Central Air - Lower Education

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.comThis week: UCLA sociology professor Gabriel Rossman joins us this week to talk about rough times in elite higher education. We start with a problem at the UC system itself: California’s top public universities haven’t considered test scores for admission since 2019, and that has led to the universities admitting some students who are wildly unprepared for college-level work. Then, behind the paywall: star scholar Jason Arday has resigned from Cambridge University in scandal, and it reflects a phenomenon Tyler Austin Harper complains about in his Atlantic essay about his time as a professor at Bates College: universities being more interested in black academics’ political symbolism than their academic output, which is pretty racist, if you think about it.Plus: ideological homogeneity in the humanities and humanistic social sciences (and in sociology specifically) and what could be done to combat it, and during cocktail hour, we talk about what “Woke 1” is and whether it’s really over, and we talk with Gabriel about his academic work on the laundering of disreputable financial exchanges — a useful lens for talking about both Melania Coin and the debate over whether men are really expected to send Ubers to fetch women for first dates.Upgrade your subscription at www.centralairpodcast.com

Welcome to Central Era, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Ben Dreyfus, who writes the Substack newsletter, Calm Down, and Megan McArdle, columnist for The Washington Post. Megan, I think academia is giving us some stories for August this year. We always talk about how there's the August news drought, and some academics have very kindly been filling that for us. Yeah, I think it's really generous. You know, academia and journalism had a kind of similar trajectory during the Great Awakening. and we've moved in slightly different directions

where I think journalism has done more of a correction than academia has so far accomplished. But it's nice to know that the solidarity is still there. They looked at us across their ideological fellow travelers and they said, my comrades are in need. I will help. And on their summer vacations, no less. Thank you to all of our comrades in academia.

We're really grateful. Yeah. And actually, we have an academic here with us this August. We much appreciate Gabriel Rossman, who's a sociologist, a professor of sociology at UCLA, who studies cultural industries and economic sociology. Gabriel, thank you for taking some time. I assume you spend your summer on the beach. That's right. All we do is teach classes and we don't do any research. We don't do any service. It's just teaching undergrads and it's a marvel that we only do it four times a year. And it's only like 15 hours a week, right? You just go to class, you show up, you spat off for a while and then... We don't even have to do the reading say.

a second time because we did them last year. So, Gabriel, and you appear to be actually in your office, I mean, those, you have file cabinets. This is a very convincing office backdrop that you have here. Yeah, that's right. This is not, I don't have file cabinets in my apartment. I'm working at UCLA and work at UCLA pretty much every day since I got back from sabbatical. And so we have a few things we want to talk with you about this week, but why don't we start with a story that's specifically about the UC system, which is that the UCs, like a lot of

colleges when COVID hit decided that they weren't so into standardized tests anymore, and went not just to making the tests optional, but actually going test blind. The University of California system does not look at test scores when doing admissions. And a lot of colleges that either went optional or blind in the last few years have decided that was a mistake, and they were admitting worse applicants because of it, and they have reinstated test requirements, but not the UCs. And there's a burgeoning movement led by faculty in the UC system pushing for tests to be brought back. And so I just, you know, I'm wondering, how have you seen the effect of, you know, teaching a student body that is not evaluated based on standardized tests? The New York Times ran an editorial about this said at UC San Diego, now 12% of students being admitted were not qualified to take pre-calculus, which, you know, is a class a lot of people take in 11th grade in high school. That was up from only half a percent of them being unqualified in that manner in 2020. What are you seeing with the undergrads you see at UCLA? So I don't have access to the math placement data at UCLA, but I know for a fact that there's

similar issues at Berkeley as there are at UCSD. So this whole story really started with UCSD where the math department wrote this report where they were finding more students needed to take remedial math, and they found that not only were more students need to take remedial math, but remedial math no longer meant what you should have learned in 10th grade. It was increasingly what you should have learned in 8th or 9th grade. Or in grammar school. Some of the them were like, they can't handle fractions. Yes, that's right. So my colleagues at UC Berkeley math love to tell stories about students who can't do basic fractions. They'll be in like a second semester of calculus class and students will ask what are basically six or seventh grade math

questions, just like not understanding those things. Anyway, so it started with UCSD where they found that not only did more students need remedial math and not only were they dumbing down what remedial math meant from high school math to middle school math, but also more students were failing that remedial math class, even though they made it easier. And I've seen similar data from Berkeley. So if you look at the math placement exam scores from Berkeley, so they're no longer using SAT, but they're still using basically the placement exam to figure out what, you know, should you go into pre-calic or calc or whatever. And before 2020, before they changed the admission standards, they had a test called Alex. And Alex had kind of a.

left skewed distribution. So a strong majority of students were placed into pre-calc or calc, and then you'd have this long left tail, and a tiny handful of students, like, I don't know, 5% or something, would basically need to redo algebra one. So the left tail means particularly poor performance. Yeah. So if higher is good and less is more than, you know, higher is right and less is left. So left skewed means that there's most people... Josh, these are like six and seventh grade questions, all right? I know what a left-tail skew is. I'm, you know, and I assume that most of our audience is very smart, but maybe there's a, maybe there's a left-tail skew among them, too. We have a left-tail that could not get into advanced math at UCSD and needs to have this explained to them.

So skew is which direction the distribution is pointing not where most of the people are. So it's the opposite of where most people are. So anyway, left-skew means most people are doing great. A few people are having problems. And so it used to be that the math placement at Berkeley was left-skewed, and now it's of a bathtub distribution where you have about a third are doing great, a third are doing absolutely abysmally, and then there's a third are kind of spread out across the middle of that distribution. And that's a huge change, right, for it to be that most people are doing pretty well, and then very few people are doing really poorly to you have almost equal numbers of people doing really poorly and doing really well. And it shows up in that more people are failing for

semester calculus at Berkeley. Why is that happening? Because, I mean, you're still looking. at high school GPAs, right? And I realize, you know, college essays were, you know, you could always get help writing an essay and now you can have an AI engine write your essay. I know that standardized tests are better correlated with performance than GPA is, but shouldn't there, shouldn't the GPA still be a somewhat useful measure for weeding out students who couldn't do math? Shouldn't that show up on their high school transcripts? Depending on who you ask, some people will say that high school GPA is actually a slightly better predictor of college level outcomes than, you know, and you're not.

