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FOX News is now streaming live on Fox 1. When news breaks, we don't just report it. We go beyond the headlines to get the full story. Get live coverage in depth, analysis and perspectives from the voices you trust all in one place. Whether you're at home or on the go, stay connected to the stories shaping our world stream.
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Fox News on Fox 1.
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Download today. But trust, as anyone who has studied moral philosophy or just speaks English knows, is mutual. And it depends on an understanding that is shared of what the purpose is of this or that institution, this or that custom or ritual.
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And now, the Good fight with Yasha Monk. Longtime listeners of this podcast will know that I very much care about higher education. I love my job as a professor at an American university. I think universities do a lot of good things in the world. And I'm also frustrated with some of the real shortcomings of American universities and with the way in which they have squandered a lot of the Public Trust. About 10 years ago, most Americans had deep trust in American higher education. The number of people who do has now gone down to about a third of the population. And that, I think, is a genuine existential threat for their long term existence. Well, as you may have heard, there is an interesting development in this area, a report by a committee of faculty members at Yale University on trust in higher education, which is asking the question of how it is that universities have lost so much trust and what it is they might be able to do in order to regain some of that trust. And whereas a lot of people were expecting a very lowest common denominator report that, you know, puts the problem at the feet of everybody else and calls for a couple of very cosmetic changes in response. The piece of writing that Yale came up with is actually much more interesting than that. So I asked one of the members of this committee, David Brumwich, the Sterling professor of English at Yale University and a sometime contributor to Persuasion, to come on the podcast to tell us about what they found about why it is that universities are too expensive, too opaque in their fee structure, too opaque in their admission system, and not prioritizing academic achievement sufficiently in it, haven't created the conditions for real ideological diversity on campus, and to reflect together about what can be done about those things. In the last part of this conversation, I also asked David about the crisis of the humanities. Why is it, for example, that the number of people majoring in English at Yale University has gone down so much over the last decades? Is it mainly because of job pressures, etc. Or does that also have something to do with how the humanities are nowadays taught at leading universities. I also asked David whether he thinks there's a realistic prospect for universities to regain the trust of the public to listen to that part of the conversation, to support what we do here at Persuasion, to allow us to produce two of these podcasts every week and to allow you to listen to them in full length without ads. Go to writing yashamonk.com listen become a paying subscriber, hit set up podcast to get your private premium feed in your favorite podcasting app. That's right@notiashan.com Listen. David Bromwich, welcome to the podcast.
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Good to be with you.
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So I've been hoping to have you on the podcast for a long time, but we have a good occasion to have you on now because you were on the faculty committee at Yale University that was tasked with trying to figure out why people have lost faith in higher education in significant numbers in the United States and what universities, and particularly Yale, can do to regain the trust of the public. What I the findings of the committee. What do you think does lie at the heart of the loss of faith in universities in the United States?
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Yeah, several things. You used the word faith. The official name of the committee, I think, was restoring trust in Higher education. But trust, as anyone who has studied moral philosophy or just speaks English knows, is mutual, and it depends on an understanding that is shared of what the purpose is of this or that institution, this or that custom or ritual. And I think the understanding that was lost is how higher education, and specifically liberal arts education, prepares you for life in a way that both will serve students who graduate well in getting jobs, but also make them thoughtful citizens so that there's some effect from the education that they wouldn't get just from reading a lot of books or even watching a lot of television. So some of the causes of waning trust that we looked at were the process of admissions. Yale is an elite school, so this is particularly dealing with loss of trust in schools that have that sort of prestige. The price of the school is very high, although most people don't pay the sticker price. And that relates to a lack of transparency in the way that things like how you pay, what tuition costs are, how it may be deferred, what loans are available, how much tuition can be paid for people who aren't rich. So, I mean, recently, and this is overlapping with the work of the committee, an announcement that came out about a month or two before our report was put into its final draft, the president of Yale, Mari McGinnis announced that families making $200,000 a year or less households would not have to pay any tuition. Now, if you know how low on the scale of what to say, disposable wealth income $200,000 for a whole household is, that's not surprising. It's not extraordinarily generous, but still it's more generous than most people imagine. The Ivy League schools are so so
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and for probably a lot, perhaps most of the households that send kids to Yale are above that. Median household income in the United States is something like $70,000 a year. Right. So it does mean that for the median American that is able to get their kid into Yale, they're going to have a free ride.
