← Which Side of History?
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- [00:01]
A
You know, sometimes if you lead with your chin, somebody will hit you. And some of what went on after October 7 was leading with your chin. I'm the Secretary of state who spent 24 trips to the Middle east trying to get a Palestinian state. And I think everybody understands that. I believe in the two state solution. I think everybody understands that I worked hard to try to bring it about. I ended the Lebanon War in 2006. Right. And I was appalled at the lack of understanding on college campuses of the complexities of the Middle East. And so sometimes when you lead with your chin, people will hit it. So one thing we have to do as universities is not lead with our chin.
- [00:58]
B
Welcome to which side of History? This is Jim Steyer. I'm the founder of Common Sense Media and a longtime professor at Stanford University. This is a new podcast, so we really need your support. Please make sure that you follow this podcast and also subscribe to my channel on YouTube. In this episode, we're going to look at a very big issue. What is the current state of American universities? And joining me today, some truly special guests. Jonathan Levin, the President of Stanford University, and Secretary Condoleezza Rice, the former Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and extraordinary Stanford professor. Let's get their thoughts. Now. In the past almost year, we've seen unprecedented challenges to the roles of universities in the United States and in our democracy. And the opening question I'd like to ask you and Secretary Rice is what role do you think that university leaders, because you guys are university leaders, in addition to being also great teachers and scholars, have at a time like this in preparing the students here for this unique environment. And I'm going to ask you some about the challenges of the federal government and stuff like that. And also to be citizens at a time where we have deep political polarization, misinformation. We talked a lot about that in the context of tech and just some of the most significant challenges in our lifetimes to the role of university. So what do you see as the role of university? And how do you think Stanford particularly is prepared to take that on and lead for other universities? So first you, John, then you, Condi.
- [02:40]
C
First of all, great to see everyone, Jim. Thanks for having us. And it's always a pleasure to do a panel with Condi. And thank you for asking me the first question so I don't have to follow Condi right from the start. So I think so. One thing to start with in terms of American universities is to recognize that one of the great strengths of this country is that we have an incredible array of different colleges and universities in this country. We have small liberal arts colleges, we have religious colleges, we have historically black colleges and universities. We have public institutions, we have research, private research universities like Stanford. Each of them has a somewhat different mission in terms of what it seeks to accomplish. A university like Stanford, we have a very distinctive role in this country, and we have a mission of creating ideas, of providing the research that will hopefully illuminate people's understanding of the world and also develop new ideas, new discoveries, new innovations that will go on to benefit people in this country and everywhere, now and in the future. We have an educational role of seeking to educate students who will become great citizens and hopefully great leaders, scholars, innovators, public officials, a whole range of different things that we'd like to see our students go on and do. The most important role in university leadership is to make sure that the institution that you're entrusted with stewarding serves its mission, is able to provide an environment, attract, in our case, the very best students and faculty from all different backgrounds, provide them with an environment where they have the freedom and the resources to create ideas, to learn, and to some extent, get out of their way that has let them go ahead and pursue those things. There's also an important role of university leadership to advocate for universities as an institution in this country. And that's particularly true at a time like this, when people are questioning the value of universities, the contribution they make to the country, how well they serve the national interest, which, of course, I think we do in an incredibly important way. And so that's also part of the responsibility of university leadership, is to be a spokesperson and advocate for your own institution and for the overall university of Marcel.
