Breaking History - Why the Future of Education Won’t Come from the Ivy League

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

Peter Berkowitz returns to the show to trace the slow collapse of liberal education in America, all in his new book, Reclaiming Liberal Education in America. In this episode, he and Eli Lake walk through 50 years of ideological capture, from the campus radicals of the 1960s who became the tenured professors of the 1980s, to the speech codes of the 1990s, to October 7, 2023, as the moment it all came into full view. Along the way, they dig into the French postmodernists who gutted academic standards, the DEI bureaucracies that replaced intellectual diversity with conformity, and the peer review process that failed so spectacularly. They end on the essential question: Can the university still reform itself, or is it time to build something new? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back, Breaking History listeners. In this episode, we've got a returning guest, or you may remember from our punk rock Socrates episode, Peter Berkowitz. And in this episode, which is just going to be a conversation between the two of us, I wanted to talk to Peter, who is, in my view, one of the kind of sharpest and early, was just sort of Jeremiah about the state of the academy. And he has a new book coming out, which is a collection of his columns and essays. looking at how to save the universities. Peter, welcome back to Breaking History. Thanks so much for being here. Good to be with you. Thank you.

So let's start and maybe let's talk about this new book that you have, which is the collection of essays. If you could sort of distill, what is the major theme that you were trying to get readers to understand about where we are right now in the academy? Well, I can summarize in a single sentence. Liberal education is in the United States, This is in a state of great disrepair, and it's an important public interest to repair liberal

education in America. Why is liberal education in the public interest, in your view? Well, for reasons that were articulated all the way back at the time of the American founding, if you have a government based on the consent of the governed, that is a popular government in which citizens make decisions about who serves, decides how long they stay, votes representatives out of office, you want the citizens to be informed.

And not just about matters of current public policy, you want them to be knowledgeable about how government operates, how our system operates, the premises that it rests upon. And by the way, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't hurt to have a refined understanding of human nature, human motivation, religion, and more. So it seems to me plain that the United States needs people who are educated in liberal education. Okay. Let's define what we mean by liberal education. What are we talking about? We're talking about Gibbon and Mill and Locke and Jefferson,

or are we talking about a way of thinking and approaching the world? How would you define it? Yes and yes. Let's start with education, which goes back to Latin word or words, meaning to draw out, to form, to cultivate. Liberal modifies education. It's a specific kind of education. What kind of education is a liberal education? It's an education that prepares young men and women for the rights and responsibilities of freedom.

So a liberal education is especially appropriate in a free society. Now, what is the content of that education? Well, it makes sense to begin with the form of government under which these young men and women live in the United States. That's American constitutional government. It makes sense to include in that knowledge. of the civilization in which your nation emerged. For us, that's Western civilization.

It makes sense to include in that also the study of not only the humanities, but the sciences, how the physical world works, and because you can't really understand yourself unless you understand other peoples and other nations. A liberal education also includes study of our neighbors, study of distant peoples, study of other civilizations. So you can see it's ambitious, but its guiding standard is preparing students for rights and responsibilities of freedom. What are we getting now largely? What has replaced, in your view, liberal education in the universities?

Well, very often, indoctrination has replaced liberal education in our universities. of our faculty members believe that it's their job to inculcate in students the right opinions about morality and politics, not present students with, as Matthew Arner once said, the best that's been thought and said in Western civilization, other civilizations, but in effect, tell students what they need to think. And these days, especially, what they need to understand about all that's wrong with the United States of America. Okay. I went to college in the early 1990s. I thought I got a pretty good liberal education,

and I was motivated about it. But at the same time, you know, in the early 90s, I think you and I were both in the universities at the time. I mean, you were a little older than me, but there was this wave of what was called political correctness. And there were, you know, the fashionable thinkers at the time, people like Catherine McKinnon that comes to mind, Kimberly Grinchaw. And they offered a kind of new critique, kind of in some ways.

We've talked about this privately many times, based on Foucault, maybe going back to Nici. Tell me about the intellectual roots of maybe what you would call the illiberal trends that we are seeing manifested today. There are really two parts of this. Before we get to Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and the French influence, let's look directly at at changes that transpired in the American Academy. And yes, I agree with you in Tyler. You were there as sort of one of the important turning points, early 1990s, when this term political correctness came into vogue. And of course, what we call wokeness today is a descendant

of that. But consider the following timeline. Great social and cultural upheavals in the United States, also in Western Europe in the late 1960s, students from the 1960s undergraduates arrive in graduate schools and professional schools in the early 1970s. And they bring with them a new opinion about the purpose of education, that is, the purpose of teaching and the purpose of scholarship. The proper purpose, they believe, is promote the correct political opinions and to call students to action. So instead of understanding the world, say nothing of serving as guardians of the treasures of Western civilization, something that sounds today hopelessly antiquated, no, they thought

