The Daily Signal - The Daily Signal Presents “The “Signal Sitdown - How Modernity Betrayed Education | Dr. Matthew Spalding

Episode Date: August 16, 2025

 Should I even send my kids ⁠back to school⁠ at all? Parents at every level are asking this question, whether they're concerned about the exploding cost of higher education or the liberal takeover of the preschool classroom, because there is a disease running rampant through our education system. Though Dr. Matthew Spalding, a Ph.D., is not a medical doctor, he has diagnosed this disease that has led to more parents questioning America’s educational institutions. As the dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College’s Washington, D.C., campus and a Gov. Ron DeSantis appointee to the New College of Florida Board of Trustees, Spalding continues to work on a cure. He joins ⁠“The Signal Sitdown”⁠ this week to discuss. Keep Up With The Daily Signal Sign up for our email newsletters:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.dailysignal.com/email⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠     Subscribe to our other shows:  The Tony Kinnett Cast: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/7AFk8xjiOOBEynVg3JiN6g⁠  The Signal Sitdown: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2026390376⁠   Problematic Women:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL7765680741⁠   Victor Davis Hanson: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9809784327⁠   Follow The Daily Signal:  X:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://x.com/intent/user?screen_name=DailySignal⁠ Instagram:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/thedailysignal/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Facebook:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Truth Social:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://truthsocial.com/@DailySignal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠    Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Black Friday is here at IKEA, and the clock is ticking on savings you won't want to miss. Join IKEA family for free today and unlock deals on everything from holiday must-haves to cozy at-home essentials, all the little and big things you need to make this season shine. But don't wait. Like leftovers at midnight, our Black Friday offers won't last. Shop now at IKEA.ca.ca.com slash Black Friday. IKEA, bring home to life. Hi, Bradley Devlin here, politics editor of The Daily Signal, and I'm excited to share this episode of my show with the Daily Signal with you. The Signal Sitdown is one of the Daily Signal's other podcasts, and each show I bring you inside the biggest battles in Washington, D.C., with some of the biggest names in politics.

So if you like what you hear today, make sure you subscribe to the Signal Sitdown for weekly episodes. We'll see you there. forming a human being liberating them, training their mind. You do that by the things by perfecting and getting better the things that human beings do by nature. If you think through American history about how the normal person becomes a good citizen, a good human being, a good member of their community, it's by learning those basic things.

Modern society has made those things under an attack through a large extent because it denies that, really, denies that man by nature can do these things. these things. You need science, you need mathematical expertise, and you need academic experts to tell you these things. And so as a result, there's now these slivers left. Liberal education, classical education. When in reality, that is an education of what it means to be human. Thank you so much for tuning into the Signal Sit Down. But before we get to the interview, we'd love it if you'd hit that like and subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you may be

be joining us. And please remember to give us a five-star review because we love your feedback. Remember, it's your government and together we'll expose how it really works and how to affect real change. Without further ado, here's the interview. Dr. Matthew Spalding, welcome to the Signal Sit Town. Great to be with you, bad. So first off, I got to ask you, what's in the water at Hillsdale College? Because you are the dean at the Van Antle School of Government, Hillsdale's campus in Washington, D.C. you throw a rock, you hit a Hillsdale grad in the head. I work with so many Hillsdale grads over the years. Some of them I knew right off the bat that they were Hillsdale grads.

Others I found out later. And a kid born and raised in Southern California had no idea what Hillsdale College was until I got into the conservative movement. And now it's everywhere. There's long answer, short answers, all sorts of things. But all of which we can think about here. But I mean, part of it is you've got to think about the times we find yourselves in right now and what kind of institution a place like Hillsdale College is.

So, as you know, I was a long time at the Heritage Foundation, one of my kind of home bases, if you will, which is a great institution. I love it and does great work. But it's a different, you know, kind of different in its way. It's focus. And I always wanted to go work for something that was. more in the academic world. I like to write. I like to teach. But also had even a longer-term view about things. And that's definitely Hillsdale College. Now you can go back to it's kind of

in the nature of education and what's wrong with higher education and all of that leading up to it. But part of it is when you think about it in, say, the context of Washington, D.C., we're a different kind of organization in this city, which is to say that we're interested in teaching people. We're interested in talking about ideas. We don't have policy objectives. We don't have pieces of legislation we're trying to pass. We don't have a partisan agenda. Right?

I mean, intellectually, I suppose you could say we are quote unquote conservative, although intellectually that means something different that does politically. But it's a different type of organization. So what we're interested in is shaping minds. and teaching people to think. And so it creates this twofold momentum, if you will. On the one hand, it's something that this city is a vacuum that we can fill.

But on the other hand, more and more people are attracted to that because right now, where we are in American politics, conservatism, kind of the liberalism and its broad sense, if you will, I think more and more people are realizing either an emptiness in our politics, but also a certain lack of depth. And so they're looking for something more, and they turn more and more to what, a place like Hillsdale College?

So it just kind of comes together, and this is a great moment for us right now. And then the other just practical thing I would mention is it turns out that what do people look for when they're hiring someone out of college? And, well, we've had a long-term view for a long time that you're looking for my who knows how to read, knows how to write, can analyze things, can think about things, can articulate them and communicate. And it turns out that that's what we do and most of what higher education is no longer doing. Yeah. And so as a result, it just actually just physically creates a product that is in high demand. Yeah, and I mean, I tell people quite often that the reason I'm in journalism is because I graduated with,

no marketable skills. And to a certain degree that's true because so much of our conversation, as we'll get into later, surrounding higher education is like, those darn liberal arts degrees, they're worthless, you know? Why don't you go and pick up a real skill instead of learning how to write an 800-word op-ed? To which the flip side is some of our most successful graduates, say you go to law school and clerked on the Supreme Court, going to journal. It's these soft skills, if you will, that are turned to be very valuable. In this world of high technology and artificial intelligence

and all these things, it turns out the old things still matter. Can you articulate and communicate in the written spoken word? I mean, this is, you know, old is the Greeks. And it still matters. I don't know how many guys I know

it's a good amount of guys who are like classics majors in college. And then they graduate. And they're in the world of finance. They're in the world of consulting. And it's because They've spent so much time with Aristotle and Cicero compared to the average American grad student.

