Beyond Peak Woke?: VDH Interviews Ilya Shapiro on Our University Censors

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Speaker 3 Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson with the Victor Davis Hanson podcast. And today we're doing one of our solo interviews.

Speaker 3 Jack Fowler and Sammy Wink aren't with us, but I'm interviewing an old friend of mine, Ilya Shapiro, and he has a new book just about ready to be published called Lawless.

Speaker 3 the miseducation of America's elite. And I'd like to talk to him about it for the next 40 minutes.

Speaker 3 So Ilya, I'm going to ask you just to summarize in a couple of minutes what it's about, but it's not just about the corruption of legal education because by the time students get to law school, they've already been quote-unquote indoctrination.

Speaker 3 It has in the book

Speaker 3 a broader critique of general education in general, especially at our elite colleges, and then you focus on the law schools. Is that a fair interpretation?

Speaker 2 It is, and good to be with you, and thanks for holding up the book so I wouldn't have to.

Speaker 2 This came out of my lived experience, as they say, with Georgetown Law School when I was hired

Speaker 2 three years ago. Now we're coming up on the third anniversary of my

Speaker 2 I was supposed to take over as executive director of their Center for the Constitution, which is an important institution because, as we've learned, the rest of the law school is the center against the Constitution.

Speaker 2 But anyhow, a few days before I was due to join that job and leave the Cato Institute, where I had spent nearly 15 years, I tweeted in critique of President Biden's holding to his campaign promise to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court, restricting his candidate pool by race and sex.

Speaker 2 I thought that was inappropriate,

Speaker 2 as 76% of Americans agreed in a poll conducted by that rabid right-wing outlet, ABC News. But anyway, I tweeted in a way that perhaps wasn't the best phrasing.

Speaker 2 Who among us hasn't issued a hot take, not best phrased on Twitter, X.

Speaker 2 But that subjected me to an inquisition by Georgetown's Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Affirmative Action, their DEI office. That lasted four months.
A really bizarre farce in the end.

Speaker 2 And anyway, so that, you know, I was ultimately cleared on a technicality, but the report I got made it evident that I wouldn't be able to carry out my job.

Speaker 2 So I made a loud resignation, as lawyers say, and then joined the Manhattan Institute and have been using that platform that I've been given to shine a light on this rot in academia and specifically on legal education, not just because I happen to be a lawyer and was hired by a law school, but because

Speaker 2 You know, it's too bad when English or sociology departments go off the rails.

Speaker 2 But with law schools training the next generation of the gatekeepers of our political and legal institutions, and if they're being trained that there's no objective truth and your rights depend on where you are in a privilege hierarchy or intersectional matrix or all of this postmodern mumbo jumbo, that's really

Speaker 2 dangerous for the future of our society. And so I go into

Speaker 2 how we got to where we are, what the problems are, and how we can begin to address them.

Speaker 3 Let me just ask you a series of questions.

Speaker 3 This tweet that you posted

Speaker 3 a commentary on Joe Biden's

Speaker 3 Justice Brown, wasn't it?

Speaker 2 It was before Katanji Brown Jackson was nominated. It was right after Justice Breyer announced his retirement.

Speaker 3 So it wasn't really directed at a specific nominee. It was just this limitation of the field and the manner that he had done with Kamala Harris as well for the vice president, as I understand it.

Speaker 3 But what I want to get at is this tweet was how many days or months prior to your appointment?

Speaker 2 It was four days before I was due to serve.

Speaker 3 So you weren't even an employee of Georgetown. That's right.
And they were trying to suggest that they had... what jurisdiction over your behavior before you were employed

Speaker 3 that came up as well

Speaker 2 the ultimate resolution was it took some high-paid attorneys at at a big white shoe law firm in Washington four months to look at the calendar and determine that I was not yet an employee, as you deduced, and therefore the harassment and anti-discrimination policies under which they were investigating me didn't even apply.

Speaker 2 So, you know,

Speaker 2 it was, like I said, it was a technicality.

Speaker 2 It wasn't that, yes, the free speech and expression policy protected me, or no, I should be fired for heresy, but no, it's just, oh, the students are off campus now. There's not protests.

Speaker 2 We can reinstate you.

Speaker 3 One One of your,

Speaker 3 you have these iconic chapters, and that's one of them. But another one I followed very closely because I was on campus, and that was the judge, the federal judge Duncan at Stanford,

Speaker 3 where his speech was interrupted, disrupted, hijacked, whatever term we use by a lot of activist lost students.

