Policies and Prospects of Our Woke Universities

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This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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This is our our weekend edition, and we talk about things in depth and cultural.

And this weekend, we are going to look at universities and colleges and the education system broadly because we seem to have a lot of problems in our education system.

So it needs a good talk over.

And so Victor's here to do that this week.

But first, let's take a break for a few messages and come right back.

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Welcome back.

And Victor, how are you doing today?

I know that you're in the process of giving out some education in the next few weeks.

So how are you?

I am at Hillsdale College and I'm acculturating.

I'm going to, I just got here and I'll be teaching a course on strategy tomorrow.

And I'm acculturating from leaving 106

degree temperatures in Fresno County with zero humidity to looking out the window to a pour downpour and it's 80 degrees.

So

I'm excited about that, huh?

Desert to a tropical.

Yeah, that's and then this is the first time I think in years that I've actually had a connecting flight.

I want to thank Pete Buttigig for his

intervention to make sure that my 45

minute connection worked perfectly.

Thanks, Pete.

You got the whole airline under control.

Robert, let's go ahead and cut this right here because I got to Victor, you got to make sure you stay on that microphone because the moment you, if you move your mouth any direction, it really affects that particular microphone.

So just try to keep it right here.

Is it right here?

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine.

As long as you keep it and your head stays the same the whole time.

All right, Robert, three, two,

one.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead ahead then and look start in on education system i wanted to look first at policies of our universities and colleges that are affecting the whole idea of free speech and freedom of everything actually in the united states and especially two things one the abridging of the right to self-defense by some of our colleges and by college policies bro policies broadly, and also just censorship.

And so the end to academic freedom.

I think that the abridging of the right to self-defense when through the Title IX

agreement, which colleges have taken to mean that

if Title IX is the right for protection against harassment, just to remind everybody, but colleges have taken it that the

accused doesn't necessarily need to have a lawyer on his side.

And two, that the accused cannot

face his accuser necessarily.

So they've taken and pretty consistently taken those things away from the accused.

And so that's a very dangerous precedent.

I don't even quite, and maybe you can answer this first, see how a college thinks they can do that if they're a public entity and they exist in the United States where we have our first 10 amendments and the right to due process.

But go ahead and take it away, Victor.

It's very ironic because remember, Title IX was the democratic effort to update the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by extending it to gender or sex.

And remember what the 1964 Civil Rights

Act was intended to do was to make sure everybody had due protection under the Constitution, regardless of their race.

And now after Title IX and

their sex.

But that's not how it functions.

And why it doesn't function the way maybe its liberal architects envisioned is they believed in equality of opportunity and they wanted to protect that equality of opportunity.

But when you give somebody equality of opportunity, which is wonderful,

that doesn't mean that you're going to have an equality of result.

And that means there's so many extraneous factors that go into the complex human persona that you don't really know what to do.

If everybody has a right to go across, let's say this street that I'm looking out the door, everybody has a right to cross it.

In the old days, maybe some people didn't, but how do you know they're all going to cross it at the same speed?

Somebody's stronger, somebody's weaker, somebody's lazier, somebody's more aggressive, somebody's got better genes, somebody's got worse gene, somebody's got depression.

Somebody's wealthy, somebody's poor, somebody's old, somebody's young.

So, when the state made that leap to guarantee an equality of result,

the result is you have to not protect it and expand the Constitution, you have to destroy it because you have to destroy individual liberty and take it away and then substitute the state's wisdom.

And that's what's happened in Title IX.

It's gone through

the entire, I guess there's 6,000 colleges, and it said to them,

we're going to look at your

makeup, gender makeup on campus.

And if it does not reflect the demographics of the United States, we're going to assume culpability, whether it is or not.

It's implied culpability, just like we do with race.

And we're going to go in and correct it.

And you can see what happened.

I mean, if you want a woman's lacrosse team and you say, okay, women's, and they say, well, every sport is dependent on three sports, baseball, football, and basketball.

They earned the money.

And then they're going to have to take money out of their budgets and subsidize.

Yes, they are going to have to subsidize female water polo and lacrosse and equestrian events.

And so that was another thing.

And then when it got to the point of sexual misconduct,

you remember what I think it was Senator Hironey said during the Kavanaugh, women must be believed.

And so there was a suspension of due process.

I know when I, at Stanford, there was a notorious case of the entrepreneur, the kind of boy genius, Joe Lonsdale, and he had had a girlfriend, and I think he had met her while he was a part-time instructor, and it was a mutual relationship.

And of course,

if you're married to a brilliant multi-multi-millionaire like he was,

and it didn't go well, and it didn't go well.

Then she accused him of all sorts of sexual depravities and rape almost.

And then she got the university into it, I think, because he had taught just a course.

And without even due process, they banned him from campus.

Banned him from campus.

And they've done that to a lot of people I know.

They banned him for life, and yet he sued.

And then guess what?

It went into the regular court system where the Constitution is still alive.

And he won, or they dropped it.

She dropped the complaints.

And then Stanford said, oh, by the way, you're not banned anymore for life.

And so that's how it works.

There's no right of due process.

There's no Fourth or Fifth Amendment for the accused.

There's no necessary guarantee of legal representation on these Star Chamber hearings on campus.

Yeah, and what about that Duke La Crosse case?

I mean, they were actually finally

acquitted or found not guilty because of DNA and a rape test.

But boy,

their

names were just slandered.

Yeah, they sued and they sued successfully.

And remember, the local DA was, I think, disbarred and thrown out of office for that.

But they'd ruined a lot of lives.

They'd hired a stripper to come, African-American stripper, and she alleged that she was raped.