their aim is to pursue politics by other means. These students get their degrees in the late 70s, they arrive at them campus in the early 80s, they obtained tenure in the late 1980s or so. These numbers are approximate. Now they have power. And in the name of their political program, they impose limitations on what can be said and limitations on what should be taught. Because after all, if you happen to be blessed with knowledge of the truth about politics and you know exactly how political life ought to be organized and you have methods, you have

and you have a sensibility that dictates the correct outcomes, why would you waste time on debate? Why would you waste time reading Dante or Shakespeare or Plato, or for that matter, Sotsonitzen. Why would you read these matters? You have no time to lose in transmitting to students the correct views. Into this mix, especially beginning in the late 1970s, many American professors of the humanities imported cutting-edge French thinkers, Derrida Lacan Foucault. What was their message? Their message, we can use the term postmodernism to describe their message, was that everything is up for interpretation.

There are no, as Leotard said, there are no grand narratives. The supreme, but also the constant intellectual act, is one of interpretation. We can acknowledge this or we can fail to acknowledge it. Those of us who fail to acknowledge it are enslaved to somebody else's ideas. Those who acknowledge it are the ones who are truly free. This became a postmodern conceit that around the time that you were an undergraduate had gained dominance on faculties. Okay.

So then what happens, which is, I mean, I think I would add to that, that even though Edward Said is doing Middle East and Palestine studies, he also says that scholar has to be an activist, scholar has to be political. And that means that, you know, if you're in a political fight, it's very different than if you're an intellectual kind of symposium. that has, and there is, in a weird way, Lacan and Foucault have this one, on the one hand, they say everything's open to interpretation,

but then there's very little intellectual humility that they might be wrong and that, you know, that would allow for the counterpoise, if you will, of different, and different ideas. So is it that basically you have all these grad students becoming professors and then they get tenure and they slowly are kind of indoctrinated in this view. And the old ideal of ideological diversity and the idea that we might be wrong and that I am grateful for, you know, Hillel is grateful for Shemai. You know what I mean?

I'm grateful for the dialogue. I'm grateful to have somebody to argue with is replaced with, let's all, you know, understand that the system is evil and Israel is a settler colonial estate and any number of other things that are now kind of doctrine. Is that kind of what happens and slowly over time those people gain power and then they move everybody else out? Yes, that is sort of what happened. But also let's underscore some important distinctions. You introduced the name of Edward Said quite correctly. We some think of Said as postmodern in a way he is, but he also stands in sharp contrast, at least ostensibly to Foucault Derrida, how so. According to Edward Said,

there is an authoritative narrative. The one we're accustomed to hearing in the West is wrong. The true narrative, the true account of history, is that the United States has been a rapacious marauding power, not least in the Middle East. Even the West scholars are part of colonial socialization. Said devotes the biggest part of his career to showing that the efforts by scholars, not least, especially the great Bernard Lewis, are actually part of the Western effort to colonize, subdue the Orient, that is, the Muslim Arab world. Now, you might point out, and you would be correct, that, well, it's inconsistent on the one hand to argue that everything's up. for grabs. And on the other hand, there actually is a true narrative in which the United

States is the great villain of world history. And yet, for 30 years, those two ideas have co-existed in a significant swath of the American humanities professoriate. Again, one idea is that everything's up for grabs, there are no authoritative standards, everything's a matter of social construction, and America is a rapacious colonial power to which the only proper response is resistance. Right. Okay. Yeah, that is an interesting. I mean, I'm glad you pulled that out. That is a tension in the sort of philosophy there. What I want to try to understand is, when did, I mean, I remember speech codes in the early 90s, and I also remember there was a backlash to the speech codes in the early 90s. I mean, I wrote in my college, New York,

at the time, you know, some sophomoric columns that were poking fun at some of the speech codes and so... Good for you. And, you know, I wasn't disciplined. I remember there was a professor and I met with the head of the... I mean, but it wasn't anything terrible. But now, then we start to see in within 10 years of that, let's say the early 2000s, maybe, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you start to really see that there, the, actual bureaucracy of the university is kind of then enforce it in a much more serious way in a way, right? That there is this idea that, you know, words are kind of violence, that, you know, you can't say

