How Politics Destroyed American Universities - Neil Gross

0:00Oncology is a key focus for Pfizer. With 40 % of R &D devoted to the oncology space, Pfizer is committed to advancing cancer care for your patients. Learn more at cancer.pfizer.com. Both sides are getting some things flat wrong about the current situation. What did students tell you that neither Fox or MS Now wouldn't run? A lot of the students, especially students who are more moderate or conservative, certainly, they really are hesitant to speak up in a lot of their classes. Most college classes aren't really about politics. Taking a math class, not really about politics. But there really is a lot of hesitancy to speak in classes.

0:37And even when talking to peers, people who don't feel like they fit in politically to their college context are really hesitant to speak up. And that's a shame. People should be willing to talk about their ideas. On the other side, I think the right-wing media overstates how much influence professors have over their students' political views. And I think there's also been a kind of celebration of the moves that the Trump administration has made against higher ed. And those moves have done much more harm than I think they've done good. So, you know, both sides talk about different aspects of the problem, but the basic problem is that college has gotten polarized.

1:06The country is being torn apart and that's affecting lots of different institutions. And ultimately it's affecting what's happening inside colleges and universities. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is sociologist and author, Neil Gross. Title of the book, What Happened to College, How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do to Fix It. Neil, I mean, that is on everybody's mind, Neil. Very topical. That's why I wanted to have you on. Before we dive into the book, though, I want you to tell us a little bit about yourself and why you took this course trajectory growing up, because I think, obviously, you are right at the center of all the stuff that's going on on this interesting subject.

1:52But yeah, well, thanks. First of all, thanks so much for having me on. Happy to happy to talk about it. I have, I have kids too, and one's about to go up to college. So the subject is also near and dear to my heart. So I had a bit of an unusual trajectory maybe for someone in academia. So I, when I came out of college, I became a cop. I was a police officer in the, in California and realized I didn't want to stay there. I didn't want to do that. So I went to graduate school and And I've been working on politics in higher ed for the better part of 20 years now. When I first started working on it back in the early 2000s, it was a big deal, but it's a bigger deal now.

2:28So I'm happy to be able to share my findings with people. So I have three adult kids, two of which graduated from college. My 27-year-old did not. He went two years, and he convinced me to have him leave. He's in the film industry. I think he got more film experience. I would have liked to have seen him receive the traditional liberal arts degree. He didn't want to do that. What has changed culturally? Because you and I growing up as roughly contemporaries in the same generation, our parents were beating us over the head to go to college. Well, I mean, it's true that a lot of parents and a growing number of teenagers have lost the faith that a college education is going to really help them in the labor market.

3:14And, you know, some of that's understandable. Um, you know, it's really expensive to go to college. Uh, there, there's a cause certainly has a bad political rap, which is mostly what my book's about. You know, it's also true that, uh, that for some people who go to college, it's not worth it, right? The big studies by the fed that look at kind of the long-term payouts of, of getting a bachelor's degree. And for maybe like 25 % of people who go, it's really not, it's not worth it. But for the other 75 % who do it, it is worth it. And really the more selective the college you go to, um, the more that payout tends to be long-term.

3:47So I totally get why people are skeptical. Of course, there's always going to be people who've got lots of other opportunities. It's definitely not for everyone. But it doesn't have the same universal appeal as it did in our generation. You're totally right about that. Kahan Academy, which I know you're familiar with, I had dinner with Sal. And he basically, I'm calling him Sal. You know, it's a little bit of an Italian version of Sal's name. But anyway, he said to me, you can get the liberal arts education online but can you though sir because isn't part of the experience the beer keg and isn't part of the experience the football game or the sorority dinner and the other elements of things that go on on a college campus yeah i'm pretty worried about the idea that we can communicate the best parts of a liberal arts experience online uh i mean obviously you can you can learn stuff online and technical skills or can be acquired that way uh but you're right i mean the liberal arts education is supposed to be about, yeah, the beer keg and all that, but it's also supposed to be about learning about a whole bunch of different subjects and sharpening your mind and becoming a more critical and experimental thinker.