They probably said as if, I mean, if you're going to get a sex worker and you're going to put them

in to a dorm building or any building with a bunch of young testosterone

charged males, they're going to say things.

Well, she apparently didn't like what she said or she wasn't comfortable there or whatever during her act.

So then she said she was raped and filed a complaint.

And then the Duke faculty was off to the races.

Poor black woman, wealthy white, snotty little

lacrosse players.

And there you had it.

Yeah.

And so before, and it was rushed to judgment.

And then, you know, what kicks in and all of these mechanisms, the virtue signaling and performance art.

I think this is horrible.

And where's Al Sharpton and Jesse jackson and da da da da and then when it's all over it's kind of like the russian collusion hoax or the covington kids or the jesse smollett

uh hoax nobody says i'm sorry i rushed to judgment i should not have said that they're not guilty they're not you know the covington kids did not attack mr phillips uh jesse smollett was not attacked by mega Hatworth and this woman in question was not attacked by

they never do they never do they didn't they had a big petition and these people have no character or credibility they really don't the best way to deal with them to these faculty mobs they went after scott atlas on another matter that the way to do them is give them no credibility and give them no prestige or no honor they don't deserve it Yeah, I agree with that.

And also, you get the lot of crazies that really test the system.

And remember that mattress girl who came out and said she was raped after she had had a relationship.

And then it turns out in the case that there were all these emails that she had written the guy about yearning for him.

If you're going to have

on campus

a huge Title IX administrative bureaucracy, and you're going to join it at the hip with a huge gender studies program,

and you're going to force multiply it with mandatory gender instruction, then you've got hundreds of people whose reason to be is to find wayward young men.

And what usually happens in these cases is wayward young men are not rapist.

Almost in every single case, they're not rapist.

That can occur.

They're cads.

In other words, in our promiscuous society, people feel that they want to engage in sexual intercourse either under the influence of alcohol or when they barely know each other in very impersonal, exploitive fashion on both sides a lot.

And so, a lot of times, what happens is a boy dates a girl and they go to a party, they have something to drink, they have consensual sex, and then biologically, socially, culturally, whatever term we use, the male is not necessarily automatically so, but more prone to see this as a one-time

healthy event.

The woman who professes that she wants to have sex, I suppose, sees it as an exploitation because what?

He doesn't call.

He doesn't call and say, how are you today?

Would you like to date?

In other words, they reverse the process, the cart and the horse.

There is no civil and careful courtship.

encapsulated with non-sexual activity and mutual respect.

It's the sexual gratification at a very early age stage of the relationship, and then there's no other, there's nothing that follows.

So, males being what they are, and I have a low opinion basically of a man between 16 and 19.

I know.

Okay.

Well, I know what they're capable.

I was one, although I was lucky that I had a mother who,

you know,

lectured me every day to make sure women had respect and never to,

even if a woman said she wanted to do certain things, that didn't mean that she really did wanna do them.

And so

I never got into that situation.

But my point is

that when you try to regulate that, what usually happens is a woman, in these cases, I don't mean everything, but in these particular high-profile cases, a young woman talks to her peers and says, you know, I had sex the other night with so-and-so

and he never called.

And now that I think of it, I'm going to go talk to the sexual harassment therapist or something and she's told me that even if i did get consent that was under duress or i didn't mean it and now that i think about it no i see him on the football team or i see that he's phi beta kappa or i see that he's headed and that intensifies it and so then kind of post facto they've filed charges under

consultation with various university people and then they go to town and then once you're in that process if you've got that investment you surely are not going to have lawyers and cross-examinations and constitutional, you know, processes.

Because if you would, it's not going to work in your favor.

So then they, and then what happens?

The person then goes outside the university and finds protection under the Constitution.

And under the Constitution, there's nothing legally wrong with being a creep.

Just isn't.

You know?

Yeah.

So if you, if you say to a young woman at a party, hey, here's a beer.

Ha, ha, you got the prettiest smile I've ever seen.

I love you.

Oh, wow.

I'm going to spend the evening with you.

And then that ends up in sex.

And then you go back to your dorm and say, ha,

got another really fine girl.

We had sex.

Ha, ha, ha.

I'm not going to call her.

Well, that's a horrible thing to do, but it's not illegal.

Yeah.

And that's what we get into these processes.

And then you add, it's all, it's further confounded by we're ambiguous about adulthood.

We send these young people 18, 19, 20, 21,

and they consider themselves adults on every other matter possible.

If Charles Murray or Amy Wax comes to school, they think they're 40 years old and sophisticated critics of social policy and they shout them down.

Or if a faculty member says an inappropriate word, they think they're equals.

But in matters of sexuality, then they have to be protected.

And so you never really know how you're going to hurt a student's feeling because they're five or eight or 10 or 12 or 20 years old.

So

they go back and forth automatically between adulthood and pre-adulthood, not just in matters of sex, but in sensitivity.

So they can say the F word all the time.

I walk across the Stanford campus, I hear it all the time.

And I hear the other words as well.

But if some word is spoken that they don't like, then all of a sudden they're a Victorian person, you know, having

a panic.

And that's another problem.

And so the result of all this is a lot of men, if they're wise, will just check out of all this.

And by that, I mean, if I was a young man today, I would not date anyone,

anybody of the opposite sex on campus.

They just wouldn't do it.

I would not die.

And I basically did that anyway when I was an undergraduate.

So I wouldn't get involved in any of those events.

And if I was a graduate student, I wouldn't date any other graduate student.

And I think that's wise advice.

Yeah, that's very wise advice.

