Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Heather Lynn Mac Donald: A Classic Modern University (#067)

Episode Date: August 29, 2020

  Heather Lynn Mac Donald is an American conservative political commentator, essayist, and attorney. She is a Thomas W. Smith Fellow of the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of the institute’s City Journal. She has written numerous editorials and is the author of several books. Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Host Brian Keating: ‍♂️ Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Welcome, everybody, to this edition of The Into the Impossible podcast. I am your host, Brian Keating, professor of physics at UC San Diego. And UC San Diego features rather prominently in the book by my current guest, Heather McDonald. I'm going to read your bio. Heather McDonald is the best-selling author of the War on Cops, the Truman, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow.

at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She holds a BA from Yale University and an MA from Cambridge in English and J.D. from Stanford. Her writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the New York Times, The New Republic, the Partisan Review, among others. She lives in New York. She's visiting San Diego, and we are distant as we were having this conversation in San Diego. And it's a pleasure to have you here, Adam. Thank you so much. Brian, it's an honor to be on the podcast with you at one last. It's so, so interesting.

It's so great to have you here. So I've been, you know, obviously consuming your content for so long. I really love it on many different levels. And I love the way that you think and we don't always agree on everything as nobody does, as we always say. The only person you agree with is yourself 100% of the time. Some people don't even agree with themselves most of the time. I try to challenge myself to realize.

that the criticisms I like, you know, launch at the other side, but he's been watched against me. Yeah. So we'll get into some, you know, gentle critiques or at least the so-called steelman arguments. I listened to your interview with Michael Shermer, who's a mutual friend of ours,

and he has this new book out called Giving the Devil His Due, and I've seen a lot of proliferation of these books. Dave Rubin has a book out, who I know is a friend of yours as well, at him on the podcast. There are a lot of books that are complaining about the, the kind of treatment, the squelching, free discourse and conversation. I wanted to ask you first, how do you rank that as a threat to sort of an educated society, the discourse that's being

perhaps suppressed? I mean, Dave Rubin claims it's so bad he has to found a whole new social network. And I know you're not big on social networks, but do you really feel like it's as big a threat as, say, Dave and Mike do? Or do you have a different part to this issue? Well, I think we've seen the acceleration of the threat in the last month or so. We're speaking. now in the July, and the left is now starting to turn on itself, and we see more and more actions being taken within the private sphere against non-conforming speech. But I believe that the free speech problem, as central as it is, and as truly threatening as it is, to the possibility of a society where people can look out their disagreements

through reason rather than through violence, that that problem, as troubling as it is, is a symptom of a deeper problem or is an epiphenomenon of a deeper problem, which is the discourse about victimology. The efforts to silence non-conforming speech on campus, which have now spread to the society at large, result from this idea that to be a thing that to be a thing that female or a so-called underrepresented minority on the college campus that is predominantly blacks and Hispanics, is to be at daily risk of one's life. And that is said, I don't think hyperbolicly, there's always a slight play around it, are they merely speaking as a figure of speech? Do they mean it literally? And frankly, I think they mean it pretty literally, that

that circumambient racism and sexism is so great that these college students are literally under daily threat, but the effort to shut down speech on campuses grows out of that conceit that college campuses are places of lethal and systemic bigotry. And it is that idea that sexism and racism are the defining feature, of a college campus and now of American society in general, that is a conceit that is even more dangerous. It is tearing down meritocratic standards. It is tearing down the possibility of colorblind accomplishment of institutions that are driven by excellence and not by the trivialities and the irrelevancies of sex and skin color.

How do you make of it? So I have a friend, a colleague, Professor Chonda, Prescott Weinstein, who wrote an article recently delivered to a collection of American particle physicists just recently to the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, which is entitled particle physics in the wake of slavery and settler colonialism, in which, you know, I don't want to get into the whole thing and really dispute or have your opinion about the article. But, I mean, her basic point is that places like where her alma mater, Harvard and where she currently teaches in New Hampshire, these had historic ties to slavery, to owners of slaves, in the case of and even overseers of the slaves, in the case of Harvard, according to Professor Prescott Weinstein. She also says, you know, the land on which it's owned as Native American land and so forth. When I look at UC San Diego, where we are, this land, if you like, it's probably not the right way to put it, but it was impossible for me to own a house as a Jew in the 1960s. In fact, the covenant on my house was so-called Lechoa Covenant said the house could not be sold to a black, a Jew, or a Mexican. And it was rampant here until Jonas Saw came here and Roger Revelle founded this wonderful university that I'm very fortunate to call my home institution. He said, you can't have a university without Jews, and he was able to convince the locals to overcome that.

