The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Heather Mac Donald | Part 1 of 2

Episode Date: September 19, 2021

This is the first part unique conversation with journalist and author, Heather Mac Donald. Heather doesn't mince words, but Lawrence and she don't agree on everything as you'll see during the podcast. Nonetheless, these conversations are critical in fostering an open dialogue as we try to come to a deeper understanding of the world around us. Stay tuned for the upcoming second part of this episode, where Lawrence and Heather revisit their earlier discussion for updates, clarifications, and further discussion around current events as they unfold. You can show your support and access exclusive bonus content at https://www.patreon.com/originspodcast Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, I'm Lawrence Krause and welcome to the Origins Podcast. Today's podcast is unique in our experience for a variety of reasons. My guest, Heather MacDonald, is a very provocative and interesting journalist. And we originally had a conversation in her apartment in New York City almost two years ago. And the issues she was discussing at a time based on her book called The Diversity Delusion of that time were provocative as they are provocative today but at the time may have seemed outrageous to many people and they still may to some people but what's been interesting is in the last two years the public conversation has shifted

with the development the popularization of critical race theory and and and and discussions of wokeness and in in popular literature and and mainstream magazines some of the issues she's she raised then are a little more common and may seem a little less outrageous, though I suspect they'll still provoke and disturb some people, but that's okay. But because that was recorded a while ago, what we decided to do was do a second discussion,

more recently by Zoom, where we could update some of those issues. So this is a two-pronged interview spanning almost two years, one in person, recorded in three cameras and the other by Zoom. And I hope you'll find both discussions interesting and the updates particularly interesting. Heather doesn't mince words and she and I don't agree on everything as you'll see, but I think it's very important to have these conversations with people,

even if you don't agree with them, especially in fact if you don't agree with them. And so this is another example of the kind of dialogue that I think should be happening. Plus I think several issues she raises are very important and need to be discussed in public. So I hope you enjoy the upcoming. interview or discussion. They're not interviews, their discussions. But let me also say that for our viewers on YouTube, about 85% of our viewers are not subscribed to our channel. It'd be great if you could subscribe to our channel. And if you want more content and want access to things like live Q&As with me, please consider subscribing to our Patreon subscription service where you can

watch these things, in fact, without any additional advertisements as well. But we also have live Q&As and other things. And it helps support this podcast, which is part of a nonprofit organization, the Origins Project Foundation. So please consider either subscribing to YouTube and or subscribing to Patreon. And if you want, if you're a Patreon member,

you can write in about issues you want to discuss people you'd like me to interview or dialogues we'd like to have and make it a little more interactive. and we're hoping to try and make this more interactive all the time. Having said all that, I hope you enjoy the upcoming podcast here with Heather McDonald. Well, Heather McDonald, thank you for letting us invade your personal space here. Well, it's been interesting watching the setup. It's an impressive crew you've got here.

They are. They're always behind the scenes, but they're impressive behind the scenes. I look like a studio, a Hollywood studio here. It's right. It's actually all fake. It's just a backdrop. But here we are. And I want to, first, this is going to be a fun conversation for so many reasons, in my opinion. But we come from opposite sides of the political aisle in principle.

Don't be so certain. Well, we'll see. And that's great. And this is an example of actually talking to people you don't always agree with about everything. It's a new concept. And I applaud you for, in your writing, which I've been a big fan of, for sort of, confronting what you might call much conventional political wisdom. And you do it with actually facts, which is really refreshing, as well as cogent arguments.

And so, as I say, I don't agree with all of them, but I really applaud your lucid and courageous efforts. Well, thank you. I appreciate you then keeping an open mind if we do come from polar opposites, which we'll discover. I didn't realize that. So now I'm going to be on my guard here. I'm a left-wing. Traditionally. And academic, of course.

Yeah, of course, exactly. We all are. And the, I should also, in the spirit of the current times, give a trigger warning to the people watching and listening that we're going to talk about difficult concepts for some people to hear, and they shouldn't be, but they are. And we're going to push people's buttons. And that's a good thing, in my opinion. And if you don't like having your buttons pushed, it's time to push the button and listen to something else right now. Just remarkable that you have to give that, though. I frankly do not believe that, I don't take it seriously that people are truly emotionally traumatized by hearing a discussion of something they disagree with. I frankly think it's fakery. It's a way of shutting out trying to shut down ideas you disagree with. But the idea that people actually feel emotionally, affected by a perfectly rational discussion to me is preposterous. But maybe I am completely out of touch. Well, I think we find that what people believe they feel makes them feel a certain way.