You know, it concerns me as much, perhaps even more, is the

censorship and the lack of academic freedom in the universities.

And I know we have lots of cases of

professors that are being

fired, a lot of them, for things sometimes they're doing on Twitter and views that they have on Twitter, and in some cases, you know, private emails that they have.

And I just remember the case of Jonathan Katz, who is who was fired from Princeton.

I don't know if he ever got his

job back, Victor.

Do you happen to know if he did?

No, he didn't.

Yeah.

And I think you're referring to Joshua, right?

Joshua.

Yeah, Joshua.

Who did I say?

Yeah, he's a Homeric classicist.

I know him.

And he's a wonderful person.

He was given various teaching awards at Princeton.

Remember, his sin, his sin was that in the past, he had had a consensual relationship with a young woman,

and

that had not come to light at the time.

And then

a few years earlier, it did come to light, and that woman had not chosen to participate.

But anyway, the knowledge was known, and he was given a suspension temporarily of his teaching duties.

And that was that.

And then he made

the mistake in their eyes.

I don't think it was a mistake, but he suggested that when Black students occupied

the office of a dean or assistant dean, I'm being very loose with the details because I'm doing it by memory.

He suggested that it was terrorist-like to do that, and it was unfair to Black people that were often the targets targets of other Black militants.

And for that, suddenly they couldn't find anything.

You know, he's a great scholar.

He's a great teacher.

He's probably the best teacher in that department.

So then finally, they went back throughout his life and they dug up this incident.

And then a classic example of double, you know,

jeopardy or.

They doubled it again.

They said, okay, we're going to go and reinvestigate it.

And they put enormous pressures on the person involved.

And still,

she didn't come forward and voice complaints until there were some email exchanges.

I'm just reading off the public record: email exchanges between him and her.

And she was getting divorced, and he was getting married, and that caused tensions years later.

And she decided that maybe she hadn't been

a victim in a way that had already been adjudicated that she wasn't, that he had been violating protocols and rules, but she didn't press charge.

Now she was coming out of the woodwork years later and saying, yes, you're all right.

So they were trying to, it was typical barrier

methodology.

They had the

offender, they just needed the crime.

And they tried to put videos on where they said, don't take, be careful about this guy.

He said that blacks were,

you know, that they were terrorist-like, but he didn't, they didn't give the whole video.

They cut and selected, so they didn't want to put the part and said he was worried about their treatment of other blacks.

They cut that out.

Did he counter sue for that kind of thing?

He did, but

the problem is,

and I'm not basing this on any private correspondence with him.

I've never mentioned this, but I think as an outside observer, it was just a question of whether he wanted to go nuclear or not.

He was newly married.

He'll probably get a job, I think, somewhere else.

He's been

invited to a lot of prestigious places.

But the question is, do you really think in the School of Arts and Humanities in Princeton that

the current tenured male faculty have not had sexual congress with graduate students and that those who married graduate students kept their vows of virginity until they were married?

I'm sorry, but I watched it in graduate school and it doesn't happen that way.

So my point is, if he had said, though ye without sin cast the first stone, I think he could have said this person, this person, this person has done exactly what they're accusing me of doing.

And they could have opened the whole thing up and had a it's time for Princeton to re-examine whether its faculty has violated back 10, 15 years, its own statutes about having sexual relations with students.

I think you would find that there have been a lot of prominent people that have done just that and it's been covered up.

I know that's a fact.

So I don't think he wanted to get into all that.

He was in his early 50s and I think he wanted to move on.

And who would want to teach in a department?

That was also a department.

where they eliminated the Greek requirement for classics.

I wrote an article about it in the new criteria, and I don't want to get into the guys involved, but it's not a very, when I was a graduate student, Princeton was a very impressive classics department, but it got woke.

Yeah.

And it's not now.

It's mediocre.

I'm here at Hillsdale College.

I can tell you the teaching of classics at Hillsdale College is five times better than what you would find at Princeton undergraduate instruction.

Yeah, it seems like that's the way the world's going, these private institutions that aren't taking any government funds like Hillsdale.

I just want to put in a plug for when I was researching this, the Organization of FHIR, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, they've got a plethora of cases that they are prosecuting or they are defending, I guess I should say, on free speech, freedom of conscience, due process, et cetera.

There was one that I thought was really interesting.

The University of Oregon is requiring their faculty to have

a

diversity statement

or an equity statement requiring loyalty oath.

1950 UC Berkeley.

Have you ever been?

I have never been, nor am I now a member of the Communist Party, nor do I know people associated with the Communist Party.

I have never been against diversity, equity, inclusion, nor do I know anybody that's ever been against it.

And then if you don't write that,

I guess the administrator says, I have in my hand a list of 209 people who have not written their diversity statements, subversive.

So that's where we are right now.

It's very funny.

The ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, doesn't exist anymore.

It's an activist organization.

Most of these people grew up in the 60s

and 70s.

They came of age, I should say, and they were the ones that stormed into presidents' offices.

They were the ones that smashed windows.

They were the ones that destroyed the curriculum.

So now they're on the inside.

And they never never did believe in civil liberties.

They never did believe in the First Amendment.

They only believed in the First Amendment, you know, to scream and yell at professors and,

you know, swim nude in the swimming pool, all that stuff.

But they didn't believe that you should tolerate opinions across the political spectrum.

And they don't.

And now they have no,

I don't, they call it hate speech.

They're Orwellian.

Yeah.

And the fire was started by Alan

Coors and I think

Harvey Silvergate, I think his name was.

And it was a wonderful organization.

Greg Lukanoff runs it now.

He's one of

the directors, I think, or if not the director.

I think they have to sue.