- [05:31]
A
I would just add, I completely agree with John that the first and most important thing that any leader does is to make sure that you are cognizant of and defending what you actually are supposed to be, and dedication to mission. And, you know, we're a very decentralized place. Universities are not hierarchical, and there are many, many, many voices within a university that think universities ought to be doing lots of different things. And that's fine, but university leadership has to make certain that the mission of the university, the creation of knowledge and its transmission, which in a sense leads to people who become leaders, I think is the most important thing that university leadership can do. And then there's one other element, and John mentioned advocacy. I've often said that there are a lot of things that I think people don't understand about universities, and there's some Things that they understand that they don't like. The piece that I think they don't understand is even if you are quote elite university, it doesn't mean that your student body is somehow elite. So Stanford has a very high percentage of first generation students who come here with a chance to capture the American dream or the dream someplace else. And yet if you were to say to most people, people, what is the characteristic of the Stanford student body? They would not say that. So some of it is making sure that people understand that something we thought people understood about us, but apparently they don't because there doesn't seem to be a constituency for it is that we are in a decision that was taken 80 years ago, the innovation engine for the United States of America on fundamental research. And we don't have a plan B. And so getting people to understand that piece of what we do is very important. And then there's a third point that I think people wonder about us and maybe there we have fallen down. Are we really a place where the contestation of ideas, where differences of opinion, where different viewpoints, where there is no ideological orthodoxy, where our students are not taught what to think, but they're taught how to think. Is that true of the modern university? And there I think we've got work to do. We're doing it here at Stanford. One of the real leaders in this, two of the real leaders, Paul Bress former Dean of the Law School Deborah Satz Dean of H and S Civic education means learning that democracy is in effect about disagreement. The founding fathers would have said it's constant contestation of ideas and you can't seek the truth and you can't seek the best outcomes if you're only listening to one side of the story. And I think there we have some work to do but I really believe we're well on the case.
- [08:30]
B
You know, by the way, Paul came over this afternoon who was my professor at Stanford Law School and privately helped fund the law office. We started in East Palo Alto when your dad used to to work and he fell off Condi. He came over and because I'm going to do his class it's called democracy and disagree. It's great. And said will you do it this winter? And I'm going to do it with him. But I want to ask you a question about what you to follow up what you just said Condi because I remember once talking to Don Kennedy when he was president and I was probably railing on him about why Stanford wasn't doing it. I was probably occupying his office Actually, but. And then I was like. He said, jim, do you realize that we also run a very large institution, financial institution here and that we actually have to keep the lights on and it's a huge company. And the reason I was gonna say it is this, in my lifetime, this is the first time that I can recall you're talking about the key. There is no plan B. Conde okay, but for the first time that I can recall, you've had a president personally in an administration threaten various universities for their federal funding and overtly threaten them. And in some cases there's clearly some degree of culture of fear. We're going to talk about this later when we talk with the students about immigration and some of the other stuff. But there's clearly. I happen to be friends with a woman who's sadly been the acting president, former trustee chair at Columbia, acting president. She's not had a really fun time over the last year, I can assure you. But what is this a paradigm shift? Is it a blip on the radar screen? And John, I ask you first, is it, you know, do you worry about what you're going to say? Because you might get some, someone including the President of the United States or some high official going, wait a minute, I don't like that. Therefore we're going to cut $500 million out of what Stanford is going to get because this is the life, one of the lifebloods university. How much is that A, something you worry about? And B, do you think this is a long term paradigm shift or it's a one off because of the challenges that this administration's posed to universities?
- [10:40]
C
I think I have multiple concerns about the way that the relationship between the federal government and universities has broken down. I mean, I am to take the broad point that Condi made about research in this country and innovation. The federal government is by far the biggest supporter of research in this country as an institution. And the decision that was made after World War II was to locate that research within universities. And the sense in which there's no plan B isn't that. No, no ideas come out of companies like Google and Meta and these tech companies. Lots of ideas come out of them. But it's a different kind of research. The research within a university. We give faculty tremendous freedom and students tremendous freedom. They can go out and just explore wherever curiosity takes them. They can work on ideas that might not be applied for 30 years, if ever. And that's incredibly valued. That's the reason this country is the scientific leader. It's the reason that students Everywhere in the world, wake up in the morning and this is where they want to come to the United States to have that freedom to get to explore it is such an asset for the country. So I'm very worried about that foundation getting eroded in a way that would go way beyond the current administration. We would set a different course and that would be a long term course. I'm worried about the near term culture war fighting that's going on as well. But I'm really worried about long term institutions and the role that universities play and how important it is to get through this period in a way that universities can go on and thrive not just for two more years, or three more years, or four more years, but for the next many decades. That's so important for universities, but it's also important for the country and important for the the world.
