Free Speech, Colleges & Trump with Princeton President Chris Eisgruber

19:05And in some sense, whatever is most popular will get the most support. Lots can go wrong in marketplaces. We know that. And the most popular ideas are not necessarily the truest or best ideas. But I like about Louis Brandeis, in his opinion, he was one of the contemporaries of Holmes and has often lumped together with him. But he's a great civil rights lawyer. And in a case called Whitney v. California, he writes a concurring opinion in 1927, where he both recognizes the goals of free speech differently. And he talks about what they presuppose in terms of our culture. And about the goals, he says, free speech is allowing us to be governed on the basis of more deliberative ideas rather than less deliberative ideas.

19:51That should be our goal.

19:52Kara Swisher:So it's opposite from marketplace of ideas. Because marketplace of ideas is sort of the tech bros. I'm going to defer to you on the tech bros and exactly what they view. But yeah. The difference is that you get to a better place. Well, Brandeis recognizes, look, it's not necessarily the case that what is ever popular in a kind of free-for-all, unregulated marketplace is good. He says, we want speech to do certain kinds of things. We want it to produce a more deliberative kind of governance. We want better opinions rather than worse opinions. And it's not just about the more popular. We want to develop people's faculties.

20:27And he says, getting there requires people to be courageous and self-reliant. If you just want to be comfortable or happy with whatever ideas are around, you're not going to have that discomfort, Cara, that you talked about earlier when you were describing what you say to your class. Brandeis recognizes that. So I think it's a much better way of understanding what free speech is all about.

20:50Kara Swisher:So every week we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours. Hi, my name is Jason Stanley. I'm a professor in the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. as well as the Department of Philosophy. First of all, I wanted to thank you for being a university president in the mold of my ideal of university presidents growing up, which is all too rare nowadays. You've really clearly seen what's going on right now. But to me, this clear-sighted vision is in tension with some of the arguments in your forthcoming book that was shared with me. You talk about the problem in America being polarization.

21:36Kara Swisher:However, I would have thought that the problem in America is authoritarianism, autocracy, or fascism, whatever you call it. If we are indeed faced with a fascist attack on universities and other democratic institutions, isn't it right to be polarized against it? Isn't polarization a good thing when facing fascism? Let me start just by saying, Jason, thank you for your comments, and thank you for the question. What I would say about what the book tries to do is to describe some conditions that give rise to our current politics that we are confronting. And I don't take a position pro or con on polarization.

22:14I certainly don't say we should just get rid of polarization. I don't think we can. We really are divided as a country right now. And your characterization of the division that we face is in many ways in line with the way Americans on both sides of the aisle think about our political divisions. So about half of Republicans and half of Democrats think that the other side is morally evil. That makes it hard to have conversations. It makes it hard for people to be transparent about what their own political viewpoints are. It may or may not be a justifiable view. It's what we've got to live with. And the question that we face as colleges and universities is how do we contend with that kind of polarization in our society, whatever its sources, and enable people to have constructive conversations that might eventually pull us, as Brandeis hoped, in a better direction.

23:05Kara Swisher:So is polarization a good thing when facing being angry like this? I don't think anger is a good thing. I think— But is polarization okay? Like, no, no, we refuse to accept this. Yeah. Look, I think there's a lot of partisanship. My friend and colleague, Julian Zelizer in the Princeton History Department has a book out called In Defense of Partisanship, where he talks about how partisanship and the division into competing parties is, you know, an ordinary part of American life and a functional part of our politics. But he agrees we're in a period right now of what he calls hyper-partisanship, which is damaging what other political scientists say is that we're in a position of what they call effective polarization.

23:51Effective meaning in terms of our emotions or how we feel so that we don't just disagree about positions. We really dislike or even hate the people on the other side. And Kara, that is clearly a bad thing. That is dangerous. And we should want to get out of it.

