evidence for students, for faculty, what's happening in classrooms, that this is a real problem. And it's a problem. It's a problem. It's clearly a political problem. It's an educational problem, because people are. The students are no longer engaging with each other in serious debates and discussions. But that is, you can do something about that. That is not a given, that there's not a natural law or anything like that. And so, you know, we were very. We were concerned about this already when I arrived. And so what you do is you clear about your principles. In our case, the principles are commitment of free speech, what we call open forums, institutional neutrality, and what we call civil discourse, which is that you use arguments and reasoning and you don't ostracize each other just because they have a different point of view. Remember that we're members of one community that's number one. And then you have to act accordingly when things get tough, like during October 7th, because people pay attention to that, whether you are. Whether you're doing that, whether you're even. Whether you're considering being. Having bds as part of your endowment or not, those are important things that reinforce this institutional orthodoxy. And then there's a very important component on the student side which I think again is underappreciated. Many of the students already. So we do an enormously thoughtful and intentional work to recruit students to venerable, to attract students to venerables that have that what you just described. They talk to each other, they're curious, they have serious debates with each other. And still. And even though we talk about it and you know, we have this, they're not, they're not. They're worried. They're worried and they're worried because in their high school they're not prepared for that because the institutional orthodoxy is already their high school environment. So the problem is they come in and first we, you know, first we have them all sign a pledge. These are our values, this is what we hold dear. Just like when they do an honor code, then there's programming. But the critical thing that we've learned is that the biggest problem is that they're worried that they're gonna say something that their peers will consider to be outrageous. And then they're ostracized and excluded from the parties. That's their biggest fear. So at the core you need to create a relationship of trust among the students. That that's how we do things around here. And we've developed a whole program around that called Dialogue Vanderbilt.

B (40:04)

So tell us about that, because I agree that that is, that's the key, that when I speak to students, the fear of a professor with a bad grade is real, particularly in certain institutions. I served my own, but I've heard it a lot in some other institutions and that is certainly something that motivates the students. But part of a campus university, part of that pressure cooker environment is that you're around your peers 24 7, you're not a part of the normal community for most people. And so the fear of saying something in the classroom that somebody takes objection to or perhaps exaggerates or perhaps completely distorts and then makes a TikTok about. And suddenly all of your neighbors, your suite mates, the people you're friends with, are no longer going to talk to you. That is certainly real and very vivid in the minds of students. Now, obviously, I think part of the problem of a contemporary marketing university is that in some ways administrators decide for too much over the students. So how can a university shape a culture that remedies that without making the whole social scene even more one where the assumed referee for everything as some Student light administrator who may themselves have quite strong ideological leanings and who, you know, who may actually be part of a problem.

A (41:14)

This is exactly the wrong way to do it. Okay. The way you like to have to have constantly the administration adjudicate this debate or that one. It's exactly the wrong way to do it. So we have seen. I want to first tell you what the results are and then I want to tell you what we've done and how to deal with that. Right. Just a couple of pieces of evidence. So we have this. We have a very strong group of College Republicans and college Democrats on campus and they jointly did a debate before all on their own. We're not have anything to do with that. Just all self organized. Right before the presidential election. Most College Democrats, Republicans on most campuses do not even talk to each other. After Shaunie Kirk was killed, they had a joint statement where they condemned the shooting and reinforced their commitment to civil discourse. So we are seeing the students accepting that is, that's how we do things around here. It becomes a culture. And one of our most popular classes on campus, which I think you'll appreciate is called Free Speech and Dangerous Ideas, where they're like, you know, it's for 150 sophomores. All they do is talk about controversial topics. So there's a multiple things that need to happen. So let me just highlight a couple. One, the commitment to free speech needs to be active. It can't just be like something you put in your bylaws and then it has to be operationalized. So what that means, for example, is every one of our registered student groups or faculty can bring any speaker to campus as they see fit. This is a commitment we've had since 1964. So 1967, for example, the students, all student organized, created this thing called the Impact symposia where at the time they brought Storm Thermal and Stokely Carmichael. You can imagine what this does, what this did at the time. But that is how we do things around here. Now I want to give you an example on that. The practical things are critical. So this is three weeks after October 7th. Okay, so we have a strong chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom on Campus, conservative student organization. Three weeks after October 7th, they brought a speaker on campus called Michael Knowles, you know, kind of like a conservative, you know, very conservative kind of, you know, speaker that tends to kind of attract controversy on campuses. So his topic, this is three weeks after October 7th, is in praise of settler colonialism. That's the topic of the speech. Okay, now you may imagine that many of us students are very unhappy about that. But our students have the right to bring anybody to campus as they see fit. It's not checked by us. It's not controlled. The other students can protest, but they can't disrupt. So we don't have a heckler veto. So now we had, after that, you may imagine, that created some, you know, bit of a stir in the student community. So the students, I had a discussion with the students, my students newspaper, the Hustler. Not, you know, kind of unusual name, you know, but that's, that's our name. And they said, you know, this is terrible. You know, how can you have. This just creates controversy and, you know, the usual arguments. And we sat down and we said, well, let's think about it. How should we do this in general? What's the process?