I think they get over 100 suits a month.

I mean, they've vastly expanded because

where else do you go?

You can't call the ACLU up for help.

You can't call the faculty union up.

You can't call the American Association of University Professors up because they're all woke.

You can't go to the find a sympathetic voice on campus.

Even if you found a dean or provost who said, this is atrocious what happened to you.

This is horrible.

You were denied all constitutional redress.

You were railroaded out.

They would fire him.

You know, it's like, okay, you're supporting.

that poor witch that says she didn't cast a spell on anybody.

Then you're a witch.

You're a witch too.

We're going to burn you at the stake.

That's how the mob is.

These people are mobsters.

They really are these woke people.

And I think it's going to end.

I think we're at the end of the,

you know, 1793, 74, and there's some thermidors that are going to come in and turn the guillotine back on its guillotiners.

Well, I hope so, Victor.

But let's go ahead and take a break and come right back and talk a little bit about the problem of administrators, speaking of those who run things.

And we'll go ahead and be right back.

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Welcome back, everybody.

And Victor, let's look at administration because it seems to me, again, from doing research for this, that it's just outrageous how big the administration is compared to the faculty.

If what the

objective of a university or college is, is to actually educate people.

The statistic that I could find that looked like the best

studied was that there were 2.5 faculty per one administrator.

And that was from an article in Forbes in 2017.

And that just seems outrageous, the very top heaviness of

these institutions.

What are your thoughts?

Well, it is about two to one, I think, now, actually.

And I know

at a place like Yale,

I think there's like 5,500 administrators, more than there are faculty.

And so, what do they say?

And so, the faculty hate that because

they get PhDs and they have to do research and they have to do faculty.

And I mean, they have to do teaching and they have to do their faculty assignments and administrators just oversee them.

But so often the case is the administrator sometimes has an education degree, not a PhD, which means that he didn't write necessarily an original thesis.

He doesn't know two foreign languages, for example.

Also, people who are not very accomplished classroom teachers go into administration for the money.

Used to be in the 1950s, they would get the greatest Renaissance scholar or Homeric scholar and say, look, it's your turn.

Come on, be chairman of the department or be a dean, be a provost, and get stepped down in four years.

Come on, I don't want to do it.

You do it.

You're the most prestigious guy.

That's not it.

It's now a professional career path.

And the people who are drawn into it are not the university's best scholars or best teachers or best colleagues.

And what do they do?

They say, well, we're just having to oversee all these new government requirements.

But

that's not it.

What it is, is that they're like rabbits.

They get one in and they multiply and they create these little feetums.

And then they love getting back at faculty and they love this little

love affair they have with students in the sense that, oh, your teacher said this, or you recorded your teacher saying that, or you heard that.

Well, let me go

call this person in.

And

when I was

a faculty member, I won't mention the university when I started out, a colleague that I had voted against tenure, or I was going to vote against tenure, filed a complaint that while this faculty member was walking along a sidewalk, and we had a door.

We had shared office, and I had a closed door.

She claimed in her paranoia that I had said something derogatory about her to another faculty member sharing my office.

She admitted,

no one could figure out how you could hear that if I had said that, which I didn't.

But the point I'm making, I had to go to a hearing and the person almost started laughing.

He said, so this person whom I cannot tell you who it is,

said that while she was walking on a sidewalk, she paused because she heard voices in your office and then she sort of got closer to the door, i.e.

she spied or tried to put her ear on the door and she thought she heard her name mentioned in a derogatory fashion.

So the whole purpose was to get me off her tenure committee.

Here or his.

Well, my point is, they took that seriously and the number of administrators I had to talk to was like four or five.

And I finally just said, you know what?

Okay.

I said to one administrator, I'm going to file a complaint against you because I was walking by

a area and you were doing something on tour.

Now, I didn't see it, but I heard some muffled sound behind a bush.

And I'm going to go file a complaint right now to the president against you.

And I don't want my name mentioned.

It's not going to be mentioned.

just like this person.

But I'm going to say that I was walking down the sidewalk and I saw some bushes rustle and i got the impression it was you because that's it was near your office

and we'll see and you can just deal with that and he called me back you know said please don't do that let's just drop it and that's that that's how that's how those people operate they operate on fear and uh

i don't know what to say the poor student is paying for it.

I think a recent study, as I said earlier with you, is that five or six $6,000 has been added to Stanford tuition to pay for the equity, the diversity, equity, inclusion administrators.

Now, this is a new topic, Sammy, that generally faculty don't like administrators because they feel they do the actual teaching, which is the fuel of the university, and the administrators don't contribute commiserately, at least in a cost-to-benefit analysis of how much more money they make.

But you put in the fact that you're hiring all of these diversity administrators and equity administrators

and inclusion administrators, and you can't say anything about them.

You can't say they're not necessary or they're lazy or they're poorly educated the way you usually talk about administrators.

They don't know what to do.

And especially when these people who, let's say, you're teaching a class in Civil War history and they couldn't tell you the difference between,

I don't know, Joe Johnston and

General Pope.

they would have no idea whether Shiloh was Gettysburg or the wilderness.

They have no idea where Richmond is.

They don't know anything.

And yet they will look at your syllabus and say, we don't see that you have anything in there that resonates on your reading list with diversity.

And so when they start to oversee scholars'

syllabi or they start to interfere in promotion, it gets scary, but everybody's scared of them.

It is so similar to the French Revolution when you had suddenly Saint-Just and Robespierre, these nothings,

you know, just emerge from the Garandas and say, we're the real revolutionaries and

we're not going to compromise with the Bourbons.

We're not going to have a constitutional monarchy.