SAT, but my understanding is that that's basically dated, that that dates to a period before grade inflation got really bad and also before AI essays and all that sort of thing. So my hunch is that if you were redo those studies today, like it used to be neck and neck, like one was slightly better than the other. My hunch is that if you were to do it today, the SAT would come out a clear favor, not like, you know, three times more predictive, but clearly more predictive than high school GPA. High school GPA can be fairly effective at telling you who's the best student within a high school. But unfortunately, there's a lot of variation between high schools. And so basically high school is engaged in a lot of grade inflation, where if you have a poor high school that's poorly performing, you don't want to flunk everybody in the high school.

You want to make it so that you give most of the students B's. And so what that means is that you have a lot of students getting A's at poor performing high schools who would barely be passing. at high-performing high schools. And then on top of this, so there's this issue that high school GPA is not a good way to compare between high schools. And then on top of that, roughly contemporaneous with the dropping the SAT, the admissions committees at the different UC campuses began giving a ton of weight to advancement relative to opportunity.

And you can see this. If you look at graphs at the high school level of what percentage of the students at that high school passed the state competency exam. So if you go back to like the, you know, there's all these like no child left behind style exams. So in California, that's called Smarter balanced. So if you look at the percentage of the students who passed, who were assessed as competent according to the 11th grade smarter balance exam, and then you compare that to the percentage of students from that high school who got into one of the top UCs, that used to be a positive correlation. And now it's a negative correlation. So effectively,

the admissions offices are giving preferences to people who went to the worst high schools. So be very concrete about it. The way to get into, say, Berkeley or UCSD or UC Irvine is to get A grades at the worst high school in the state. Yeah, there's remarkable data from the San Francisco standard, which, Ben, that's where your sister works these days, right? Oh, yeah. She might have edited it.

An article there about students applying to Berkeley out of high schools in the San Francisco public school system. And like 45% of students from Mission High School, which is one of the worst performing high schools in San Francisco, who apply to Berkeley are admitted there. A much smaller fraction from Lowell High School, which is the Selective Magnet School, are admitted if they apply. And this is interesting to me because, you know, going back 30 years when affirmative action was prohibited in the UC system by ballot measure, you saw the UCs in a number of other public university systems go to a system where they say, well, if you are in the, you know, X top. percent of your high school, then you are guaranteed admission to some school in our top-tier public university system in the state. And that was partly a way to promote both economic and racial diversity. And my sense broadly was that that worked fine. But that was partly because like X was a number like five or ten, and not a number like 40. And so, you know, if you're admitting the top 10 percent on admission high school, you're probably still doing okay. It's just,

It looks like it's gotten so extreme that you're ending up with a basically implausible admit mix. So there's a few issues. So one is exactly like you said that even at a very poor performing high school, you could probably find 5, 10% of students are doing well. There's another issue, by the way, that at the same time, it's slightly before we went to the 10%, we switched to a holistic admissions plan. So it used to, during the affirmative action era, half the class at the University of California was admitted by a weighted average of, of GPA and SAT. And then after the affirmative action ban, it took them a few years to figure this out,

but they realized that this was creating unacceptable demographic outcomes. And so they switched first Berkeley and then the rest of the University of California. I think Berkeley did in 1998, everybody else did in 2000, 2001, something like that. They switched to 100% holistic admissions, just like the IVs had done in the 30s.

So you have that issue. But I think the other thing to keep in mind is that the 10% thing never guaranteed you admission to UCSD or Berkeley or LA. It guaranteed you admission to the UC system. And in practice, that means you get into UC Merced. And actually, if you look at those negative correlations between high school quality and admissions rates to the UC, they haven't really changed for Merced. They've mostly changed a lot for the top half of the UCs. So UCSD, UC Berkeley, and UCLA are the most selective schools in the UC system.

They also have the most number of Nobel Prize winners among the faculty, those sort of thing. And those are the ones where you've seen this precipitous shift in the relationship between our feeder high schools and those feeder high schools, this quality, right? Where it used to be that the best high schools sent us a lot of students. Now it's the worst high schools who sent us a lot of students. That hasn't really changed that much for Merced and Riverside, which are towards the bottom of the UC system. Also, still good schools by national standards. And we should say just how crazy this is, because I take the point that, you know, the top 10 to 5 to 10 percent. are going to be doing reasonably well.

But the UCSD report on math said that they had that of the kids who needed, again, grammar school level remedial math, a startling fraction of those kids, like well into double digits, had been in either pre-calculus or calculus. And if you can't do fractions or handle percentages, then there is no sense in, which you should be in a pre-calculus or calculus class, right? Because you can't possibly grasp what is going on. And that, like, it's not just like a little grade inflation. It's not just like evening out. It's that these schools were holding classes in which it appears that at least of the UCSD admits, no one in the class could possibly have comprehended the material.

And were nonetheless giving these kids, like A's, A minuses, B pluses, which was their average grade in these classes. Just totally insane levels of social promotion. Wasn't there also a problem with it where a lot of the high schools in California were just not requiring these high school kids to take anything even close to those classes? They were giving them other ways of fulfilling the math requirement by some bullshit. Right, but the UCSD report specifically said that like a significant fraction of these kids were in pre-calc or calc of the kids who could not do fractions, right? I completely understand what you're saying. I'm just saying it like wasn't there an entire other issue about like

there was a whole other group that wasn't even in those classes. It was instead of taking those math classes, they were going to the park and talking philosophy about how many leaves there were. So with what Ben is saying, there's been a continuing push in California, I assume also in other states, to eliminate algebra two as part of the high school curriculum. Oh, sorry, I thought it was algebra one from middle schools.

