We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jashinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium version of our website as well. I did it again. I
referred to x as Twitter easy mistake to make, but Annez Stepman is someone
who does not make any mistakes at all. Even though she's completely mistaken about
the topic, she is here to discuss as I'm sure you're very glad that
I've given you such a generous introduction. And Nez is of course with the
Independent Women's Forum. She hosts the podcast high Noon over there, which I
highly recommend that you check out. And Nez also is a senior contributor at
The Federalist, and you are surely familiar with at this point the dulcet tones
of her voice, and as welcome back to federal Astradio Hour. Well,
that's a great introduction, and I highly recommend going to High Noon. Emily
did not mention that she is on there once a month, so that's really
the only reason to pop over to that podcast. And just yeah, it
makes people uncomfortable when I bride because it's so powerful. You know, there's
just so much to brag about. Kidding, I'm kidding, But and this
is actually here because she has a take that is rarely It's sort of going
to be your rare dose of optimism. Optimism is of course spiritually important,
uh, psychologically important, and it's not something that Annez often experiences. I
don't think it's something any of us often experience. But and Nez has been
specifically working in the area of higher education for years now and has this feeling,
has the sense since October seventh, as sort of academia's rot has been
laid air, that this moment could indeed be a turning point along away to
turning point towards a better future for American higher education. And just before we
started taping, and has made an interesting point that I think is a good
launching point into this broader discussion, which is and as you said, you're
glad that Claudine Gay, the sort of disgraced president of Harvard, one of
the three women female presidents that were skewered by a last sephonic to the point
where it became an SNL parody, a really bad smell parody. But you
know, kind of famously now she has refused to resign, even though kind
of plagiarism of stuff has trickled into the discourse. Liz McGill obviously did resign.
Why is it you think I actually agree with you on this point,
which is why it's a good place to start. Why are you glad that
Claudine gay Sophist has not resigned her post? Because I think that it would
have been it would have been too easy. And the problem in these institutions.
Here's where I'm sure we do agree, and then we can get to
sort of why I'm optimistic or perhaps you are not. The institutions, these
particular institutions, the rot in our higher ed It goes deep, it goes
to the foundations, it goes back decades. Well. M. F.
Buckley wrote Got a Man at Yale seventy years ago. The right has done
functionally nothing, and the new Left, especially since the nineteen sixties, has
used its dominance in the universities basically to spread the ideological poison that we confront
virtually in every institution of American life, and so all of that to say,
I think that the universities have been the enemies of America, to paraphrase
Donald Trump, the enemies of the people for quite some time, and I
don't think any particular resignation of these particular presidents would have altered the reality of
thus universities, and therefore I'm actually glad it didn't happen. I think the
clarity that it presents is actually really important for keeping us, particularly Republican moderates,
on board with what actually needs to be done, which is to treat
these universities as the enemies of the people that they are, to strip them
of the myriad of privileges and very lucrative gravy train items that they have been
able to accumulate over the last seventy years that have allowed them to sit in
this position of wealth, of power, of being the pipeline to not only
the elite, but in many ways increasingly to middle class life in America.
And those are all policy choices that can be undone and firing Claudine Gay ain't
going to be enough to do that so well. And that's why I wanted
to start there, because your optimism hinges on the idea, and you've actually
studied all of the sort of vulnerable points for academia and come up with some
very innovative policy ideas as to where on a policy basis, on an institutional
basis, they could be vulnerable to serious reform. And I wanted to start
there actually because your optimism hinges on publicans and obviously some Democrats as well coming
to the table and actually taking some of these steps. So tell us a
little bit about and actually some of this comes it's like original policy prescriptions from
you. Tell us a little bit about what some of these attainable policy solutions
that are on the table right now and hopefully stay on the table, what
would that really look like? What kind of votes would Republicans and some Democrats
have to take here? So there's a whole list of possibilities in terms of
the policy. But I want to back up for one second and say why
this hasn't been done anything against the university. It's no matter what right,
anything to constrain the power and the wealth and the gatekeeping function of universities in
America, nothing has been done. Why is that? I think in large
part it has been the lack of backbone and incentive structure in place in the
Republican Party. It has never meant made any sense to me that the Republican
Party would fund to the two of trillions of dollars. They're not only opponents,
but I think the right word would be enemies inside the country. There's
no reason why universities, you know, should have any access special access to
at this point trillions in taxpayer funding, Trillions that have made life much harder,
not only for us ideologically on the right or anyone who'd want to see
any semblance of what the American way of life has been to be retained,
but also has made things much more difficult for both for people who graduated from
university with with huge amounts of debt. We now have a one point seven
trillion dollar problem, debt problem for a generation and a half of Americans who
are starting out underwater. And that that all that money is money the universities
have gotten and spent upfront, right, and that money comes from taxpayer.