certain things, that there are certain views that are not all right, you know, and slowly but surely, you see a kind of suffocation of the debate. All the while, the old guard, what might be called the liberal university professors are, small L, dying out. And they're not replaced with people who might offer a challenge of the view on whatever the topic might be, but rather more people who kind of buy into the program. I mean, is that basically right? I think it's basically right. It reminds me of an observation that Machiavelli makes early on in the prints in which

he says, doctors know that early, early. on a disease is hard to diagnose but easy to cure. Later on, it's easy to diagnose but hard to cure. So you're a young undergraduate making fun of something that deserves to be made fun of, speech codes at a university. Around this time, David Bromwich, who's a serious scholar, by the way, of literature at Yale and a man of the left, wrote a precious book called Politics by Other Means, early 90s, in which he, like you, also criticized speech codes. But you guys, you and Bromwich were crying in the wilderness and not too many people were listening. So remember, almost 35 years have passed more.

The students who came up under that regime of political correctness of speech codes are now, in positions of power. They're parents who are sending their own children to college. Remember also, in 1998, discussed this in the book, Alan Charles Coors and Harvey Silverglate publish a book called the Shadow University. That's 1998, now almost a little less than 35 years ago. 300 pages of documentation of violations on campus of freedom of speech and violations on campus of due process. This all began in the early 90s. When you were in college, you remember the notorious water buffalo incident at the University

of Pennsylvania? Of course. Oh, yes, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Right. This was the beginning.

At Penn. At Penn. Cors was a professor of history. Silver Glate was a lawyer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They had gone to Princeton together. One grew up to be a somewhat conservative history professor, that's Cors, the other left of center attorney. They both shared a devotion to free speech and liberal education.

Cors stuck up for this student who was accused of racism because at midnight he, from the eighth or tenth floor. of his apartment building, his dormitory building, he shouted below for quiet and he called the people who were making a lot of noise, water buffaloes. It turns out he came from an orthodox Jewish family, I think, in Brooklyn, and this was a translation of a biblical term, water buffalo for a sea monster. But he was immediately accused of racism, and the pen disciplinary procedure seemed only too willing to punish him for this, but Cores came to his rescue. In any case, this prompted Cors in Silverglades as they were, as Cors was deluged with inquiries from around the country,

and please, for help, they realized that something had to be done. They published a book, documenting the abuses on campuses, and if you ask them, they will tell you, they continue to get so many requests for help that they created the fire, originally the foundation for individual rights and education. And they both were convinced this foundation would go out of business within 10 years. That is, a foundation devoted to defending free speech and due process on campus. Instead, they discovered that they were in a growth industry. Their caseload increased every year from the late 1990s so much so that just a few years ago, they'd changed their name from Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to Foundation for Individual

Rights and Expression because they realized that there was a need to expand their mandate from universities to other spheres of the United States in order to defend free speech. Wow. So the Canaries are in the coal mine in the 1990s. Yes. Now, would you say then, okay, so then slowly but surely the faculty changes. the administration changes. And then we should add, there's another element here, which is that the actual school bureaucracies, we see an explosion of administrative deans, right,

for all a number of things. And as this is happening, the price compared to inflation of most, especially elite universities, is through the roof. Individual students and families are going into debt to send their kids to these schools. And then, I mean, would you mark October 7, 2023,

as another kind of hinge point, which is that's when we see in some ways the explosion of student activism often encouraged and nurtured by the faculty itself to then target, in many cases, other students with whom they disagree. So that's sort of another phase, which is that what you had before

were you could see it in the coursework that was offered, you could see it in the disciplinary procedures. You could see it in the speech codes, all these slowly things. And then suddenly you had a moment where literally all of the rules that would have applied to any other minority group are thrown out the window when it came to Jews or who support Israel after the worst pogrom that we've seen since the Holocaust, which became a lightning rod. Is that correct, would you say? that that's the sort of next shoe to drop? I do want to talk about it. It's a crucial shoe that dropped.

It is a crucial hinge point. But if I may, I want to identify two hinge points before it. So three hinge points. Please. So probably make more, but let's build up to October 7, 2023, because you're absolutely right about its importance. Let's start, though, with 2005. What happened in 2005?

Then-president of Harvard University, Larry Summers, was invited to a closed door off the record session. The subject was, why are women underrepresented in the sciences? Now, the background of that is women had achieved near parity in all the, and the rest of the university, in the humanities, in the social sciences, in the professional schools. There's only one part of the university in which women were. lagging behind. And that was in the sciences. And Summers, as an intellectual, a bit of a bulldog, he came into this meeting and he analyzed the matter and he offered three hypotheses. One is

the scientists are more chauvinistic. He rejected that. He said, I've talked to them. It's not true. A second possibility, he said, is that capacities are distributed differently among males and females in mammals. That is, there are more men along the bell curve tend to gather at the extremes. What this means is that for every one woman with the high theoretical intelligence necessary, let's say to excel as a physicist, they're four men. Of course, this also meant that for every one female moron, they're four male morons. That's what a bell curve is. But Summers rejected this. He said, no, that can't be the explanation because in this enormous country, there are too few such positions.