We're going to name the days of the month and rename

the months themselves and instead of a statue to radio.

And we're going to really be revolutionaries.

And if you don't like it, we're going to behead you.

That's kind of like these people are.

They're They're headed for a fall, they are, because there's nothing to them.

There's nothing to them.

But it's terrible what the poor student, when you have the rate of tuition increasing faster than the rate of inflation because of this moral hazard that you've created by not making the universities responsible for a student default, the students can't pay for it.

Then they default.

And then the federal government has to pick up the 1.7 trillion that's owed unless Joe Biden comes in and tries to illegally just with a stroke of the pin get rid of it.

Yeah, so it's a very controversial topic and it's ruining the university.

There's too many administrators and we should all make every administrator teach one class and the ratio should be seven or eight to one.

They should have no control whatsoever over faculty's syllabi unless they're qualified to weigh in on it and they're not for the most part.

Shouldn't be a lifetime job.

It BC should be a rotating sort of like temp term limits.

We all know this, but never happen.

Yeah, absolutely.

And it should come from inside the faculty cadre rather than these outsiders that have just earned.

And

I'm sure that

they learn important things in the education doctorate programs, but it doesn't seem to me that they're learning much about

direction.

Yeah, about the direction of curriculum.

Yeah, they're learning method and not, they don't know anything about

a good education.

They really do believe that a high school history teacher

will be better if

he understands that he knows how to make a syllabus their way, or he understands the protocol of calling on students, or a gender, race

type of perspective, rather than whether he really does know what the Constitution is or the War of 1812.

So

we're teaching the method, but there's nothing there.

So what good's the method if they have no method?

They can apply a method.

They don't have anything to apply it to because they're ignorant and everybody knows it.

And

you can't say anything about that.

And I don't want to say collectively they're all ignorant because some of the nicest people that I've ever met have been college administrators, president.

I think three of my closest friends have been college presidents and deans, but there's a difference.

Every single one of them went into college administration for the express purpose of taking on this hysteria.

And they stood up and most of them found themselves in deep trouble

because they spoke out.

And so if you, they're like lawyers.

Administrators are like lawyers.

I remember my mother always said to me, I made fun of a lawyer.

She said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

There is nothing worse than a bad lawyer, but there is nothing more beautiful than a gifted, courageous lawyer.

And that's the way it is with administrators.

There's not very many of them, but every once in a while you bump into one.

And I don't know whether they have a suicide pact or what, but they will speak out.

And there's some very good college presidents that have done that.

And

so.

Yeah, so

let's move forward to one thing that I think might be a little bit of a digression, but it does have to do with this administration and that case where they finally revealed all of these people that were bribing administrators to get their kids into

good colleges.

And that was called that varsity blues investigation.

Gosh, yeah, they did.

They found that the guy, one of the guys that was, oh, go ahead.

Well, it was at Stanford, too, with the sailing coach.

It was all over the place.

They were fabricating sports credentials and they were claiming disabilities and they were helping them cheat on entrance exams.

It's just,

I think they didn't they sentence the USC's soccer coach for like six years.

I mean, uh, six months in,

I don't know, home confinement or something.

Yeah, they had some of them got

a day or two in jail as well.

And it was always water polo or,

you know, it was some minor sport.

I don't want to say they're minor, but they were not baseball, football, basketball to the same degree.

In other words, people would,

I guess, if I'm a cynic, it means that they didn't really, the universities really didn't watch very carefully who was a brilliant lacrosse player or a sailor or you name it, because they let a lot of people into those sports on the idea that they were so gifted that their bad grades and test scores didn't matter.

And then, of course,

a lot of them had people take the SAT for them.

And what was the whole lesson when it was all said and done?

It was a lot of wealthy people had mediocre kids who didn't try very hard, but their parents had convinced them that they needed to be branded like a cow with Stanford or USC or whatever the particular university was.

They needed that brand.

They needed that brand.

They didn't care whether they were educated.

They didn't care how they got in.

They just needed that brand.

They wanted either one of two things.

They wanted to say,

I am applying to Goldman Sachs and I have a BA from Stanford.

Or they wanted to be at a cocktail party or in the Upper West Side or somewhere and say, oh, you know, I'm the third person to my family to be at Harvard or Yale.

So it was either the prestige or the career trajectory or both, but it wasn't that they wanted their child to go to a particular university so they'd get an outstanding liberal arts education, trust me.

Yeah, no, because there's lots of other universities to be able to do.

Cheaper.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Absolutely.

All right, Victor, let's go ahead and take our last break here and come right back and we'll talk about curriculum and what might be good curriculum and what is definitely not a good curriculum so we'll be right back

we're back and victor i wanted to talk about curriculum because we always sort of do but maybe we can give a new perspective on this um

i i think what What I want to talk about is that, you know, we've left the humanist empiricist curriculum, which is what would be nice for this curriculum that is limited by diversity, equity, and inclusion and critical race theory, which is where our administrators are becoming encroaching, which we just talked about.

And I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about what might be a good approach to returning to a humanist empirical education?

Well, the idea of the university was not the personal career trajectory, it was the public good.

So

it was predicated on two concepts that everybody would have opportunity through the GI Bill or Pell Grants to go to a four-year college where they would have exposure to ideas and they would

be given an

inductive education.

So they would read Dante, they would read Machiavelli, they would read Hobbes, they'd read Homer, they would take a class in the history of science, the basics of mathematical theory, they would take a course on the great artists of the Renaissance or,

you know, cross-cultural studies in India and China.

They do all of that.

And the teacher was, the professor was not interested in what their point of view was politically.

