The Age of Grievance - with Frank Bruni
Frank Bruni is a long time journalist, including more than 25 years with the New York Times. He is the author of four New York Times bestsellers. He is now also a full professor at Duke University, teaching at the school of public policy, while he continues to write his popular weekly newsletter and additional essays for the Times.
Two of Frank’s recent books are relevant to what we are watching play out right now on America’s college campuses. Eight years ago, he published “Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania”
And Frank’s most recent book, which was just published last week, is called “The Age of Grievance”
In our conversation and in his new book, Frank addresses the fact that Jews are being blamed for objecting to the 10/07 massacre of Jews. How did this happen? It didn’t come out of nowhere? How is it the college campuses have become the focus of this debate over here?
"The Age of Grievance" addresses the shocking upside down debate that erupted over here following 10/07, which we discuss in our conversation. We also try to understand how some universities are getting it right and others are getting it so wrong. Frank is uniquely positioned to have insights – from his perspective at the Times, on the front lines as a professor at a top American university, and as a bestselling author of a new book about grievance.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
FB: Given how illiberal some campuses have become, I think you really need to look under the hood. It is not difficult to tell, if you start looking at the course offerings, which schools are operating along a sort of single ideological tract and which schools are trying to do something different.
DS: It is 11:30 AM on Sunday, May 5th, here in New York City. It's 6:30 PM on the 5th in Israel. Frank Bruni is a long time journalist, including more than 25 years he's spent at The New York Times. He's the author of four New York Times bestsellers. He's also now a full professor at Duke University teaching at the School of Public Policy while he continues to write his popular weekly newsletter for the Times as well as additional essays for the Times. Two of Frank's recent books are extremely relevant to what we are watching right now play out on America's college campuses. Eight years ago, he published ‘Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania’. It was a book that, among other things, gave students and parents a new playbook for how to think about choosing a college and getting the most out of the university experience. Well, Frank now has some amendments to that playbook, in light of what we are watching play out on campuses today. We discuss that in this episode. In Frank's most recent book, which was just published last week, ‘The Age of Grievance’, which is about how, as Frank writes, and I quote here, “More and more Americans are convinced that they're losing because somebody else is winning. More and more tally their fights, measure their misfortune, and assign particular people responsibility for it. The blame game has become the country's most popular sport”, Frank writes. Well, one particular people being attacked today, or blamed, on U.S. college campuses, are Jewish students. And what are they being blamed for? Well, they're being blamed for objecting to the October 7th massacre of Jews. How did this happen on our campuses? And it's not just U.S. campuses. It's happening in the U.K., in Canada and elsewhere. And it didn't come out of nowhere. It's certainly not a flash in the pan. How is it that the university campuses have become the focus of this debate over here, outside of Israel? Frank's book addresses the shocking upside down debate that erupted over here following October 7th, and we talk about that in today's conversation. He's uniquely positioned to have insights from his perspective at The Times, on the front lines as a professor at a top American university, and as a best selling author of a new book about grievance. Frank Bruni, on the age of grievance. This is Call Me Back.
And I'm pleased to welcome to this podcast, for the first time, my longtime friend, Frank Bruni of Duke University, of The New York Times, and a bestselling author of a number of books. And we are now out with the new one called ‘The Age of Grievance’. Frank, great to see you.
FB: I'm delighted to be here.
DS: This really is The Age of Grievance for many reasons. One grievance I have had for the last few years is a result of a man named Zach Wilson, who has been our -
FB: Oh, we're on the New York Jets. We're on the New York Jets. That didn't take you long.
DS: Because my grievance is about to become your grievance. Because you're a Broncos fan.
FB: I know.
DS: And good old Zach Wilson, or shall we say young Zach Wilson, is headed to the Broncos. I can't think of actually anything more American than that, that not just me suffering in my grievance, but the joy, the sense of reward I get, psychological reward, when I get to take my grievance and turn it into your health.
FB: You know, I would understand that, Dan, if, uh, the Broncos had had a great number of seasons recently, but we've been suffering just like Jets fans. So why you would wish more misery upon us, I do not know.
DS: You've had a more recent Super Bowl win than we have.
FB: Well, I mean, everybody has. By about four or five decades. Pretty much every team in the NFL has.
DS: But I, but I just couldn't, when I saw the Zach Wilson news, my kids were like, have you told Frank? Have you told Frank? So, uh, anyways. All right, so Frank.
FB: God bless Eli and Asher.