So that's that's the backdrop. This has always been a series of policy choices.
It's not that Harvard wouldn't be an elite it was an elite university before
we started giving it billions and billions of dollars, but it has used those
billions and billions of dollars to develop a hedge fund, basically an endowment of
fifty three billion dollars, which would put it in the top ten. I
believe hedge funds in the United States tax free in any case. So,
in terms of actually running down the list of what's possible, some of these
things required legislation, some of them don't. Some of them could be done
by any serious minded Republican administration in the White House. So the legislative piece
of this is as I've proposed over at IWF dot R. You can find
my policy focus on this idea called taxing universities. You essentially, we should
be treating these universities. Their claim on the special status that they have both
with reguard to not being taxed and to getting affirmative subsidies from the government has
been the idea that they are increasing the GDP and that they're making wiser citizens.
The wiser citizens claim is absurd and has been absurd for decades. The
GDP claim is becoming worse, and where the proposition is becoming worse and worse,
where Essentially, the cost of university has escalated to such an extent that
while it is still true that lifetime earnings for people with bachelor's degrees are higher,
those two lines are coming closer and closer together right in terms of it
not being financially worth it, because the cost is getting so disproportionate to the
debt that you have to take on. That's really what's caused this debt crisis.
Right, So, both on Option A and Option B, the proposite,
like the sort of offer that universities are giving taxpayers has declined, and
so I think the obvious answer is to stop treating them especially And the most
important thing we could do is first to cut the student loan subsidies. The
fact that any eighteen year old in the country can take out one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars loan to go to a university, no matter which university,
how it's ranked, no matter what they choose to study, no matter what
the projections of their earnings after that, that could not be done without the
federal government being the lender. Ninety three percent of student loans under gate now
or are held by the Department of Education. There are no real banks.
In this it is the taxpayer lending money to students specifically to go to university
in a way. They don't lend money to anybody for any other reason.
Right, you can't go to get a loan from the federal government to get
a new truck, for example, or to do any number of things,
but they specifically lend it in this way, and that bare fact props up
most of the higher ed sector. The second piece that I think federally could
be attacked is we can simply cut a lot of the grants. So in
addition to having subsidized student loans, there are also billions and billions of dollars
that go out in grants to universities. A lot of that is to research
either one of those things, the loans. Cutting the loans or cutting the
grants could be done instead by putting writers on that money. We can demand
just about anything from the university sector. We can just say, well,
you don't qualify for title for funds, which would be student loans and grants
if you don't fix this about yourself. This was always a matter of political
will. We have the policy leverage to demand almost anything from these universities or
a large percentage of them will go under, so they're dependent on us.
What could Republican governors, maybe even Democrat governors, but probably mostly Republican governors
be doing right now on a state level, Well, there's a really illustrative
example out of Wisconsin, I believe, where the board and again I prefer
clarity, the board of University of Wisconsin voted down eight hundred million dollars from
the state because it came with a demand to freeze, not even eliminate freeze
the DEI department. That is the sort of thing that go badgers every single
red stay should should have done a long time ago, but I think should
be looking into now. If there's public universities that are taking direct taxpayer funds,
you have every right in the world to demand that they're subject to political
scrutiny, and what they're doing should be subject to political scrutiny. And if
what they're doing is hiring DEI administrators right or you know now recently right bowing
to mobs of anti Semitic chants on campus, there's no reason why that money
should continue to go to those universities. Eight hundred million dollars is a huge
amount of money and it's enough to start a new institution. You know,
think about what could have been done with that eight hundred million dollars in terms
of building a institution that actually communicates what is great about America and about the
Western canon. Well, and here's where my passimism comes in because this sort
of in a way, it's similar to Ukraine or other like foreign policy quagmires.
You have the kind of battle plan for taking the territory, and then
the giant what if question or what next question looms over absolutely everything, and
I just I'm completely pessimistic that the what next. You know, if these
universities, obviously, if they start getting defunded at historic levels, that creates
an incentive for them to be better. But we're just not on the same
page about the benefit of You know, that speech exists. Free speech as
the framers envisioned it, you know, exists for progress towards the good.
