The American College Crack-Up - with Niall Ferguson
In this decade we may finally experience a true crack-up in higher education. There have been comparable periods on American college campuses in the past (in the 1960s and 1980s, for example).
But our guest today, historian Niall Ferguson, believes what’s happening now is on a whole other level. Niall is doing something about it -- he’s starting a new university. Niall argues that parents -- who had enriching and intellectually diverse experiences when they went to college -- don’t fully appreciate that their own children will experience something completely different when they go off to university. Niall Ferguson has taught at Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and New York University. He’s authored 17 books. He’s currently at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University where he is the MIllbank Family Senior Fellow, and Managing Director of Greenmantle, a macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm.
Transcript
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[00:00:00] I'm old enough to remember a time when you, you went to university expecting greater freedom of speech and freedom of thought than anywhere else. But the exact opposite is now true. You will be able to speak more freely in your local diner than on the major campus nearest to you.
In this decade, we may experience a true crack up in higher education. There have been comparable crackups on American college campuses in the past, in the 1960s, for example, or the political correctness movement in the 1980s and early 90s. But our guest today, historian Niall Ferguson, believes what's happening now is on a whole other level.
I tend to agree. But Niall is doing something about it. He's starting a new university. Because Niall argues that parents who had [00:01:00] enriching and intellectually diverse experiences when they went to college don't fully appreciate the extent to which what their own children are about to experience. We'll talk about all of this with Niall in part two of our Call Me Back conversation with him.
Just to refresh from last week's episode, Niall has taught at Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, and NYU. He's authored 17 books. He's currently at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, where he is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow. And he's founder and CEO of Greenmantle, a geopolitical risk and applied history advisory firm.
We'll pick right up where we left off with Neil last week, so the conversation will open a little abruptly. Niall Ferguson and the Great American College Crackup. Let's get to it. This is Call Me Back.
I want to switch gears to the state. Universities in the United States, which is a topic you have been [00:02:00] quite not just prolific on but quite active on Including a new enterprise that you're backing which we'll talk about in a moment But I want to start by asking you on this topic. It's a big topic What do my friends who are fixated on getting their children into the best?
Universities in America, what are they missing about the current state of Universities in America not what they their own experience was when they went to college or their parents went to college Not even what may have been going on at universities 10 20 years ago But what what is going on now at American universities that people don't fully comprehend unless you're on the front lines It's certainly a mistake to make judgments based on One's own experience, whether it was in the, uh, 1980s, as my undergraduate, uh, days were, or in the 1990s, or even more recently than that.
Things have changed [00:03:00] very suddenly, for the worse, in the last five or six years. And you don't need to take it from me, just read The Coddling of the American Mind, by my good friends, uh, John Haight and Greg Lukianoff. Who run organizations, uh, uh, Heterodox Academy and, and FIRE, uh, respectively, dedicated to trying to uphold academic freedom and, uh, avoid the, the really serious deterioration in the atmosphere on campuses going even further.
So, first of all, Your own experience, parents, is irrelevant here. You need to look at what has happened in the last few years. And what has happened has been, uh, a rise of a highly liberal culture on campuses, which specializes in disinvitations, No platforming or de platforming of, of speakers, [00:04:00] informing on professors or students who, uh, transgress, uh, the speech rules of the progressive movement and I could go on, but the basic impact of all of these different Um, So tactics is to create an atmosphere of fear in which people are reluctant to speak their minds in the classroom or indeed on campus.
62 percent of undergraduates today in the United States are afraid to speak their minds on campus. Now, I'm old enough to remember a time when you went to university expecting greater freedom of speech and freedom of thought than anywhere else. But the exact opposite is now true. You will be able to speak more freely in your local diner than on, uh, the, the major campus nearest to you.
And I could give you so many cases that it would take up the rest of the podcast to illustrate the way all of this has, uh, [00:05:00] evolved. But, let's just, uh, look at the recent events at Yale Law School. The most prestigious law school in many ways in the country, which seemed to me symptomatic of something that's wrong not only with Yale, but with the Ivy Leagues, with the major universities generally.
What is interesting is that an apparently trivial event, an invitation to a party, is deemed by a combination of a few students and administrators to have some racist implication. The student is then called in and told to apologize. Uh, and the, the wording of the apology is presented to him essentially for signature.