4:56And that's hard to do without somebody, faculty members or peers who are pushing you to think harder about different things. One of the problems that I've identified on college campuses today is that there's just not enough debate. There's not enough people sitting around trying to disagree with each other about big political issues, moral issues, value questions. And without that, it's also hard to get a really meaningful liberal arts experience. I love my college experience. Did you like your college experience? How did you feel about your college experience? So I had a weird one because, like I said, I was planning to become a cop the whole time.

5:33So I went to a bunch of different places and transferred. So I had an unusual college experience. I will say I've taught at Colby college here in Maine for more than 10 years now. And I love it. I think it's great. The students are great, really interesting group, lots of athletes, very smart. And it's, I think they have a good experience overall. You know, but I've talked to a lot of students for this book, did interviews with more than a hundred students around the country, surveys, lots of surveys. And I found that generally speaking, students were having a pretty good experience, except that there's one part of college, which has fundamentally changed from when we went, which is that politics is just a part of the college experience at every step it's shaping whether kids go to college what colleges they go to it's shaping who they become friends with who they date the classes that they're willing to take the conversations they're having what they say in class what they major in and ultimately even the kinds of occupations they're going into so politics got threaded into college in ways it's always been there to some extent but much more than was true.

6:36I think when we were going, I mean, I was a cop. I wanted to be a cop. I never even really thought about whether, you know, I was, I was a good fit to go to college or not. Like I ended up going to Berkeley, graduated from Berkeley. Never really thought like, Oh, it's too liberal. I I'm never going to go there, even though I'm going to law enforcement. Um, and I think now that that's just really central for, for a lot of kids, whether they're on the left, the right, even the middle. No, there's no, no question. I mean, I have friends of mine that went to Ivy League schools and they feel that those schools have become too liberal and they're sending their kids to, you know, the SEC schools, you know, places like Vanderbilt or Auburn or things like that, and they don't want them to go there.

7:17Did you find that to be something going on in your research? Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely been a big shift of students who are, you know, maybe less, less, less, either less progressive or maybe just don't want to have politics be as important to their college experience who are heading to the Southeast. Privates like Vanderbilt, but also big publics. Those are getting a lot of shift from students from the Northeast. But it's, you know, it plays out in lots of different ways, even beyond that. I mean, you've got students who are really activists, who they want to go to a liberal arts college where that's really central.

7:51Or you've got students who, you know, really want to debate big ideas. And so they try to find a place where that's really top of mind. So, of course, with these elite schools, you can't always pick where you go. It's more that you pick them. And to some extent, they pick you. But it's something that people are thinking about. You know, there are college churches. There's online sources. You go to like niche.com, gives you an indication of what's happening politically at the college. You know, and sometimes those are accurate characterizations. Sometimes they're not. But it's just shaping the experience.

8:18And the downside is that we're kind of creating these political bubbles. So we're getting, you know, the activists are going to one set of schools, you know, make more conservative kids are going to another set of schools. And there's no talk. There's no crosstalk. There's not as much crosstalk as there should be. You know, you and I both know about this and you've written about it. There's a great culture war going on and both sides are fueling that culture war. But you, you know, you interpret this, you basically write in the book that both sides are getting some things flat wrong about the current situation.

8:50What did students tell you that neither Fox, let's say, or MS Now wouldn't run? Yeah. Well, from one side, the things they're telling me that I think MS Now would be less likely to cover. You know, a lot of the students, especially students who are more moderate or conservative, certainly, they really are hesitant to speak up in a lot of their classes. You know, most college classes aren't really about politics. You're taking a math class, not really about politics. But there really is a lot of hesitancy to speak in classes. And even when talking to peers, people who maybe don't feel like they fit in politically to their college context are really hesitant to speak up.

9:29And that's a shame. People should be willing to talk about their ideas. You know, on the other side, I think the right-wing media overstates how much influence professors have over their students' political views. And I think there's also been a kind of celebration of the moves that the Trump administration has made against higher ed. And those moves have done much more harm than I think they've done good. So both sides kind of talk about different aspects of the problem. But the basic problem is that college has gotten polarized. The country has been being torn apart, and that's affecting lots of different institutions.