But for a while, there was doubt because of this covenant against Jews and blacks and Mexicans specifically. So can you separate, you know, the historical. One thing I worry about is, is there any forbearance? Is there a way to do, you know, as we say, Judaism, Teshuvra, or repent? Or is it if it was once historically, you know, ill, gotten land, et cetera, as this land was, This is Kumiya land, according to historians, that goes back thousands of years. So how do you separate that? How do you separate the fact of history that these lands where these universities were belong to others, first of all,

and that some of the wealth of these universities, say Harvard, your arch nemesis as a Yale grad, that they owned slaves. And even L.U. Yale allegedly was a slave owner, I believe. Is it possible by near passage of time to erase that history, or is it endemically, systemically, as it's often said? What would went into the fabric of these institutions? Well, first of all, I would distinguish two points that I take it she's making. One may be related to the shutdown stem movement, which we saw earlier this summer, which would argue that science itself is somehow inherently racist or sexist.

And her second point would be that, leaving aside the nature of science, that there is institutional racism in universities, in cities, that we have yet to purge or make reparations for. So let me address those, Syriata. The idea that science is itself

tainted by racism and sexism, which was in fact the claim that was being made and is being made now by scientific societies. I think even maybe at UC San Diego, or UC Davis, the head of the Earth Sciences Department there, is running a whole set of readings on the racism of Earth Sciences. This is preposterous. It makes me sorrowful and angry that somebody in the field of physics could think of blending those two realms because the very hope of science is that it is a universal language, that it is open to every single participant

on a colorblind and sex blind basis, that has been able to transcend national differences. It is a language that all can participate in that is the language of nature. And so to bring, again, the trivialities of gender and race politics into science, I think is an amazing betrayal of what this accomplishment is, this extraordinary triumph with the scientific method of randomized controlled experiments which obviously is not what you're doing in physics, but it's something that gives us...

We don't do it in astronomy. It's hard to change the temperature of the sun and have a control. But let me just... We can do it to regression analysis. Yeah. But the second question is, of course, there is the reality, the historical reality of discrimination in this country

that was a grotesque violation of our founding ideal, something that is hard to fathom that for so many decades, for so many centuries, the leaders of this country, starting with the founding fathers, could have tolerated that contradiction. And I think that the founders did so

consciously, having made that devil's bargain. That is a different matter than the reality today. Yes, there are students, undergraduates, who are playing around with taboos that may make the occasional comment that is now viewed as a microgression. But the idea that any science STEM department is discriminating against qualified females

and underrepresented minorities at this point is fantasy. Anybody in a university environment has got to know that the game of every faculty hiring search now is to find the qualified, remotely qualified female or underrepresented minority can.

that they fell higher. When we had 1960, when UCSD was founded, as I said, it was founded, you know, in part because of the Desirative Jonas Salkier, who had, you know, invented the vaccine that treated polio. And yet, as late as that, in the sciences even, there was discrimination against Jews. And this science as a method hasn't changed, you know, in large parts, since the invention of the scientific method, Galileo popularized the scientific method in 1609, 1610, using evidence trials, as you said, thought experiments. So given that the laws of physics are time translation invariant, in other words, the law of

gravity is true now as it was in Galileo's time, why are you so sanguine that physicists now, as we discriminated against Jews, you know, Hitler had his chief of Aryan physics, was a man by a name of Philip Leonard, who for decades successfully advocated that Einstein should not get a Nobel Prize because he practiced what's called Jewish physics. And in fact, he didn't get it for his main discoveries of the two theories of relativity. Instead, he got it for an effect related unsurprisingly to this guy, Leonard's experimental discovery. So Einstein provided a theoretical underpinning of the photoelectric effect, and in part that was attributed his Nobel Prize. So given that the Nobel Prize and even admissions of people like Richard Feynman and others were barred admission from places like or throttled, quoted out of getting positions at places like Princeton or, you know, Columbia.

And even Maria Gepart-Nayer, who won the Nobel Prize in 1963 for certain phenomenon related to the nucleus of the atom, she's who our physics department is named after here in San Diego. She couldn't get a job except for the fact that she was appointed sort of an assistant for her husband, who was a lesser physicist at Argonne National Laboratory. So this is in the 60s. This wasn't 200 years ago. How much has really changed if we all know that there were quotas on Jews, there were unspoken these covenants against Jews and women to some extent. Why should be saying when that these, if not overtly, systemically as the language has it, that there aren't perhaps a need to counteract that, as was done with Maria. So Maria Geppert, if she didn't get the job here as a professor, maybe, you know, this department would have suffered greatly. And we only

got it because the people in Chicago wouldn't give her a position because she was a woman. please give me some examples of competitively qualified females, blacks, or Hispanic physicists that you know of that you think should have gotten a job who did not. Give me an example. Currently, currently, I'm talking about now the anti-Jewish quotas in the past were people did that unapologetically. Our culture has changed 180 degrees. We are now affirmatively anti-Rewish. racist. I would love