And he considered a third option. And the third option was that whereas in almost every other field, you can obtain tenure, including or begin your professional career by the time you're in your early 30s, in the natural sciences, you don't obtain tenure to your late 30s. And so a woman blessed with the high theoretical intelligence needed to, you know, to become a physicist at Harvard will probably choose law or medicine or social sciences or humanities. Socialists have the option of combining family and professional life. But there was a biologist, of all things, a biologist in that room who left it, called the Boston Globe

and said she felt faint, nauseous when Larry Summers said that women lack the high theoretical intelligence, which is not what Summers said. In any case, this created a big controversy. Originally, originally, the country seemed to be with Summers, but in my opinion, he abjectly folded. He apologized repeatedly for having, as if he had said something wrong, when instead he was following the argument. Eventually, eventually, within about six months, he was forced to resign from the presidency of Harvard. This taught a lesson. If the former secretary of the Treasury, a Democrat, a distinguished economist, the president

of Harvard University cannot analyze matters based on empirical evidence, then no one can. is violence. The second, second really important turning point was the spring and summer of 2020, COVID. This less for universities, but more for K through 12. Parents were forced to stay at home as their children did their lessons over over Zoom. And they got to watch indoctrination in K through 12. I'll give you one concrete example of this. I had a colleague, I was in State Department at the time, who had to spend two days a week at home with his children during the initial lockdowns. One day, he comes to my office in the morning, enraged after everyone staying for a day, says, you tell me what I say to my daughter. So, what do you mean? By the way, I should mention, this guy who's white had married a native-born Japanese woman. They had two beautiful

children, and the children look more Asian than not. As my guy was standing. As my guy was standing over his daughter, then nine-year-old daughter, the teachers were explaining, prestigious Northern Virginia school, that the United States is divided into two classes, oppressor and oppressed. The oppressors are white people, oppressed everybody else. And this beautiful nine-year-old girl turned to her father and said, well, Daddy, if there are only two classes oppressor and press, which one do I fall into? She being the daughter of a native-born Japanese woman and her father, a white guy. Okay, this experience was repeated across the United States.

Parents were learning that our schools were specializing in indoctrination. So, so to speak, awareness was raised. And then came, Eli, she walked us through October 7, 2023. Around 5 p.m. on October 7, 2023. that's midnight in the Middle East, we knew by then that Hamas jihadists and other Palestinians were conducting a massacre in Israel. We knew that. Thirty-four student groups at Harvard University published a statement on Instagram saying, we hold Israel entirely responsible for the violence perpetrated against it, implication that somehow Israel's treatment of the Palestinians

justified Palestinian slaughter of Israelis. Now, you have to ask yourself, where could these students have learned such things? Could it be that Harvard had taught them, that there are any circumstances in which massacring, 1,200 mostly civilians, kidnapping, 251, mostly civilians, using rape as a weapon of war, killing children in front of parents and parents from children. Could it be that Harvard University taught these students, that all this was somehow just and appropriate? And the answer is, to some extent, yes. People don't grow up with, they're not born with such beliefs.

They have to acquire them somewhere. And to bring this point to its conclusion, Where did the sensibility come from? It came from the belief widely taught at our universities that the United States is a settler colonial power. It is essentially rapacious and the United States has a settler colonial partner outpost in the Middle East and that's Israel. So resistance to Israel is resistance to the worldwide injustice perpetrated by the United States of America. and the rest, that's just details. Well, I would go one further, though, because to me, what made it different in the ensuing weeks and months

was that, I mean, listen, college campuses are going to have been protesting Israel for a long time, and that is understandable, but, or not understand, you know what I'm saying. I mean, like, that'll happen. But it was the, utter negation of all of these protections that were built up in the last 35 years or so for minorities

that went out the window for one group of students. So you was okay to verbally harass. It was okay to block areas off and say no Zionists can enter. It was okay to show up at Israel's studies courses and disrupt literally classrooms. All these things were fine, whereas if you had done it to any other group on campus, you would have been expelled. That would have been, you know, speech is violence, this is crossing the line, et cetera. And suddenly, as we saw in the congressional hearings in 2024, amazingly,