And that changed in the 60s.

They said, because of Vietnam, the draft, it was the idea, well,

society has you, corporation has you, the government has you, your right-wing country has you for the rest of your life, but we faculty only have you for four years.

So we're going to balance their prejudice with our prejudice.

And they politicized and weaponized the faculty and made it deductive, the curriculum.

So that's where we are.

And it's not for the public good.

Nobody in that university system now believes they're turning out young people who are disinterested,

educated, knowledgeable, and empirical.

No, they're turning out people who are ignorant and arrogant and committed to a particular left-wing jihad.

That's what they're doing.

And they know it.

And so.

It's time, I think, for the United States to look very carefully at higher education.

And I think you could stop it really quick with, I don't know, eight or nine very easy things you could do.

You could, number one, say, if, okay, you want to play this game, then your endowment is now not tax-free.

So we want everybody to give endowments to these big private universities, Princeton, Duke, but you're not going to get a tax write-off at our expense.

Number two, there's going to be no more federal loans.

So we want you to issue federal loans, but they're coming from your endowment.

So if Harvard's got $60 billion, you can guarantee student loans.

And if they default, then you're going to pay for it.

Not us, not some guy in a forklift in Tacoma, Washington.

And that would, I think, make people say, oh, wow.

The more we charge, the more likely they're going to default.

So let's try to get them out in four rather than six years.

Let's make sure that half don't drop out, but we get 90% finish.

Let's give them real courses and let's fire all these administrators so that we can have lower tuition and be more competitive against the other college.

And when we don't get these bloated loans,

then why not give, I said that before, anybody that has a master's degree in an academic subject, let them teach in K through 12.

They don't need a credential.

Don't even fight the schools of education.

Give them a choice.

Just say, you're right, schools of education.

Your methodology is a good theory and we'll let anybody who wants to go to your school get a credential.

But on the other hand, we'd like to think think that you would like a person with a MA in anthropology or psychology or English or history to be able to teach too.

And you would see the biggest mass exodus from that brainwashing school of education you can imagine.

And if you just said to people, well, you take an SAT, why do people take an ACT or SAT?

It's predicated.

It was a very good idea.

It was predicated on the idea that

people were prejudiced against high school.

So if you were from Fowler, California, and you had a straight A, they were convinced that was not the same thing from the Dalton School up in New York, right?

So they were going to equalize it by taking a standardized test.

It wasn't quite equalizing because a person from the Dalton School got prepped that you didn't get it Fowler High School.

But nevertheless, it was meritocratic.

So why don't we do it on that back end?

Just say, you know what, whether you went to Hillsdale or you went to Fresno State or you went to Yale, you're all going to get that BA.

You've got to take a SAT on the way out and you've got to get a minimum math and verbal.

We're not going to certify, just like we have to take the bar when you leave law school.

And you know what?

That would put the fear of God in those places because they know they have a deep suspicion that most of their students would score lower after being in four years in college than when they entered.

I think the college is not as competitive as their high school.

And that would be a big help as well.

You should get tenure and make it revolving contracts of one to five years.

And if they don't fulfill the requirements or what you adjudicated, and then see you.

So there's a lot of things that you could do to reform the university.

You would have to say that any university that receives any federal funds has to follow the Constitution.

And if it's found

that they don't allow free speech and they consistently shout down speakers and people are attacked when they visit their their campuses or they racially segregate in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they racially segregate their graduations, their dorms, their safe spaces, then they should have all of their federal funds cut off.

It would be very easy to do.

I don't know why Trump didn't do that when he had the House and Senate.

I do know why he was on Organize and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, I think, were committed to see him fail.

But nevertheless, they could have had a very easy reform reform package in higher education that would have really helped the country and made the higher institutions furious.

Yeah.

But, you know, you're saying all this, and I'm thinking, well, okay,

but the DEI and the critical race theory people are all deeply, deeply embedded in these places.

I know people that work

in California, at the community colleges and at the CSUs.

And it's not just the administrators and then then all the faculty are against it.

Most of the faculty are on board with those things.

And they don't care if it's being forced and it's limiting free speech.

That's what they say.

But I don't think they enjoy being told how to make a syllabus or that they have to sign a diversity loyalty oath.

They say, I know they're all left is what you're saying, but I don't know what they really, because we're in a reign of terror right now.

We don't know what anybody thinks, because if you say what you think, you're going to be fired and your life's going to be ruined.

These are all coming from supposedly liberal people.

So I don't think we know exactly what people feel, but I do think that

after George Floyd in particular, but in general before that, when you started to have this idea of first a proportional representation by race,

and to a lesser extent, gender, and then you force multiplied it into reparatory admissions so that you took a person's demographic, and let's say 12% African-American, you decided to go up to 16% or 15%.

And if it was Latino, it was 8% or 9% of the population, you went up to 10% or 12%.

And you kind of let alone Asians because you're going to get sued because they are, in the university's term, overrepresented.

And they would be 50%

if it was purely meritocratic.

So then you went after the white male and you cut back his 33%

portion of the admissions.

I'm talking about the elite school.

And to a lesser extent, all of them, and then you cut him back.

Okay, when you do all that social engineering, then it's predicated on the fact that racism explains why there were not as many black students as 12% of the population, or maybe what you need to make up for past racism, which is now 16%.

Is that true?

If it is true, it happened, I think, at age five.

So, my point is: if you really were wanting to have Black students in perfect sync with

their demographic, or you would want them to be 16% to make up for past years of oppression, then you should have had a Marshall Plan where you went into the inner city, so to speak, and you had private charter schools and academies, uniforms, mandatory Latin, mandatory physics, and just

gave them the most rigorous education possible.