It exists towards you know, pointing your direction at a goal of creating a
better society, not just saying the F word or whatever. It is,
not just studying lesbian basket weaving, but doing it for a sort of consensus,
common good purpose. And I don't know that we have a the personnel,
the ability to be on the same page about that, the ability even
to get Republicans on the same page about that. I don't know. I
mean, what's the talk to me a little bit? And as about the
what next? Yeah, I mean, I assume that we're not on the
same page, right. I am the last person who is like naive about
how deep this The purpose of the university as currently constituted is to turn out
people like Claudine Gay Right, who plagiarized her way to being essentially the living,
breathing figurehead of an ideology that has dispensed not only with merit but with
anything valuable about essentially the West. Right or will not see anything valuable in
this particular civilization that we have built in America and in the rest of the
West. I am under no illusions about that. I do think there's enormous
interest and growing interest in an alternative. It's the reason that Hillsdale College has
gone It's always had an excellent education, but it's gone from being not particularly
selective and very easy to get into in recent years has been able to be
incredibly selective about its student quality, simply because there are so many more people
who are desperate to send their kids to an institution that actually respects that and
it's not exclusive on the right, Like I would say that an institution like
Saint John's College. Although I don't know how far Woke has proceeded into Saint
John's, it also does that kind of Western canon survey. They only give
one degree, Liberal arts degree, and it's exactly because they were tied to
the Western canon that I sort of doubt, Like I'm sure that it's chock
full of like crazy liberals even at Saint John's, but they really couldn't destroy
they would destroy the purpose of the university by like putting in a sort of
dei degree, right, because the only the whole concept of Saint John's University
is you can only get a degree in the Liberal arts and there's a canon
of great books you have to read to get that degree. In any case,
aside from the individual examples, I do think there's a lot of desire
for a place like that. I think if Wisconsin were to seed a new
university, I think there's a ton of professors who would like to be hired
at that kind of university. I think the talent is there now. It
may not be a behemoth overnight the way that the rest of it is.
But first of all, back up a second, taking eight hundred million dollars
out of an institution that hates you is a W. Even if we burn
that money big time huge, that's it. Yeah, that is you weaken
the institution that hates you. And then if you get to building something new,
that's great and necessary. But it's still a W to take eight hundred
million dollars out of an institution that hates you. And there is in terms
of the politics. The reason I am optimistic is how well this hearing has
gone for Republicans, how viral it's gone, how much it's per penetrated into
norminess. Just having that terrible SNL sketch, I think is an evidence of
the fact that it has penetrated into the normy consciousness. I think much like
we had this moment, this tipping point in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one,
where a huge percentage of normally a political moderate American parents realized because they
were hearing it from their kitchen tables, right, Holy crap, this is
what they're teaching my child. They're teaching my child that having white skin is
makes them inherently guilty. They're teaching my child that we need to split up
by race and essentially and then order ourselves by privilege. People knew. I
think people know that universities are liberal. That's a well known fact in American
life. The extent to which, and here's where I do think this is
possibly a tipping point. The extent of the craziness on college campuses until now
has been I think for normal people has been confined to like a Fox News
segment here about the crazy campus left, a Fox News segment there, But
to have those presidents and have it go viral of r elite institutions not being
able to answer a very simple question about calls for genocide in a way,
and this is critical. People know they would not be answering in any other
context, any other group. Right. Yeah, I think it is breaking
through, and I think this might just be the beginning of a snowball of
people discover because the more you look, the more crazy you will find people
just weren't looking, and it's making the look it gets so much worse than
what we saw actually at the hearing. And that's a part of what I
wanted to ask you here is to sort of put your don Draper hat on,
and like from a messaging standpoint, as Republicans perhaps look to tackle higher
education and a substantive policy legislative and executive fashion, what is the because because
there was something very interesting in that. I think you know, you said,
you agree Claudine Gay probably best that she's not fired. I agree with
that, and I actually I think there's still an open question as to whether
what at least Deephonic was asking them to agree to. And maybe as you
have thoughts on this too as an actual attorney, it was like testified before
Congress whether that was a real So she was specifically asking about the bullying and
harassment codes of conduct at these universities, and she said calling for a Jewish
genocide. She was also referencing from the River to the Sea, which Jews
rightfully interpret as a call to Jewish genocide. Then there are people who say,
you know, from the pro Palestine side, it's not about that,
it's peaceful coexistence, and take that with a grain of salt. Obviously we
all sort of know there's a wink and a nod to all of that.
But I don't necessarily agree that that should be a speech violation. At the
same time, it's the double standard that you're talking about. It is,
and others have made this point very well too, that this is we know
that they would never be talking about trans identity in this way, or about
any other protected class in this way. And so as Republicans are looking to,
you know, design hearings like this one to ask questions, to write
letters, to make demands of universities, what are some of those pressure points
and what are some of the what's some of the framing that they should be
kind of looking to as they sort of put the screws to these you know,
absolutely worse than worthless bureaucrats. Yeah, so, I mean I can
agree, like sort of an abstract, it's an interesting discussion where the line
is between incitement and free speech, right and protected speech. Similarly, there
has been a move into action. I mean, the way it was phrase
in those and those hearings was very funny, where like the university presidents were
like, well, if they actually try to commit genocide, then of course
that's against our policies. We draw the line at genocide. But I mean
some of the videos that have come off from campus, in my view,
do violate Title six. We should be taking these universities tocord for violating Title
six. Especially for example, so it our civil rights law demands that people
of all races and national backgrounds be able to access their education. And if
if the institution turns a blind eye to things that like the something that rises
to actual harassment, where a kid would actually be like plausibly or objectively prevented
from actually you know, going to class or accessing that education, that is
a violation of our civil rights laws. So in that context, I have
seen a few things that I think come out to that, like, for
example, following Jewish students around with the kafias and like trying to like force
them into right. If there's any truth to the fact that and I'm kind
of two minds, if there's any truth the fact that it's actually physically dangerous
for Jewish students on campus, then of course that's also illegal. I don't
know to what extent that's true, in the sense that I just kind of
wonder what would happen if the students in Cooper Union opened the door and said,
and what right. It's not clear to me what would happen if there
would be violence or not. But certainly there's a lot more merit to these
claims than there have been to the calls for sort of various other safetyisms.