B (44:38)

Right. Do you want me to decide who you're allowed to invite or not? Is that really what you prefer?

A (44:42)

Exactly. That was the thing. You know, there are three doors here. Door one, we have no speakers on campus because people can be controversy all the time. Or you decide and the faculty decide as part of your academic freedom. Or I decide, or a committee that I appoint decides. Which door do you want? And of course, everybody wants door two. And you know, and they don't want to be the first students.

B (45:02)

Well, what they want is door four, which is magically, you know, I decide and people who think like me decide and, you know, the censorship decision always aligns with what I prefer. But this is, this is the door that people always imagine exists in these three spaces discussed.

A (45:16)

Exactly. But the important point is that the mechanism is critical. And you're basically, by making these decisions, you're implicitly having a governance mechanism of how to make those decisions. And you want to think about the mechanism, not about every case. And that was a good moment for us as a university community. And people understood it. And we haven't had any disruptions. We're, you know, speakers shouting down. That's just part of the culture. But you gotta do it and you gotta reemphasize the principle when you have these controversies so that the culture. We have student ambassadors as part of dialogue, Vanderbilt that are part of an advisory board that's about 150 now. There's so much demand for that that we did it for the freshmen as well. You gotta do a lot of things that. This is how we do things around here. And the last thing I'll mention on that is our faculty in the faculty senate recently passed a resolution on academic freedom. It was about as good, as perfect as one could hope for. And it was like, what was it, 56 to 4? So the faculty is buying into that as well. Not everyone, not all the time, but this is part of the culture. But it requires multiple things, principles and creating a culture and then practicing that. This is how we do things around here. Because practice is important. Yeah.

B (46:40)

And this is what strikes me about this moment in universities that I think the societal trends do provide significant headwinds in terms of the partisan polarization by educational status because of a number of other factors we'll get to in the conversation. What strikes me is the reluctance of many university leaders to actually explain both to the outside world and to the early university community, what the university should be for. And this is not to say that they should impose political views on the university community. They certainly should not. But they should be able to formulate basic principles like academic freedom and its importance to a culture of successful inquiry in convincing ways. And so few of them try. And this, to me was the most striking lesson from those famous congressional hearings about antisemitism to which the presidents of Harvard and MIT and UPenn, I believe it was, had been invited. It's not that they made a couple of missteps under hostile questioning. It's not that there were some incidents on those campuses which perhaps were really open to criticism. It's that they made no concerted attempt to use this moment to speak to the American public about this is who we are, this is what our principles are. This is why we have great institutions that are actually doing something valuable that you should care about. It's that unwillingness or inability to formulate that basic case, which to me was infuriating.

A (48:14)

