What Matters Now to Bret Stephens: Where North American universities went wrong

welcome to what matters now a weekly podcast exploring one key issue currently shaping Israel and the Jewish world I'm your host Amanda Borel Dan this week as campuses across North America open their doors for their fall semester I speak with New York Times opinion columnist Brett Stevens the Pitzer prize-winning writer recently wrote a column called what I want a university president to say about campus protests in it he channels a university president presenting his foundational principles including what Stevens calls the spirit of inquiry this is a spirit that I personally encountered over 20 years ago when I was a fledgling journalist and Stevens happened to be my editor and Chief and the person who set me on the journalistic path that I still walk after Steven's column about the status of universities today I reached out to hear his take on Concepts that have evolved in the past several decades including critical theory and diversity equity and inclusion so this week as students return to campuses I ask Brett Stevens what matters now Brett thank you so much for joining me today I've bugged you so many times after you've written a stellar column just echoing things that I think and expressing them in such better language and more concisely than I ever could but we're here to discuss a column that you wrote recently which was called what I want a university president to say about campus I did it was actually it wasn't so concise it was a column written in the form of a speech what I I sort of put myself in the shoes of a president of a unnamed but Elite University talking to returning students on their first day back about why the protests in the way they unfolded on so many campuses last spring and actually going back to October 7th or October 8th were so troubling and I wanted to go beyond making the case that they contained large dose even if unwitting of anti-Semitism although personally I think they did uh but because the real offense in my view was that they were a violation of the spirit of inquiry which is at the heart of the University Enterprise and I sometimes feel that modern universities in the states have forgotten what in fact they're doing they think they're in the business of social Mobility or political activism but universities exist in at least Le our system for a very specific purpose which is to nurture and protect what I called the spirit of inquiry which is rooted in curiosity but leads to certain habits of mind that Foster genuine inquiry so what are those habits asking insistent questions and believing that in fact questions are more important than answers uh believing in the art of conversation which is an exchange of thought it's not a contest of Wills um it's being willing to admit or at least be prepared to concede that you're wrong that the argument you've made is inadequate to the question that you're discussing so it involves not just curiosity it involves humility it involves patience it's about the art of listening and listening for the sake of obtaining information not just figuring out what your answer is so these things that I call the spirit of inquiry are what universities do and they establish at their best a series of policies meant to protect it one policy is institutional neutrality the purpose of institutional neutrality isn't just to save universities from tricky political conversations it's to say that we are not in the business of preempting the thought of our faculty or our students by taking institutional positions on boycott divestment sanctions on Israel or you know what to think about uh Russia academic exchanges and so on it's about Free Speech almost unfettered not as an end to itself because the spirit of inquiry cannot accept that there are certain questions that are just off limits because they might be perceived as rude or offensive and it goes beyond that to the kind of conversations that one can have in the classroom so if you have a professor who is more of an ideologue than he is a pedagogue if he's more about indoctrinating than trying to Foster thinking that also violates the spirit of inquiry so I put all of that to say that the way in which these protests unfolded with the encampments the noo zones the attitude that the only valid opinion is the opinion that those protesters had and there was no point in engaging with a different point of view that was a more fundamental violation of what universities are about than uh whatever slogans they happen to be chanting although the fact that they're chanting slogans as opposed to thinking is itself is itself troubling so that was the that was the purpose of this comment it was gratifying to get reactions from a lot of University presidents and professors who kind of I think felt like I was providing them with a basis on which to um think about the year ahead sorry for that long answer that's why I have you here Brett so in many cases however universities have been the starting point to political movements or ideological movements so how do you fit that into your rubric of the spirit of inquiry when just even think about you know the 1960s when universities were a hotbed of politics well I think the 1960s actually were the beginning of the decline of universities now I don't mean to say by this that if a particular student or a professor have ideas that have dramatic political ramifications or economic ramifications that that is somehow illegitimate it's not I'm talking about not the role of the individual student or Professor but of the University itself whether it is supposed to be also an actor in these political dramas or merely the stage for the actors but even there I think that universities do themselves a profound disservice when they get into The Business of Being about politics rather than about inquiry and I'll tell you why because for the same reason that uh the purpose of the heart is to pump blood and that's distinct from the purpose of uh your pancreas your liver your kidneys your brain and so on universities have a very specific purpose and when they go outside of that purpose right when they're really interested in becoming political activists uh not only are they extending themselves beyond what they really know how to do what they ought to be doing what's