Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - American Higher Education: Disaster or Envy? with Sol Gittleman

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

Why does higher education matter? Hardly a day passes without reference to some scandal, fraud or failure associated with American academic institutions, and there are few more important stories to be told in America right now than this one.  Anthony is joined by Tuft’s Professor Emeritus Sol Gittleman to discuss his new book, The Accidental Triumph: The Improbable History of American Higher Education. Sol reflects on his many years of leadership at Tufts University discussing whether American higher education is a disaster as it is sometimes painted, or really the great envy of the world.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open book where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word from authors and historians to figures and entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe, wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones.

I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. Today's interview is a very special one for me. I'm joined by my old Tufts professor, Saul Gittleman. Dr. Gittleman taught me a great deal during my time at school, lessons that I've carried with me throughout my life, both academically and personally. His new book explores the history of American colleges from the successes, failures and accidents that shaped our system as we know it. He is still the most passionate person I've ever met when it comes to education. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

I'd like to take a second to recommend my friend Andy Astroy's great podcast, The Back Room. Every episode is a fun, incredibly honest take on our society and the political situation, along with some brilliant guests. I've been honored to join Andy on the show, and you know anywhere that it's accepts me with no filter, deserves a shout-out. Okay, it's a great pleasure for me to tell you that joining us now on Open Book is Professor Saul Gittleman. He's the Professor Emeritus and former Provost of Tufts University. Now, he's written several books, but his most recent book is an accidental triumph,

The Improbable History of American Higher Education. What a time to be talking to you, sir. And just as a way of background, I met Professor Gittle. He probably may not remember this as well as I remember it, but I met him in November of 1981. So this is 43 short years ago. I had a lot of pimples on my face. I took the Eastern Shuttle to Boston to spend some time with you. And you told me to get my, well, you were very polite.

You never use any bad words earlier than. But you told me to get my stuff together, professor. And I tried to do that. What was the name of that good friend that you had was close to Trump? Also a tough graduate. Yeah. His name is Billy Tomaso. The concrete business, right.

Yeah, yes. Bill Tamasso, nice man who really loved you. Yeah. Well, he loved my dad. So, you know, I lost my dad last year. But my dad, at that time in my dad's life, he had graduated from being a crane operator. He was actually weighing trucks. So this is how the butterfly effect, right?

It's all, you know, so my dad's weighing trucks. He strikes up a relationship with Billy DeMaso. Billy Tomaso is a former tough. graduate. I think there's some study halls and so forth named after Billy. And he said, okay, well, don't send your son to the local school. I want you to send him a place called Tufts. My father thought Tufts was spelled T-O-U-G-H-S, just to give you a sense for. Well, there are a lot of colleges in this country. That's one of the things that's remarkable about it. We've got 6,000 institutions that give degrees. Yeah. Well, I mean, you were very, very dear to me then. You're very, very dear to me now.

But my first memory of you was I went up the stairs of Ballou Hall. You were in that beautiful office of the provost. Yeah. And you told me my SAT scores were not good. They were okay, but I needed to take them again. But I got into Tufts, and then we stayed close. And you were instrumental in me getting into Harvard. You probably don't remember that, but you wrote my-

instrumental too. But suddenly went from being a Dems-Dem's, those kids from Long Island to Phi Beta Kappa, You got accepted the Harvard Law School. I took it seriously, so you helped me. I did, but you had a lot going on between your ears, and without what you had already, it wouldn't have happened. So we both can complement each other, but I remember you as becoming a remarkable student. All right. Well, it's very, very sweet of you.

Okay, you joined Tufts in 1964, if I remember correctly, because that's the year of my birth, that's 60 years ago. But you've been in higher education for seven decades. Yep. Do I have that correct? Yeah, the next birthday is number 90. Yeah, and you look great. God bless. And, you know, so I expect to be at your 110th birthday.

Hopefully, you'll still like me at that point and you'll invite me. But let's talk about the choice of going into higher education for somebody like you, very, very gifted man, could have done anything. You were also a great athlete and a great baseball player. But let's start with the choices that you made and your origin. You know, so much in life is serendipitous, Anthony. You've learned that yourself. It's an accident. My parents were East European immigrants who would never spend a day in a school anywhere. Now they're in Europe nor in America. They snuck into this country after World War I. My father came illegally, my mother came illegally and settled down. But they never learned. My mother couldn't read or write. And so when it came time to go to college, they were going to push me onto it, particularly my mother, but they knew nothing about colleges. absolutely nothing. It wouldn't have been able to name one. And prestige meant nothing in those days. This was the 1950s. I had started elementary school in 1930. So I had a long educational experience