DS: You have a number of perspectives, you come with a number of perspectives to not only the topic you wrote about, but this seemingly crazy moment many of us feel like we are living through. And a few weeks ago, I spoke at two campuses, as you know. I spoke at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on a Sunday, and then I flew to you, to Duke that evening and spoke, you and I did an event that the Students for Jewish Life and a few other departments or organizations co-sponsored at Duke the next day. Both events were on Israel, both talks. The conversation I did with you, you moderated, it was - no real problems. No protests. A few hundred people attended. There was no disruptions. You interviewed me. Some questions were tough. You know, you asked me some questions that pushed me. And you made it clear that I was not answering one of the questions. But it was perfectly constructive, and I think the students in attendance got something out of it. The day before, at the University of Michigan, I was doing an event with Naftali Bennett, the former Prime Minister of Israel, who, by the way, was the Prime Minister of perhaps the most pluralistic government in Israel's history and most pluralistic government we've seen in any democracy in the Western world. You had members, parties from the right, parties from the left. You had for the first time an Arab Muslim party in the government that was like a kingmaker in the, in the establishment, in the formation of the government. So Bennett and I are giving a talk. I'm interviewing him at Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan. The day of the event, they had to cancel the event. Because the security at the University of Michigan had determined that they could not properly staff the event and secure the event, given the protests that they had learned that had been planned. The ticketing system had been hacked, literally, so the majority of tickets were - had now been taken by people, made it clear that they were gonna prevent the event from happening. And it is a former Israeli Prime minister. So he still has security including Israeli security so that Threshold is higher for moving forward, which I guess is, in that sense, understandable. But the administration at the University of Michigan advised that the event be shut down. What ultimately was resolved was that the event would be publicly canceled, but then, quietly, to something like 75 or 80 Jewish students, as opposed to the few hundred that were supposed to attend the larger event, were told the same day, quietly - Bennett's gonna, and Senor are gonna speak at a different place, at a quote, undisclosed location. The event started at something like 4, 3:15. “We'll tell you where to go”, and “undisclosed location”, and “we'll live stream it from there to the broader community that wants to see it”. It's like the worst of all worlds because we're out of COVID and we're still telling students that they have to watch events - on their campus. Like we were right there in the middle of campus, but they had to watch it on a screen somewhere else and not be part of the conversation and not be part of the communal experience of attending a live event because of risk to, you know, security of those involved. And so, the whole notion, the term, “undisclosed location”.
FB: Very cloak and dagger.
DS: Right, the fact that on a college campus, you have public events, by people that want to stimulate conversation and educate and inform, have to do it in secret. For Jews, that is like, especially creepy, this idea that, like, sort of being driven underground. The students who put the event on, which is called, uh, FOG, F O G, Facts on the Ground, amazing group of kids and they were students. And I encourage, I'll, I'll link to their website in the show notes. 'Cause if people wanna support this organization, they should. The pressure these students are under is extraordinary. But again, as I told you when I was with you, the contrast between that experience there, there I am with the former Prime Minister of Israel. We're like running around campus. They're moving us here, moving us there, quietly get - you know, and then I come to Duke and it's like, no problems, people are generally upbeat, you know, not everyone agrees, but disagreement doesn't devolve into shutting down events, taking over buildings, vandalism, incendiary language. And it was really day and night. So you are living this campus experience, but in the age of grievance, you write a lot about, I think the factors that have contributed to this environment that you may not be experiencing on Duke, but you're certainly witnessing at other campuses. How do you explain what's going on?
FB: Well, in terms of what happened to you at Michigan versus at Duke, right? Every, uh, and this is something that gets lost a little bit in the coverage of campus protests. Coverage which is necessary. These campus protests are very concerning. Every campus’ culture is a little bit different. And Duke's culture is different, I think, from Michigan's and a lot of other schools. It's different from UNC, just down the road. Much as I interviewed you on stage at Duke, in January, I interviewed Bari Weiss, whom we both know well. I met Bari through you. I interviewed her at UNC, and we did have protesters.
DS: And UNC's been big in the news this last -
FB: There are encampments, and I think there have been arrests at UNC, too, not at Duke. Every school is different, and Duke, you know, being a sports school, Duke being a school that the students who can get into a Duke or a Brown, or a Duke and a Harvard, our acceptance rate is down to 6%. They choose Duke because they are looking for a different kind of experience. There's the whole romance of the Southern University. There's the big sports culture at Duke. That is a less politically agitated student as a broad generalization, than you're going to get at Michigan or even then you're going to get at UNC. So that's one of the differences. The other difference, and I'm speaking to what I could see, I didn't help organize your event, and this is a kind of sad thing to say, but I think the people who put on your event were very smart and careful.
DS: You mean the event at Duke?
FB: At Duke. I did not see that event on campus wide calendars. I did not see posters for that event all over the place. That event, I think, was publicized very well to the community that would be most interested in it. Certainly students know about it. I have several Jewish students in the class I just taught called ‘The Age of Grievance’ that just concluded who went to the event. I didn't see them there, but they told me later, “Hey, you know, we're really glad you did that. Thank you.” So word got around enough that you had a packed house and I think a very meaningful event. But I think if you went back and talked to the organizers, you would find that they were very careful about the way in which they put the word out. Now that's really sad and concerning because you shouldn't have to be that careful, but that's one of the reasons I think for the difference.
