Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - How Politics Destroyed American Universities - Neil Gross

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Neil Gross joins me for a conversation about what happened to the American college experience, how politics, polarization, and fear of speaking your mind have damaged one of the greatest institutions this country ever built. We get into where the left went too far, why the right’s attacks on higher education could make things even worse, and whether America is at risk of giving away one of its greatest competitive advantages. Neil Gross is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Colby College. He is the author of "Why Are Professors Liberal?" and "Why Do Conservatives Care?", which was based on the most comprehensive study of faculty politics since the 1960s. He has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Williams, and the University of Southern California and written for The Atlantic and The New York Times. Pick up your copy of Neil's brilliant new book What Happened to College?: How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do to Fix It (out today). Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. Pre-order my next book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, out on the 17th of September in the UK and the 22nd of September in the US: ⁠https://www.scaramucci.net/allthewrongmoves Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Both sides are getting some things flat wrong about the current situation. What did students tell you that neither Fox or MS now wouldn't run? A lot of the students, especially students who are more moderate or conservative, certainly, they really are hesitant to speak up in a lot of their classes. Most college classes aren't really about politics, taking a math class, not really about politics. But there really is a lot of hesitancy to speaking classes. And even when talking to peers, people who you don't feel like they fit in politically to their college context, are really hesitant to speak up.

And that's a shame. should be willing to talk about their ideas. On the other side, I think the right-wing media overstates how much influence professors have over their students' political views. And I think there's also been a kind of celebration of the moves that the Trump administration has made against higher ed. And those moves have done much more harm than I think they've done good. So, you know, both sides talk about different aspects of the problem, but the basic problem is that college has gotten polarized. The country is being torn apart, and that's affecting lots of different institutions, and ultimately it's affecting what's happening inside

colleges and universities. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is sociologist and author, Neil Gross. Title of the book, What Happened to College, how politics broke higher education and what we can do to fix it? Neil, I mean, that is on everybody's mind, Neil. Very topical. That's why we wanted to have you on. Before we dive into the book, though, I want you to tell us a little bit about yourself

and why you took this course trajectory growing up. because I think obviously you are right at the center of all the stuff that's going on on this interesting subject. Yeah, well, first of all, thanks so much for having me on. I'm happy to talk about it. I have kids, too, and one's about to go up to college, so the subject's also near and dear to my heart. So I had a bit of an unusual trajectory maybe for someone in academia. So when I came out of college, I became a cop.

I was a police officer in California. And realized I didn't want to stay there. I didn't want to do that. So I went to graduate school. And I've been working on politics in higher ed for the better part of 20 years now. When I first started working on it back in the early 2000s, it was a big deal, but it's a bigger deal now. So I'm happy to be able to share my findings with evil. So I have three adult kids, two of which graduates from college. My 27-year-old did not. He went two years. And he convinced me to have him leave. he's in the film industry. I think he got more film experience. I would have liked to have seen him receive the traditional liberal arts degree. He didn't want to do that.

What has changed culturally? Because you and I growing up as roughly contemporaries in the same generation, our parents were beating us over the head to go to college. Well, I mean, it's true that a lot of parents and a growing number of teenagers

have lost the faith that a college education is going to really help them in the labor market. And, you know, some of that's understandable. It's really expensive to go to college. There's a college certainly has a bad political wrap, which is mostly what my book's about. You know, it's also true that, uh, that for some people who go to college, it's not worth it, right? The big studies by the Fed that look at kind of the long term payouts of getting a bachelor's degree. And for maybe like 25% of people who go, it's really not, it's not worth it. But for the other 75% who do, it is worth it. And really, the more selective the college you go to,

the more that payout tends to be long term. So I totally get why people are skeptical. And of course, there's always going to be people who've got lots of other opportunities. It's definitely not for everyone. But it doesn't have the same universal appeal as it did in our generation. You're totally right about that. Cahan Academy, which I know you're familiar with, I had dinner with Sal. And he basically, I'm calling him Sal, you know, it's a little bit, it's a little bit of an Italian a version of Sal's name. But anyway, he said to me, you can get the liberal arts education online.