Is it both? Well, it kind of goes backwards, right? So it's like if you start with the idea that we don't want high school students to have to take algebra two, and you kind of count backwards of how do you get to three years of math, that implies that they shouldn't take algebra one until ninth grade. And so there's been this continuing push by people who prioritize equity to remove algebra two from the high school curriculum,

which implies not teaching algebra one until high school. And that's more or less what Ben was talking about. And then to bolster Megan's point, one of the ways that we can tell that some of these students weren't really learning anything in what we're theory. If you look at the transcript, it sounds like a pretty advanced. high school and math class, we can tell that they weren't learning anything because there's high schools where you have the average grade in AP calculus is an A-minus, and then, you know,

only 5%, 10% of the class passes the AP exam. And the AP exam, like the SAT, that's not administered by the school, so it's kind of an objective test. And, you know, you have many schools where nobody passed the AP. But again, the high schools are under pressure to offer the AP because one of the things that people complain about with educational equity is like, oh, there's these schools that don't even offer AP classes. So they're under pressure to offer the AP classes. But then either those students aren't well prepared from the middle schools they came into or the schools just aren't teaching the AP class as well. But one way or another, you have this farce where they're teaching what are called AP classes. And it says on the transcript AP calculus or AP literature or

whatever. And then everybody gets a one or two on the AP exam. This sounds so absurd to me that I was just quite curious because I'm having a hard time imagining what the defense is when you go to the AP math teacher and say, it looks like you've been given everyone A minuses and yet, uh, evolving failing. It looks like this has been going on for about four or five years. What, uh, what's, what's up? Like, how does this happen at a persistent level where they must be making some

defense of it, right? That's a question for them. I mean, I, yeah, I mean, I assume it's just to think of like, look, we got to offer the class. These are the best students at the school. and, you know, then they don't worry too much. And it's partly about what are they evaluated on, right? If they'll get criticism for not offering AP classes,

but they don't get criticism for the students not passing the AP exam, then you're going to end up in this far school situation where they offer AP classes and they give good grades in those AP classes, but nobody actually passes the AP exam. This is kind of like witchcraft. Like, if you are in a room with a calculus book and there are some numbers on the board, then you will reap the benefits that accrue to people who have learned calculus.

By the way, in some ways that's true. So if the college admissions boards give you an extra point on calculating your GPA for taking the AP version of a class, instead of taking the actual version of class, you do gain a concrete benefit from taking the AP class, even if you're not actually learning AP-level material. But then that just moves the witchcraft to a slightly like different locus, the shamans are now in the college admissions office, right? This is one of the problems for the UC system here, right?

We'll talk about the movement that you've been involved in trying to bring the test scores back. But one thing, obviously, is that you have, if you completely change who you're admitting to Berkeley and UCLA and UCSD in a way that gets a much, you know, weaker applicant pool and they, you know, they aren't able to complete the coursework, is that that presumably devalues the degree that comes out of the UC system. It doesn't send the right signals to employers about what people are. have learned when they come out of it. And it makes me wonder how this situation persists. Like, because you say, you know, this is presumably happening elsewhere. I don't think this is really happening in New York. We have our own, you know, difficulties in terms of education policy here and there are problems with the New York City public schools. But the sort of like, essentially anti-learning approach that seems to have overtaking California just strikes me as,

like, it ought to be politically unsustainable. And in some places, it has been politically unsustainable. I mean, the San Francisco Board of Education that drew a lot of attention for, you know, the fact that they were canceling Abraham Lincoln and, you know, having this whole commission on renaming all of the schools that were named after problematic people like Abraham Lincoln. A lot of the political controversy there was also about the fact that they took algebra one out of the middle school curriculum. And there was a recall vote that was successful that changed over who's on the board. And a key part of the push there was let's bring back some rigor in math teaching in San Francisco. But it's remarkable to me that so many.

of these changes have persisted for so long when it seems like basically everyone looks at them and says, this is a disaster. This isn't working like it's supposed to. Let's, you know, let's bring back the tests and let's actually try to teach people things again. So how come that hasn't happened yet? I mean, I would assume, I'm not a political scientist, but I would assume that a big part of it is just that these are low salient elections. That, you know, I mean, we all have pretty good information on who the presidential candidates are or even who the gubernatorial candidates are and whether they share our values, share our priorities, think they'll do good policy. I don't know who's on my school board. And, you know, it's a relative, and usually often these are nonpartisan elections or

they're partisan elections, but they're in a place that's effectively a single party jurisdiction. And so if you're like a normie who doesn't follow these things closely, but, you know, every once while you're kind of surprised like, wait, my kid's learning that or my kid's not learning that, it's very hard for you to know for whom to vote. Where if you're part of the teacher's union, or if you're part of DSA or you're part of some other group that heavily prioritizes equity over excellence, you're going to actually know who those people are and you're going to vote them in. And sometimes these are off-cycle elections, right? There's all sorts of reasons why democratic accountability can kind of fail to a certain extent here.

Can you talk a little bit about what's going on directly with the effort to push the UC Regents to bring the tests back? Yes. So as background, I should say that as you mentioned in the intro, in 2020, most universities, universities went test optional. In part, that was about the Great Awakening, in part that was about COVID making it infeasible to do proctering for SAT exams. At the same time, we didn't just go test optional. We went test blind. And I think we're the only major university that went test blind. Maybe there are a few others, but most other universities went test optional. In part, that was because we're facing a lawsuit where there was some type of civil rights organization that was

suiting the University of California on grounds that the SAT has disparate impact. But of course, that same fact pattern would apply to every university in the country, or at least every selective university in the country. I'm convinced that we could have won that lawsuit if we fought it. But the University of California decided to settle, and that gave us an order that we couldn't bring back the SAT until 2025. Now, of course, it's 2026, so we're no longer bound by that settlement. It's not an issue of reopening the case or something like that. But back in 2019, the University of California president asked the Senate to investigate the issue. The faculty senate appointed something called the Senate Testing Task Force.

They wrote a 250-page report, and they showed that not only is the SAT highly predictive of student success, which they measured four ways. It was freshman retention to sophomore, six-year graduation rate, four-year graduation rate, I forget which, but basically graduation rate, first-year freshman grades and grades at graduation. And they show that for all four of those outcomes, not only is SAT about as good or sometimes better than high school GPA, but if you stratify by high school GPA, it still is predictive, right? So basically, SAT predicts whether you're an A student or B student or a C student. And if you stratify by race or by income, it's also an equally good predictor. So SAT is equally good at predicting whether white students will succeed, Asian students will succeed, black students will succeed. exceed, everything like that. In fact, if anything, it's actually slightly less predictive for white students than it is for students of other ethnicities. So they did this amazing report, very well detailed. And then the regents had a meeting and the then president of the University of California, Janet Napolitano, basically said, and you could watch the video of this meeting. I don't recommend it because it's kind of demoralizing. But you can watch the video of this and you can see the regents saying like, oh, we take this really seriously. You did amazing research. We really appreciate it, but the movement compels us, right?