DS: And the one thing that is true for Michigan and Duke and all these schools more or less, most of them, they're in the news today, at least among the more elite schools, is the one thing they all have in common, or most of them have in common, is these minuscule, extraordinarily low admission rates. And they take great pride, as you chronicled in your book, ‘Where You Will Go Is Not Who You Will Be’, like, they go out of their way to say, “We only allow, we only accept, you know, 0.0001 -” I mean, I'm exaggerating, but this one's -
FB: You're barely exaggerating, which is what's crazy.
DS: And so they're in this competition to show how exclusive they are, and how the best and the brightest are all applying to their school, and even the best and the brightest aren't getting in because they're not the best and the brightest enough, and that it's kind of sickening actually to watch because it says so much about education in this country and access to education. But what I'm struck by when I think about those numbers, and I watch events in the last couple weeks, is these schools can get whoever they want. And at least the students who were dominating the, campuses and the campus discussion these past few weeks all are of a certain kind of ‘social justice activist’ category.
FB: Yeah, social justice warriors.
DS: Yeah, and is it the school's fault? Are the college admissions department's been actually, you know, kind of playing with the dials to get a certain kind of student - and they got that kind of student and it turns out that student has literally now been blown up in the faces of the school administrators…
FB: I'm not in the admissions offices, so I don't have a definitive answer to that. I think it is possible, uh, that there's a little bit of a prejudice in that direction because my guess is like most of the adults that work on college campuses that work in elite education, my guess is most of the admissions officers lean left a little bit or quite a lot. But I think what's really going on is different. When you're talking about 6 percent acceptance rate schools like Duke or like Harvard or like Yale, a disproportionate share of their students come from very elite secondary schools, either elite public secondary schools, or in many cases, elite private secondary schools.
DS: So the high schools, they elite high schools.
FB: I think the question you need to ask is, what is being taught at those high schools? We've read stories here, you and I are sitting in New York City, we've read stories that almost sound like satire about some of the very, very kind of far, far left progressive stuff that students are not just taught, but sort of subjected to day after day after day. I think it may be extreme in New York, but I think it's emblematic of elite secondary school education around the country and the kinds of students who are well enough prepared and have the sorts of resumes that can get them into a Duke or a Harvard or a Yale or an MIT. There are students who disproportionately come from these schools. And I think what we need to ask is, what are these students being taught at those schools? Are those schools sending up to the college level a disproportionate share of social justice warriors because they are trying to create social justice warriors? It's a question. I don't have the answer, but I think it's an important question.
DS: What’s interesting is, I'm now hearing from more and more employers that they have historically relied on these elite colleges, these universities, to do the first screen of their job applicants. So if you're a major American corporation or investment firm or whatever, you rely on a handful of elite universities to kind of do your first cut, do your first screen, because you figure, well, if it made it through Columbia, if you're McKenzie, if you’re Boston Consulting Group, and you say well if this applicant made it through Columbia University, they've already done effectively the first round of interviews for us. So there it's almost like these universities are their HR departments. They're like outsourcing HR. And in many respects, what you're saying is, some of these for these universities outsourcing may be too strong a word, but they're relying also for the first screen of application on, well, this school's an elite high school. So, but now some of these employers, you're starting to see this in the press are saying, Whoa, I had really relied on the vetting and the credentialing that comes from these elite universities to help me with my HR. And now I can't. And I'm going to look, I'm going to expand the schools I look at, I'm going to diversify. And where you really saw this play out in recent weeks is, I think 28 or 30, it was in the news, 28 or 30 Google employees, I don't know if you saw this, they demanded that Google stop doing business with Israel. And they tried to organize some walkout or some protest or something - and Google fired them. They're like, this is not a democracy. You're employees of our company. You can express concern about some issue, but you don't get to, like, take action based on our business decisions. And if what you're saying is true, it's starting at the high schools, then it's being advanced at the colleges, and then it winds up in companies. So, it's like this whole stream and each one of these entities is relying on the entity that sent the person forward to do the first screen and the screening may not be good or reliable. But you've also said, there is some issue with the professors, that in many respects, students are kind of following the signals of professors. So can you talk a little bit about that?
FB: Well, I mean, a lot has been, I mean, this has been chronicled and established with survey data, et cetera. When you're looking at higher ed, and I think particularly when you're looking at elite higher ed, and I'm talking here about the humanities, not the STEM fields. It's very different when you get over to the medical side of things, et cetera. But the overwhelming majority of faculty members are quite progressive. Right? That's just, that's their politics. It is not an ideologically diverse crew of people on most faculties. I think students fundamentally want to please their professors. And this isn't out of some sort of like, goodness of heart necessarily. They want an A. Right? I would not go so far as to say, I think my fellow faculty members are trying to indoctrinate students. That's a verb that has a lot of currency these days, and I think it is overwrought. It's a verb of the age of grievance, where we exaggerate just about everything. But I don't think enough faculty members are taking a pause and taking the opportunity - something that I do, and I'm not congratulating myself, I just think it is important. I tell my students in any class in which it's appropriate, which is most classes, the very first session, I say, I think the more ideologically diverse our class discussions, the better our education's going to be.