when the Chancellor of UC San Diego or the President of Yale gets up and beats their chest about being a racist institution. Name some names. Name some names about the faculty who you think are discriminating against qualified

physicists in the elevated sanctified victim categories. Who are your faculty bigots and why haven't you fired them? Alessandro Svrmea, as you well know, a physicist, Italian physicist from Pisa, who delivered a paper at CERN and used to be at CERN, the European Consortium of Nuclear Physics, showed that females are hired and promoted with a thinner research record than males. It simply is not the case. I've talked to here at UC San Diego,

scientists who come up with their final three list, the short list for hiring. And if it doesn't contain a female, the dean will say, tear it up, start over again. The whole process. I've never actually had that, as you say, I've never seen an official memo that says things like that.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to envision that it doesn't happen. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light, and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows,

and they were all free. The truth is our city. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 N-EX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary.

Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Are it happened? So you've never been in a hiring committee that has a final short list and they have said, we need a female here. I've never had someone say specifically, I've been on committees where the candidates that we had in the final analysis were all female, for example, that has occurred. But, you know, but these are... Is that a problem? Is that a thing kept me a male?

No. No, no one is said, right. What happens if you have old male? You know, that's really interesting because in the past few years, astronomy has become far more, far more, far more. And it's, you know, some of the most brilliant colleagues that I could ever be happy. And I've worked on to hire these women specifically, not because they're the best scientists that will apply for the job at the time. And, you know, in my opinion, again, I can agree that I've never, I have yet to meet one of my colleagues from left to right on the spectrum. And, you know, we can talk about the propensity on each side of the distribution.

It's really bimodal in terms of left and right. Let's leave that aside. But I've yet to meet someone that says, I am a racist. but I have yet to not meet someone who will not say the system is systemically racist. And I say mathematically speaking, that's impossible to reckon unless there is a conspiracy. Because what do you have to have to have a system? You need multiple people believing that something is true and conspiring to do something. Conspiracy means to breathe together, right?

So they're whispering, they're breathing. We must hire a female. I have yet to see that from the dean's side and I have yet to see that on the faculty side. So where is the systemic? Like where do we, where does it manifest itself? Is it, is it, I mean, there are things where. Which is systemic. You're saying, where is the systemic pressure to hire?

Right, women, for example, yes. Right. Where is it? You've just been in a sort of a sacred bubble that if it has not manifested itself in the physics department because I have never talked to a professor anywhere on campus, on a campus, anywhere in the country, where that is. not a very explicit goal, that the diversity language is constant. Yeah. You mentioned in the book, and it is true. We nucleated these positions called

excellence positions, and they were to have an emphasis, perhaps equal to research and teaching. Maybe not in some cases. I know at UC Davis, the chancellor has said that contributions to diversity shall be held equal to contributions to research and teaching. I believe that's the case. But here in San Diego, at least the official word, was these positions could go to men. And in fact, they have. We've had male physicists get so-called excellence positions. Like males? Yeah, I believe so.

Yeah, I mean, we, unfortunately, we don't have any African. I've tried to recruit many African, and I want to get into a couple of cases that actually, you know, in the interest of time, we hear often in science that it's not only the discrimination that takes place in the academia environment. It's the fact that these professors will get pulled over. They'll get arrested. The only physicists I've ever known to have guns held to. their heads. These are two eminent physicists, high-energy theorists, and they're African-American.

They've had guns held to their heads. They've had police, pull them over for the crime of driving a car to the faculty club or whatever at these very Ivy League universities. This is their, yeah, I have no reason to doubt what they're saying. This is the only people I know. And so is that attributable to the great, in other words, is it a hologram? Is it a projection of the outside racism in our society such to the extent that exists? that then is impossible for them because these are the same people. Anytime there's a search, my friends who are African Americans get called upon to participate in these sessions and to really, it's almost above and beyond what I get asked to do as a white

man in academia. They're always asked to be on these committees to search, you know, whether it's to nucleate the positions I said before or to set some strategic goals for increasing diversity at UCSD. And I always say, look, if there's an island of the best talented African-American, physicists, just do the thought experiment. If they're, if they're at the top level, we're going to accept them, but so is Harvard, so is Yale, so is Berkeley? And these are older institutions than UCSD. So I guess I'm wondering, I'm kind of meandering here, but the question I'm asking is, is it possible that racism in society as a whole and the need for the very few blacks in

academia to play an outsized role? Is that sort of like a tax on black intellectuals, that white intellectuals and myself, I don't have to pay because my skin color. Well, you can't have it both ways. You can't claim that you need diversity mentors and then complain about being asked to be a diversity mentor.