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Right. So there's. What should we say? Opacity rather than transparency. I like the 18th century word for it, publicity. There should be more publicity in a neutral sen. Making public of the criteria that are used by a university like Yale to accept or not accept students. And this is all the more important because we've acquired an excess of sort of bogus prestige from rejecting a lot of students. There are more and more applicants. More and more people think they might make it, but it's lower than 5% admissions now at Yale and at places like Yale. So how to account for the distrust? Well, there seems to be a kind of false advertising in which the institution has been unconsciously indulging.
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The report is also quite explicit about the problem of grade inflation in Yale. The median grade is now an A or an A minus, I believe. How is that contributing to the loss of trust in universities?
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There's grade inflation. A student reporter writing for the campus newspaper, the Yale Daily News, found in an article published, I think, about a year and a half ago that the average grade given at Yale was in the A family, as this was put, meaning A's or A minuses, something like 70% of grades. And I have to say, as a teacher in the humanities, and we are usually charged with being the great culprits on great inflation, I was shocked to discover that even in the natural sciences, grade inflation of this sort prevails. So in order to distinguish non invidiously, but to discriminate among students, some much greater separation of degrees of distinction would seem desirable. And that's one of the suggestions made under the final category, or rather the final section of our report, which is called recommendations, there are 20 recommendations, and one involves making it easier to calibrate how well students are doing against the cohort of people in that class. So if A class is 80% A's. Your A in that class is going to count less than an A in a class where there are 30% A's. That can seem like a small recommendation, but it may mean that students demand classes where distinction can show up. And if they demand classes like that, they may gravitate more towards courses that have some real rigor and be a little less shameless about attending big lecture semi gut courses in the social science or even the humanities and sciences that assure them of a good grade and thereby mingle with the respectable crowd of Ivy graduates.
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One topic that obviously has been broadly discussed in the media, but also felt by many professors, including left leaning professors at universities, is a sense of political conformity and a sense of fear that you may in some explicit or implicit way be punished for expressing unpopular views. The report mentions that the number of students and faculty members at Yale who fear sharing the political view is quite substantial. How has the problem of political conformity contributed to a loss of trust in universities?
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The fact, I mean, it's a reductive way of framing this. But it's not without its own revelations that 90% or so, maybe more of faculty at universities like this tend to be registered Democrats and to have, let's just say, left liberal politics. Why is that? That's a long story. We can talk about it a bit if you like. I have my own speculative explanations. But there's no doubt that the enormous sharp divide between the political culture of the United States right Now it's a 5149 politics doing it just as Democrat versus Republican, and it keeps going back and forth. So it's about even. And what these two parties stand for is not quite clear, very often even to themselves. But to have it all balanced, or rather leaning with great imbalance on one side doesn't seem an adequate representation or an adequate preparation for society among the students who go to college. That's not to say that there's a great deal of political discourse or that there's political indoctrination in depth. That's just part of the ethic of campus life. I don't think that's true at Yale. I think it's been overplayed as a problem about universities in general. But there's no doubt that the actual disproportion of political tendencies among faculty members was a factor in creating more distrust. And then there's the question of free inquiry and free speech related to politics, but related to cultural and social issues too. Are there questions that could be important moral topics for discussion in a university that are pretty much off limits or where it's understood, it's understood with nobody having to say so, that there's one right answer, one right response, one right side to take. So that students are often insensibly, imperceptibly, but nevertheless discouraged from getting into animated discussions about these things in class or
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outside class is part of what happens in terms of making students afraid to speak up in class. For example, the threat of social media that if I say something that, you know, some classmate of mine is offended by, they may go on TikTok or some other social media platform and perhaps misrepresent what I said and couldn't call it out. And then, you know, I may no longer have, you know, friends, I may no longer have something to sit with in the dining hall and so on.
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Students are wary of saying something controversial because it might be reported and reported in such a way as to harm their reputations very early. And how that affects people's willingness to speak is pretty easy to guess. So one of the recommendations, it's one I'm most proud of on behalf of this committee, is a no gizmo classroom, no laptops, but also no iPhones, people not recording. It was suggested maybe that we should propose Chatham House Rules for all classes, which, as you know, means you can report things that were said, but you must never report who said it. I don't think we went that far and I don't think it's necessary to go that far. But you want to stop very short of permissiveness towards creating gossip around comments made in class, either by a teacher or a student.