10:02And ultimately, it's affecting what's happening inside colleges and universities. Guys, thank you so much for listening and subscribing to Open Book. You know we've got 200 authors on this show. It's been a lot of fun for me, but I'm also an author now too. And I've got all the wrong moves available. Go to Scaramucci.net backslash all the wrong moves. You can buy your copy today. It's a lot of fun and lots of commentary about what's gone on in the U.S. over the last three decades. Okay, I'm going to say a couple of different narratives that are inside your book, and I'd like you to thread them for me.

10:37Okay, so narrative number one is tuition has outrun inflation over the last 40 years. So it's become monumentally expensive. You were talking 60, 70, 80, in some cases,$100 ,000 a year to go to school. That's almost a half a million dollars for four years. Wage premium, however, is still way ahead. As you point out, it's around 70 % if you go to college versus not going to college. But it feels like confidence has collapsed despite that narrative. And so is it the politics that's driving the disillusionment or is it the society? Has it just become socially acceptable to say, hey, not going to college is too expensive for me and my family?

11:22Well, I think it's a lot of different things. I mean, there's no question that cost is huge. Like I want to say upfront to start with it, you know, the numbers you're giving, those are the sticker prices for college for people whose income are typically above$200 ,000,$250 ,000 a year. You know, at most private colleges, there's a pretty steep discount for families who are making more than that. And certainly at public universities, especially if you're going in-state, it's not that expensive. So that's true, actually. And net college prices have been edging down. But people, I mean, it's a lot of money.

11:51Those are good points. And you do mention those in the book. And those are a good question. But the politics piece, I think, is also there. I mean, I think part of the problem also in the background is we probably sent too many kids to college. there's lots of other jobs people need to have and lots of other skills that people are great at and maybe they don't feel they don't really need to go to college to get what they need to get to do well in life. So I think there was probably an overinflation of the emphasis on college. But I think there's no question, you know, the confidence in higher ed is very much predicted by what your political views are.

12:29Those on the right just tend to be much less confident than than those on the left. But it's not just that. I mean, there's people on the left and people in the middle who also think higher ed just kind of went out of control politically. And that leads them to be, especially when mixed up with these cost concerns, just a little hesitant to send their kids there. Okay, so I'm going to stipulate because you more or less say it in the book, and I actually agree with your book, which is why I want to invite you on, that things have gone a little haywire, right? And I would say that college administrators are now acknowledging, whoa, we may have broken this very valuable vessel.

13:06So tell me how they broke it and tell me about they're at least aware of the problem now and how are they going to fix it? Yeah. Well, I think they broke it. Kind of my diagnosis is they broke it by not recognizing where the train was going. It's not hard, I think, to predict that if you've got an institution where basically like your kids, a lot of kids are gonna have to go there to get the kinds of jobs that pay really well. If the people who are teaching those kids and the administrators who are overseeing those institutions are all on the completely different side of the political aisle than the parents, eventually there's gonna be some tension there.

13:47And I think that's a big part of what's going on. But I think college administrators kind of let polarization get the best of them. So I think you see this in different areas, like take DEI, for example. I had conversations with the students I interviewed about DEI, and it was interesting. Many of them said that the things that really stood out to them about DEI were just things that have been part of higher ed since when we were going to college, like multicultural centers. They've always been there, diversity requirements. It's always been around to some extent. But I think starting in 2015 or so, you started to get a real emphasis on administrators from administrators on trying to impose different kinds of dei ideas on faculty and on student life and i think some of that stuff went uh you know i think the evidence suggests that it really went too far people really recoiled at that you know colleges work well they're they're places of creativity and searching for new knowledge and debating ideas and when there's any effort to impose kind of an ideology on what happens on college campuses uh the the system just doesn't doesn't run well.

14:52So that's true when it happens from the left. It's true when it happens from the right. And I think higher ed kind of let itself be overtaken by the movement left in big parts of the country. And I think you can't really serve the country well if you're mostly serving one part of it. Well, listen, I mean, what I love about the book is that it's all right there. I mean, you could hand that to a student, you'd hand your book to a teacher, a professor, a college administrator you've done the work for them uh aoc you know who she is and i do okay aoc said something that i want you to react to aoc this is apropos to what you were just talking about said woke one was crazy did you hear her say that i did see that yeah okay i want you to take that statement and put it into what is going on culturally at colleges now.