Claudine Gay and these college presidents had all discovered the virtues of free speech on campus, which they had clearly been against, you know what I'm saying? So that to me was, wait a second, this is not about a principle, this is really now kind of entering into something much uglier. Maybe just talk a little bit about that. I mean, do you think I have that right in terms of the diagnosis there? You do, but we still have to explain why the fury directed at at Israel, why the sympathy for a avowedly genocidal organization, namely Hamas. In its 1988 charter, it proclaims that its reason for being is the elimination of the state of Israel, the planting of the flag of Allah over every corner, in every inch of the land between

the river and the sea. How do we explain this? You said earlier, you checked yourself, but you said the protests of Israel are understandable. Well, in some sense, yes, because every country is flawed. But it becomes harder to understand the protest focus on Israel when one considers that between 2011 and 2021, the Syrian civil war, that is Bashar al-Assad, killed somewhere between 500 and 600,000 Syrians and displaced around 13,000. million. I don't remember demonstrations on campus. In Yemen, almost 400,000 people have died since 2014.

I don't remember any demonstrations on campus. In China, is committing crimes against humanity, and both the State Department under Mike Pompeo and the State Department under Todi Blinken said genocide of the Uyghur people was taking place in northwest China. I don't see regular demonstrations on campus against China. Tens of thousands of Christians in Nigeria have been murdered by the Muslims there. I don't see protests. So we have to ask why the intense focus on Israel. And I think a big part of the answer has to do with the anti-Americanism that our universities have been teaching in a variety of ways. Because Israel, in a way that China can't, and Syria can't be, and Yemen and Kampi, and Nigeria can be. Israel, though, can be seen,

because it's true. Israel is a friend of and partner to the United States of America. So Israel becomes a, in one sense, a scapegoat, in another sense of target. So, Eli, you remember that during the student encampments of 2023 and 2024, one of the common slogans was, globalize the intifada. That illustrates this point. that Hamas' resistance to Israel is one front of the resistance to, well, what? And the answer is, two, the Western civilization led by the United States. We must never forget that Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood, Muslim Brotherhood in the first place,

understands its enemy not as Israel, but as the West. It wants to destroy Israel, but it wants to destroy Israel, but it wants to destroy. Israel because Israel represents this incursion of Western poison into Muslim land. Do you ever gaze longingly at your old NPR toad bag and wish you could call up the Kar-Talk guys and ask them how to fix the meaning crisis? Do you get Afab confused with ACAB but are too embarrassed to admit it? Do you long for a social life that was a little more nuanced? Sounds like you might need The Unspeak Easy.

The Unspeak Easy offers intimate, off-the-record gatherings with incredible guest speakers, amazing food, and life-changing conversations. This October 19th through 21st will be in New York's Hudson Valley with John McWhorter, Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano, and rising theater star PJ Adsma. Spaces are very limited and going fast, so go to theunspeakeasy.com to learn more. If you're listening to this podcast, use promo code. free press at checkout. That's one word free press and get $100 off your retreat fee. That's the unspeak-easy home of the original free speech vacation. Well, I agree with you that the cause itself,

the tenor of the cause, and the embrace of vulgar, bloodthirsty barbarians is itself a major alarm. And in some ways, you can trace all these ideas back to some of the concessions and some of the evolution within the academy that are happening over this period of 50 years or so. I mean, we didn't talk about Franz Fanon, even though in my view, Franz Fanon, it's like everybody reads the first chapter of the wretched of the earth, and they don't finish the rest of it. We actually some interesting thoughts on sort of the problems of violent revolution, violent resistance as well, but leaving that aside, that you're right, and this is the welcome back breaking history listeners, full flower and of these ideas. And now we should just note, even though we're

conversations about the academy, this is escape to the lab. This summer we have seen in Democratic primaries the victories of people who represent this insane, radical kind of politics. So that's That's where we are. Now, I want to sort of say, what do we do about it? One approach has been what we're seeing in the Trump administration. I have my objections to some of it. On free speech grounds, I have a problem unless you can identify, in my view, an actual crime that some of these high-profile protesters have committed, then I don't want to get to the point where they're losing their visas that they already were granted. I don't think they should be getting visas if we know where they're coming from. I think no problem with serious vetting there. But in my view,

that gets dangerously, and I know there's a law from the 50s that Rubio is using in this case. But I have problems with it on kind of free speech grounds, which is to say, if you write an op-ed that I disagree with, even if it's grotesque, the best antidote to that is to, right of response, you know. However, there's other things the State Department has recently been doing as well. What they've shown is that there are organizations that do have some kind of connection to very hostile governments. Marco Rubio gave a very important speech at the State Department. In fact, it reminded me a little bit when you were at the State Department of something that you might have gotten Pompeo to do. You know, I mean, it was like incredible. And then they just put out a

report on Cuba, which I've been going through, which shows, again, it's not necessarily illegal, but it does show that there is an effort to work with various Cuban state organizations and hard left groups in America. But what do you think we ought to do? What is the answer to this? Because some of this might have nothing to do with the government. I'm a conservative in the sense that I'd like to, if there's a solution that doesn't involve the federal government, I'm all for it. But, you know, there are alternative models like Vanderbilt University, University of Florida. So how do you approach this problem at this point? So this is another very big question.