And they go into these industries and they have a ton of amount of success because they're thinking about these things in what I think common parlance would say is a political way rather than a economic way or a or a mathematical way. So part of that is kind of jumping ahead, but I'm sure we'll I'm sure we'll jump around. This is really the nature of modern education in a certain non-examination. nutshell, you can think of modern education being a professional education. That it's broken up into different categories. You learn economics, you learn politics, which tends to be kind of political sciencey, psychology, whatever. You have a major. But what modern education doesn't do anymore is what education used to do, which was just to take a human who's young and immature and doesn't know how to do things well and kind of matures them,

especially their mind. Or as we used to say, say liberates their mind, hence the term liberal education in the best sense of the term. And so institutions that still have that as an objective, on one end they're outliers in the modern educational system, but also they're actually doing what education should be about. And it's noticeable. It's highly noticeable. And it's being more and more noticeable and more and more in demand by students, but by employers. and by people who still do the things that human beings by nature have always done.

It's funny. I mentioned previously that I say I graduated with no marketable skills. And there's a lot of pressure on the right in particular to say, you know, if you're going to go to college, you know, make sure you get a hard skill. Make sure you go into STEM. Liberal arts. So you can get a job. Yeah, go get a job. Make sure that make sure that your college degree is actually setting yourself up for employment.

And to one extent, I agree, like underwater basket weaving and intersectionality isn't a major that anyone should pursue if they want to have gainful employment when they graduate. But my wife was a liberal arts major. I was a liberal arts major. I want to find a way to save the liberal arts. I think that it wasn't my economic background that helped me prepare to be married and manage the finances of my household. It was all of the reading that I did about politics and about tradition and about marriage, nature, human nature. All of those things are what informed me on a day-to-day basis when I go about my daily life. So far as is to think about just to what extent that really is, and as I said earlier, an outlier.

I mean, I very much favorite liberal arts education. Sometimes we term also speak of classical education. We use these terms. Right. There's the classical learning test now that a lot of people talk about. But if you think more broadly for a few moments, and when I say broadly, I mean higher education, K through 12, homeschooling the whole array, education should be about forming a human being, liberating them, training their mind. And you do that by the things by perfecting and getting better at the things that human beings do by nature. Primary education, you know, middle school, high school, and then college, it's perfection, it's growth, but even in the trades, in the normal way, if you think through American history about how the normal person becomes a good citizen, a good human being, a good member of their community, it's by learning those basic things.

Modern society has made those things under an attack to a large extent because it denies. that really. It denies that man by nature can do these things. You need, you need science, you need mathematical expertise, and you need academic experts to tell you these things. And so as a result, there's now these slivers left, liberal education, classical education, when in reality, the claim of those things is, yes, there is a higher aspect of liberal education. Not everyone is going to become an expert in 13th century literature or whatever it might be, right? Not everyone is going to get the same type of liberal arts education, its highest sense. But broadly speaking, that is an education of what it means to be human.

And it should inform everything. And we shouldn't, you know, it's very German. This was kind of the roots of modern education is in the German educational theory, right? But in Europe, they still do this. You segment people. Oh, no, you're going to go into the professional world. You're going to go into this, you know, right? Whereas the Americans, even from the very beginning, always had this older notion,

which actually grew out of the medievals about this sense of education, which is it's very broad. You study history. You learn some languages. You learn how to think. And a lot of them started as religious institutions, which doesn't surprise me too much at all. That's a completely separate part.

They all started out really. institutions. And there's a very close connection. Because it's that foundational layer on which you have to build the human mind, on which you have to build. Yeah. And part of that is it's part of that is, is there's something inherently Christian about understanding the human person.

But there's also just the historical fact that it really is Christianity that, that brings the classical world, the Greek, Greek world, especially the Roman world, right? When that becomes Christianized, when Cicero is essentially an Aristotle or combined with, say, Aquinas, then Christianity becomes a vehicle, or you can say that the Greeks and the Roman political thought become a vehicle for Christianity. How are you going to put it? But that's what brings it into the modern world. So it's no coincidence at all that the higher education at large periods of our history is really carried over and protected by religion and Christian schools. Because there was this long coincidence, which today is still true in much of modern American education, right?

many of the best institutions of higher education are also either former or informally Christian institutions. There is something about Christian institutions and Christian thinking and theology that could see the Greek and Roman roots of modern, of, excuse me, of reasoning in the nature of things. and there is something about that philosophical understanding of the nature of things that could see a certain coincidence with an idea of Christianity that held that all are equally equal before God and equal in their being. And I think that melding is actually a very important component of educational systems in the West, if you will,

which in turn, just to finish that point, then we can go wherever you want it. Yeah. But that also is why the, when you think about progressive education or the German education coming into the progressives and all, what is the thing they attack most? Precisely that link. You've got to sever reason from revelation and make them to different things. And you've got to turn reason is got to be by scientific reason as opposed to this over here. Well, and the implications for a lot of the university departments that conservatives don't like these days.

DEI departments, gender studies departments, insert minority group studies departments. If you sever that link, those things can continue to exist. But if you acknowledge that link, you think to yourself, hmm, there's something antithetical. So, you know, education itself, about these. You know, DEI, these things are kind of wokeness in the broadest sense. This is, you know, now it's kind of a morphed, you know,

ugly version of this, but it's just kind of the latest flavor, if you will, of the modern project, or it's degradation. But, you know, if you destroy, which is essentially what the modern project does, whether you think of it in reason, from the point of view, reason, classical reason, or revelation in biblical or Christian thinking and theology, if you destroy the notion that the human mind can know things, philosophically or by in a sense of almost a natural theology through reason you can see creation, you can understand the natural law tradition, if you will.

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It's week three of Canadian tires early Black Friday sale. These prices won't go lower this year. Maybe too long. Freezing. Save up to 50% November 20th to 27. Conditions apply, details online. We're just kind of morphing these things out over time. This is why modern liberalism starts spinning out of control at a certain point. Oh, it's science, but then science becomes this and it becomes this, becomes this. And so sex becomes gender, becomes fluidity, becomes whatever. And how do they go about destroying that notion that you could know things?

And it's interesting, too, that the, this notion that the human mind cannot know, emerged from the academies, which I don't know if I'm a, if I'm a president of a college, I would like to sell parents on the idea that their kids can graduate knowing things, right? Like, that is that is the whole entire game is to make sure that students are knowing things. And what do they say? Come to our college and you will know things. What will you know? You'll know psychology and you'll modern science of politics and you'll know, right? You will know what factually we can know. And there's nothing else we can know, which is why you have always pop psychologist or pop theories of other forms of knowledge,

basically becomes various versions of relativism. It's all relative. And subjectivism. It's subject to whatever you think, whatever your will is. That's always various forms. We're seeing different versions of it in different places. But if you kind of go back and look at, you know, kind of go back and look at, you know, where does this turn, what point does this happen?

