The Daily Signal - Chris Rufo's Quest to Abolish DEI

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Chris Rufo was in Washington, D.C., last week to accept The Heritage Foundation’s prestigious Salvatori Prize and visited The Daily Signal to share his thoughts on a range of topics. Over the next two days, we will feature his interview on this show. On part one today, we cover Rufo’s recent reporting on NPR and the plagiarism plague at America’s leading universities. He also shares an update about his campaign to abolish DEI—the controversial idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion that has infested American businesses, colleges, and even our government. And you won’t want to miss Rufo’s advice for how high school students should approach college and what parents need to think about sending their kids to public school. We’ll be back with more from Rufo tomorrow on his award-winning book, “America’s Cultural Revolution,” and what he has planned next. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Feeling festive. Catch classic holiday favorites like Home Alone, the Santa Claus and Die Hard, along with holiday episodes from Family Guy, Abbott Elementary, and more with Hulu on Disney Plus. From festive Disney flicks to binge-worthy Hulu originals, Hulu on Disney Plus is your home for the holidays. Celebrate the season with Hulu, available on Disney Plus in Canada. When we broke the story that President of Harvard was a plagiarist, she had plagiarized a large, number of passages in her doctoral thesis, and she was the president of the most prestigious

university in the world. That's untenable. And of course, as we started to look elsewhere, we're finding plagiarism everywhere. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, May 28th. I'm your host, Rob Lewy. And that was the voice of Chris Rufo, the popular writer, filmmaker, and activist. Rufo was in Washington, D.C. last week to accept the Heritage Foundation's prestigious Salvatory Prize and visited The Daily Signal to share his thoughts. on a range of topics. Over the next two days, we will feature his interview on this show. On part one today, we cover Rufo's recent reporting on NPR and the plagiarism plague at America's

leading universities. He also shares an update about his campaign to end DEI, the controversial idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion that has infested American businesses, colleges, and even our government. And you won't want to miss Rufo's advice for how high school students should approach college and what parents need to think about sending their kids to public schools. We'll be back with more from Rufo tomorrow on his award-winning book, America's Cultural Revolution, and what he has planned next. But before we get to our interview,

I'd like to first tell you about a new book from my Daily Signal colleague, Mary Margaret Olaahan, our senior reporter covering culture and politics. D-trans, true stories of escaping the gender ideology cult, is out today. Pick up your copy wherever books are sold. Through her extensive reporting, O'Lahan's book, gives detransitioners a voice, and their stories are truly unforgettable. She reveals the consequences of gender ideology and the dangerous ideas being pushed by teachers, doctors, and even their own parents.

D-trans is an expose on the life-altering effects of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gruesome surgeries. Ola-Han spoke directly with detransitioners and documents the unconscionable abuse that they have endured. To learn more, be sure to check out the archives of this show for her mate, 10th interview on the Daily Signal podcast, and tune in later today for our top news edition to hear more from her. Now, here's my interview with Chris Rufo. We're joined in studio today by Chris Rufo, the one and only, the writer who is a popular

substack producer. He has made several documentary films, and if you're not following him on X, I encourage you to do that. Chris, you come to town today for another award. You were just here a couple months ago to collect ISI's. A Conservative Book of the Year, Award for America's Cultural Revolution. This time is the Heritage Foundation Salvatory Prize. Congratulations.

Thank you. It's great. I certainly have been enjoying it, collecting awards and giving speeches, and it's a huge honor. Well, it's great to have you here. Thanks for making the visit with the Daily Signal. Any plans to stop by NPR while you're in town? That's a good idea. I didn't think about that.

We could stop by NPR, see how they're doing over there. They've been some hot water lately. I may have had something of a hand in that. Tell us the backstory for our listeners. So I guess, I don't know, a month or two ago now, Barry Weiss's outfit, the Free Press, had this great story from a longtime NPR editor who basically confirmed what conservatives have known all along that NPR has drifted very far to the left.