in the 30s on. And my baseball coach, Mr. Bo Keri, came home one day and said, Saul will go to Drew. That's where I did my Navy V-12 program during World War II, he told him. And so whatever Mr. Bo Keri said was fine. And the next thing I know, Sydney is basketball player, Saul, baseball player, we showed. We didn't even apply. We just showed up on the campus in Madison, New Jersey, as ballplayers, and we were accepted. The manager of the team asked me, what are you going to major in? I said, what's a major? I thought it was an Army rank. And he said, well, it sounds like you don't know too much about colleges. I'm the German teacher here. You'll major in German. I'll take care of you. So I go home and told my parents, I'm going to major in German. I never studied it before,

not in high school. Nobody studied German. And the next thing I know, I'm a German major. and on a pathway to a career as a German teacher. So accidents showing up at Drew, changing my life. They were a little method of school, and it changed my life. There are thousands of little colleges in America that give kids like me that kind of opportunity. But, Saul, you were arguably one of the most passionate teachers. I took as many of your courses I could take. So you had a passion for education and you had a passion for,

lecturing. Am I wrong? Tell me. I was a performer. I didn't know it. I didn't know myself. Teaching and what you get a degree in, you get a PhD eventually. It's a research degree. The only thing you're really taught is how to do research. Nobody teaches you how to teach. If you got it, you got it. If you don't have it, you don't have it. And the vast majority of the million and a half faculty in this country, none of us was trained to teach. Very few. PhD programs spend any time in training people to teach. They train them to do research. The PhD degree is a German invented degree. The Germans invented it. We wanted it. We took it and trained generations of PhDs to be scholars. If you happen to be a performer, and I was a performer,

you're a performer. You have a certain gift of being able to present material. And I learned that, And it came intuitively. And I also knew to keep my own opinion out of the lectures. So when kids would ask me, well, how do you feel about this? I'd say, it's none of your damn business. All I'm doing is presenting the information, the facts, and as much as I can, the evidence. And I happen to be a good teacher. It was the luck, just a lot of luck.

Okay. Well, we're going to get into the book in a second. But there were a couple seminal courses. When you were at Tufts University, the hardest courses to get into were your courses. And so there were three courses I took as an undergrad. And one, I came back to the school from Harvard and took at Fletcher. I don't know if you remember that, but I took a diplomacy course with you. I actually wrote a paper in that diplomacy course related to FDR and decisions that were made by FDR during the Holocaust.

But the four courses I took, one was called German writers. Yeah. One was the introduction to Yiddish literature. Sure. Yeah. And then there was a... It's where you learned all your Yiddish. Oh, I learned Yiddish, yeah. I'm one of the few guys out here on Long Island, Saul, that knows the difference between a Shagas and a Shiksa. See that? But you also learned Schadenfreude.

I did. I learned Schadenfreude, which is... We're going to talk about that as well. Why those courses, Saul? Why teach German writers? Why teach about Yiddish literature? Why teach about diplomacy during the Second World War? You know, I was a generalist. I was told... teach your courses and make them teach anything you want that was the message i got from the dean who gave me tenure he put his hands on my head and said puff you have tenure now don't go teach whatever you want and that's fine and i invented a whole bunch of general education courses i was a firm believer in general education i didn't know it but i wound up that's what i wanted to do kids who had no interest and

who all the prerequisites they had they could breathe on a mirror and had a pulse and they could get into my classes. I had no prerequisites. I wanted to teach my parents, and I invented the course on Yiddish culture. My parents came out of that culture. I also knew that Hitler was something unique in world history, and I got two courses on German culture, both dealing with the rise of Nazism. And I felt every student that I, every undergraduate should know something about the rise of Nazism, how it happens. And so I invented these courses. I taught it in the Fletcher School. I taught it in the undergraduate college, no prerequisites. You didn't have to know anything. I had engineers, museum school students, dyslexics, everybody under the sun, they could take that course. All you needed

to get into it, as I said, was a pulse themselves and could breathe on a mirror and they were able to get into the course. So it's 40 years for me now, Solve. I'm taking those courses. And so I'm going to say a couple of things to you and I want you to react. Okay. I'm going to say the word Tatsio. You know, Datsio was the character in Thomas Mann's death in Venice, the young 14-year-old boy that Gustaf and Ashenbach fell in love with. So I had kids like you reading stories like death in Venice. You discovered Thomas Mann. You discovered Shalom Alecum. You discovered that there was a thing called literature that you could learn about human nature from.

I mean, you didn't have Magic Mountain on your syllabus, but I ended up reading. It was too long. It was too long. I ended up reading Magic Mountain as a result of you. So when I say Tatsio, you know what I'm talking about, right? Oh, sure. Do you remember the scene in death in Venice when you looked up in Asha Box? With the overripe strawberries.