And you think about the shift, to put it in the broadest terms, but very simplified, in the classical world and the Christian world, there was this notion that, well, what man can know, you can't know everything, you can't know everything from a revelatory point of view. There's some things we just don't know about the nature of God that have to be revealed, or at some point we might learn this, but we don't know that. And then even in the classical world, there's certain things we don't know because man's knowledge is limited. But there's certain things they can know because they can perceive certain things about reality.

And when you think about it, these are assumptions we make, we human beings make every moment. We sat down here at a table with two microphones, and what do we do? We started talking to each other. That is, I assumed you were a human being. You assumed I was a human being. we can talk and communicate and have a conversation. Sometimes you might have your doubts. And that, you know, you weren't a dolphin or, right?

I mean, this is what human beings do all the time. Well, the, you know, if you throw in the French Revolution and then German political thought and whatnot, it starts turning away from that because, oh, those are all just claims of knowledge. We don't really know that. You think about it in its more radical, skeptical sense. I don't actually know you're a human being. I don't know that this is a table. I have no evidence of any of these things.

Right? There's there, you know, I can't prove any of this reality. It just becomes, you know, a nihilistic breakdown in a certain point. But most famously, the Germans replaced it with, well, what we do know is history, in which we get the notion of progress. You know, the arc of history, as we say now, as we're saying now, you have been on the right side of history, all this kind of thing. So there's a, there's a kind of progressive view of all of these things that plays out. that modern sense of things is what came to dominate very quickly amazingly quickly the

institutions of higher education especially when you think about the Harvard's and the Ivy leagues but the major university systems John's Hopkins you know they're the Wisconsin school the progress is really reshaped all of higher education in that sense and then you got this split then between all those institutions which were running forward into progress and following where history was leading us and they're very open to learning whatever. And then you have these backwards institutions

like Hillsdale or other institutions like that. I think Hillsdale is really the best of them. But they're kind of still trying to maintain that, no, no, you can actually know things. You can actually learn things. You can actually read Shakespeare. And there's something that he has to tell us. There's something that Aristotle has, we can learn from Aristotle.

There's a conversation here we can talk about. We can study the moderns as well, but why should we, you know, the problem with the modern academy, it assumes all of that is true, meaning all the, the great contradiction of modernity, right? There is no truth, but that is true. Yes. There's no truth. It just gets at a certain point, it becomes nonsense.

And that, I think. And that just, it controls the mind. modern academy, which is why it's just all over the place trying to figure out what it's what is its mission. I mean, what's the motto of Harvard University? Oh, it's Veritas. I don't know. It's Veritas.

Is it Veritas Luke's or something like that? Is it Truth in Light or something? Yeah, yeah. But truth. Yeah. I mean, do you think any of them could, what is truth? Yeah. They're so far beyond that.

It's a hard question for them to answer. Right. And I think the right, there's, divides on this all the time of, you know, why. the universities are institutions of the left, especially, particularly in America. And some say it's because we didn't play the mid-century political game like the left did in the United States, that we were in a marriage with libertarians and afraid to use state power to ensure that the progressive institutions couldn't just run away with it. Others say, or they like to emphasize the philosophical turn with Machiavelli and modernity.

Others say, no, no, no, no, no. As soon as you take the Socratic turn, right, if your idea, if the proper mode of education is to liberalize a young mind, well, then any sort of institution that focuses on education is going to be high in openness. and they're just naturally left-wing institutions. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't tax the endowments or make sure that they're not, you know, hives of anti-American sentiment. But I think this is a very interesting divide on the right right now where they're trying to force, you know, they want to hold these institutions accountable

and they want to ensure that these institutions are not the hives of anti-American sentiment that they've turned into, but the political solution, rests on 2,500 years of history and you have to figure out exactly how to address it. Part of the problem is it, well, of the things you, the third point you made, which I don't think these institutions of higher education are naturally liberal in the bad sense of the term liberalism that we're thinking about. The conversation, the Western civilization is defined. If you want to think about it at its best, it's defined by the conversation between

Socratic wisdom, the Greeks and the Romans, and essentially the Christian West. Right? I mean, so it's it's precisely those things. And they're the ones that created the university in the first place. Right? I think the problem we have today in many ways is we're looking at two things, both of which are true and it becomes a hard question about how to defraud. find your policy or what are you going to do about it, which is to say that one group on the right

is looking at the practical reality right now. These are hives of liberalism. They're opposing free speech. They're doing all their anti-American, everything, you know, then some. Right. We want to destroy them. And I'm not completely opposed to that general idea. But having said that, you don't want to destroy higher education because if you do that, you're actually giving up on the West. So how do you simultaneously destroy the bad parts of it and recover the good of it? Because you can't be a civilized people

and give up on a higher education system. The higher education in its good sense is really the gym of all the Western civilization. It doesn't mean everybody has to go to a college. Doesn't mean it has to be a be-all and end-all. But it is in the hierarchy. of knowledge and learning, there is something about it that it's a great and beautiful good in our civilization. Our objection should be to save that. But how do you do it when the big ones

and a lot of them are following the big ones are not only politically corrupt, which by the way, I don't think is the main problem here. They're intellectually bereft. They're intellectually bereft. they're nihilistic and empty they have lost their mission so I ask about what is Hillsdale's mission or excuse me what is Harvard's mission in the world hedge fund

hedge fund with a school it seems to be having an extremely successful hedge fund with this little thing over here yeah and you know I think you know I don't ever want to speak for the president but it seems like

the administration is pointing in that direction. Also a very prominent Republican governor, governor points in that direction quite frequently, and that is Governor Rhonda Santos in Florida, trying to get rid of the bad and recover the good. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. And so he, in January of 23, brought you on to the board of trustees of new college, which has been a source of big controversy over the past two years. I mean, you guys kind of take the Javier Malay approach when you get in there. Afwera.

Left-wing professors seeking tenure in these departments that, as we talked about, seem antithetical to education in the first place. Gone. Some of these gender studies departments. Gone. Take us inside that process. What was that like? What do you think of DeSantis' efforts? Well, so that's why I said earlier.

And I'm not completely opposed to destroy those of these institutions. But the point is you've got to battle institution by institution. One of the reasons why for a long time, and I actually still think, generally speaking, this is the key to the higher education problem, are governors. Because governors and governors working with their state legislatures control the public university systems in every state. And that's where the big goings on are occurring. The problem here are not the small private colleges, right?