There's no ideological balance. It doesn't represent the public. And it's run by people who are committed activists and ideologues who don't care about the news, they care about pushing a propaganda line. You know, again, like anyone who's really been thinking about it could see that, but hearing it from the insider caused something of a stir. And then on the back of that reporting, I did some other reporting on NPR's new CEO, a woman named Catherine Marr, who, you know, had, I mean,

is just like a caricature of a kind of far-left, kind of managerial leader. I exposed some of her tweets, which were like, you know, almost like parodies, like left-wing hikus. They were really kind of poetic in their own way. And then I really dug into her background as a left-wing operator, regime change activist overseas, and then, you know, kind of turn the screws on NPR, which if it would hope to actually be public radio representing the public, really can't have someone that is such a kind of left-wing, ideologous. in charge. Sure.

Yeah. I mean, at a minimum. I mean, also, let's be clear. The other thing is that the public should not be paying a cent for NPR. And I think that we've shifted public opinion on this in recent months in the right direction. Oh, I think that's absolutely true. And it obviously followed on the heels of the other successful campaigns when it came to

some of America's highest profile universities. Walk us through that particular situation. You have a situation where the president of Harvard is out of a job because of the plagiarism allegations that you surfaced. How do you go about doing something like that and being successful? I mean, for so long, it seems conservatives are up against these challenges. And you've proven that it's possible to affect change and have an impact. Yeah. And look, I mean, is it possible to reform NPR?

Is it possible to reform Harvard? Is it possible to kind of wholesale reform the federal government? You know, in the immediate term, no. That is a generational project. But what I've tried to do is demonstrate that at least tactically, we can score victories, we can change incentives, we can change the way that, you know, kind of change the distribution of three goods. Money, power, and prestige.

And so as I'm thinking about different activist campaigns, I'm always thinking about those three points of leverage. you know, how can we kind of find a target that has a kind of opening where we could do some good reporting, good investigation, good, you know, agitation, so to speak, and then how can we put, how can we take away their money, how can we take away their power, how can we take away their prestige? Ideally, like, two of those, you know, of course three of those is great, but really, like, I found that as a rule of thumb, you know, you need to hit an institution along two of those axes, in order to really be successful at changing policy, changing staffing, you know, from the president down,

you know, changing kind of programming, changing the ideological balance, whatever your specific kind of reform is. It takes actually an enormous amount of pressure. And so one of the things that I've been trying to study as I've been working on this in practice is how does that work? how does pressure work, how do institutions work, how does media work, how does kind of money, finances, budget work, and then trying to figure out how through storytelling, through reporting, through, you know, more direct activism, how can you start to shift those conditions? And then the theory is that over time, if we can do this enough, if we can do this successfully, if we can demonstrate how, how to actually wield power in a meaningful way,

and in a way that makes things better, of course, you know, I think you could have more significant reforms building up over time. Sure. Well, I mean, you document how significant the problem is with your book, America's Cultural Revolution. So, I mean, there's a lot of work to do. Let's stick with higher ed for just a moment

because, I mean, that's an area where there has been some movement. But how big of a problem is the plagiarism scandal? I feel like you've only scratched the surface, and there's probably a whole lot more that we could do when we dig in there. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. You're kind of limited by time, resources, but certainly when we broke the story that the president of Harvard was a plagiarist. She had plagiarized a large number of passages in her doctoral thesis, and then some additional reporting from Aaron Savarium at the Washington Free Beacon, and then some follow-up reporting from me as well, showed that she had plagiarism. Pagerized in total, the majority of all of her academic papers contained plagiarized material. And she was the president of the most prestigious university in the world. That's untenable.

And of course, as we started to look elsewhere, we're finding plagiarism everywhere. We're finding particularly extreme high rates of plagiarism among DEI administrators. It seems like DEI administrators and universities have a hard time completing doctoral theses without plagiarizing material. And we found them even in some of the kind of more left-wing ideological academic departments were uncovering plagiarism. But it is discovering it is somewhat tedious, time-consuming work. You have to run papers through the plagiarism software. You have to do kind of hand side-by-side vetting.

You have to write stories and reach out to sources and request comment. And, you know, it's actually a pretty big effort. But what I think we're demonstrating, at least in a moderately substantial way, is that plagiarism is very much a real problem. And kind of the irony is that the work is actually awful as a matter of quality. I mean, it's not like these papers are good either. I mean, these papers are awful. The papers are devoid of substance.