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So I want to double click on a bunch of these because there's a lot of interesting things in there. I'm struck for by your first observation that there is a lot of opacity and I don't think that opacity is by design exactly in some areas, perhaps it is more than in others, but it's sort of being created over time. But it's true that a lot of the things that universities do that supposedly are meant to serve worthy goals, like sometimes equity and other kinds of things, in fact have this result of really favoring the people who know how to play the game. Personal statements are meant to give admissions officers a richer view of a personality and allow students to share when they dealt with some kind of genuine hardship, et cetera. In reality, it often is the most privileged students who come from most privileged backgrounds who have a kind of cultural knowledge to understand what you do and don't say in a personal statement, and to have had the money to go volunteering in some wonderful project somewhere and all of these kinds of things, right. You know, with the financial aid system, you know, there's some really strong reasons why universities have embraced the models they have. Right. The logic, which I understand is we have a lot of students who come from very rich households. Let them pay a lot. And then, you know, the students that don't come from rich households, we are going to actually not charge them any tuition or perhaps even give them full living expenses. And the top universities with big endowments are now very, very generous in that regard. But of course, the result is that if you come from a genuinely underprivileged background, you may not know that and you may only have heard in the general conversation that going to Yale now costs about $100,000 a year, a little bit less than that all in. And so you may not even apply. Right. Not to speak of the fact that I'm sure there's some parents who are smart about how they plan out their finances and their income so that if you're self employed, you really front load some losses to your business in the year where your kid goes off to one of these schools. And because you really know the system, you're able to come in under $200,000 a year. When it happens certain years before and after your kid attends college, you're way over $200,000 a year. So these are all examples in which the system often designed in a quite earnest way, for example, to make college accessible, which it now factually is for most people who are not very affluent to, if your kid gets into Yale, have it, Johns Hopkins, et cetera, like you do actually get tremendous aid. But the system is so opaque, but people may not know it. And it seems to me that that's sort of a broader condition of the modern university, which is quite odd. So I was wondering about your thoughts on. I mean, how did that come about and is that fixable?
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I don't know how it came about. As the scholarship process became more intricate, with more kids from public schools being let into these elite schools, the Ivies in Chicago and so on, I suppose they found it difficult to explain the intricacies. And there's also the advent or the gradual coming in of what came to be called the holistic approach. This is what Harvard got hit very hard for in the Fairness and Admissions case before the Supreme Court, because the holistic approach could be shown to disfavor Asian students on personality criteria that are very obscure. They kept getting low grades to compensate for their ISATs so they wouldn't have to admit too many. Right.
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And here, just to expand this for a second, I mean, there's both a dark history here, which is that those personality scores were explicitly introduced to keep down the number of Jews at these schools 50 years ago. And now they're being used to keep down the number of Asian students. And then the figures were just remarkable. I mean, I believe it was like at Harvard, it was like on a five point scale. And the personality of the average Asian applicant was determined to be, you know, more than a standard of deviation lower than that of any other racial group. I mean, so, you know, basically Harvard University's institutional judgment is just that on average, Asians have, you know, remarkably terrible personalities. And all of this just as part of this opaque system.
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It's a cultural and racist cliche, but it fits all the old models. So, you know, black people are just more interesting, more animated, more lively than everyone else. They have personality. Asians are whatever their surface is, so hard to read. They all seem to have, I don't know, not enough personality. And white people are somewhere in between. It was absurd what came out there. But all these schools have been practicing some version of holistic admissions. That in itself is what to say depends on spontaneous judgment, on the tact for reading an application of the people who are working in admissions. They should presumably be people who have been taught some basic rules of what are the good schools, what are the hard schools, what are the districts where if a student's really done something exceptionally, it means a lot and so on. But nevertheless, that system, because it's so personal, so subjective, if you will, is liable to particular abuses. No doubt about it. I also think that a democratic desire, well meaning, to present a welcoming face to students of all kinds is largely responsible for some of the obscurity of the process. But one recommendation that came from our report is that they don't advertise it just as sticker price with nothing else. They actually go into some of the intricacies. So it shows up just what kind of chance you have. But a subjective element remains. And there are students who will be prompted, they feel, to try their chance at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, whatever, but who, on objective measures such as can be given by an satisfactory, aren't really quite up there with the best students who do come from more privileged backgrounds, but are more ready for a difficult university.
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One of the interesting things that the report suggests is that over time, the mission of university has broadened explicitly and with it the criteria for the kind of students that you want to admit. And the report suggests that the university should refocus its mission much more narrowly on the creation, preservation, transmission of knowledge, rather than those kind of vague goals of educating future leaders and all kinds of other things. And going with that. It suggests that academic merit should be the core criterion for admissions in a way that evidently it is not always. Now, how far should we go with that? I mean, why shouldn't we do what other top universities in most other countries do? And the report acknowledges that in most other countries where universities like Yale and Harvard and everybody else, as we've recognized in the last year during the Trump administration's attacks on these universities, are private universities with large endowments, but they do actually get a lot of public funding. You know, one obvious way to preserve a trust in them is to have a very transparent, clear academic metric for who should get in. Whether that's a national entrance examination, whether that is a university specific entrance exam, but something where people without knowledge of their identities get a grade on an exam and the people who come top are admitted. That is, broadly speaking, the system that most other democratic countries in the world use. Why not go the whole way and get rid of the holistic admissions altogether?