DS: You say that at the front end of the class?
FB: I absolutely do. And I say, I welcome all viewpoints here except for hateful ones. I mean, I send the message, don't come in here, listen, I don't have any white supremacist students. I mean, I don't have any, I don't have any Charlottesville marchers, you know, students. And if I did, I would shut them down. So, I mean, but I say, you know, shy of hateful - you know, shamelessly disrespectful language - I welcome, I want you to say what's on your mind. I welcome all viewpoints. And I am expecting all of you to do the same and to be open to wherever discussion goes. Those students want to please me, not because they like me particularly. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. I hope they do. They want an A. You can turn that desire in any direction you want. And I think there is not just an opportunity here, but a mandate for more faculty to send the signal that I am not looking for you to agree with me on everything. I'm not looking for you to follow my political ideological lead to the extent you can figure out what it is. I'm looking for you to kind of interact in the most open minded, elastic, intellectually curious way. And I have not had a problem with students in my class. I have brought in very conservative people. I taught an opinion writing class, Dan, where because I wanted them to hear from brilliant writers of different kinds and I wanted them to hear from opinion writers across the spectrum, I brought in Kevin Williamson, who's quite conservative. He and I have a very respectful email relationship, although I am absolutely left of center and he's absolutely right of center. And he has written some stuff, for example, on abortion.
DS: Yeah, that cost him, he cost him his job at the Atlantic.
FB: It did. And I alerted my students to it, not as a trigger warning, I said, you're going to research Kevin Williamson and come to class with intelligent questions for him as I ask you to do of everyone who comes in. You know, Maureen Dowd, Bret Stephens, on and on. And I said, you're going to come across some stuff that you're going to find very upsetting and you're going to disagree with him. You know what? Ask him about it. Ask him about it. It's fair game. I chafed it at that stuff when I read it. But it didn't make me want to shut down Kevin Williamson and never hear from him again. And he's coming in here because as you read him, if you read him in an open minded way, while you're disagreeing with him, you're going to agree that he's a really terrific prose stylist. And I'm trying to teach you how to be better writers. Anyway, I don't know, maybe some students were unhappy with that. They didn't say it to me. I wasn't canceled. They didn't go on social media.
DS: So there were no complaints filed? I mean, Jonathan Haidt talks about this because he was one of the early signalers. He saw this early, what was going on, what you're describing, and the bad version of what you're describing. And he said he was teaching some class and suddenly all the students started, like, organizing complaints against him because there was no real direct or indirect pushback.
FB: Well, I mean, there again, NYU's campus culture is probably a lot different from Duke's. I'm probably the beneficiary of a very, of a much kind of more tempered campus climate and a campus culture at Duke. But no, I mean, maybe, maybe my complaints are yet to come. I've taught twice now, a course called The Age of Grievance that parallels my book. The first time because I was working on the book and I thought it'd be a great way to work out some of these ideas. The second time, because I, effectively finished the book, and even though it wasn't coming out until the end of the semester, the semester ended a week or two ago, the book came out just a couple days ago. I thought, it's basically a syllabus, I know the material better now, and I would occasionally photocopy pages from the advanced copy, the galley of the book, and share them with students and say, just don't send this out. I mean, but you've looked at the book. The book takes serious issue with actors on the right and with actors on the left, and I did not hide that from them. And we had discussions about that, and there were 28 students in that class. And so far, no complaints and the semester’s ended. So there would have been - my guess is, some of them didn't like some of what they heard. And some of what protected me was this. We want to please the professor, not alienate him. But I also think some of it was, I was really clear from the beginning, I want you to disagree with me. I would have students who would argue with me during the class, not necessarily about ideological differences, but about the interpretation of material. And at the beginning of the semester, they would be, I hope you don't mind, but is it okay if I disagree with you? And I'm like, not only is it okay, it's great. Bring it on. You know, and we had a running joke in the class that when, I don't want to give names, but, I'm going to make up fake names, that when Matt raised his hand or when, Lionel raised his hand - I'm like, okay, what are you disagreeing with today? Like, what's your counter argument today? And it worked. And I think it can work in more classrooms, and I think it can work in a way that will lead us to healthier campus cultures, but faculty need to take the lead.
DS: October 7th, you were teaching that day, or teaching immediately after, 7th was a Saturday, so October 9th, I guess. Can you talk a little bit about what that was like and how you and your students unpacked this trauma?
