Optimism for (Some) U.S. Universities - with Will Inboden & Eric Cohen

You are listening to an art media podcast.

As I said to my 30 master's degree students, how many of you have ever once in your life read the Declaration of Independence?

And only two hands went up.

I then said, okay, how many of you in your life have ever read at least some portions of the 1619 project?

And almost every hand went up.

And so it's not just that we're neglecting to teach some important, you know, foundational eras and ideas in history, but instead it's often being replaced with much more politicized or tentious.

And again, I'm not saying don't read the 1619 project, but if that's all that they're reading, that's the distortion that we're trying to correct.

It's 9 p.m.

on Wednesday, May 28th here in New York City.

It's 4 a.m.

on Thursday, May 29th in Israel after Israelis just marked 600 days since Hamas invaded Israel.

600 days that 58 hostages still remain in captivity in Gaza.

There is a lot of news happening right now from Israel's expanded military operations in Gaza to movement on hostage negotiations, movement, at least according to Steve Witkoff, as well as movement on the U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations and increasing international pressure on Israel.

So, we are going to be releasing an episode later today, Thursday, with analysis from Call Me Back Regulars Nadav Eyal and Amit Segel.

So, be on the lookout for that.

Before today's conversation, one housekeeping note: next week on June 4th in the evening at 7:30 p.m., I'll be in conversation live with Brett McGurk, who is the Biden administration's point man on the Hamas-Israel war and the hostage negotiations.

Brett also worked closely with Steve Witkoff on the January hostage deal.

Brett has strong views about what worked and what didn't work in these various rounds of negotiations and where the blame lies.

Brett was also working on Saudi Israel normalization and still spends a lot of time in the Arab world, specifically the Sunni Gulf today.

So needless to say, this will be an interesting conversation.

If you want to join us for this live recording of the Call Me Back podcast, it's at the Manhattan JCC.

Please follow the instructions in the show notes to register.

Now on to today's conversation.

We spend a lot of time on this podcast and elsewhere bemoaning what is frustrating all of us about higher education.

But there are encouraging signs and promising projects in some of America's universities.

It is actually a bright spot, believe it or not.

One project that I've been especially impressed with is one that my two guests today have been very involved with, and they also have a unique perspective on the broader landscape of changes at American colleges, including what are some sterling examples of what can be and schools and programs that you should keep an eye on.

Will Mbodin is professor and director of the Alexander Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida.

He previously served as the chair and executive director of the Clements Center for National Security, and he was an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Will is also with the National Intelligence Council and is a member of the CIA Historical Advisory Panel.

He previously served on the White House National Security Council and he is the author of a terrific book about President Reagan called The Peacemaker, Ronald Reagan, The Cold War, and the World on the Brink.

Highly recommend this book.

We'll link to it in the show show notes.

Will studied at Yale and at Stanford.

He's won numerous teaching awards.

Imagine that, being a professor who doesn't just do research and publish, but actually is celebrated by the students he's in the classroom with.

And as of today, Will has been named the finalist for provost of the University of Texas at Austin.

What Will accomplished previously at the University of Texas, and then while he's been at the University of Florida, where he built the Hamilton School, all of these parts of his background have played a role in this even bigger role he'll have at UT Austin.

Now, we recorded this conversation before he was named the finalist for provost, but there's a lot he has to say about higher education across the board, I'm sure, that will be relevant to his next post.

And speaking of the University of Florida, It's one school that has been in the news these days as the president of the University of Michigan, Santa Ono, has recently resigned from the University of Michigan to become president of the University of Florida.

Santa Ono was confirmed unanimously by the Board of Trustees just yesterday, but there's still a crucial vote to take place by the Board of Governors.

Interestingly, Ono has pointed to his support for pro-Western civilization studies at places like the Hamilton School at the University of Florida and his shift on DEI and his work against the anti-Semitic protests that occurred at the University of of Michigan and that we've seen at other campuses as to why he'd be a fit to lead the University of Florida.

It's also worth looking at the close ties between the University of Michigan while he was president and Israeli universities and research institutions.

I'll be in conversation with Will and Eric Cohn.

Eric Cohn has been the CEO of TICVA since 2007.

He started and serves as the publisher of Mosaic, a publication I read religiously.

I highly recommend it.

And he is the author of the book, In the Shadow of Progress, Tech and the American Future.

He worked in the George W.

Bush administration, and he studied at Williams College.