- [12:37]
A
I've asked myself what is kind of the antidote to some of this. And I think in one sense we do have to kind of make the case. So John mentioned things that for decades won't pay off, so to speak. So you want the curiosity or I heard Mark Horowitz say recently, the big idea that might be world changing not to be tied to the quarterly earnings of a business. So that's one piece. A very good example of that which our friend Fei Fei Li talked about is neural networks, which ultimately, once the compute power was there, you could do the kinds of things we've seen with AI. The discoveries of those began in the 60s. No company would have waited that long.
- [13:21]
B
Exactly.
- [13:22]
A
So there's something to fundamental research. I will say that we also need to be very clear that the this is not a Stanford, MIT Caltech thing. One of the strongest supporters of federally funded research has been Katie Britt of Alabama, because the University of Alabama Birmingham is a medical center, biomedical research center that I used to compete against when I was provost. So we have to maybe broaden our view of what is a peer institution because this is in a lot of states that will get people's attention politically as well. So that's the second point and the third point I would make is there may have to be some alteration of the model. It may be that what we've always done, I think the fact that we go and build these great buildings over in the engineering quad and then the federal government helps us turn on the lights, I think that's kind of a good deal. But maybe some of the ways that we account for expense, maybe some of the ways that what we charge, maybe we need to look at that and we probably do, given where industry is in something like AI, we probably need to figure out different relationships with industry. The truth is, a lot of the compute power to do what is needing to be done in AI, not, not to mention the quantum revolution may actually take place first in industry. And so new relationships there will be very important too. And I have been saying to my friends in the federal government, I can say this because it doesn't matter, because I don't have to actually do it. I would say I'll give you back 10 points on the indirect cost if you'll just let me not have to report in a way that makes me hire 15 people to report on every grant that you give me. And so maybe there are some bargains to be struck. But to your point, Tim, I don't actually think this is just this administration. I think this has been brewing underneath for a long time, the misunderstanding of what research universities do, thinking they all are Ivy League. And maybe this is an opportunity then to answer those questions, because I think it will persist.
- [15:45]
B
By the way, just a note on that. In my day job at Common Sense, we're right now negotiating with the big five companies, you know, who they are, to build an AI Safety institute for kids and families. Because somebody's got to do it, you guys, and someone's got to do it really soon. And so that's really where I'm spending most of my time right now, in my day job. And one of the things that's really interesting, Kanye, is it's the compute. But we obviously cannot do any. We have to build it on top of their platforms. And I would think that would be true even for the FEI and all the people at HAI and all the other. I mean, Stanford is really obviously the incredible leader on all this, but it is going to change the role of the companies with this, particularly the AI.
- [16:25]
C
The money involved, the investment companies are making in computing and AI boggling is so many orders of magnitude beyond what we could envision. I mean, Google this year is going to spend $85 billion on their AI infrastructure. I mean, we opened, we have 1,000 GPUs for faculty and students to use in the country, which seems like a lot. Meta has 250,000. So in that sense, we're very underpowered. And actually, if you think about the way that innovation and research is going to go, it makes you have to think about what is the role of universities relative to these companies which have a business model that enables them to spend orders of magnitude more than us. And I Think one thing it tells you is that at least in the near term, maybe COMPUTE will become less expensive, that we will not win by having the most GPUs. We will not lead the world by spending the most on infrastructure. We'll win with people brains. We'll win with. We have to take a human capital strategy. And the things that we can do at a university that are totally unlike the private sector because it doesn't really have a business model, is we can bring in talented people across many disciplines and we can give them a lot of freedom. And that's what gives rise to a great research university, is people being able to explore. And that's why the federal government's program of using merit based grants is so important. It lets the best ideas percolate up. Doesn't matter who you are, what you believe, what your political preferences are, and then let them bounce into each other at the university. And Stanford probably more than any university in my mind excels in having people who are great in things like computing and AI and then they're just on the same campus as people who know about biology or know about material science or know about climate change or know about social sciences. And those intersections between different people and students play probably the biggest role in that, is what makes Stanford an amazing university. And all our peers try to do similar things.