These papers are intellectually vacuous. These papers contribute nothing to the world. They don't create new knowledge or suggest ways to improve our societies. But for a variety of reasons, that's not really enough. You have to say, and also they're fraudulent. That gets people's attention. And so the plagiarism campaign has been quite fun, and I think it will be continuing to produce some stories in the future.

Well, unfortunately, that does still get their attention. It seems that critical race theory or diversity, equity, inclusion policies have diminished the importance of merit and have emphasized other qualities that these universities are emphasizing. Is there any hope that that will change or is already changing in some places? Yeah, it's already changing in many places. So one good example is that many universities after COVID scrapped the requirements for SAT scores for college. admissions. And the reason was, I think, twofold. One is that they were, I think, correctly sensing that affirmative action, which is a nice euphemism for racial discrimination, was going to be

correctly deemed unconstitutional by the courts, which of course has happened. And they also, in a deeper way, they've been grappling with what are very real racial despondes. For a variety of complex social scientific reasons, there are disparities. You have disparities, group disparities by race on SAT scores that have been stubborn. They've been, all of the educational interventions, hundreds of billions of dollars, have not been sufficient in closing what's called the achievement gap. And therefore, closing a disparity in college readiness, a disparity in kind of SAT scores with a denied towards college admissions. And so rather than, you know, comply with the law and rather than be honest about disparities, they said, well, if we can't, if we can't, you know, if it's going to be

illegal and if we can't, you know, if we're giving up on closing disparities, we should just scrap the requirement for test scores at all. That was the theory. And those of us who are, want the best universities, I want to have the best students, I want to have a fair and equal process could see the writing on it. It's like, this is not going to work. This is going to be worse than what happened before. And sure enough, of course that happened. But now you're seeing universities pulling back on that. They're actually reinstituting SAT requirements. We have universities that are scrapping their DEI statements voluntarily. And then, of course, in red states, we've now abolished the DEI bureaucracies in now seven states. I think that will expand to upwards of 20

states. And public opinion has also shifted where the editorial line, even at Center-Leod, publications is now softening on some of these DEI programs, softening on these idea of scrapping test scores, because ultimately Americans are practical people. If something does not work, eventually people are going to say, hey, wait a minute, this is just not practical, this doesn't work. And we're also a kind of quality-minded people. When people sense that a system is deeply unfair, again, DEI is just a polite way of saying rewarding certain groups and punishing other groups on the basis of their ancestry,

Americans also will say, hey, you know, this is not the right approach. And I think we're steadily making progress on that. The fight is not won. The fight is still in its beginning stages. But I think we're in a better position now than we were a year ago. And, of course, you directly have your hands in trying to do that at New College in Florida. So thank you for your service on that board. But a practical question, either, maybe for 17, 18-year-olds who are listening,

or their parents, what should their outlook be on higher ed today? And what practical advice do you have for them as they're trying to decide whether or not it's worth the massive investment in college? Yeah, I mean, look, that's a hard question. And, you know, a little bit is a very personal question. Each family will have to make its own decision. But I think there are two components to the right answer. You know, the first is that there is a popular line or meme in some conservative circles. don't go to college, you know, go to trade school, you know, drop out of college. College is not worth

an, it's not a good investment. College is, you know, indoctrination center. College is not the right way. You know, we should just stop going to college. And look, for many people, trade school is a great option, work experience is a great option. You know, those are important. And frankly, some of the trades are very lucrative. And some of the trades, the highest-paying trades, are probably more lucrative than the lowest-paying college majors. Okay, fine, yeah. But still in general, there is a return on a college education. And politically speaking, a good, a functioning and successful conservative political movement has to have college graduates and has to have elite college graduates. That's a fact. Even when college education was in its infancy in the United States,

States during the founding period. You know, the founding fathers were most, for the most part, college graduates at a time when almost no one went to college. And if you look at their professions, they were lawyers, large landowners, physicians, you know, scientists, merchants, those are high prestige, high education, high intelligence kind of fields. Given that we're now, you know, 250 odd years later, in a. more complex economy with higher levels of general education, with larger post-secondary institutions, the idea that we could have a successful political movement without a large number of very smart, very educated people, I think is misguided. It's actually a kind of completely wrong position.