It's like we have this. It was almost like the Pope has sent a papal bowl telling them that, you know, you'll be subject to interdict or excommunication or something if you don't do this. And in particular, Janet Napolitano, who is then president of the University of California, said, you know, for basically equity reasons, we need to get rid of the SAT, even though the report had shown that the SAT has equal predictive validity by ethnic group, and they'd shown that 75% of the enrollment gap by ethnicity is not driven by the SAT. It's driven by the minimum requirements enrollment in the university,

which is basically what we call them the A through G requirements in California. Basically it means you take a standard academic high school curriculum and you get passing grades in it. So fast forward to the present. First, you have the UCSD math report. Then the torch really got picked up by several people at Berkeley, mostly from the math department, who had their own grievances with this, largely paralleling the grievances from UCSD.

And they wrote this petition that was framed as being written by math faculty and joined by STEM faculty. I read it and I'm like, this is great. I support, I'm very glad my STEM colleagues are doing this, but it says from STEM faculty, I'm not STEM. I'm Kwan, but I'm not STEM. And so I cooperated with the drafters of the original letter, and I was the lead author of the Social Sciences and Humanities letter.

And between those two petitions, we have about 3,000 unique faculty signatures. So we're not inviting signatures from the general public or undergrads or alumni or anything like that. We're only inviting applications from faculty at the University of California, but we have about 3,000 unique signatures. I say unique because some people sign both. Now, kind of going beyond that petition effort, the UC Senate Committee that oversees admissions, this is called boars, like a wild pig, boar. So the Boers Committee announced that they were going to write a report. And then just before a regent's meeting, they pulled that back and said, we're not going to do it anymore. So it's a little hard to figure out what's going on inside Boers.

My hunch is that they said they would write the report when they thought it would move it forward. And then when they realized it would actually cause a delay, they canceled it. So I'm going to assume that they were kind of on the side of the angels there. And then alongside that, the regents announced that they want to make a decision by June of 2027. So if you do, which basically the end of this academic year, and they want to get some type of information from Boers or at least from the Senate in general to get some type of update. My personal opinion is that there's very little for them to learn because the student, the 2020 report was so good. But they're hoping to make a decision in June of 2027, which by the way will basically be too late for the. So freshmaned applications are due November 30th.

And realistically, you can't have students. to study for and take the SAT in just a few months. So I'm hoping that they'll go to test optional for that first year and then go to test mandatory and basically bring us back to the policy we had in 2019. It's funny to me how incredibly bureaucratic that is. You can see that all your peer institutions have done something different. I mean, we'll talk about something interesting that Tyler Austin Harper wrote about Bates that is sort of similar to this.

But like, it reminds me of when we look at any government agency, you know, why is it so hard to build high-speed rail in California or anything else. It seems like there's a problem here that has a very obvious fix, which is going back to the way things used to be done and the way things are done in other places. And the fact that it has to tie up in all of these formalities and take all of this time to go through this process just seems like another, you know, it's just a lack of state capacity. Well, this is actually accelerated because under the original plan, it would have been that Boers would have issued a report in June of 2027. And then every campus faculty Senate would have had to give feedback on it, which would have taken basically fall semester.

And then the regents would have voted on it around Christmas of 2027. So I'm actually happy that they moved it up to, my glass half full is that at least they're making a decision in June 27 instead of Christmas 2020. Can I ask you what your experience has been with spearheading this letter? What sort of reaction have you gotten from your fellow faculty members? Has it been mostly, thank God. And what are what did the negative people say? So it's mostly been positive. So, you know, we've gotten a lot of people signing it. Like I said, we have over three, about three thousand unique signatures. Many of my colleagues in my own department signed it, which I think is contrary to many people's stereotypes of sociologists. We did get, so on the website, we have a

email address called like questions at UC student success. And we've gotten a few negative emails there. And some of those, I think, are like, you know, people have different priorities. Some of them I think people are purely misguided. There was one guy who wrote us and was basically talking about how there's some, some people have the illusion that the problem is the SAT and you can come up with a better test than the SAT and that the problem is that the college board people are evil. That reflects a profound misunderstanding of psychometrics. I'm sorry. Anything that would give you equal predictively. The fact is that the SAT has very strong predictive validity. And so anything else that would have good predictive validity is going to have similar correlates, including all the bad outcomes that that would have for equity concerns. So, and then other people have this idea of like, oh, well, it's like this evil company that's making money off of it. The SAT costs like $100. And like we got like one email saying like, oh, the UC should develop its own test. And then that test wouldn't be biased. And then they would make money on that test.

And then they could do it. And it's like, it's the kind of thing of like there's a lot of academics who think they want. to set up a new social system to, you know, run the world. But these people couldn't run a lemonade stand. Like, they don't understand that things actually do cost a lot of money. That it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and validate a test. And then at the end of that process, you're going to have something that would have all the same outcomes about SAT that make people satisfied with it.

It is funny because, like, when people say, you know, like offhand, well, everyone knows the SAT is racist. And even I thought, you know, I have no idea what these fucking people mean. I don't care. But it sounded to me, and I'm certain because they all, what they meant was, these questions are all about what Ralph Lauren shirts are like. You know, like, like, there's some, there's some wording issues going on here that is just helpful towards white people. Why are there so many questions about country music, you know?

Why isn't there questions about more ethnic music? And like, that's clearly not what the people who were developing the things about, the questions about the outcomes meant. But that thing you're saying that those emails that you got, it is just such a common belief. I'm sure that if I went and asked a number of people I know, they would be like, oh, well, of course, it's just written by white people. And white people ask silly, idiot questions about that they don't understand ethnic food. Yeah. So there actually was a period where you could make a reasonable critique of the SAT that it was biased in that. And the famous example is regatta. It was like one of the analogies, like a regatta as to such as you had to know

what a regatta was. You basically have a reasonable critique of the SAT. You basically have to be at Megan's Summerhouse to know what a regatta is, right? It's a boat career. I had never, I mean, there were all sorts of words on the SAT that I didn't learn by hearing them used. And in fact, there's a thing that highly educated people do, right, which is they mispronounce somewhat obscure words. I believe it's okay for me to out. Dan Dresner told me a very funny story about being, you know, in his first graduate seminar. And he's really, you know, wants to impress everyone. And so he raises his hand and confidently talks about how there's a new paradigm. But like everyone does that. And I frequently, you know, like once a month

or so, I'll be like, I just realized I've never heard that word spoken out loud. And I need, is that how it's pronounced? And then it turns out that no one has any idea. And everyone has like made their own pronouncement in their head. And we can all argue about it. But we have to go to the dictionary to find out. So for example, I for the longest time thought, that interdict was pronounced interdite because like indictment. So, and I surprised other people by saying like interdition, not a word. So I don't even know that that matters that much. It's fundamentally you do what, you did well.