So this is the confession you're supposed to sign. And the administrator's Make clear to him that if he doesn't, then it will have negative consequences for his career. That's the kind of thing that, uh, goes on, on a routine basis on American campuses, and it's a [00:06:00] very unholy alliance between a minority of students who have extremely radical views on everything from race to gender, Administrators who have proliferated, uh, in numbers throughout the system over the last, uh, 40 years, and broadly weak leadership, uh, at the highest level of, of the universities.
So this is the situation. It is, uh, it's not about the theories. I'm not saying that critical race theory is so dreadful that nobody should be allowed to study it. On the contrary, what I'm really saying is that the methods, the tactics used by the left on campuses, and I, when I say the left. Basically, everybody's on the left on campuses today.
There are hardly any conservatives. I'm talking about the far left, the radical, progressive, or woke left. The tactics they use, regardless of the theories they espouse, but the tactics they use are designed to intimidate. And they succeed in intimidating, so that not only students, but professors are fearful of [00:07:00] speaking openly, of dissenting openly from these very radical views.
That's the reality. And there really aren't exceptions to the trends that I'm describing. You might like to believe. That Chicago is different, because they have a clear code of, uh, free speech, uh, on the campus there. Which, interestingly, a relatively small number of universities have adopted. But Robert Zimmer's very clear statement about academic freedom and free speech on campus, that exists and is, is, is spelt out to students when they arrive at Chicago.
But if you talk to people who are there and say, well, is, is it actually a, a, an atmosphere where you can speak freely? They'll say, no, not really. These, these guarantees in practice, you have the same atmosphere of what I call it kind of totalitarianism light when you're wondering, you know, who's going to denounce you to whom and when you're going to be subjected to an investigation, that whole culture exists everywhere, even in [00:08:00] Chicago, you have written about.
What universities were founded to be you you've traced it all the back way back to like the 11th century Oxford Bologna like looking back at the very earliest universities that basically hewed to a certain culture for most of their existence which was to provide some protection from the craziness of daily life so people could really think and debate and disagree and You know work out their ideas and worldviews I don't want to conjure up a romantic golden age because universities have, throughout a millennium of their existence, been subject to the kind of strange pathologies that we've just talked about.
It's not the first time in history that a university culture has become dogmatic, intolerant of heterodoxy. We've seen this before, [00:09:00] but universities are important, and the reason they're important, and the reason that they exist today, uh, as they, uh, began to exist, uh, a thousand years ago, is that you need institutions for intergenerational transfer of knowledge and wisdom, uh, you need institutions that can educate your elite, uh, and, and this can only really be done in a rather special Uh, an artificial, uh, setting in which the, the, the teachers are essentially protected from the, the hurly burly of, of daily life and the need to, uh, earn their crust in the market.
They're given a privileged position as professors and, and the students are given time out from the hurly burly of daily life too. That, that was the model when Oxford and Bologna were founded, the oldest universities. And it's still the model, it's still the basic idea that you're going to Give a bunch of people a strangely removed from reality situation and give, uh, young people, especially the more academically capable, [00:10:00] exposure to the ideas and wisdom that those professors can impart.
That's the theory. As I said, it's not always Uh, worked brilliantly. There have been periods when, uh, the great universities of Europe have, have been in a torpor. Edward Gibbon, the great historian, said that his years at Oxford were the least profitable intellectually of his life. But by and large, if you look back on, let's say, the 20th century, it's very hard to imagine, uh, the United States, uh, and its allies, Achieving victory in World War Two without universities, because it was basically professors who cracked the German, uh, code at Bletchley Park, and of course it was academically trained scientists who ran the Manhattan Project and came up with the atomic bomb that ended the war against Japan.
Just to take two simple examples that illustrate why universities matter. I mean, those people, and I know some on the right, who say, look, a plague on all their [00:11:00] heads is just You know, let's be done with them. Let's just walk away and do without universities. I don't think of being realistic. You, you can't really do without these institutions.
There's a reason they've persisted for so long. Despite all the technological changes of the last thousand years, you know, printing press didn't render universities obsolete, nor has the internet. But we have a problem if our universities are subject to an illiberal monoculture, have become so politically skewed that in a highly divided country, the universities are all on one side of the divide, namely on the democratic side.
There's a problem there. We're educating our elites with ideas, particularly in history, but I could mention other disciplines too, which are highly inimical to the ideals of the republic itself. If you educate an elite that despises the institutions, That they're ultimately going to be running. Don't expect it to end well.