But even aside from from sort of the legal standard of what isn't isn't accepted,
I would really caution the right not to be played by this obvious bad
faith argument about free speech right. The idea that Claudie and Gay cares about
free speech at Harvard is absurd, and there isn't a sense in which I
don't think, for example, this strengthens calls against free speech or strengthens aside
that is against free speech. I think applying the same rules when we have
the opportunity to to the left is exactly what, if anything, can restore
a free speech to tent, which I'm sort of skeptical that it can,
because I think these clashes are about substantive values and not about procedural issues like
free speech. But to the extent that it may be possible to restore kind
of nineties to taunt on free speech, it will be by holding the left
to their own standard and hanging them by the own standards that they are hanging
everybody else, and so I feel no like sort of libertarian regrets at all
about coming after the universities aggressively for this. I think I want your memoir
to be titled libertarian regret. Colan, I feel none. Yeah, No,
it's obvious, it's obvious bad faith. We know that it wouldn't be
applied in any other instance, and I just I just think it's the time
for the right to allow ourselves to be played by this two step game where
we're held to one standard and they're held to a completely to no standards whatsoever.
Look, what's good for the use is good for the yander. I
don't. I'm not worried about the effects on free speech. Honestly. You
know, it's interesting to look at a lot of the work that people have
done fairly recently in the wake of twenty twenty A lot of this happened,
but also a little bit before that, as DEI was starting to become more
and more tangible as its own entity that was drawing on a lot of these
ideas that Germany in French universities American universities and then just became prolific. And
the reason I say that is because the nineties Dyton question is a really interesting
one. From my mind, what really broke the nineties di tent was the
kind of critical mass of moral relativism that allowed terms like white supremacy and gender
to suddenly be weaponized in a way that really seriously and I'm sure talking about
what Title six like that, the question of like safety and your ability to
access your education, I can you know we've already seen it be weaponized on
terms of gender and a race discrimination. We've seen Title nine used in a
way like that too, And to me, that's where the sort of rubber
meets the road. And I don't think you disagree with this at all.
I mean, again you said this yourself, but like you are the last
person to downplay the fundamental discord and the fundamental sort of divide between people on
one side and the other when it comes to higher ed. But that is
a big question, you know, if we no longer have consensus on those
really important points, you know, if what constitutes a man and a woman,
what constitutes violence versus words? You know, that's a that's a big
one. I was hit with that as a student that you know, if
for opposing like a mandatory pronoun training that we had committed an act of violence
against the transgender community on campus. So in that sense, I guess it's
it's hard to see the path forward. I don't know what do you think
about that? Yeah, I mean, look if we if we do it
to them, they'll do it to us. Used to make sense as im
mutually assured destruction, they have done it to us. I mean, you
just described all the ways under Title six and Title nine words have become violence
on university interpretation. And then also the federal government, right the regulations that
Biden, the Biden administration has put out formalized this. It's not just that
his titleline regulations obscured the difference between male and female. They also obscured the
difference between words and harassment, right between expressing a political opinion or opinion about
how the world is and following someone around, And like this is this essential,
just like in what is protected speech and what isn't? Right? So
yeah, I think I tend to agree that shouting from the river to the
sea is protected speech. Following Jewish students around, screaming from the river to
the sea as they try to attend their classes, or singling them out in
dorms, that does rise to the level of harassment under the way that even
a sort of more conservative interpretation of the law in my view, So say
hypothetically, though, you know, Wisconsin takes that eight hundred million dollars and
seeds in a new school something like that. And I know we've seen projects
like Universe of Austin and obviously Hillsdale is growing, which is fantastic, but
in the kind of normy academia space. When you try to start a university
and you are kind of boxed in by you know, the Biden administration's guidance
on Title nine and sex and gender and all of that stuff, and more
importantly boxed in by the new consensus, especially among zoomer students and younger than
zoomer students that you're serving about sex, about racism, about those terms.