Willem Bowden and Eric Cohn on optimism for some American universities.

This is Call Me Back.

Will, Eric, thank you for being here.

Glad to be here.

Great to be with you, Dan.

Thanks much.

Will joins us from Gainesville, from his office at the University of Florida, and Eric joins us us in New York City from the TICFA headquarters.

Will, I want to start with you.

Before we get specifically the University of Florida, I want to talk about just what you're seeing in terms of neglected subjects of study that you at the University of Florida are trying to revive, because it seems like you are trying to bring something back into higher education that at one point I think was very common and now it's not.

It's sort of like a less politicized, more serious, more traditional form of education.

So can you talk about what you've been frustrated about in terms of what's been missing and then what it is you're trying to build?

Absolutely, Dan.

And let me say thanks again for the attention you've been devoting to higher education reform and these issues on Call Me Back.

I'm a regular listener, so it's a special privilege to now be on the other side of the mic here.

Let me start with this, because I think the key to understanding so many of the modern pathologies in academia is, at least in part, the neglect of these fields.

And, you know, most of America and a lot of the rest of the world since October 7th has been horribly exposed to a lot of the rot and the decay and the pathologies on campuses, but they are downstream effects of, you know, trends over the last few decades.

And one of those has been over the last few decades, the decline and marginalization of a number of really important humanities and social science fields.

So in history, diplomatic and military and intellectual and to some extent religious history have really been marginalized, replaced primarily by what's called social history, a very obsessive focus on race and gender, and oftentimes a very ideological approach to those as well.

In English literature, there's a significant decline in reading and teaching on the classics like Shakespeare, like Milton, like Chaucer, like Austin, like Dickens, and instead for much more avant-garde critical theory approaches.

In political science, as it's gotten much more quantitative and often, again, ideological, there's been a real decline in classical approaches to political theory, right?

To thinking about the great ideas on the nature and destiny of humanity and how good societies can organize themselves.

So we could go down the line with others, but with all those, and these trends go back decades, with those fields being declining and marginalizing, being replaced by much more ideological or politicized approaches, that has contributed to some of the overall radicalization on campuses, to the...

diminishing and marginalization of what you might call dissenting viewpoints or sometimes more traditional or conservative approaches.

And also why a lot of undergraduate students have just been fleeing those fields too.

All those trends are wrapped up together.

So I want to get a little more granular here so our listeners and viewers understand exactly what you're talking about.

My understanding, and you're closer to this than I am, but my understanding, for instance, is if you are a student today, say at Harvard University, an undergraduate student, and you want to take a class on the military history of, say, the 20th century, or from a military historian's perspective, World War II.

There actually aren't military historians teaching those classes at a place like Harvard today.

You can take a class on the role of gender in societies at war during during World War II.

I mean, I'm making that up, but there were classes like that.

But when I was going to college, and I just assumed that like this was the norm today, but it's not.

If you wanted to know, study military history, you could understand the military or diplomatic, as you said, the diplomatic histories of these world-changing conflicts.

And that's just in short supply today, at least at elite universities.

Yeah, it certainly is.

And even in some second-tier universities as well.

The decline in marginalization of these fields and topics that started with the elite universities, but they set a lot of the agenda for the rest of the academy.

Again, I don't have the Harvard history course catalog in front of me, so I can't quote chapter and first of what they are and are not offering, but everyone knows, everyone involved in this knows it's overwhelmingly the case that those sorts of classes are by and large not offered at all, or if they are offered as a one-off or as a rather politicized way.

So rather than the military history of World War II, it would be gender and sexuality narratives in World War II or something.

And so, yeah, it's a huge problem for history departments and similarly for some of the other humanities I mentioned.

And I think it manifests itself in a number of ways, not the least of which is I was speaking to a Jewish parent recently who has a daughter and son who went to secular prep schools in New York City, and then a daughter who is currently at Penn at the University of Pennsylvania.

And he said she's never in high school, middle school, in college, taken a class that just actually teaches the military and diplomatic history of World War II.

And therefore, and he's not as worried about her because she's in a Jewish home and they talk a lot and read a lot, I guess, about World War II because of the obvious implications for the Jewish people.

But he's sitting there thinking, how are her classmates who weren't raised the way our kids are raised, how are they actually going to learn about what happened in World War II?

What actually happened during World War II?

Yeah.

Well, and let me give you another example, because obviously, you know, military history is a very easy one to focus on because it's such an egregious neglect right now.