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Well, I'm probably closer to that view than some of my colleagues on this committee, but we went a distance towards it. As you mentioned the previous mission statement and what these mission statements import is a hard thing to say. They started becoming inspirational and part of the brochures that are sent out to prospective customers, that is applicants to the universities, 30 years ago or so. And now, for example, all of these elite universities will speak of their virtues as being a second home. The word home is used, I would say, even half as often as the word community is used, as if it's a whole separate community. That leads to some fallacies about the sort of concord or comity that ought to exist among everybody. That are very hard to erase but should be erased. Because if you want what John Stuart Mill called the clash of ideas to happen in the universe, the clash of ideas means friction, some abrasiveness and some what to say, not necessarily wounded feelings, but surprise, startlement, shock, feeling of being rubbed the wrong way in an argument, hearing for the first time an argument being made, well, that you didn't think you had to take seriously. So you want that to be part of, of what goes on in universities. And students who are equipped, as a University of Chicago philosophy professor once told me, we respect you here. If you can defend your ideas. That's a nice way of putting it. Maybe it's a little less forbidding than clash of ideas, but students, by the time they're some way into university life should be interested in defending their ideas. If they're going to, for example, a lecture or even, or a political, political speech by a personality whom they dislike, distrust and are opposed to, they should have some pride in their ability to ask a hard question instead of shout the person down. Why? Because it's a university. And so, I mean that seems to me to move towards. You want to have people who are qualified are the people who are qualified, the people who score the highest on these merit tests. And I think on the whole that should be aligned. I believe it's one of the recommendations in our report that there be a baseline set explicitly which is not there yet in Yale's advertisements for potential applicants, that if your SAT score is below X and it's going to be pretty high, you shouldn't bother to apply or you're not encouraged to apply because you're probably only in for disappointment. They don't do that yet. In fact, you know, in previous roundups of potential applicants they say, you know, don't worry too much about SATs. And as you know, all these schools, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, I believe Columbia and Harvard around the time of the George Floyd protests and Covid 20202021 abandoned the SAT for a while and then gradually took it back because it was so impractical not to have it be a factor at all. And I think there shouldn't be a hang dog idea about oh, we're so ashamed to be using this test. It's merely objective. It should be a good test and it should be one that tells you something about the student. But there's a democratic.
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Yeah. And one of the interesting things about the SAT test, I think what happened is that it went test optional. Most of those universities, which of course meant that if you had a very good score, you would include it. But if you had a bad score but otherwise great experience volunteering in Ecuador or teachers that for one reason or another were really pushing you, you would admit it. So, and you saw in many universities that the effect of that in the income and class was very negative, that there was a very serious drop off of intellectual quality. The other thing that this speaks to, I think is exactly the kind of nexus of admissions and opacity. And perhaps I don't like the term too much, but a form of mole coddling that has just become the kind of background hum of the American elite class. I think there's a very odd mix of highly meritocratic culture of outsized returns for getting into Yale, for getting into that investment bank that you want to work for, and so on, and a culture that is very reluctant to actually be explicit about criteria and so on. And you see that in admissions and see that in grading, right? So part of the advantage, let's be clear, about not having minimum SAT cutoffs is that you can do all kinds of social engineering. And that's one reason why universities are reluctant to do it. But part of it is just the kind of it feels mean to tell people that if your SAT is below 1300, you probably don't stand a chance in hell of getting into Yale. So let's not say that explicitly, even though in reality I'm sure these admissions offices will claim never to have, you know, to read every file. Holistically, they probably throw every damn application unless certain criteria are fulfilled that are below 1300 into the bin without looking at it for more than two seconds. But this sort of. It would be mean to put it on the website, so let's not write it. But as a result, you're actually inviting lots of students spend a lot of time on these applications to get their hopes up. To think perhaps I'm such a unique student and they're going to read my file and going to recognize how wonderfully neglected my talents are and then just get disappointed six months later. It's a kind of fake niceness. And I think that's related to the grading inflation. And I'm a relatively soft teacher in the sense that I don't want my students to be punished for taking my class rather than the class of some colleague of mine. And I like my students. And so because grade inflation has become the practice my grades are about. I try not to make them more inflated than most of my colleagues, but I don't think they're Less inflated either. There's no individual incentive to hold firm. But I think that's also fake niceness. My students deserve to know whether the piece of writing they have handed in is poor, decent, good or exceptional. And at the moment, we don't have the signals to send them, for them to know better about themselves. And in the moment, that feels nice. But I think it is actually nice if we take seriously intellectual development and so on. And that's the kind of. I mean, I think you can lay that at the feet of universities. I think they should have a stronger sense of mission and be able to stand up against this better than they have. But it's kind of a downstream effect, I think, from a broader set of cultural attitudes that have become very widespread in the kind of American professional managerial class.