Let's try to take it in steps. Yes, in response to the disorder and the disrepair of our universities, the Trump administration has overreached. Sometimes it's taken a sledgehammer where a more delicate, somewhat less rough tool would be appropriate. Let me give one example where I think the Trump administration has focused on a serious problem that it is proper for the federal government to handle. And that has been the abuse on campuses of the diversity equity and inclusion programs, which are really programs not about diversity, but about conformity and not about equity

in the sense of equality, but equity in the sense of treating people different based on race, and not about inclusion, exclusion. DEI is about awarding benefits based upon race, sex, and ethnicity, and denying benefits to people who supposedly belong to the oppressor class. The federal government, the law says that the government may not provide funding to universal. universities that discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity. The Trump administration was not only within its rights, but I think honoring the law by saying to universities, if you continue under the guise of DEI, classifying on the base of race, color, and ethnicity, allocating benefits and burdens based on these categories, we're going

to cut off your federal funding. That's just the law. Now, characteristically, the Trump administration proceeded in a way that did not honor the procedures for withdrawing funding. That's worked out through negotiations and the courts. But in general, it seems to me entirely proper for the federal government to withdraw funds on that basis. In its dealings with Harvard, the Trump administration went so far as to demand oversight over

the humanities and social sciences, or some parts of them. participate in the determination of when departments are suitably diverse. That goes way beyond what the federal government should be doing. On your point, the State Department, no doubt the State Department, the Federal bureaucracy, has not been as responsible as it should be in granting out visas to students. And I welcome the State Department that wants to avoid bringing to this country, subversives, men and women who hate America. That seems to me reasonable. But I share your concern about identifying an op-ed as a, or two op-eds, as a reason for deporting a student. Even if that were legally legitimate under the 1950 law, it sends a very bad message

that on campuses, we don't tolerate freedom of speech. So here, what's important, this is not always the case, but the optics outweigh what the letter of the law allows here. As we're talking about this, by the way, a related matter is the tremendous amount of foreign funding that comes to university campuses from two countries in particular, Qatar and the People's Republic of China. You mentioned my time in the State Department, yes, Secretary of State Pompeo was deeply concerned about Confucius institutes which provide large sums of money to universities. They build or rent buildings which supposedly teach the Chinese language to students. But in exchange for university administrations, not speaking out against Chinese dictatorship and silencing people who do,

Qataris are notorious funders of Middle East Studies programs, and Middle East Studies programs in the United States seem to be dominated by a single issue, that is the evilness of the state of Israel. And also a single, yeah, a certain perspective. Yes, a single perspective on this question and the disallowing of any faculty members who have an alternative opinion.

Right. I heard a story. My wife is at a university that after October 7th, there was at her university, American University, a number of Jewish faculty members. A lot of very good kind of Jewish Israel studies at American reached out to the Middle East studies. And they were completely like ignored, blackballed, no dialogue whatsoever. And to me that was and the, the idea was not even, And the idea was just let's have a conversation after this event with students. Let's try to, the mission of the university. Let's reason together.

And they would not do it. And that to me was extraordinary, given the mission of a university, that you had a set of faculty members that basically just would completely ignore and as if there was, you know, there was nothing to talk about, which to me is. telling. So this is a hugely important point, Eli, and we have been focusing on questions revolving around Israel, but we shouldn't give the impression that this problem is restricted to Israel. The largest problem at the university is that many faculty and many administrators have lost

sight of what the mission of liberal education is. The mission of liberal education, we said this at the beginning, begins with the study of your own country, its institutions, its ideas. It broadens into a study of the civilization of which you're part. You need to study other civilizations, but you must undertake this study in the right spirit. Nobody said it more succinctly than Mill in Chapter 2 of On Liberty, where he said, he who knows only his own side of the argument knows little. of that. He who knows only his own side of the argument knows little of that. If you're at the

university and you do not just tolerate dissent, no, no, I'm not talking about tolerating dissent, welcome dissent. If you don't appreciate that having conversations with people who see things different from you is not an obligation, or I put it differently, is an obligation of learning, because only by having your own opinions check. challenged. Can you be a more secure and understanding of your own premises and the implications of them, but also you can benefit from seeing where you've gone wrong and you can benefit from seeing what other people see, but you don't see. If you are not infused with this sensibility, you are at the university, but undermining the university. And sad to say,