You remember that? Right strawberries. And he kills himself. 40 years later, I still remember, right? So you must have impacted me somehow, right? Yeah. But the point was the messaging, how many if I got this wrong, you were describing the Eastern European Jews and their culture of suppression and oppression. And they were telling very interesting

stories at that time. One of the stories was the lottery ticket, left the very big impression on me. One of the stories was Gimple the Fool. And of course, you had the Tevier stories that Shaw Malachium wrote about. And these were about family. They were about commitment to culture, commitment to religion. They were about love. What else were they about, Saul? They were also about not understanding what your children were all about. I mean, don't forget, Tevia, who was an Orthodox, observant, Hasidic Jew, had two daughters. One married a Jewish communist, the other married a Gentile communist. The one who married the Gentile communist said to her father, Father, he's another gorky. He's the second gorky. And Tevya said, so who was the first gorky?

Tevya knows nothing about what's going on around him in Russia at the end of the 19th of the beginning of the 20th century. And young Jewish kids were dropping Torah, dropping Bible, weren't interested that they had discovered a new Bible, Karl Marx. And Tevia had no idea what was going on. And so that part of it, not understanding children and their parents, that was a big part of that course also, a tragedy for Tevia. When I was reading that as a young man, you know, I felt the emphasis on culture, the value system. You also, you also, you also, put in that course things about reform as the Jews left Europe and came to the United States, goodbye Columbus. Yeah.

By the Philip Roth stories. It becomes relevant for today's trouble that's going on on the campuses because where did those people want to go? They didn't want to go to Palestine. They wanted to come to the United States. And millions did. But when you got into your FDR research, you also found out that the United States closed its doors in the 20s and 30s. them tight. We didn't want those people coming in. Especially during the war. I mean, we sent... Before the war. Before the war, during the war, we sent ships back.

Oh, yeah. But the Reed Johnson Restrictive Immigration Act was 1924. That's why my father had to come in illegally. He came on a boat floated with Scotch whiskey, he said. It was during prohibition. My mother got in okay through Ellis Island. It was a chain. My father had to come in illegally, in which he managed to. But that was America in the 20s and 30s. The doors were shut. We wanted nothing to do with immigrants. We want it's things, nothing is new. Everything gets repeated. So you have to understand the 20s and 30s to understand where we are now in the 21st century.

Well, I mean, you know, listen, my grandfather talked about how he came through Ellis Island and because of Teddy Roosevelt's immigration legislation in the early 1900s, Italians were to be designated as non-Caucasian. Yeah. And so that was a very... That was eugenics. You know, we were teaching eugenics in the American public school system. When Hitler wrote Mindcomps, he wrote a letter congratulating America on getting it right so that Hitler learned everything he knew about eugenics from a few Germans and a lot of Americans. Yeah, no, it's fascinating.

But I want to segue because this country, this beautiful country that you and I live in and love created the two of us because we're both middle class people. And without higher education and the enrichment that you get from higher education, the continuous learning, the curiosity of the fire that gets ignited at an undergraduate university, you don't end up having the lives that we've had, these interesting lives that we've had. So tell us about higher education in America, the moral land grant acts of the 19th century and this beautiful book that you've written about education. Well, you need about two or three weeks or a 15-week course for this, Anthony. But the American higher education is unique along anything in the world. There's nothing like it. We have 6,000 degree granting institutions.

Some are tiny. Some are huge. Some are faith-based. We have religious institutions. There's nothing like it in the world. There's no Holy Cross in the Soviet Union. There's no Notre Dame in Iran. There's no Brigham Young anywhere.

There's no MIT, no Harvard. or Brynmore, they don't exist in any other country. The rest of the world has civil servants, and we have anarchists like myself or you. There's a little bit of ungovernability about you, a little bit of ungovernability about me, and we are the products of American higher education. We take adolescent kids much younger than the Europeans and say to them, come in, you don't have to pick a major for two years. You can start out wanting to be a doctor and end up.

being an Episcopalian priest. No other country does that. When at the age of 11 in Europe, Germany, Italy, most of the other countries, China, they tell you at the age of 11, you're going to be a doctor, you're going to clean toilets. Well, we don't do that. We waste time. We waste a lot of everything, but we are unique. There's nothing like American higher education. The rest of the world's teachers as faculty are civil servants. They work for the state. The American academic is ungovernable, and works for nobody. So, and yet, we have never been less popular. I mean, the rest of the country right now considers American universities, American higher education, the biggest problem that they've got. It's worse than China. It's worse than Iran. Worse than anything. The American colleges and universities.