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Yeah, and there's a. What shall we say again, well, meaning and rather innocent democratic idealism reflected here, that we want all kinds of people. We don't want to feel that we discriminate, we don't want to feel we're elite, we're not an aristocratic country. So as the Ivy League, which we're an aristocracy, if anything, was, began to become more democratic, at least in its surface presentation, I think these holistic considerations try to find a student who has overcome an obstacle, a student who is a fascinating strong personality and intellectually good enough. That kind of exception started to be made. And it's one form of diversity. I think the word diversity has mainly before Trump, he uses it to cover everything but anything to do with civil rights, gender or whatever. But before that, it really meant, you know, devoting special studies to race, to gender, to ethnic background, to immigration status, to things like that, cultural, ethnic issues. But diversity is also just wanting different types of people. And this is. This has always been. It goes far back. And that's there in the preface, in a brief way to our report, anti intellectualism, but let's put it more politely, non intellectualism has been a major strand of American life. So it seems wrong for the academy to present itself as participating in this unprejudiced non intellectualism. But I think there's a little bit of that too, and it leads to unfortunate effects in trying to have a popular face when you're not really a popular institution.
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Talk for a moment about that idea that you want to put together a diverse class, which I find very strange. I mean, I was an undergraduate in England at Cambridge, and the admission system is so fragmented, there's no chance of putting together a unified class of a whole university because colleges do their own admissions per subject. So there's no real way of doing that. And yet the University of Oxford somehow always had a second violinist. And the idea in America is that you need to make sure that we have this kind of student and that kind of student. And there's a law of large numbers in statistics. I mean, if you admit the smartest students, you're going to end up having one student who happens to be interested in music and one student who happens to be interested in sports. So I just don't buy the premise that this is necessary to create a diverse class. My class in Cambridge was every bit is diverse in terms of its interests and talents and the way that they spend their free time as the class in America without each kind of constituency university being able to say, but we need to make sure that we have somebody who's able to do this board to do that. The report, I think, rightly calls out all kinds of special categories that continue to be given preferential treatment. These include athletes. These include the children of alumni. These include, this is a minor point numerically, but always one that I find very striking. The children of faculty and staff that explicitly get a leg up, which is really quite remarkable, actually. The one thing it doesn't include is a treatment of race. That is partially because officially we no longer have affirmative actions at Ivy League University in the wake of recent Supreme Court judgments. But that's where the opacity comes back in, isn't it? Because when you look at some of the amica briefs that various universities wrote in the Supreme Court litigation about affirmative action, they said that the number of black students would decline radically if they were not able to practice affirmative action. I think in the case of Harvard, one of the calculations that was presented by Harvard's side in the court case said that without affirmative action, the number of black students at the university would go down from about 14% to something like 2%. And what happened after the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action? The number didn't budge, or it budged a tiny bit. I think at Yale, it went from 14% before the Supreme Court judgment to 14%, 14% a couple of years later. And I think now it's fallen a little bit to 12%, which is still.
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I think it may have fallen farther. You should check that on both of those schools. But I mean, the desire to have the, what to say, percentage of students represented in an entering class reflect the percentage in the population goes with, I think, a fallacy that Michael Oakeshott talks about in some of his essays. On education, which he calls the reflection theory of culture, that is to say, higher education. Universities should somehow in all possible respects reflect the society to which they are meant to serve. But institutions are good at functioning for different purposes. Ed, if you're thinking about an activity, let's call it an institution such as classical music or engineering at a high level of specialization or the armed forces. The kind of abilities needed for one thing or the other or the other aren't necessarily at all going to reflect the distribution in the population. Universities are a large institution. You should maybe strive to make them as representative as possible. But the reflection theory also has the trouble in it that it makes the university think it should reflect attitudes in society as well as populations. And again, I think that's wrong.