Mills' sensibility, he who knows only his own side of the argument knows little of that, is these days very poorly represented at American colleges and universities. Mill would go even further. You would say if you only know your side of the, you don't even know if it's true. The testing of your opinion, your argument is how you find out of it's true or not. That's his point. Yes, and if I may, I'll take this invitation to elaborate. Mill says there really only three possibilities concerning your opinion.

All of them call for free speech. You might be wrong, in which case, what luck. Here's somebody with a different opinion, maybe the true opinion. Second, you might be correct, but if you're not challenged, you'll hold that your opinion as dead dogma. You won't understand its implications. You won't understand its vulnerabilities. But then Mil emphasizes, neither of these, when we're talking about serious moral and political matters, is the common case. The common case is that the opinions that we hold are partly true and partly false,

and the people on the other side of the question have opinions that are similarly, partly true and partly false. And it's only in conversation that we can identify the false parts of our own opinions and the true part of the other man or the other woman's opinion. So, conversation with people who differ is absolutely. essential to the university's educational mission and hardly at all understood by the people who are now in control of our universities. Oh, yes. Preach on.

So a couple other things I wanted to get at really quick. Did you see in the Chronicle of Higher Education, it's an interview with, I think, the president of the Association of Anthropologists, and she could not handle a basic critique that did not come from, commentary magazine or you know the right wing it came from Washington University and it was a study of you know answered said listen there were some blind spots here and she just dismissed it and I there was a lot of kind of academic Twitter there were a lot of people who were commenting like this is unbelievable like what do you make of that though this is a Princeton University professor who is literally the head of her organization this was an anthropology is important and she seems to say there's nothing wrong

She had one another point in the interview. She said, teaching that there are only two genders is like turning, would be like turning astronomy into astrology or something. I mean, it was just, I felt like this was so out of left field and crazy that I was like, there's something that's kind of unsustainable here, that it can't go on like this. Oh, well, well, it is sustainable. This attitude has been around for a long time. Those of us who have been telling these stories for decades have been looked at as if we're the insane ones, as if we must be making us up.

This is not some novel opinion that suddenly arose after 2023, or even after 2020 with COVID. We didn't talk about the Yale Halloween costume imbroglio from 2015. Yeah, it's very important too. This sensibility of self-righteousness that. that things couldn't be better than they are. Because after all, they would say, we have a peer review process. But what is this peer review process? The world of sociology, the leading figures in sociology, through the tenure system,

have nearly complete control of who their successors will be. Exercising this near complete control for now many generations, They've produced a self-condained discipline which answers to nobody else has its own hierarchy and treats dissent from the authoritative paradigm as madness or blasphemy. So these people really have extraordinary difficulty entertaining the possibility of approaches beyond what their discipline has sanctified. But their discipline has been operating in blissful separation from every other discipline and from dissent for a long time. They've effectively bleached out dissent. They control tenure, they control who gets into the graduate schools, and they send

unmistakable messages to the undergraduates about what are permissible opinions in sociology and what are not permissible opinions. And by the way, this includes not only opinions regarding politics, but opinions regarding method for studying sociology. Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because we should briefly talk in this history, which we were going through Alan Sokol, who, you know, who is this, you know, the hoaxer,

but he ends up exposing in some way the limits of peer review or the failure of peer review to catch, you know, his, I mean, what is he, he wrote a paper saying that the theory of gravity was wrong, was it? This goes back. By the way, I'm glad you mentioned this, because this shows you how far back this goes. It's the mid-1990s. Sokol is a math professor, I think, at NYU. And by the way, he's a Marxist, but an old-fashioned Marxist who believes in facts.

and he's appalled by postmodern conceit that everything is just a matter of interpretation, including the sciences. So he submits to a journal that was edited by Stanley Fish, an article called something like the transformative project. Yeah, social text. Transformative theory of quantum mechanics. And they accept it. and they publish it. And a month or so later, two months later, a few weeks later,

he publishes an expose in lingua franca, the late lamented lingua franca, in which he reveals that anybody equipped, even with high school mathematics, would have immediately seen that his equations are nonsense to say nothing of his nonsensical prose. But this was happily published by the editors, I think it was a Duke University president, publication, social text. 30 years ago, the leading postmodernist had already abandoned standards, or to put another way, the only standard was, does this writing appear to advance our political agenda? That was 30 years ago.