It's a circular system. I think it's ridiculous. Let me just speak as a female point of view. The idea that I would need some female to aspire to be a physicist or discover radiant

that becomes an impossible loop to break out of if there are none. Marie Curie did not need a female mentor. Why not have a mentor or aspire to be the best possible physicist? I don't think that one should only be able to think about the future if somebody's of your sex. But again, she almost didn't win the Nobel Prize. In fact, it was her... It's a different world.

Again, do you really think that? that the Nobel Prize Committee is discriminating against females, it's, that just, to me, it defies credulous. I've got my own negative opinions of the NOVA. That's be so deep into implicit bias, which I just don't, I think that the explicit cues and rhetoric is far more important. It overrides any possible implicit bias. And as far as why we don't have the black physicists, you guys are the scientists, you know what the pipeline looks like.

You know what the academic skills gap looks like. It does not close. You have at the National Assessment of Educational Progress Test, this is the NAEP, eighth grade level, math, over 40% of black eighth graders are not even at the basic level of math skills. And that is a huge, huge proportion. They're not even basic. They're below basic. Very few of them are proficient or advanced. That gap continues throughout college. There's a 200-point SAT gap.

GRE is the same thing. L-SAT's over-standard deviation. And I'll say that's a reflection of racial bias in the testing. If you want to say that, fine, the fact of the matter is by the time you get to the PhD level, there are many scientific fields that have zero black PhD graduates. That many engineering fields, I think nuclear physicists, they are not out there. As you say, every school is competing in a ruthless dog-eat-dog competition for the six or so national black PhDs in a STEM field.

So to expect, given this academic skills gap, that any school should have a proportional representation of black PhDs, which is 13% in its faculty, is ridiculous. Yeah, on the other hand, I mean, I have heard, and I don't want to name things, because you actually know these people, some of the physicists that I'm thinking about, who, no one will say, I'm not going to hire this person because he's black. That would be career suicide. That would be, that's just foolish on his face. Maybe there are people that would say, I don't know. But I know in particular one extremely prominent Nobel caliber physicist that he hasn't won a Nobel Prize. But upon hearing talks, whenever I'm with him, he'll hear a talk and it happens to be an African American who's speaking, he'll say, oh, this guy's a charlatan. And things that he would never say, you know, and I've actually communicated to friends of mine who are African Americans.

And I do want to read something because I actually think there's a slightly different approach that maybe we don't hear about so often because there is this, and I appreciate. the reverence that you have for physics and for physical sciences, the so-called hard sciences. But I think there's always this halo effect. It's a form of bias I'm not talking about, implicit bias or whatever, but it's a bias that we think that because person A is so brilliant in nuclear physics that he or she is going to be so brilliant about social policy. So I want to read an article by a very close mentor of mine. This is Dr. James Gates, Sylvester James Gates, who's the Ford Foundation professor at Brown

University. He won the National Medal of Science from President Obama. And he's a hero and mentor to me. He's one of the fathers of super string theory, super symmetry, rather. He's the first black theoretical physics, a PhD from MIT, and was a postdoc at Caltech. He is the president-elect of the most prestigious, I think, in the world, I'm biased, but the most prestigious organization of physicists ever, which is called the American Physical Society. It's one of the few unions I belong to. And he's writing just last week at a conference, this kind of in contradistinction to the essay I read by Professor Prescott Weinstein. Professor Gates writes, since 1995 I've been preserving some small number of written reflections on my journey as a scientist who is African American. These works are in the forms of essays, not polished didactic narratives.

Each essay is a freestanding document. If left to my own natural tendencies, I return to the question, why is the mathematics of space-time supersymmetry lying at the foundation in heart of string theory so completely and poorly, understood. The majority of these writings address questions around post-secondary education and the struggles to maintain the meager and modest progress that have occurred within my lifetime. These do not deeply engage the questions of whether or not ideas in STEM disciplines can be black, nor if such do exist, do they even matter? Neither have I written on the question of whether racism is systemic or a fractal tessellation in STEM disciplines. However, something has changed. The prima facie evidence of this is by my very existence,

as the first African-American theoretical physicist elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Since it was established, he notes, by President Abraham Lincoln, makes progress impossible for me to deny. And he's one of these gentlemen that I know who has been confronted with, you know, firearms by police pulled over and harassed in some sense. But he's saying that it makes progress impossible for him to deny. He's at the highest level now as the president-elect of the American Physical Society. But here's what I want to get your thoughts on. represent myself as an authority on this complicated domain of human society, as I will only present

my thoughts for others to essay, contemplate, and evaluate, and weigh as they come to decisions about their own beliefs and actions. I fervently wish that I could present data or mathematics, as that is the foundation with which we scientists are most familiar. Unfortunately, the number of relevant data points is so small. I can only offer anecdotes and thoughts that flow from these. I want to ask you. Is it a problem that we task physicists? I don't have training in this and bias assessment and sociology and racism. I have training and astrophysics and detection of cosmological signals that are 14 billion years old. But yet I'm often put in positions where I have to weigh these complex socio-political dynamical things that I have no training in, and nor do I quite frankly