- [18:40]
B
I want to ask a hard question, actually. I was talking to our good friend Jim Montoya this weekend about this Conde, you know, who's finally retired from the College Board.
- [18:49]
A
I know, yes.
- [18:50]
B
Amazing. He's former dean of students, I mean dean of admissions, vice provost, when Conde was provost and a very good friend of ours. And we were talking about the Columbia situation again, because my friend has had to go through the Columbia situation, which has been pretty terrible. And he was talking about the fact that as part of the deal that Colombia struck with the Trump administration, administration that they agreed to turnover detailed. And we're going to talk a little later about diversity and diversity in the student body, et cetera, et cetera. But they agreed to turn over detailed information about applicants and admitted students broken down by race, gpa, standardized test. Of course, it really put the government, which they demanded, or at least publicly said, in the business of overseeing sort of the admissions process at a place like Columbia. And my question is, when you look at that one again, university was in a uniquely challenged position for many reasons, including massive turnover in leadership, repeated turnover in leadership. But still, what's your reaction to that? If they came to Stanford and said something like that and it's a hypothetical. But what if they came.
- [19:58]
A
Let me answer that, John.
- [19:59]
B
Okay, fair enough. He's really grateful for that, actually. Thank you.
- [20:04]
A
When I would testify before Congress and they would say hypothetically, I would say, I don't answer hypotheticals. And I think the circumstances of each of these was so different that if you are defending, which I am quite certain we would defend, freedom of expression, free freedom of speech, freedom for our faculty to research what they wish and teach what they wish. I can't imagine that we would ever stray from some very important principles. But all of these circumstances are different. And I can't judge whether Columbia should have done this or whether Brown should have done it because of their circumstances. I will say this, Jim, and is, it's maybe not very popular. You know, sometimes if you lead with your chin, somebody will hit you. And some of what went on after October 7 was leading with your chin. Now, I'm the Secretary of state who spent 24 trips to the Middle east trying to get a Palestinian state. And I think everybody understands that. I believe in the two state solution. I think everybody understands. And I worked hard to try to bring it about. I ended the Lebanon War in 2006. Right. And I was appalled at the lack of understanding on college campuses of the complexities of the Middle East. And so sometimes when you lead with your chin, people will hit it. So one thing we have to do as universities is not lead with our chin.
- [21:44]
B
My question is, I agree that everybody, each situation is different and some people have led with their chin, and we'll talk about that with the students in some context as well. But do you think it's important for universities broadly to band together now? Because not necessarily in each individual circumstances, because I've seen that in other, like I actually think the legal profession, after the first few Paul Weiss examples said a bunch of lawyers and firms got up and said, wait a minute, this is not okay. And my only question in the broader context, do you think that universities are now, even though every case is different and each university has their own set of challenges, et cetera, do you think that universities need to band together in the country to sort of stand up for the. Again, knowing each circumstance is different, I
- [22:31]
C
think there are principles that are common across, certainly across all of the research universities, and they're both can and should be wide agreement across the university on those things? I think the, I mean, we're all engaged in the pursuit of academic excellence. We all want to make education more accessible to students. We all want to have rigorous curriculums and we all want to produce students who are going to go on to be great citizens in this country. We're all committed to the research enterprise and we all believe in the premise that at least the private universities should be self governed. That is, we should have the freedoms of the university, the freedoms to choose who our students are, who our faculty are, what to teach, how to teach it, and that the country will be much better off if the government allows universities to pursue the these principles and objectives, these goals, each in their own way. We might do it differently. And that's actually okay. It's fine to have universal. It's probably better for the country to have universities differentiated, pursuing things in somewhat different ways, maybe putting different focuses on different things, than have everybody in a homogenous state where we all agree on everything. So yes, I think there's lots of room to work together at the university. If you look at, for example, at the, all the debates right now in research funding and some of the lawsuits, this is all collective efforts by the universities to support the research enterprise on other areas. You see the universities going in somewhat different directions. I actually think that's fine. I actually think we're better as a country if we have different universities than trying to have all the universities completely aligned on all issues, particularly all political issues. I don't know that that's a healthy country if we all converge on exactly one thing. You started with the idea that democracy is all about disagreement. We're in a democratic country and that's okay for institutions to chart somewhat different courses to being great at their academic missions.