I'm just like practically wondering how bringing a faculty together, how bringing administrators together,
how's are being able to do that? How is that possible going forward
for academia. Uh, you don't do it by putting the same people in,
right, These are truly parallel institutions. University of Texas or University of
Austin Hillsdale. These are truly h power l it's a parallel polus, and
he'll still doesn't take said I'm sorry, yeah, I was just in that
hillstill doesn't take government money. Like that's one really good way to free yourself
from time, yourself completely from those things. And by the way, everything
I'm saying about government money applies equally to you know, folks like Bill Ackman
uh and his his uh millions of dollars right, Like, imagine what good
he could do with a private institution fund to buy that money. But that
see, that's the interesting point for me, Like can we convince Bill Ackman
that sex and gender and I don't know what Acmen particularly thinks about this.
I know there are people in the sort of private sector, powerful echelons of
the private sector, like Bill Ackman who think that where we've gone on sex
and gender and race is crazy. I don't I don't know about him particularly,
But I also know a whole lot of those sort of normy dem donors
or hedge fund Republican normy donors are appalled by what Ron DeSantis did with so
called book bands. For example, there was a a I think it was
a hedge fund guy or pe guy who was saying that to the Wall Street
Journal. One of the reasons he stopped supporting DeSantis was because of the book
bands. How do you kind of come to the point of agreement, a
starting point of agreement on some of those major questions with normies so kind of
deluded and I keep saying normies and like, I sound like a gamer,
but you know what I mean, And as how do we sort of do
that anymore? No, I mean, I think there's two points I want
to pull out or separate from each other on what you said. One is
about the Normies. The other one is essentially saying and it's a type of
resentment argument that I actually have a certain amount of sympathy for, which is,
you know, people didn't care, not only like sort of big Jewish
donors and liberal Jews didn't care the fact that their universities were anti white for
generations these like big even Republican donors and Republican Party wasn't talking about, you
know, wasn't talking about dressing down the Ivy League for that that was not
considered you know, sort of the tipping point, right, And it really
is a tipping point. We can get to this with the politics within the
Republican Party. When Nicki Haley says we need to strip their tax exent status,
right, Nicki Haley is by all accounts, you know, the establishment
darling. If she is saying we need to strip this status from universities and
tax and that's really what she's saying. When she says to strip their nonprofit
status, it means expose them to the kind of taxes that hedge funds have
to pay. So, I mean, I can see why people would be
resentful of this being the tipping point. There is this sense that either of
this is about a conflict on the other side of the world and therefore not
domestic in some way, or that like essentially that this is all going to
end with a card back for the Jews as special victims on the victimhood hierarchy.
And that's actually what we're going to get out of this. We're just
going to get more DEI. It's just that it's not going to be applied
anymore to Jews. So we already saw a University of Michigan go in that
direction and say that we're doubling down. I think that is untenable for the
left. And I'll tell you, I just I just don't think that their
mob is going to accept that. And this is where October seventh really did,
I think, make a huge difference. Basically, it's not new.
By the way, this is part of the left, is anti Israel and
anti Smitic. It's not a new thing. It was on campus when I
was on campus. I mean, it's very much part of the left.
It was part of the code Pink Left, like back in the two thousands.
This is not a new thing. And it has always been. I
mean, if you go back to the sixties and the Wretched of the Earth,
there's always been this sense that it's essentially oppressed people's of the world unite.
And some of those oppressed peoples have been Arabs who really hate Jews,
and particular in particular hate Israel right sore. This has existed for quite some
time on the left. The difference is it was ignorable and that a lot
of liberal Jews were all too happy to ignore because you know, look,
actually, contrary to I guess conspiracy theories on the left and the right,
you know, Jews don't vote on Israel in America. They don't order their
politics around Israel. There's seventy percent of Jews vote for the Democratic Party because
they're liberal. They're liberal Democrats. Like that's me. Uh, that's the
that's the explanation. But what has happened on ten to seven, and then
correspondingly in the West, in the western capitals in Europe and then here in
America on the campuses has been the too obvious to ignore embrace of a Yeah,
frankly, anti Semitic ideology is now so open on the left and has
now come to the four because of the massacre on October seventh and the protests
after that. I mean, I just don't think they're going to be able
to ignore it anymore. But I also don't think that mob is going to
accept like, I don't think do you think the people I mean, it's
largely a lot of the same people were marching on in June of twenty twenty,
right, it's just like this sort of pick and play mob that left
can gin up on any number of issues. Do you think the people marching
right now will accept that they can't call from the River to the sea.