healthy for the democratic system as a whole but I think they profoundly injure their own credibility and that has happened really powerfully just in the last few years you know if you go back to 2015 or so kind of like the eve of wokeness on campus you will find that very high numbers of Americans think well of universities they want to send their kids there they aspire H for their kid to go to you know Yale Stanford uh whatever okay those numbers have plummeted literally plummeted in the intervening decade because a lot of Americans sensibly ask themselves why am I going to pay tens of thousands in fact hundreds of thousands to send my child to a school so they can be indoctrinated in political ideas that have nothing to do with education and have everything to do with a particular and highly politicized worldview and so you've seen a retreat by a lot of Americans I think a very Justified Retreat from the business of higher education I don't think that serves anyone particularly well it certainly doesn't serve the universities well but it doesn't serve our democratic system well because up until a few years ago our best universities were one of the things that made America genuinely great it was the ideas that were coming out of Stanford that uh created Google ideas that were coming out of dropouts from Harvard that created Microsoft and Facebook know these were incubators for a lot of talented people to meet other talented people and create great things in addition to all of the scholarship and knowledge creation that these universities were doing uh in themselves I wonder if you hit part of the nail on the head when you just said the word dropouts because I know a lot of people traditionally have sent their kids to universities in order to get a better job in order to have a livelihood and so many people are coming out of these universities with no chance of any kind of respectable position working at Best Buy or something like that and I have all respect for people who work at Best Buy but they're no longer also the I don't know the vocation centers that they were once perhaps even prior to the 60s but definitely when I went to University I came out with a degree that I couldn't do anything with and here I am in journalism Brett I think you've done okay actually amand I I don't know whether it was the University or something that went back a little further this is a really interesting question on a number of levels I mean first of all I think there is a palpable perception rooted in reality that a lot of University degrees really are worthless now there are two kinds of worthless degrees I have a worthless degree essentially in political philosophy from the University of Chicago but the University of Chicago really taught me how to think and that has served me well throughout my entire career and I think it would have served me well if I'd gone into Finance or law or any other number of professions figuring out how to ask great questions and how to extend your thoughts a little deeper how to penetrate the surface of things which is what foror in philosophy taught me how to do that was valuable there's another kind of useless degree which is just a crappy education where no matter what you're studying you're just not getting a lot out of it so so that's one problem but the other problem that you've really put your finger on Amanda is what I'm trying to remember his name he's uh he's a sociologist at the University of Connecticut I think and I'm sorry I can't remember his name but I can remember his term which is Elite overproduction I I came across this term thanks to Richie Tores the congressman from the Bronx another uh University Dropout he often will say that the reason he's pro Israel is that he dropped out of NYU one of the great great political figures in the United States today and I think has an amazing future but he introduced me to this term Elite overproduction which is that we are churing out every year in the United States hundreds of thousands if not perhaps even millions of young men and women who think they are entitled to be working in law firms or whatever and as you said they're stuck in Best Buy or again no disrespect back to Best Buy but it's not what they spent all that money and all that time aspiring to do and this is a source of I think profound social discontent you know I remember on October 8th I went to a left-wing protest in Times Square uh Pro Hamas protest and I was looking around and just looking at the faces of the people who were in that protest I thought all of these people are the product of elite overproduction they are what happens when too many universities churn out too many intellectual mediocrities who think that they should be involved in the revolution because that's what they got from their school so that is a separate sociological in fact social problem that we have in the United States which is that we have a large class of halfway educated people who are angry that they have not gotten what they think they were owed and uh as a result are inclined towards increasingly radical forms of politics of both the right and the left and so we see cases such as this movement that has been around since the the early 90s called the student into F have you heard of this movement and it seems like a collection of people in this category that you're talking about where they feel entitled to be part of some kind of change making movement but don't perhaps necessarily understand what they're trying to change well well I mean and change making doesn't happen by chanting anti-semitic slogans on campuses while demanding a steady supply of food from Uber Eats and female hygienic products which was what happened at Vanderbilt that's kind of a source of something you know vaguely comic you're barricading yourself into a university building and then you don't understand why the university isn't supplying you with the tools you need to extend that barricade look radical politics go way way back I mean I'm not just talking about the 1960s you can go to the 30s you can go into the salons of the late 18th century in in in France and other other European countries and and part of that is just human nature and there is an admirable sense even to politics I dislike of young people wanting to engage in the social issues of their time and I