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B
So that brings us to the question of kind of intellectual diversity. You alluded to this briefly earlier, that the vast majority of faculty at the leading schools lean left, many of them registered democrats. You know, that in itself need not be a problem. But I do think it's indicative of a deeper problem, that the debate at these universities kind of lies, the way I feel it, between the kind of identitarian left and the liberal left. I think there's probably a slight preponderance of a liberal left on most campuses, not necessarily in every department, in every field, but everything that's outside of that range is hard to formulate in those universities without experiencing significant pushback. And of course, some of the solutions to this problem I see in a somewhat critical way. I think in an ideal world, we wouldn't hire colleagues at my university of yours in order for them to be sort of intellectual diverse. I mean, A, it's very hard for one person to be intellectually diverse in themselves unless they have a very incoherent view of the world. And B, it's kind of odd to have a colleague who's just there to have a different opinion. But of course, the truth of it is that political criteria are currently a very big part of a selection process, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, where the quality of work certainly matters, but where people who have a view that falls too far outside of a consensus in a particular department often just aren't even considered in the first place. And so you have this kind of effective application of ideological criteria that is covert, that sometimes may not even be self conscious, where it's just like, well, this person just outside of a reasonable fold. Of course we're not going to consider them because, I mean, they just, you know, like, why would we even. Right. And that is basically this implicit but very effective political filter. And so, you know, unless you're able to upend that, perhaps the only alternative is to impose, to say, well, sometimes we're going to hire people who fall outside that. It's very hard to know how to fix this. And of course, again, as in the case of a broader intellectual virtues to lack of. We're talking about, as in the case of a kind of reluctance to be mean and to state our criteria explicitly. This is also downstream from a larger transformation of a professional managerial class. Right. A lot of the problem today is that the Democrats have just become the party of a professional managerial class. And so, you know, as obviously professors and university administrators and to a significant extent students are recruited from the ranks of the professional managerial class and its offspring, there's always going to be some lean in that direction, as long as that is the kind of nature of our political cleavage. So how can universities improve on intellectual diversity, on actually having genuine debates on campus in a way that doesn't itself run counter to some of the principles of free inquiry, to the fact that we don't want political litmus tests for faculty hiring and so on and so forth?
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A
Yeah, it's very hard. And I mean another way. What you're describing is a sort of standoff between two tendencies. On the one hand, you know, the or two desirable goods, the intellectual autonomy of departments. Departments should be able to choose to hire and then possibly to tenure scholars they consider the best doing this kind of work. On the other hand, if you have no or very little variety of opinion in a field of study such as politics, where there is in fact great variety outside the academy, there's something lacking in the kind of education students are going to get. This is called by people who do the kind of study this report was working at, the pipeline problem. And the pipeline problem of having so few black people represented in the academy was solved by affirmative action. But affirmative action is no longer constitutional and it maybe had run its course. In any case, where the, what to say, left liberal side got its strongest foothold was in certain departments in the humanities and social sciences, but also in the studies programs, Black studies, ethnic studies of various kinds, immigration studies, gender studies and so on, is that we have
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a left liberal or the identitarian left.
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A
Yeah, more identity.
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B
My sense, I mean, I know Harvard much better than Gail, but in Harvard, I would say that, you know, the government department, you know, the main faculties have a left liberal predominance.
- [42:20]
A
Yeah, you're right. Correction taken. I meant consciously political and consciously left. But you're right that that would better. Better be described as identitarian. But in any case, if you want a pipeline going the other way, you can't do it by political affirmative action. That is, as you said, a litmus test. But universities, for better or worse. No comment on that, have these places. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, et cetera, have created a lot of what they call centers or institutes, which aren't quite academic programs, even, let alone big departments, but where people can be permanent and be a presence on campus and teach classes that are for credit and it's imaginable, I think that you will get at some places, if they do it with imagination and scruple, it can turn out well. Centers where there's more chance for people with academic training and academic presentation to hold, let's say, religious views that even get into their teaching without being dogma, or to hold views that are libertarian in a way that's not, you know, what to say, communist, libertarian. So, you know, that should be possible. That's one solution, but it's a standoff. It is a hell of a problem how to change the composition of faculties without somehow compromising intellectual and departmental autonomy.
- [43:53]
B
What about the student side of this? The report refers at surprising length, I thought, to the famous Halloween incident in which there was an email from the office of something or other Intercultural Affairs. Intercultural affairs that urged people to be very sensitive in the Halloween costumes they chose. And then there was a response to that by Erika Christakis, who was, I think it was then called the Master, along with the husband.
- [44:22]
A
Associate Master.