FB: Yeah, no, I'm glad you asked that because I want to share what happened in one class because I think it explains some of what we've seen, but it also, I think, illuminates that this situation, the students we're seeing in the news right now are not the norm, and there's a more complicated, nuanced situation out there, at least at Duke University. I was teaching two classes, and one of them was a first year seminar. I volunteered to teach it because I wanted to teach first year students and hadn't had the opportunity yet. And it was a course basically on media coverage of things. So when October 7th happened, it was logical for us to look, for example, at some of the kind of fake videos that happened, on and on and on. And I believe in that class, if memory serves me and if my knowledge of the students is what I thought it was, uh, it was a class of about 15, 14 students, and I think three of them were Jewish, maybe four, right, and were affected, obviously, in a very different way. Not obviously, but they were affected in a different way, in a much rawer way, by October 7th. Right afterwards, we started talking about it, and a couple of interesting things emerged that I think help us understand what's happening even now. For starters, they didn't understand why Israel was bombing Gaza, and they would say to me, I don't understand, their issue is with Hamas. Not with Gaza. And they were actually reading a bit of news, but obviously not reading deeply enough. And I said, you do realize that Hamas governs Gaza. “No!” Really, but hearing it like you could see
DS: Meaning they still thought Israel had never left Gaza. They were still in Gaza.
FB: They just didn't understand. They thought there was some Gaza government, perhaps. And Hamas just happened to have some cells there or something. But they didn't understand at that point in time that if you were trying to stamp out Hamas, if you were trying to retaliate in any way, Gaza was where you had to retaliate because it was governed by Hamas. They didn't understand. I said, You can't disentangle the two. So for starters, a lot of students out there don't have the kind of sophisticated understanding of the situation that they might. And that explains some of what they get lured into and some of what they believe. But what I also saw, and this was so distressing, in a way that transcends the Israel-Hamas war. A lot of them talked about the pressure they felt as people of their generation, as the social media generation, as soon as it happened, to post something, on TikTok, on Instagram, like that they were not being a kind of engaged citizen of the world, or citizen of their campus. They would look strange to their friends if they didn't post something. And often, what they decided to post was a matter of what they saw their friends posting. And by the way, I'm not saying this to malign them, or to belittle them, I don't know that I was any different when I was in college. I don't know that I would have had a sophisticated understanding of whatever would have been an analogous situation then. So they feel like they need to say something just so they seem to be kind of alert, aware, present. They really don't know what to say because they don't understand the situation well, and those who think they do are often misunderstanding it, as we just kind of established. So they look to what the people around them whom they most want to be friends with or are friends with or admire are doing, and they do the same thing. They repost those things. They mimic them. In the safe confines of that class, where they kind of knew they could say anything to me and where they felt at that point in the semester very kind of comfortable with their classmates, they admitted that they kind of didn't know if what they posted was right. But it was just the only thing they could think to post. And they also admitted, and give them great credit for this, and I hope going forward this class has made a good impression on them, they also admitted that they then started reading the news. In a manner that would tell them what they'd posted was right, that the initial reflexive position they'd taken was not a foolish one, but a righteous one. And so they did what all the adults in their lives, let's be frank, do as well. And they began to curate and filter information to affirm what they’d decided to believe. That is a cautionary tale that goes far, far beyond the Israel Hamas war. And that has everything to do with why we're living in an age of grievance.
DS: Yeah. To just immediately, they stuck their neck out, so now they need validation for that decision. That's chilling. A friend of mine, Jared Cohen, has made this point. He's worked at Google for a number of years. He worked in the U.S. government, and he's worked at the State Department, and he's now at Goldman Sachs, and he made this observation that before social media, and the pressures of social media, young people who wanted to become leaders had to develop leadership skills by building consensus, learning to work with people, that external relations, meaning their brand or whatever you want to call it, their external kind of social influence was the least important part of leadership development. It was about what you did with the kind of people you were trying to cultivate and build a movement behind you. And the problem now, the distorting effect, is, every young person, whenever an issue pops up, that's exactly what you just described. So their immediate mindset is always, how do I manage this like, external ecosystem? Will people notice if I didn't like a post that was sympathetic to quote, unquote, Palestinian suffering or, and that's exactly where they go. So it's all about like, gaming the system that they exist in, this sort of virtual ecosystem, that, that's not leadership, and that's not how you learn to be a leader, and those are the skills they develop.
FB: It's about making sure you maintain good standing in your tribe, right? And of course, the way social media works, once you've started to do that, the algorithms kick in, and even without your sort of awareness or consent, you're bombarded with things that tell you, yes, what you feel is exactly right, or actually, you might, should feel it a little bit more angrily even than you do.
I mean, social media just turns the temperature higher and higher and higher.
