Can college survive Trump?

29:55I think it is a problem when schools define, let's say, activism or civic engagement in a very ideologically restricted way. I think it's an intellectual problem. I think it's a moral problem for schools. I'll give you an example. I'm giving a talk at some conference and a guidance counselor from of high school says, I'll just tell you, if one of my students was applying to Wesleyan and she said her civic engagement was protecting the rights of the unborn, it would be professional malpractice for me to allow her to put that in the application. Now, I guess I was naive. I was shocked by that. You know, I've been a president for a long time.

30:38I've been a faculty member. And I said, come on. Everybody knows that is civic engagement. And he said, and everybody in my world, he said, and guidance counselors know that your admissions people won't like it. That was, to me, a slap in the head that I needed because I have no reason to doubt he was right because all these guidance counselors like shaking their heads. And I think that's a way in which the soft despotism of prejudice in a college or university constricts this free speech, the realm of contestation. and I've been fighting against it now for the last decade or so, both as a person who has access to the media and writes articles about such things, gives speeches about such things, but also as a teacher, adding more conservative voices into my own classes.

31:34I teach courses in history of moral philosophy or a course on the modern and the postmodern. And so I've always privileged to kind of mavericks in philosophy or political theory, but now I'm also adding to my classes criticisms of those voices, of those progressive thinkers. And sometimes the students are quite surprised by it, and they're totally capable of dealing with the issues. In other words, they may not on their own gravitate towards conservative critiques of progressivism, but when exposed to them, they're perfectly happy, willing, able to deal with a variety of perspectives. So all that is to say that a school can define a civic purpose, I think, that's not in tension with its educational purposes.

32:32And most schools in the United States, ever since the 1700s have had a civic purpose as part of what they do. I think it's nonsense what some of the presidents these days are saying, oh, we're just for the pursuit of truth. Colleges in America have always been about character and about civics. And so we can embrace that, but we can't do it in a parochial way because if we do it in a parochial way, we're limiting the educational potential of our students to explore ideas that may not be currently fashionable in their generation or among the faculty. And I found at Wesleyan, many faculty members who themselves might be leftists, you know, but are perfectly happy to teach a range of material, not satirically or critically, but actually because they know it's important, even if it's not where they've come down themselves.

33:33And if schools do that, I think they also make better citizens. That is, they make people who are more capable of dealing with disagreement and conflict in the public sphere. Do you see some cultural or institutional or moral harm in too much ideological conformity on campuses? I do, especially in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. I think people don't ask certain questions. that conservatives have long asked. They will neglect questions around, let's say, the family as a incubator of social practices. They won't ask questions around inequality that conservatives might ask that progressives don't ask.

34:23So I think a lot of things just don't get asked because us. There's no one to ask those questions. Like, you know, when I was a graduate student, women were starting to go to graduate school and they were asking questions about women's history. And the men were like, women's history? Just history. You know, and they said, no, well, actually it's men's history. You know, you haven't asked these questions about, let's say childbirth or about women's work. Eventually people said, oh my gosh, those are really interesting questions too. You don't have to be a woman to ask them. It just so happens that men didn't ask them.

34:54And so I think in some areas, having religious people, having people with libertarian perspectives, having conservatives, it really does open up questions that have, that are productive. Someone will say, what do you want, Nazis? No, I don't want Nazis. You don't want flat earth people in the geography department. But there's a long way between a department that defines itself in, let's say, Marxist terms or in anti-colonial terms, and Nazism. There's a lot of other things there that can be asked that don't get asked in some colleges and universities because of ideological conformity. Universities would be stronger if they were more intellectually diverse because we learn more from people with whom we disagree than from people with whom we agree.

35:41Is that to say that you think the university should be a place where people sometimes feel uncomfortable? And if it is, and I think we both believe that it is, how do you distinguish productive discomfort from actual harm? It's a good question, theoretically. I don't find it that hard, actually. A lot of people seem to. I know, but I don't believe them, frankly. Like yesterday, my grandson was sitting there. He's six years old. And he says he found out that there's a button in the car that somebody pushed by a mistake and his seat got very warm, you know, and his seat warmer. So he's looking at that button.

36:25He's thinking, what if I push it by mistake? And he starts getting upset because what if my foot hits it? And the proper answer is like, just calm down, basically, right? Because he's not really being harmed by that button. I've had to say to students, and I know not every, my colleagues don't always agree, but they'll say to me, I don't feel safe. I'll say, you are safe. And they say, I don't feel safe. I said, that's really not my problem. My problem is if you're not safe, that's my problem. I had a student years ago wanted to ban someone from graduation. This guy had done some stupid stuff.

