American Higher Education: Disaster or Envy? with Sol Gittleman

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:48Today's interview is a very special one for me. I'm joined by my old Tufts professor, Saul Gittleman. Dr. Gittleman taught me a great deal during my time at school, lessons that I've carried with me throughout my life, both academically and personally. His new book explores the history of American colleges from the successes, failures, and accidents that shaped our system as we know it. He is still the most passionate person I've ever met when it comes to education. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

1:30I'd like to take a second to recommend my friend Andy Ostroy's great podcast, The Back Room. Every episode is a fun, incredibly honest take on our society and the political situation, along with some brilliant guests. I've been honored to join Andy on the show, and you know anywhere that accepts me with no filter deserves a shout out.

1:56Okay, it's a great pleasure for me to tell you that joining us now on Open Book is Professor Saul Gittleman. He's the professor emeritus and former provost of Tufts University. He's written several books, but his most recent book is An Accidental Triumph, The Improbable History of American Higher Education. What a time to be talking to you, sir. And just as a way of background. I met Professor Gittleman. He probably may not remember this as well as I remember it, but I met him in November of 1981. So this is 43 short years ago. I had a lot of pimples on my face. I took the Eastern shuttle to Boston to spend some time with you.

2:38And you told me to get my, well, you're very polite. You never use any bad words or anything, but you told me to get my stuff together, Professor. And I tried to do that. What was the name of that good friend that you was close to trust, also a Tufts graduate. Yeah, his name is Billy Tommaso. Tommaso, the concrete business, right. Yeah, yes. Bill Tommaso, nice man who really loved you. Yeah. Well, he loved my dad. So, you know, I lost my dad last year, but my dad, at that time in my dad's life, he had graduated from being a crane operator. He was actually weighing trucks. So this is how the butterfly effect, right?

3:14So my dad's weighing trucks. He strikes up a relationship with Billy Tommaso. Billy Tommaso is a former Tufts graduate. I think there's some study halls and so forth named after Billy. And he said, okay, well, don't send your son to the local school. I want you to send him to a place called Tufts. My father thought Tufts was spelled T-O-U-G-H-S, just to give you a sense for... Well, there are a lot of colleges in this country. That's one of the things that's remarkable about it. We've got 6 ,000 institutions that give degrees. Yeah. Well, I mean, you were very, very dear to me then. You're very, very dear to me now.

3:52But my first memory of you was I went up the stairs at Blue Hall. You were in that beautiful office of the provost. And you told me my SAT scores were not good. They were okay, but I needed to take them again. But I got into Tufts and then we stayed close. And you were instrumental in me getting into Harvard. You probably don't remember that, but you wrote my - went from being a Dems, D's, D's, D's kid from Long Island to Phi Beta Kappa. Got accepted to Harvard Law School. So you... I took it seriously, Saul, but you helped me. I did, but you had a lot going on between your ears. And without what you had already, it wouldn't have happened.

4:34So we both can compliment each other. But I remember you as becoming a remarkable student. All right. Well, that's very, very sweet of you. Okay. You joined Tufts in 1964, if I remember correctly, because that's the year of my birth. So that's 60 years ago. But you've been in higher education for seven decades. Yep. Do I have that correct? Yeah, my next birthday is number 90. Yeah. And you look great. God bless. And so I expect to be at your 110th birthday. Hopefully you'll still like me at that point and you'll invite me. But let's talk about the choice of going into higher education for somebody like you, very, very gifted man, could have done anything.

5:12You were also a great athlete and a great baseball player. But let's start with the choices that you made and your origin. You know, so much in life is serendipitous, Anthony. You've learned that yourself. It's an accident. My parents were East European immigrants who never spent a day in a school anywhere, neither in Europe nor in America. They snuck into this country after World War I. My father came illegally. My mother came legally and settled down. But they never learned. My mother couldn't read or write. And so when it came time to go to college, they were going to push me onto it, particularly my mother.

5:46But they knew nothing about colleges, absolutely nothing. They wouldn't have been able to name one. And prestige meant nothing in those days. This was the 1950s. I had started elementary school in 1930. So I had a long educational experience from the 30s on. And my baseball coach, Mr. Bo Carey, came home one day and said, Saul will go to Drew. That's where I did my Navy V-12 program during World War II, he told them. And so whatever Mr. Bocari said was fine. And the next thing I know, Sydney's basketball player, Saul, baseball player, we showed up. We didn't even apply. We just showed up on the campus of Madison, New Jersey as ballplayers and we were accepted.

6:24The manager of the team asked me, what are you going to major in? I said, what's a major? I thought it was an army rank. And he said, well, it sounds like you don't know too much about colleges. I'm the German teacher here. You'll major in German, I'll take care of you. So I go home and told my parents, I'm going to major in German. I never studied it before, not in high school. Nobody studied German. And the next thing I know, I'm a German major and on a pathway to a career as a German teacher. So accidents, showing up at Drew, changing my life. They were a little Methodist school, and it changed my life.