The SAT2 doesn't really test vocabulary anymore in the same way that it used to. But all of those like doing well on analogies and all that stuff that they've slowly gotten rid of over time, none of it was like because you're hanging out at regattas or like, teeny tiny 0.001. Most of it was, how much do you read? And I think one of the reasons that you get these arguments about the SAT is that people who went to very elite colleges are extremely range restricted. So I taught SAT prep, or I actually taught GMAT prep after business school.

And it was really my first experience of interacting with people who get like 500s on those tests. And I had one girl, white, by the way. this is not like a racial commentary, upper middle class as far as I could tell, but I remember she was struggling with percentages. I finally said percent means per 100. And she said, uh-huh. And I said, okay, so if it's 25 percent and I have 100 objects, how many objects do you have? And she just blanked, right? And if you went to an elite college, you have never met anyone like this. Or you have, last time you met them was like in the lower tiers of high school because you got sorted out and you don't, you never watched them struggling with math. I'm sure she was like

a lovely person. She was an advertising. She seemed to be having a perfectly happy and fulfilling life, but she just couldn't do it. And so if you have not met people like that, it's a lot easier to assume that test must be just like a made up barrier that doesn't have anything to do with reality because you have not dealt with people who really blank at math or really blank at analogies or whatever because those people were not in your classes by the time you were a junior or senior in high school. But I mean, isn't the politics of this at base about the racial and ethnic composition of the admit pool that like, I mean, you know, what we see here in New York City is, you know, we have schools that are, you know, 100% exam-based for admissions. And the admitted

student pool is wildly disproportionately Asian. The white admit percentage is actually fairly proportionate to the white population in the city. And then there are very low admit rates for black and Hispanic students, which is in part because there is a very aggressive program to admit top-performing black and Hispanic students in the public schools to private prep schools. But you also, I mean, I think, you know, you have universities that had an ideological commitment to trying to maintain a certain racial balance in the student population. They see the exam undermining that, and therefore they decide that the exam is racist. I don't think it's, you know, specifically about the regatta question. Well, yeah, that's right. And I don't think it's a coincidence that you saw more. I mean,

this is obviously speculative, but first of all, we didn't go to holistic admissions until after affirmative action was banned. When affirmative action was still allowed, including in the state of California, right, we banned it by ballot initiative in 1996. Part of that, nobody really complained that half the class was admitted by a weighted average of SAT and GPA, right? It was only once it became apparent that this was decreasing, that if you didn't have affirmative action to balance that out, you would end up having lower rates of admission for black and Latino applicants. And then we switched to holistic admissions. And then likewise, I don't think it's coincidence that, I mean, obviously COVID was a big hit,

but by the time every school went either test optional in the case of the IV plus or test blind in the case of the University of California, I think a big part of the reason they did that is because by the time that happened in 2020, it became obvious that Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard was going to go to the Supreme Court. And, you know, it didn't take a genius to look at this and say it's a very heavily Republican Supreme Court. They're probably going to, and it's been almost 25 years since O'Connor famously said, in 25 years we won't need this anymore, let's set a time limit on the Grutter decision. And it didn't take a genius to say that Harvard is probably going to lose the students for a fair admissions case.

And, you know, one of the ways that you could do that is that you could address that issue to say, okay, well, if using this piece of information tells us that there's preparedness differences by ethnic group, we're not allowed to adjust for that on the back end, then we need to give up that piece of information. But, of course, that leads to a bad situation. I mean, one of my pet theories is that we were much better off in the early 90s when we could basically have an implicit policy of you. We have racial balancing explicitly, but then we use the best possible information for admissions. Then we are now where we try and find all these little cheat codes to work around and pretend we're not trying to engage in racial balancing, but really we're not.

The best way to do that is to throw out the best piece of information. But yeah, I don't think anybody would care about SAT if it didn't have disparate outcomes by ethnicity. Let's take a quick break. We'll be back with more Central Air. Oh, and by the way, we're still planning that segment for later in August on our least popular cranky policy ideas, and we want to hear them from you. We've gotten a few already really good ones from our listeners who have some really cranky ideas. If you want to share yours, just respond to any email you get from the show. We read those replies, and if you're not getting those, you can go to Centralairpodcast.com and sign up.

We'll be right back. Gabriel, one thing that's interesting to me is that, you know, you've led this effort on this, this letter from the social sciences and the humanities on bringing back testing. And you are, you know, an openly conservative professor in a sociology department at a major university, which I sort of thought wasn't really allowed. But like, more seriously, like, there's, there's all this media coverage and, you know, a certain amount, and a lot of, you know, complaining from the right about how hostile academia is to conservative scholars. And it's interesting to me that it's possible for you to lead this campaign in the UC system and that there isn't a reaction that's like, oh, that's Gabriel Rossman,

we shouldn't touch that letter. It seems that you are making common cause with a lot of faculty or presumably mostly far to your left politically. No, I think that's right. And we've made a deliberate effort to not have this SAT campaign be political. And partly that's because we think it's not political, and partly that's because it would be suicidal to do that. If we did frame it as like, here's the, and by the way, the California Republican Party has shown some interest in this effort, and we're glad to have their support, but also we're not embracing it with both arms, because, you know, the UC regions are all Democratic political appointees, something like, I don't know, 80, 90 percent of the UC faculty are Democrats. The idea of saying, like,

oh, here's this Republican plan for education would be nuts. And the, fact it's like we don't really discuss politics in the SAT petition group, you know, because it's not really relevant. I mean, I know at least one of the co-organizers is a moderate Democrat. And just in general, in academia, there's a lot of people who are moderate Democrats, you know, basically your constituency here, who, you know, are kind of tired of the excesses. And, you know, they want Medicaid funding and they want abortion access and whatever. but they also think that there's been certain excesses, and one of those would be that they want excellence to have a role

and for not to be completely jettisoned in the interest of equity that it should be balanced. Can I ask, do you think that this letter would have gone differently five, six years ago, and I don't just mean that, obviously, at the height of the Great Awakening, this letter was not getting signed by anyone because they like their jobs. But my sense of talking to people at schools that went test,