So by the time they got to college, they would be as prepared or better prepared than other students.

But they didn't do that, did they?

And so now what happens is you're in an Orwellian situation that if a faculty member decides to grade

according to a blind standard, and if African-American students, to take one group, it could be others, they don't perform

according to the standard that represents their percentage.

In other words, 25 of them get D's or C's, 25%,

and that's higher than their representation, then that person is targeted as a racist.

Doesn't matter what the reason is.

And this is called systemic racism because the whole system then was racist because they created a reading list, they created a methodology of material presentation, they created a system of grading that was inherently racist, and only that can explain why an inordinate amount of African-American students didn't do as well as Asian students.

It doesn't have anything to do with two parents, doesn't have anything to do with the Asian work ethic, doesn't have anything to do with the tiger mom and helicopter parents, doesn't have to do with any of these so-called stereotypes about the Asian community.

It just has to do with racism.

And that's what everybody knows.

So

they make the necessary adjustments because they don't want to lose their job.

What are the necessary adjustments, Sammy?

They

don't say anything that they, you know, they think about those issues at all.

And they just smile and pretend like they are going along with it.

And they change their grades because they don't follow a blind meritocratic standard, do they?

Because they look at the prayer and they say, these people,

are these people who are getting decencies black?

If they are, I'm in trouble and I'm not going to die on the altar of standards.

And that's happening throughout our society.

And it could be easily addressed if we wanted to go through 10 rough years of acrimony and strife and say, you know what?

When we're out of this 10 years, the African-American community on its own volition will be scoring on test scores just as well as any other group because they're going to get a superb K through 12 education.

And I tried to do it at Cal State.

I went up there in 1984

and I looked around and I saw that the increasing demographic of the Cal State University system in the Central Valley was Hispanic and Southeast Asian, and there were vanishing numbers of white students.

and to a lesser extent black.

And I thought, I'm teaching Greek and Latin and classical history and literature and translation and humanities.

And we assembled a team where we said, we're going to be more rigorous than the other disciplines.

And we're going to have an MA program in which they can spend an extra year, and that will be comparable to a BA at the Ivory League.

And over 20 years, we placed over 150 students at law schools, business schools, graduate schools, at the top universities.

And anytime a white male came to me, usually a child of a grandchild of the Oklahoma diaspora that Steinbeck wrote about in the Central Valley, and and said, well, all the students are Mexican and American and Asian and they're women and they're all getting into these great schools.

What happens to me?

And I'd always say to them, let's double down.

Let me give you an independent study.

Let me be your friend.

Let me find a way to accentuate some.

And I didn't even like saying accentuate your working class roots because why?

Well, that's not fair to a very wealthy kid.

But I had to work with the tools I had.

And after 20 years,

we had a pretty good classics department that had a good name throughout the United States.

And we offered philology, Greek and Latin, Greek, Latin composition.

I'd give independent studies and archaeology, epigraphy.

But the point I was trying to do was to give an intense education, like a prep school.

And then maybe at the MA level, making that equivalent to a BA at Williams or Kenyon or Oberlin or something.

In those days, now those those places don't have very high standards.

But the point I'm making again is it was a holistic effort.

So after, you know, when I turned 50, I said,

no more

eight in the morning till eight at night, you know, five days a week.

It's not going to happen anymore.

And I retired burned out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it seems to me then, because I'm not very optimistic.

I just feel like, boy, that wokeism is so deep beyond the particular college into the administrations at the state level, et cetera.

And all the things that, in fact, I read

for this talk with you don't make me optimistic at all.

It's based on a lie, though.

I mean, anything that's based on a lie, that's why communism failed in the Soviet Union.

It was based on a lie.

That's why Mao had to kill 70 million people.

It's based on a lie.

That's why Hitler failed.

It was based on a lie.

So what's the lie?

The lie of wokeism is that anything that is perceived is inequality, anything, must be attributed to deliberate human agency.

And it's the duty of the state to find out who is the culpable oppressor or victimizer and what remedies can be given to the oppressed and the victimized to find parity.

And that's not the way the world works, unfortunately.

It should be: we're going to give everybody an equal opportunity.

And we understand that people have not had an equal opportunity from birth.

So we will tutor people, we'll give them extra chances, but we're not going to discriminate against people and punish some and punish others.

We're just not going to do it.

We are going to urge the people who tend to be the most successful, and we do that with the most giving country in the world, to be philanthropic.

Give your money, give your time to people less privileged than you.

And they do it all the time.

Less so now.

They tend to go for elite green projects or 419 million for Mark Zuckerberg to warp an election.

But anyway, that's what woke is.

It's a bankrupt ideology that the state has the power and the moral superiority to adjudicate every instance of inequality as somebody else's fault.

And they're going to punish that person and help the person who's the victim.

You know, as we're getting close to the end of this,

your talk today did make me a little bit optimistic in the sense that it seems like, well, okay, if we've got a president in an administration that would do what you said to the Department of Education and the expectations of federal funds.

And then if we had some sort of models for better colleges, universities, K through 12.

And I don't see those modeled.

We do.

Go ahead.

I'm sitting at one right now.

If I walk tomorrow into the Hillsdale bookstore, you know what I'm going to, first thing I'm going to notice,

there is not one class with a hyphen studies.

There's no gender studies.

There's no peace studies.

There's no leisure studies.

There's no black studies.

There's no conflict and resolution studies.

There's no green studies.

there's no environmental studies, there are basic history, philosophy, science.

So in other words, they're inductive courses.

They're not there to persuade somebody of a pre-existing agenda.