24:07Kara Swisher:Certainly. But I think Jason's point of view is like you don't want to have a civil, you know, a conversation to get to a deliberative debate with someone who is a fascist or, you know, in his case, you don't like chit chat with the Nazis. Essentially, I think that's his larger thing. And just so you, Jason, recently, I just interviewed him about his decision to leave Yale and move to Canada to get away from the Trump administration. But with students, you write about what you see as co-relationally political engagement and closed-mindedness, too. I think, if I can say this, right, as long as we're dedicated and you can make a decision to move out of the country, I suppose, and say I'm leaving that political state of affairs to others.

24:45But our challenge in the United States throughout our history has been to find ways to come together across differences. So from my standpoint, and maybe it's an act of heroic optimism under the circumstances, but I think it's a necessary act for an educator. I want to be able to have constructive conversations across differences, even with people with whom I profoundly disagree. And I think as a university president, that has to be our mission. But you're right when you think about what do we confront when we're dealing with students and trying to get them to have those conversations. People are coming into our colleges and universities now having been raised and having experienced their political life almost entirely in this atmosphere of effective polarization.

25:31That does produce closed-mindedness, and it means we have to work harder to open minds up and get people to think about how they have those conversations across difference.

25:44Kara Swisher:we'll be back in a minute

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27:48Kara Swisher:Is Kamala Harris running for president again? Listen, I might. I might. I'm thinking about it. But does anybody want that? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah, I think so. Well, I don't see why not. Absolutely, I think Kamala Harris should run for president again. I don't think there'll never be a woman president in the United States. Now, wait, wait, wait. You can't just walk away on that. Tell us why. I know it's still early to talk about 2028, but as we build to our post-Trump future, it seems to be a big question about the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris leads all of the presidential polling. So does this mean that the person who led the ticket in 2024 is going to lead the party again in 2028?

28:31The campaign needs to be called bye-bye. It's just a tainted brand.

28:38Kara Swisher:Do you think from a donor community largely that there's any appetite for a Harris return? I don't. I'm Estet Herndon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Of course, the entire conversation about free speech is coming at this time when And institutes of higher education, especially elite universities like Princeton, are directly being targeted by Trump. I want to walk you through the timeline. In January and February, Trump signed a number of executive orders directed at universities, including an order to roll back DEI efforts and one directing agencies to monitor and report on campus anti-Semitism.

29:15Kara Swisher:In March, the Department of Education sent letters to 60 universities announcing investigations of potential anti-Semitic discrimination and harassment, and the administration started threatening to withhold federal funding if they didn't make changes to their hiring and admissions policies. And over the spring and summer, the responses have been varied. For example, Columbia and Brown agreed to concessions. Harvard and UCLA fought and beat Trump administration in court on free speech grounds. But Harvard also made many of the changes and the administration demanded and UCLA's chancellor said he'd address valid concerns.

29:45Kara Swisher:Recently, the University of California at Berkeley provided the administration with the names of 160 students, faculty, and staff as part of an investigation into allegations of anti-Semitism. The administration also subpoenaed the names and emails of all the employees of all the Cal State schools. Finally, this past weekend, The Washington Post reported the Trump administration is considering changing tactics instead of awarding federal grants based on peer review and scientific merit. the administration is considering giving schools a competitive advantage if they pledge to adhere to the government's admissions and hiring policies.

30:15Kara Swisher:It's the same thing. Back in March, let me just say this, finally, you wrote in The Atlantic that Trump's attacks present, quote, the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 50s. Every American should be concerned. So where are we now, given that litany that I just went through? Well, the risk remains, and we continue to be in a crisis where fundamental aspects of universities are under threat and at stake. The basic argument that I made in The Atlantic was, first of all, that universities depend on a commitment to academic freedom that enables them to decide what it is they're going to teach, how it is they're going to teach it, whom they hire, and whom they're going to admit its students.