But the American Revolution and the American founding, right?

I mean, you know, this is fundamental to the civic identity of all Americans.

To be an American citizen, we need to understand our country's founding principles and ideals.

A few years ago, when I was still on faculty at the University of Texas, I was teaching a master's degree seminar.

Okay, so these are master's students.

They all have completed high school and completed their undergraduate degrees.

This was an international relations class I was teaching, but we were doing a unit on the American Revolution as a geopolitical shock, as an international relations phenomenon transitioning from the era of empire.

You know, this is one of the first successful revolts against an empire to create a self-governing republic.

And in the course of my remarks, there's 30 students in the class.

I just quoted a few stray lines from the Declaration of Independence, and I got all these blank stares back.

And then I just asked for a show of hands.

I said to my 30 master's degree students, how many of you have ever once in your life read the Declaration of Independence?

And only two hands went up.

It was just stunning, right?

And this is a basic failure of historical and civic education.

And then it gets a little worse.

I then said, okay, how many of you in your life have ever read at least some portions of the 1619 project?

And almost every hand went up.

And so it's not just that we're neglecting to teach some important, you know, foundational eras and ideas in history, but instead it's often being replaced with much more politicized or tententious.

And again, I'm not saying don't read the 1619 project.

It's problematic, but it also, you know, there are some insights in there, at least worthy of debating.

But if that's all that they're reading, that's the distortion that we're trying to correct.

Okay.

Go ahead, Eric.

Dan, I was going to say, I think this crisis of the humanities is put in sharp relief if you look at that library at Columbia where many of the protests, you know, the great disruptions at the university are taking place.

Butler Library, where we just saw the videos the other day.

Right, but if you actually look at the library, engraved in stone at the top of the library, these important names, Aristotle, Plato, Homer, Cicero.

And so you have this perfect scene, right, where students are standing out there in revolt against America, revolt against the West, revolt against the Jews, under the library that has all these important, enduring works of the heights of Western civilization and wisdom that they're either not reading at all or they're reading in a tendentious, silly way as a catalog of human error rather than a source of human wisdom.

And so it's like the perfect irony that the very books they ought to be reading carefully if they want to understand how the human soul works and how politics work and how human nature works, that instead they're out there protesting rather than reading.

But the other thing that's striking about that scene is the books that aren't there, which are the books of the Bible, the books of the Hebraic tradition.

Because the truth is, that's another indispensable source of wisdom that all students should be reading.

And that, I think, is central to what I think Will, you're trying to do at Hamilton and that all of these kind of centers of Western civilizational renewal are trying to bring great books back into the curriculum so we can actually understand the problems we face today.

If you want to understand Vladimir Putin, well, you better understand the nature of tyranny.

You better understand the soul of the Russian Empire.

You better understand the clash of civilizations.

We're not getting that from ChatGPT.

Okay, so let's stay on that because, Eric, you and Tikva have made a big bet on the Hamilton Center and the University of Florida.

So I want to just...

First, like set the table here.

Maybe we'll start with describing what is the Hamilton Center?

What actually is it within the University of Florida?

And then Eric, I want to talk about Tikva's role in the Hamilton Center.

Yeah, thank you, Dan.

And let me just first clarify that we were created three years ago by the Board of Trustees and the Legislature in Florida as the Hamilton Center, but we've recently grown and we now are the Hamilton School.

So, in a sentence, we are a Western civilization teaching and research unit at the University of Florida.

So, we have hired now 53 faculty.

We are offering four undergraduate majors and soon have two new PhD programs we're rolling out, all centered around this broad theme of Western civilization on up through the American founding and even into the present era.

And of course, Western civilization cannot be understood without the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the Judeo-Christian tradition cannot be understood aside from Judaism and Jewish thought.

And so that's why we're especially excited about this partnership with Tikva.

And Eric will tell us a little bit more about the details there, but to launch the Baron program and Jewish classical thought and the Rosenthal-Levy Scholars and some of these related initiatives.

It's all integrated academically, educationally, into this broader curriculum we're developing on Western civilization, the American founding, and the ideas and texts that students will need to know to be citizens in a free society and in this great republic.

Okay, Eric, tell us about what Tikva is doing at the Hamilton School.

Look, Tikva has been working with high school and college students for many, many years.

And the crisis of the universities that became so clear, not just to Jews, but I think to the world after October 7th and the reaction to it.