have an interest in devoting that. I feel like I have skills. My skills are to educate black, white, any color, any gender, any sex, that's my core goal. I have a mission. It gets detracted and and I get, you know, it gets diluted when I have to pretend that I'm some sort of expert on complex issues of race and society or gender issues in society. I wonder, is some of the nexus of the problem the fact that we're relying on the people in the system who have no training or expertise and maybe you don't think it's important or maybe, actually, what is your Do you think that there's a value to education, obviously not like indoctrination, but should physicists be educated in issues of race, or should we stay in our lane, so to speak,

and not really just focus on physics and then leave the social thinking to other people? Well, I don't know. To what end you would have them educated in race. If the issue is to countervene their own biases, I would say no, if it's to educate them on the basis of race as a general matter, I would also say now. I think they have much more important things to do. Again, please name me names of competitively qualified blacks who you think were turned down from jobs currently in physics departments that should have gotten them. I can't, but they'll say it's systemic and therefore it's hidden. It's so deeply well.

Again, I just, I don't believe it. Every signal being set now is diversity. And if I had a child, to be honest, if he were black, he's going to have a better set of opportunities right now than being white. Let's just be honest, because he'll get into Harvard with lower SATs, lower GPAs. if Harvard was completely colorblind in its admissions, it's black students, and this was from its own evidence in the recent affirmative action lawsuit that was filed in Boston, the proportion of black students there would go down from 14 percent to less than 1 percent, and those disparities get larger and larger with every lower tier, because Harvard has the cream of the crop. So it just is not the case that there is discriminatory.

against the official victim groups. So, science, let it stick to what it does best, and I do not think it's necessary for physicists to have education in race, whatever that means. Race is not a field of study. It's a fact of life. It has been turned into a field of study by what I would say is largely a specious industry

now that is determined to keep America obsessed about this issue, and most Americans, in my view, are desperate to become post-racial. They are of good heart, good nature. They would rather, they don't give a damn about race. They're ready to get along, and the race industry, which extends through every aspect of society now will not let you do so. So just the last time turning to this essay by Professor Prescott Weinstein, she says, less than 100 years after the end of chattel slavery, but not prison slavery, which continues

today, in the famed 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, the majority argued that separate can never be equal. Writing for the majority, Earl Warren highlighted this conclusion because the intangible considerations of equal treatment of a student's ability to study, to engage in discussions and exchange views with other students, and in general, to learn their profession. He noted that segregation based on race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status. And so she's talking about the feeling and the sense of dignity that students have if they're perceived. So, you know, some might be. say, well, maybe they don't even get to Harvard because they suffer the systemic racism

that's embedded within our society, and that there's, you know, there's differential, you know, there's differential grievances that occur to the African American community, so maybe they won't even get there. And I think she's talking about dignity, and I wonder if the preference, if you could see, as, you know, as Roger Reveld did here in San Diego, that he basically forced on the community that you have to accept Jews, and it took. some time. I mean, there were still in my, in the title to my house, it said, I could not sell it to, you know, from the people I've authored from. I could not sell it to a black, as I said before, a black, a Jew or a Mexican. And that was persistent in the title of the document, the very house where I would later raise my family. Is it possible that, you know, the greater, you know, society would be, the society of physicists might be improved, but it might take some time. And maybe these rules, we can't assess it because there hasn't been enough time, just as if I assessed it in 1961, what was the impact of allowing Jews to live in La Jolla, it would have been impossible to say,

oh, there's not enough time elapsed to make a judgment as to whether or not that policy had been, you know, of preferential, you know, a religion-based admission, if you will, to San Diego. Is it possible that, you know, these things just take time, and eventually these will catch up? I mean, that would, I think, be the hope to have equal representation based on, you know, all groups and zero discrimination. I don't, as I said, I don't know anyone who's racist. I hate racism. I know you feel similarly. So maybe it's just going to take time before these tools that have been, you know, fairly recently implemented across the UC system, as you point out in the book, this UC1, UC2 dichotomy.

You know, maybe it'll just take time. And who are we now in 2020 to assess policies that are five years old? So do you feel optimistic that things will, like if we come back and have this conversation in 50 years after we've invented, you know, some pills to keep us alive, that things will be better? Or do you think it would improve on its own, so speak? Take time. Baki versus University of California was 78. There was already massive racial preferences. That was a suit about Baki, a Jew, as a matter of fact, being denied admission to Davis Medical School because they were already setting aside 100 spots, I think, or maybe it was 16 spots out of 100 in the incoming class for blacks and Hispanics, and I think Asians back then.