That's the general impression that Americans have of their colleges and universities. At the same time, they don't want to recognize that we are the envy of the world. The rest of the world, already sent a million of their children to American colleges, if we would let them in, they'd send two million, or they'd come themselves, because what they want is what they don't have and what we have, a kind of unbelievable freedom to learn and to do pretty much whatever you want. American people don't like what they have now. In the 20s and 30s, nobody cared. I mean, I learned my Civil War history from Gone with the Wind. I thought that was it. Everything was, And I learned we cared more about Newt Rockney, All-American, and Pat O'Brien playing Newt Rockney and Ronald Reagan playing the Gipper in 1940, then we can't.

People knew who they were. They wouldn't have known of the President of University of Chicago, or Harvard was. They didn't care. What was the American image of college student? It was Groucho Marx and Horse feathers. They laughed at it. He was president of Huxley College, trying to win the big game against Darwin College and hired two professionals as brother Chico and Harpo to play on the football team. It was

anarchy, chaos, and funny. And Americans prefer their colleges and universities that way. Right up through John Belushi in Animal House, 1978, we don't want our colleges to be successful or serious. We win the Nobel Prizes. We are the envy of the world, and they don't care. So I want to test a few things on you because when I, there's a couple of big revelations in your book. I want to talk about the GI Bill on a second, but before that I want to test something on you. So the freedom of speech that the United States has in its constitution and the freedom of the press, it checks people in power. It's the fourth estate. It holds people in power, but it has his ancillary effect, professor, in the sense that it's a, it's a wide birth for creativity.

We teach our young people that they can think and speak freely. They go on to create Facebook, eBay. They go on to create things like Tesla. I mean, I can name all these great innovations. We also have people like Edison or Henry Ford or John Rockefeller who never went to college. We love them, though, also. Yeah. Yeah, but my point is that this freedom, this petri dish, it does have some excesses to it or fat tails.

One of them is the protest movement. One of them is, you know, the silent majority may not like certain. I've always viewed our universities as the lungs of the First Amendment, you know, meaning, you know, they love Division I athletics. They love the transfer portal. They love the billion dollar industry now, hundreds of billions of dollars of gambling that's going on. There's not much criticism of that, but that is, One of the great disgraces of higher education, but they'll never go away because we love it. When I was an undergrad, there was a protest movement. People went into Blue Hall. They occupied it because they wanted the university to divest from South Africa. There was a struggle against the apartheid movement in South Africa. And you and Jean Maier, then the president of the university, the protest lasted a little while, but it ended quite peacefully. What do you think is going on today in comparison to protests, say, 30 or 40 years ago? Not that much different, Anthony. They want to politicize, kids want to politicize the university. They want to, they want the university to have a foreign

policy and have political opinions. My response to that, my yes response was also the same. Our job is to protect your political opinions. Universities don't have a political opinion, so we're going to keep our mouths shut and teach evidence as much as we possibly can. We also had a cover at that time the Sullivan principles. So we were able to divest a little bit or do something. It sort of placated the kids. And then before long, Mandela got in, got in. DeClerc didn't blow up the world because he had eight atomic weapons and dismantled them and it ended. But South Africa was very much a training ground, just as Vietnam had been a training ground for college campus protest before that. Nobody protested in the 20s or 30s. They didn't care about what was going on

in the rest of the world. They didn't care about Nazis. They cared mostly about white people not keep saying in power. That character in the Great Gatsby, who you meet on page two, Tom Buchanan, Yale graduate in 1915, said the white people are losing authority, the blacks of people of color are taking over the world. That's what he learned at Yale. Yeah. So it's interesting. I mean, there was one great protest in the early 30s. That were the World War I veterans. They descended upon the March on Washington. The march on Washington.

I remember what MacArthur had to do. McArthur put them down. Yeah, but that wasn't a college protest. These people were basically uneducated. I mean, the vast majority of American soldiers in World War I, illiteracy was the major problem and bad teeth. There were more people who were discharged from the army because of bad oral hygiene. no teeth and had gun infections and illiteracy. It was the biggest two problems. That's why the

GI Bill was such a transformative thing and changed America. This is a real segue. I think of all of the social programs in America, the thing I got out of your book, and I want you to react to it, is that the GI Bill did more to create the American dream than anything that I could think of because you took Jews from East New York and Italians from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who had no shot at getting educated. They came out of the Army, and they were told by the U.S. government that their tuitions were going to get paid for. So they showed at Ace University or Hofstra or CUNY.