But can you, though, sir, because isn't part of the experience the beer keg and isn't part of the experience the football game or the sorority dinner and the other elements of things that go on on a college campus? Yeah, I'm pretty worried about the idea that we can communicate the best parts of a liberal arts experience online. I mean, obviously, you can learn stuff online and technical skills or can be acquired that way. But you're right. I mean, the liberal arts education is supposed to be about, yeah, the beer keg and all that. But it's also supposed to be about, you know, learning about a whole bunch of different subjects and sharpening your mind and becoming a more critical and

experimental thinker. And that's hard to do without somebody, faculty members or peers, who are pushing you to think harder about different things. One of the problems that I've identified on campus is today is that there's just not enough debate. There's not enough people sitting around trying to disagree with each other about big political issues, moral issues, value questions. And without that, it's, you know, it's also hard to get a really meaningful liberal arts experience. I love my college experience. Did you like your college experience? How did you feel about your college experience? So I had a weird one because I, like I said, I was planning to become a cop the whole time, so I went to a bunch of different places and transferred. So I had an unusual college experience.

I will say I've taught at Colby College here in Maine for more than 10 years now. And I love it. I think it's great. The students are great, really interesting group, lots of athletes, very smart. And I think they have a good experience overall. You know, but I've talked to a lot of students for this book, did interviews with, you know, more than 100 students around the country, surveys, lots of surveys. And I found that generally speaking, students were having a pretty good experience, except that there's one part of college, which is fundamentally changed from when we went, which is that politics is just a part of the college experience at every step. It's shaping whether kids go to college, what colleges

they go to, it's shaping who they become friends with, who they date, the classes that they're willing to take, the conversations they're having, what they say in class, what they major in, and ultimately even the kinds of occupations they're going into. So politics got threaded into college in ways. It's always been there to some extent, but much more than it was true, I think, when we were going. I mean, I was a cop. I wanted to be a cop. I never even really thought about whether, you know, I was a good fit to go to college or not. Like I ended up going to Berkeley, graduated from Berkeley. Never really thought like, oh, it's too liberal. I'm never going to go there even though I'm going to law enforcement. And I think now that that's just really

central for a lot of kids, whether they're on the left, the right, even the middle. No, there's no question. I mean, I have friends in mind that went to, to Ivy League schools, and they feel that those schools have become too liberal, and they're setting their kids to, you know, the South East, the SEC schools, you know, places like Vanderbilt or Auburn or things like that, and they don't want them to go there. Did you find that to be something going on in your research? Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely been a big shift of students who are, you know, maybe less, less,

either less progressive or maybe just don't want to have politics be as important to their college experience who are heading to head into the Southeast, privates like Vanderbilt, but also big publics. Those are getting a lot of a lot of shift from students from the Northeast. But it plays out in lots of different ways even beyond that. And you've got students who are really activists, who they want to go to a liberal arts college where that's really central. Or you've got students who, you know, really want to debate big ideas. And so they try to find a place where that's really top of mind. So, of course, with these elite schools, you can't always pick where you go.

It's more than you pick them. And so some extent, they pick you. But it's something that people are thinking about. You know, other college churches, there's online sources. You go to like niche.com gives you an indication of what's happening politically at the college. You know, and sometimes those are accurate characterizations. Sometimes they're not. But it's just shaping the experience.

And the downside is that we're kind of creating these political bubbles. So we're getting, you know, the activists are going to one set of schools, you know, make more conservative kids are going to another set of schools. and there's no talk, there's no cross talk, there's not as much cross talk as there should be. You know, you and I both know about this and you've written about it. There's a great culture war going on, and both sides are fueling that culture war. But you, you know, you interpret this. You basically write in the book that both sides are getting some things flat wrong about the current situation.

What did students tell you that neither Fox, let's say, or MS now war, wouldn't run. Yeah. Well, from one side, the things are telling me that I think MS now would be less likely to cover. You know, a lot of the students, especially students who are more moderate or conservative, certainly, they really are hesitant to speak up in a lot of their classes. You know, most college classes aren't really about politics. You're taking a math class, not really about politics. But there really is a lot of hesitancy to speak in classes. And even when talking to peers, people who maybe don't feel like they fit in politically to their college context or really hesitant to speak up. And that's a shame.