Speaker 3 And then it was...

Speaker 2 I guess the word would be hijacked by

Speaker 3 the DEI law coordinator. And she took over.
And then, and you devote a whole chapter to that, and

Speaker 3 you quite rightly quoted that one outburst where students said, We hope your daughter is raped.

Speaker 3 I went back and looked at that, and I realized that in the two or three years, Stanford rate of passing the bar on the first time was about 83%.

Speaker 3 And that was lower than, say, San Joaquin Law School at Fresno, where I...

Speaker 3 So what I'm getting at is it's a zero-sum game, and you imply that throughout your book. So if you're spending all of this time on social activism and DEI, and

Speaker 3 as you point out, the law courses themselves have lost the preponderance of contractual law.

Speaker 3 contractual law, liability law, all of these foundations of American jurisprudence. So it's not just a sin of commission, but one of omission, isn't it?

Speaker 3 These lawyers are not very well trained.

Speaker 2 Sure, absolutely. And so it's not just kind of the sexy headline-making things that we see

Speaker 2 of critical legal studies and DEI.

Speaker 2 It's that they're failing at their basic tasks of educating lawyers to be lawyers, whether in those bread-and-butter subjects of torts and property and contract, or whether

Speaker 2 when there's a federal bench that is always going to be roughly half appointed by Republican presidents, you don't even teach originalism. You don't even teach theories that

Speaker 2 you would need to succeed to be a zealous advocate for your client, whatever your own personal views might be.

Speaker 2 Now, especially the elite law schools have long been criticized for being too theoretical. Now, the joke at Yale law, which is typically ranked number one in the U.S.

Speaker 2 News rankings, sometimes Stanford ties it. But

Speaker 2 the joke is

Speaker 2 you learn poetry, not law. And so Yale's bar passage rate has historically been slightly lower than, say,

Speaker 2 Columbia or other Northeastern law schools that send their students to New York and D.C. and what have you.

Speaker 2 But of late,

Speaker 2 they still teach torts and property and contracts in the first-year required classes.

Speaker 2 but otherwise it's kind of this therapeutic stuff and it's policy oriented and it's not just theory oriented in terms of legal theory but it's

Speaker 2 it's these the the theory of relativity as it were that there's no objective truth and all of these isms and and what have you and as you say they they crowd out the ability or the teaching of legal analysis how to think rigorously about the law not not in terms of to be an intellectual academic, but to actually understand what the law is, whether you think it needs to be amended, whether you want to argue one position or another on a given

Speaker 2 clause of the Constitution. But

Speaker 2 the DEI is crowding out the actual teaching of law. And by the way, it's not just the DEI deans and offices that are at fault.
The admissions offices have put a thumb on the scales

Speaker 2 of activists rather than those that say, well, I just want to be a very good prosecutor or I want to be a leading antitrust litigator or what have you.

Speaker 3 We're going to take a quick break. I'm speaking with Ilias Shapiro in his new book, Just About to Appear.

Speaker 3 It is, when you hear this, it'll have just appeared, is Lawless, a critique of America's law schools. And we're going to be right back.

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Speaker 3 We're back with Ilya Shapiro. I should say that it's been a quarter century when Ilya called me up and he was a at a

Speaker 3 convention at the Intercollegiate Students

Speaker 3 Intercollegiate Students Institute, ISIS. Yes, yes.
And he called me and you were, as I remember, a quarter century ago in the year 2000, I remember it was Olympiad.

Speaker 3 You said you were just graduated from Princeton.

Speaker 3 You had met me and you were on your way to Chicago Law School and you had an interim of three or four weeks and you wanted to get some first-hand experience about farming life.

Speaker 2 It was actually so that that year between between college and law school, I was in London at the London School of Economics,

Speaker 2 mostly studying beer theater and rugby, but they gave me a degree in international relations for traveling around Europe, I suppose. But yeah, I had a few months before the start of law school.

Speaker 2 And it was kind of an awkward period. I couldn't really get a normal internship or what have you.
And I thought, yeah, Victor has that farm. He's also writing a book that's interesting.

Speaker 2 Maybe I can help you out for a bit. And I think I ended up being there for about a month,

Speaker 2 half as a research assistant and half as a manual laborer. It was definitely

Speaker 3 a formative partner.