- [44:23]
B
Yeah, the Associate Master for Hasten, Nicholas Christakis of one of the houses at Yale, saying, I think students should be able to think for themselves and these kinds of things. And there was a huge eruption of anger with what did look rather like some form of cultural revolution, like exorcism of Nicholas in the courtyard and so on. There was a moment in which students, a subsection of students, but an influential subsection of students, saw it as their calling to impose a certain identitarian orthodoxy on campus, and that included intimidating senior faculty members, as in this instance, and it sometimes included intimidating their fellow students. And there's some discussion in the report about the norms that should be established so that people feel free to actually share their opinions in class without a fear of getting cancelled for them afterwards on social media or in other ways. I personally have actually found that moment has somewhat passed. I've been struck for the last few years of teaching that for a lot of students. These ideas are now the received wisdom of what they've been told in high school and in middle school and sometimes in elementary school depends a little bit on where they grew up. But if they grew up, for example, in the suburbs of a major metropolitan area in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, et cetera, these are largely just the ideas that the teachers have always taught them. As a result, I think they tend to take them for granted. At first, it's just the world. It's the mother's milk. It's the world for which they've grown up. But they no longer think that I am the bearer of this flame and it is my goal to impose it on people. That's what my teachers told me. And like most things that my teachers told me, I kind of assume it's true. But, oh, how interesting. Somebody has a different opinion on this. That's surprising. I didn't know that existed. But let's talk about it. It feels kind of a little bit less fraud. So I was wondering whether you kind of, you know what your impression is of a campus culture of whether at Yale it has somewhat improved or whether perhaps I'm speaking also from the experience of a less politicized university like Johns Hopkins and then more broadly, sort of what some of the recommendations for what to do about it. One of the recommendations in report is to get rid of electronics in the classroom and so on. You entertain, but dismiss the idea of a kind of Chatham House rule that you're not supposed to be able to refer to what particular people said in the classroom. How big is the challenge today and what are some possible solutions for it?
- [47:01]
C
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- [47:31]
A
Well, I. I agree with your impression that the pressure zone, so to speak, has lifted some in the last two or three years. A person I'm very close to in this household who is a psychologist speculated that the year 2020, this country had a nervous breakdown. The whole country had a nervous breakdown. Covid was an element of it. But so were the George Floyd protests. The disorders in cities and so on. And of course, the Halloween event you have mentioned a moment ago came in 2015 16. So that's an earlier BLM moment. And it was going for a long time, if you think about it, really Obama's second term on into recent days. But I agree that there's more, what to say, tolerance, interest in exchange of ideas, if we can call it that. There's more animated talk and. And more susceptibility to humor in the classroom, as far as I am able to discern. And that's great. It means that younger teachers, who tend to be cautious because they're worried about student evaluations, are going to not constantly develop 20 different tones of voice for saying, that's interesting. That's interesting. Oh, that's interesting. Maybe they'll learn how to say, I don't really think that's true and here's why. Or, that's absolutely true, but let's go further with it. That sort of give and take in a classroom is very important. And I think that one of the things you could hear from conservative students in the bad recent days is here at Yale, which is not as bad off as other places because it's got three conservative political union parties, it's got a conservative side in the background, and they don't feel so isolated. But that sometimes in classes when they made a remark that showed their traditionalist sympathies or whatever, they would not get denounced or in any way shamed by anybody in the class or the teacher. But the teacher would be silent for 30 seconds and go on to something else. Well, that's not good. And I think a greater openness that reflects a community with divergent, somewhat unharmonizing points of view is a good thing to the extent that it really is coming back. And I think it may be.
- [50:07]
B
It's one challenge that is not explicitly mentioned in the report, that there is a minority of faculty that really do abuse the power in the classroom to impose their ideological views. My impression is that most faculty members do not do that, and I certainly think most of my colleagues do not do that. But I am struck, speaking to students, that they very consistently bring up experiences of this. I go out of my way when I explain what I think a good essay is for my class because every faculty member has a different set of ideas about this. One of the things I say is, look, I don't care if you agree with me or not. The last thing I want is for somebody to badly parrot my views back to me. That's not going to get you a great grade. If you write something that I agree with, I want to feel like that is a really strong, interesting representation of that view. If you write something that I don't agree with, the criterion is not. Am I going to come to agree with you? That's unlikely. Amazing. If it happens, I want to feel is the pull of that argument in my mind a little bit stronger after reading your essay than it was at the beginning? Have you made a case for a point of view that I may happen to disagree with? Where I'm like, okay, I still probably disagree, but I see the force of that. I see why somebody might believe that. And because I'm very explicit about that and really want to emphasize that students sometimes say, oh, it's nice that I really feel like I can say what I think because it's not always the case. And I always sort of listen up like, oh, when is it not the case? And I remember one recent case in particular where a student said, I had this student, this is in high school, I think, where this teacher had this set of views. But actually I largely agree with. I think the student has a more woke set of views than the teacher was very woke. But I really chafed at the fact that it was very clear that any disagreement is going to get punished. And so, I mean, are there ways that universities have to reckon with that even just in terms of training the teachers, in terms of setting clear expectations? You don't want to be too intrusive and you certainly don't want auditing of every grade, which I think would be open to abuse in all kinds of other ways. But Even if it's 1 in 20 faculty members, that's an experience that most undergrads are going to have once or perhaps twice during their college career. Is that one of the things that damages trust in higher education in ways that we need to deal with?