Anywhere they went. And they went from blue-collar families to white-collar aspirational living. Tell us a little about the GI Bill. Jersey all, it was an accident. Yes, of course. Tell us about the accident of the GI Bill. The American Legion did not want to repeat of World War I or the end of World War I when there were 200,000 soldiers coming back whose jobs had been taken by somebody else.

So they wanted a create a means by which maybe 200, 250,000 returning soldiers could hold off for a year or two or three or even four and let the economy settle down. Well, 250,000 and go to college. 250,000 didn't go to college. Seven million did. They never expected this tidal wave of student people and soldiers coming back who decided they wanted an education. So it shocked them. The colleges all of a sudden exploded, needed anybody standing in front of a classroom. That's how I got my opportunity to teach anywhere I wanted.

It was before World War II, the faculty was 99% male Protestant. white. Right. The student body was 90% white, Protestant male. And that was it. World War II changed it all. And the GI Bill was basically responsible for that. But so I want you to react to this because I think about this often. World War II changed so many different things. But think of the man in the gray flannel suit for a second. The Sinclair Lewis book. Think of Mad Men, the television series. These men, mostly men, they came back from the war. A million married war brides. A million married war brides.

They come back from the war. They have this organizational structure of the military. They apply it to corporations. They matured. They were much more mature. They were much more mature. And they applied it to businesses large and small. But they also applied it to American politics.

85% of our members of the Congress, both in the Senate and the House of Representatives, came out of the war. So that's the big change now. Now, when the draft ended in 73, that ended 99% of the country's relationship with the military. Now you've got hardly any of you. You've got this group of people who do all the fighting and most of the Americans don't know any of them. But I think it's contributed to the great polarity of our time. Do you not?

George McGovern couldn't really fight with Bob Dole. They both served in World War II. Even though they were ideologically opposed, they loved the country and the Constitution. It didn't save John Kerry in Vietnam. He lost, you know, they made fun of him or whatever they did. They made it a political thing. It didn't, even the senator from Arizona, John McCain, that it didn't help him, even though he was in the Hanoi Hilton. So by that time, Americans were getting sort of already isolated. And now it's got to complete separation between military soldiers fighting, wherever they are fighting now and the rest of the population. And the Congress reflects that. We still have the largest economy. We still have the largest amount of business startups, the largest amount of venture capital. Most of this flows from this great asset that the United States has, which is it's higher education. Yet, it's research. It's research. Yes. And yet we have this bad rap about higher education. And we win on the Nobel Prizes also. We win the Nobel Prize. So I'm

to put you in charge for a few minutes. You're now the madman marketing executive. You're the ad guy for higher education. What is the message that America would need to hear about their higher education? Just try not to be quite so anti-intellectual. Now, American higher education has shot itself in the foot. I mean, we make terrible mistakes also. The costs are out of control. It's $1.7 trillion of debt. Biden is trying to deal with it. He can't. And people yell and scream. The big time athletics is a disaster. We have scandals of people trying to get their kids into prestigious schools. Besides March Madness, the football thing.

We have Stanford football players flying out to the East Coast to play games. So we create an insanity. And there are many, many mistakes in higher education. At the same time, just acknowledge that we are the envy of the world. And the rest of the world, even though you don't want to acknowledge it, normal John Q. Public America, just accept the fact that our research, our Nobel Prize winning research is the greatest in the world. The university at Shanghai, the Chinese monitor this very closely. They have a list of the 50 best research universities in the world, and you publish that

list, and 40 of them are American. And the Chinese themselves acknowledges. They have spent billions and billions in trying to catch up. They have not yet. And ironically, they haven't yet, have let our research become what it always should be, free and unfettered research to break through and make great discoveries. That doesn't happen anywhere else. Well, Hitler had an opportunity. The Germans had the greatest educational system in the world up until 1933. Then he politicized it, destroyed it, and within 10 years, we got the bomb. The only reason we got the bomb is we got the Germans and Hungarians who helped us get the bomb. Well, you know, Saul, you ignited a fire in me of lifetime learning. And so as a result of you, I've read more than my share of Rilke, more than my share

of Burtlebrecht. I've read passages of Gerta. And I've also... What it all is about, Anthony? It's lifelong learning. That's why it's called commencement. It's the beginning. Right. Amen. And I, and I, but I, but I, I, I want you to react to this for a second, because you said this to me 40 years ago. go and I didn't fully understand it, but what you basically said was that Adolf Hitler was a man. And, you know, we have a tendency to demonize him today. Okay. And yes, he could have been perhaps one of the most evil people to live, or at least the most evil that we're able to historically record. But what is it about human nature so that creates somebody like Adolf Hitler? Because we can demonize him and two-dimensionalize him, but we have to recognize because

You asked me to read a book called Damien by Herman Hesse. And in that book, we talked about the Abraxas, the good and bad in each of us and that were blended between good and bad. And some of us have more bad than good and vice versa. So what do we learn about human nature and people like Adolf Hiller? You know, I think I remember, if I can remember my lectures about that all through that semester, I talked about also the need for a scapegoat. You've got to have somebody you can hate.