don't want to denigrate in absolute terms that kind of idealism because there are many inst where social change is uh absolutely necessary I think of I can think of few people more admirable in American history than the Freedom Writers who went down to the Deep South in the early 1960s to help uh the process of desegregation of of voter registration everything that went into that movement that was so uh essential to America's uh well-being and to to justice for for every American citizen so I don't want to just put it down right but you know if you're going to be an activist one of the things that ought to be expected of you is that you're going to accept consequences so by all means be an activist even in causes I don't like but don't be an activist who doesn't believe there shouldn't be consequences for what you're doing because that then becomes pure performance art uh it has nothing to do with genuine sacrifice genuine investment of your time it's just putting on a CFA and feeling fears for a bit before you know calling up your your your dad and asking for your allowance it's putting on a cafia but also putting on a mask which I initially really didn't understand uh and one of our writers from the US explained to me that it's what is called virtue signaling because here in Israel of course people are only wearing masks if they're really ill or trying to prevent some kind of disease coming to themselves and so there's this whole costuming that's happening with these prot us that needs it's very symbolic on the one hand but as you said it reduces the consequences because the minute that you're masked you can say almost anything it's almost like being online and being some kind of Twitter troll but it's it's more than that Amanda because it's not just virtue signaling virtue signaling is going on Twitter and you know stating your pronouns and adding your multiple political affiliations you know BLM DSA blah blah blah right Ukrainian flag Palestinian flag Etc that's virtue signaling it's also an instrument of Terror okay let's be clear when you put on a mask when when your face becomes invisible to others even as they are visible to you that is uh a way of scaring people very simply scaring people that's why the cuu clan put on masks or Hoods from the 1870s uh onward I mean that those pointy white whatever they were there were you know face coverings that that they had they were terrifying um and I think uh it is absolutely the case that when in the building of the New York Times where I work or around it at least around Columbia University not far from the times all these mask wearing kids chanting intimidating people on uh on subways it is supposed to terrify that is the nature of uh the Enterprise They can see you but you can't see them and that is yet another reason why it's it's so profoundly insulting to the spirit of inquiry to have these kids uh on campus uh masking themselves and uh and and scaring uh other students it's why so many Jewish students uh couldn't take it have had to leave one campus or another [Music] you said earlier that universities the status of universities or the quality of universities started to decline in the 1960s I went to University in the 1990s but I wonder if it has something to do with this diversity equality and inclusion training that is so popular to talk about right now but I wonder what the consequences of this has been yeah so that's a that's a really good question and important uh topic um so you know in uh like many uh terrible ideas that sound like mother's milk and apple pie uh diversity equity and inclusion you know comes to our schools like uh how could anyone object to this right you know who other than a bigot could be against uh diversity and inclusion at least Equity has a a more subtle and disturbing meaning but uh Dei offices establish themselves not only at every university in the United States but I think most private schools at least have di officers or programming of one kind or another and the problem that you have with it is the Dei isn't simply rooted in good old-fashioned American traditions of pluralism tolerance and fairness right it has its roots in critical theory which is a very specific kind of postm marxist worldview that sees social problems as rooted in structural issues which are Central to the American Republic if you will and americ ideals and that have to be in some sense over chur so uh masquerading as uh kind of standing for these unimpeachable values it has a very radical core a radical ideological core and whenever you encounter people who work in Dei offices at least whenever I've encountered them there's no question where they're coming from politically which isn't the liberal side of the American equation it's it's the very far and they speak in the Argo and the ideology of the very far left the second aspect of it is that their notion of diversity is a very limited notion of diversity it's not Viewpoint diversity right it's not uh we should make sure that at our University points of view whether they're geographically specific or ideologically specific are fairly represented on our campus it's black and white diversity it's people of color and everyone else and one of the effects of that is it it erases all of the diversity that exists Within These binary categories you know a lot of indian-americans don't really recognize themselves uh I'm talking about South Asian indian-americans don't really recognize themselves within the kind of bipo framework at least not ideologically some do some don't but many of them feel deeply alienated from it but they're kind of included on one side of The Ledger then if you take so-called white people well what about what used to be diversity in America Irish Americans Jewish Americans polish Americans a whole salad bowl to use the old metaphor of of different ethnicities Traditions historical experiences Community networks and so on erased under this so-called blanket of whiteness so it ends up as a binary worldview which then becomes man because all evil is attributed to one side and all goodness is attributed to the other so instead of actually having diversity it's good and bad that's what you end up with and then it has this notion at its Center equity which is supposed to mean fairness but in practice ends up meaning a demand for equality of