No, it's their current thing. They're not going to accept it. But
to your point, do you create a culture of shame by weaponizing some of
the left's own I mean, this is there's the kind of double edged sort
of moral relativism, which is that you have all of these zoomers who are
just sort of swimming in the moral ether like there's no direction. And so
if you tell them that, if you start to create consensus around the idea
that from the river to the sea is a call for genocide, or that
you know, they're on the wrong side of the oppressed oppressor or of the
you know, kind of dialectic, then maybe they're persuadable to that. I
don't know, that's just the thought I had as you were talking. I
think the only way that the left is actually in a bind, which is
why I think the right should, you know, come down as hard as
we possibly can. This is this is a classic wedge issue in the sense
that it splits the left in half and it unifies the right for the most
part. And I don't see that split in the left going away. It's
growing rather than fading. For generational reasons, for indoctrination reasons right, also
for immigration reasons, right, all three of those, I just I don't
see. I don't see an opening actually to satisfy like maybe there's some liberal
Jews who would take the car about as a solution to this. The other
side won't. I just I think it's I think it's it's actually I think
we're underestimating how difficult it is. You see, how like Biden has to
sort of tap dance now, and the administration has to tap dance now,
and top Democrats have to tap dance around a lot of this. That tap
dancing is going to fall off an edge eventually, and sooner rather than later.
And so just to circle this back to the republican side of politics,
the only thing that is required to quite frankly bash universities, to just punish
them for this and many other sense right, to just just punish them and
weaken them. All that is required is Republican political will. And I think
this just seeing over an over again starting with this testimony. But you know,
like there's probably going to be more testimony. They're probably going to bring
more university headsend, right, They're going to keep pushing on this question because
it makes sense for them to do so politically, And that's why I'm optimistic
for the first time it makes sense for them. I've thought, you know,
Okay, the base is going to support this, Like screwing university is
very popular among the Republican base right. If you look at any pole in
terms of trust in universities, it's off a cliff in terms of Republicans and
moderates are following the same trajectory. By the way, but the Republican Party,
as you well know, as this buying like a wet noodle, and
it is usually only comes out for preferred interests of their donor class, or
sort of really basic things where they don't really get the opprobrium of the left
and of the media right, like adjusting the marginal tax rate by three points.
So I have what I'm hopeful about is I think that they have realized
that holding hearings like this is very popular, that proposing these kinds of punitive
measures against universities very popular, and all it needs is unified Republican will.
And that's why I'm worried about us being too cynical about this, Like it's
actually not that hard. Unlike some of these other problems that are really intractable,
universities really are vulnerable on so many policy grounds that you could easily make
sound like a moderate right. You can just attach something that you know universities
won't accept, like in this Wisconsin debate, right, just attach no more
DEI to that money. Let them blow themselves up. I mean they are
true believers. There's going to be a lot of universities that don't take that
money. That's going to devastate them. I mean there's no downside. Either
they get rid of their DEI departments or they are much weaker institutions and they
have much less money and much less power. So Devil's advocate would say they
can get rid of their DEI to apartments. But you know, unless they
stop you know, assigning Judith Butler at their leisure, or Fuco or Finong
or whomever at their leisure, because they're the entire academic class. Like professors
broadly, I have this sort of deep seated anti Western directional ideology. That's
not to say there aren't some you know, kind of old school ACLU people
out in academia that would be happy to hear about University of Austin or you
know, want to go to Hillsdale or New College of Florida type stuff.
I know those people exist. But so you get rid of DEI, what
kind of what should Republicans, Like I was thinking when you were talking about
the University of Chicago letter, that became a very tangible item in the free
speech debate, and really I think changed things because it gave other university presidents.
I mean, here you have a very powerful if people don't remember it
was, it was a very powerful embrace of free speech from the University of
Chicago's president at the time, and other schools started to sign on to it,
and that kind of gave them something to hold on to and to hold
up as an example of what values Professors should be At the very minimum,
that's sort of their baseline as they go into class and teach students. So
what should republicans and thinkers in the space be pressuring Republicans to do when it
comes to curriculum to mission statements. Are there kind of tangibles in terms of
like the this is what we believe at the school going forward. Yeah,
I mean, I think getting rid of DEI is an easy one. I
mean, look, I'm in favor of not giving them the opportunity to reform
and just cutting their funding. But I do see that like there is I
think the Wisconsin example shows that there's a lot of value in just attaching something
that sounds really, really reasonable and watching them just burn their institutions to the
ground rather than accept something that's obviously reasonable. So I could see the argument
for going either direction at this point. But this has always been a matter
of policy and will on the part of the right and upon the part of
the Republican Party. They have not had the will to do this in the
past. And here's where the normy part of the conversation does come in.
I mean, in twenty twenty two, right, there are more kids offered
school choys than as far as I know, any other year in modern school
choice movement history. When the normies get mad, things change quite quickly.