6:58There are thousands of little colleges in America that give kids like me that kind of opportunity. But Saul, you were arguably one of the most passionate teachers I took as many of your courses as I could take. So you had a passion for education and you had a passion for lecturing. And am I wrong? Tell me. I was a performer. I didn't know it. I didn't know myself. Teaching and what you get a degree in, you get a PhD eventually, it's a research degree. The only thing you're really taught is how to do research. Nobody teaches you how to teach. If you got it, you got it. If you don't have it, you don't have it.

7:35And the vast majority of the a million and a half faculty in this country. None of us was trained to teach. Very few PhD programs spend any time in training people to teach. They train them to do research. The PhD degree is a German invented degree. The Germans invented it. We wanted it. We took it and trained generations of PhDs to be scholars. If you happen to be a performer, and I was a performer, you're a performer. You have a certain gift of being able to present material. and I learned that and it came intuitively and I also knew to keep my own opinion out of the lectures. So when kids would ask me, well, how do you feel about this?

8:15I'd say, it's none of your damn business. All I'm doing is presenting the information, the facts, and as much as I can, the evidence. And I happen to be a good teacher. It was the luck, just a lot of luck. Okay. Well, we're going to get into the book in a second, but there were a couple seminal courses. When you were at Tufts University, the hardest courses to get into were your courses. And so there were three courses I took as an undergrad. And one, I came back to the school from Harvard and took at Fletcher. I don't know if you remember that, but I took a diplomacy course with you. I actually wrote a paper in that diplomacy course related to FDR and decisions that were made by FDR during the Holocaust.

8:57But the four courses I took, one was called German Writers. Yeah. One was the Introduction to Yiddish Literature. Yeah. And then there was - That's where you learned all your Yiddish. Oh, I learned Yiddish, yeah. I'm one of the few goys out here on Long Island, Saul, that knows the difference between a Shagus and a Schicksal. See that? But you also learned Schadenfreude. I did. I learned Schadenfreude, which is, we're going to talk about that as well. But why those courses, Saul? Why teach German writers? Why teach about Yiddish literature? Why teach about diplomacy during the Second World War?

9:33You know, I was a generalist. I was told, teach your courses and teach anything you want. That was the message I got from the dean who gave me tenure at Tufts. He put his hands on my head and said, poof, you have tenure. Now don't go. Teach whatever you want. And that's fine. And I I invented a whole bunch of general education courses. I was a firm believer in general education. I didn't know it, but I wound up, that's what I wanted to do. Kids who had no interest and who all the prerequisites they had, they could breathe on a mirror and had a pulse and they could get into my classes. I had no prerequisites.

10:06I wanted to teach my parents and I've invented the course on Yiddish culture. My parents came out of that culture. I also knew that Hitler was something unique in world history. And I got two courses on German culture, both dealing with the rise of Nazism. And I felt every student that I, every undergraduate should know something about the rise of Nazism, how it happens. And so I invented these courses. I taught it in the Fletcher School. I taught it in the undergraduate college. No prerequisites. You didn't have to know anything. I had engineers, museum school students, dyslexics, everybody under the sun.

10:42They could take that course. All you needed to get into it, as I said, was a pulse themselves and could breathe on a mirror. And they were able to get into the course. So it's 40 years for me now, Solve. I'm taking those courses. And so I'm going to say a couple of things to you and I want you to react, OK? I'm going to say the word Tazio. You know, Tazio was the character in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, the young 14-year-old boy that Gustav van Aschenbach fell in love with. So I had kids like you reading stories like Death in Venice. You discovered Tomas Mann. You discovered Sholem Aleichem.

11:17You discovered that there was a thing called literature that you could learn about human nature from. I mean, you didn't have Magic Mountain on your syllabus, but I ended up reading. No, no, it was too long. It was too long. But I ended up reading Magic Mountain as a result of you. So when I say Tazio, you know what I'm talking about, right? Oh, sure. Do you remember the scene in Death in Venice? I do. with the overripe strawberries. You remember that? Overripe strawberries and he killed himself. 40 years later, I still remember, right? So you must have impacted me somehow, right? Yeah. But the point was the messaging, tell me if I got this wrong.

11:55You were describing the Eastern European Jews and their culture of suppression and oppression. And they were telling very interesting stories at that time. One of the stories was the lottery ticket. It left a very big impression on me. One of the stories was Gimple the Fool. And of course, you had the Tevye stories that Saul Malachium wrote about. And these were about family. They were about commitment to culture, commitment to religion. They were about love. What else were they about, Saul? They were also about not understanding what your children were all about. I mean, don't forget Tevye, who was an Orthodox, observant, Hasidic Jew, had two daughters, One married a Jewish communist.