Speaker 3 Yes, my son was

Speaker 3 17 at the time. And I think we were building an arbor and some

Speaker 3 construction. So I've known Ilya, but this leads into a question.
So you went to Chicago.

Speaker 3 It was starting, as all schools were, to maybe modulate its curriculum and its admissions, although it had a reputation of being more resistant to those trends than others.

Speaker 3 But in that quarter century, whether gradually or suddenly, to paraphrase I mean we,

Speaker 3 when you

Speaker 3 as an experienced lawyer looked at each cohort that was graduating, did you see a a decline in,

Speaker 3 I don't know, intellectual rigor or empiricism or

Speaker 3 people were less trained in the law.

Speaker 3 Could you and other lawyers start to see the practical effects, not just that they were activists, but that people lacked the skills or they lacked the objectivity each year that this continued to go on, especially the last, it seems, the last eight years?

Speaker 2 Well, I'm not a hiring partner at a law firm or anything like that in a prosecutor's office, what have you. Anecdotally, you do hear that the graduating students need to have their hands held more.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 when some traumatic event like an election that doesn't go their way, they need some time off to process and rehabilitate and what have you.

Speaker 2 I hired certainly young lawyers at Cato, now with the Manhattan Institute, to help me, but they're of a different species,

Speaker 2 I suppose.

Speaker 2 And Chicago, for that matter, is the exception that proves the rule, whether in terms of protecting free expression or never having diversity statements as a requirement for hiring and these sorts of things, they've always kind of gone against the grain.

Speaker 2 But in too many law schools,

Speaker 2 whether the things that make national news, like

Speaker 2 the protests and shouting down of Judge Duncan at Stanford, fomented by the associate dean of DEI,

Speaker 2 or below-the-radar things

Speaker 2 that don't make news, like the selection of courses and how students are admitted and

Speaker 2 how rigorous the legal writing sections are and things like that.

Speaker 2 There does seem to be a qualitative change.

Speaker 2 That's not necessarily, I don't think bar passage rates are necessarily the number one thing you should look at because there's problems with the bars themselves and ABA accreditors that are pushing the people.

Speaker 3 They've adjusted to this, haven't they? I mean, sure, absolutely. They become broke themselves, right?

Speaker 2 But it's,

Speaker 2 again, it's surprising.

Speaker 2 There are a lot of companies or firms that have taken the position that

Speaker 2 we're simply not going to hire from Ivy League schools because

Speaker 2 there's a sense of entitlement and privilege, quote unquote, there that we're better off going to someplace like University of Alabama, which is very good.

Speaker 2 It's 25th or something at the latest rankings, whatever that's worth.

Speaker 2 But the kids there actually are hard driving and want to be lawyers rather than harboring illusions that someone's going to make them

Speaker 2 a deputy cabinet secretary straight out of law school.

Speaker 3 Do you feel that way yourself? So if you're at the Manhattan Institute where you are now and

Speaker 3 you have a project and you need a legal team,

Speaker 3 would you hire people, say, from Ohio State? I'm just picking names out. Or

Speaker 3 would you go with Stanford, Yale, Harvard?

Speaker 2 It depends. One of the young lawyers that I hired very quickly after joining MI is from Stanford.
He was actually the president of the Federalist Society who had invited Judge Duncan Duncan there.

Speaker 2 So he had actually gotten some national coverage for his response there.

Speaker 2 So it just depends.

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 have

Speaker 2 certain advantages in that I can only hire a certain number of people and I want them to be ideologically sound in a different way and rigorous and what have you. So it's kind of self-selective.

Speaker 2 And there are still enough students at these big schools that

Speaker 2 can be good enough. But I'm happy to entertain your Ohio State, your Alabama, your Iowa, your, you know, of course, some of these schools have the DEI networks or the deans can be worse

Speaker 2 at some of the so-called elite schools, but it just depends.

Speaker 2 It's different when you're only hiring one at a time versus trying to fill the entering class

Speaker 2 at a major corporation or law firm.

Speaker 3 It reminds me, I gave a lecture not too long ago to some

Speaker 3 supporters of the Hoover Institution, and I just remarked haphazardly if Stanford had at that point dropped the SAT for two years, then it was four years, this year they reinstituted it, and they were publishing on their website their

Speaker 3 demographic

Speaker 3 breakdown of each new class. And whereas they used to be, I would call it, proportionally representative, you know,

Speaker 3 that would translate into something like 12% African American, 15% Hispanic, the rest Asian. Asians always discriminated against, even in law school.
And then white.