- [24:47]
B
So let me ask you guys a question about diversity at Stanford, but also in general right now, because in 2023 the Supreme Court ended affirmative action as we know it and race conscious remedies. Obviously both of you have spoken incredibly eloquently on any number of occasions over any number of years, as your dad did too, by the way, about the incredible importance of diversity on college campuses, at the student level, at the faculty. And by the way, we're going to get into diversity of opinion too when we bring the students up. But this is a really challenging time because the court ended the tradition of the affirmative action regime that we lived with for 50 years, if you will, in college admissions. My question is how do institutions like Stanford ensure diversity in representation? Now, when a, the court has put some degree of limitations on what you can do. And second, where there have been certainly a lot of incredible criticism of companies doing where people have scrubbed their websites, a lot of major corporations have taken down all of their diversity initiatives, or at least their public representation of that. And where there has been a. There's certain degree of public assaults on the idea of. And we're going to get into immigration later on, the idea of diversity, which seems to be such a core value of Stanford and of the educational institutions in the country. How do you all see that playing out over the next few years and Stanford's role in that?
- [26:34]
C
A big part of what makes a university like Stanford great is that we seek to attract talented students, exceptional students from all different backgrounds, from different cultures, with different ideas, with different interests. And then we try to put them into an environment where they're able individually to have access to all the educational opportunities of any Stanford student. They can go on and thrive here and in the future. And the campus is a place where we're more than the sum of our parts, where there's interactions and people learn from each other. And that is a big part of the premise of campus diversity. And there's nothing that should prevent us from doing those things on the campus today. We need to continue to focus on that. There's another aspect of university education which is, I think, a little less about representation per se, but more about the creation of opportunity. And I think one of the things we should be proud of at Stanford is that we have been able to create a system at Stanford, a financial aid system at Stanford where once our admissions office identifies someone and says they would like to have them, we're able to make that possible for just about every family. 80% of US families, if their child is admitted to Stanford, will pay zero tuition. Last year at graduation, when the students, undergraduate students, walked out of that stadium, 90% of them had zero debt. It would be great if it was
- [28:20]
B
100, but that's amazing.
- [28:22]
C
Was really pretty good. The ones who had debt were pretty low numbers. And I think we can continue to do that. We should continue to make that a huge priority for the university to make the education accessible. And I think we can actually do a better job than we're doing today to help communicate out to the country, to people that if they do work hard and if they do get into Stanford, it's possible to come. Yeah, I'm not sure we've done a great job communicating that. People point to the sticker price and they say, oh, it's so expensive to come to Stanford. It's terrible to go to these universities. Look at how high that number is. And what they don't appreciate is, yes, if you're in the top 10% of U.S. families in terms of income. It is expensive, but for many of the students that we admit, it won't be expensive once we add in financial aid. And one of the big investments our admissions office made after the Supreme Court decision in June of 2023, which really did have a very big effect on the admissions process, was to make a major investment in regional outreach around the country and start to have admissions officers who are located, stationed all over the country so we could do a better job of communicating out the opportunity to come here. This will be the first year that we really see the effects of that, hopefully in our admissions process.