- [52:36]
A
Sure it would. And I don't know if it's 1 in 20 teachers, it shouldn't damage the poor students skin tone too much. But I agree that it goes against the ethic of teaching. If you have anything resembling a Hippocratic oath as a teacher of the liberal arts and sciences, it should be that a view that is well defended gets the respect of the teacher. And a view that is earnestly and genuinely meant but not well defended receives a response that is not crushing and personally harsh, but is reasonable and an example of how to, what to say, point out the fallacies or the loopholes in a rival argument. I mean, teachers should be exemplary in that way, and it should be part of their training. But I think what's involved in acquiring a PhD is so specialized in other ways that that element of pedagogy is often neglected. And of course, some of it is intuitive, some of it is, as I'm sure you have experienced, getting to know what your classroom presence is like and what it's like to teach a class or different kinds of classes. I remember in early days teaching at Princeton, I was in my 20s and I was morbidly worried about what I thought of, I suppose, as, you know, dead time, what the disc jockeys called, you know, dead air. Nothing's being said. And so if I asked a question and there was no answer for 10 seconds, I got very anxious. But some it's, you know, as a teacher, you learn. Well, that was well asked. I think I'll just wait or you learn not to.
- [54:26]
B
The best piece of teaching advice I've ever gotten was when I was in graduate school, and I forget who it is, but, you know, the department put on some kind of little meeting for people who are going to be teaching assistants for the first time after your comprehensive exams and so on. And the best piece of advice, which I follow very often is if you ask a question and you look anxious that people might not answer it, and you look like you're going to jump in yourself to answer your question, when students think I'll just sit back and let the teacher do their thing, I don't need to jump in, right? And what you should do instead is lean back, look comfortable, let an awkward silence arise, and some student always can't bear the awkwardness, and they jump in and suddenly you have a real. And again. I mean, I don't generally have trouble getting my students to talk in the classroom, but on the occasions when that happens, I do that. And sometimes I even call it out, I say, you know, I'm happy to sit here in awkward silence for as long as you like. And when you do that for a few seconds and somebody always jumps in.
- [55:33]
A
But the other thing is, I mean, again, this is just a matter of what the function of a teacher is, when it's working. Well, sometimes you haven't asked the question well, and that shouldn't lead to too much self consciousness either. You, you learn to listen to yourself and you say a few seconds later, you know what? I posed that badly. Let me try again. And there was a philosophy professor, modal logic and philosophy of language and other such things at Princeton, David Lewis, who has described to me, who spoke perfect paragraphs and was an excellent lecturer and so on. But he would walk back and forth on the stage and in the middle of a sentence would sometimes say, bzzt, I was about to talk nonsense, and then go back and say the whole thing again. Teachers, in a quieter way, you know, should be. Should be able to do that. Can I read out a little passage from a British education master of the 19th century that's quoted by Oakeshott, please? Because I think it's what we're talking about, the kind of habits and manners that go with thinking in the context of higher education. So, I mean, this is the passage. A certain amount of knowledge you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain, nor need you regret the hours you spend on much that is forgotten. For the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions. But you go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits, for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms. And that last part is obviously what's become most challenging for students in the last generation or so.
- [57:48]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of a good fight. In the rest of this conversation, I asked David about the crisis of the humanities. Why do so many fewer people major in English at Yale University than they did? Why is that crisis of humanities so severe at many other of our top universities? Does that have something to do with job pressures in general? Or does it perhaps have something to do with the general posture of teaching in those departments? Is there something fundamentally mistaken about the attempt to problematize texts under a kind of background condition that they're really influential in society in an age where that relevance no longer really exists? To listen to that and to David's fortune, whether universities are going to be able to regain the trust they have lost in the last decades, please listen to this extra piece of the conversation. Please become a paying subscriber. Please go to writing.yashamunk.com listen and if you are a paid subscriber and you're hearing this message, you are on the wrong feed. You should Also go to writingtodiachamonch.com Listen, hit set up podcast and get full ad free version of this feed onto your favorite podcasting app. Writing.dashmook.com Listen. Thank you so much. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month, of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments.
- [59:50]
A
But that's weird.
- [59:52]
B
Okay, one judgment anyway, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for
- [60:00]
C
3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com.