Speaker 3 But then after George Floyd, I would call it repertory. So they would actually put on the website 20% white admissions at Stanford for undergraduate, 9%.

Speaker 3 So it's roughly that would translate to about 200 white males were let in. Of course, they had another category called other,

Speaker 3 which was of mixed heritage. But my point is this.

Speaker 3 When you're hiring and you're starting to turn out students that are not taking the SAT, and I don't think that many schools, and correct me if I'm wrong, Ilya, dropped the LSAT, did they?

Speaker 2 Some did during the pandemic. They did.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 2 there were some deans actually called for the ABA, which is the only accredited. There's another problem.
I have a whole chapter on the ABA because it's a monopoly on law school accreditation.

Speaker 2 Some deans pushed for them to call for the doing away of the LSAT. That seems to have gone away.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, after this, I just said if this keeps up, it's the beginning, not the end.

Speaker 3 And this applies to your book that came through that once you let people in that are not qualified under Merocratic, or at least at a...

Speaker 3 there's a baseline, then it starts a process where the classes have to adjust to that. And

Speaker 3 you have to either introduce new courses or water down the content required of old courses, or you have to have a great inflation. In Stanford, there's great inflation.

Speaker 3 Yale gave 80% of all their undergraduate, I think it was last year, A's. So I was giving this talk to these people, many of them were captains of industry in Silicon Valley.

Speaker 3 And I said, it's going to get to the point where you might not want to hire a Stanford, you know, HR or...

Speaker 3 coder. And he said, where have you been? We said, we've noticed this for years.

Speaker 3 So we would rather have a Texas A ⁇ M or a Georgia Tech person because they come with better skills and they don't, the first thing they do is not go to HR and complain. Right.

Speaker 3 These Ivy League people are very pampered. They're used to being accommodated.
They don't have the technical skills. And what I'm getting at is, do you see that if this were to continue,

Speaker 3 that There is going to get a point that everybody's talked about, but nobody really believes, that these elite schools, and in your case, the law schools, are going to lose this reputation after people bump into their graduates again and again and again.

Speaker 3 And they're either going to have to adjust, or maybe you're going to see University of Alabama coveted more than Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.

Speaker 2 It's a little different dynamic at the law school level because

Speaker 2 the national schools are the national schools. And when everyone's doing law, it's different than sorting through someone who majors in English versus history versus whatever.

Speaker 2 And do they actually have a rigorous education, what have you? So it's somewhat sticky. Within bands, there's certainly movement.
So

Speaker 2 Yale, Stanford, Columbia, after the anti-Semitic encampments and all these, are definitely losing relative to their competitors.

Speaker 2 University of Chicago is gaining, for example, relative to its competitors at the moment.

Speaker 2 But after a while, certainly

Speaker 2 it depends where.

Speaker 2 The biggest firm in Atlanta looks at hiring a little differently than the biggest firms in New York and things like this, let alone smaller cities. So,

Speaker 2 and you have the,

Speaker 2 I cover this, the judicial boycotts of hiring of law clerks, which of course are very important for the elite schools. They trumpet how many of their students go on to be visas.

Speaker 2 It's kind of like a postdoc for lawyers. You work right beside the federal judge in your first year or second year at a law school and help them.

Speaker 2 them with their research and opinions and what have you. And a dozen or 14 federal judges stopped hiring from Stanford and Yale and later added Columbia for their bad free speech policies.

Speaker 2 Now, it's prospective, you know, and the students currently there would not be penalized, but it's one of these exogenous shocks, one of these external forces that along with employers saying that we're not going to hire Hamas supporters and things like this, that are the way to check and reform these schools, because it's not

Speaker 2 just making internal arguments about open inquiry and academic freedom that's going to change these things.

Speaker 3 We're talking to Ilya Shapiro, and his new book is Lawless.

Speaker 3 By the time you hear this, it'll be released, and we'll be right back after a word from our supporters. And we're back with Ilya Shapiro Shapiro.

Speaker 3 You mentioned there's all of these outside influencers and influencers. And I want to be a little bit...

Speaker 3 specific. Do you see any of these outside phenomenon developments having a positive effect? And

Speaker 3 specifically, do the alumni of the law schools then predicate their support for the law schools

Speaker 3 on being to remain empirical and disinterested?