outcomes rather than an equality of opportunity or inputs now there's some justification for this right I mean the AR arent is you know if you're going to ask someone coming in who's not had certain advantages in life to compete with people who have say on their SATs you know people from poor communities haven't been able to afford SAT prep for their kids like that's that's an inequity and I I understand that but it becomes increasingly troubling when the question of equity and the question of achieving statistically correct outcomes starts to erase questions of Merit and excellence and this brings me full circle to where Jews stand at this because in theory we should have a seat at the table of Dei right I mean we're one of the most victimized groups in all of history anti-Semitism has been skyrocketing around the world and the United States but in practice Jews don't have a place in di why because unless you happen to be Ethiopian or maybe misaki you're just considered a white person right or white something that's even worse which is white passing you you choose to essentially affiliate with the oppressor class so that's one aspect of it then the other aspect of it is that you know it used to be the case that Jewish kids from often lower class families worked very hard to do extremely well scholastically and ended up having disproportionate places at places like Harvard this this isn't just recently this is the 1920s and so in order to achieve quote Fair out comes the number of meritorious Jewish students who are getting into Yale Harvard other previously Elite universities has been steadily declining so this is another aspect not just for Jews but for any ethnic or religious minority that puts a premium on uh discipline effort and education in terms of their their value system right and then fi the final piece of this is is the inclusion piece but the inclusion piece turns out to be an extremely limited view in the eyes of many Dei officers who gets to be included in the status of being you know a victim if you're going to end up saying you know the only victims are victims we recognize because of the color of their skin you're going to miss out on a lot of history not the least piece of which is is the Holocaust so again another very long answer to a a really important question it really sheds a lot of light on something I was encountering for the first time about 10 years ago in that a lot of writers from the US were writing me and telling me well Jews aren't white actually and it sounds as though this movement that the Jews aren't white is a way to put them out of that binary situation of black versus white you know and you often hear I mean to me this is astonishing my mother was a hidden child during the second world war at Nazi occupied Northern Italy so she was hidden because she was not white enough as far as the Nazis are concerned but now the problem problem is that we're too white right I mean it's so whatever the reigning fashion is of either being super white or not at all white Jews end up being shunted to the wrong end of that equation and that's that's just insanely insanely troubling sorry your question was no my question was that I I finally it wasn't a question it was that I finally understand through your explanation of this Dei which is not equality as you pointed out it's equity why these young Jews were taking themselves out of that equation by saying no we're not white Jews are not white trying to stake a claim I guess in in getting in this uh rainbow of uh placement that they're otherwise shunted out of this is a debate that I think is taking place quite actively in Jewish circles I was just having this conversation in fact just two weeks ago with Jewish academics and at least one of their adult children I don't think Jews should want a place at the table of Dei I don't think that's a table we we want to sit at it's untrue to our experience of the United States in fact it's untrue to the United States itself right because what Dei says is we've all been sort of victimized right and so uh yeah you Jews come to think about it you're victims too right so so come join our table and complain about the structural inequities of American life that have you know kept your uncle Mort out of the bocaraton this club or the Nantucket tennis club or what one one thing or another but that's untrue to our experience as uh uh as Jews in the United States yes Jews have faced discrimination there's no question about it but we've also encountered on a vastly greater scale acceptance and opportunity and celebration and we should look at that and be thankful for what the United States has offered our community our as a community as individuals so when we sit at the table of di we are indicting the United States for all kinds of crimes and there's obviously a certain amount of Justice to that but there's also a great deal of Injustice to that and by the way the same goes for so many other minorities that came to this country did encounter discrimination did en did encounter nastiness of one form or another other but overcame and are fully members of American life so when when Jews insist on sitting at the table of di it feels false to our experience false to our values and false to this country that has done so much for us we should be out there saying No this entire framework is wrong uh by all means we need a framework again based in old-fashioned American values fairness equality of opportunity pluralism an acceptance of different kinds of uh religious and ethnic uh traditions and skin tones and so on but to just paint the United States as nothing but a brute system of Oppression is is completely false it's it's a it's a form of ingratitude and I think we should be careful about engaging that kind of politics um because it is ungrateful and because people will notice by the way it seems to me if I'm not mistaken that this fashion Dei is leaving slowly that there are certain places that are Banning this kind of uh placement I don't even know how to call it Dei what programming admissions how do you call it I think the battle has been joined it hasn't been won uh one thing that has changed is obviously the Supreme Court weighed in on the subject of affirmative action and has made it just more difficult for universities to use the kind of blunt instrument of an