37:04And he was punished for it. He said, but I don't want him at graduation. And to me, that was like he wanted a scalp. He wanted the trophy of saying I had him banned. I said, no, I guarantee your safety. If you don't want to come, that's up to you. We had a speaker this year who had a controversial inquiry about trans issues, especially about gender affirming care for young people. She hadn't taken a stand on it, but she had explored these issues and the real controversies around them. A group of students came and said, we think you should cancel this because I think you're doing actual harm. And I have said our duty is to protect the vulnerable, like trans students and immigrants, undocumented people.

37:48I've said that publicly many times. So they said, well, Kevin McRoth, protect us. I said, I'm not going to protect you against somebody who's asking good questions. You don't have to go if you don't want to. But no. But if there's somebody who's harassing a student, intimidating them, harassing them, I want them kicked out.

38:47We'll be right back. from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not play play. We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best idea win! On Brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere Tuesday on NBC. The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America. And Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small. From improving emergency response times to protecting against cyber attacks, local, state, and federal governments are innovating with Google AI.

39:26This is a new era of American innovation. Find out more at g.co slash American Innovation. Lowe's knows how to help make your home holiday ready for less. Get Select Style Selections Vinyl Flooring for just$1.99 per square foot and have it installed before the festivities begin. Our team can help you every step of the way. See a Lowe's Red Vest Associate or visit lowes.com slash holiday install to get started. Lowe's. We help you save. Basic install only. Date restrictions apply. Subject to availability. Install by independent contractors. See associate for details. Contiguous U.S. only.

40:16Let's zoom out from this a little bit because there's a more fundamental question that we've wrestled with on this show. And I don't normally have a university president here. So I want to ask. And the question is, what is college for, really? Should we think of it primarily as a way to get prepared for a job? Or should we see it as something much more than that? I believe that college is for three things. The first thing is to discover what you love to do. I think that that can be in a community college. It could be at a trade school. It could be at a liberal arts school. but to have the freedom not to, I don't say discover your passion because that sounds so psychological.

41:02I think it's actually what stuff you like to do that makes you feel alive when you're working. And so I think it's so important for students to have the freedom to make that discovery because, you know, at a selective school, they say, well, I got A's in this subject, But they may not like doing that or they've never tried fill in the blank, you know, engineering or they've never tried astronomy or they've never tried poetry. And so a place where they can discover the kinds of things that give them meaning when they do those things. I mean, I think that's the first thing that a college is for.

41:43The second thing a college is for is to make the person who's discovering what they love to do get much better at what they love to do. And we can do a better job of that. I mean, grade inflation drives me batty. It makes me feel like the old man that I am. But I think we need to kick the students in the butt because a lot of the time they think they're pretty good at something. And maybe they're pretty good, but they can get a lot better. And so I think it's really important that every student go to a school that's going to make them work really hard. and it's so against the grain of American consumer view of higher education, which is it should be this time in your life where you get to have so much fun, you make your friends, you get married, have a lot of sex and blah, blah, blah.

42:32And that's fine. That's discovering what you love to do in a way. But I think they should go to a school where there are people around you who are making you get better what you love to do. The third thing is that you learn how to share what you've gotten better at and you love to do with other people. And that usually means, often means, selling it, actually. It means getting a job where you can continue to practice the things you love to do and that people will pay you for doing it. People say, well, I just got to love poetry, so I sit in the basement and write poems. No, no, no, no, no. I mean, you've got to get better at it.

43:08And then you've got to be able to take it out into the marketplace, out into the world. If you have those three things, discovering what you love to do, getting much better at it, and then learning to take it out into the world, finding a job where these things can, not going to be identical, but they can be aligned. That, I think, is a way that college can help people thrive long after they graduate. Are colleges still doing that? I mean, we talk a lot about AI on this show. I know you think about it as well. You've talked about it. there's always been a debate about the exact value of higher education, what the point of it is.

43:47That debate feels especially live in the age of AI as more and more work and learning is being automated. How do you think about this as the president of a university like Wesleyan? Do you worry that AI is a threat to the model that you just described? It can be a tool for the model I just described. I mean, I use AI all the time when I'm trying to find out information about things or get various takes on an issue. I think it's really helpful. But I do worry that the joy that I've tried to describe of thinking for yourself in the company of others or discovering what you love to do and getting better at it, that you might just not have that experience because you can outsource it to a bot.