So that's the first part. The second part of the answer is then, therefore, what do you do as an individual? Then it becomes a little more complex. But what I would say is that If you're a child or if you're a young person, if you have intellectual gifts, you should absolutely go to college and you should absolutely go to the best college that you can get into for your desired field of study, for whatever personal calculations you have to make. But I think the idea, yes, is it left-leaning? Yes, fine. But if you have your head on straight, if you're independent-minded, if you can connect with the right people, I think it's still. still a worthwhile endeavor, and, you know, we should not give up on universities. We should fight to make universities better. That's my view. No, thank you for that. Thank you for that. Looking at the K-12 level, you know, I've struggled with this myself. I mean, I'm a graduate of a public school. My mother, my mother-in-law were both public school teachers, sent my kids to

public school, not initially, but they did spend some time there. But I've now, my wife and I I've moved in the complete opposite direction, and next year the kids will both be in private school. The other one's too young to be starting school yet. But given the state of our public schools in this country, is there any hope for reform, or are parents better off looking for alternative options where they maybe have more control or say in the outcome of their child's education? Yeah, I think, look, I mean, there's a wide variety, of course. there's no universal judgment that we could make, but in general, I would say parents should absolutely,

and this is frankly already happening. Parents are looking for alternatives. Parents are looking for better options. Parents are demanding an education that reflects their values, not the values of university humanities departments. And so we're seeing that happening. And so I think that, look, probably when you and I grew up, it was standard, the standard practice for, let's say, educated or, you know, professional class, people was move to a good neighborhood

with good public schools, send Johnny to kindergarten, and then, you know, he goes through school. That's it. It's all laid out for you. I think that the situation has changed. You have to be much more discerning. And I think, you know, homeschool is an option for many families. You know, private school, religious or parochial school is a great option. There are a huge, you know, a huge, huge number of options that are that are emerging kind of great new experimentation in k through 12 i think we've had kind of more options now for primary and secondary education than anytime in multiple generations and this is a very positive development and for policymakers the best method is not necessarily although this is it's necessary to reform public schools because

they're not going to go away anytime soon so you have to deal with it as as it is But you should also create the alternative, which is now law, I think, in seven or more states, which is parents can take their education dollars anywhere to any school of their choice. That is a game changer. It changes the whole system. It makes public schools better and more competitive. And it gives parents this great resource where they can take typically between $7,000 and $8,000 per year per child to any institution of their choice.

And that also, from an economic perspective, you know, Is it perfect? No. Is it a perfect free market thing? Not exactly. But it puts a huge new flow of cash into a kind of semi-market economy that is based on individual parent choice rather than the kind of legislator's centralized choice. I think that's going to over the long term create better options. Well, and the investigative reporting and the work that you've done, the activism with certain governors and other state lawmakers has led to a lot of those changes. So you've had a direct hand in it. So thank you. For giving parents. And I'll tell you, though, it's still hard. You know, as a parent, look, the policy solutions, the kind of, the policy fight is much easier than the personal.

You know, policy is, it's kind of self-contained. You understand the rules. You make it happen. You know, providing an education for your own kids is in some ways, you know, more of a challenge. Because it's a human endeavor. It requires, you know, a huge effort sometimes. And you have to adapt it to your kids. personalities and whatever, you know, struggles and challenges they're facing. So, you know, I would

just say to anyone that has kids in school, it's very difficult, do the best that you can, except that no school and no system is going to be perfect. And, you know, just try to do the best that you can within the means that you have. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to The Daily Signal podcast. Be sure to check out our review. show right here in this podcast feed. We help you cut through the clutter and bring you the top news at 5 p.m. each day. Also, please subscribe to The Daily Signal wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts and help us reach more listeners by leaving a five-star rating and review. We appreciate your feedback. Thanks again for listening. Have a great day. The Daily Signal podcast is made

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