The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 545. Reaction to Harvard: Scam? | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

Dr. Jordan Peterson breaks down what the media has framed as a battle between Harvard University and the Trump administration—but it's much deeper than that. Peterson exposes the ideological decay at the heart of elite academic institutions, driven by the dogma of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and enforced through cowardice, corruption, and groupthink. From firsthand experience at Harvard, McGill, and the University of Toronto, Peterson connects the dots between academia's collapse and its ripple effect on society. With insights into why DEI statements are eroding scientific credibility, how universities became ideological factories, and why the future of higher education may lie in alternatives like Peterson Academy, this episode is a must-watch for anyone who cares about truth, merit, and intellectual freedom. This episode was filmed on April 30th, 2025. Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy

Hello everybody. So in recent weeks, there's been a well-publicized war between, in principle, Harvard University and the Trump administration. Or at least that's how it's been framed by the remnants, the pathetic and sad remnants of the legacy media, most particularly the utterly despicable New York Times. Now you see this isn't really a war between Harvard, that august institution, and the mega Trump administration. This is a much deeper problem and the reason that it seems to me that you should all know about it is because whatever the universities are doing that's corrupt and appalling spills over into the broader culture in a way that's cataclysmic. The people who end up running everything come from the universities, particularly the Ivy

Leagues, and so what that means is that if those institutions become corrupt, and they have become corrupt, make no bones about it, then everything they feed into becomes corrupt in exactly the same manner. And so now we could be thinking that it's Harvard, that august institution, against the strange mega Trump conservatives, or we could be thinking that this is a way deeper problem that concerns everyone.

And so we're going to investigate that today. I'm going to give you some facts and some opinions, and I'm going to read to you from the New York Times covering this debacle, and also from the Montreal Gazette concerning McGill University in Canada, which Canadians like to regard as the Harvard of the North. Now, you see, I also taught at most of those. I was a student at McGill, and I taught there as a teaching assistant, running my own seminars for my graduate student friends.

And then I worked at Harvard for six years in the 90s when it was truly an outstanding place. And then as many of you know, I worked as a professor for about two decades at the University of Toronto, which has become equally corrupt. And so I know what I'm talking about, or you might make that case, although I suppose there are people who would disagree. So I can't tell you how important this topic is for you to understand, and in some detail. I should also point out that I haven't exactly been sitting around in consequence of believing that this is a vital issue. My family and I, most, my son helped me in the beginning with a broader project in this regard.

And then my daughter and her husband, Michaela Fuller and Jordan Fuller have taken over over the last four years, I suppose, to produce Peterson Academy. And we're trying to bring the best professors in the world to the public stage and To bring what they know to everyone at the highest possible quality and at the lowest possible price Which we estimate by the way at the moment at 1% of an Ivy League education so I I'm putting my money in my time where my mouth is and

You can you can make of that where you will. Okay, so let's delve into this topic. I'm going to do some reading and I'm going to do some opining and well, bear with me. Let's see how this goes. Harvard University is locked in a high-stakes conflict with the Trump administration and conservative critics, centered on accusations of anti-Semitism ideological bias and the role of diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI programs. Let's talk about those for a minute. DEI programs, diversity, equity and inclusion.

It sounds pretty good, you know, diversity, who would be against that? Equity, man, that sounds like a lot like equality of opportunity, although it actually means equality of outcome, and that means that everyone ends up in the same place no matter how hard they work, for example, or how competent they are, which is a hell of a good deal for people

who don't work at all and they're so incompetent that it's a kind of miracle. And then inclusion, well, you know, some people should be included and some people shouldn't be included. And if you're doing something difficult and demanding and goal oriented, then inclusion shouldn't exactly be the principle. The principle should be if you can bloody well do the job, then you should be hired. And anything other than that is absolute nonsense. and that's particularly the case if the way that you define whether something has been inclusive enough, diverse enough, equitable enough is that it segregates people by race and ethnic identity and then makes the case that if there

are any on sex as well and gender as well, and then makes the, and sexual preference for that matter, any idiot group identification category that you can possibly imagine, you make the case that if all those people and the intersection of all those groups aren't statistically represented, statistically represented at precisely the level that a census would indicate that the system is

Systemically Prejudiced. Yeah. Well, so what what are we supposed to believe as a consequence of that? The reason that 90% of people are nurses and 90% of 90% of women are nurses and 90% of Engineers are men is because of systemic prejudice. It couldn't possibly be that women and men are actually interested in other things. Like psychologists have actually been claiming for about five decades, difference in interest between men and women are the biggest differences between men and women. And so the idea that, oh well,

I've talked about the bricklayer problem in many other places, but 99% of bricklayers are men. I don't see the feminists clamoring to ensure that just exactly the same number of women become bricklayers and just the same number of women, for example, are incarcerated in prison. So it's complete bloody nonsense, and it's worse than that because it's radical leftist nonsense that's one step removed from Marxism itself. And so it's not this is not a trivial problem. This is a major problem.

It's dependent on how you characterize human beings at the most fundamental level of analysis. They're even either individuals who you rank order on the basis of competence or they're classified according to the group identity and those are very different worlds and In my opinion, you don't want to live in a world where people are classified by their racial identity That's called a racist world by the way, so When we talk about DEI programs, we're not talking about some goddamn sweetness and light that's doled out by people who have

nothing but love in their hearts. It's a complete bloody scam and it's destroyed many institutions and Harvard is definitely one of them. Okay, the clash. Escalating since Trump's second term began in January 2025, pits Harvard's academic autonomy against federal demands for sweeping reforms with billions in research funding at stake. Yeah, well, Harvard likes to think that what it's pitting is Harvard's academic autonomy against federal demands for sweeping reforms,

but that's complete rubbish as well. Hillsdale College, which is one of the few remaining truly reliable educational institutions takes zero federal money. Now, does Harvard have to take federal money? Well, you know, they have the biggest endowment of any university in the world. I think at the moment, Harvard's endowment, valued at $53.2 billion as of fiscal year

2024, is the largest among US universities. It's managed by the Harvard Management Company since 1974, and it comprises over 14,000 individual funds. So it distributes $2.4 billion a year, which is 1 25th of the endowment. It only covers 1 3rd of Harvard's 6.4 billion operating budget. So it's tax exempt.

That's kind of relevant when you're talking about ideological issues that might be pertinent to political leanings. For example, we'll get into that. It has tax incentives for donations and it issues low interest tax exempt bonds. So, Harvard benefits massively from its favorable tax relationship with governmental institutions, most particularly the federal government.