People should be willing to talk about their ideas. You know, on the other side, I think the right-wing media overstates how much influence professors have over their students' political views. And I think there's also been a kind of celebration of the moves that the Trump administration has made against higher ed. And those moves have done much more harm than I think they've done good. So both sides kind of talk about different aspects of the problem, but the basic problem is that college has gotten polarized. The country has been being torn apart, and that's affecting lots of different institutions. And ultimately, it's affecting what's happening inside colleges and universities. Guys, thank you so much for listening and subscribing to open book.

You know we've got 200 authors on this show. It's been a lot of fun for me, but I'm also an author now too. And I've got all the wrong moves available. all, go to scaramucci.net, backslash all the wrong moves. You can buy your copy today. It's a lot of fun and lots of commentary about what's gone on in the U.S. over the last three decades. Okay, I'm going to say a couple of different narratives that are inside your book,

and I'd like you to thread them for me. Okay, so narrative number one is tuition has outrun inflation over the last 40 years, so it's become monumentally expensive. So if you were talking 60, 70, 80, in some cases, $100,000 a year to go to school, that's almost a half a million dollars for four years. Wage premium, however, is still way ahead, as you point out. It's around 70% if you go to college versus not going to college. But it feels like confidence has collapsed despite that narrative.

And so is it the politics that's driving the disillusionment or is it the society? has it just become socially acceptable to say, hey, not going to college, just too expensive for me and my family? Well, I think it's a lot of different things. I mean, there's no question that cost is huge. Like, I want to say up front to start with it, you know, the numbers you're giving, those are the sticker prices for college for people who, who's income are typically above $200, $250,000 a year. You know, at most private colleges, there's a pretty steep discount for families who are making more than that. And certainly at public universities, especially if you're going in-state, it's not. not that expensive. So that's true, actually. And net college prices have been edging down. But people, I mean, it's a lot of, those are. Those are good points. And you do mention those in the

book. And those are no question. But the politics piece, I think, is also there. I mean, I think part of the problem also in the background is we probably sent too many kids to college. There's lots of other jobs people need to have and lots of other skills that people are great at and maybe they don't feel they don't really need to go to college to get what they need to get to do well in life. So I think there was probably an overinflation of the emphasis on college. But I think there's no question. The confidence in higher ed is very much predicted by what your political views are. Those on the right just tend to be much less confident than those on the left. But it's not just that. I mean, there's people on the left and people in the

the middle who also think high red just kind of went out of control politically. And that that leads them to be, especially when mixed up with these cost concerns, just a little hesitant to send their kids there. Okay. So I'm going to stipulate because you more or less say it in the book, and I actually agree with your book, which is why I want to go fight you on, and things have gone a little haywire, right? And I would say that college administrators are now acknowledging, whoa, we may have broken this very valuable vessel. So tell me how. how they broke it and tell me about they're at least aware of the problem now and how are they going to fix it? Yeah. Well, I think they broke it, kind of my diagnosis is they broke it by

not recognizing where the train was going. You know, it's not hard, I think, to predict that if you've got an institution where basically like your kids, a lot of kids are going to have to go there to get the kinds of jobs that pay really well. If the people who are teaching those kids and the administrators who are overseeing those institutions are all on the completely different side of the political aisle than the parents. Eventually, there's going to be some tension there. And I think that's a big part of what's going on.

But I think college administrators kind of let polarization get the best of them. So I think you see this in different areas. Like take DEI, for example. I had conversations with the students I interviewed about DEI. And it was interesting, you know, many of them said, the things that really stood out to them about DEI were just things that have been part of high-ed since like when we were going to college, like multicultural centers. They've always been there, diversity requirements.

It's always been around to some extent. But I think starting in 2015 or so, you started to get a real emphasis on administrators, from administrators on trying to impose different kinds of DEI ideas on faculty and on student life. And I think some of that stuff went, you know, I think the evidence suggests that it really went too far, people really recoiled at that. You know, colleges work well. They're, there are places of creativity and searching for new knowledge and debating ideas. And when there's any effort to impose kind of an ideology on what happens on college campuses, the system just doesn't run well. So that's true when it happens from the left. It's true what happens

from the right. And I think higher ed kind of let itself be overtaken by the, you know, by the movement left in big parts of the country. And I think that's, you know, you can't really serve the country well if you're mostly serving one part of it. Well, listen, I mean, you're, what I love about the book is that it's all right there. I mean, you could hand that to a student, you could hand your book to a teacher, a professor, a college administrator. You've done the work for them. AOC, you know who she is.