44:44Now, take athletes as a counterexample. If I say to somebody on the football team, you know, instead of hitting that guy or running laps, why don't you just get a video, like just play Madden or something, you know, just do or go on and have a very good AI version of football. with it, put your immersive thing on and you don't have to play. They'll look at me. I think they'll look at me like I'm crazy because it's an embodied practice. It's not just watching football. Now, the question I think that the hard question that you're pointing to is, do people want to think or will they be happy if AI thinks for them?

45:25I believe they want to think if you invite them to think and give them that experience of thinking with tools and figuring out where they themselves stand on any particular issue. I think people want to think, but if you make it too easy for them not to think, they'll take it. I mean, we just, a couple of weeks ago, had a journalist, James Walsh, who was talking about college students who are using AI to cheat. And the way he described it, you know, cheating is so widespread at this point and so hard to detect that it's sort of throwing into doubt what it even means to earn a college degree at this point.

46:06You know, you're not just a president. As you said, you're also a professor. I don't know if you're experiencing this in the classroom. Are you seeing this? I am. Okay. I mean, does that worry you? It worries me. It worries me. But I find, it's interesting, like I, in my class, this moral philosophy class and others, I have them write something every week in relation to the reading. Usually it's just a question about a quotation. So occasionally I'll see one. It's so, you know, it's good and it's coming from a guy who sits in the back with a hoodie on and is like, doesn't want to be called on.

46:41They say, oh, must be AI. So, and I call on Max and I say, what, what, you know, what do you mean when you ask this question about Virginia Woolf? Very confident that he doesn't know what the hell it is. And he blows me away and says some very interesting things. So I can't tell. I can't tell when it's being used. So what I'm going to do this year is I'm going to actually have the students have dialogues with AI about the issues in the class. And then they're going to have to talk about it in discussion groups orally themselves. I'm not totally sanguine about this. I'm not, because some people are better just speaking out like orally than others.

47:21I want people also to have the experience of working things out on a page. I'm not sure exactly how I'll get that now. I mean, that's going to be a challenge. But I do believe that we as teachers need to encourage students to think for themselves with others around them. And that's going to be much easier to do in a seminar, in a small discussion class, you'll be able to tell than in a large lecture class. That, I think, will present some real issues. But I do worry that the invitation to think for yourself is an invitation to work and to be uncomfortable and to find your notions challenged. And some people will avoid that more easily because of AI.

48:18Other people, because of AI, will actually encounter things that make them more uncomfortable and make them think harder. So my job as a teacher is to invite students to think for themselves in a way that encourages them to do so. That actually gives them the appetite, enhances their appetite to do so. And if I can't do that, I'm not a good teacher. The whole thinking for yourself thing. I mean, that's what a humanities, that's what a liberal education is supposed to be. Yes. And, you know, I've heard administrators, I've even heard professors trying to defend the humanities in market terms, right?

48:57Like just talking about the transferable skills and all that sort of thing. And I really hate what gets lost in that framing. I mean, do you worry that the case is being made too defensively, always in terms of skill or utility, rather than this intrinsic value? I don't worry about that so much. I've had my arguments with folks like Stanley Fish always tells me, you know, I'm giving up the game if I say that it's useful to do humanities. And I'm a pragmatist. So I think if it's not useful, it's probably not worth doing at all. It just depends how you define usefulness. I'm not naive. I don't think that you should study poetry for four years and then we don't care about what job you have.

49:40I care that they get good jobs when they graduate college. To not recognize that they have to work in the world and that their education should be relevant to the work they do, it doesn't have to be the same as the work they do. But that it should be relevant to the work they do, I think that's an easy one. I think otherwise it really is just an education for those people who don't have to work. And that's a different kind of education. There's another story in the news, I'm sure you've seen it, about Indiana University, where something like 100 academic programs are being suspended or eliminated.

50:18And the Republican governor there, the explicit justification is that this is about reorienting our program so that it's more practical and geared towards better workforce outcomes. But when you look closely, you see what's also going on here, which is an attempt to control what's being taught and purge programs that are deemed too ideological. I just wonder what you think when you see something like that. Public universities are in a very different situation than I am. I have a board that, you know, they're very supportive. If they weren't, they'd fire me. In a public institution, you have to deal with politicians who aren't as devoted to the university as typical members of board of trustees at private institutions, because the politicians have lots of other competing interests, not just universities.

51:14What they're doing in Indiana is so terrible, especially because Indiana has had such a great public system for so long. And you can reform it. I mean, look what the president of Purdue did a few years ago. I mean, he really changed the direction, the economics of Purdue. And he's a conservative guy, he's a Republican. And that can happen. But it happens in talking with faculty and thinking about the educational purposes of the university. This wholesale closing of programs without giving the faculty a chance to figure out what will benefit students' education in the long run, I think is a horrible thing.