We should be trying to save those and helping them however we can. Because in the long run, it's going to be because of some little, these little Christian colleges all over the country. That's where your future is. The Harvard's of the world, yeah, we should tax them. Deloise things make it much harder for them. But it's kind of a different type of thing. But where's the real battle over education occurring?

I think it's in state public universities. So, and I have to give credit to. to not only the president, but also a governor like Ron DeSantis, right? He understood that. We've been preaching this for years, decades, to governors. You finally got a governor who understands that he's willing to do something about it. Most governors just appoint people. They appoint donors.

They appoint donors' spouses and the university system just kind of continues. But we have this idea that no, no, we should try to change one. And my hope was that if we did that, other governors would pick up on it. But I think they're kind of afraid of the implications of this. But what you need to do is you'll point a majority on your board. And then that board runs the institution. One of the problems in higher education is that most faculty think they run the institution. It's actually not the case.

The people who have the fiduciary responsibility are the boards. So, you know, we got a majority of the board. And then we've, you know, we're very quickly got rid of a lot of the problems. Yeah, so you open the hood. I mean, what do you find? Well, I mean, so New College was the kind of a poster child of a liberal institution of higher education. The problem is that a lot of it there, when you think about, you know, gender studies or DEI, all these things. That stuff doesn't fit the model of education.

Right? I mean, one of the debates we had about gender studies at the board meeting, I pointed out that Look, the problem with gender studies, you can do whatever you want here, but it's not part of the liberal arts It actually is not an actual part of the deliberative Western history of the liberal arts and it's not a science Indeed, it's anti-scientific about the human body and those kind of things You can have your ideological view, but it's not going to be at this college Doesn't fit here. Well, and that's been in just you. You guys have taken a lot of heat for these actions against DEI and critical race theory.

Not only at New College, DeSantis paired that with legislation against CRT and against DEI that impacted K through 12. And the response from the left was, you know, what about all that academic freedom, which you conservatives have been throwing in our face for years, saying that we didn't have enough conservative professors on staff. So I guess the question is, what is academic freedom properly understood first? That's the big question. And then the second order question is, how do you deal with claims like that when they're forwarded to you? Because I think the American people have this sadly reduced view of what human freedom, of what academic freedom actually looks like. because those terms have been devalued by its political leaders for so long. Yeah, I think part of it is you have to go back to how these terms have been used and understood.

I mean, for the longest time, academic freedom was basically kind of a cover for professors to do whatever they wanted. And this, but that's clearly not the case, right? I mean, you can't have, your tenure does not protect you if you want to advocate, you know, child molestation. right there are there are clearly limits legality for one but in general there are certain moral standards uh and in some institutions like one that i went to i mean even that isn't really off the question is minor's minor attractive but the question is is um the last notion of of of uh you know freedom of speech especially academic freedom is essentially utter relativism there are no standards but there's got to be standards so the only question is who will

who isn't responsible for the standards? Well, at a college, it's a board. If it's a public college, ultimately, it's a board, which is ultimately responsible to the people of that state who fund it. I mean, the notion somehow this gives cover for people to do whatever they want

is not the case. That is, one's free speech in the public square is much broader than your free speech in the classroom. But even in the public square, you can't yell fire in a theater. I mean, there are, there are limits.

Questions, how do you define, define limits? Well, higher education has, if you will, an informal contract, so to speak, each institution with the people it's dealing with, right? It's a relationship between the faculty and the students and the parents to do a certain thing, to educate them. and that school says here's what our mission is, here's how we understand that,

here's the tradition in which we teach, and they're obligated to maintain that mission. That's their market. It doesn't mean they, once you give us your child, we can do whatever we want with them, and we can make them into little, you know, moral ingrates. But if, you know, if that's what some institutions, that's fine, but there's no reason why the public dollar should fund them. There's no reason there's there's there's there's no reason why you can't have limits on where the money goes. It's not their money. They can raise money on their own if they'd like to do that. They wouldn't be a

private institution and and teach about and just you know kind of the university of Nietzscheanism and and utter nihilism. That's fine. Let's see what kind of market they find and what kind of private funding they get for that institution but the the notion that somehow they have the act of freedom somehow requires that the American people public through a public university have to fund that or that somehow uh you know a board at a private institution can't say no that's we think that's beyond the pale we'd like we'd like to close that program down or in our case that gender studies Part of, you know, the heritage of new colleges, new colleges actually originally a private liberal arts institution,

and tactically it's actually the Honors College of the state of Florida. It's actually got a very interesting history, including it was founded in Florida as a institution which would make no discrimination based on race or religion. So we're like, it doesn't fit here. Right. It's not going here. And, you know,

It's funny that you bring that up. A lot of complaints, especially from people of the left, are that all of these public dollars are getting sucked up by big sports programs and all of that stuff. Yeah, they got boosters for those. But where I will say that the sports part comes into the equation and all these different bogus majors that we've talked about is the transformation of higher education into. something of the hospitality industry. Like, I remember when I was touring colleges, they were like, and you never have to do your laundry if you don't want to.

Right. Because we have cleaning ladies, and we have, you know, people who work down at the laundromat, come by, pick up your hamper, wash your clothes, dry your clothes, fold your clothes, and put them right there on your dorm room bed, and you'll never have to do laundry.

And you know, oh, you can eat buffets, everywhere you look. The food, you go to the cafeterias in these modern universities, It's like going to the high-end mall where anything you can pick, any delight you want. Right. And I think the, you know, part of that goes to the, you know, there's so many different problems in higher education. I mean, you know, one is, which we've been talking about is more the philosophical underlying problem, which I think is actually corroding everything. But, you know, to something we have to recognize the fact that higher education, especially the big institutions, state and private, have become themselves. very bureaucratic and administrative, and especially to consent that they're reliant on public

money, they're less and less educational institutions anymore, and they're being driven by other things. Right. It's a four-year vacation. It's a four-year experience. My wife has written about this quite a few times in her writings about the University of Notre Dame, which is the, I think the motto of the College of Liberal Arts there is study everything, do anything.

It's like this sounds like a, this sounds like a cruise line. Right. Well, part of this is, so just think about it. If to make your budget work, you're dependent upon more and more students getting more and more government funding. That means the important thing here is actually not getting choosing a class of students who are ready to learn what you have to teach them. right you're not trying to form a class you're trying to get as many people in those seats as is humanly possible paying as much as as humanly possible and if that means getting more and more you know and so basically it becomes the the the objective becomes how to get more and more people

how to you oh you want a you want new food in the cafe sure what do you want right the other drinking fountains right and then and then of course the other phenomena we have here is it foreign students because more and more they they since they're not getting loans they usually pay 100 percent and so more and more schools but then they become dependent upon that and that it changes the character of the institution more and more the institutions are no longer defined by their mission right one of the great things about hillswood to all to all it's it's folks on its mission yeah yeah this is what we're doing we're doing it's 1844 this is what we're doing we're doing we're doing this kind of education, we're teaching these things, three-quarter of your time is based on a core.