DS: It's, as Scott Galloway has pointed out, on, we had him on a few weeks ago, actually recorded the conversation when I was at Duke. He wasn't at Duke. And he made this point. And also that social media rewards conflict and rage. So the algorithms not only validate what you're thinking, but you really get positive feedback if you're like -
FB: Absolutely. I mean, you see that, I mean, I write for the New York Times, right? You see a version of that. It's actually exactly in sync with it. When you write a headline. A headline that signals that the opinion essay that's about to come is quite nuanced is going to get you fewer readers than a headline that makes it sound like you're about to take a rip roaring trip down one ideological tract. You know, and we have the ability in the media now when we do it at the times, and I think every media organization does it, everyone that's online. We have the ability to write several headlines, to send all of them out into the world during the first 15 minutes, half hour that an article or an opinion essay is posted, see which one gets the most click throughs. And then make sure that headline is on every version of it. So it's possible, let's say you were sitting there with two friends and you, all three of you clicked on something that had just gone up from the Opinion page that moment. It's possible three of you might all see different headlines, just for a brief window of time, until it's determined which one is the most likely to get clicks. Now, that's smart business, and in the abstract, there's nothing wrong with that. We shouldn't be publishing anything that we don't think is worthy of readers and that we don't want to kind of compel readers to read. But what happens is sometimes the headline that's doing that takes things in the most emphatic, least nuanced direction. So the business strategy isn't necessarily in sync with what would be the best for civic health.
DS: Okay. Speaking of civic health, or lack thereof.
FB: Lack thereof.
DS: Your book, ‘The Age of Grievance’, we sort of have jumped into it, but I do want to just, for purposes of our listeners, who I strongly encourage to order it, to order it today - I devoured it. So I guess, A, why'd you write the book? And what's interesting is, you and I had spoken while you were beginning the process of writing the book. I don't think you could have anticipated things would have gotten as toxic as they had gotten, but maybe you did, where your book is even more relevant when it was published, I think, than when you first started working on it.
FB: And I fear, and I really mean fear, that it will be even more relevant six months from now and 12 months from now. I worry that the trajectory is in a bad direction like that. I wrote the book because I don't think where we are is sustainable. And I think it's threatening our democracy. I think too many Americans, a perilous share of Americans, have no interest in understanding other people's points of view. And I think this is a phenomenon of the whole Western world right now, the Western democracies right now. I think they have no interest in finding common cause with people. I think they've lost all sense of the collective good as they kind of nurse their individual grudges. And I just see the nursing of individual grudges everywhere I look, and it has created this environment in which it's very hard for people to press the most urgent complaints, the most urgent causes, because they're mingled in the public conversation with much less legitimate gripes, with petty gripes, and it all becomes this kind of din, that just, you can't hear, to use the popular locution, the signal for the noise. And I wrote this book because I think we need to look really hard at that, we need to figure out how we got there, and I spend a lot of the book giving you my theories for why I think we've degenerated in this way. We need to look even more at what it's costing us. I mean, we have political violence, we have, um, congressional sclerosis, we have a just sort of kind of nasty tenor to American life. I mean. It invades every corner of American life. How many stories have you read in the last couple of years, and it's not just COVID, it has survived COVID, you know, about bedlam on an airplane, or in a departure terminal? I think Campbell, your wife, she sent me some videos of like, just total bedlam at the gate and then on a flight that she was on. I mean, it was savage. It was not civilized.
DS: Yeah, so, so, so for our listeners, Campbell was flying from the West Coast, I think, and there was an argument that broke out on the flight between a passenger and the flight attendant. It seemed, based on her videos, like a pretty innocuous argument that could have easily been resolved. But the flight attendant complained to her supervisor that she felt aggrieved, she felt threatened, and she refused to service the flight. And it's something like, they didn't have a backup flight, a requisite number, so they had to kick everyone off the plane until they figured out how they were going to properly staff the flight. This took hours and hours and the woman, the passenger who had started or gotten into this argument was like, this is not a big deal. We had a disagreement. Can we all get back on the plane and fly? And so she started freaking out like, this is outrageous. 200 plus people are now stuck in a, and it was nighttime. There was no way they're gonna get out that night. They started giving out hotel vouchers, then people started going crazy. Then the police showed up and Campbell did Chronicle, 'cause she literally was like watching. It just feels like this kind of scene wouldn't have happened ten years ago, five years, I don't know, pick a year, that this is of the moment.
FB: No, and we can't know the merits of the situation, we don't know what happened to that flight attendant, right? But, it's impossible not to see that story as a metaphor. It's impossible not to see America as that grounded plane that can't take off because there's so much screeching in all directions.
DS: Okay, so one part of the book that I want to quote from, which is obviously very relevant to what I spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about, which is the chapter brilliantly titled ‘The Oppression Olympics’. And you write here in ‘The Oppression Olympics’, “there's sometimes even a cruelty to it”, and I'm quoting from the book, “evident in the way that many people on the left moved so quickly to condemn rather than console Israelis and their Jewish allies in the United States after October 7th, 2023. Yes”, you write, “the scope, intensity and duration of Israel's retaliation in Gaza could be deemed excessive, and demanded debate, but some protests of it reflected the moral logic of the oppression olympics: Israelis and Jews had more power and wealth than Palestinians and Muslims, and all empathy and solidarity should be meted out accordingly.” So, explain what the ‘Oppression Olympics’ are and then how even an event like October 7th becomes the ‘Oppression Olympics’ play out in a news event as it's unfolding.