Speaker 3 Or do you see a change because of the Trump administration and the people in the DOJ, who they'll hire, or their editorialization, or the Department of Education?

Speaker 3 Is there any outside influences that will affect change in these law schools? Are they going to be resistant to it?

Speaker 3 Or will market forces or political forces or just common sense trying to overwhelm this DEI attitude?

Speaker 2 The short answer is all of the above. All of the above is necessary, and all of the above may have an effect.

Speaker 2 In society writ large, it does seem like we've passed peak woke and there's a backlash to all this stuff.

Speaker 2 In academia, it's still very much an open question because

Speaker 2 it's an echo chamber, as we saw from the disastrous testimony of the university presidents

Speaker 2 just over a year ago, December of 2023, leading to the resignation of the presidents of Penn and Harvard.

Speaker 2 These institutions are not going to reform themselves.

Speaker 2 Maybe somewhat

Speaker 2 as alumni and trustees put some pressure on. There's some evidence of that at Penn because of the Wharton School, and they're such a business-focused place.
And when

Speaker 2 a few billionaires start making noises, that can have an impact.

Speaker 2 But I think in law schools, it will take these external actors, whether state legislatures for public schools saying, no, you have to close your DEI offices,

Speaker 2 we're not going to fund that. That's different.
That's not an academic freedom concern, by the way. That's not dictating to faculty what they say inside the classroom.

Speaker 2 That's how you organize the bureaucracy. structurally.

Speaker 2 So those kinds of, or investigations by state attorneys general or the federal department of education over denial of student civil rights, we've seen since October 7th, especially, as Bill Ackman put it, a big Harvard donor alumnus, billionaire, the anti-Semitism is the canary in the coal mine, the

Speaker 2 signaling factor of

Speaker 2 so many pathologies that are going on under the surface, whether moral corruption, failure of leadership, all of these things that have been revealed in these institutions, and including in the law schools.

Speaker 2 And so, Heather Gherkin, the dean of Yale, who hopes to be president of Yale or Princeton or Harvard eventually,

Speaker 2 saw the worrying developments and Yale making the headlines for shoutdowns of speakers and things like this.

Speaker 2 And so, he hired Keith Woodington from Princeton and gave him a bunch of money to start a new center on free expression, hired a former Alito clerk to be a junior professor, kind of clamped down on some of these other things.

Speaker 2 Well, we'll see. So, that's, you know, that's just after a dozen judges announcing opposition and

Speaker 2 some bad PR. It doesn't take very much.
You know, to mix metaphors, a lot of these structures are Potemkin villages guarded by paper tigers. And so just a little bit of publicity.

Speaker 2 I'll give you another example in a non-legal context.

Speaker 2 My now colleague at the Manhattan Institute, John Saylor, who's an investigative reporter, two years ago published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal after getting public documents through FOIA from Texas Tech, a public school in Lubbock, Texas, saying that they were showing that they were hiring biologists based on diversity statements.

Speaker 2 And he just wrote this op-ed, wrote this up, what he found, public documents. And the very next day, the chancellor said, no, we're not going to be doing that anymore.
This is inappropriate.

Speaker 2 So it doesn't take very much.

Speaker 2 And just like major law firms in New York a month after October 7th said, told deans,

Speaker 2 take a look at what's going on in your schools.

Speaker 2 Make sure you're creating a healthy culture because if these students are all about post-colonial studies and all of this stuff, that's simply not going to work.

Speaker 3 The other thing,

Speaker 3 you focus on more of the elite schools, but not exclusively so. But I think your argument that you is thematic in most of your chapters is that listeners should care about this.

Speaker 3 because it's these people, whether it's fair or not, that graduate from these top-tier schools, then they go on in the next decade or so, and you bump into them as CEO, legal counsels who can become CEOs, or you bump in through them among the 300 or 400 political appointments in the DOJ, or they become judges.

Speaker 3 And I was, and the theories that they, I mean.

Speaker 2 Lawyers are disproportionately represented for good or ill among our elite classes, and especially in our political legal institutions. They are.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 do things like critical legal theory, does that come out of law professors or is that something the lawfare professors adopted?

Speaker 3 Because I was just thinking that when you look at the lawfare, and I think that's a fair term of what I think Fannie Willis was from Emory Law School, and I think Alvin Bragg was from Harvard.