30:57And secondly, the United States has benefited tremendously from a 70-year kind of compact between the federal government and our research universities where the government has supported research that's in the interests of the American people, enhances our security, prosperity, and health, and has done that while respecting our academic freedom. And now that compact is being turned into a kind of lever to pressure universities to make concessions around things that are related to academic freedom, how they admit students, how they organize academic units. So I support Harvard and what they've done and taking the strong stand that they have done and UCLA and taking the strong stand to date.

31:42I think it is important that those of us who lead colleges and universities stand up for these principles that are essential to our institutions.

31:49Kara Swisher:What about Columbia and Brown? Very early concessions. I think there are – one of the things that I feel very profoundly as a university president in what has been an extraordinarily difficult time to be a university president is that we are faced with choices that are just heartbreaking and agonizing. So you get university presidents who are in a position where they're either making concessions that may be the wrong concessions to make or they're leaving their faculty potentially, some of whom are paid on federal grants in a place where not only can they not do their research, they really can't pay their mortgages or afford to continue to care for those families.

32:28And I don't want to be judgmental for that reason about the tough choices people make in almost impossible circumstances. But I do think it's important if you're going to make those kinds of choices to say, look, we need to stand for academic freedom and there are problems here. So I do have concerns about those deals.

32:44Kara Swisher:And when you think of valid concessions, are there valid concessions? There are valid concessions. Look, I'll give you a couple of different kind of varieties of them. And there's one issue that's going on right now more broadly about how it is we calculate what are called indirect costs on research. That is, how do you calculate the cost of facilities, shared staff, equipment, and other things that are used on federal grants? Those formulas are very complicated. And there are concessions that can be made there around purely economic and financial matters and room for discussion about how you negotiate that.

33:21You mentioned that Harvard made some changes. My understanding, as I read what Harvard has had to say about those changes, is they felt there were things where they could do better, they wanted to do better, and these were the right things for the institution.

33:33Kara Swisher:And not under pressure, necessarily. Not because of pressure. Those two things were contemporaneous. But look, you know, when we're talking about something like anti-Semitism on our campuses or making sure that a wide array of viewpoints are represented on the campus or that people are able to speak up on the campus, we should all want that. And the fact that they get caught up in some of this pressure, which doesn't respect due process or which invades academic freedom, is not a reason to reject good suggestions when they're made or to act on things the university was planning to do anyway. Just in August, the article in The Atlantic claimed this spring that you all but accused some of the university presidents of, quote, carrying water for the Trump administration.

34:17Kara Swisher:How much cooperation with the administration is okay? And where is that line? Honestly, I don't think that was an accurate article, and the all but is an interesting—it was an off-the-record meeting, so I can't speak to that. But what I can say is every university has to be very clear about what its mission is, and it has to know exactly what the values are, how it understands academic freedom. The questions about what kind of cooperation is okay and what is not are going to be sensitive to those issues about principle. In a recent New York Times interview, May Mailman, a former senior policy strategist for the Trump administration who was a key staffer on education, said the problem with U.S.

34:57Kara Swisher:colleges is they glorify victimhood and value diversity over meritocracy, especially elite universities. This is what the administration is trying to fix. This is their line, I guess. And to me, it's specious. But your thoughts? Well, the first thing I want to say is, you know, I'm proud of the efforts that American universities have made around diversity and inclusivity. They have made American universities better because to be the best we can be, we need to be getting talent from all sectors of society, and we need to be allowing that talent to flourish on this campus. A little over 50 years ago, the university I lead wasn't admitting women to its student body, undergraduate or graduate.

35:37It wasn't appointing women to its faculty. We are much stronger right now because we are more diverse. And that is true across the board with regard to our diversity effort. doesn't mean everything done in the name of diversity has been a smart thing to do. But our efforts around diversity are essential to our campuses, to our pursuit of excellence, and to this country. With regard to victimization, frankly, I find that a bit of a red herring. I agree on one critical point. As I said earlier, we should all be courageous and self-reliant around free speech. And ideally, we're all willing to deal with tough questions and we're willing to brush off things that we find to be insulting or potentially hurtful and do our best to get the conversation back onto the merits.