And this has been, we've only got 6,000 years of recorded history. I remember telling you that too. All we got is the evidence of 6,000 years of recorded history. And in those 6,000 years, we have never been able to stop killing in the name of something. And once you find a scapegoat and you've got the technology to be able to kill a lot of people, then you get the mass death that we're getting, that Hitler got to, World War I got to. Since World War I has been mass death. we can kill more and more and more people because our technology has gotten better to be able to do this.

We're now in the atomic age and all we can do is hope that we don't blow the world up. But what is it about evil, Saul? Tell me you're 90-year-off. This was the kind of the question that I would leave to you. I'd say you can either describe us as a naked ape with it with, I remember telling you about the book by Conrad or Lorenz called Onaggression. Is there a kind of aggression in this evolutionary cremate? creation that has evolved into what we are. Simians, do we have a spirit? Do we have a soul? Is there an afterlife? Those are questions that only you can answer. You have to answer them themselves. The evidence that I can show you

and that I showed you then was the results of 6,000 years of recorded history. That's all we had to look back on. And that 6,000 years has been nothing but aggression. Hitler found the perfect device. He found the Jew. He was just the right number of Germans. I think, and I think I said this to you then, when he started out, I don't think he had the Holocaust in mind. It came to that. Initially, all he wanted to do was get rid of them and send them someplace. American didn't want them. Nobody wanted them. So they had no place to go. And they wound up among the 50 million Europeans who died. Six million were Jews. Fourteen million were Russians. God knows how many gypsies. But you had to find people that other people were willing. to despise. And that has been the nature, you know, that's the way it's been. We haven't really gotten away from it. We're looking for enemies now. Okay. So to demonize. Well, I mean, listen, the Jewish population is now back to where it was prior to World War II. And so it was obviously absolutely devastated. Tell us a little bit about Theodore Herzl, who he was. Hurtzl is an interesting example, because you don't hear too much about him in this debate. Herschel was a Hungarian Jew.

who was totally secular. He didn't want to get bar mitzvah, he didn't want to speak any language but German. He wanted nothing to do with anything, almost converted to Catholicism. And then between that and the trials of the French general staff in 1894, he got the idea of Zionism. What did he have in mind in Zionism? He wanted a German-speaking, secular state, no religious test, all. His first choice might have been Argentina. He started the Zionist movement in 1894. He died 10 years later in 1904, at the age of 44, still trying for Kenya in the last year of his life. But he died and then Zionism focused more on the Holy Land. You know, the anti-Semitism will never disappear. But how it came to the Holy Land, if those people could have gotten to America,

they would have gone to America. That's where they really wanted to go. But when the doors were shut everywhere else, and then at the end of World War II, after the Holocaust, Europe solved its political problem by getting rid of the rest of its Jews and the two million Palestinians who were there already, they had to pay the price.

So right, wrong? I don't think you're ever going to get to right or wrong. I don't think there's an answer right or wrong now to Gaza and Israel. You have to make up your own minds about that. And that's where the university comes in. How do you teach these subjects in a way that give the student an opportunity to come to his own conclusions? No, listen, and I, and I respect that. I guess the thing I would say about all of this is something that you and I both know.

We've watched the Northern Irish situation with the U.K. Protestants and Catholics, we can talk about the 30 years war. Catholics and Protestants and butcher each other. We can talk about centuries in the 6,000 years. We can talk about centuries of hatred. And we can talk about the Rom. Millennia, not centuries, millennia of hatred. And, you know, obviously, you know, Shakespeare writes about this in Romeo and Juliet. And you have this tribal hatred.

And usually the great irony of this is it's usually people that have a lot in common. They could be family members. They could be family. You read the book of Joshua. And he says, kill every man, woman, and child. In the Canaanites, they were the vessels of evil. Who knows how different the Canaanites were from the Hebrews. I don't think anybody's been able to make certain.

The archaeologists can't figure it out. But this need for finding someone who you can dehumanize, human nature hasn't been able to deal with that successfully yet. Before we go, I want to switch to something fun. Okay, the baseball field is named after you at Tufts. Mazel Toff on that. Very nice. on the nice mitzvah for you and you deserve it.