This was, preferences were already going on. We have lived with a racial preference regime now for well over half a century. This is not some novel experiment. I think you're again, blending some things. You're talking about compensatory education. Okay, we can look again. It's not as if we haven't been looking.

It's not as if we haven't been trying with K through 12 to try and close that skills, to put more people in the pipeline. There's been an obsession with American society from the great society. I do not know a single wealthy Republican donor in New York who is not trying to do social uplift to close that achievement gap. It is an obsession of the elites. We have been trying to do that.

The fact of matter is by the time you get to college, it's too late, but we're still doing it. We've had preferences in undergraduate admission. We've had preferences in graduate admission. We've had preferences in professional schools, law schools, medical schools, business schools. They have had preferences for decades. This is not a novel five-year experiment. And the evidence for me, empirical evidence, is compelling that Richard Sander started working on, the UCLA law professor, that preferences harm their beneficiaries by catapulting students into

academic environments for which they're not competitively qualified, puts them in a disadvantage. Let's take it out of the toxic race area and look at sets. If MIT decided it needed more females in its freshman class and admitted me with a math SAT, let's say, of 650 out of an 800 point score, and my peers were all on average about 800. But this was what they were doing to diversify on the basis of gender. my first year at MIT would be held. Because the teaching is going to be pitched to my fee, the average of the freshman calculus who are far ahead of me.

If instead of being catapulted artificially into MIT, I had gone instead to, let's say, Boston University of Boston College, or even Amherst, where I was whatever, you know, the 650 would be an average, I would succeed. And that I would have a great chance to graduate with the STEM degree. We see that happening, the Duke study that looked at the fact that more black male undergraduates enter Duke intending to major in a STEM field than white male undergraduates. But by the time senior year, those black male undergraduates have dropped out by half,

leaving the graduating STEM classes at Duke overwhelmingly Asian and white. because those black undergraduates who've been admitted with over a standard deviation below in math SAT qualifications couldn't keep up. It's no criticism of their math skills. It's a criticism of the system that puts them into academic environments, which they're not. And that's preceding the colleges.

But, you know, again, just to play doubles out of kids, for women, you know, back before Title IX and another measures, legal measures. They made up a much, I was talking to you on the way over here about my mother, who had a drop out of, you know, Cornell, and she only, you know, perhaps was admitted there, because my father was a professor there at the time, and then she had my older brother, and then she couldn't continue to be an undergrad. And then she went back and got her bachelor's degree in Connecticut, you know, 40 years later or 30 years later. And by that time, it had gone from, she was the only person, only woman in these, and her undergraduate class at Cornell.

in 1960s sometime, to she was, you know, almost 50%, right? In fact, now there's more female undergraduates than, so is that not a sign of progress in terms of, you know, thanks to these Title IX and other provisions? It depends. I don't think, yeah, you have a 300% greater chance as a female being admitted to Cornell's Engineering Department of males. Given the math SAT gap between males and females,

I don't think that is a sign of progress. I don't think as a female I should be admitted with lower SATs and MAP qualifications than males. I think that's an insult. And yet they say, as studies have shown, that there's, you know, in terms of the actual student performance, which is why places like the University of California campuses, many of them, Harvard, Princeton, elsewhere, are abolishing, not even saying that's optional to take the physics GRE, but they're not even going to consider it, so don't even bother taking it. And this is a new development.

And that's because the studies that at least I've seen as a physicist, practicing physicist, show very little to no correlation between success as a professional physicist, as my colleagues are, male, female, black, white, and their performance on the GREs. And, you know, because of that, they claim it's burdensome and needs some, and we shouldn't bother with it. So, you know, that's led to them. If there was not disparate impact in those scores, we would not be getting rid of them. The only reason we're getting rid of them is not because they don't have predictive value,

not because they don't contribute something to the ability to select students. It's because they have disparate impact. But I would say as well, you keep conflating the past with the present. Your mother may well have experienced anti-female photos. That is simply not our present reality. We have been trying compensatory preferences for five decades. The gap does not close. In fact, black students do worse than their SATs would predict.

The idea that the SATs are discriminatory, that there's racism baked into the test, is simply wrong. They over-predict black performance. If these sorts of programs close the achievement gap, they would have worked. The solution, again, is to go back to the culture, to create an academic culture of success. Jews were discriminated against some science. You know what happened? You looked their ass anyway because you decided we're just going to try the hell

and we're not going to put up with this. You did not demand, say, that standards be lowered for you, or you kept trying. And you had a culture that put overwhelming emphasis on academic achievement. We're seeing that in Asians now, who is They're outperforming whites, right, yeah. They're destroying everybody.