It's been deep and growing and worsening for a long time.

It's a real erosion of their purpose.

And so I kept feeling this problem that on the one hand, we'd have these high school students turned on to the study of Jewish and Western civilization and they'd say, where should we go to college?

And I'd have no great answer.

You know, these are high-performing students.

There's a natural seduction to go to the Ivy League schools, but we all know what the real problems were there.

And then at the other end, we'd be working with kids enrolled in those schools and summer programs and other things.

And they'd say, look, what we've been doing with TICFA is so much more serious, interesting, intellectually rigorous, soul-shaping than what I was doing at Northwestern or Columbia.

And I'd be gratified.

That means great.

We're doing good work, but mostly I'd be.

And depressed.

And I'd be depressed, right?

Exactly.

They're giving four years of their life.

Which is, by the way, that's a very Jewish reaction, which is like, you've given me a compliment and good news and you've made me miserable.

Exactly, because they're giving four years of their life and $400,000 of tuition to these broken places.

And so I actually think the crisis precipitated by October 7th was a moment of great awakening and now great opportunity, which is to build these new citadels of educational excellence in places like Florida and parts of the country that really still value America and value the West and value the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Let's make them destination schools schools for great Jewish students.

Let's make them schools that take the place of Jewish ideas and their role in Western culture seriously.

Let's help them build partnerships with Israel where students can study abroad.

And let's build almost like the Rhodes Scholarship for Jewish undergraduates to places like Hamilton.

And I think, Will, you were excited about this idea.

We had a lot of Tick for supporters who were excited about this idea.

And in short order, we were able to work with some wonderful donors, the Barron family, Gary Rosenthal, Paul Levy, who capitalized this.

And we were able to leverage TICFA's kind of network of high school students that were looking for alternatives.

And we now will have in the fall our first incoming class of Rosenthal-Levy scholars who will be studying at the Hamilton program and doing this highly integrated mix of Jewish and Western thought, the best of American ideas, and getting the kind of education for leadership that should be the core purpose of every university.

And Dan, let me just add something here.

There's a strategic principle, which is that as we've all become aware, and the whole rest of the country has seen, you know, again, some of the awful toxicities and pathologies on campuses, it is necessary but not sufficient to end the DEI indoctrination, end the anti-Semitic protests and disruptions on campus.

We've got to absolutely have to take those measures.

We also have to build positive things.

Thank you, University of Florida, for not tolerating anti-Semitism.

And, you know, Florida, I think, was, you know, showed national leadership on that.

But let's do something positive, right?

Let's build a positive educational program and curriculum that will expose Florida students, Jewish and non-Jewish, to the riches of Jewish thought and the Jewish heritage and how it connects to Western civilization and to broader American constitutional principles.

And so that is, you know, my one sentence plea to all of us as we're thinking about what can be done about higher ed reform is, yes, we've got to end the bad stuff and some good measures are being taken there and more needs to be done, but that's not enough.

You know, if you get rid of the bad stuff, what are we left with?

Well, still, some universities that aren't teaching enough good things are not doing research in enough these good areas.

And that's what we're trying to do here: build something positive.

Yeah, just Dan, building on that, I admire and respect those donors as well as students who have fought back against Columbia, fought back against Harvard, trying to pressure them to be more responsible.

And they should do it.

One honors their courage and independence in mind.

But at the end of the day, it's a Pyrrhic victory.

If all you get is, well, they're not going to allow protesters to destroy the university or they finally realized it's unacceptable to call for the annihilation of the Jews.

Like, that's not great.

That's not like a big success.

The heart of a university is the faculty.

And tragically, with exceptions for sure, there's a deep rot in the humanities and the social sciences and those soul-shaping and culture-shaping shaping and civic shaping dimensions of these institutions.

And I am very skeptical that those places are going to change because I think they actually are what they want to be.

And that's tragic, but that's the truth.

And so I think it is much more important to build around the country places like Hamilton that are really rooted in an educational vision and that over time can attract the best students, Jewish, Christian, and all backgrounds, to say, I don't want to go to Columbia.

I don't care that the sticker looks nice in the back of my mother's car.

By the way, I'm not so sure it looks so nice anymore.

Right, exactly.

By the way, that is the big change now.

I'm telling you, as someone who hires a lot of young people, suddenly when you see that credential in a resume, I'm not saying it's a deal killer, but it's no longer the insurance policy of excellence that it once was.