36:21But, you know, I think we see people reacting differently from that and understandably on both sides of the aisle. You were talking about some of the responses to the comments made about Charlie Kirk, where there was a very sensitive counter reaction from people when some were saying arguably offensive things. That's happened on the left. It's happened on the right. It's happened earlier in our history. It's happened. And now what we've got to do is push forward into brave conversations.

36:47Kara Swisher:Yeah, it's kind of ironic. Last week, the chancellor of the Texas Tech University system told faculty over to restrict academic discussion of gender to the Trump administration's approved definitions of male and female. In your book, you write about how the expansion of free speech has usually gone hand in hand with the push for more equality. How big a deal is this when the administration is literally telling professors what they can and can't discuss in class? I would think that would be a bright red line for you. It's a bright red line for me. There has to be the capacity to argue about critical questions and gender and how we understand gender and sexuality are critical questions.

37:22There are contested questions within our society and something is going deeply wrong when one position is being imposed on what faculty members can say in the classroom or in their scholarship or when students are being prohibited from saying things. And I'd go a step further than that, Cara, I would say we need to make sure that all of our students, our LGBTQ students, our trans students, are able to flourish on our campuses. That's part of our commitment to being a place that's excellent, where people from all backgrounds are able to thrive.

37:51Kara Swisher:But the Trump administration is also targeting students. It's restricting visas of foreign students, threatening student financial aid. It recently announced a new policy that would require employers to pay a one-time$100 ,000 fee for H-1B visa holders. Talk a little bit about the repercussions here, because I have kids who go to universities and a lot of their friends are telling me who are from other countries are worried about their social media. They're worried about what they say and everything else. What are the repercussions of this? Because foreign students, one, some of them are very wealthy and they bring in full freight.

38:19Kara Swisher:And two, the ones that are especially graduate level bring in innovation and excitement to our country. Will that impact your ability to bring in talent, whether they're students, young researchers, or top-tier academics? Absolutely. I agree 100 % with what you just said, Kara, so far we have continued to be able to bring in talent at both the faculty and the student level. But when you have extraordinary people who are thinking about coming to America and contributing to our country in ways that immigrants have done throughout our history, if they perceive hostility or high barriers, or if there are just costs that they can't meet, of course that is going to make them think differently about the options that they confront and the choices that they have.

39:01I want to say I regard this as something that all Americans, again, of whatever political party should care about and should recognize it as something that has historically been a strength for America and should be into the future. So my responsibility is to speak up for universities and their values and not to take sides about the administration as distinguished from its policies. And so when I'm talking to the administration, I'm talking to them about why I think the continued recruitment of talent, continued investment in universities is in their interest as well as in our interest.

39:35Kara Swisher:How is that being met? I think it depends on who you talk to in the administration. But I certainly think there are people in the Trump administration who recognize the importance of doing what they call gold standard science. The president himself had signed a letter back in April talking about the administration's commitment to doing gold standard science. That depends on recruiting people from all over the world. It depends on making sure that people can thrive on our campuses. It depends on protecting academic freedom and it depends on protecting this compact. When you said it depends on who you talk to, it sounds like they're still using it as a cudgel.

40:07Kara Swisher:What's the long impact on, say, Princeton to financial cuts in research? Are you less dependent than other universities? There are ways in which I think our financial model is stronger. I mean, just to name one, you know, we don't have a medical school at Princeton. Medical schools are really important to America and the world, obviously, but a lot of medical school faculty are paid on soft money. That is, they're paid on government grants. We have a model that pays our faculty from an endowment that is very strong and enables us to support our faculty, our students, and a lot of our physical plant.