It comes from the family. It comes from a culture that does not define academic achievement as selling out your race. Hatterday presents in the Red Corner the Undisputed Undefeated Weed Wacker Guy. Champion of hurling grass and pollen everywhere. And in the blue corner, the Challenger, Extra Strength, Hannity! Eye drops and work all day to prevent the release of histamines that cause itchy allergy, And the winner by knockout is Padiday. Padiday, bring it on.

Well, I want to turn just in the last few minutes that we have today. Maybe we'll be able to do a part two. You obviously are deep thinker about education. And education, you know, presumably is one of the highest values or our highest achievements of our civilization. I want to ask you if there was the McDonald's University, not the one where McDonald's, where I've spent way too many lunches in my life, but if there was a McDonald University, what would it look like?

What kinds of offerings? I've heard you say on previous shows that education is an act of love, which I found a very beautiful message. Obviously, it should be platonic. I pointed out some of my colleagues in the UC system and elsewhere have not obeyed that. And I do think, I mean, just as a quick aside, I mean, I do have a policy that I probably wouldn't have had if I was a professor in the olden days. Whenever I mean with a student, I can always keep the door open.

I want to do that. Unless they ask me to close the door, I'm going to keep it open, male, female. I have blessed to have the best students in the world, I think, in the universe. And I've had almost a third, which is higher than the national average of physicists that were women. I've had minority students from underrepresented backgrounds. But I want to ask you, what is the goal of an education? and what would a university that you were the chancellor of, president of, look like? Well, I think there is an arrows of learning, and I have to say I fell in love with my professors,

and it was platonic, but to me, I revered my professors at Yale because they stood for knowledge and scholarship and wisdom. I think in that regard I was in many ways blinded because I became an accolite of deconstruction. because it seemed to be the hottest thing happening, and it promised a secret knowledge about language, which I was always very interested in. And I got sucked into what I think was ultimately, in the case of Yale's Paul DeMond,

a literally quite insane worldview. But at least back then those people, the original progenitors of deconstruction, were true scholars. as much as I wasted time doing deconstruction, multiculturalism and feminism had been, and I was allowed to read the greatest writers of the English language without thinking to complain that I was reading dead white males.

That relevance to the moment. So there is an arrow of learning. And I'm reading now Middle March to prepare for a book, with Michael Knowles and Dorothy and Brooks, it's somewhat related. You know, she falls in love with Kazabon out of a desire, not so much for academic knowledge, but in the hope that he will hold out to her the possibility of a greater intellectual and emotional life. And that becomes a sort of love, which unfortunately her part too is misguided,

But as far as what I would have as a university, I found moving and inspiring the way that the late British philosopher Michael Oakshot talks about education. And he says it's a transaction between generations to pass on a civilizational inheritance. And he says once politics enters the room or any kind of external. that education tiptoes quietly out the back door. It should simply be about passing on a love for our civilization

for its greatest accomplishments with as much humility and gratitude as possible. I would immerse people deeply into the greatest works of Western civilization. I would start with Western civilization. That is our culture. That is our primary responsibility.

If there is world enough in time to be equally first in, say, Chinese or Indian or African civilization, by all means do it. But the primary responsibility is to start with the Judeo-Christian tradition, with Greek philosophy, with Greek phrygians, with Estilis, with Aristophanes, with Erypides and Sophocles, with... Plato, or so the ideas that gave us such as the rule of law, the responding to the human desire to live with neutral decision-making, with neutral principles not to be under the tyranny of political partisanship. And I would immerse them in medieval romance, renaissance, pastoral politics. poetry, Spencer, Andrew Marvell, the great novels, the wit of Max Beardom of Mark Twain, the great oratory of Frederick Douglass, and it should be with a sense of we do not deserve these works. We are not good enough for them. Let us understand how people could be so eloquent and so insightful.

And science, I think, given the current interest and belief that the STEM fields are the way to go, of course we should have science, but that's not what's missing now. You know, we already have students that are flocking to those fields and computer science as well. What is missing, the gaping, tragic hole in contemporary education is in the humanities above all. to a lesser extent the society is the humanities are where my heart lies. And we need to return to a depoliticized version of that where students can simply fall in love with beauty and fall down the abyss that takes them out in the other direction

into a universe of just sublimity and grandeur. I want to finish up with one question. I usually ask a whole bunch, but in the interest of time, and now your time is very precious, right? right now. If you, to the Into the Impossible Podcast is named after one of Sir Arthur C. Clark's famous three laws, the first law being any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, for which our friend Michael Schumer has one about extraterrestrials, but we're not going to get into that. The second law is that for every expert, there's an equal and opposite

expert. That's the second law of Sir Arthur C. Clark. And the third law is the only way to tell what's possible is to venture a bit beyond into the impossible. And that's where we get the name for our podcast. My question for you is, looking back on your life, what things might have seemed impossible to you as a 20-year-old, as a 30-year-old, that now seem eminently doable because you went ahead and did them. In my life. Yeah, advice to your former self, so speak.