That is the big opportunity right now because finally the curtains have been opened on what these places have been for a long time.

And in the Jewish imagination, it's changed, meaning it's a source for many parents, not of pride, but of shame that they've sent their kids there.

There's still a prestige addiction.

It's hard to get over.

I don't want to minimize the fact that it's very powerful to, you know, your kid's done everything right.

He or she's worked hard.

They got their 1600 and their SATs.

They're the captain of 19 clubs.

And they, and by the way, they're probably still not going to get into Princeton.

But if they do, it's hard to say no.

But I actually think the most independent-minded students, and by the way, it's not so easy to get into the University of Florida, meaning out of state, it's like 1500 SAT scores.

But I think the most independent-minded young people, Jews and non-Jews, are going to look at this and say, I have so many more better people to study with at Hamilton or places like Hamilton.

Why am I going to live as a dissident in like the underground at Columbia?

It just doesn't make any sense anymore.

And so we can be angry, we can fight back at those places, but my honest view is they're not going to change.

Or they'll change very much on like a superficial, like they tweak the DEI statement or something.

It's totally on the margins.

They'll put some wrapping paper on it that will appease some people, but it's not actually changing the core of it, which is, are they actually reading those books that are listed on the top of that library?

Are they actually studying the great heritage of the West?

Are they actually being educated to believe that America is a worthy experiment that ought to be protected and preserved?

Or the opposite?

And the tragic truth is it's usually the opposite.

Yeah, so I want to stay on that because I think what is changing, I agree with everything you're saying, Eric, the mindset is changing in the Jewish community throughout the country.

I see this, especially in New York, which in New York, the Jewish community, particularly kids coming out of Jewish day schools, we're very focused on these elite colleges.

And I think I see it changing.

And I think what's breaking through is even if you win these small fights, your kid is still spending four years at a place that's still like the best you can say about it is it's slightly less awful than it was.

And by the way, if it were one year or a semester or they're taking a couple classes there, that'd be one thing.

But you're sending a kid for four years at a critical formative stage in their life.

And the best you can say about it is it's a little less awful and a little less hostile and a little less damaging

than it was.

I mean, in that sense, I think we're at a real inflection point.

I want to pick back up on something Will said.

Sarah Hurwitz, who's an author, she was a speechwriter in the Obama administration, and she's written one book about Judaism, then she's got another book coming out about Judaism.

And I recently heard her say something in a talk she was giving that struck me.

She basically said, We, generally speaking, for many Jews, obviously not kids who go through Jewish day school, whatnot, but for many Jews, their Jewish education stops at their bar above mitzvah.

So they kind of study, study, study, and then bar and bar mitzvah, the parents act like it's done.

All right, you're done.

You know, you reach this point.

And her point is, this is the exact point at which kids are really getting turned on, is when you cut off Jewish education, right?

It's like, don't you really want to focus on studying some of the things you're talking about when they're 14, 15, 16, 17, going to college?

But we act like Jewish studies, not you and I, Eric, but I think many people act like it's, you know, they say it's over.

And then these kids go to college and they say, they come back and they say, wow, I took a fascinating class on Eastern philosophy and it's really changed my thinking.

And they're taking, you know, they're studying about Hinduism and Buddhism and there's nothing about Judaism.

And along the lines that Will has been talking about here, that actually the Jewish history, Jewish ideas, Jewish texts could really light up these kids the same way their classes on Buddhism and Hinduism did.

And these are Jewish kids who don't even know the role that their own inheritance, if you will, has in Western civilization.

Yeah, Dan, can I jump in on that?

And here with, again, a strong affirmation, and here I'm going to speak as a Christian, right?

I'm not Jewish, but I have great reverence for the Jewish faith and the Jewish tradition.

And as a Christian, I, you know, certainly have read the Hebrew scriptures.

Just as, let me give two examples of what we're talking about when we talk about the importance of Jewish ideas and texts for broader Western civilization.

The first one is an insight I got from Max Campelman about 25 years ago, right?

He was obviously a great diplomat, served in senior roles in the Reagan administration, one of the original Reagan Democrats.

And he and I were talking about modern human rights and kind of, where do we get this idea that all people are equal and deserve human rights?

And he said, look, let's look in the book of Genesis and particularly Judaism's original claims to monotheism, right?

We're very controversial in the ancient Near East when everyone else is polytheistic of some sort.