Boom. We're just doing that. That's all we do. But that's the way college always used to be, right? That's Harvard in its day. And it's in its heyday. Now, of course, there's big, bloated bureaucratic institutions that aren't focused on teaching anymore. You're right. It's a four-year experience. Right, right. No, you can go

do goat yoga in the morning and then you show up to your class. And the class is usually about an hour and you're a sophomore and you're probably already in an upper div because all of the quote-unquote core curriculum you've tested out of. The grades don't really matter. So whether you actually know something is not not important. And we're talking about it will help you get a job afterwards. And, you know. But whether we're talking about the over bureaucratization, the hospitality industry, you know, the foundation of all this in this relativist modernism, all of that adds up to the affordability problem. The affordability problem that Americans face with higher education, student debt is real. It is a problem.

I think a lot of folks now, even though a decade ago, 15 years ago, it was kind of nobody decided to question. And everyone decided that government intervention in student loans was going to increase the price. And they thought that was wrong. The conservative movements thought that since the Reagan years. But I don't think a lot of people really thought too hard about whether or not an 18-year-old is capable of making a decision that can put them tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. thousands of dollars into debt. Right. And, you know, I remember, I got very lucky and graduated with no debt.

And I cried when I ended up going to UC Berkeley because I knew it was the right financial decision. I knew it was the right academic decision for me. But at the same time, I really wanted to go to a university that would have put me at least $50,000 in debt every year that I went there. And the fact that I was crying over not graduating with 200,000. thousand dollars right in student debt um i think is is a testament to how a lot of 18 year olds aren't really capable of that decision and all of the adults the adults the adults that want them

to go to college sometimes their parents you know i had good parents who said like 200 000 in debt zero dollars in debt what do you think is the right decision bradley but not a lot of people not a lot of people say that it's it's go to the most prestigious that you can or um you you know, get as many scholarships as you can, sure, but if you need to take out debt, that's fine. You know, you're going to make it back in the first 10 years of your time in the workforce. That's not proving to be true, really, and we'll get to that in a second. But this affordability problem is real. But it's also just kind of a circular problem, right?

I mean, the universities in order to survive want more and more students to go to college, which means more and more debt in turn. And whereas if you really think about it, what do you want? you want to kind of restructure the whole higher education system. Yeah. Which is a practical matter means we should have some, first of all, we're, you know, assuming universities are kind of correctly, reorient themselves and market themselves, you know, correctly.

Yeah. It just feels like usury. Like, it just feels like so many kids that I know. You know, it's kind of taken on its life of its own. And so it's, you know. Taking on debt, if you know you're going into a job or something that you can pay off the debt, right, which is kind of always so much about law school, is one thing. But just kind of blithely taking on debt is makes no sense, given that you're not getting anything for it.

Right. I mean, the real larger question here is, should so many people be going to these institutions? Right? I mean, one of my hopes is that the kind of the breakup or the debates over higher education will lead to a certain diversification of it, if you will. Yeah, there should be liberal arts schools, right? But they shouldn't be dominant. They're going to be rarer. But there should be public institutions that teach some of the liberal arts in which kind of expands the mind, but also just to give you a broad general good education. I remember years ago when I was at Heritage Foundation, we asked at the time, I was working for the policy view of the old.

magazine there. And we would send out these questionnaires or we'd have some clever idea. We'd just send out, ask a lot of people, what do we do about this? And we did one and once and we asked, what do we do about higher education? And we had a bunch of people where. And we sent one to Harvey Mansfield at Harvard. And what would be one thing you would do? And his answer, revive junior college. Which when you really think about it, it was, it was brilliant. In the instance, is absolutely right, which is say that there needs to be an outlet, a place for people to go to get a good education. High school is insufficient for a lot of things. A good high school in the old day was more than most colleges.

But, I mean, there needs to be just a broader range of options. Not everyone needs to go to a four-year school that's charged in these outrageous. amounts. Yeah, you're like the junior college, you have almost like a two-part degree for your bachelor's degree. But also, and then you have all those questions about professions. I'm not, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, a lot of professions can make a lot of very good money. Now, I'm actually in favor of professional schools that actually include an element of what we would broadly call the liberal arts. Right? If you're going to go to your welding school, get a, you know, a degree, a licenseable degree in which you're going to make a lot of money,

it actually is also good that you know how to read and write well and maybe read some great books. That is important of being an educated person in the modern world. But we said that, more options. I mean, today we just assume it's, you know, I go to high school and you go to college and they're all putting their prices up and making more and more expensive. You want a bigger market, and then the good schools will survive. The ones that aren't that good won't. And then I think the public school system, like in Florida, right? Yeah, you should have it.

There's an honors college, but then these other colleges are not that, but they're still broadly good educations. I think we're in a very hard spot to see how you maneuver from where we are now to where you want to get to without a lot of disruption. Yeah. And let's talk about some of that disruption because, I mean, you mentioned it a little bit earlier, the pyramid scheme that is this, you know, in order to keep the pipeline going from your undergraduate to your graduate to your PhD, you produce a lot of PhDs like we're minting PhDs like crazy

in this country, but it's lowering the value of the PhD and then they don't have jobs in the academy. So what do you need to do? You need to keep bringing in students to give these people roles. And they said, whoa, whoa, that's not really sustainable because we want to, one, it's just a matter of geography, like how many, I think Ohio State has 70,000 kids at this point, can it really get to 150,000 kids to keep this thing going? There's only so many dorm rooms. You can only, four is probably enough in a dorm room. That's the geographical constraint. And then the other constraint is prestige when you're dealing with these more elite schools like Harvard, Yale, et cetera. They don't want to increase the number of pupils because they want to really protect

that brand and that degree. And they've decided. They've decided. decided to thread the needle by exploding the number of administrators, right? So I can hire all these people that have graduate degrees or PhDs, I can give them jobs at the university, but I don't actually have to increase the number of students. And that seems like one way that they've tried to solve that problem. And of course, the other way that they've tried to solve the problem is with foreign students. I heard a story from a friend the other day that Singapore, the government of Singapore, will pay for kids seeking higher education in the United States as long as they come back and they serve at least five years in the diplomatic corps.