That seems like a pretty clear lesson of history. You, in your [00:12:00] book, Doom, you wrote that catastrophes are, um, are like revelations, right, like pandemics or economic depressions. They don't so much change societies. But they do get us to focus on what trends or developments that may have already been in place that we just, we weren't focused on.
And I guess I wonder, this issue you're talking about now, how much of it was sort of exposed by the pandemic? Because I know a lot of people who are parents of kids in, in elite private schools or Or you know, meaning high schools and then post-secondary like colleges and universities whose kids were home during the pandemic and they actually, the parents for the first time got to focus on what their kids were learning and they actually overheard a lot of the course content on Zoom 'cause it was just playing in the house and they got completely freaked out.
Yeah, I think this is what happened. And the [00:13:00] reason education is now an issue. And it wasn't an issue before. I mean, I've been writing about this stuff for years. I wrote a book called The Great Degeneration about it ten years ago in which I said, if we look at the problems in our society, one of the big four problems is what's going on in education.
Nobody paid any attention to this. I would, I would make these arguments and people would essentially say, la la la la, I still want my, my kid to go to Harvard or Yale. The pandemic was the moment of revelation when parents who, it must be said, can't have been paying much attention before suddenly became aware of what their children were being taught.
And it may have been overheard Zoom, uh, instruction, or it may have been conversations at mealtimes. I heard a lot of that. Uh, but at any event, suddenly the penny dropped that, oh, actually, high school and college are not the same as they were. When I was there, what is happening to my children feels a lot, seems a lot more like indoctrination.
And, uh, there's no question that, [00:14:00] that, uh, that most parents, once they realized this, were, were appalled. And that's, that's I think a big part of what, what happened in, in Virginia. Because when, when one candidate says, It doesn't matter what parents think, that's not up to them, what goes on in schools. And the other candidate says, it absolutely matters.
You know, guess who wins because parents do care about the education of their children. Busy parents in our time have not, I think, been doing their due diligence. Why? Because the prestige of the institution counts for everything. Our elite is obsessed with, like all elites in history with the impossible challenge of passing on.
to their children, their achievements. And, because actually we're not that good as a species at transmitting, uh, intellectual firepower, and, and particularly the work ethic from generation to generation, [00:15:00] there is this race by high achieving people to get their children to achieve as much as they did. And, and this is done through educational.
Credential seeking in this spirit. I've got to get junior into Harvard, whatever it takes, a complete lack of scrutiny to what was actually going on at the elite institution set in and it took the pandemic to make people realize that they were handing money to institutions that were essentially engaged in indoctrinating their kids into progressive ideas on race and gender and many other issues, which which parents Don't subscribe to.
I mean, I can only say it's a shame it took a global pandemic to wake you up to this problem. It wasn't exactly hidden from sight. You mentioned a moment ago, a big problem going on at universities is administrative blow. Can you just Explain that. I just want to draw you out a little bit on that. How, how bad [00:16:00] has the administrative bloat problem become?
And why does it, why does it exacerbate this exact problem you're talking about? Well, one of the things that's obviously wrong with American college life is that it's so expensive. I mean, the cost of, of public college tuition has been going up at A rate of 6. 7 percent per annum since 1980. Uh, a lot of the cost of tuition ends up, uh, leading to student debt.
Student loan debt is now greater than credit card debt. And one of the things that's driving the, the rising cost of college, which is not a universal global phenomenon, it's a very American phenomenon, is this extraordinary growth of the bureaucracy. The number of managerial staff Yale employs has gone up three times faster than the undergraduate student body over the last few decades.
So, I think one of the things that's [00:17:00] really important to notice here is, is that there's a structural problem with the way college works, and a kind of arms race to make the elite colleges really attractive to applicants has been accompanied by a proliferation of bureaucrats with responsibilities like title nine officer, diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, officer responsible for student relations.
Those were the people of course. Who were up to no good at the Yale Law School. And this, this bureaucracy is one of the things that's really shocking. If you're, like me, somebody from the Oxbridge world. I mean, Oxford and Cambridge are still remarkably un bureaucratic places. Where the academics, uh, the professors do a lot of the administrative work.
Including admissions. When I was at Cambridge and then Oxford. Part of what I would do at this time of year would be to read application files from Potential undergraduates and then interview them. I [00:18:00] got to Harvard and I found all of that was taken care of by a large and entirely opaque Admissions bureaucracy and it took me many years to work out what their criteria for admission to Harvard were.