And if people have been convinced that they should feel that way, we'll get to that, actually. Because I think, I mean, much of the points you're trying to raise, many of the points you're trying to raise are just about this. But first, you know, this is the origins podcast. So I want to talk a little bit about your origins, how you came. to the point to be escorted by police off a campus, or at least protected by police from students. So let's talk about your background a little bit. How did you, what was your interest in and why,

ultimately, what I really wanna focus on is your recent book, which I think is a masterpiece called The Diversity Delusion, How race and gender pandering corrupt the university and undermine our culture. But how did you get there? I don't know if you wanna know politically intellectually. I began as a default liberal on the West Coast, you know, which is what one is. I have to say, and I don't really mean this sounds condescending, but it's what the air one breathes. And so

you have to work your way out of that position if one is going to do so. I was, I loved school. I loved studying. I loved reading literature. And I was fascinated by language. And in high school, I adored Faulkner, I adored Moby Dick, I adored language that was pushing the envelope, was trying to create something wild and new. So when I went to college, I was a prime sort of target for this mad literary theory that was reigning at Yale, which is where I went to undergraduate at the time in the 70s. and it embraced a set of propositions that I now look upon as obviously, empirically wrong, things like language always breaks down. There is no possibility of a successful communication.

Every book is about its own failure. Literature is not, you may think it's about trying to describe the agony of a first love or the vicious. social gossip in a tiny 19th century town. No, that's not. Wrong. DeMond and Paul DeMond would tell you it's about its own inability to mean. And the most absurd claim was that the human

self is nothing more than a trope of language. There is no self. We are simply a play of linguistic science. I bought into this... Which, by the way, for people who weren't subjected to that nonsense was called deconstructionism. Deconstruction, post-structuralism, right. So I

was uncritical. I It felt like the hottest thing going. Yale had this feeling of being at the cutting edge intellectually, and this was a secret knowledge. It was a secret society that allowed you to feel superior to those unwashed who actually thought that you could read a book and understand the author's intent or that, you know, you could make a contract and it would actually work to bind the parties.

So I got sucked into this. I wasted far too much time in the Sterling staff. of Yale's main library slogging through Jacques Derrida's La Mietalche because I suspended disbelief and I revered my fact, my professors, they seemed the source of knowledge. And so that, I wasted far too much time reading theory instead of great books, which I did fortunately at the time still read some extraordinary literature.

and in fact the one benefit of being in the college in the 70s as opposed to the 80s was one still got to read the canon. I got to read dead white males without anybody thinking to bitch and moan about their gonads in melanin. It never occurred to me as I was struggling with Milton's syntax in Paradise Lost that what I really should be upset about besides his Latinate diction was that he's a male and, you know, he's writing from some patriarchal tradition and yes, in fact, Eve is shown as submissive to Adam. So what? The fact of the matter is the language was erotically rich. It was unbelievable. It was bursting with gorgeousness of the fruits in Eden. And so deconstruction still

read great literature from a perverse perspective. Trying to deconstruct it. Trying to deconstruct it, but it had very good taste when it came to literature. So I then studied in England, and I studied linguistics, which was a complete revelation to me. And I loved phonetics. We were talking before about Chomsky. I liked syntax.

But what I really loved was speech act theory. J.L. Austin, how to do things with words. and John Searle, who's a philosopher at Berkeley. And Austin has this wonderful dry, he was a British philosopher in the analytic tradition, and he has this marvelous dry language. But what he noticed is that analytic philosophy up to then had been interested with what it called the truth conditions of language.

What are the conditions under which a sentence is true? and Austin noticed there's a whole category of language for which the criteria of truth and falsity don't apply. Things like, I hereby take you as my duly wedded husband. That's not true or false. It can backfire. It can be a successful statement or an unsuccessful, but it is not describing something in the world. It is actually changing the world. And, you know, I, you know, I christen this ship, HMS Pinafore.

Again, if you don't have a ship or you don't have the capacity to christen it and nobody, like, you're sitting there breaking your champagne bottle and you're just walking by, you have not christened the ship. But under certain conditions, that speech act will change the world. And so Austin set out to think about those conditions in the way he called them illogynes. evocutionary utterances can work or misfire. So that to me was a sense of language as something dynamic. I came back to Yale to start a PhD.

In literature? In comparative literature, which is where deconstruction was at its hottest. And I sat in on Paul de Mont's class. He was the most sort of austere and daunting and magisterial of the Yale deconstructionist, whereas Jeffrey Hartman was sort of elfin and playful. And I heard him engaging in the same rhetoric, this weird, bizarre rhetoric, obsessed with decapitation and mutilation in Shelley, for God's sakes.

And I thought, this is madness. This is madness. And these people are saying the same thing as when I left. It's a broken record, and it has nothing to do with language. It is not interesting. It is a rhetoric that is self-referential. It's a bunch of effete rhetorical. gestures, this arcane language. And, you know, we all know it's because it spread, these di-critical

marks, you know, so you'd have the, you know, impressions, disimpressions with the slash, you know, and everybody started picking that up. So I thought, this is madness, but it was sort of a crisis for me, because I had revered these people, but I quit. But I still had the theory bug in me. So I had, I had intuited that legal studies had a lot of the same questions of hermeneutics, which is the question of interpreting texts. How do you interpret a text? Yeah, sure, for the legal profession. So I went to law school, not because I want to be a lawyer,

but I was interested in critical legal studies, which was the legal version of deconstruction. I still had the theory bug in me. And it was absurd. I tried writing a law school note on Article 3 of the Uniform Commercial Code, applying speech act theory. Article 3 deals with promissory notes, negotiable instruments.