I totally agree. And I think there's a reason for why this is so difficult for many university leaders, because we've seen mission drift. So the. From my point of view, I mean, it's certainly what's happening at Vanderbilt was true at the University of Chicago as well, is our mission, our purpose is utterly clear. It's about pathbreaking research and a transformative education. It's about the creation of knowledge and then its dissemination or transmission. That's what we do. We are not a political party. We're not part of a political movement. So that means we need to resist the temptation to act like one. And that's the whole essence of this debate over institutional neutrality, is that it is none of our business, is to create a platform for people can debate stuff. We want to encourage debate, not to settle it on Anything unless it's directly connected to the university. But once you have a specific incident, just like on the free speech example, the pressure to take sides is super high. So, and then people do it and then it drift, and then the ship drifts a little bit more. So it's a little bit like a sailboat without a keel. Every time, you know, the wind moves, it drifts a little bit. And of course, the wind always typically moves from one side. Things are moving over there. So, example, right. You have the Dobbs decision on, you know, on abortion. Okay? Now, Tennessee is a trigger law state. That means that the moment the Supreme Court decision came in, abortion was considered to be illegal in the state of Tennessee. Now, this affects your community directly and institutional neutrality, just to be clear, it means you have to focus on the issues that directly affect universities, but be silent on the ones that are beyond the purpose or core mission of the university. So abortion is an interesting case. How do you think about that? Right? It's a good question. Right. So here's one way some universities have said is that the Dobbs, Berkeley, for example, the Dobbs decision, is inconsistent with the mission of the university. Okay? So prohibiting or removing Roe versus Wade and a federal right to access to abortion is inconsistent with the mission of the university. Now, what we said is we don't have any criticism. We don't have a point of view on the Supreme Court. I don't pretend to be a constitutional lawyer, and by the way, my faculty has points of view all over the place on that. Some think Roe v. Wade was right. Some think that Roe v. Wade was decided incorrectly on constitutional grounds, but that's the good public policy. And, and, and, and, and you want to have that debate on campus. You don't want to say that this is inconsistent, that this Supreme Court decision, which is not about the educational mission of the university, but about abortion generally, is inconsistent with the mission of the university. How do you feel? Now, if you're a law school professor who has written that, wrote for, for 30 years that Roe v. Wade was decided incorrectly, your teaching is inconsistent with the purpose of the university. That stuff is going on all the time, has been going on in many different ways. So you got to be clear about your mission, and then you have to act accordingly, even when it's difficult. That's the key. And that has not happened. And now if you have to explain it to people, the problem is you say, well, we have a commitment to free speech, but people look at the record and they say, no, you don't. Here's example. 1, 2, 3, 4. That's the problem.

B (52:07)

Yeah. And I think certainly my debate on free speech, including after October 7th, my position for a long time had been that a lot of universities were in an impossible position because they had acted badly for many years before that, because they had often censored people because of their viewpoints. They had often prosecuted students for saying things they didn't like, for example, in various ways and punished them. And because they hadn't actually properly imposed

C (52:37)

the thing that every advocate of free

B (52:39)

speech will agree is important, which is

C (52:41)

limits on the place, space and manner, because they had allowed students to disrupt events and so on over Bandon over

B (52:47)

the last 50 years. And so suddenly, when they were saying, on the one side, we're not going to punish genocidal speech, one community on

C (52:55)

campus said, why aren't you punishing people for that if you're punishing people for all kinds of other stuff? And on the other hand, the Palestinian students understandably said, well, hang on a second. Suddenly you're telling us you can't put up tents and can't put up all these things, but in Occupy Wall street and all these other instances, you didn't take any action. And so that consistency over time is extremely important. You are saying that the wind mostly

B (53:17)

blows from one side. And of course, in terms of the

C (53:19)

university community and other things, that has

B (53:21)

for a long time been true.

C (53:22)

But of course, right now, the wind is suddenly blowing in a rather gusty manner from the other side. The Trump administration was expected to be hostile to higher education in a number of ways, but it has taken much more robust and extreme action than many had thought. This includes the endowment tax you were talking about, but it also includes direct targeting of particular universities, huge scrutiny of federal funding of universities, the cancellation of student visas for students who express their favorite viewpoints, and a whole host of other things. How can a university that is serious about free speech stand up for those values at a time when that incurs huge financial risks? Because actually, it turns out even affluent private universities are deeply dependent on. On the financial support of the federal government. What has Vanderbilt done on this? What have other universities done? What do you think universities can do to protect academic freedom against White House, which is, I think, in many key ways, attacking it.

A (54:35)

The description is that the wind is blowing rather gustily from the other side right now is, of course, exactly correct. So I think what you have right now is you have an administration that, as we said before, believes that universities have lost their way, have drifted dramatically to the left, and they want to use every tool in their arsenal to fix that or to change that.

C (54:58)

Thank you so much for listening to this part of the conversation. In the rest of this conversation, Daniel

B (55:07)

and I talk a lot more about

C (55:10)

the threat that American universities face face from the Trump administration, and Daniel gives his assessment as to whether he thinks that this will lastingly harm American universities. We also talk about whether American universities should react with intransigence or with reform to this political moment. To listen to that part of the conversation, to become a paying subscriber, to stop hitting these paywalls, to no longer have to hear these annoying jingle ads that come into your ear and blast some inanity about the world every 20 or so minutes. Please go to writing.yashamonk.com2026 to claim your special offer. 30% off the first year. That's writing.jashamonk.com 2020. Sa.