- [29:50]
B
Go ahead, Gay. That's what I was going to ask you. Same thing.
- [29:52]
A
Not to the admissions process. I think John is right. We just have to try harder. And we're really going to have to try harder because nobody wants to look like 1950. So I think with that premise, we need to try harder. I will say again with the leading with your chin point. Some of what got defined as diversity, I think began to sound more like exclusion. And that was a problem. So I'm gonna give you a very personal example of this. I'm black. I'm not even the first PhD in my family. My aunt is a PhD in Victorian literature from 1952 at the University of Wisconsin. My father was associate vice chancellor of the University of Denver. I grew up on college campuses. My parents and I visited college campuses like other people visited national parks. We once went 100 miles out of the way to see Ohio State.
- [30:56]
B
That's a mistake.
- [30:57]
A
Yeah, right. You know, I'm sorry, but in what world am I not comfortable on a university campus? And am I marginalized?
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B
Right? Yeah.
- [31:11]
A
The kid who's the first gen from Appalachia, maybe that's the marginalized Parisitor. And so you have to be a little careful that it didn't just become about race. And I say that as somebody who would say that. I probably came to Stanford because they were looking to diversify the faculty. I was here on a one year fellowship. They did not need another Soviet specialist, but there was this young black woman, Soviet specialist. And they thought, well, that would be good. They found a place for me. All right? So I actually benefited and would have, if it had been left to me, continued to allow at least Bakke to be used in admissions. But I do think to the degree that we started to think about talk about race in ways that sounded exclusionary, we set up a circumstance in which somebody was taking something away from somebody else. And so it's a very delicate issue as to how to deal with it.
- [32:13]
C
Just to build on what Condi said, I to me, one of the fundamental flaws that elite universities made over many decades, maybe the fundamental educational flaw was that we became so exclusive. The history of universities in this country, the elite universities after World War II. For the first couple of decades after World War II, elite universities competed to add more students every year. They tried to build new dorms, they tried to build new classrooms, they tried to build new residential colleges. That was how you showed you were a great university. You expanded, you had more faculty and you added more students. Starting in about the early 1970s, we started to compete in a different dimension. We started to compete to turn students away and to show how few students we could commit. If you remember the David Brooks op ed piece about Stanford has finally achieved zero admissions rate. I mean, it's an exaggeration, but not so much of one. And part of what that did was it turned admissions, undergraduate admissions into this incredible sense of scarcity and zero sum so that literally anything that gets done to promote a particular group of students, which might be a really good idea, is perceived as a loss for another group. And I think we need to get at that's one of the reasons that for me, one of the most important things we can do at Stanford in the coming years is to try to expand the number of students who get to study here so that there's more opportunity to go around. Instead of taking a fixed pie and just slicing it up in a whole lot of different ways that are contested
- [33:56]
A
in politics, always try to avoid zero sum games.
- [34:00]
C
I do think that is a huge issue for today's students, that we've put a lot of pressure on them to be perfect in every way and they internalize a lot of that pressure on themselves. And some of that is good. It's good to put pressure on yourself because that's how you achieve things. But some of it is it's okay as a student to make mistakes or to pursue a path that doesn't work out and then find another path. And I actually think that's a really important thing for the university to try to make as part of the culture that students don't have to just check every box and dot every I and cross every T, that it's okay to try some things and fail at them and it's okay to make some mistakes. And there are many paths in the world to being successful and making a difference in the world. And the more we can communicate that right from the time students come and ideally back into high school, the better off this generation will be. And I'm like, condi. I'm an optimist about that transition.
- [35:01]
A
You can be an English major and become president of Stanford. You can be a piano performance major and become Secretary of State. So I'm in complete agreement.
- [35:11]
B
Okay. Thank you. That was an awesome class. Thanks again for checking out which side of History. Please make sure you follow the show wherever you listen. And please head to my YouTube channel for more great content. I'm Jim Steyer, and this has been which side of History?