If you really believe that there is one God who's the creator of all human beings in the universe, then all of a sudden that that gives you a very different understanding of human equality, right?

Because they're all created by one God.

Whereas if it's, you know, polytheism and everyone has their own God, maybe we're not all even of the same nature.

Of course, related, as we know from Genesis, it's not just that God created everyone, but did created all of us in his image, right?

And so those two things, monotheism and image marriage, it gives you a much better founding for why would we want to advocate for human rights around the world or against oppression, totalitarianism.

The second one, what I've said before, is I think the most profound sentence ever written in political philosophy is the last verse in the book of Judges, right?

In those days, there was no king in Israel.

Every man did what was right in his own eyes, right?

We could spend a whole semester on that, right?

I mean, that's where we get the need for political authority, but also questions of individual conscience and how is order maintained or not, right?

So we could do hours and hours on this, but those are just a couple of ones.

I want to make sure that all of our Hamilton students, Jewish and non-Jewish, understanding these ideas of political order in the West, of human rights, of human equality, of the nature of the state, so many of them can be traced back to the Hebrew Bible.

Yeah, all one could say is amen to that.

I mean, the most important book.

at the heart, I would argue, of Western civilization and of American culture and civilization is the Hebrew Bible.

I mean, it's not by accident many of the very universities that we're worried about have Hebrew letters and Hebrew words and Hebrew phrases in their mottos and on their seals if they've kept them.

It's because it was the biblical vision of man that gave shape to the West and the covenantal vision of, you know, the idea of being a new city on the hill, the kind of the idea of the Israelite exodus that inspired the original founders of the country.

And what we've done, not only in the universities, but in our schools, is we've sort of written the Bible out of our own story, and it makes no sense.

And that's why we have this crisis.

And so then when you then fast forward to the protests and to the sort of assault on the Jews, well, what is it that has brought the radical left and the radical Islamists together?

It's this assault on the one hand on the biblical value system that the Jews at our best should represent.

And on the other hand, it's an assault on Israel, which the kind of Islamist project at its worst wants to destroy.

And so these two groups of people that should have no friendship can rally together around their shared hatred of the Jews, which at a deeper level is a shared hatred of America.

And if we're going to stand up against that tide of radicalism, you need a kind of Hebraic renewal of the culture.

And I think Jews have something to contribute to that, that it's a much broader thing than the Jews.

I want to ask you, Will, about how you think about hiring in your role, hiring a faculty.

As Eric said, the core of a university experience is the faculty.

If you don't get that right, I'd say probably nothing else matters.

I mean, students could have a fun time, I guess.

But at the end of the day, if you get the faculty wrong, you're kind of screwed.

And viewpoint diversity is a challenge at many institutions.

And sort of litmus tests on hiring are a problem in terms of viewpoint and kind of philosophical orientation.

So

how do you do that in your capacity?

Because you're doing a lot of hiring.

Yeah, no, thanks very much, Dan.

And you're absolutely right on the stakes, right?

I mean, if we can build the right faculty, this project has a strong prospect for success.

And if we don't, it will fail.

That's why I embrace those stakes and I feel very excited about our progress thus far.

So when we are are recruiting and vetting faculty candidates here, we're looking for three things.

The first is research and scholarly excellence, right?

We want people who, whether they're junior or senior, either have shown already or have the potential to be some of the leading scholars in their particular fields in these important areas I've described, right?

We're already looking for people in these particular areas, but it's not just enough that you maybe are a scholar of military history or political theory.

You have to be excellent.

Second is teaching devotion.

We don't want people who are only going to hide in the library or hide in the offices writing important, interesting articles and books.

We want ones who will be investing in our students, who will be engaged in the classroom, who will be mentoring the students outside of the classroom who see that as very much a core part of their calling.

And the third is mission alignment, right?

You've got to believe in our academic mission.

I always have to clarify: this is not a political admission.

I can give you some numbers.

We've received over 2,000 applications in the last two years for our faculty positions.

We've done, I think, 300 or so Zoom interviews.

That's a staggering number.

So, 2,000 applications from, you may not want to be precise, but like, is that for roughly how many positions?

For about 50 positions.

50 positions.

Okay.

And the, again, without being precise, if you had to like summarize what the kind of profile or kind of general background is, professional profile of the people who are applying for these jobs, because I bet there are a lot of refugees, if you will, from elite institutions who are like, yeah, for all the reasons Eric is saying, like, I can't take being at such an unserious place, even if it has a serious name and a serious history, serious brand name and a serious history.