Well, I never thought about a career. I never had the confidence to think that I would be employed. and anybody would want to hire me. I was one of these perpetual students that I could think of nothing more sublime or desirable than being in the library stacks and being allowed to learn more.

I just, I hunger for knowledge. So I just was always wanting to overcome my own ignorance more. So it's not as if I ever thought, what am I going to do in five years? I had the luxury of being able to always study. I guess I came up against Latin. I learned languages that Latin. I founded on.

I couldn't do that. I wasn't good. I did physics for poets. I'm afraid we got hit with the Lorenz transformation. This was supposed to be physics for poets? Come on. So I found it on that. But I guess I never would have thought of myself as doing journalism.

I regret that I did not do student journalism. I was not interested. I wasn't political. I wasn't involved in current affairs. I was in the stacks, alas, reading too much Jacques de Ridae, but also reading the Fairy Queen. So I can't say that I thought about things

and said I couldn't do them because I really wanted to be able to understand what I was reading at the moment. But I guess if you'd said to me, you will be writing journalism. I would have said, what's that? And how could that be because it's perhaps too practical or too much in the world or that you would be, you know, going to housing projects in East Harlem or welfare offices in the Bronx and talking to the clients there? That would have been somewhat of a surprise to my Niagara-Sell.

And then the other connections that are Arthur C. Clark on this podcast is I usually ask guests, Presumably you've seen the movie 2001, a Space Odyssey. Have you? I do. I don't remember it very well. It was very scary. Yeah. There might be one iconic scene that you remember when these primates come upon this huge

monolith, this structure, and they throw a bone up into the air, and then it becomes into this whirling around satellite. But there are these monoliths placed by this unseen. I don't know how much of a sci-fi fan you are, by the way. Maybe I should have asked you this beforehand. But there are these time capsules, basically, placed on the moon meant for. for to teach the human species lessons only when they're ready to learn them. In other words, we can't find something on the moon until we have technology to go to the moon.

We can't find, you know, the primates in the savannah three million years ago couldn't understand this monolith that was placed there. There are either some kind of machine or technical communications device meant to teach lessons. And now I want to go, you just went to the past, tell your future or your past self, what advice you might have given to her. Now I want to ask the opposite direction. what would you put, if you had a time capsule and you knew it would last a billion years, what kinds of things, what would you put on it, what would you put in it,

what would be the things that you most want to celebrate maybe by yourself or about humanity as a whole to last for all eternity effectively? I would put all of Mozart's operas. I would put the St. Matthew Passion. I would put Chopin and bronze. Don't put it on a USB drive. They might not be able to use it. Yeah, that'll floppy just

So you're going to have to take care of the technology. That's right, I'll do it. I'll handle that. Yeah. Good. So it'll be in a cultural artistic realm. Yeah, and it's, I mean, I guess, as far as I, what we might discover, I think consciousness is obviously the, you know, neuroscience,

whether we will understand ourselves every if that's possible to double back. And whether we'll understand the origin of the universe. That's obviously the both of those are near and dear to my heart. In fact, some of the greatest questions I'm interested in exploring are all these kinds of origin stories, whether it's the origin of the universe, possibly from nothing, we don't know yet, or it's the origin of matter, or it's the origin of life from non-organic matter, or it's the origin of consciousness from organic matter. These are these kind of big bangs that took place in our grand history. And on the consciousness front, in a little bit, I'm going to be talking, you know, I said Arthur,

second law was for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. Later today, I'm going to be talking with Noam Chomsky, who is probably far on the other side of the spectrum politically from you as is possible. Not important policy. Okay, so interesting. So in the ways that you are, what do you think makes him so controversial? I want to say, first of all, and I'm going to ask you what your controversial figure, and I think you've, you know, for someone, what do you think makes you controversial to people?

wise and you can't say because I tell the truth because that's... No, right, obviously, you know, everybody, yeah. Well, I think right now there is a pact that society is made to blame everything on racism, all socioeconomic disparities on racism. And I think people turn their eyes away from other explanations for socioeconomic disparities. I think the myth of bias is very powerful now, and I think that, that needs to be countered. There are behavioral, cultural explanations

that also should be brought into play in understanding any socioeconomic disparities, questions of personal responsibility, again, the academic skills gap. So those are things that are taboo. You're not supposed to talk about. Heather, thank you so much. Any sufficiently advanced technology

is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible, Please subscribe, comment, share, rate, and review. For a chance to win a free copy of our most recent guest's newest book, send a screenshot of your review to info at imagine.ucsd.edu. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, go to imagination.ucsd.edu. Find us on Twitter at Imagine UCSD.

Watch us on YouTube, listen on iTunes. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Vary, director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, associate director, produced by Stuart Volko.