And so if Harvard has become remiss in its duty to be neutral and truth-seeking, then there's no reason whatsoever to assume that it deserves its favorable relationship with the American government. And you could also make the case as Hillsdale has under particularly under Larry Arne, that any reliance by higher education institutions

on federal funding compromises their essential mission, which is actually what Harvard is arguing right now because Harvard has told Trump, this is the legal arguments that'll start in July, that it's a first amendment issue and that Trump doesn't get to tell arguments that will start in July, that it's a First Amendment issue and that Trump doesn't get to tell Harvard that it has to sort itself out because that's a First Amendment violation. Larry Arne's reaction to that and Hillsdale's refusal to take any federal money was in some

sense a variant of that argument, except in the other direction. Their position, Hillsdale's position was there's no possible way that a university can be reliant on government funding without eventually becoming utterly corrupt. And so, and by the way, Hillsdale is flourishing. And if any of you out there listening are donating money to Harvard or any of the other Ivy League institutions, well, first of all, and thinking about sending your children there, first of all, you could give Hillsdale like a real consideration, both in terms of donations and enrollment.

Yeah, and you could also think about educating your children at the Peterson Academy. It's a hell of a lot cheaper, and the professors are a lot better, and they're not ideologically warped. So that's something. Okay, so Harvard also doesn't really use its endowment to a great degree to fund its researchers or its student costs.

So it relies on $2.2 billion in federal grants and contracts annually. Only 5% of the endowment is unrestricted, which limits Harvard's ability to replace federal funds, for example. Now, let's also point out that the costs to students are extremely high at places like Harvard. So tuition, 2024, 2025, tuition room and board is essentially $83,000, with 55% of undergraduates receiving financial aid.

The endowment funds $749 million in financial aid, but critics argue this is insufficient given the endowment size. Taxing just one percent of the endowment could make community college free for all Massachusetts students. Yes, so that's an interesting little fact. Okay, I've, I've, what? Cynics believe that Harvard has actually become an endowment with a university as a somewhat ineffective appendage. And I think there's some real truth in that. Now, we also have to understand that Harvard

is being used as a test case. There are much broader issues at stake here than Harvard against Trump. Do we think that if you're someone, if you're someone who leans classically liberal or classically conservative, then it's actually Harvard against you. And it's not just Harvard, it's the Ivy Leagues. And it's not just the Ivy Leagues,

it's higher education as such. And so this battle between Harvard and Trump is a battle between the elite educational institutions that essentially dominated the selection of people in leadership positions for the last 50 years and you. And so that's partly why you need to pay attention. The administration has frozen $2.2 billion in multi-year research grants and $60 million in contracts, threatening up to $9 billion in total funding. Harvard's tax exempt status and its ability to enroll foreign students.

So these are pretty severe sanctions that the Trump administration has at least threatened to levy against Harvard. These measures aim to force compliance with demands to eliminate DEI, which we already discussed, audit viewpoint diversity. I don't like that word much, viewpoint diversity, because it allows the progressives to maintain their claim that diversity should be one of the selection criteria for hiring instead of just merit. And also, the Trump administration is trying to force the universities to reform hiring and admissions. Harvard, under President Ellen Garber, we'll get back to him later, has resisted suing the administration in April 2025 I think that's lawfare by the way for violating its first amendment rights and bypassing legal procedures. Yeah, well, perhaps. Perhaps Harvard could just stop taking federal funding and they

could do whatever the hell they wanted to. Garber argues that no government should dictate what universities teach higher research. That's pretty goddamn funny, I must say, after the Biden administration and its insistence that DEI, for example, be prioritized pretty much above all else, not only in teaching, hiring, and research. So that's a complete bloody crock. And it's also the case that Harvard cravenly submitted to all the radical progressive demands that emanated, let's say, from the Biden administration. So that's just a non-starter as far as I'm concerned, at least on the moral ground, on

moral grounds. Who knows what will happen legally? The lawsuit backed by faculty, yeah, we'll see why that is, and other universities marks Harvard as the first major institution to openly defy Trump's crackdown. Yeah, it's not exactly Trump's crackdown, which has also targeted Columbia. There's another institution that deserves to be. Well, let's start with defunded. That would be enough that everybody could attend to it and understand exactly what it's

up to and just how bloody dangerous it is and then defund it. Cornell, a billion dollars, and Northwestern, 790 million dollars. Harvard's defiance is rooted in its massive endowment and prestige, yes, prestige which it earned by the way, first of all by being like, what would you say it was the, it was the prime edifice for the transmission of somewhat hereditary autocratic rights down the generations till about 1960 or so, right? It was an upper-class institution with relatively well socially positioned people enrolled who weren't necessarily drawn from the upper echelons of the cognitive elite The average IQ at Harvard has gone up substantially or at least had between 1960 and 1995 Let's say I don't really know what's happened since then in any case Harvard drew on its reputation as the place where the elite went to meet and rule and then transformed that into and rule and then transform that into a meritocratic selection process primarily based on general cognitive ability which is essentially IQ. IQ is age corrected

general cognitive ability so Harvard selected on the basis for example of the SAT which is essentially an IQ test even though people also lie about that all the time so and further graduate programs they use the graduate record exam, and for their legal programs, the LSAT, and for their medical school, the MCAT, and so forth. These are IQ tests. Make no mistake about it. Harvard was pulling the top percentage or so of high IQ people into their institution, and then advertising to companies who can't use IQ tests because that's against the law, that they were ensuring that their graduates had

the kind of extremely high intelligence that's necessary to thrive at the most competitive levels in extremely complex jobs, as well as the conscientiousness that enabled them and social ability that enabled them to participate effectively in at least a four year degree program. Well, they've mucked all that up since the 1990s. And so this is also partly why so many companies don't really give a damn if you have an Ivy League degree anymore and Harvard has also noted that

because applications to Harvard have plummeted in a precipitous manner, and that's well deserved as far as I'm concerned. Harvard's defiance is rooted in its massive endowment and prestige, positioning it to challenge Trump's demands, where others, like Columbia, have partially complied. Key points. Harvard's lawsuit, this is legal, argues the funding freeze violates the First Amendment and Civil Rights Act's procedures seeking to halt the $2.2 billion freeze. Oral arguments are set for July 1st, 2025. So keep your eyes on that because that's important. DEI adjustments. Well, this is another stack of lies that's so thick you can hardly even

imagine it. So because Trump won and there's a bit of a conservative uprise let's say or a classic liberal uprise because it's not exactly as if Trump and the people around him, many of the people around him are conservatives. 20 years ago, well Trump was a Democrat, so was Musk, and so was Tulsi Gabbard. And so, it's not exactly even conservative, it's just sane people, fundamentally. So now, they've had some success, Harvard and many other universities have started to reconstruct their DEI offices, but basically what that means, and all of you conservative types listening should know this, is that they keep the same people and they give them different names. So for example, Harvard renamed its DEI office the Office of Community and Campus Life. Welcome to Community and Campus Life

at Harvard in April 2025 and ended race-based affinity group celebrations. Well, thank God for that, unless you want to keep all those black people in their own graduation ceremonies where what? Are those at the back of the bus just out of curiosity? Now I should get in plenty of trouble for asking that, but I think it's pathetic and appalling that these bloody universities have race-based affinity group celebrations for graduation, for example.