Speaker 3 And then you had Letita James Jackson. Where do they, this idea that the law is an instrument of political change or progressive transformation?

Speaker 3 Do the law professors, are they thinkers or do they just absorb this stuff from philosophy and English?

Speaker 3 Or do they actually have theorists that are trying to formulate these idea that it's against the law to steal a candy bar because wealthy white people don't steal candy bars and so they make these arbitrary laws to hurt people?

Speaker 3 Where does that all come from? Is it the law school play a role in the theoretical level?

Speaker 2 Absolutely. And it's funny, when I was in law school, as you noted, a quarter century ago,

Speaker 2 we thought that this critical theory stuff, critical legal studies, that that was something from the 80s and early 90s.

Speaker 2 It was a spent force that was now some niche thing that's relegated to sociology departments and

Speaker 2 those weird area studies departments and things like that. But then it made

Speaker 2 a roaring comeback with a vengeance.

Speaker 2 The racial reckoning, the so-called racial reckoning that started roughly in 2014 with Ferguson and then the election of Trump and all of these inflection points. And of course,

Speaker 3 eight years of Obama, too, really. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 Obama harmed race relations

Speaker 2 tremendously in this country.

Speaker 2 It's sad, really.

Speaker 2 But that put all of those theories about how the law needs to be deconstructed, burn it all down and reform to better help marginalized people. It was kind of

Speaker 2 Rawlsianism on racialist steroids, if you will, to get

Speaker 2 name-check a few philosophical

Speaker 2 touchstones.

Speaker 2 And it's not so, you know, so there's the faculty part that

Speaker 2 there are more of those kinds of critical theory faculty than there were in the 2000s when I was in school.

Speaker 2 But also the bureaucracy. And this is kind of a story that is not told as much.

Speaker 2 The rate of non-teaching staff at universities broadly and in law schools as well has just exploded such that there are now more non-teaching staff than faculty.

Speaker 3 No, there is.

Speaker 3 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 Whatever is going on inside the classroom and who's hiring, and there's huge problems with that, with the ideology.

Speaker 2 But the bureaucracy, which in the last decade has been largely, if not almost entirely, in the DEI space, is a huge problem because they are charged with inculcating the culture of the institution, having trainings and orientation programs and all these deanly memos that go out to first-year law students and what have you.

Speaker 2 And that has really just swamped things. And you talk about the explosion in cost, tuition costs.

Speaker 2 That is part and parcel with the growth of bureaucracy, which it's not even so much that they're not value they're value-subtracting.

Speaker 2 And we've seen from campus climate surveys, for example, that the growth of these DEI offices, which are meant to have people feel more welcome, more included at their institutions, is inversely correlated to feelings of belonging or feelings of comfort with people of different ethnic backgrounds.

Speaker 2 It's a really shocking thing. And as I said, especially in the last five, 10 years, this is what's really

Speaker 2 thrown higher education and worryingly legal education off the rails.

Speaker 3 We're talking with Ilya Shapiro and his new book is Lawless. And we have one more

Speaker 3 segment, and we'll be right back. Ilya,

Speaker 3 I noticed that the Wall Street Journal, I think it was a year and a half ago, talked about what you were talking, about the administrative bloat. specifically accelerated by DEI.

Speaker 3 And they mentioned that Stanford had,

Speaker 3 and I went and looked at that, and that was accurate, 15,000 roughly

Speaker 3 administrators, administrative staff, and then total graduate and undergraduate and professional schools was, I think, 800 more. So they were one-to-one.

Speaker 3 And that costs...

Speaker 3 So we're looking at this new Trump administration and whether you look at what they're proposing. It's pretty radical in the first hundred days.

Speaker 3 It reminds me of Napoleon's 100 days, if they can pull it off.

Speaker 3 But they're talking about moving the FBI headquarters or decentralizing it or stopping the revolving door of generals going into contract, all of this stuff.

Speaker 3 But if you look at the Department of Education,

Speaker 3 and I'm not sure that they're going to abolish it, but are there things that people around Heritage or around the

Speaker 3 Trump administration, our commentators have said would work? And I'll just give you a couple of examples and let you go with it. One of them is that

Speaker 3 maybe there should be a cap on tax-free income from endowments.

Speaker 3 So the small schools that say have a billion dollars, liberal arts, but anything, and you could use a ratio from student to endowment cost. At some point, because these are agents of ideology...