optional was that in part because of that range restriction thing that I was talking about before, that a number of more liberal, lefty professors were genuinely shocked by the change in the average level of preparation of their students. And it's not like their best students were still great, right? Like we're still very well prepared for their class. I shouldn't say great. I'm sure they were all great. Their best students were handling the material fine. But suddenly, you have classes that have 800 SAT kids and 500 SAT kids who would have under the old system been separated in high school. And they don't know how to teach. First of all, you know, professors at Harvard don't know how to teach 500 SAT kids, but they definitely don't know how to teach them in the same class as the kids who are like are very well prepared. And so there was a lot of people who five years ago would have genuinely supported. going test optional as an equity thing, who after they experienced what that looked like or going test blind, they realized, no, no, that's not. I cannot do that and keep the character

of my class. No, that's exactly right. Experiences the school of mankind who it will learn at no other. You know, and I've heard that specifically, I mean, not that quote, but I mean, I've heard that specifically from colleagues where I've heard a lot of colleagues say things along the lines of, you know, I used to be against the SAT, and then I saw the consequences, and I saw that my classes just aren't being taught the same way, and including what you were saying about it, not just being the mean, but the variance. That is not just my average student as at a lower level of preparedness, it's that I still have some of the amazing students, and I now have less prepared students, and I can't teach them at the same time, that I can't teach integrals and go back and give

a remedial lesson on fractions at the same time. For any, you know, hour, of class time, you've got to do it on integrals or you got to do it on fractions. And so trying to have a class that can teach both sets of students just isn't going to work. This makes me wonder a little bit whether you think some of the critiques that we're seeing of academia these days from outside are overstated. I mean, there's this idea that, you know, it's an ideological monoculture generally and maybe especially in sociology. There's this report that came out of Vanderbilt University about the state of the humanities and the humanistic social sciences that is very focused on the idea that academics have become two activists, that departments are rejecting people who don't follow

along with a specific, you know, quote-unquote, decolonial intersectional, whatever approach to the field. And then there's a specific one that just came out from that Vanderbilt Committee, specifically on sociology, written by a professor at the University of Hawaii, leveling a lot of these critiques at your field. Are things better than people think from the outside there? Are things more pluralistic and more academically rigorous than people understand them to be, you know, from reading the Atlantic? So I liked both reports, both the general one, which was written by a committee led by philosophers, but also including an, and a very famous anthropologist, you know, very famous a couple of historians, linguistics, literature, and

sociology, and the one that just came out by Ashley Rubin at University of Hawaii, specifically on sociology. I thought both reports were really good. The general one was kind of interesting, and the message of the general report, which came out in June, early June, is that the disciplines have a lot of problems and they need to self-correct, but there's no need for receivership yet. And that there's, you know, that there's still room for self-correction. People are still doing really good work, and they need to be allowed to do that good work. And it even pointed out that there's nothing wrong necessarily with saying, okay, I did the research, and based on my research, I found out that lead pain is bad for kids. And so based on having studied how lead pain is bad

for kids, I'm going to show, I'm going to go speak of the state legislature and talk about how the building code should make it so that you have to remediate lead pain. They didn't say, they said, they explicitly said that there's nothing wrong with that. What's wrong is when people go in thinking they know the answers already, where they're not asking questions. or even asking questions getting the answers and then saying, here's the implications of the questions, I'm going to push for those implications of those questions, but saying here's the only acceptable answer.

Here's the only answer that's allowed. And that actually has been kind of a trend in academia where you've seen more and more of that. Now, kind of a notable lacuna of the main report is that they're talking specifically about the traditional disciplines, and they kind of hinted the idea that some of the interdisciplinary fields might be much worse off, that there are disciplines generally,

speaking, they have the word studies in their name, who have as their mission a certain set of answers, right? So it'd be very, imagine imagine a gender studies professor. It's very hard to imagine somebody being a gender studies professor and talking about how everybody should be trad wives or something like that, right? It's like, you... I mean, that's kind of a fun thought. Exactly. It'd be like a breaching experiment, right? Studies of how there are only two genders. Well, I mean, did you guys see that the report about how American Studies majors were all very negative about America. Yeah.

And it's like, of course they are. I mean, like, it's a critical studies thing. You're mad at the wind for blowing. But it didn't used to be. It was founded as like this pro-American Cold War thing. Like Tom Wolf got his Ph.D. in American Studies, and he was extremely right-wing. But it's over time, it kind of became, you know, criticism of America's studies rather than American studies. Right.

So you're a sociologist. Gabriel, explain to us how everything became critique. So first of all, I should say that in Ashley's report, she talks a lot about negativity bias in sociology specifically and how there's an emphasis on social problems. And I really recommend Ashley's report. We've got a link to that report on the show page for this episode, by the way, at centralairpodcast.com. Like, I've been a sociologist for my entire adult life, and I've read many of the studies that she's basing this on. I have personal.

witnessed many of the scandals that she's talking about. And I don't know everything she talked about, but everything that I do know, she nails it. So I recommend that to anybody who, for whatever perverse reasons they may have, is really interested in the problems of sociology. But the negativity bias, I would say that there's kind of two dynamics. So there's one, which is that you have certain disciplines where it's kind of, that's their mission from day one. So if you look at the studies fields, with the exception of American studies, but with most of the studies fields, it's like they were really created largely as the result of student protests in the 1970s in order to solve the problems of this or that identity group. Right. So like the classic example is that you have, it'll be

1971 or whatever, and there'll be a bunch of black students occupying this college president's office saying, we're not leaving until you create an AFAM studies department. And the assumption would be that it's not just, hey, here's some interesting things about black people, but here's specifically how black people have been subjected to oppression by the rest of the United States. And then to a lesser extent, you saw that same process, mostly modeled on AFAM for, you know, Chicano studies, Asian American studies, et cetera, et cetera. So those fields, I would say, it's just kind of baked in. Like, that's their mission from day one.