I can't being at such unserious place.

So I'm coming to the University of Florida.

Like I'm trying to get a sense for the kind of people who are applying for these jobs.

Yeah, no, that's a great description there, Dan.

And again, obviously, it's impossible to generalize about 2,000 people, right?

But I'll say this, that when we planted the flag and announced to the world that we are going to build this new faculty for what's now the Hamilton School at the University of Florida, sure, I did a lot of outreach to my academic networks and recruited a lot of people, but the vast majority of the ones were ones I hadn't known before who just came out of the woodwork, right?

And I think a common theme of not all, but almost all of our applicants is they are dissidents, right?

They are academic dissidents or refugees who for different reasons had become disaffected with a lot of the status quo and the rather intellectually stultifying orthodoxies that one has to embrace in most other universities and schools and departments.

And they wanted just to be at a place where they could be free to be more free and original thinkers, right?

A like-minded community that takes ideas and the Western tradition seriously.

But again, this is, like I said, it's not a political project.

And that's why when I was going through the numbers, you know, so we then did about 300 or so Zoom interviews.

We probably had about 120 to 150 people come out for two-day campus interviews.

And then of those, we've hired these 50.

And, you know, never once did I ask any of these single candidates, who do you vote for?

Or what's your party registration, right?

Rather, we talk about, do you share this academic mission?

No matter what your personal politics may be, keep those out of the classroom, right?

You know, there's been way too much politicization and I think progressive indoctrination in too many universities, but the answer is not counter-politicization or reverse indoctrination, right?

It's just returning to the pre-political tradition upstream from politics of a classical liberal education.

And so insofar as some of our faculty may personally reveal what their political preferences are, you'll probably find a higher number among ours who are centered right than other places.

But the way I describe that is unlike most other university departments who do disqualify conservatives or do have a prejudice against conservatives, we don't regard being conservative as disqualifying to join our faculty, but nor is it the qualifying thing either, right?

Rather, it's those criteria of mission alignment, of teaching devotion and research excellence.

And your listeners can look at our website and see we've hired some really excellent people and we're seeing that with overwhelming student demand for the classes.

And so I think that we're showing a proof of concept here.

Okay.

If you are a parent or a high school student who's looking ahead years into the future and thinking Hamilton at the University of Florida wasn't a place that was on my radar.

Wow.

Listening to this conversation, maybe it should be.

Can you just paint a picture of what that experience, according to your vision, would look like for a student applying or arriving at University of Florida in the next few years?

Call it the next kind of three to five, 10 years?

Yeah, sure thing, Dana.

There's some really exciting stuff ahead.

So we're in the process of renovating a massive historic building in the center of campus, which in two years will be our home.

We are, as of this fall, have four different majors that we're offering.

In terms of that building, I mean, I actually have seen it.

It's a major piece.

It's a major piece of real estate on the campus.

Oh, yeah.

And it'll be a beautiful, self-contained

50,000 square feet.

The state and the university are putting $55 million into renovating it.

It's in the heart of campus.

It's the old infirmary building.

It's wonderful, you know, southern brick gothic.

Like I said, we now have 53 faculty members.

This fall, we are offering 57 classes.

We've got about 1,500 students enrolling in them.

We are offering four different majors.

Politics, philosophy, economics, and law is one.

Great books and ideas is the second.

War, Strategy, and Statecraft is the third.

And then American government, history, literature, and law is the fourth.

Of course, we also have the special Baron program in Jewish Classical Civilization and some dedicated courses in that.

And all these majors are designed to give the students a really meaningful education in the best of the Western tradition, but also equip them for jobs, right?

Not all of them are going to go on.

to get PhDs.

Not all of them are going to go on to be poets or writers.

The War Strategy and Statecraft one is a great preparation if you want to go into a national security career.

The PPEL degree is a great one if you want to go into venture capital or investment banking or private equity, right, or management consulting.

So we're very mindful of the professional dimensions there, too.

We want to eventually have about 2,000 students enrolled in our Hamilton School majors.

We're building a really meaningful community there at a great university, which also has terrific weather and world-class sports.

So,

you know, where I, where I in undergrad today, this is exactly where I'd want to be coming.

Football and most recently, the final four.

Yeah, no, the national championship.

Yeah.

National champions, yeah.

Eric?

So, look, we've been excited to piggyback on the foundation that Will is building at Hamilton and say, okay, let's make this a destination school for the top students around the country.