It's absolutely, it's absolutely appalling. It's appalling. So they renamed it, but that doesn't make any bloody difference because it won't, you can do the same nefarious activity with, under all sorts of different names, and this is part of the problem with the universities. You'd have to fire all the people who are progressive, essentially. And that's not going to happen. Now, and then that, of course, that's going to make you ask how many of them are progressive. We'll get to that. Faculty like Harvard Medical School's George Daly emphasized that funding cuts threaten breakthroughs in biomedicine, AI, and public health.

Yeah, I don't think so. I think most of the breakthroughs in AI are going to come out of Silicon Valley, and probably some out of China too. And in terms of breakthroughs, well, breakthroughs only occur when you have researchers who aren't corrupt, and only when they're publishing in journals that aren't corrupt. But the researchers are corrupt. They're all progressive, or at least they follow the progressive dictums,

as we'll see, and the journals increasingly publish in accordance with DEI mandates. So I think it's time for everybody who's watching and listening to understand very clearly that whatever you might think about the research breakthroughs that the great universities of the United States have historically been making, that those days are probably done.

And the reason for that is because the researchers themselves, in a fit of absolutely craven, pathetic cowardice, decided that they would promote, hire, and publish on the basis of these race, ethnicity, and sexual identity-based categories instead of sticking to merit. And that was true for the small L liberal faculty members, for the progressives, and for the tiny proportion of people that were conservatives.

How many faculty members stood up and refused to write DEI statements? None. Like so few that you might as well just say none. Me, there's some other people too. And that's it. And it cost me my, essentially that cost me my career as a professor. There's no goddamn way I was going to write a DEI statement for a grant. That was never going to happen. So now the researchers whine,

well you know it was the government that said we had to write these DEI statements and all we were doing was following the rules. It's like you, you guys are supposed to be leaders and you're supposed to be ethical and that's why the public supported you. And you weren't leaders. You were craven followers and you violated the public's trust. And that's why Harvard admissions are plummeting and why no one gives a damn that your research funding is being cut. And it does suck because Harvard, for example, and many other universities, particularly in the States, were stellar places, but here we are. Harvard stances have emboldened other universities, with Columbia's acting president adopting a more defiant tone after initial concessions.

How brave can you get now that they have $53 billion behind them? Okay, so on to the New York Times. There's a terrible thing to say. So this is an article by Gina Collatta and Jeremy Peters that was written in May 3rd, 2025, about Dr. Ellen Garber. So Dr. Garber, and I don't know him, and he might be a perfectly fine guy for all I know, and he probably is, I'd probably like him if I met him, though I don't know if he'd like me. But that's beside the point, because we're talking about the institution, and he's required as the head of the institution to act as a

representative of the institution. So we'll adopt that analytic standpoint as we go through this. He is fighting Mr. Trump, I'm reading from the New York Times now, he is fighting Mr. Trump as the federal government tries to strip Harvard of billions of dollars in research funding and its non-profit tax status. Yeah, well, the federal government gave Harvard that, those billions of dollars in research funding and its non-profit tax status, and they are not morally obliged to continue, especially as I said, when that institution has acted in the manner that it has acted, which is so appalling that it's almost incomprehensible, which is why people don't believe it. Dr. Garber has said, I'll paraphrase the article as we go through it, that Harvard has a campus culture problem that needs urgent fixing. Harvard has shut out voices that

many liberals disagree with. He said, it's not liberals, by the way, it's progressives. Okay, so Dr. Garber has admitted that there's some problems at Harvard, but he said this in Washington, the issue for me was not principally whether we had problems that we needed to address. Yeah, that's the problem, Dr. Garber. That's definitely the problem. The problem is the Trump's administration methods, which are growing more aggressive, according to the New York Times, by the day. And no bloody wonder. Last month, Trump officials said they would cut more than $2 billion in federal funding,

etc. On Friday, a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Trump escalated the attack. So that's the threat to take away Harvard's tax-exempt status. Yeah, do it, as far as I'm concerned. Now, to Dr. Garber, defending and reforming Harvard is not a local matter. Americans are questioning a higher education system that many see as disconnected from their values. Yeah, like at least 50% of the population. But it's worse than that because the Harvard faculty, the Ivy League faculty, and the administration aren't just liberal in

the classic liberal sense. That's complete nonsense. They've moved well over into the progressive lane. And even if they don't really believe the progressive shibboleths, let's say, the DEI nonsense, for example, they're not doing that thing to oppose it. So it's not that Americans are questioning a higher education system that many see as disconnected from their values. That's how the New York Times lies nonstop. It's that we'll see. There are no conservatives at the universities. Right.

And so I can tell you some of the stats here. We might as well do a little bit of that now. OK, are we ready? Based on available data from surveys conducted by the Harvard Crimson, student newspaper, the political leanings of Harvard's faculty, particularly within the faculty of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences,

so that's a pretty central part of the university, show a strong skew. Let's find out what a strong skew means. 2023. 2.5% of surveyed faculty identified as conservative and 0.4% as very conservative. Totaling about 2.9% conservative leaning faculty. Over 77% identified as liberal or very liberal, with 20% as moderate. Let's think about that again. 20% are moderate. Okay, 80% of Americans are moderate. That's a good way of thinking about it. 80% of Americans pretty much agree on everything. Okay, that means 20% of the Harvard faculty are kind of like 80% of Americans, whereas 77% of them, the ones who identified as liberal or very liberal,

are like 10% of the American population. And then with regards to the conservatives, there's none of them. There's none. So that means if you're a centrist at Harvard or the other Ivy Leagues or most universities, then you're a Nazi. So, 2022 survey, 1% of respondents identified as conservative with no respondents identified as very conservative. 80% were liberal or very liberal. 21% pretty much the same thing. These surveys consistently show that conservative faculty members make up a small minority ranging from 1 to 3%. Okay, so let's see if, let's think about that for a minute and then decide whether this is Trump against Harvard or whether it's the universities against

everyone. Right? 1 to 3 percent are conservative. 50 percent of Americans voted conservative in the last election. Okay, so that's, you can do the math yourself, right? It's 25 to 1 or 50 to 1, something like that. So this isn't some opinion that the universities have become radically left in a way that is really quite novel now. There were conservative people or at least classically liberal people everywhere at Harvard when I was there in the 1990s. It wasn't a politically radical place. There were departments like English that were infected, so to speak, with the postmodern bug and that were radically liberal, but they were fringe, and now they're not. And then let's talk about the administration.