I'm not sure about that, but that's nice of you to say so. Why don't we have such a love affair in America? I mean, the Europeans are looking at us like, we're crazy. You and I watch a baseball game. I could watch 200 of them a year. I'm riveted by every pitch. And I see the game as a mental game and a physical game and an individual game and a team. Why do we like baseball as American?

One other footnote, though, Anthony. I'll get to that in a second. But remember, baseball also is as American as Apple Podcast. It was a white man's game until Branch Riki and Jackie Robinson changed that in 1947. Coming back from World War II, it was going to be business as usual. The women were going to go back. Levitown was you could not sell your property to a Negro. That's the way it's in the protocol language.

But Robinson and Ricky came along and changed baseball and changed the national pastime so that even at baseball, which I taught baseball history for 15 years at Tufts, also reflected all the pros and cons of American prejudice. And we are a nation that has always had a prejudice. We create our own narrative, and there are several different truths about American history. Baseball, the big thing about baseball, when it was created, was to make sure it had no English roots. They used to yell and cheer. No rounders, no cricket.

It's nothing to do with cricket. Well, that's not true. Baseball, if you look at the way they turn their hips, baseball is an evolution of cricket of the English game rounders. But Americans fell in love it because it was fast. It was a fast game. And then Babe Ruth learned to turn his hips. Up until then, it was a game of separate hands. Ruth learned to turn his hips. He hit home runs. Americans loved it. And that love affair has only got big. Now you can gamble on it, just like you can gamble on basketball and football more. I'm not sure if baseball is the American pastime any longer because it's not as easy to gamble as you can on

football and basketball. It's still like you said. It's part of the Americana. It's part of Americana. And it's a myth that we want to maintain the national pastime. Football is more than national pastime. March madness is more than national pastime. More money is spent gambling there than spent on gambling on baseball.

Okay. Of course, another great book by you, Reynolds, Rashi, and Lopat, New York's big three in the Yankee dynasty, 1949 to 53. And there's an amazing book about those three. pictures. It really is. I think the best of a book I ever wrote because it was at time, DiMaggio was in decline, Mantle was breaking water fountains, was not yet. And three veteran ethnic pitchers, one a Polish-American, one an Italian-American, and one an American, Native American, part Creek Indian, Native American. None of them is in the Hall of Fame. They're all forgotten.

People don't even know who they are anymore. Created a record that nobody will ever break. five consecutive World Series victories championships. 49 to 53. Of course, the great Yogi Barra was catching for these games. Barra was there. So is important. But they taught Berra how to be a catcher. Barra would never even call curveballs because he was afraid to have, with a man on base,

he was afraid to have a curveball come at him if a runner was on first base. He was terrified of Robinson and Reese. Yeah. And they played the mayor's cup game in 46, 7, 8, 9. three-game series before the season began. And Robinson and Reese used to steal Berra's jock. They were going to despair. They famously argued about that play at home plate, which...

Yeah, he'd argue until his day. But he took a close play. He made it close. He was behind the plate. He had to reach forward. You can look at that video a million times, and Berra will keep arguing, but he will not argue where he was standing up. No, no.

He told me in Steinberg's box that Robinson was out, but he loved Jackie Robinson. Ralph Brank. They got along. Barrett didn't have a bigoted bone in his body. Or Ralph Branca, for that matter. These are two. Bank was another great guy.

Fellow Italian immigrants make me very proud that I had known. And I'll tell you a third one who just passed away is Carl Erskine. A trimmily great, great guy. Indiana, where the Ku Klux plan felt very happy all during the 30s and 40s. This is the best thing that Indiana ever did was create Carl Erskine. Yeah. Amazing, Sal. So I have five famous words at the end of my podcast.

I read out the word. I ask my author to react to it. You can give me a word back or a sentence, but something that comes to your mind immediately, okay? I say the word teaching. You think what? Objectivity, detachment, disinterest, not your opinion. Give the arguments and get out of it. Okay.

I say the word education. You say what? Education is when the teacher can get the evidence out without getting his own opinion. in in. Okay. I say higher education. That's what the university is all about. Higher education. The little American college that transforms your life, that's a miracle. Yeah. They don't exist anywhere in the world. Well, it did it for me, Saul. I was in a family of people that were all blue-collar people. Nobody went to college. And so I was obviously the first person in my family to go to law school after college. And so it was a unique experience for me. I'll always be grateful for that.