And then in terms of, if you look at the traditional disciplines that were not born that way, right? I mean, anthropology, history, linguistics, literature, sociology, economics, they had long periods where these disciplines were kind of, you know, not entirely, but mostly kind of apolitical, but you've had this shift. And I would say part of that is just kind of like a special case of the Great Awakening, where you see that among an educational polarization, where you see educated people increasingly go towards the left and they increasingly go towards like the left of the left, not center left, right? I mean, it used to be that your average, basically, if we were to send an episode of Central Air into a time machine and play in the faculty lounge in 1995, you would hear a lot of people saying, this is amazing. This is, you know, I basically agree with this perspective that we're hearing in this, what they would have thought of as a radio show. But it's really during the Great Awakening that you saw

a more radical understanding of, you know, how to understand social problems. And then specifically in terms of academia, there's also this really strong dynamic of self-selection, where, you know, and I'm convinced that this is. is most of it. I think, you know, Ashley talks a bit about certain cases where you had people subject to unfair critiques or other things of what you might broadly call discrimination. But the vast majority of what's going on is just self-selection. So I've been on graduate admissions many times. It's not like there's a bunch of conservatives applying to get PhDs in sociology and the committee's rejecting them. It's much more like you have a mix of people

who are saying you get a precious few set of people who are just interested in how society works because it's just, you know, glorious to mankind to understand nature, including human nature. And then you have some people who have basically reformist left politics and you have other people have radical left politics. You have basically nobody coming in saying, you know, I want to study society from a distinctly right-wing perspective. It's all self-selection that's driving these things. It's interesting because, like, you know, I think it's probably, speaking just for myself, I was in college about 20 years ago at a very, like, left-wing school at NYU. you. And I was always sort of more right-wing than a lot of the teachers I had and a lot of the student body, of course.

But like, you know, I'm going to buy my Democrat, not that far, right? But like, that always was happening. And I had my, you know, my advisor was a gender studies, that professor, and I took a lot of literature classes from communists and all of this stuff. And all of those people never once judged me or graded me on like how much I agreed with them. You know, they were all very good professors who gave me interesting insights and all of this and like it was a fair exchange, the goal of the class for them and the criteria was not that I became a communist, which I didn't become. And that was all well and good and wonderful. And I think that when I hear about the stuff that upsets people when they think about academia's current situation is that it sounds a lot like

there's more of value judgment instruction and things like that, which you would get, as Megan was saying in critical studies. And it's hard for me to even understand this happening because it's so different than what not that long ago my own experience was in a place filled with communists. And I don't, I think that there's like a disconnect, I think, with people even from that time to now when they look back to like, when did this change in 2014, 2015? Like, was there a meeting where everyone got together and said, actually, you know what, this was other thing wasn't working? Let's actually, let's actually directly just tell them that every sentence needs to end with capitalism is the problem.

You know, like, when did this happen? Well, I would say broadly speaking, you have the Great Awakening. You can look at survey data. You can look at appearances of certain keyword keywords in the New York Times and Washington Post and, you know, other major periodicals. And no matter how you measure it, it really seems to be roughly speaking, 20, 12 to 2022. You see this trend. And the survey evidence and the analysis of major periodicals, they all kind of agree on this. And I would say that that more or less correlates with when you had it also going on in academia, although there's a little bit of a change in that people who

work in media tend to be young because a lot of young people enter and then exit. And, you know, some people stay around their whole careers, but you do have a lot of young people churning in, turning out. Whereas in academia, you know, we have tenure. And so once you get in, you're in there for life. And so there's a certain sort of lag. And that can work both ways, right? So it could be that in 2016, you know, you could get canceled for using the wrong soy milk at the Slate office party. But your gender studies professor might be kind of old school in some ways and, you know, still be the person who was hired back when it was called the women's studies department and, you know, really be like a second-wave feminist.

So you could, so there'd be that kind of like, but it can also work the other way around where one of the things we saw in academia is that there was this massive wave of cluster hires. Cluster hires almost always reflect the central administration's priorities rather than the department saying, we need someone to teach algebra, we need someone to teach 19th century history, or we need somebody to teach demography. So in 2021, right, so after Floyd, every major organization, at least every major organization in America, they had a lot of educated people. working at it said we are committed to racial justice. And the way the universities did that in practices said, we're going to hire this many people who study the black experience in the United States. And that happened through cluster hires. So what happened is they didn't just hire people who study black people. They studied people who study black people specifically from a CRT perspective. And so you had a ton of cluster hires in 2021. Those people were going to get tenure,

at least most of them are going to get tenure. And they're going to be here for my entire career, right? For our lifetimes, those people are going to be in academia. And so, One way to think about it is that if you've ever been to Yosemite, they teach you about like a glacial moraine that it's like there's like there's the glacier and the glacier moves forward and it pushes the rocks ahead of it. And then the glacier retreats, but the rocks are still there. So one way to think about it is that like whatever's going on is like a social movement type thing or some type of big moral impetus across society. That's going to lead towards hiring. But the people get hired. They don't just get laid off. It's the same way that it works in private industry, right? In private industry, they hired a bunch of like, uh, you know, C-suite-level DEI people in 2020. Those people all got laid off in 2023 and 2024. It doesn't work that way in academia. In academia, those people get tenure and are there for decades. The combination of these two things makes me actually very pessimistic about the future of these fields

and makes me question the idea that receivership of some sort can be avoided. Because what I mean is, you know, these people come in and they're there forever. And then also, you know, the lack of ideological diversity. is largely about who applies and that there isn't, you know, a whole bunch of conservatives beating down the door trying to get into sociology departments. In a way, the problem would be easier to fix if there was a lot of explicit discrimination against conservative hires because you could just stop doing that and you would get a more diverse group that would probably be more inclined to agree on a set of norms that aimed toward objectivity and learning rather than trying to promote

a particular ideological agenda. I think it's actually the case that there are very few qualified and interested conservatives who would like to do these jobs. I think we saw that, especially in public health during COVID, that, you know, public health departments, you know, both in government and universities, had a really strong left skew. And then when you tried to get conservative voices in that generally involved promoting people who were completely unqualified and had a bunch of quack ideas because all of the expertise was in packed possessed by people who were very left-wing and had an ideological agenda. And so, you know, I mean, there's a, there's a story in the Atlantic this week by Tyler Austin Harper, who is now a staff writer there who left a tenure track position,

at Bates, college in Maine, which is an unusual thing to do. He got this very difficult to get job, decided he hated it and left. And one of the things he described there was that, you know, post the Great Awakening, Bates decided, they voted in this requirement that every department was going to have to offer at least two courses that, quote unquote, centered race, white supremacy, colonialism, and intersecting experiences of power and privileges within the major to include things like mathematics and chemistry and you need to have math of white supremacy or something like that, they eventually decided that you'd only have to take one course on this in your major. Another one could be outside your major. But basically, you know, they were going to make

chemistry professors do this sort of teaching, which he thought was a manifestly absurd idea. And interestingly, you know, a few years have passed, they delayed the imposition of this requirement to 2029. I think they decided, you know, maybe now is not the right time. But it's still, you know, in theory, they're committed to doing this eventually. But it seems like this perspective is is embedded in the universities because of the, you know, because of the factors that you describe there. And these reports like the one out of Vanderbilt, you know, they say, well, this, you know, this is a problem for a number of reasons. One is quality of scholarship.