So, we're doing that in a couple ways.

One is we created the Rosenthal-Levy Scholars Program, which is full ride, four years, the most prestigious, I think, undergraduate scholarship in the country for Jewish students who care about Western civilization and who want to be a part of this community.

And it's modeled after things like the Moorhead Cane and other scholarships like that, where it's not only the opportunity to do these Hamilton majors, take these courses, immerse themselves in these ideas, but to actually have a peer group that is second to none anywhere in the world.

Second is, and we'll mention it, this Robert M.

Barron initiative within Hamilton is a way to create dozens of courses that are not just putting Jewish studies in a ghetto, but that are putting Jewish Jewish ideas at the center of the curriculum.

And that's going to be open to students across the University of Florida to try to draw in as many students as possible who care about these ideas.

And then the last thing I'll mention is our larger ambition, which I've called the Exodus Project, is to actually build a network of these universities like Florida.

We want to try to do this at Texas, UNC, Ohio State, Arizona State, that have programs like this and where you can really create a kind of Jewish disruption in the higher ed market.

And all this takes, honestly, is capital.

The idea is clear.

The strategy is clear.

We've shown in the first year with basically no advertising, hundreds of students applied for the first year of these scholarships.

We're going to have, I think, many, many hundreds as we head into the fall.

The market proof is now in Gainesville.

We can scale it nationally if people invest in this enterprise, and it can really change how we look at higher ed in America.

Okay.

So you mentioned some of these other places because there's a few of these kind of beachheads at a few of these schools.

So there's the, you mentioned University of Texas at Austin.

There's Justin Dyer, who I've spoken with, the School for Civic Leadership at UT Austin, which I think is starting their first class, I think, this fall.

Yeah.

And they just got a big investment from the state.

I think I just saw some announcement that the state's investing like $100 million, the state government or the regents, or I don't know how it works in Texas.

Yeah.

UNC has a version of what you guys are describing.

Chet Atkins is leading leading that.

They're hiring some great people there.

Yeah.

So do you guys, is this a movement?

Because it feels like it is.

Yeah, I think it is.

We could also mention the new Chase Center at Ohio State, and then there's a new initiative at University of Tennessee and some others.

Yeah, so the commonality, and each of these program center schools has its own particularities, but the common theme is the ability to hire faculty and offer new majors and degrees around this common theme of Western civilization and American civic renewal.

And we hope that some of the elite private universities will sit up and take notice and maybe adopt some of these, you know, their own versions of these as well.

Dan, I think it's absolutely a movement.

And I think what happened is governors and state legislatures in more conservative states woke up and said, you know, we can do more than complain and lament the crisis of higher education.

We actually have power.

We can control boards of trustees.

We can allocate money.

And we can create wonderful new citadels.

And a key strategic innovation here is is to create independent schools of learning within the university that rather than trying to fight a guerrilla fight within the history department, which probably has 60 people, most of whom are not sympathetic to this approach, and try to get one or two teachers hired, they say, no, no.

We're just going to build an alternative college of arts and sciences or a center for civic learning.

And they're going to have their own faculty and their own majors.

And then we'll actually create within the university market competition.

and let's see where the students want to go and this red state renewal of higher education has the chance to transform the landscape and that I think is what's happening and I think the only thing it needs is enough talent over the next few decades to lead it and to fuel it yeah talent and capital because I really do believe I'm telling you as someone who's in touch with a lot of parents and students because the conversation is already moving in your direction.

So now the question is whether or not the capital and the talent will be there to kind of like meet this market where it's heading.

By the way, Eric, you and I have been talking about this stuff for years.

I didn't even feel this way two years ago.

Yeah, it's changed.

Meaning, we interviewed 150 or so students, personal interviews for the Rosenthal-Levy Scholars at Florida.

And these, many of them were top students, perfect or near-perfect SATs.

They could have gone or tried to go anywhere.

And these are 17-year-old kids.

Many of them said, I didn't even consider Columbia.

Like, I don't even want to go to those places.

Like, their mindset has shifted.

All right.

Will and Eric, thank you for this conversation.

And we will post more information about Hamilton, about TICFA, about the University of Florida in the show notes.

But hope to have you guys, both of you back, and give us updates as you're moving along and building what is, like I said, something quite hopeful.

Dan, thanks.

Thanks so much.

Thanks, Dan.

Really enjoyed it.

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