FB: The ‘Oppression Olympics’ refers to this really toxic dynamic in American political debate and public life or American life right now in which you have various minorities and marginalized groups competing for the crown of most oppressed and most persecuted, and in which you have many too many conversations in which it is assumed that the more oppressed group, however that's judged, must have the correct position, that the sort of the morality lies with whatever their perspective is and what they are demanding or asking for, that kind of victimization equals virtue. But of course, victimization is sometimes in the eye of the beholder. There are many degrees of victimization. The idea that we can actually rank this stuff is just so absurd. For reasons we could spend the next hours talking about, it reduces people to categories, it has no nuance, it has no sense of history in an expansive way. But it is the way a lot of this is conducted, and what I saw happen after October 7th, and I think we all saw it, no matter what language we put to it, was in many precincts of the left, I don't know that this isn't the whole left, it might not even be most of the left, but in many of the kind of more flamboyant precincts of the left, you saw this instant: “We must be on Palestinians’ sides. We must be on Hamas’ side, even, which is that kind of slide from Palestinians to Hamas.
DS: No, these protests on campuses are, they're openly embracing Hamas. That's jarring. I'm as horrified about the suffering of innocent Palestinians as anyone, but you can't embrace Hamas.
FB: No, it's a crazy, it's a crazy, lazy and scary leap. Yeah. But part of what was going on was just what you read from the book, just what I said in the book. These are the people who, by our estimation, have less power, less wealth. They are thus more persecuted, more oppressed. Thus, we must take their side, and they must be more right than the other side. There are so many things that are interesting and concerning about that. For starters, do you remember why Israel came into existence? Do you understand the history that preceded it? And you're telling me that the people who are defending Israel and its right to existence, need to exist. Are you telling me that they don't know anything from oppression and marginalization? Well, then we've really failed you and in our, in your education because you haven't read much history, you know, that's just for starters. But also this notion that you can take one paradigm who has power, who has money, in some cases who's lighter skinned, and apply that in the service of moral judgments in every single set of circumstances, that's just not so. But we see that happening sometimes, and when it happens, I think it's a huge problem.
DS: And you write in the book, you describe some seminar you were in, where you first saw this sort of ranking or the pyramid.
FB: I was in a faculty development seminar. I think in this particular kind of seminar, or this seminar itself is taught widely, and it was, I forget whether the title of it or the, it was a multi week thing, was how to have an anti racist classroom, or whether it was just about kind of how to have a more race conscious classroom, whatever. And at one point we were all shown - and by the way, when I say we, I'm talking like Duke faculty and administrators. I'm not talking about, you know, first year students or whatever. We were shown this pyramid which represented most oppressed minorities to still oppressed but less oppressed. You know, at the top of the pyramid it said ‘black’. The next layer, I can't remember exactly how the layers went. I delineated in the book. But again, it was such a crude tool, you know, was there some truth to it? If we're just kind of putting everybody in a group and just talking in the broad strokes of groups. Yeah, there was some truth in it. But as it went down, you're like, how do you determine that this group has more advantages and privilege than that one just below, and the one just below is more oppressed? Like, what is your metric here? And by the way, why are we doing this? Like, here in America, a diverse democracy, where I think the message and the meaning of this country is that all of us can come together with our different skin tones, with our different ethnicities, with our different religious beliefs, and we can agree that the common project is more important than any one group or person getting everything he, she, or they want. Doesn't this send the message that skin color, that ethnicity, is destiny? In some of the discussions we have, I mean I'm gay, in some of the discussions we have about LGBTQ plus stuff, when we sort of define people solely in terms of whether they're an L, a G, a B, a T, aren't we sending the message that that is destiny? I think that message is flatly antithetical to the American project.
DS: You talk about the American project, other times you write about the American experiment. I actually love both those terms.
FB: I love experiment especially.
DS: Tell me why.