I say toughs. You say what? I say transition from college to university and all the problems associated with that. Are we a teaching university where everybody has to do research? That's tough. Teaching university where everybody has to do research. You have to be a good teacher and you have to be a productive researcher. That's a problem. Very few schools have that burden. Dartmouth, Georgetown, Tufts, a couple of smaller schools that are neither small nor large. And that's a toughie. I was an okay researcher and a very good teacher. Okay, my last word, okay, and I'm going to give you the last word, of course. I said the word America. America, who owns the narrative? Who gets to tell the story? That's what the fight is all about now. It's who controls the narrative.

who gets to describe what America really is all about. And that's what the fight is. They call it the cultural wars, but it's who owns the narrative. Very well. And you tamper with American narratives, you do so at your own risk. We don't want to hear nasty things about Columbus or about Custer or about slavery. We think that there is a nicer story to tell, and that's the one we want to hear. It's fascinating, Saul.

The title of the book is an accidental triumph, The Improbable History of American Higher Education, It's written by Professor Saul Gittleman. And Saul, you made a big impact on my life. I hope you know how big of an impact. And so I'm very grateful to you always. It's what we're in the business to do, Anthony. Well, what an honor to have Professor Gittleman about to turn 90, 90 years young. We are celebrating the success of the higher education system in the United States.

And of course, Professor Gittleman takes us through his latest book as to why this great laboratory and experimentation of high. higher education in the U.S. became the international standard of great liberal arts universities, great research universities. There's a lot to say about how great these colleges are. One wonders now, though, if the culture is drifting to too much moral and cultural relativism on some of these elite campuses, I hope it shifts back to something saner. But in the meantime, I just want you to think about Dr. Gittleman's life. I took a couple of courses from him. One was the introduction to Yiddish literature. Just imagine a non-Jewish student in that class. I learned things about Eastern European Yiddish that I don't think many goys know. Goy, of course, meaning a non-Jew.

But I will say this about Professor Gittleman. One thing he was very keen on is teaching people about lighting a spark in their lives of intellectual curiosity and purpose. One of the things that he often said to all of us, it's one thing to learn, but it's another thing to learn to learn. And you have to teach yourself how to learn. And this is something that Saul taught me, and I'm very proud to take with me. It's hard for me to admit, frankly, how long ago it was that I graduated from college. But let's just put it this way. In a moment of deep honesty, it's 38 years, which I find ridiculous and hard to believe. But having said that, 38 years ago, I was learning from Saul Gittleman. It's 38 years later. And as you can see from this past interview, there's still a lot

to learn from this incredible, amazing man and amazing educator. No, but you're on my podcast, Ma. You're listening? You ready to be on the show? Let's go to Saul Gittleman. Do you remember Saul Gettleman? Yes. Who's Saul Gettlement, ma? He was your friend, was he? Yeah, he was the professor from Tufts. You remember when I had the track, office named after Nana at Tufts. Remember we went to that event? He was sitting at our table with us. Do you remember that? It's 25 years ago.

I call them. Love you. People love you. You're never belittal people. When you work for your uncle, you met people like very, very well left, hardworking. Okay, but let me ask you this question, Ma. Do you remember going up to Tufts?

Of course, I don't. Okay, so what did you think of Tufts? you like it? Yeah, but I thought it was produced week and I didn't want my kids that for. All right. And you remember I told you had to stop smoking, otherwise I was moving to California after I graduated. You remember that? And I did stop. You did, right? Well, look at that. So you see, he's still here. April 14, 1986. I never smoked again. You stopped smoking. You figured you knew I was serious about it. I was leaving. I was going to California. Well, I think when... All right, let me ask you this. You still feel like having a cigarette, ma, or no? No. All right, so that's

good, right? At least you stop smoking, right? What about when I went to Harvard Law School? Did you like that place? You didn't like that either, right? Too far, right? It was too far. And then when you failed the exam the first time, I couldn't believe it. The bar exam. I wasn't paying attention. I failed the bar exam. You got mad at me, right? I wasn't going to be a lawyer, Ma. Let's tell the fact. I was screwing around that summer. I thought I could just pass. I only failed it by one multiple choice question. But you got, you went nuts on me. You remember? Yeah, of course I do.

I mean, the Italian guilt was like unbelievable. When you passed it, Brooklyn Place. Right. And I came early so I could have the center seat more you get it. You drove me crazy, okay? I didn't have to pass it because I never practiced law, but I took the stupid exam for you, Ma. Was that okay?

Yeah. Mm-hmm. All right. Okay. A common person will ask you questions. When they wanted to take my brother's name, was ghost and a person. Oh, the trademark.

Yeah, no, they were cool. Once I explained to them that he owned the rights of the name, they were cool. All right, what out you want to talk about, Ma? It's your show, okay? You're the star of the show, so what else you want to talk about? Anything else? I love you very much, that's for sure. All right, I love you too, Ma.

All right, I'll call you later. All right, okay, honey. Bye. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends, and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review.

If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.