40:44But we, like everybody else, are at risk from what's going on. There are steps that we might take and we are taking now to get more efficient and leaner in what we do. We're going to go through a round of budget cuts. We're going to pull back from some of the projects that we had envisioned. And that will allow us, we hope, to continue, despite the headwinds, to achieve very high levels of excellence.

41:07Kara Swisher:So they can't shake you down quite as much, in other words, essentially. I think we have more capacity to stand strong on the basis of the values that we have. But, Kara, I want to be clear about this. At Princeton and everywhere else, if the federal government pulls back from the 70-year compact that the government has had with research universities, public and private, across administrations, Democratic and Republican, it will reduce the level of excellent research and teaching that gets done in the United States. There's no way we or anybody else can escape from that. And the effect on the U.S.

41:41Kara Swisher:economy, too. And the effect of the U.S. economy will be significant. It will affect our prosperity. It will affect our health, the ability to develop new cures. It will affect our security. Because let's take something like quantum science, which the Trump administration identifies as a major priority for the United States. Quantum science is relevant to computing capacity. It's relevant to things like cryptography. We don't want to lose to China when it comes to quantum science. But we need the government to be investing alongside universities like ours, which are ready to do that if the United States is going to be preeminent in that field.

42:16Kara Swisher:Right. Although if you say Trump should get the Nobel Prize, you'll probably get lots of funding for that. Please don't do that.

42:26Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute. Thank you.

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44:03Kara Swisher:Streams switched on pop on Netflix and anywhere you get podcasts every Tuesday, starting on July 14th. Remember Snapchat? The app best known for being the place to send disappearing photos and videos to your friends? Well, Snapchat was back in the news recently, but this time it was not about disappearing photos and videos. It was about smart glasses that you put and keep on your face. Snapchat was trying to get in on the game with a pair of black, horn-rimmed-looking spectacles. Think the pair that the old man in Up wears, but like three times thicker and with a price tag of$2 ,195. Photos of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wearing his specs, that's what they're called, by the way, specs, were all over the internet and not in a good way.

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45:00Kara Swisher:Smart glasses are officially here, so we're going to officially talk about them on the show and worry about our privacy. Scott Galloway, who's a university professor, has been. One of the things he noted, he wanted me to ask you, was you have a$34 billion endowment, is that correct? Yeah, roughly. Yes, roughly, yeah. And that's not just Meg Whitman. But you only have 1 ,400 students. This is an issue Scott talks about a lot. No, that's wrong. We have 5 ,700 undergraduates and 2 ,800 doctoral students. Okay. He thinks that's too small and wonders what universities can do to expand, that they become sort of a luxury item for wealthy people internationally, for students.

45:43Kara Swisher:And he said, aren't many elite universities just hedge funds with really nice campuses? Talk a little bit about that, that idea that you should be bigger. If you had more of a constituency, these attacks wouldn't land so easily. Well, look, I think we should continue to grow. And in fact, one of the main reasons I took the job at Princeton was I wanted to see us expand in two different ways. One was just to grow the student body. So that was a commitment I made when I came into office. We've expanded by 10 percent, and we've landed in a way that would enable us to continue expanding beyond that.

46:18How we expand it is also important because I thought one of the most important things to do was increase the representation of low - and middle-income students on our campus. So we've taken over a period that began when I was the provost and Shirley Tillman, also a big champion for low-income students, was the president. into my presidency, we've gone from 7 % Pell students, which was unacceptable in my view, that Pell students are the students from lowest income families in America. That number is now 25 % in the entering class, 17 % plus our first gen students. We've added a transfer program focused on military veterans and community college students.

46:55So on that point, you know, I agree basically with Scott Galloway. Yeah, these places are special. We should be expanding them. We should continue to expand them, and we should make a real commitment to bringing in low-income students.