Right. And there's just something so twisted that these universities would even give these students the time of day. Like, I'm an American institution. I'm here to make sure that I'm educating American citizens. and instead, not only am I going to like bring in some foreign students, give them an American education, hopefully they come out, they love America so much, they want to move here and bring their talents here, whatever. Okay, I can at least somewhat understand that. But to train the diplomatic core of another country that's going to be negotiating with and or against the United States of America seems like a bridge

too far to me, no? Well, yes and no. Your general point I'm agreeing with, but let me let me, me back and put it this way. In the, if you think of higher education, say, in the 1940s, 1950s, even the early 1960s, it understood itself to have a civic responsibility. You said, you know, they should be forming American citizens. I mean, what university today understand itself to be forming American citizens? Right. No, we're going to create citizens in the world. Mind you. Citizens of the world. But this goes back to the philosophical problem.

I mean the, but you know, in the in the 1940s and the 50, that kind of the period of the Cold War and there was still that sensibility in the modern universities. But properly understood the notion that somehow that is also a way to influence the rest of the world is not necessarily a bad thing. This is this transitional problem, right? If I knew that, like for instance, China since a lot of people over here to the American system, if I knew they were coming over and here learning about the West and then going back and that will have an effect on China, that's not a bad thing.

The problem is that we're taking, they're all coming here and learning bad, getting really bad liberal education. I mean, we literally change our curriculums vis-a-vis Taiwan, vis-vis, you know, Tiananmen Square to placate these people and to make sure that the dollars keep coming. Like, Xi Jinping, when he was a student, spent what, six months in Iowa or something? And like, the family that he lived with in Iowa still has contact with him. And, you know, I'm sure that they're a little perturbed by the young man that grew into this dictator of China. But at the same time, like, like, what, you know, this is so busy. No other country does this.

not to the scale that we do no but think about it you know isn't it interesting that we think of all different problems America has and oftentimes our problems are worse

that is the good that is America when it becomes problematic it becomes really problematic right there is something about that we tend to those extremes I mean the Europeans are really

it's kind of a it's kind of a dead civilization when you think about it. It's this recovery problem. In this kind of situation, what do you do? What do you do? I mean, the revival of the West will occur in America, if it's going to be revived. And higher education will have something to do with it. There are a lot of other factors here, but that'll be a component of it. What do you do? I don't think as much as I like a lot of the policies coming out of Washington in terms of going after particulars and changing things and whatnot. I'm not sure it's going to be directed from Washington, D.C.

The things I like most in going on in Washington, D.C. is when they're disrupting things, which is to say, look, if you're getting public money and you're discriminating against certain people, that's a problem. Disrupting or dismantling in the case of the Department of Education. But then how do you do the, where is the recovery going to occur? And I think, you know, one thing I wish we'd have a better sense of is, yes, I think we need to kind of break up the blob, if you will, which is this kind of this monopolistic cartel relationship between federal money and universities and all this kind of saying in the Department of Education. But we should also be thinking about how you then kind of, once you, when you're breaking that up, what do you, how do you restructure a different kind of relationship that actually incentivize? incentivizes it to right itself. Because there are certain things you could do.

I mean, I referred to earlier, we were thinking about these kind of private liberal arts institutions dotted all over the country, Ohio, Pennsylvania. You think of just hundreds of, a lot of they're going to go under because they're going to go broke. But you could change the system through the accreditation system such that these universities could say bundle more easily and save themselves. That strikes me as a good idea.

But you can't do it under the current system because the monopoly powers prevent you from doing that. Yeah. And we just need to think more cradily about how, okay, you're breaking up something up. We know what's bad. We know it's a problem. And the bad things we're either going to, which is what government does, very good at. If it's bad, we tax it. Right?

Or we get rid. Right? We won't break all that up. But how do we change the incentives to try to actually encourage a longer-term process? So, for instance, we just went through this whole debate about the endowment tax. Right, right? The smart thing, first of all, I don't think that endowments of institutions as much as I dislike some of these should be taxed because the power of taxes is the power to destroy. They should be forced to be used for educational purposes and not buying land, you know, apartments, and

Tahiti or whatever. But when you said that, you could take that system and you could have used that tax to encourage institutions to move off of federal dollars, which say the more you remove yourself and the more you don't depend upon federal money, the less your tax is going to be. Oh, that's what we call an incentive. But no, no, no, we don't, you know. I just think there are creative things that could be done here that I think we should be thinking more about. You mentioned you like the disruption.

You mentioned that if there's going to be a revival of the West, it's going to happen here in the United States. And then the other part of that, not only of the administration's efforts to make that happen, to enter the new golden age, is not only to disrupt, but to dismantle. Is the Department of Education necessary to restore the West here in the United States of America? Because the dismantling of the Department of Education, at least in my mind, is a great way to return that power to the states and those actors at the state level that can have the largest and quickest impact on the state education system. It's getting the federal government completely out of the way. Look, there are, if I were looking at the federal government, map out the federal government, although you probably can't map it out because no one knows what it's the extent of its operations. But there are some things that are really crystal clear.

One of them is that the federal government has no authority over education. I mean, that's a state responsibility or a private responsibility through private institutions. So I think you actually have no choice but to get rid of the Department of Education if this is the direction you want to go in. Now, there's certain things the department does that might not be gotten rid of. You can put them somewhere else. Yeah, you go put it in treasury. You might want to keep... People don't understand with the Department of Education.

I'm sorry to cut you off, but they don't understand what the Department of Education actually does. It is not the curriculum creator, really, and it is predominantly a massive financial institution that deals with... Well, but even worse than that, right? It's... The problem with the Department of Education is that over time, it is combined certain things, which you're correct. It doesn't actually do curriculum, but it's like the, it's like the, um, you know, some Italian mafioso operation, which owns like the five or six pieces of the puzzle necessary to get anything done, right?