I do. Okay. AOC said something that I want you to react to. AOC, as apropos to what you were just talking about, said, woke one was crazy. Did you hear her say that? I did see that, yeah. Okay, I want you to take that statement and put it into what is going on culturally at colleges now.

Do the administrators know that woke one was crazy? Well, let me maybe put it in a somewhat different term to talk about something we haven't talked about before or yet, which is this idea of cancel culture. You know, you're right. I mean, I did try to write a book that you just hand to people. I really wanted to put the student voices front and center because they've kind of been absent from this debate, like what are actual students thinking? So I have one chapter where I delved into this idea of cancel culture and what does that look like.

And so to contrast like woke one with woke two, you know, when students like recent alumni told me about, or people who were just graduating about cancel culture, what was like 2020, 2021, you know, they described basically saying something that others took offense to and then there'd be like an online mob. Everyone would, you know, kind of say that what they're doing was terrible. They felt horrible. It's a lot of just ostracizing them. I think, you know, there's kind of less of that than probably people feared, but it certainly

did happen. And now it's changed, according to the students that I've talked to. And it's changed in two different ways. Number one, a lot of students now think that that wasn't a good. situation. A lot of students now say, actually cancel culture, even if they're on the left, say that that wasn't a good way to run a college experience. And so they're hesitant to do that. It's kind of shifted now. It's a little bit quieter now. So it's more like defriending. So now if you say something in class that's a little bit untoward, people might take offense at, it's less that people are going to pile onto you. And it's more that they'll just kind of quietly back away and not want to be your friend. And kids are scared of that. They really want to make friends in college. It's a big part of the college experience, which is another reason that they're just hesitant to talking. class. So, you know, I think there was a moment like, you know, progressivism really bubbled up really intensely in 2020, 2021. It certainly happened on college campuses. And it just did stuff to the college experience that was, that made it different than it was before. I think,

I think professors and college administrators, you know, they might not all agree with my diagnosis, but I think a lot of people recognize that something's not working right and they've got to do things to change it up. But you've had a little bit of about with this, Right? I mean, your last book, I think, was on police reform. And then you got a petition demanding your resignation for writing that police abolitionists should consider becoming officers. How much of this book comes out of that experience? You know, it's interesting. I actually, that wasn't the driving force for writing this book. And I'll tell you that the driving force was, I was talking to a colleague who writes. a lot about this stuff. And I was just studying police issues, police reform, what works in policing, reform, what doesn't. And he said, you know, the college politics stuff is really front and center right now. And it's something they worked on before. Like, why aren't you gathering new data on this?

And I realized I didn't really have any new data to offer. And so I thought I better, I better look into it. But certainly, as I started thinking about it more, I did want to understand, like, well, why was it that some students at my college called for my resignation? nation from publishing a piece in the New York Times. I'm personally on the left. And the idea was, you know, if you want to reform the police, to extent that they need it, one way to do it is to get more people with kind of more liberal-leading ideas to become cops, kind of fix it from the inside.

And, you know, there's a group of students. This was, you know, right during COVID, right after George Floyd's murder, her said, yeah, you know, we should fire this guy. Luckily, in my case, I teach a Colby. We're a college that really puts free expression front and center. I've got this longstanding award that we get. It's a big deal award in journalism for courageous journalists who've sometimes fought and rifts their lives to report stories. So I had total support from my college.

I never was worried about losing my job or anything. But I guess at some level it did make me think, like, why is this happening? And this is not the way that a college should work. It's not the way to get big ideas out there and debate them. Okay, really well said. I mean, I think that the book captures things for me that are true. You know, the campuses are overwhelmingly liberal. They were very liberal when I graduated.

They become more so. You write, and I'll repeat this for viewers and listeners, the Yale survey found roughly 39% of the undergraduates thought physical violence could be justified against someone espousing hateful views. A little hypocritical, I think. I don't know. I've been a lifelong Republican, but I'm still against the death penalty because the death penalty isn't fairly administered. You know, if you're loaded, you can machine gun your colleagues and you'll stay in jail. If you're not loaded, you'll hang.