Right. And then later, we saw with James Lindsay and others, another series of hoaxes, which they also managed to get a lot of these fake papers. published sort of proving nothing had changed. That to me is like, how is that not an epistemological crisis? How was that not a five-alarm fire and nothing happened? In fact, they were run out. They were seen as, you know, how dare you? Yes. And I think the ultimate answer is that too few of the members of our faculty, two few members of the administration, the university's proper mission, or at least for undergraduate education, of liberal

education, for graduate education, scholarship that follows the argument where it leads. Too many of them accept that the university has a fundamentally political mission. And so if you get some facts wrong, if your equations are a little bit off, provided they are advancing the true understanding of social justice, that's okay we needn't be pedants about the details oh yeah okay now finally I want to just end on this question because I've been thinking a lot about it can you solve this problem simply by brave university presidents hiring ideologically and intellectually heterodox thinkers people who will challenge and to

reintroduce this sense or do you have to go further? Is that only a half measure? And I say that it might only be a half measure if you have a number of people with positions of power in the university who have abandoned the essential Socratic humility that is necessary to run an institution that prepares, as you pointed out in the beginning, students to be a, citizens in a free society, which is to say, if you've abandoned the mission and you're only doing indoctrination, must there be a purge? It's hard to imagine what a purge would look like at a great private university or public university. Not clear to me that even the most powerful president has that kind of power. And forgive me for the following pretentious formulation, but as I argue in several of the chapters of reclaiming liberal education in America. We who want to reclaim liberal education

need to operate simultaneously on many fronts. A brave university president who wants to introduce intellectual diversity, intellectual seriousness into the ranks. That, Eli, is not a half measure. It may not even be a tenth measure. It may be a hundredth measure. It's very important. And by the way, I myself would focus not on intellectual diversity, but subject matter expertise. We need people who will teach. If you teach military history and religious history and constitutional history, in diplomatic history, Edmund Berkin, Friedrich Hayek, and others, the conservative tradition in America, you'll end up with more conservatives.

But it's better to approach this. We need to fill enormous gaps at the faculty. But the universities, the private universities, their selective universities do not wish to be reformed. They are like the chair of the sociology department. They don't think they have a serious problem. Or if there's a problem, it's just on the edges. So we need brave university professors. We also need to encourage the civic thought programs at flagship public universities around the country,

which are ways of introducing liberal education into private universities. We need summer programs run by a variety of foundations and think tanks in Washington, D.C. Hoover does one of these at Stanford University. We need the creation of new colleges like Ralston College in Savannah, the University of Austin at Texas, as opposed to the University of Texas at Austin. So we need to proceed on many fronts at once because we need more citizens who enjoy the benefits of a proper liberal education. It's essential to, I think, to, or let's put it this way, overcoming the disrepair of liberal education, I think, is essential to overcoming the disrepair of politics in the United States. Okay.

So multiple fronts. Yes. But what do we do about the problem of the cadres of illiberal ideologues that happen to have PhDs in tenured positions? I mean, it strikes me that they have already proven that they are interested in closing their ranks and locking the door, so to speak, you know? Yes. So again, what I don't see a means for, firing them and replacing them with people we prefer, partly because they've done such a good job of diverting talented men and women from the academic world that if you fired all of them, you'd have nobody to replace them with. So again, we're going to have to understand this

as a long-term challenge. We have to proceed on many fronts. We need appointments here and there, we need the creation of centers like Robbie Georgia, Princeton, the James Madison Center for Ideos and Institutions. We need the programs in civic thought. We need alternative universities. Nobody can do all these things, but the defenders of liberal education, we need defenders of liberal education doing all, undertaking all of these reform efforts. The problem is dire. We have no time for pessimism. We have to focus all of our energies. Choose a front, choose an arena, work in that arena, and be supportive of your comrades who are working in other arenas, so long as their goal is the reclaiming of liberal education. And I would add if you're in the

media like I am, you know, don't seek out Peter Berkowitz, seek out people who are interested in this project. because it is very important. And if we can provide some kind of shine, we can bolster, I think it's important to do that as well. All right, and that's that. Thank you so much, Peter. Tell us when the book's coming out, the name and everything.

How do people get it? The publication date for the book is late September, I think September 29th, but it's already available for a pre-order at Amazon. It's called Reclaiming Liberal Education in America. I highly recommend it, read everything by Peter Berkowitz. is brilliant. Thank you.