15:51Do the administrators know that woke one was crazy? Well, let me maybe put it in a somewhat different term to talk about something we haven't talked about before or yet, which is this idea of cancel culture. You're right. I mean, I did try to write a book that you just hand to people. I really wanted to put the student voices front and center because they've kind of been absent from this debate, like what are actual students thinking um so i have one chapter where i delved into this idea of cancel culture and what does that look like and so to contrast like woke one with woke two uh you know when students like recent alumni told me about or people who were just graduating about cancel culture what it's like 2020 2021 you know they described basically saying something that others took offense to and then there'd be like an online mob um everyone would would you know kind of say that what they're doing was terrible.

16:39They felt horrible. There's a lot of just ostracizing them. I think, you know, there's kind of less of that than probably people feared, but it certainly did happen. And now it's changed according to the students that I've talked to. And it's changed in two different ways. Number one, a lot of students now think that that wasn't a good situation. A lot of students now say, actually, cancel culture, even if they're on the left say that that wasn't a good way to run a college experience. And so they're hesitant to do that. It's kind of shifted now. It's a little bit quieter now. So it's more like defriending.

17:11So now if you say something in class, that's, that's a little bit untoward, people might take offense at, it's less that people are going to pile onto you. And it's more that they'll just kind of quietly back away and not want to be your friend. And, you know, kids are scared of that. They really want to make friends in college. It's a big part of the college experience, which is another reason that they're just hesitant to talk in class. So, you know, I think there was a moment like progressivism really bubbled up really intensely in 2020, 2021. It certainly happened on college campuses. And it just did stuff to the college experience that made it different than it was before.

17:44I think professors and college administrators, they might not all agree with my diagnosis, but I think a lot of people recognize that something's not working right and they've got to do things to change it up. But you've had a little bit of a bout with this yourself, right? I mean, your last book, I think it was on police reform. And then you got a petition demanding your resignation for writing that police abolitionists should consider becoming officers. How much of this book comes out of that experience? You know, it's interesting. I actually, that wasn't the driving force for writing this book.

18:23and I'll tell you that the driving force was I was talking to a colleague who writes a lot about this stuff and I was just studying police issues, police reform, what works in policing, reform what doesn't. And he said, you know, the college politics stuff is really front and center right now. And it's something that he worked on before. Like, why aren't you gathering new data on this? And I realized I didn't really have any new data to offer. And so I thought I better look into it. But certainly as I started thinking about it more, I did want to understand, like, well, why was it that some students at my college called for my resignation from publishing a piece in the New York Times?

19:01I'm personally on the left, and the idea was, you know, if you want to reform the police, to the extent that they need it, one way to do it is to get more people with kind of more liberal-leading ideas to become cops, kind of fix it from the inside. And there's a group of students, this was right during COVID, right after George Floyd's murder, who said, yeah, we should fire this guy. Luckily, in my case, I teach at Colby. We're a college that really puts free expression front and center. I've got this longstanding award that we give. It's a kind of big deal award in journalism for courageous journalists who've sometimes fought and risked their lives to report stories.

19:38So I had total support from my college. I never was worried about losing my job or anything. But I guess at some level, it did make me think, like, why is this happening? And, you know, this is not the way that a college should work. It's not the way to get big ideas out there and debate them. Okay, really well said. I mean, I think that the book captures things for me that are true. You know, the campuses are overwhelmingly liberal. They were very liberal when I graduated. They've become more so. you write, and I'll repeat this for viewers and listeners, the Yale survey found roughly 39 % of the undergraduates thought physical violence could be justified against someone espousing hateful views.

20:22A little hypocritical, I think. I don't know. I've been a lifelong Republican, but I'm still against the death penalty because the death penalty isn't fairly administered. If you're loaded, you can machine gun your colleagues and you'll stay in jail. If you're not loaded, you'll hang. But what does a number like that tell you about where all of this is going, sir? You know, social scientists talk about two kinds of polarization. One is ideological. It's when people just start to disagree more on issues, big debate issues like the death penalty. The second kind is affective polarization, which is when you, it's not just people disagreeing, it's people who are really coming to hate each other and think that if you've got a view that's different from mine, you're a terrible person.