Uh, shock, horror, academic excellence was not the top priority. And so it's a, it's a very broken system. And I, I, I'm amazed that when a bunch of us say, Hey, let's create a new university because we kind of haven't had a new university for a while. It's just, you know, like a startup, let's create a new university in, in Texas at Austin.
I don't cry. The outpouring of hostility, uh, from the establishment, from the defenders of the status quo is really. Extraordinary to me considering the modesty of what it is that we're trying to do. So let's talk about that. Can you just, because our listeners may not know that the, the, what you're referring to is you're referring to the University of Austin, which you and a number of your colleagues, mostly from academia, but not, not entirely from academia, [00:19:00] have decided to launch a new university.
So. What is the, what is the project? Well, some of the founders are academics. I, I'm certainly one of those. Uh, Heather Hying, uh, is, uh, or was until, uh, driven off the campus at Evergreen, uh, a biologist and academic. Uh, Pano Canelos, a scholar of Shakespeare, is, uh, going to, is the president of the new uh, university he was at St.
John's for many years. But there are non academics involved too. Uh, Joe Lonsdale, The, uh, the venture capitalist, uh, Barry Weiss, uh, the journalist, uh, and we have a, a broad range of, of advisors, too, some of them figures from what might be called the academic establishment, some of them from outside academia, uh, including, uh, including other journalists, public intellectuals, people without affiliations.
Now, why did we do this, and do it in a hurry? Because, I mean, this was an idea we discussed in late May of this [00:20:00] year, and we launched Uh, just a couple of weeks ago, because there's an urgent need to create a new institution for the people who are losing their jobs, uh, to cancel culture. People like Peter Boghossian, uh, who was driven from his position at the, you know, at Portland State.
Because he dared to, uh, expose the bogus nature of the scholarship at a number of so called academic journals, the Grievance Studies, uh, scandal, when he and, uh, two collaborators got fake and really quite funny fake articles published in supposedly serious, uh, gender studies and, and similar discipline.
Uh, similar disciplines journals, so there's an urgency when people are being driven off campuses. Kathleen stock hounded off the campus at Sussex University in England for expressing views on the nature. Uh, of, uh, of, of, of gender and sex that are now considered [00:21:00] to be heretical by the extraordinarily intolerant radical transgender movement, and I could go on.
So, there was an urgent need to create an institution for the new intellectual or academic refugees. A little bit like the role the New School played in the 1930s when Uh, mainly Jewish refugees from Central Europe needed homes because they were being persecuted, uh, in, in Germany and, and, and Austria.
But there's another, and perhaps more important goal here, and that's just to model academic freedom. I mean, my passionate belief is that we need institutions of, of higher education where free thought and free speech are the key means to the end of, of the pursuit of truth. And that's just all we're trying to achieve.
We're trying to show that this can happen in the, uh, in the 21st century, without restrictions on, uh, speech, without, uh, rules about what can and cannot be said. We just want to show that this is possible. [00:22:00] And I hope that if we succeed, and I think we will succeed, We'll set an example that other universities will be forced to follow, uh, because we'll start attracting the smart people.
Smart people don't want, uh, to sit in class worried that they might say something that could get them cancelled. Uh, or, or get a lousy, lousy grade. They don't want that. Smart people want to experiment. As I did when I was in, in my late teens and early twenties. They want to be able to think aloud and say things that are stupid because they're experimenting to try to find out what, what is true.
And if we create an institution where that is possible again, where it no longer is possible in the major universities, then I think we will get some very, very talented people. people. We've already had thousands of inquiries from academics who want to come and work at the University of Austin. I kid you not, within a week of announcing more than 3, 000 academics had emailed saying, when can I apply for a position?
And more than 5, 000 [00:23:00] students, potential students that said, when are you going to be able to, uh, to take applications for admission? So we are definitely Uh, at a moment in, in the history of American education where people are hungry for real academic freedom. Not some list of rules that nobody really pays attention to, but a real system, a real foundation of academic freedom in which, once again, people's minds can, can flourish.
You know, Neil, you are so onto something. Um, leave, I mean, obviously the, the actual project at the University of Austin is exciting, but just the idea that you've sparked this conversation, it's like the market is speaking and that reaction you've gotten, I have, I've had two separate friends who are professors at top universities.