But another is that universities are heavily dependent on public money. And they're also dependent on consumers being willing to put their money toward it. And ultimately, if you're offering people something that they don't think is valuable, those funding streams are going to dry up. I don't see how you refocus these departments without some sort of top-down, mandates, given the fact that, you know, you do have this extreme ideological sorting that has gotten much worse over the last 20 years because of some of the social phenomena that you describe. And we should say that, like, the pipeline problem, which is absolutely huge, is also huge in journalism. But it's not entirely exogenous to the fact that these fields are so skewed.

And partly that's because if you are the skunk at the garden party, it's not really that fun, speaking as someone who has spent most of her career being that skunk at the garden party. And you have to have a pretty unusual personality to be willing to do this. You have to like be part and partly that is a personality where you can be disagreeable enough to do work that is different from what your colleagues are doing, but not so disagreeable that you're unbearable to be around and you get fired or you don't get tenure. But it's also that like rationally if you expect discrimination, you should do something else, right? And so, well, I don't think that academia would ever get to parity.

I do think it could get farther, but it's probably, I mean, like, a thing I have tried to convince conservatives in my columns is that, like, this is the rationale for affirmative action guys. It's really hard to get people to come into spaces where they expect to be unwelcome. Yeah, but I doubt an affirmative action program for conservatives would work. I mean, we've seen some state university systems sort of try this. They create these centers. It's basically conservative studies.

And I don't think those programs have been impressive. Yeah. And I think there are a lot of questions about that approach. And I think, like, there are different ways to do it. You can do it as conservative studies and you can do it as genuinely pluralistic. And different ones of these civic centers are taking a different approach. But it is solving one problem which a political scientist said to me, it was like, I can make conservative graduate students. There are people who would come.

I think sociology is probably different from, like, political science in that regard. But where would I get them jobs? Well, I mean, where are the political scientists, student, the liberal ones getting jobs? IT tech or something? The point was that scarcity actually drives part of this, right? When you only have so many jobs, you can afford to indulge your discriminatory tastes. But his point was that he didn't think that any political science department in the country would reliably hire a conservative graduate student that he graduated.

And therefore, like, those students were rationally going to stay away. by creating those slots, you can actually get good students into the pipeline, or that is the hope. And Steve Tellis at Hopkins, who was working with Gabriel, is now working with Ben and Jenna's story at the AI, on actually, like, trying to get some kids into the pipeline and overcome their fears that this will be doom and misery. So Steve Tell us his program at Hopkins, he's starting with Polly Sye, but they're hoping to eventually expand it to other disciplines. The other thing I respond to Josh with the idea of like, I think you're right that to a different extent you kind of can't do this because it's like one option is that you have the civic centers, which is basically a code word for conservative studies or at least non-woke studies. And then the other is that you have basically conservative cluster hires. But even though I was talking about like how centrally they are, you still have to put cluster hires in departments and departments still have to prove them. And my understanding is that central administrations have tried to do basically conservative cluster hires find that departments resist them. So it actually, which kind of gets you back to the original

issue. And you could say that that's a point of principle that, you know, maybe we shouldn't be doing targeted hires on the basis of people's ideology. But of course, when you had, you also had plenty of cluster hires on the basis of like, I do critical race theory, which is, of course, an ideology. Well, but I think that was bad. Well, yeah, I agree. Speaking of that, I want to talk about this Jason R. Day story out of the United Kingdom because it's just really wild. This is, people have probably seen this. This is the professor who was the youngest black professor ever hired at Cambridge University at the age of 37. And there was, there was a bunch of puff coverage about him at the time. I personally had not noticed it. I hadn't heard of him until the scandal came out in the last few weeks. But he was featured, for example, on Good Morning America on ABC.

and his story was interesting beyond, you know, young black hire in sociology at Cambridge. It's that he claimed that he was unable to speak until he was 11 years old. And that, you know, he had this fantastic story of, you know, this young man with autism who overcame this. And he ran 600 miles in six days and 30 marathons and 35 days, 10 of them with a broken leg. And he raised $5 million for charity. And so all of this, you know, great human interest angle. And ultimately, you know, after finally, you know, learning to read and write at 18, he's, you know, getting his PhD and joining the faculty at Cambridge.

And then it turned out that a substantial amount of his work was plagiarized. And this was laid out by a guy named Nathan Confis, who used to be some sort of lecturer at Cambridge and who's, you know, a quote-unquote race realist who likes to write about measures of IQ across racial groups and who has seen. said things like that, you know, that if it weren't for affirmative action, black people would essentially disappear from elite positions outside of entertainment and sports, a less than ideal messenger for the fact that, you know, that this black academic had engaged in this plagiarism. But the text is the text, and you can see it up against, you know, various other documents where he's, you know, copying the text out of. He also appeared to have invented certain data, basically, claiming to have conducted interviews with various people, even though it appeared that he lifted

quotes from other papers or attributed the same quote to two different people of different demographic characteristics. And so this came out and initially there was a circling of the wagons. And, you know, this is yet another racist attack on black academics. But as people looked more and more at it, it became more difficult to defend. Cambridge announced it would be doing an investigation. That's it for this week's free episode of Central Air. We have much more with Gabriel Rossman this week.

We talk about the Jason Ardei scandal out of Cambridge, this guy who, you know, supposedly ran six hundred miles in six days and ran marathons with a broken leg and, you know, was chased through his office building at Cambridge by an intruder with a knife but didn't call the police about it. Apparently plagiarized a substantial amount of his work and after some initial defenses, has resigned from Cambridge University, and this is a university DEI scandal at an interesting time for higher ed. And so we talk about that. We also talk about the end of woke one, which Alexandria Ocasio Cassie Cortez has declared, but is it really over? And Gabriel is an expert on the laundering of disreputable exchange. And so we talk about a couple of places we're seeing that in our

society, the Trump coin, this alleged situation in which women in New York expect men to pay for Uber's on their first dates, which we think is not really happening very much outside the sugar baby community, but they're an interesting case study for laundering of disreputable exchange. Anyway, if you want to hear about all of that, go to centralairpodcast.com, upgrade, become paying subscriber. You can hear that full episode and every full episode we would love to have.