You know, so what does a number like that tell you about where all of this is going, sir? You know, social scientists talk about two kinds of polarization. One is ideological ones. when people just start to disagree more on issues, big debate issues, like the death penalty. The second kind is affective polarization, which is when you, it's not just people disagreeing, it's people who are really coming to hate each other and think that if you've got a view that's different from mine, you're a terrible person. It doesn't take a big leap to go from effective polarization to maybe being okay with political

violence. You know, I have to say, I'll just say this. I think some of those numbers are a little confusing. I'm not sure that people who are answering surveys always mean the same thing when they respond to them. When there's those questions, like, it's not like they're saying that I would commit criminal political violence or I would necessarily support someone who does. But I think there's no question that support for political violence has risen. And, you know, whether colleges are contributing to that or not, I'm not sure. But we're certainly not doing enough to combat it. And I think we need to tamp down effect of polarization. Look, that's got to be one of the things that colleges do.

We have to be institutions that, you know, try to help stitch the country together. That's a big part of our mission that always has been and get people to debate. And I think we're, we've kind of lost that, lost that, that, that, that plot. So let's talk about what campuses are getting right. Well, the first thing I want to say about this is if you, if you ask students about their college experience and about their faculty, most of them will say, even if they've had some issues with free expression, most of them will say, had a good experience.

Most of them say that their faculty did a good job. Even the majority of students who are on the right will say that their faculty did a great job, taught them, inspired them. So we've got a really fantastic group of folks who are doing science and doing important scholarship in higher ed. We've had for decades the leading higher education system

in the world. And it's helped to power a lot of American success, a lot of American innovation, growth, has basic knowledge produced in universities as like its core. I think that's still there. There's amazing science being done in lots of different schools, great, great research. I think we shouldn't ignore that. I think whenever we try to put a cap on that, the country suffers. I think that's one thing that colleges are doing it right.

And the other thing that I think they're doing right is that they're starting to pay more attention to teaching. There's a long time when, especially at really top universities, teaching was really secondary to what the university was all about. It was really all about research. I think a lot of schools now are leading into the idea that, you know, if we're going to compete with Khan Academy, we've got to do a great job in the classroom and really put a lot of our energies there. And I think schools are doing that, which is great. Listen, I had a great, look, I'm generally moderate. I thought the campus was left-leaning. I love my professors.

I got a great lot out of that. I thought the level arts education prepared me for life. Unfortunately, this generation has a mixed thing. I don't even think that was a debate for you or me, Neil. I just think it has become a debate now. Something else happened, though, pretty recent, but, you know, may be with us for a while, is the federal government is now using funding

as leverage over the universities. Does that fix anything? or does it accelerate the collapse in the trust that you describe in the book? So there has always been some effort by the federal government to influence what happens on college campuses, right? So the federal government has always had some priorities for what kinds of areas it's going to fund research in. And under the Obama administration, certainly there were demands and requests for certain kinds of boxes to be ticked in research grants. You know, that's some of that's to be expected. But to come right to your point, yeah, I think the really multi-pronged efforts from the Trump

administration to go after a higher education have been pretty damaging to the sector, tons and tons of grants, billions of dollars in grants, sometimes for really crucial biomedical research, were canceled arbitrarily when Doge was just doing keyword searches of grant applications to see, if anything, you know, look bad, didn't fit their priorities. But I think more generally the idea of this administration's is that, you know, everything that the federal government touches that goes to higher ed should align with the administration's ideology. And that is not what the federal government has historically done. Historically, they've said, you know, generally speaking, we've got some priorities,

but we trust you in higher education, you scientists, do the research that you think is important. Now, I think maybe we lost the trust. You know, higher education perhaps became too activist and led there to be less trust in our ability to figure out what we should be studying. But the idea that the federal government should dictate what happens in the classroom should dictate exactly the kind of research is being done. It's bad. It produces terrible research. It produces terrible teaching. And it's, again, bad when it's done by the right.

It's bad when it's done by the left. it's not the way things should go. It should be a pretty autonomous sector. And because, you know, it's really smart people running it. You know, I don't want my elected official telling a nuclear physicist how to do their research. And I doubt that most of your listeners do either. Well, I mean, listen, you make such a compelling and such a balanced case for all this stuff, which is why I wanted to get you out here.