The education landscape in twenty twenty three is very different on the K twelve level
than it was in twenty nineteen. I think the same thing could happen with
universities, and in some way it's easier because they are so dependent, right,
and there are so many policy levers that could be pushed both regulatorially,
so just through the White House with a pen in a phone. That's a
hell of an adverb. Yeah, regulatorially anyway, just like sure, the
White House of the Penina phone through Congress. Also on the state level,
like these universities have a ton of property they don't get taxed on. University
California is the biggest landlord in the state. That's often true that the biggest
landlord in many states is the university. So I mean, look, if
we can't do it immediately on the federal level because we don't have the presidency,
there's lots of things that the state level can do, as the Wisconsin
example shows. But fundamentally, this is a industry of trillions that is completely
dependent on American taxpayer dollars and tax payil are jess. That's what they are.
And it would be if indeed these kinds of hearings that are going viral
awaken a sleeping giant of people who are generally not you know, not like
the listeners' podcasts, not like watching politics in and out, and just kind
of shocks them with the reality of how radical universities are. And that is
paired with a push from the Republican Party to actually do something about it,
I think that could be very popular. I also think it would be again
one of the greatest cultural blows struck for the right again That's why I don't
think we should be that cynical. This is even if it's if nothing comes
of this, I think it's at least a coin flip right now in a
way that it hasn't been. And the evidence for that is exactly the fact
that you Pen fired their president. Do you think they would have done that
if they weren't worried about it? Oh? I mean absolutely. And they
heard immediately publicly from huge donors, and you're worried about their private donors,
and they're worried about their funds from the government because it is being circulated the
Hill as a possibility, and they that would collapse. They're at between the
private donors pulling out and the government no longer subsidizing student loans to go to
you Pen. That will bankrupt them, Yeah, and their salaries. I'm
hypersensitive of this because I live in DC and this is probably true in New
York as well. But I also think one of the reasons there was such
swift action taking at PEN, like huge financial incentives obviously, but when things
make it uncomfortable, as silly as the sounds to go to cocktail parties,
you see action happening really quickly too. If you're on the phone with someone
that's kind of in the cocktail party circuit and you're in your Ivy League corridor
at penn or up in Boston, and they think that you are perpetuating anti
semitism h and you know, they sort of weaponize I don't mean weaponize,
or you feel like they're weaponizing. This is from the perspective of a leftist.
You feel like you're you're on the receiving end of something. You do
a lot, but in this in this case, it's entirely sincere in good
faith. You know, people feel like you're legitimately putting Jewish students in danger,
which we have seen repeatedly, and you're kind of hearing that refracted back
to you. That is a huge social pressure as well that I also think
is important. It's one of the most interesting things that elite opinion is split
when it comes to Israel in a way that it's not on transit theology.
At least it wasn't, you know, it's sort of going in that direction.
Now. This is one of the few areas cultural areas where elite opinion
is split, and those flare ups make people incredibly uncomfortable, especially because their
own standards can be flipped against them, and we saw that with Claudine Gay's
statement after the hearing went so poorly she referenced her truth that she did not
clearly she regretted not clearly expressing her truth. I mean that social stuff is
powerful too. I think what's happening within university boards is the realization that and
you can see you could see it in that hearing. Every one of those
presidents had been prepped by a team of lawyers to answer exactly the questions that
they were answering. And what was shocking, It was honestly shocking to them
right to discover all of a sudden that those answers were not acceptable. I
think that I don't know, I find that incredibly optimistic. I love thinking
about how uncomfortable Harvard's board is right now. I love thinking about how uncomfortable
UPenn's board is right now. I want them to be afraid because either they're
going to reform themselves, as something that I find probably impossible, Like I
just doubt that they're actually going to be able to reform themselves. But if
they don't, they're only going to strengthen the movement to actually undercut them and
to actually replace them, as as this conduit to wealth power, elite status
honors everything right, and the fact is they don't deserve it on so many
different grounds. And again I can understand, like, Okay, why is
this the tipping Why I can understand that, But it would be to my
mind, it would be a great tragedy if we allowed this kind of backwards
looking settling of scores to prevent us from taking out the great white whale of
the universities. I think this could be an enormously productive moment. Maybe it
won't be, maybe it'll collapse, or maybe you know, people will just
get distracted and after this initial sort of SNL moment or whatever, they'll move
on to something else and this will go back down in the priorities of Republican
politicians correspondingly, But right now they're responding to the fact that people are horrified.
And if we can shape that response in a productive way, I think
there is enormous benefit to be to be gained for the right and also,
you know, for the future of America, because this is ground zero for
the poison that has infected what you and I see as the great things about
this country. Yeah, no, I mean completely ground zero, and you
said something interesting. That's a good probably spot to start winding down on.