21:12It doesn't take a big leap to go from affective polarization to maybe being okay with political violence. You know, I have to say, I'll just say this, I think some of those numbers are a little confusing. I'm not sure that people who are answering surveys always mean the same thing when they respond to them, when there's those questions. It's not like they're saying that I would commit political violence or I would necessarily support someone who does. But I think there's no question that support for political violence has risen. And whether colleges are contributing to that or not, I'm not sure.

21:47But we're certainly not doing enough to combat it. And I think we need to tamp down effective polarization. Look, that's got to be one of the things that colleges do. We have to be institutions that try to help stitch the country together. That's a big part of our mission. It always has been. And get people to debate. And I think we've kind of lost that plot. So let's talk about what campuses are getting right. Well, the first thing I want to say about this is if you ask students about their college experience and about their faculty, most of them will say, even if they've had some issues with free expression, most of them will say, have a good experience.

22:22most of them say that their faculty did a good job even the majority of students who are on the right will say that their faculty did a great job taught them, inspired them so we've got a really fantastic group of folks who are doing science and doing important scholarship in higher ed we've had for decades the leading higher education system in the world and it's helped to power a lot of American success a lot of American innovation, growth has basic knowledge produced in universities as like its core. I think that's still there. There's amazing science being done in lots of different schools, great research.

23:00I think we shouldn't ignore that. I think whenever we try to put a cap on that, the country suffers. I think that's one thing that colleges are doing right. And the other thing that I think they're doing right is that they're starting to pay more attention to teaching. There's a long time when, especially at really top universities, teaching was really secondary to what the university was all about. It was really all about research. I think a lot of schools now are leaning into the idea that, you know, if we're going to compete with Khan Academy, we've got to do a great job in the classroom and really put a lot of our energies there.

23:34And I think schools are doing that, which is great. Listen, I had a great, look, I'm generally moderate. I thought the campus was left-leaning. I love my professors. I got a great lot out of it. I thought the liberal arts education prepared me for life. Unfortunately, this generation has a mixed thing. I don't even think that was a debate for you or me, Neil. I just think it has become a debate now. Something else happened, though, pretty recent, but may be with us for a while, is the federal government is now using funding as leverage over the universities. Does that fix anything or does it accelerate the collapse in the trust that you describe in the book?

24:20So there's always been some effort by the federal government to influence what happens on college campuses, right? So the federal government has always had some priorities for what kinds of areas it's going to fund research in. And under the Obama administration, certainly there were demands and requests for certain kinds of boxes to be ticked in research grants. You know, that's some of that's to be expected. But to come right to your point, yeah, I think the really multi-pronged efforts from the Trump administration to go after higher education have been pretty damaging to the sector. Tons and tons of grants, billions of dollars in grants, sometimes for really crucial biomedical research, were canceled arbitrarily when Doge was just doing keyword searches.

25:10of grant applications to see if anything looked bad, didn't fit their priorities. But I think more generally, the idea of this administration is that everything that the federal government touches that goes to higher ed should align with the administration's ideology. And that is not what the federal government has historically done. Historically, they've said, generally speaking, we've got some priorities, but we trust you in higher education, you scientists do the research that you think is important. Now, I think maybe we lost the trust that higher education perhaps became too activist and led there to be less trust in our ability to figure out what we should be studying.

25:54But the idea that the federal government should dictate what happens in the classroom should dictate exactly the kind of research that's being done. It's bad. It produces terrible research. It produces terrible teaching. And it's, again, bad when it's done by the right. It's bad when it's done by the left. It's not the way things should go. It should be a pretty autonomous sector. And because, you know, really smart people run it. You know, I don't want my elected official telling a nuclear physicist how to do their research. And I doubt that most of your listeners do either. Well, I mean, listen, you make such a compelling and such a balanced case for all this stuff, which is why I wanted to get you out here.

26:33I mean, I think I'm going to stipulate this. You can agree or disagree, but I more or less know that you agree because I read your book. American universities are still the envy of the world. Have we broken something or said differently? It's 10 years from today. Are we still the envy of the world or we've broken something that we can't rebuild? I think we're in danger of having broken something. I'm not sure that it's broken yet. I've spent a bunch of time talking recently with colleagues in Europe who study higher education there and what's happening with issues of academic freedom there. And for many years, the European Parliament and European Union produced a report of threats to the academic freedom of European researchers.