47:07Kara Swisher:Is there other ways of expanding besides bringing everyone to your very gorgeous campus? Because a lot of people think that elite universities don't have a constituency because they're elite, and they make everyone feel bad for not—I was joking about not getting in. But you know what I mean? Like, it feels exclusive to people. Well, look, I think in-person education matters. I think it matters at the K-12 level. I think it matters at the undergraduate and graduate level. So I do think you have to bring people to our campus. And I think there are important reasons why Princeton uses and should use that endowment, not only for undergraduate education, which you and I have been focusing on, but for doctoral education and to support research, right?

47:47That's critical to what we do. And we do the education and research at a very high level. That's important, too. So that constrains how much we can expand and how rapidly we can expand. I think, Kara, look, you know, there's a lot in this right now. If you take a look, I think you noted earlier in the program, University of California is one of the universities that's under attack right now. Those are large campuses and astonishingly good campuses, perhaps the best public.

48:14Kara Swisher:Yeah, that's where Scott went. That's where Scott went. I did not know that. Yeah, he was poor and they paid for him. And we are paying for more students coming out of low-income backgrounds here at Princeton now to want to be a leader. But we're never going to catch the University of California system in terms of the numbers. Those numbers are not making a difference to whether or not the University of California system is under attack. So I want to keep those two issues separate. Yeah, there are good reasons why I think great universities should be thinking about reaching more students. because that makes a difference to our country and it makes a difference in student lives.

48:50Is that going to solve the political issues we're facing? I don't think so.

48:53Kara Swisher:So before we go, I want to talk to you about how this has impacted you personally. You've been extremely outspoken about these threats and you have been targeted as a result. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo claims you've created a system of widespread racial discrimination, Princeton. Have you felt pressure to back off, to lay low? And if so, from whom? Yeah, I think there's outside pressure. And one of the things I've said in the book is that if you stand up for not only free speech, but for equality and diversity and do that in higher education, you will be subject to attacks. So I know that that's a risk.

49:26What I would say, CARA is my own community, has been really strong. That doesn't mean unanimous, but it means really strong behind me. That means our trustees. It means our faculty. It means graduate students. It means undergraduates. You know, when I spoke out in the spring, I had a couple of undergraduates chasing me across Quadrangle to say that they appreciated it, that I was speaking up for the mission that they care about. So, you know, as I look at it, it is a hard time to be a university president. It's hard to speak up. There are risks to doing conversations like the one that we're doing right now.

49:59But for a long time, American universities have let other people tell stories about us. If we don't start telling our own story and if we don't take the risks that you're talking about, we're going to lose that fight. We've got to speak up.

50:10Kara Swisher:Was there a pressure moment or a pressure from someone, you don't have to say who it was, that really pushed you back a little bit? No, I would not say. The hardest point in it, Cara, was for me before I made the decision, as I was thinking about publishing that article in The Atlantic, people talk about metaphorically losing sleep. I lost sleep literally for a couple of nights because I knew that it wasn't just a risk to me. It was a risk to my campus. But once I published it, what I found was somewhat to my surprise, it liberated my campus to speak up and say, we're looking for this. And again, it may not be everybody on the campus, but having that strong sense of support has really helped as we go forward.

50:50Kara Swisher:Yeah, maybe you could speak to Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer right now. I call it push-send. I always am like, when everyone's like, I don't know what to do, I'm like, push-send. Just push it. Just push it. I love that. Hakeem Jeffries was one of my students back when I taught contracts at NYU, so I look with pride at what he's doing as a leader. And yet you need to make him push-send a little harder, I would say. You should give him a little backbone. He was an independent-minded student. He's an independent-minded leader. All right. Well, he just needs to step it up. That's my opinion. Anyway, so you're, that's funny.

51:22Kara Swisher:You're a student. Your parents were both immigrants also, German immigrants. You grew up thinking your mother was Catholic, but in 2008, you found out that she and her family were actually Jewish refugees that fled the Nazis. Your father had allegedly been in Hitler Youth. As you look at what's happening right now, did you grapple with your own family's legacy? Has that any impact of how you think about your role at the current moment? Yeah. You know, this discovery for me of my Jewish identity and my mother's Jewish identity has been very meaningful to me in my life. It's put me in touch with a group of cousins about whom I feel very warmly.