12:36The other married a Gentile communist. The one who married the Gentile communist said to her father, Father, he's another Gorky. He's the second Gorky. And Tevye said, so who was the first Gorky? Tevye knows nothing about what's going on around him in Russia at the end of the 19th or the beginning of the 20th century. And young Jewish kids were dropping Torah, dropping Bible, weren't interested that they had discovered a new Bible, Karl Marx. Yeah. And Tevye had no idea what was going on. And so that part of it, not understanding children and their parents, that was a big part of that course also, a tragedy for Tevye.

13:14When I was reading that as a young man, you know, I felt the emphasis on culture, the value system. You also put in that course things about reform as the Jews left Europe and came to the United States. Goodbye, Columbus. Yeah. Mother Philip Roth stories. It becomes relevant for today's trouble that's going on on the campuses, because where did those people want to go? They didn't want to go to Palestine. They wanted to come to the United States, and millions did. But when you got into your FDR research, you also found out that the United States closed its doors in the 20s and 30s, shut them tight.

13:53We didn't want those people coming in. Especially during the war. I mean, we... Before the war. Before the war, during the war, we sent ships back. Oh, yeah. But the Reed Johnson Restrictive Immigration Act was 1924. That's why my father had to come in illegally. He came on a boat loaded with Scotch whiskey, he said. It was during Prohibition. My mother got in okay through Ellis Island. It was a chain. My father had to come in illegally, which he managed to. But that was America in the 20s and 30s. The doors were shut. We wanted nothing to do with immigrants. Nothing is new. Everything gets repeated.

14:29So you have to understand the 20s and 30s to understand where we are now in the 21st century. Well, I mean, you know, listen, my grandfather talked about how he came through Ellis Island, and because of Teddy Roosevelt's immigration legislation in the early 1900s, Italians were to be designated as non-Caucasian. And so that was a very - That was eugenics. We were teaching eugenics in the American public school system. When Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, he wrote a letter congratulating America on getting it right so that Hitler learned everything he knew about eugenics from a few Germans and a lot of Americans.

15:08Yeah, no, it's fascinating. But I want to segue because this country, this beautiful country that you and I live in and love created the two of us because we're both middle class people. And without higher education and the enrichment that you get from higher education, the continuous learning, the curiosity, the fire that gets ignited at an undergraduate university, you don't end up having the lives that we've had, these interesting lives that we've had. So tell us about higher education in America, the moral land grant acts of the 19th century, and this beautiful book that you've written about education.

15:47Well, you need about two or three weeks or a 15-week course for this, Anthony. But American higher education is unique among anything in the world. There's nothing like it. We have 6 ,000 degree granting institutions. Some are tiny, some are huge, some are faith based. We have religious institutions. There's nothing like it in the world. There's no Holy Cross in the Soviet Union. There's no Notre Dame in Iran. There's no Brigham Young anywhere. There's no MIT, no Harvard or Bryn Mawr. They don't exist in any other country. The rest of the world has civil servants, and we have anarchists like myself or you.

16:27There's a little bit of ungovernability about you, a little bit of ungovernability about me, and we are the products of American higher education. We take adolescent kids much younger than the Europeans and say to them, come in. You don't have to pick a major for two years. You can start out wanting to be a doctor and end up being an Episcopalian priest. No other country does that. When at the age of 11 in Europe, Germany, Italy, most of the other countries, China, they tell you at the age of 11, you're going to be a doctor, you're going to clean toilets. Well, we don't do that. We waste time, we waste a lot of everything, but we are unique.

17:06There's nothing like American higher education. The rest of the world's teachers as faculty are civil servants. They work for the state. The American academic is ungovernable and works for nobody. And yet, we have never been less popular. I mean, the rest of the country right now considers American universities, American higher education, the biggest problem that they've got. It's worse than China. It's worse than Iran, worse than anything, the American colleges and universities. That's the general impression that Americans have of their colleges and universities. At the same time, they don't want to recognize that we are the envy of the world.

17:44The rest of the world has already sent a million of their children to American colleges. If we would let them in, they'd send two million or they'd come themselves because what they want is what they don't have. And what we have a kind of unbelievable freedom to learn and to do pretty much whatever you want. American people don't like what they have now. In the 20s and 30s, nobody cared. I mean, I learned my Civil War history from Gone with the Wind. I thought that that was it. Everything And I learned we cared more about Newt Rockne, All-American, and Pat O 'Brien playing Newt Rockne and Ronald Reagan playing the Gipper in 1940 than we cared.