There's no direct survey data on the political leadings of Harvard's administration. There's more administration than faculty, by the way. Conservative faculty members at Harvard, yeah, all two of them, such as Harvey C. Mansfield, have suggested that the administration is even less ideologically diverse than the faculty. A 2015 Harvard Crimson analysis, and so you can be sure it's much worse than this now, found that 96%, only 96% of campaign contributions from faculty of arts and sciences, faculty and staff, which may include some administrative roles, went to democratic campaigns between 2011 and 2014.

So well, so there you go. Now we can talk about researchers, right? Because those are the scientists, the people who are in the labs, busily pumping out these world-shaking novel discoveries that are then published in the entirely reliable scientific journals and distributed to interested scientists all around the world. Or that's the theory, isn't it? And that was actually true. You know, for most of my academic career, I could be pretty much certain that everything that was published in an academic journal, 90% of everything that was published in an academic journal, maybe even more than that, was at least good faith.

It wasn't true because you can't expect all scientific publications to be true. If 20% of them were true, that would be like something stellar and remarkable. People are going to make mistakes, but you could assume reflexively that if a paper was published, particularly in a decent journal, that you had reason to trust the integrity of the researchers, even if not the truth of the report. And then you had to be a scientist and try to figure out for yourself what was credible and what wasn't credible. And you can't do of the report. And then you had to be a scientist and try to figure out for yourself what was credible and what wasn't credible. And you can't do better than that.

And from, like I started my graduate training in 1985 and I finished my academic career in 2016, so that's 30 years. And for most of that, I was pretty solid in my delight to be not only a professor but also a researcher. It was trustworthy. And then that stopped. And we'll see.

So now we have the researchers and they're winding up quite the storm because Trump is threatening their research funding. And I can understand why because it's hard to get research funding. Academics probably spend a third of their time writing grants, which is also appalling, and also an indication of the corrupting influence of government funding. But it's hard to get research funding, and you need it to run your lab, to hire graduate students, to buy equipment, although at places like Harvard, you know, the endowment could in principle be used for such difficult things. So being hit where the money is distributed is, you know, that's a tough blow. And it does threaten the continuation of the research enterprise as it currently exists.

But this is the point. Since at least the early 2010s, DEI statements have become ubiquitous in academic hiring, promotion, and grant applications, particularly at elite universities like Harvard. Researchers dependent on federal funding, for example $37 billion from the National Institutes of Health in 2024, have dutifully complied, often prioritizing ideological conformity and, let's say, cowardice over merit and bravery, for sure. And so, like, I started to see this about in 2010, where I would write a grant application for National Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Medical Research Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. This was in Canada, but similar entities exist in the US,

and I'd have to write out an ideological belief statement. And I thought, no bloody way, am I doing that? There's no excuse for that. It's completely irrelevant to my stated, to my commitment to seek truth as a scientist and a researcher, and to teach truth to my stated, to my commitment to seek truth as a scientist and a researcher and to teach truth to my students. And so I thought, to hell with you. You need me more than I need you. Now did that spread? No.

The researchers pretty much to a man and woman rolled over and let the progressives have their way with them. And there's no excuse for this. And there's no whining about this now. You made your goddamn bet. It's time to lie in it. So let's document some of that. Early 2010s, DEI statements emerged as optional components

in faculty hiring at universities like UC Berkeley, surprise, surprise, spreading to Ivy League schools by 2015. By 2018, remember they started out as optional, right? Well, maybe we should have some more people of color as our research assistants or our professors. Well, let me tell you, I sat on a lot of hiring committees as a professor, and any person of color who is vaguely qualified,

and I mean vaguely, is going to be snapped up by universities so fast you can't bloody well believe it. And that's been the case at least since the 1980s. And so if universities have been unable to flesh out their quota of racial, sexual identity, and gender proportions, it's because qualified people in those categories simply do not exist. Now, no one will say that, but we'll get back to that

when we discuss McGill in Canada. And that, I'm telling you, this is the straight truth. I sat on lots of hiring committees. If there was anyone who vaguely smacked of minority status in any possible manner, and they were even remotely qualified, they were prioritized over every other candidate. And that goes back all the way to the 1990s, at least, probably before that. There's probably no institutions in the world that have tried to be more inclusive without sacrificing merit until recently than the universities.

And if they're not able to do it, and you think that's a consequence of systemic racism, well then you're one of those neo-Marxist types that really we shouldn't be contending with anymore, especially not in universities. Okay, so back to, and we notice as well, DEI statements are optional in 2010, but by 2018, they're mandatory. And then it gets worse than that. They're not only mandatory, but they're the criteria

by which faculty are now hired. And so we'll get to that, especially in the faculty of arts and sciences and medical schools. So you remember that, by the way, all you people, when you go see a newly graduated doctor, you have no bloody idea if they were selected for merit or on some other basis, and you have no idea if the program that they were trained in, even at an august institution, evaluated them without prejudice for their merit.

So you remember that when you put your sick kid in their hands. I would be very careful about that if I was you in fact I am post 2020 following George Floyd's death DEI requirements and test of intensified Um, it isn't exactly obvious to me that the events surrounding George Floyd Were of sufficient historical importance all things considered so that the world's greatest universities should have reconstituted their promotion, hiring, selection, and publishing criteria. But that is what they did instead of having like an iota of courage. Harvard FAS, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, mandated DEI

statements for all tenure-track hires, evaluating candidates' commitment to diversity alongside scholarship. Well, alongside or prior? We'll get to that too. Grant applications to NIH and NSF increasingly require DEI plans, with 80% of major research universities adopting similar mandates by 2023. Okay, so understand that. So now you have to hire on the basis of race and sex and gender and sexual identity and

You have to promote and you have to publish on those spaces. Okay, and so Well, what does that mean? It means that you've stopped using truth Quality and merit as criteria. So why the hell should you be getting any money now? Let me make another case here, and I know this to be true as well. So I talked to a lot of professors at Stanford, especially at the Hoover Institute, and there were some people in Stanford like Jay Bhattacharya, who's doing quite well now

in the new Trump administration, just as case in point, who stood up against the woke mob in the mid 2010s. And Jay suffered pretty tremendously because of that, but he had a few colleagues around him who stuck by him. And you know, it's possible for the woke mob cancellation psychopaths to go after people one by one really successfully. But if there's like five of you and you're major researchers and stellar professors and you band together they haven't got a hope. And so how many places did that happen at? Well it happened at Stanford. That's one place. And that was also a place by the way because it had the Hoover Institute that had a place where there were

Actually some classic liberals and conservatives. It's not like Jay Baddacherius some kind of Nazi You know, first of all, he's a person of color. And so, you know Obviously should be credited with that for what it's worth but What am I making a case for here? If five of my colleagues with my kind of research background or better had stood together at three universities and told the DEI mob to go to hell, none of this would have happened. And that didn't happen. And that's a illustration of a depth of cowardice

that's so profound that it still shocks me. And those of you listening and watching should have no sympathy whatsoever for what your, the people that you support involuntarily, essentially with your tax dollars did with the responsibility that had been vouchsafed to them, for example, with their tax exempt status. And they bloody well know it too. Harvard, Columbia, the major league universities, they're running scared because they know they

put their foot into it, and they did. They deserve whatever's coming to them. And, you know, in terms of reforming them, how are you going to reform them? 75% of them are progressive. If the problem is the disproportion of progressive ideology and the pathology of that ideology, especially with regards to racial, sexual, sexual preference, classification, and the proclivity to do that. What are you going to do? Are you going to keep those people? And what, give them new positions?