And they control it such that you have no choice but to do this. Right. There is something about it, which I think is much more nefarious. And education is extremely susceptible to that. And so if you want to revive a market. of education in the college systems, both private and the public schools at the state level, you need to break up that department, break up its power. Now, the part of the, one of the modern problems in modern politics is we think that,

well, if something's not a cabinet, it's not important. It's not a cabinet department. I mean, come on, this is ridiculous. You know, take its part, send them elsewhere. You know, turn it into, if there is. a national office of educational statistics that still exists, fine. Someone's got to collect data or something like that. Okay, fine. But it can't be the notion of a department that somehow directs education, which just teaches people and implies that somehow the federal

government is responsible for education. You want to get it back to the state legislatures and governors and these other institutions who were responsible for K through 12. and public education at the collegiate level. So let's talk about the K-12. And then let, then you all of a sudden you have 50 different places where we can work on, what's the best way to do it? Well, let's talk about the problems with K-12 because you mentioned when we were discussing higher education that part of the problem higher education faces right now. And the reason that we've seen in part prices increase and this ballooning of the hospitality industry, more administrators, yada, yada, yada, is that K-12 just isn't what it once was. and K through 12, while the Department of Education has existed,

has spent tons more money per pupil on the American educational system, and yet educational outcomes have not really increased at all. I mean, I think this is part of the problem with the higher education options, because in Mansfield's response to you, like make junior college great again, that kind of reflects the continuation of that K through 12 system that can prepare you for. On the one hand, on the one hand, there's a connection between K through 12 and higher education in terms of the philosophical problems. And it plagues the whole thing. That is true.

But the dynamics are very different in the different places. In K through 12, in many ways, the answer, the clearest answer, what's wrong with K through 12 is if you look at spending and where money is going, in K through 12 institutions over time. And the federal spends more and more money directly or then through the educational system at the state level and just massive amounts of money going through K-12 education. But more and more money, the number,

the increase is not in teachers, not people in the classroom. It's in administrators and bureaucrats, essentially. That skyrockets. that is to say it's become more and more dominated by kind of theories of education and education thinking and all this kind of as opposed to just the old-fashioned way of finding good teachers paying them well and and letting them teach I mean there are wonderful teachers in this country and and they they are I have great respect for someone teaches fifth grade or whatever it might be, right? I just, I can't fathom, but they're good at it

and they're, you know, how do you, how do you make that better? And the problem is just this bloat that's preventing that from happening, which is why in turn there's a renaissance going on, where? Classical education, charter schools, private Christian schools, all these alternatives. Why? Because they're kind of based on this old-fashioned notion, whether they're Christian or classical or what you just what you find the best teacher you can to teach that subject to that age and you'll let them go and you have you you test them you you you have standards and you kind of And it turns out it works pretty well Government is not good at that this is what why part of the the notion of kind of getting government away from the department down to the state level and from the down to the state level getting it down to the school districts and and and and that kind of thing is is it's no coincidence right I mean the the the local school board

like where I grew up local school my dad was on a local school board for a long time right I mean just these are people in the community who have their kids in these schools so much of modern progressive education the objective was to precisely to centralize it in Washington because that's the way to implement a progressive educational molding of these students. That's not the American process, but also turns out that's not the, that's not just a good process of educating people. Well, and I'm glad that you mentioned that there's so many good teachers in this country because there are.

And I totally understand why it's important to show parents in particular videos of kindergarten or first grade teachers that are flying. pride flags in the classroom and all that stuff. Those, there are Looney Tunes teachers. Let's just for sure. Yeah. A lot of bad apples. But a lot of the pernicious leftism that's kind of inculcated in these schools is not

necessarily a function of the teachers. It's a function of the administrative bloat that you just talked about. And of course, one of the K through 12 administrators' favorite, uh, curriculum pieces of all time is the 1619 project. You, during the first administration, Trump administration, were part of the response to that 1619 project, the 1776 report. And now we're heading to America 250, which the more that I learn about it, the more I feel like it is just the 1776 report put on parade and turned into massive. State fairs in Iowa, for example, all of that type of stuff. First off, let's start with the 1776 report, writing that and the response to this 1619 project

that was gaining so much traction at every level of education. It wasn't just something read in the New York Times by wine moms living in the Upper East Side. It was making its way to the classrooms in Oklahoma and Texas. And it still is. It's out there in a lot of classroom because it's got a curriculum. I mean, the, I'd probably say the, you know, when that first came out and I remember I was, you know, people were asking about it, I was doing some interviews and things. What do you think about this? At first, I thought the 1619 project, oh, this is a debate about history. And it took me a couple of steps to figure out it has absolutely nothing to do with history, actually. Because if it were debate about history, we could talk about the extent to which we should be teaching about slavery and all the problems. in American history and the messiness of it, the compromises and that. But we'd also be teaching about the principles and how it's an aspirational system

that had nothing to do with that. I mean, it's a perfect example of a kind of an intellectual construct from the top down that found, they kind of wanted to go down and get into the, get into the curriculum. So it's about power? It's about political power. and it kind of grows out of the, you know, kind of critical theory movements of which there are different elements. And the point here is not to actually try to find out what actually happened in history or what the truth of the matter is or even have a balanced debate about something. It's to actually form, you know, change opinions about a particular thing in the past in order to affect something in the future.

What the 1619 project wanted to do was have an argument right now about whether or not America is racist. And to do that, they wanted to use the argument of, well, it was always systemically racist. They were going to draw it back in history, but order to fight the kind of the debates. It's a long answer to kind of took me a while to figure that out. But then it really does make sense. That's what it is. That's what it is. That's what it is.

And so in that environment, it becomes a, you know, controversial to kind of go back and try to understand the founding as it understood itself. Which one of the thing is a general rule of history. The first thing we should do, whether we like Jefferson or not, is to give him his due. And what did Jefferson say? What did he think? What did he think he was doing? And then we can kind of make judgments after that. But you don't kind of look back into history with my blinders on, with a preconceivable.

notion and just kind of find things to come out of it. The right does this too, by the way. It's not just the left. But good history should go back, try to understand them for what they understood, what they understood the time, what they thought they were doing, how they did it, what were the good, the bad and the ugly, what are the warts, what are also the great parts about it, and then teach that. And so that's what we tried to do in the 1776 report. But now, granted, it was designed as the opening report, which of what was supposed to be a larger number of other things. It's a short piece that was supposed to be punchy to the point. And we did it in a very quick amount of time.

So there are downsides to that whole process. But it defended the declaration. Because it was a matter of months. But it recognizes that, you know, it has a lot in there about how slavery was the great problem at the center of this. But the controversy, the main controversy, was that it argued that how they dealt with slavery, slavery has to be understood as a compromise in light of a principle, which is say that, yeah, they were trying to create a nation. But in order to do that, they had to get votes and make compromises and whatnot.