18:24People knew who they were. They wouldn't have known him the president of the University of Chicago or Harvard was. They didn't care. What was the American image of college students? It was Groucho Marx and horse feathers. They laughed at it. He was president of Huxley College trying to win the big game against Darwin College and hired two professionals, his brother Chico and Harpo, to play on the football team. It was anarchy, chaos and funny. And Americans prefer their colleges and universities that way. Right up through John Belushi in Animal House, 1978. We don't want our colleges to be successful or serious.

19:04We win the Nobel Prizes. We are the envy of the world and they don't care. So I want to test a few things on you because when I – there's a couple of big revelations in your book. I want to talk about the GI Bill in a second. But before that, I want to test something on you. So the freedom of speech that the United States has in its constitution and the freedom of the press, it checks people in power. It's the fourth estate that holds people in power, but it has this ancillary effect, professor, in the sense that it's a wide berth for creativity. We teach our young people that they can think and speak freely.

19:42They go on to create Facebook, eBay. They go on to create things like Tesla. I mean, I can name all these great innovations. We also have people like Edison or Henry Ford or John Rockefeller who never went to college. We love them also. Yeah. Yeah. But my point is, is that this this freedom, this Petri dish, it does have some excesses to it or fat tails. One of them is the protest movement. One of them is, you know, the silent majority may not like certain. I've always viewed our universities as the lungs of the First Amendment, you know, meaning, you know, they love Division One athletics. They love the transfer portal.

20:27They love the billion-dollar industry now, hundreds of billions of dollars of gambling that's going on. There's not much criticism of that, but that is one of the great disgraces of higher education, but it'll never go away because we love it. When I was an undergrad, there was a protest movement. People went into Blue Hall. They occupied it because they wanted the university to divest from South Africa. There was a struggle against the apartheid movement in South Africa. And you and Jean Maier, then the president of the university, the protest lasted a little while, but it ended quite peacefully.

21:04What do you think is going on today in comparison to protests, say, 30 or 40 years ago? Not that much different, Anthony. They want to politicize, kids want to politicize the university. They want the university to have a foreign policy and have political opinions. My response to that, Maia's response was also the same. Our job is to protect your political opinions. Universities don't have a political opinion. So we're going to keep our mouths shut and teach evidence as much as we possibly can. We also had a cover at that time, the Sullivan Principles. So we were able to divest a little bit or do something.

21:43It sort of placated the kids. And then before long, Mandela got in. DeClercq didn't blow up the world because he had eight atomic weapons and dismantled them and it ended. But South Africa was very much a training ground, just as Vietnam had been a training ground for college campus protests before that. Nobody protested in the 20s or 30s. They didn't care about what was going on in the rest of the world. They didn't care about Nazis. They cared mostly about white people not keep staying in power. That character in The Great Gatsby, who you meet on page two, Tom Buchanan, Yale graduate in 1915, said the white people are losing authority.

22:27The blacks and people of color are taking over the world. That's what he learned at Yale. Yeah. So it's interesting. I mean, there was one great protest in the early 30s. That were the World War I veterans. They descended upon them. Well, that was the March on Washington. March on Washington. And remember what MacArthur had to do. MacArthur put him down. Yeah. But that wasn't a college protest. These people were basically uneducated. 100%. I mean, the vast majority of American soldiers in World War I, illiteracy was the major problem and bad teeth. There were more people who were discharged from the army because of bad oral hygiene.

23:03They had no teeth and they had gum infections and illiteracy. It was the biggest two problems. That's why the GI Bill was such a transformative thing and changed America. This is a real segue. way. I think of all of the social programs in America, the thing I got out of your book, and I want you to react to it, is that the GI Bill did more to create the American dream than anything that I could think of. Because you took Jews from East New York and Italians from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who had no shot at getting educated. They came out of the army and they were told by the US government that their tuitions were going to get paid for.

23:41So they showed at Case University or Hofstra or CUNY. Anywhere they went. And they went from blue-collar families to white-collar aspirational living. Tell us a little bit about the GI Bill. First of all, it was an accident. Yes, of course. Tell us about the accident of the GI Bill. The American Legion did not want a repeat of World War I or the end of World War I when there were 200 ,000 soldiers coming back whose jobs had been taken by somebody else. So they wanted to create a means by which maybe 200, 250 ,000 returning soldiers could hold off for a year or two or three or even four and let the economy settle down.

24:20Well, 250 ,000 and go to college. 250 ,000 didn't go to college. Seven million did. They never expected this tidal wave of people and soldiers coming back who decided they wanted an education. So it shocked them. The colleges all of a sudden exploded. needed anybody standing in front of a classroom. That's how I got my opportunity to teach anywhere I wanted. It was before World War II, the faculty was 99 % male, Protestant, white. The student body was 90 % white, Protestant, male. And that was it. World War II changed it all. And the GI Bill was basically responsible for that. But so I want you to react to this because I think about this often.