I won't say their names. I won't even say the name of their institutions because it may People could kind of connect the dots, and I don't want to out them. Um, who've both told me separately that the most interesting conversations now they have with their students are the, and these are seminars, meaning they're dis, they're, [00:24:00] the classes are supposed to be discussions, they're not lectures.
The most interesting discussions they have with their students is either, are either in office hours, or their students come up to the professor after class because they don't want, they're afraid to say anything in class. It's unbelievable. That is exactly the point. Yeah. That we've created a culture on campuses which is hostile to the very thing that is the lifeblood of a university.
The free exchange of ideas between the generations. We've got to the point where professors like my friend Amy Chua at Yale are subject to strange and it seems to me, uh, highly questionable investigations because students come to their homes. to discuss things. I mean, when I was at Oxford, it was considered a great sign of favor to be invited.
Uh, to a professor's home for afternoon tea or perish the thought a glass of sherry. But now, you, you actually take your career in your hands if you so much as [00:25:00] extend a social invitation to a, a student. The whole culture has become completely toxic. And, you know, don't, don't take it from me. Take it from Someone on the left, Nicholas Christakis, a good friend of mine, but definitely ideologically, uh, far removed from my relatively conservative position, but he was one of the earliest casualties of this ridiculous culture when he and his wife were driven out of their positions as masters of one of the residential houses at Yale because of an email about a Halloween.
I mean, crazy stuff that I, that I think is, is extreme. It's extremely important. Sorry, I'm, I'm interrupting you, but I feel really strongly it's extremely important for parents who are distant from their campus years, maybe 20 years away to understand how things have changed, including very likely at their alma mater.
And the only way they're going to find out is to do the kind of due diligence that they certainly would do if they were considering a career move of their own. This is the, this is your children's, perhaps most [00:26:00] important educational decision. It pays to look closely at what institution they are considering applying to and asking the question, Is it actually where I want?
Uh, my son or daughter to spend four years. Not to belabor the point, but you're, you're, Nick Christakis, you're right, is the case study. He's, he's been on the podcast and he, he makes this point that some of his best experiences in college were conversations in the dorm room with friends he disagreed with.
He says just that notion, friends you disagree with. Now at colleges, everyone's in an affinity group, either formally or informally. You don't have conversations with people you disagree with. You don't know anyone you disagree with. So, I mean, look at the survey that they did at Harvard on the incoming class.
Uh, and this was published in the Harvard Crimson a couple of months ago, and it, it's almost funny that 95%, I forget the exact number, but more or less, 95 percent say that they are liberals and, and progressive liberals at that. Now, there are [00:27:00] two possible interpretations of the data. Number one, The undergraduate body is incredibly homogenous, and that can't be healthy.
We talk endlessly about diversity, but if diversity of outlook has been sacrificed to all the other kinds of diversity, then I don't think the atmosphere is healthy. But the other possibility is that the conservative undergraduates at Harvard know damn well not to admit that they're conservative, least of all to the Harvard crimson, for fear of consequences.
And that seems to me probably the more likely explanation, and a more depressing one. It's a very exciting project, the University of Austin. I really wish you guys, uh, the best of luck, and if, and if the conversation you've already sparked is any indication of, uh, its promise going forward, it's, uh, you know, hope for a revolution in education for the better.
Sparked by your entrepreneurialism and that of your your band of brothers and sisters. We prefer the term renaissance Revolution, we've had enough revolutions on american [00:28:00] campuses and what we need is a renaissance. All right. Thanks Uh, I all we can do is hope for it pray for it and help make it happen So, uh and support it and support it right we need more than luck and prayers.
We we need support you don't build a a university out of thin air. You need support. And you can read, just Google, uh, University of Austin. Uh, there's the, the homepage is, is easily findable and lots written about it. And we'll post the link on our show notes. Neil, thanks for joining the conversation.
Thank you, Don.
That's all for today's conversation with Neil. To keep up with Neil, you can follow him on Twitter. At N. Fergus. That's at N F E R G U S. And of course you can find all of his books at your favorite independent bookseller or Barnes and Noble or barnesandnoble. com. Or that other e commerce website they call Amazon.
If you have questions, comments, or ideas for episodes, send them my [00:29:00] way. Dan at unlocked. fm. That's Dan at unlocked. f as in Frank, M as in Mary. Call me back. It's produced by Lon Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.