Speaker 3 ideological activism, maybe the taxpayers shouldn't subsidize it. So say Stanford has a $35 billion.

Speaker 3 Why is that $5 billion plus tax-free? Or if a university like Stanford, who, when a person is accused of

Speaker 3 sexual assault,

Speaker 3 Joe Lonsdale was at Stanford, and very treated very unfairly, and he's not given First Amendment rights, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth Amendment rights, or there's not free speech,

Speaker 3 and then that would be predicated on

Speaker 3 federal funds, for example. And of course, this is happening at the NAH now.
People are terrified at Stanford.

Speaker 3 Jay Bacharia was censored by the Stanford Faculty for Free Expression when he cast doubts about the efficacy and the dangers of the COVID lockdown. And now Stanford has $700 million

Speaker 3 in NIH grants. And a lot of those, if you look at them carefully, if you just scan them, there's a DEI component to a third of them.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 should the federal government come in in this rare moment when there are conservatives that are not just conservative, but they're dedicated to change, to take a look at these law schools, undergraduate schools, just universities in general, and say, there's things that you rely on from the federal government that we cannot continue because you haven't continued in your

Speaker 3 original mission statement.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. And you've hit on a number of different policy areas,

Speaker 2 none or very few of which actually need new legislation. So the IRS could make a determination that Stanford or higher education institutions over a certain threshold of

Speaker 2 endowment aren't using that for the beneficial purpose for which that tax exempt status is around. Now they would be sued there.

Speaker 2 It'd be on firmer legal ground if there was new legislation from Congress saying, you know, what specifying whatever the taxation of endowments past a certain threshold or that aren't used in certain ways.

Speaker 2 But that is a fight worth having. And more broadly, you don't need new legislation to

Speaker 2 withhold federal funds from institutions that deny students their civil rights, whether with respect to due process claims for allegations of harassment or discrimination, whether

Speaker 2 the anti-Semitic stuff that's come out.

Speaker 3 where

Speaker 2 the UCLA is complicit in blocking students from certain parts of campus and fomenting the mobs and things like that.

Speaker 2 Whether free speech limitations.

Speaker 2 How about

Speaker 3 segregated dorms, segregated graduate students? Absolutely. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 Safe spaces that are segregated by race.

Speaker 3 There are all sorts of...

Speaker 2 strings that are attached to federal funds, and those are connected to everything from maintaining accounting standards so there's not waste, fraud, and abuse to anti-discrimination principles, and the idea that you're not allowed to go to a certain place or participate in a certain event or access a particular part of educational programming because of your race or religion or gender or whatever it is.

Speaker 2 That's squarely against federal law. And both DOJ and the Office of Civil Rights at Education

Speaker 2 need to take

Speaker 2 a muscular role in

Speaker 3 schools. Since

Speaker 3 we have a friendship, have people from the administration asked your advice?

Speaker 3 Are you interested in working for the new DOJ?

Speaker 2 They have not asked for it as such, at least since the election. I know people who I imagine are going to be going in.
I'm open to opportunities. If someone called me up right after they hear.

Speaker 3 I hope everybody's listening because we have some people in the Trump administration that tune in, and Ilya might be one of the people you'd want to have for your development. Look, I just want to...

Speaker 3 Civil rights.

Speaker 2 I just want to have an impact. It's not a a matter of punching my ticket or adding a line to the resume.

Speaker 2 If I'm offered to do something to help with these things

Speaker 2 and check these

Speaker 2 run-amok schools, I would be very helpful to do that.

Speaker 3 There is a theme, though, that

Speaker 3 the left says it's an overemphasis on loyalty, but there is a theme on some of the appointments, many of them, that to

Speaker 3 ensure integrity or knowledge. Pete Hexeth wrote a book critical of the Pentagon.
He was attacked by that. He's running.
Jay Bachari was attacked by the NIH. He's going to run it.

Speaker 3 Tulsi Gabbert was put on a watch list. She's now the director of

Speaker 3 Cash Batel was spied on the FBI.

Speaker 3 So maybe Ilya Shapiro was dealt

Speaker 3 a bad hand by the DI industry in trying to attack his character, and you might be the ideal person for a Deputy Attorney General of Civil Rights. Well,

Speaker 2 your lips to

Speaker 2 whoever's appointing, whoever handles Trump's truth social accounts, ears, because that's

Speaker 2 how we learn about these appointments.