FB: I love it because one of the things I think we need to constantly remember, in part because we need to cut ourselves a break. You know, there's a lot - this country and young people in it, and I want to praise them because we're caricaturing them not in this conversation, but in general. This country, young people, one of the great things about, about all of that is how self critical we can be. We definitely have been and continue to be quite an arrogant country, but I think also what's special about America is how self critical we are. In recent years, in some classrooms, in some enclaves of American life, including in some precincts of the left, I think that self criticism goes - runs amuck. And there's an almost shame and hatred for America, because we haven't achieved the kind of equal opportunity that we're trying to because our journey toward a more perfect union is having a lot of very imperfect steps. We need to remind ourselves that what we're doing is hard. That's what makes it so meaningful. There is no precedent in history for a nation of this scale, for a democracy of this scale and this diversity, right? The fact that we've been as successful and healthy as we have been is something to bear in mind. And we need to bear in mind that there's a fragility to this too. That's why I like the word experiment. Because nobody has tried what we're trying. Not with this magnitude of diversity, not at this scale, and that's why that's a special opportunity. It's a really kind of special thing. We're doing, it's why I feel so good about being an American. But I just want us, as we beat up on the country, and I don't mean in terms of the age of grievance, I want to beat up on the country badly for that, but this is part of the age of grievance as we beat up on the country for our failings, let us never forget not just our triumphs, but that what we're doing is really, really hard. It is an experiment.
DS: Okay. Final question for you, Frank. Merging together this book, The Age of Grievance, and the book we talked about earlier, Where You Will Go, which is the book about, that you wrote about the state of the process of applying and experiencing the American college experience. You laid out in that other book, in the earlier book, your advice to parents and to students on how to think about selecting post-secondary institution for their education. I mean, when you wrote that book, I remember people were like, Oh, that's really interesting. I hadn't really, you know, it sort of was scratching the surface of a discussion that people knew was needed, but it wasn't for the first time given events of the last, really since October 7th, at least in my circles. But I don't think it's only my circles, because I think there are many non-Jews who are watching events play out at these elite campuses, and while they haven't spent much time thinking about Israel or caring about Israel or being critical of Israel, just Israel hasn't been part of their life, they're seeing what's happening as like a proxy for something fundamentally rotten or unhealthy at these institutions. And so for the first time, I'm literally hearing, I mean, I won't mention this person's name, but it's a friend that you and I have in common, who told me his daughter is applying to college and they literally like after October 7th, and he's not Jewish, and he just started crossing off the list. Nope, not that school. Okay, not going to be that school. Nope, nope. Now that school's off the list because of what he was watching happen. So my, my last question for you is merging that book about the college experience in the age of grievance, because while you taught a class in the age of grievance, which in many respects you could argue it's like an island in the sea of craziness, not a sea of craziness at Duke, but a sea of craziness just generally in higher education. Have you changed at all your advice to students or families on how to think about college?
FB: I think my advice would be a little bit different today. I mean, I haven't written anything that gives that advice. But one of the things I said in ‘Where you go is not who you will be’ is that I think you should choose colleges that are gonna make you uncomfortable, right? It was a different moment. We weren't seeing what we're seeing now. And my point then, and I wish I could take that tack right now and not feel like it was too fraught and a little bit too dangerous, but I think, my point then was too many students look for a college that is going to be a continuation and extrapolation of what they had at secondary school. And that is not what education is about. Education is about leaving your comfort zone, encountering new perspectives. It's about doing difficult things that test you, sometimes failing. Developing resilience as a result. And so my message then was, stop looking for the college that's going to have the most number of your friends from high school, the people who are most like your high school, and look for a college that's really going to challenge you in a way that is consistent with education. I think in the current context, that needs to be leavened a little bit. And I think given how supercharged some campuses have become, how illiberal some campuses have become, I think you really need to look under the hood. It is not difficult to tell, if you start looking at the course offerings, which schools are operating along a sort of single ideological tract, and which schools are trying to do something different. If you look at the course offerings at University of Chicago, they do not look the same as the course offerings at Harvard. And that is reflective of a different culture. And if your concern in this current moment is the illiberalism of some of these campuses, and the liberalism that in its current iteration has led to some horrific examples of anti semitism, I think you really need to try to see what is being encouraged in students on those campuses in terms of what courses are being offered? What are students majoring in, right? Are you seeing a lot of like, are these majors that are very, very sort of boutique perspectives from the left, super, super popular? Or are they just, you know, some students choose them, but many students choose something a little bit less target? I think you want to look at that stuff because you need to be in an environment. You can't, you can't move outside your comfort zone and be challenged and provoked and discover resilience, if you feel threatened, and if you feel unwelcome. And so for starters, you've got to find a place where the odds of feeling welcome, secure, and being able to kind of focus on studies. Where the odds for that are good.
DS: Alright Frank, thank you for this. The book is ‘The Age of Grievance’. We will post links to it in the show notes so people can order it today. And it's, like I said, I thought it was timely when you and I were, I remember we were on a walk when you first told me about it. This is several years ago. I, like I said, I didn't anticipate the maelstrom you'd be walking into, uh, for this book's rollout. But I hope everybody reads it because, um, it helps put a lot of what we're going through in perspective. So thank you.
FB: Thank you, Dan.
DS: That's our show for today. To keep up with Frank Bruni, you can find him on X at Frank Bruni, and you can also find him on Instagram at FrankBruni64. And we will post a link in the show notes to his new book, ‘The Age of Grievance’, which I highly recommend you order today. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.