admissions policy to skew their incoming classes on Purely racial grounds I think people realized that the letters Dei have become a little culturally toxic uh in the way that woke used to be considered a good word and then became a bad word but that has also just meant that people have gone for different different letters a kind of you know a sort of a cosmetic uh alteration to the same the same set of ideas you do see I think among a lot of business persons Tech entrepreneurs a real pushing back at this like like this has become we've gone from kind of worthy platitudes to uh doing actual damage to the structure of American life I think that's what they're they're saying and you have seen uh companies just saying okay we're we're just getting rid of this de office or at least we're not hiring another 20 Dei officers and there's Al an aspect of grift I've seen this in my own walks of life I don't want to get into you know but but seeing Dei Consultants feel like they're raking it in and providing kind of cookie cutter ideas to institutions that feel they need to quote do something and so that too I think people have gotten a sense that this is this is not just you know uh the Improvement of communities it's the enrichment of opportunistic profit Seekers well there's one born every minute right um Brett we started talking about your peace about campuses and what you would wish a university president would say and we're right now campuses are opening up all over the United States here in Israel it would be another month and a half or so and I wonder what you foresee happening this year on campuses in terms of the push back again to the war against Hamas so I I don't foresee the kind of protests at least on many Elite campuses that you had last year because not only I do I think a lot of senior administrators feel that they really violated what their universities were about but they're facing legal and uh Financial ramifications there are title 6 investigations there are congressional subpoenas to worry about you know there are very big donors who are just pulling their money and going elsewhere and so I think a lot of University presidents are like just asking themselves how do we avoid uh another uh balagan uh on our campuses while respecting as they should protests that abide by time place in manner restrictions I mean half of this problem could have been solved if universities had just simply said we believe in the right to protest because free speech is Central to the spirit of inquiry but there's this wellestablished feature of law time place and Manner and we're going to enforce it so I think a lot of universities are figuring out the mechanics of enforcing time place and manner in some cases it's a little tricky because they don't have really their own University police forces uh to uh deal with it and they're relling on municipal authorities who might not want to get involved I think another aspect is there many University presidents I know at least two of them who've told me this directly noticed that a lot of these protests were were actually not internally generated they were coming from the outside me look at these encampments how did these kids all get the same tents the same placards I mean it costs money there's an industry here and Danny plka in this issue of commentary magazine takes a deep dive into where this is coming from and I think that's an absolutely Fair Point universities need to be able to say you know we don't just invite anyone on our campus right least of all people who want to uh want to destroy that that campus so I think all of this is going to be present but of course A lot of it depends on what is happening in your corner of the world obviously a very fraught day today uh and where we go from here what what really worries me I have to say though is not the protests themselves the protests are symptomatic of a disease and the disease is a mindset a constellation of ideologies which even when they're not anti-semitic in themselves they're anti-semitic adjacent so this has been happening on campuses for a long time a set of beliefs has taken root in many of these campuses that uh inevitably lead towards anti-Semitism and I'll just give you an example you know if you believe that there's no such thing as real success but it's all a function of privilege and structural Privileges and hidden privileges well is that anti-semitic in and of itself no but it's going to very quickly lead a lot of people to end up saying well it's the Jews you know why do the Jews have all of this how are they so disproportionately represented at the top ranks of so many uh Industries so that's that's what idea this Relentless racialization of uh social life what category you fit in again not anti-semitic on its face but as as as we were just discussing leads to anti-semitic conclusions the social penalties and often the academic penalties that apply to intellectually heterodox thinking to being a gadfly to being a denter to being a contrarian uh which cancel culture has done so much to suppress well that's again it's not anti-semitic but Jews tend to be uh uh we're a disputatious people we love to argue we love to contradict so again cancel culture is not D overtly about Jews but it ends up I think harming a lot of Jews and I'm not talking about cancel culture and the Harvey Weinstein cases of you know obvious uh malevolent criminal behavior I'm talking about cancel culture as you know the professor who speaks out against something on campus that he doesn't like and ends up losing his job or her job Brett it's been really Illuminating speaking with you about this thank you so much for joining me it's always a pleasure pleasure and uh you are very much on my mind today Amanda it's it's good to be reunited on Zoom can I say you know we met 22 years ago when we were much younger and I was a kind of a boy editor at uh the Jerusalem Post and it was my great Good Fortune to meet you and uh I'm thinking about you uh and your family very much today thank you so much Brett take care [Music] Amanda thanks for this listening to the times of Israel's what matters now I'm amandel Dan if you have any comments or questions about this or any other episode please drop us an email to podcast timesofisrael.com this episode was produced by the Pod waves until next week shalom