Give them new name, their institutions, something different? The radical left is very slippery with language, to say the least. Property is theft. There's a classic example. You have the same players with different names, they're gonna play the same games. I see no way that the universities currently are salvageable. Hence, for example, Peterson Academy. So, major research institutions require DEI mandates, 80% of them by 2023. 90% of faculty at elite institutions, 90% include DEI statements and applications. So that means, so that means if you're a junior, if you're an

applicant to be a junior faculty member, and Lord forgive you, Lord preserve you if you're not in one of the protected categories huh that's for sure you can just forget it right and so and and that's dead serious the probability that you can be hired at a university if you're a young white male graduate is it's vanishingly small and I know this from personal experience because I had stellar students who were in those categories who couldn't get jobs.

So it's absolutely the case. At Harvard, DEI criteria influenced 70, hiring in 70% of faculty of arts and sciences searches by 2022 per internal reports. Promotion and tenure decisions also weighed DEI contributions. So that's not only a DEI contribution, a statement is not only your willingness to proclaim allegiance to an ideological doctrine. So a belief statement, it's also an indication of your willingness to sell your soul to the devil because you've been told to by an administrator.

Right, so make no mistake about this. This isn't merely political corruption, you know, analyzed from a conservative perspective. I don't like those progressives. I don't like the progressives, the Marxists. I think they're appalling to the core and that their doctrine is genocidally murderous and unforgivable in the same category, by the way, as the Nazi doctrines in the extreme. But even independent of that, I think the willingness of faculty members and researchers to pen these bloody statements,

to say that those were their words, to sign themselves to those beliefs, indicates that they don't deserve public support at all. And I don't think you should send your children to those institutions. They're gone. Just like CNN, just like MSNBC, and just like the New York Times, who we happen to be assessing today. He believes Dr. Garber, he's the new president of Harvard University, we'll get to that too,

why he's the new president. This is genuinely unprecedented, Dr. Garber said. We have so many challenges ahead and we also have so many opportunities. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. This is a time when we should be doubling down on our investments in research, particularly in science. Yeah, Dr. Garber, that assumes that what's happening in those labs is research and science. And by and large, it's not.

We haven't even talked about what's happening in those labs is research and science. And by and large, it's not. We haven't even talked about what's happening to publishing. He believes deep funding cuts would impair the kind of innovative work that has made American research universities the global engine for scientific discovery since World War II. No, not since World War II. From World War II till probably about the year 2000. And that's now 25 years ago. So no, Dr. Carver, wrong.

So the White House has said Harvard should not receive federal money if Jewish students are targeted and harassed on its campus. Well, I think we could dispense with the if personally. So, because that's obviously the case. In the eyes of Mr. Trump, this is classic New York Times, right? Just, you can just, what would you say? This lie should annoy you and demoralize you right to the bottom of your soul.

In the eyes of Mr. Trump and many Republicans, Harvard and other elite American universities have become echo chambers, places where students develop intolerance for political perspectives different from their own, yeah, as if they have their own when they're 18, and shield themselves from ideas they find objectionable. University leaders often say that criticism exaggerates the issue, claiming that critics want to perpetuate woke caricatures of university culture in order to win elections. Yeah, fine, there's four stellar sentences from the lying scoundrels at the New York Times. Let's just delve into this a little bit using some facts in the eyes of Mr. Trump, that mega maniac. Well, we already talked about the fact that 3% at best of faculty are conservative, and either 0 or 1% very conservative,

and that the administration, and there's a lot more people in the administration than there are faculty members, they're even more skewed, so there's that. But let's look at the researchers here. 90% of faculty at elite institutions include DEI statements in applications. Many of them have tailored their research to align with DEI priorities. That means developing studies, for example, on racial disparities. And then let's talk a little bit more about how the researchers have responded to these DEI statements. Candidates with stronger DEI statements, which means more radically progressive and left, and also bigger lies, assuming that they weren't radically progressive left people and just filled these things out because they had to, as seen in Harvard's 2021 hiring of Sherry Charleston as its first chief diversity officer, despite plagiarism allegations. A high-profile example from UC Berkeley, that hellish joint. A high-profile example from UC

Berkeley's Life Science Initiatives 2018-2019, Faculty Search demonstrates the impact of DEI statements. In this initiative, 600 out of 900 applicants, about 70 percent, were eliminated. Hear that? Eliminated. That means their lives were altered severely. That means that despite having worked like mad as high school students and undergraduates and graduate students, having put in 20 years of work into being educated, they were eradicated from consideration for a top tier job, regardless of their bloody research prowess, that's their publication record, which was the only true record of their capability. 70% of them were eliminated from consideration, stamped, gone, because their DEI statements didn't what? Didn't please who?

Exactly. How about the radical progressives who swarmed because they weren't doing their research to the bloody hiring committees? How about that? 70% were eliminated in the first round based solely on their DEI statements. So let's say you have some poor character who's got 20 publications when he emerges from graduate school. That's a stellar record. In fact, that's a record that's much better than Claudine Gay, who was made president of Harvard University, for example. So we're talking about people whose research records

exceed that of the woman who was promoted to president at Harvard. Those people aren't going to be considered for a position at Berkeley and other high-level institutions because their allegiance to political belief was deemed improper or insufficiently craven. So don't tell me this is a bloody Trump problem. That's such a lie. The search committee used a rubric that prioritized candidates' knowledge of DEI, track record, and plans for advancing it. Right, oh yes, what, huh, the last time I looked at the Engineering and Research Council grant application in Canada. It's frequently asked questions. It said this, if you have a lab that's notable for its diversity, which means if you've been

as craven as you possibly could have in following every single bloody dictate that we imposed on you in the last 10 years, don't just rest on your laurels because no matter how good a job you've done in the past, you could do better in the future. And so we don't want to see that you're already running a lab where minorities of the multiplicitous form that we insist upon existing are overrepresented. No matter how well you've done, that's not good enough. And your bloody DEI statement better indicate that no matter how craven you've been in the past you should be a little more craven in the present. Sickening. Sickening. This case highlighted in City Journal and National Association of

Scholars reports suggests DEI statements can be a significant gatekeeper. Yeah, well, there's something damned by faint praise. Faculty promotions increasingly hinge on DEI activity, sidelining traditional metrics like publication impact, which is really the metric that scientists have decided on over 100 years, best indexes there, research productivity and ability. That's merit, merit. That's the Merit Garber's talking about when he said that American universities led the world,

which they did in scientific research. Right, that's publication impact. Make no mistake about it. You prioritize anything over that, assuming the journals aren't corrupt, and they are corrupt now, so that's also a problem, then you're making everything worse. And maybe not just worse, maybe like failure worse. Because you don't go from great to mediocre. You go from great to useless.