And then when I meet the faculty, I'm not going to be told about, I mean, they're conservative, but they're not going to tell me,

you know, I'm on an agenda for this or I'm on an agenda for that, or they're not going to pontificate in their courses.

Anybody who's for abortion, I don't want to, you know, I mean, they don't politicize the course.

And then I'm going to see students and the students are,

they have an honor code.

And if I have a bicycle and I can ride again, I'm not going to lock it.

I'm just going to leave it right near the campus.

I've done that for

15 years.

20, it's 18 years.

I never lost a single bicycle.

If I see people, they're going to treat,

it's a holistic, a holistic process where

I'm not saying that people don't come that way.

They come from traditional families, but when you meet the Hillsdale students, there's a sense that it's a holistic education.

They have a gun range that people can go to.

They have an obstacle course they can go to.

The dorms are starting to have physical fitness so they can have mind and body excellence.

So when you meet them, they're polite.

They remind me of what

I met when I was in grammar school back in the 60s, early 60s.

People are polite.

They're professional.

The faculty are.

I'm not saying they're all that way, but more so than anywhere else I've taught.

And they do this in a very

backwater place.

Hillsdale, Michigan is not on the coast.

It doesn't have...

you know, Stanford's weather.

It doesn't have Harvard's money.

It doesn't have Yale's,

connection between New York and Washington.

It's not USC or UCLA right near Hollywood.

It's out in the middle of nowhere.

And it's very successful.

And the students are...

Each year they get more and more competitive.

I think that's their biggest problem is finding how a little school of, I don't know, 900 or 1,000 can accommodate 1,600, 1,800, 2,000, whether they are going to expand it, whether they will lose their traditional brand if they do.

Their problem is success.

It's not failure.

Yeah, well, that's good to hear.

Yeah, it's how do we change the United States by offering this as a model?

And in the process of offering this as a model, will we be challenged because

the stakes are so high and the level of magnitude that we'd have to increase to would we become imperial rather than republic.

You know what I'm saying?

but if everybody followed their charter, I think we would get back to the way the university used to be.

And

it's just

well, you're sitting on a little window into optimism, I guess.

I don't know.

I'm not sitting on the window.

I'm looking it out of the window.

That's true.

I'm looking out at a rainstorm, but

I'm not a rah-rah propagandist for Hillsdale, but I will say that,

you know, I'm not for any college, but what they do and where they came from, especially under their president, who's been taking a lot of heat,

Larry Arndt, lately, but under his leadership, if every aspect of the college, whether it's faculty size or compensation or teaching loads, or student achievement post-Hillsdale, or the physical infrastructure of the campus or the endowment.

It's just progressed geometrically, not arithmetically.

It's just amazing.

Since I came here in 2004, I wouldn't recognize the place.

Not that it was bad then, it was great.

But now it's,

and I say that as someone who's done a lot of guest teaching.

And I would say that a Hillsdale student is

more than competitive with a Harvard, Yale, Princeton student as far as what, but you take a senior at Hillsdale in government or history.

I would have them,

they could compete in a debate with a Stanford, Berkeley,

Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Michigan, any one of those places and beat them in a debate about historical knowledge.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, that is a little window into the

possible

world where we won't compromise the education and futures of our children, I guess.

It's a little island in a sea of misery.

I don't know how it's all going to work out.

But one thing is that college professors used to be highly esteemed.

You know what I mean?

And when you look at these polls and all these topics we've talked about the last three months, just to conclude, the military only has 45%

of the American people express great confidence in it.

And when you look at the people who express confidence and faculty, it's gone way, way down.

And

it's sad, but the media, the Pentagon, higher education, Hollywood, all

people used to like Hollywood.

They used to think that, you know, Bill Holden and Vivian Lee and,

you know, Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracy, all those people were great.

Now they don't.

So same thing with music.

And so what's the common denominator?

Raw politicalization and weaponization and demonization and using art and knowledge for political purposes and power and not, and then deviating from a traditional mission.

And whether it's Lloyd Austin lecturing about white rage and how he's going to ferret it out, or whether it's some multi-billionaire actor giving people a lecture while he jets off in his private jet about the environment, you know, or whether it's a college president who talks about the superior diversity morality on campus, why his campus is selling admissions to the highest bidder to get in,

whether they're fake lacrosse players or fake sailors.

That's why they've lost the esteem and the respect and the confidence of the nation.

But hopefully we'll be, well, they'll get it back.

I'm just hoping.

I'm sorry.

I have to end optimism.

Well, you said I was you were optimism and I wanted to crush your optimism.

So I said, what?

A blank optimism.

I'm going to take Sammy's little blue sky and put a big thundercloud in it to you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But the optimism was only the view of Hillsdale.

I know.

The rest of it looks

quite bleak to all of us.

What did Bormore say when he was dying to Aragorn, both in the book and in the movie, when he says,

I think Aragorn says something like, Don't worry,

I am going to Gondor.

And Boromor says, I can't see it.

I just can't see it, meaning he can't see how it's going to happen.

And he died.

And I feel like Boromor right now.

I can't share on you.

I can't see it.

I can't see it.

Speaking of movies, we have to end up with Theon.

Doesn't he get spiked when Theon and Game of Thrones goes out to get,

I don't know, spiked by the Dark Lord brand system.

Theon, you're a good man.

You're a good man.

You were a good man, I guess, or you are a good man.

Yeah, that's what we have to have that.

There's a lot of good men and women out there.

Yeah, there are.

All right, Victor.

All right, we're going to have to call it a day here.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to us.

Thank you.

And this is Victor Davis-Hanson and Sammy Link, and we're signing off.