But you only understand them as compromises if you understand them in light of what they're compromises. which was the principle of the Declaration, which is at all America cried equal, which becomes the, I mean, it was that principle that was the rocket fuel, if you will, the abolitionist movement. It's what Frederick Douglass looked to. It's what Lincoln looked to. It's what Martin Luther King looked to. It gave rise to the whole civil rights movement. It just kind of, you know, it changes the whole nature of things. But again, it goes back to this larger conversation about how do you understand how do we come to know truth and history and ideas. and how do we look at it? So you put this thing together, I mean, if I remember correctly, it was a matter of months where you had to put this thing together. It was right as Trump was heading out of office the first time, and you're punched. Those other reports, maybe they're going to be forthcoming in the next few years.

Who knows? But this product, with the knowledge that 1619 was actually about wielding raw political power in the moment, is the purpose of the 1776 project to have that type of political power, to wield that type of political power? Part of it is you have to understand that when you're arguing about history, especially in a republic

in which citizens are making their own decisions and ruling themselves, it's always a public debate. right we're not a closed site we're an open site which means we are in americans we just naturally argue about everything and i'm perfectly good with that i'm actually quite confident um and the more i study the more i work on my books and write different things i'm even more and more confident that um yeah let's put it all out there um is it messy yes do they make mistakes yes did they um get everything right no um but uh you know the american

founding is not an activity of political theory and it's not kind of content idealism. These are practical, prudent, careful men and women, statesmen, trying to accomplish some good end for some good purpose. And we have to judge them that way. Now, does that mean we can do better or we can improve on that or we can continue it? Yeah, I think that is the case. But you got to have an honest history in order to get you there. So the 1776 report was especially meant to kind of put a marker down.

What follows after that, these are always, you know, all these questions. But we want to put a clear marker down. No, there is something worth defending about 1776. And I think that's even more and more true as we move towards the 250th anniversary. And I think what we'll see happen, what I'm hoping will happen, which my books are hoping to contribute to, is that the average American, which is not to say all, you know, conservatives or liberals,

but just kind of generally speaking, including a lot of people who are not interested in the politics of it, will kind of go back and study that history anew. Because if you study the history, including its messiness and warts and all, which you see there is actually a pretty amazing story and a story worth defending.

And it's not a matter of perfection, but you might conclude that it's a pretty good country. And there was a, this kind of led to, I think, the 1619 project and all of that led to over the years of the Biden administration, a vibe shift where more and more people are willing to be a little bit more outspoken about their conservative viewpoints, about their pro-American viewpoints. They want to see America make it to 300. And as we head into America 250, I think a lot of people are going to be enjoying the vibe shift that seems like is upon us right now. But even still, a lot of people are going to be asking if we can make it to 300.

Yeah, yeah, which is a fair question. For a lot of reason not having to do with this, but, you know, foreign policy, all things are going on. But one thing I would correct is there is clearly a vibe shift, and I think actually this is one of those moments where it kind of captures the mind and focuses the mind, which is a great opportunity. But having said that, I don't like to put it in terms of kind of conservatism per se, or liberalism for that matter, because we think of those as left, right, and all that kind of thing. I think it is more broadly conservative in the sense of what is it you want to conserve? Right? I mean, and there is a certain sense in which this raises this question about patriotism, which is not necessarily, you know, just a knee-jerk, chauvinistic response, you know, no matter what. But it's kind of, Tugville talked about this kind of sense of there's a reflective patriotism.

There's an instinctive patriotism. I love where I grew up. I love my country. I like my community. my ancestors, my grandfather did this, and there's a pride to that. But there's also this reflective patriotism that's inherent in Americans because we are self-governing. And I think there will be this, what I'm hoping and contributing to is there's this natural sense that schools, parents, people generally, 20th anniversary, I might go back and think about this again. And that natural think about it again, I'm very confident in the sense that if they study it and think about it and read these great stories and these great histories, it's very dramatic and exciting and actually quite wonderful. And I think what this country has done, despite its imperfections, you know, there's a natural, thoughtful and deliberative patriotism, but still a patriotism. It's still a form of love towards something that has done something good and its heart is a good thing.

And I think we'll see more and more of that. Now, is that liberal or conservative? What is it? I don't know. Will it have an effect generationally? It very well might. I mean, I'm old enough. You're a youngan over here.

But I mean, I'm old enough. I was a little kid in 76. And I remember the train went through and you saw the big ships and parades. and I was in college during the anniversary, turn to the anniversary of the Constitution. Those moments bring attention to these things in different ways, different forms. Well, I remember...

It makes a difference. There's an old reservoir and you're on the 91 heading towards Riverside. And there's an old reservoir that is all painted and it's 1776 and all red, white, and blue and it was painted on the bicentennial. It's just this random... They used to...

They used to... A little dam on a reservoir. Yeah. And they... And there was a big effort to repaint fire hydrants. Yeah. So what you still see. And they...

And all these fire hires, all over the country repaid like little colonial figures. Yeah. And I just loved seeing that growing up. And it was like, I always knew where I was. Right. If I saw the reservoir dam painted with the bicentennial. And who knows what type of products or projects are going to come out of America 250.

But you mentioned this reflective, uh, this reflective patriotism. This was your last book, bestseller. We still hold these truths, but you're going to be contributing to hopefully that process for a lot of American people, the American people by coming out with another book called The Making of the American Mind, focusing on the story of the Declaration of Independence. Tell us a little bit about that book. When can we expect it? Yeah, yeah. Well, it's scheduled to come out in December. So we're working on our page proofs and various things right now.

but it kind of grows out of my earlier work and it tells the story, the narrative, of how we got to the Declaration. So it reminds us of all that. And, you know, Adams and Dickinson debating and Jefferson arriving late and George Washington becoming a general. But then it goes through the process

and then goes through the declaration itself. It's a commentary. It goes through it actually pretty closely as a textual matter. Because in the declaration, There's just lots of history and references and things. It's a beautiful document. And then it also tells a story about the people who signed it

and what they then did, which is kind of all forgotten. And Lincoln has a famous speech where we referred to them as Iron Men. They were made of iron. And then they fought in the revolution, what they did, and they gave up their fortunes. So, yeah, I think it's, I'm, I think it's, I'm. I'm trying to write a book, or I think I've written a book, and hopefully other people will find it as well, that reminds them of that and recovers that history.

And in recovering that history, you learn again or you discover again or perhaps learn for the first time how those activities, those actions, the things they did were based on an understanding of self-evident truths. I say in the book at one point that they didn't do this because we hold these, we have some opinions. He said we hold these truths. And they weren't signing a kind of

a personal subjective value statement. This is a real live history that has reminds us of kind of history with actual meaning to it. Lives fortune, sacred honor. Right. Dr. Matthews Pauldi.

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