There's no intermediary slide. And so if you're not great as a scientist, you're basically useless. A 2023 Nature Study found 40% of sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics faculty, that's the hardcore scientists, felt DEI overshadowed research quality. Right. So racial identity, sexual identity, sexual preference, etc., etc., gender, choice, etc. gender, choice, all these idiot group categories, now overshadows research quality. Just think about that. And then think about whether that's something you want to devote your tax money to. Now, publishing. So when you do a scientific paper, and maybe that takes you five years, it depends on the complexity of the problem, and you're working on multiple issues at the same time. So you have a steady publication stream. If you're

a great scientist, several a year. If you're a good scientist, at least one a year. You publish them, journals are ranked by quality, and then scientists evaluate their own papers to see when other scientists bothered to pay attention to the publication and cite the paper. So one of the ways you determine whether a paper is impactful is by how many people refer to it, right?

Logically. Okay, so that's the publication impact. So journals, including those tied to Harvard, prioritized DEI-themed papers. Okay, so now think about that. You won't get hired unless you're part of the right group and the groups multiply endlessly. You won't get promoted if you're not part of the right group.

You can't submit a grant unless you're willing to abide by the dictates and publicly state it that would prejudice the selection against you even if you're not in one of those favored groups. And then now you can't publish, you can't do research on any topic that isn't racially, sexually or otherwise group indicated. And if you did do that research, you couldn't get published. So now you tell me, oh, journalist from the New York Times, how that's not 100% rotten from the bottom right to the top, and how you could possibly fix that.

Journals are skewed, the promotion is skewed, the research agenda is skewed, the grant application process is skewed, the hiring process is skewed, right? And then the administration is even more skewed. So how do you fix that? How do you fix that, folks? There's no fixing that. Not as far as I can tell. There's replacing it. That's why we made Peterson Academy. Now, I have no idea if that's going to work, by the way, right? Because it's not easy to replace august institutions.

I don't know if there's a market for lectures. We're doing quite well with our new initiative, but it's long term success is as unlikely as the long term successes of anything new. Researchers have widely complied with DEI requirements due to funding pressures. Yeah, right, due to funding pressures. Researchers have widely complied with DEI requirements. Why? Because they're cowards. That's why. It's as simple as that. and maybe you think that's too harsh You know these scientists protected in their Ivy Towers Had to contend with political pressures. They'd never faced before Fair enough, you know, I have some sympathy for that. But listen to me

There's one thing you're obligated to do two things you're obligated to do if you're an actual academic and a researcher You're required not to lie when you speak especially not to students and you're an actual academic and a researcher. You're required not to lie when you speak, especially not to students, and you're required not to lie when you write, and you're particularly required not to lie when you write. And when you fill out a DEI statement, especially one that passes muster, and you're not a radical progressive who believes that everyone in the world should be categorized by their intrinsic group identity, which is how we used to define racists, by the way. If you fill out a statement that indicates that you're one of those people, and you're not, you are signaling your willingness to lie with your written words at the deepest

possible level of commitment, at the level of your career. Think about that now. How can you trust anything that anyone like that does? Written. How do you know that they won't sacrifice everything for their career, for example? The pursuit of scientific truth. They just bloody well demonstrated that that's what they would do and right at the initiation of their career or when they're being promoted or when they're being published. And what do they teach students? Exactly the same thing. They're lying. They're betraying the trust that's been placed in them. They're violating

the spirit of the institutions and they shouldn't get any money. And it's not Trump. So let's leave that kind of idiocy behind. Faculty report pressure. Pressure. What the hell does pressure mean? To tailor research to DEI themes. No one had a gun to their head, folks. And there are worse things than losing a job that you only have to keep by lying. Faculty report pressure to tailor research to DEI themes with 40% of STEM faculty feeling DEI overshadows research quality. I mentioned that before, per a Nature, 2023 Nature study. Nature at one point was the world's best scientific journal, by the way. Okay, back to the New York Times with that little side venture into the facts that they lied about. At the same time, many university leaders also worry

that Americans have lost trust in academia, and no longer see as much value in a college education as they once did. So let's be a professor here for a minute and assess that sentence for quality. At the same time, many university leaders also worry. Okay, well what do you worry about? Well, often you use worry when you're describing, like your neurotic grandmother being concerned about things that really aren't factually true. Okay, but university leaders aren't worried. They know that Americans have lost trust in academia

and they know that there are reasons for it. So they're not worried. So that's the first lie, that Americans have lost trust in academia. No, Americans haven't lost trust in academia. That's the second lie. Academics have violated the trust that Americans had placed in them. And that was trust that was hard won, because ordinary people don't necessarily trust intellectuals,

and no bloody wonder. And so, it isn't that Americans have lost trust in academia, it's that academics have lied and become corrupt. And the New York Times, when they're reporting on this, well, let's count the lies in the sentence. So far that's two. And no longer see as much value in a college education as they once did. That's the third lie. There were only three factual statements in the sentence, so three lies is actually pretty

remarkable. Americans no longer see as much value in a college education as they once did. Okay, well, there isn't as much value in a college education as there once was. First of all, they're not as rare. Second of all, as we've already pointed out, the colleges are no longer evaluating teaching or research or student application on the basis of merit. Then we have the additional problem that the corporations, by and large, and the general public have noted the radical decline in trustworthiness and quality,

and no longer regard degrees as a marker of integrity and ability. And that isn't because Americans no longer see as much value in a college education as they once did. It's because there is no, there is no longer as much value in a college education as there once was. So let's rewrite the sentence. At the same time, many university leaders have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that their institutions violated the trust of the Americans and the rest of the world that they were sworn to serve, that bestowed on them certain advantages that were granted to them by public trust. Americans as well have realized that there is no longer as much value in a college education as there once was and are acting in accordance with that and

college leaders have no idea what to do about that. Yeah that's that's a much more truthful statement. About a third of Americans have little or no confidence in higher education. Right 33% little or no confidence according to a Gallup poll published last year up from 10% a decade earlier. Yeah, those Americans, eh? They're a sad bunch. You violate their trust and they notice. We could put that in the New York Times article too.