51:57And it's also given me kind of a different set of cultural resources to draw upon as I try to understand what's happening in my life and my world. So I do think about this. I think about what happened in Germany and how rapidly democratic norms can devolve. I think about the obligation that all of us have to speak up. And I'm not sure why because, again, some of this I didn't know. But certainly I grew up with the sense that one of the things that you have to do as a democratic citizen is to speak up and make your views known. And it's part of our responsibilities and obligations. I think it may have been in part because I knew, even though I didn't know why my mother had come and what her story was, I knew that her family and my father had both come here because of the freedom to get away and to get here, more than just to get away, but to get here because of the freedoms this country offers.

52:52And with that comes a certain kind of responsibility.

52:54Kara Swisher:That you have. That I have. That we all have. But, I mean, that's something to learn. That would be sort of shocking. Last question. In our polarized society where free speech is being weaponized, what do you think the most important thing we can do to improve civic discourse? What terms of respect do we need? And is there hope that we can turn it around? I quibble with a lot of people who said we just need to be more civil. I'm like, we're way past that, right? We're way past. Don't. It's often a certain type of person who's very safe that says we need to be more civil to me. And I'm like, wow, that would be great.

53:28Kara Swisher:But that's not really our biggest concern right now. So talk about what we need to do to improve civil discourse. Part of it is resisting, of course. But what terms of respect do we need? Which is the name of your book? We need to find ways to state strong propositions and values in a way that is constructive and that people who disagree can hear what it is we're saying. I continue to believe, and maybe it comes out of that heritage that we just discussed, that there are a lot of things that we as Americans hold in common and we should be able to understand one another. And the reason that I do care about civility and I understand and respect the critique that you just mentioned is I think we need to be able to talk to one another across differences.

54:12So we've got this tremendously tempting kind of social media environment right now where we can all publish things and say things and feel good about it. And sometimes it just feels good to say things that are angry. But I think sometimes we need to be able to cultivate the skills that allow us to sit down with somebody who's got an identity different from our own and have a conversation with them where we connect at a level that's human and then manage to connect and discuss the political. And I don't mean we can all just be polite to one another and say, hey, it's OK if you have views that I find repugnant.

54:44That's not OK. But it doesn't mean that we need to insult one another either.

54:47Kara Swisher:Well, there are some bad actors that are just doing it. There are some bad actors. But look, I think our commitment to our democracy depends on finding ways to find the good actors on the other side, to recognize that there are people who may agree fundamentally on what it means to be an American, on some basic values that we share and whom we can talk to. So I realize that's an optimistic position. It may sound optimistic to people on both sides of this dispute right now, but that's what democracy is all about. And we got to remember, we've been through some tough times before where we've had to have tough conversations.

55:23The civil rights movement in the 1960s and what happened on college campuses in the early 70s. That was no picnic. And finding ways to bring ourselves back to a shared civic space where the robust argument can happen is really important.

55:38Kara Swisher:So you're glad you took the job? I am glad I took the job. I still love my job. I love the people I work with. I love my faculty. I love my students and my alumni. And I think these institutions matter so much, which is why I wrote the book. And plus you get to wear orange. I get to wear orange all the time. I embrace all the orange. Yeah, I would be remiss if I didn't say go blue for my son. Anyway. Okay. Sounds like Michigan. Yeah, yeah. That's where he is. Okay. All right. All right. Whatever. Thank you, Kara. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

56:09Kara Swisher:Today's show was produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yoakum, Michelle Eloy, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Bradley Sylvester and Eamon Whelan. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you look good in orange. Actually, nobody but a pumpkin does, everybody, including the people at Princeton. If not, push send. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

56:48Kara Swisher:We'll be back on Monday with more. Thank you.