Speaker 3 Well, that would be a good appointment.

Speaker 3 Any last words, Ilya, that where can, where, what is the pub date? It's out, but where can people find it? The usual places, Amazon, where else you have a website?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So it's put out by HarperCollins, their broadside books imprint, and it's available wherever fine and not-so-fine books are sold.

Speaker 2 It should be in your stores, Barnes ⁇ Noble, what have you, online at Amazon, or if you prefer to buy it at Walmart, it's available at Walmart online.

Speaker 2 So we're at Lawless, the Miseducation of America's Elites. I also have a substack.

Speaker 3 Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 I also have a Substack, Shapiro's Gavel,

Speaker 2 which

Speaker 2 has kind of early versions.

Speaker 2 As I was having these musings and right after I quit quit Georgetown and kind of had to get off my chest all of this process that I had had gone through, kind of early versions of my thinking as it developed on these areas there.

Speaker 2 I'm on X at iShapiro.

Speaker 2 You can look me up at the Manhattan Institute.

Speaker 3 Yes, that's where a lot of people find your work. And that's where I find it and consult at the Manhattan.
What's the Manhattan site?

Speaker 2 So it's simply Manhattan.institute.

Speaker 3 Oh, great.

Speaker 2 Great. People don't realize they're expecting some.org or.com or something, but.institute is a suffix that you can now have online.
So it's simply Manhattan.institute.

Speaker 2 And if you want to drop me a line for that matter, I'm IShapiro at Manhattan.institute.

Speaker 3 Well, that's everybody's got that information. I urge you all to buy this book.
I didn't have a time to go through all the chapters, but I hope you got a flavor of it.

Speaker 3 And this is a lot more important topic than just fights among the elite.

Speaker 2 And Vixter, you'll be amused by this. I include in an appendix uh the full 10-page report

Speaker 2 that I that I got from the DEI office which had never been published before I'd let some journal some journalists see it and quote from it but it's never been published in its entirety what's funny was the publishers lawyers

Speaker 2 said had an issue here not with slander or libel or anything uh but they said well technically that report georgetown has a copyright on it so can you like every couple of paragraphs put in your commentary about it which would transform the work?

Speaker 2 So that's what I did. You have my little snarky comments about

Speaker 2 what the inquisitors are doing.

Speaker 3 I think that's important because, as illustrated from my point of view, what they officially told you and what they were telling other people or what the media was reporting from leaks didn't quite jive otherwise.

Speaker 3 In other words, they were acting as if they were magnanimous and disinterested and concerned about your welfare and wanted to treat you, but that's not what the media who was being leaked to told us.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, I mean, I was banned from campus because

Speaker 2 my presence would be triggering of some students. It was really a bizarre situation.
I mean, you know, I was on paid leave. So I was actually financially,

Speaker 2 they did that so that I wouldn't have as strong a legal claim later on. So I was paid.
So I was, you know, I was prohibited from doing any work from Georgetown.

Speaker 2 So instead, I was doing writing and speaking and other things, legal consulting, what have you. But ultimately, you talk about

Speaker 2 the external pressure group and what have you. Alumni of Georgetown Law obviously brought up my situation with the dean in various receptions and what have you.
And he got so tired of it.

Speaker 2 From what I understand, he curses my name and what have you. And you talk about karma.

Speaker 2 Apparently, he lost out on the presidency of Fordham, where he had come from to Georgetown, in large part because of his handling of my case. So

Speaker 2 he's since announced that he's leaving Georgetown, the the deanship at least. This is his last year.
He's announced this right as my book is coming out. So

Speaker 3 I'm very sympathetic. The Stanford Faculty Senate was considering censoring

Speaker 3 Neil Ferguson, Scott Atlas, and myself all at once. Then somebody on CNN said that I had been a Soviet spy,

Speaker 3 and he got the wrong victor.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 anyway, it's or the wrong Hansen. Yes.

Speaker 3 Yes. Yes.
Maybe it was the wrong. You're right.
It was the wrong Hansen who was a CIA traitor or a traitor. He said I was a traitor.
But in any case, thank you very much, Ilya.

Speaker 3 And I hope all of you go out and buy his book, Lawless.

Speaker 2 Thank you. And I'll be at Stanford the first week of February.
Hope to see you in person then.

Speaker 3 I hope so too.