Okay, Stephen Pinker weighed in on this. Stephen Pinker is a classic liberal, by the way. He's also a Canadian, and he's been adamant in his stance against the woke mob at Harvard. The last few years have been a wake-up call, said Dr. Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor who's warned that his university and other elite institutions have devalued intellectual and ideological diversity at considerable cost to their reputations. See, that's also a lie. It isn't that the university and other elite institutions devalued intellectual and ideological diversity. It's

that they stopped doing their job properly. That's another lie. He praised Dr. Garber for recognizing what many other leaders have not, at least in public. The Trump administration had not made an unreasonable request when it said Harvard must consistently enforce its rules against disruptive demonstrations and swiftly punish anti-Semitic harassment. That's a whole other issue, right? The absolute craven cowardice and complicity of the universities, especially the big ones, with regard to these unfathomably corrupt demonstrations that emerged all across the West after October 7th.

Demonstrations that were so corrupt that they were praised, and the university's role in promoting them. They were praised by the Ayatollah Kamani himself directly on X. There's the only real, I hate comparing anything to Hitler, but can you imagine in the 1930s when the anti-Semitism rose in Germany that there were protests on American campuses in favor of it and that Hitler praised them, that's pretty much the situation. And so Harvard's making a big case that it's the anti-Semitic allegations that are behind the reaction of the Trump administration, and that's only partially true.

It's part of the problem, but it's by no means all. So the New York Times also points out that the Harvard Crimson had published an essay suggested the change to diversity programs might be politically expedient for now, but it will not solve Harvard's public relations crisis. The way to win against authoritarian attacks isn't by prioritizing optics, it's by standing up for our values. Yeah, well, we know what Harvard values are. So, okay, let me turn to something else here. Well, I should tell you why I want to talk about Canada. That's because

the same idiocy that permeates the American higher education academies also permeates Canada, and I found an indication at McGill that makes this case quite Profoundly so if you're a medical school or any other professional school training engineers training teachers training massage therapists training nurses training psychologists the programs that teach you at a university Have to be accredited before you can be granted a degree that can then be turned into a profession. Okay, so you take the courses, you get your degree, then your turn and whether the program can give you your degree is judged by accreditation authorities.

The colleges, the professional colleges colleges for example, or the professional organizations. There's various ways this can be done. Now for a long time those accreditation agencies focused on merit, but they don't focus on merit anymore because they've been captured. They focus on DEI. Now McGill University at which is Canada's Harvard, let's say, and it was a very good university, despite the attempt by the Quebec Separatists to destroy it, essentially, for like 40 years because it was English language, even though the rest of their universities basically suck, to put it bluntly.

Harvard, or McGill, has a great medical school. Now, it has to be accredited. So here's some fun. In 2017, McGill's medical school ran into trouble with the accreditors. Well why? Well, this is from CBC News, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is Canada's state-run media, right? News, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is Canada's state-run media, an appalling organization, which was once also a reasonably reliable institution.

So McGill's medical school was put on probation by its accrediting body. Well, why? Progress is minimal and below average for Canadian medical schools when it comes to the recruitment of Indigenous students. It also notes that Black and Filipino people are underrepresented in relationship to Montreal census data. Low parental income and education levels are underrepresented as well. And McGill was cited for lack of progress recruiting students from rural backgrounds. McGill's Dean of Medicine promised to improve his faculty's diversity. Well, that was his

Dean of Medicine promised to improve his faculty's diversity. Well that was his mistake. Another coward, craven, sad, ideologically captured, weak, spineless lack of leadership. Okay, and the letter from the accrediting agency continues, it is unclear what actions have been taken to improve diversity and leadership and little progress is reported in improving levels of participation by women and Aboriginals in leadership positions." Okay, so this is what you have to understand, although perhaps you don't want to. The competition for qualified so-called minorities is insanely intense. Now, are the universities supposed to hire people who can't do the job?

Well, obviously, as long as they fit the right bloody racial category, sex category, sex proclivity category, get those LGBT two types in there, whatever the hell that has to do with scholarship and teaching. There aren't, the people don't exist. The people don't exist. Do you understand that? You have to radically lower your criteria

in order to meet the mandates, in which case your quality will radically and permanently dip. And if you're training physicians, or maybe air traffic controllers, there's another group to think about. Maybe you don't do that. Maybe you'd select people for how well they do on the MCAT, right, or on the SAT. And if you can't find people who do what in the top 5% if you're a great university, then you don't take them. Because if you do, they

hire people who are even worse, and then you're screwed, really. Then your institution collapses. And that happens very quickly. How many places are there in the world with great university and professional institutions? How many do you think? There are 24 free Western democracies in the world out of 200 countries. So that's how rare it is.

And it took hundreds of years to build those institutions and they can be destroyed at a moment's notice. And that's what's happened. So McGill, in an interview with CBC, remember this is from 2017, Dean of Medicine said, David Eidelman said, a number of measures have been put in place to try to recruit more minorities. The university has hired a director specifically charged with improving diversity. There's a new indigenous health program targeting students from indigenous communities. McGill, moreover, is trying to improve rural recruitment with its Gatineau campus.

Eidleman said all medical programs struggle with recruiting minorities. It's hard. Why? Because, in order to get into medical school, you need to have very high marks. And then he does this. Then he does this. In general, it's easier to get really high marks when you come from a privileged background. Yeah, well, you know what?

It's not that goddamn easy. You know, and the marks either mean something or they don't. And if marks don't mean anything, then why the hell do we have universities? So this this statement from Eitelman, it sums up the pathology of the universities and their craven administrators in a nutshell. It's hard because in order to get into medical school, you need to have very high marks. Well, maybe that's because we want smart doctors, eh? You know, it's a possibility. And in general, it's easier to get really high marks when you come from a privileged background.

Yeah, you know, I don't think it's that easy. You son of a bitch. The University Medical School, the oldest in Canada, was put on probation in 2015, a major blow to McGill's reputation. It risked losing its accreditation after an inspection found the undergraduate medical education failed to meet 24 of 132 required standards. Well, there you go. So that was 2015.

So let's go to 2025, shall we? April 25th. For the second time in a row, McGill University's flagship program in medicine, the best medical school in Canada, has been put on probation by Canadian accreditation authorities for another two dozen clearing deficiencies. Same as in 2015. You can bet McGill bent itself backwards, hiring all the right lefties to run their bloody diversity programs and didn't make a bit of progress. Why? How about because it's impossible? How about that?