51:59people are very bad at determining what students should learn and that it'll be practical in five years eight years ago everyone all these people telling me michael you should require everyone to learn coding at wesley learn to code right learn to code what a bunch of bullshit right now no one's going to learn that ai will do that for you this idea that they know what's going to be practical in five or six years is i think really wrong-headed we need students to learn how to think, how to work hard, how to be creative, how to work with others, how to serve something in the public. All of these things can happen through a variety of subjects.

52:36The politicians don't know what the future will hold. They should allow the university to decide within its budget how to organize itself. Just on a more personal level, obviously, this is your job, but lots of people have your job and they're not showing up on my pod. You could have stayed quiet. You could just run your university. But you've put yourself out there. You've decided very publicly to defend universities, to defend liberal education. Why? What makes this fight worth having for you?

53:19you know my my parents thought of i think college education as a sign that they had achieved a certain amount of economic security they could afford to send their kids to college whatever college was and that you know it didn't really mean a lot to them uh for me

53:39as a student, it really was discovering a kind of freedom that I still enjoy, find profound, gives my life meaning in so many dimensions. As a teacher, I have seen students of all kinds, you know, from all walks of life and the various places I've taught, use the opportunity for education to connect with people in very different ways than they would have otherwise, to discover resources in themselves that they never knew existed, and to really thrive as human beings in ways they would not have without the education. and I know this because they tell me some of them tell me like around the time they're graduating now I have students in my classes whose parents were my students you know many years ago and I think that is it's a great gift that America gives to many different kinds of people in many situations in other words they're not all like Wesleyans it could be my wife teaches in the prison in Connecticut, you know, and she has students who tell her, this is when I feel free, when I'm studying literature in the Wesleyan prison program.

55:08And I just think that that's why authoritarians hate it so much. Because what you experience in an authentic education is you experience being free. And then it depends, what are you going to do with that? How are you going to build on that. And, you know, the threat of AI is that you won't experience being free. You'll just, you know, press some buttons. But that experience of freedom is extraordinarily fulfilling and something great to build on. And so I want to defend it because I believe so strongly in it. Michael Roth, you've got a big job, a lot to do. I appreciate you being so generous with your time.

55:49Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to talk with you, Sean.

55:58all right friends i hope you enjoyed this episode as you can tell this is a topic that's very close to my heart i used to teach i love the university i love the idea of the university and i am worried about what's happening to it and where it's headed but i appreciate michael's perspective and I'm very thankful that people like him are out there making these arguments. And I hope you got something out of it as well. As always, we do want to know what you think. We listen to everything you send in. We read all the emails, so keep them coming. Your notes help us make a better show. Actually, here's a voicemail we just received that I really appreciated.

56:46Sean, hello, and thank you for your show. I'm responding to your latest episode, Hopeful Pessimism. Your guest, Mara Vandelluk, sparked me to realize that so much of my existence in almost 69 years on this planet have been steered by the various forms of pessimism and optimism exhibited by my mother, father, grandmother, and the church that they grew up with. I'm also aware, again, thanks to this great episode, that I have been optimistically rebelling from their attitudes, etc., and trying to find my balance between these two poles of optimism and pessimism. Today, I believe that I must look for the nuances that allow me to hold pieces of both sides, possibly intention, while creating a peace of mind in myself.

57:38It's definitely a conscious journey to find this hybrid stance that does not swing the extreme poles of life from the world around me. Thanks, Sean. Keep it up.

57:51John, if you're out there listening, I am grateful for that note. Thank you. If any of you want to learn more about hopeful pessimism, that episode is right before this one in our show's feed. Okay, now it's your turn. Tell us what you liked and maybe what you didn't like about today's episode, or just tell us what you think about what's happening in higher ed right now and what you would do if you were president of a college or university. You can drop us a line at thegrayareaatvox.com or leave us a message on our new voicemail line, like John, at 1-800-214-5749. And once you're done with that, go ahead and give us a rating and leave a review so other people can find the show.

58:39This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey Edited by Jorge Jest Engineered by Christian Ayala Fact check by Melissa Hirsch And Alex Overington wrote our theme music New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays Listen to every single one And tell all of your friends and family members And their friends and family members It's really the only viable path to enlightenment That I am aware of The Gray Area is part of Vox Support Vox's journalism By joining our membership program today Go to Vox.com slash members to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.