I think the disconnect between your cynicism and my optimism, my cynicism, and
your obcast once is a it's a very fine line, actually, and I
feel like we've just identified it in a sense in that you talked about the
homeschooling revolution post twenty twenty and how that's sort of an example of things changing,
because these are times where parallel institutions can spring up, et cetera,
et cetera. I was looking actually also at twenty twenty and just thinking how
quickly all of this fell out of the news cycle and fell from everybody's attention
and BLM went to build mansions in the shadow of the media sort of short
attention span, and all of this grift and corruption metastasized. And what's interesting
about that is I think you may have persuaded me that you were right.
You may have persuaded me actually that we actually right now don't know the consequences
of twenty two. We have some really positive signs that things actually changed and
some signs that maybe things didn't change. And it's still kind of an open
question. But there are signs that it's it's things really have changed, and
signs that maybe they haven't. And maybe that's where there's kind of ambivalence.
I don't know, what do you think about that. I think there's this
temptation to imagine that things will inevitably just continue the way they are, and
there's been so many cataclysmic things that have happened, and yet in a day
to day way, people, I mean, there's a certain inertia to where
we're at. Even though it seems like things should constantly be collapsing under the
weight of contradiction, that they just don't. I think there are a few
differences between this and twenty twenty that are important. One is that corporate America
is not I mean, corporate America gave how many billions to BLM, I
mean a lot. Yeah, clamartsmud actually just tracked all of it. I
mean, the GDP of a small country went to that quote unquote movement,
right, that matters, That kind of patronage that matters. First, why
I wasn't even talking about homeschooling, although that has also exploded. I was
talking about actually state funded school choice there's a good point the farmest number of
slots. There are a lot of people who have the kind of market purchasing
power to put their money in the kind of education that they actually want for
their children that just did not exist in twenty nineteen, despite sort of these
spinning the wheels efforts of the school choice movement for a very long time.
And finally, the deeper objection I would have is, to me, twenty
twenty was just the capstone. It was a soft coup. It really felt
like, at least to me in the summer of twenty twenty, when statues
were coming down, the cities were burning, that this was a capstone to
a completed revolution that you know, just like when you change regimes. When
the communist regime fell in Eastern Europe, right, the statues of Lenin came
down, and when the American region felled to this long standing ideological movement to
destroy it, then our statues came down in twenty twenty, and it was
fully backed by every important institution in American life. Right, despite Donald Trump's
best attempts, right, very few of these people who broke the law were
ever brought to justice. Compare that to January sixth for example, So you
had the law behind in many cases the violation of the law, and the
mob. You had Corporate America funneling billions into this effort. Right, those
those things, and that's exactly what makes me optimistic. I think those factors
are now, if not in the opposite side, or are at least half
in our camp. As you say, it splits the elites, and so
the question then, yes, any movement has its it sort of stings and
dies out right, And the question is what form does this take? Does
it take something you know, useless, like a carve out. I've given
my reasons why I don't think that that's tenable, but for sure that's not
something I would be in favor of. Or does it take the form that
is the equivalent of school choice in this or the structural reform that actually changes
the landscape of the game going forward in a way that is incredibly favorable to
anyone who wants to preserve, you know, life in this country as it
was, you know, before twenty twenty, I guess would be that capstone
moment maybe before two thousand, right, well, the frozen and Amber on
the eve of y two k I mean again, we've talked about, like
why I don't think nineties liberalism is a good answer, And I'm simply saying,
like, to preserve any aspect of the dregs of what the civilization wasn't
once dedicated to. I still am not I won't say that I'm optimistic about
the trajectory of the country. I think there are a lot of forces are
rayed against this. But we have here, not an opportunity to win the
war, but to win a really important battle. And we shouldn't not join
that battle because of we've sort of swallowed too many black pills and we're so
cynical that we can't even sort of coalesce behind an actual policy victory that would
be important as opposed to many small you know, policy victories would actually be
a huge cultural victory. Would take out one of the in the chest analogy,
right to take out the queen, right since the culture wars Gettysburg is
what I'm hearing you say. Yeah, I don't know if we're going to
win, right, like maybe the university's walk away strogger from this, you
know, I just I don't know. But what I do since is that
this is a better opportunity than we've been as long as I've been involved in
this, and I suspect for many decades before. This is a better opportunity
to take down the universities than we've ever had, and it would be a
shame if we didn't at least try to take advantage of it. And let's
hope and probably that people in positions are powered don't squander that opportunity. And
as Stepman of the Independent Women's Forum where she hosts the Wonderful podcast, I
knew this was a great idea. It was a great conversation. I really
appreciate you coming on and you know, expressing your truth in us. Well,
it's always fun to share truths with you, Emily. Sometimes my truth
is different than your truth, but we'll table that for now. You've been
listening to another edition of The Federalist for radio hour. I'm Emily Dashinski,
culture editor here at The Federalist. Will be back soon with more. Until
then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the Pray