Yeah, well, it's not impossible if you're an idiot accreditor and you think you can make things happen in complex institutions by waving your magic fairy wand. And this is the Gazette. Even as McGill moves to address these shortcomings, it is closing its Social Accountability and Community Engagement Office, which was set up after McGill's medical program was first placed on probation in 2015 to address DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion. The Gazette has learned, and this shows you the state of newspaper journalists as well, the three individuals who ran that DEI office in the medical faculty, all of whom are members of racialized minorities, are being replaced by a single person who

does not come from such a minority background, and who will be overseeing diversity initiatives as Vice Dean of Education and Community Engagement. If you don't think that's funny, you've got no sense of humour. It's damn black humour, though. McGill's decision to close its dedicated DEI office occurred right after accreditors wrapped up their interviews and visits to the university in January. Just think about that. McGill was put on notice that unless they advanced their DEI programs, they were going to lose their bloody accreditation. That meant they wouldn't have a medical school, and the consequence of that 10 years later was that they hadn't made a bit of progress, and everything they did failed so

utterly cataclysmically on the DI front that they actually closed their office. You think about what kind of failure that indicates, right, in the face of this absolute impossibility. Technically, McGill's marquee medical program is still accredited despite his probationary status. But the news could potentially affect McGill's number one ranking of all medical schools in the country by McLean's magazine in Canada that's kind of like Time used to be in its next annual survey. So what can I say? Well, here's something else that's happened and Trump actually moved to do something about this with an executive order earlier this month.

The accreditation agencies that determine whether the professionals who serve you are competent have become more corrupted even than the universities. So you know, with Peterson Academy, we're wrestling with the issue of accreditation because our courses aren't transferable to universities. But increasingly, corporations don't give a damn if you have a university degree, and no wonder. And it might even be the fact that being accredited now is an indicator that you're ideologically corrupt because in order to become accredited, you have to follow all the accreditation dictums,

and they're all the same dictums that destroy the universities. So what we're hoping with our initiative is to go direct to corporations and to say, we can screen candidates for you for merit and we won't educate them to be narcissistic, woke troublemakers who think that the way you improve the world is by protesting, which is essentially, definitely what they're taught in university. Leslie Fellows is Dean of Medicine, by the way. Fellows insisted, however, that Miguel has made tremendous progress with its medical

curriculum since 2015. Yeah, I bet that's progress. When you dig down below the kind of headline on the outcome, you can understand better the progress that we have, in fact, made over the last 10 years. Yeah, progress. All right. According to the New York Times, Trump's at war with Harvard. But the New York Times is capable of lying three times in a single sentence that only

contains three hypothetical facts. So it lies all the time. This is not a war between the world's best university, Harvard, and mega Trump. First of all, it's not the best university in the world anymore. I don't know what might be the best university in the world anymore. It's hard to say. Oxford's pretty shaky. Cambridge is pretty shaky. Columbia, less said about Columbia, the better. You can tell Harvard's not the best university anymore because people aren't applying to it. And donors have decreased the degree

to which they're willing to support it. And there's gonna be more of that along the way. For a long time, one of the highlights of my life was the fact that I had taught at Harvard, that I was selected on the basis of my merit for a position there. And now, you know, it's not something I bring up. I never did bring it up, you know, except when it was appropriate, but I'm much less likely to do it now, as I'm less likely to presume that my status as a PhD is a meritorious designation. And that's a sad thing. I loved working at Harvard. I thought McGill was great.

And the University of Toronto served me pretty well for about 15 years. I'd say none of this with any pleasure. And I'm sorry also for a fair bit of irritation, but it's so frustrating to see this. It's so appalling. It's so sickening, it's such a betrayal of trust. I saw nothing but cowardice from my faculty compatriots, from the administration, from the research. I really expected better from researchers than, say, my compatriot psychologists, professionals. They were so cowardly. A few of us could have banned together at any time and brought all this nonsense to

a stop. A hundred would have done it, or the ten that so famously would have stopped God from destroying Sodom and Gomorrah. It would have just taken a very few people and they didn't show up. And so, whatever Harvard gets from the Trump administration is a small fragment of what they deserve, and I would say that is true, no matter how harsh the treatment. So the Trump administration has also, at one point, detailed out some tentative plans to deal with the situations at the university, to replace them in some ways, particularly given the impossibility of reforming them, given the overwhelming proportion of progressives among administration and faculty.

Back in 2023, he published as part of Agenda 47, a plan to take billions and billions of dollars collected by taxing, fining and suing excessively large private university endowments to create the American Academy. We haven't heard much about the American Academy in recent months. Trump's plan was to have the American Academy gather, quote, the highest quality educational content covering the full spectrum of human knowledge and skills and make that material available to every American citizen online for free." Okay, so look, when that happened, we at Peterson Academy thought that the Trump team had been

preusing the Peterson Academy website because he used essentially the same name and made essentially the same claims. Now I really have no idea if that's true. And I actually had a chance to ask Dr. or Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in the few minutes I got to talk to him about his American Academy plans. And he said at that point that he didn't remember making the promise. And so, I don't know if he meant that or if he didn't know who the hell I was and what the hell I was talking about But in any case it was a good idea and that's exactly what we try to do with Peterson Academy and there are other Institutions that are emerging that are trying to revitalize the university in a more

Traditional form right there's the University of Austin at Texas, which is up and running very expensive process quarter of a billion dollars to get the The University of Austin at Texas, which is up and running, very expensive process, quarter of a billion dollars to get the institution up and running in its nascent form. But stellar students, I was there a couple of weeks ago. There's Ralston College in Georgia, in Savannah, beautiful city. It offers a master's program that is accredited.

You can learn to speak ancient and modern Greek in a year and to familiarize yourself with the basis of the Greek basis of Western civilization. And there's institutions like Hillsdale that I mentioned earlier. And so there are some promising possibilities, and we'll see how they turn out. I think what I'm going to do on the Daily Wire side is continue my analysis of the university situation. And so if you're interested in a more in-depth analysis, a continued analysis of the problems with higher education and the potential solutions, then give some consideration to joining us on the Daily Wire side.

The Daily Wire makes these podcasts possible at their high production level and on this continuing basis. And they've been a very positive advocate for free speech and the dissemination of information like this over the last few years. And you could give some consideration to throwing some support their way if you're interested in material like this. In the meantime, thank you all very much for your time and attention. It's much appreciated. I hope that this relatively emotion-laden analysis of the university situation and the New York Times' craven coverage of the

battle between Trump, so to speak, and Harvard has been useful and informative. It's a very, very important issue and it would be best if people actually understood what was going on. Thanks for your time and attention. Bye-bye.