I mean, I think I'm going to stipulate this. You can agree or disagree, but I'm more or less know that. know that you agree because I read your book, American universities are still the envy of the world. Have we broken something or said differently? It's 10 years from today. Are we still the envy of the world or are we broken something that we can't rebuild? I think we're in danger of having broken something. I'm not sure that it's broken yet. I've spent a bunch of time. I've spent a bunch of time I'm talking recently with colleagues in Europe who study higher education there and what's happening with issues of academic freedom there.

And for many years, the European Parliament and European Union produced a report of like threats to the academic freedom of European researchers. What schools should be, what countries posed a base threat as China, Russia? I think we're now going to be on that list. And that's bad. I think a lot of countries are thinking that, you know, because of all the political pressures on higher ed, this is their chance.

I think there's a lot of interest in China in trying to bring U.S. researchers there. Canada is doing the same thing. Lots of European countries are saying, you know, this is our time to invest in higher ed. This is our time to, you know, kind of get back that innovation. That colleges are kind of innovation machines. And I think we're in danger there.

I think there's a real risk that we're going to lose out. And I think that national security implications of that are pretty profound. I think the economic implications of that are profound. Higher ed is just a really valuable resource, and it has to be run well. And that means that we have to run it responsibly from inside the system. And outside the system, it has to be given the support that it needs to do its job. love college. And I would like kids to love college. And if you were the college salesperson, I'm going to put your college salesperson. Give me a elevator pitch as to why kids should go to

college today. I think it's pretty straightforward. I think that there's really strong evidence that going to college produces benefits for people throughout their lives. There's, of course, a wage benefit we've been talking about. There's a health benefit. There's evidence on this is pretty compelling. If you go to college, you tend to live a healthier life. And it's not just because of how much you make. There's something about going to college that changes people in good directions. It's sort of like a four-year, or at least it should be, a four-year workout for your brain. And that additional brain training is just great. And it produces a last-year. It gives you some maturity and self-starting and it gives you some space to fail or to try things that you.

you may or may not like, you know, there's all of that stuff in there. All right, so we're down to the five words. That's the last part of our podcast. I have five words that my producer and I picked out. I'm going to say the word or the phrase and you give me a sentence or two. You ready? Yeah, ready. All right. I'm going to say the words, free speech. You say what? You say what? Free speech is just a crucial part of the college experience. And for a lot of students today, they don't feel comfortable speaking on campus. And we've got to change that. Yeah. I mean, People, they don't like what you say. They want political violence.

It's sort of crazy. I think it's free speech for me, but not for thee. As long as you're agreeing with me, you know what I mean? It's just frustrating. Polarization. We've let it get the best of us. It's pulling some colleges to the right. It's pulling some colleges to the left.

And internally, it's making some majors be more left. Some majors be more right. I'm finding that kids won't join clubs that they don't feel politically aligned with. It's a huge problem for our country, and colleges have to start addressing it in the same way that they address other big problems. Time to scale that back. That's what I think. Okay. Students.

I say the word students. I was so impressed. I teach a lot of students. I spent a lot of time with undergrads. But for this book, I interviewed, like I said, more than 100 undergrads around the country. I was really impressed with the students I talked to. There's this idea that the students today are, you know, they're all sheep. They're all being led by professors.

They don't think for themselves. When you actually talk to students, they're smart and don't as agree with what they say. But they're smart. They're interesting. This generation actually has a lot going on for it. I think they just need a little guidance to get where they need to go. But I give them more credit than I think most people do. Okay.

What about higher education? Hard to produce the goods you need in a modern society like ours without that higher education. You need to train the personnel, and you also need the research to help companies run effectively, help the military. It's crucial. It's a crucial institution. And we've got to support it. I've got all the research. I've got all the health research. Absolutely. Physical research, sciences, physics, et cetera. Okay, I say the word college. That's the last word. I'm going to give you the last word.

Yeah. You know, college is a little different than what we've been talking about. college, for a long time, it was about how can we teach people things that are different enough that they can go on to major and have whatever job they're going to have, but give them enough similar background that they can come together, recognize themselves and one another, not think that they have to hate someone who disagrees with them. I think that's the thread that we've lost. I think we have to come back to at least giving all students some core set of ideas that they can work with. And I think that's going to help stitch the country back together. Well, this is a terrific book. You're hearing from Neil Gross. The title of the book is what

happened to college, how politics broke higher education, and what we can do to fix it. Thank you so much for joining us today on Open Book and wish a great success with your book. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.