This was insane. I was so clueless. These are very practical commercial piece of paper to deal with credit in the evolving economy. To apply speech act theory is so dumb to that, but I couldn't see it. I was still blinded by theory that this is something that works. It's something that is in commerce. I kept yearning to go back to academia because to me, again, the greatest privilege in the world is to be a curator of this tradition of these books

that we should all be down on our knees in gratitude before. None of us deserve them. And if we don't read them, they die. And they bring to us language, experience, feeling that we would otherwise not have access to. So I kept wanting to go back, but every time I looked at academia, it was getting dumber and dumber and multiculturalism hit.

And so at that point, you had this shallow narcissism of students who don't know anything, thinking that they are justified in rejecting works of such profound sublimity simply because of the gonads and melina of the people who wrote them. This was shocking to me. So I didn't start a PhD up again. and my goal at that point was to write the definitive refutation of deconstruction because I was so mad because I'd wasted so much time. Instead of reading more Trollope,

instead of reading more Jonathan Swift, I read Derrida and Soseur, who's a dead end. Yeah, no, it's funny because I was at, I taught at Yale a little bit after that time, and I was on Science Hill, which we sort of looked down on that thing. But the interesting thing is none of those students, none of the most of the, Staley's students,

never walked up the hill. Yeah. The science part, they spent. down and deconstructing down at the other end. Yeah, no, it was, and if I were a scientist or a science student, a STEM student, I'd be pretty mad, you know, that there's, you still have standards there, and the students are working. There was definitely a different sense, up on Science Hill.

And yet the theorists, the literary theorists thought they knew more than you guys did. Because eventually, you know, even we had the great Alan Sokol hoax. you know, the physicist who wrote this work purporting to show that all sorts of theories in physics are merely tropes. In fact, the first time ever you heard the word hermeneutics was, I think, in Alan Sokol's, the title of his piece, which has to do with hermeneics and string theory. Yeah. So they're actually, the literary theorists are claiming, oh, you guys, you're just, you're just, like,

you're just victimized by the linguistic tropes. It's just unbelievable. So just to condense, so I started writing short pieces on what was happening in culture at that point, multiculturalism, postmodernism. And I eventually started doing real journalism, which I'd never done in college, which I regret. And that's what really turned me, I guess, a little more conservative, was going out. And this was in the 90s in New York with Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor. And big things were happening then.

Yes. He was trying to change the welfare culture of the city. We had one in every seven people in welfare in the country. We're in New York. He was also bringing crime down to record lows. So I started going to homeless shelters and welfare offices because I figure I don't know anything. My only value added as a writer is I'm willing to go out

and go into strange neighborhoods and talk to people. And I find people like talking. And so I would go to welfare offices, and people, the clients would tell me they should have done this welfare reform years ago. These welfare mothers, and again, this is a welfare mother speaking. This is not Ronald Reagan with his welfare queen conceit. You know, these welfare mothers are having more babies just to get their welfare check increase. These are the welfare mother speaking again? Or they're too lazy to even change the 40-watt bulb in their apartment.

I talked to this one couple where the guy was absolutely entitled about, I'm never going to, they're not going to make me work. You know, if getting food stamps, he's an able-bodied, hulking guy, if they make me work, I'm not going to do it. And he mooches off of his girlfriend, who is covered by what used to be called AFDC. So to get her benefits, she had to do a little bit of work fair each week. So he was happy to mooch off of her, but he felt an entitlement that he had his entitlement to food stamps. So that sort of thing, it started to change me.

It scarred you clearly. It traumatized you. Right. And started you on the conservative track. But although I've read you describe yourself as a secular conservative, which is an interesting, nowadays you have to say that, I guess, in this climate. because there's such a connection between conservatism and religious right, at least in this country. I didn't realize that. I mean, I'd never read a conservative publication in my life until the 90s. I was completely, I had no knowledge of this. But it wasn't until the 2000s when I discovered how deeply connected religion was to it.

Well, we could talk about welfare, we could talk about religion, but we're going to go back and talk about what sort of started you on this was the, well, it's interesting that deconstructionism, started you on the concern about what was happening in academia. And it's interesting that your introduction of yourself, it's a perfectly introduction of the book, because on the very first page, you refer to an incident, and I'll read it. It says in 2016, a student petition at Yale University called for the dismantling of the college's decades-long requirement

that English majors take a course covering, Chaucer, Spencer, Milton, and Wordsworth. reading these authors, quote, creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color. You want comment? I mean, that encapsulates everything. Yeah. The delusion.

I mean, it really is a delusion that reading a work of great literature creates a climate of hostility. I mean, one doesn't even know how to unpack that. Yeah, it's, well, you give a bunch of examples at the beginning, and we'll go through. But there's another example, of course,

and I know the people involved in this case, but Brett Weinstein. But another example of the extremism, quote-unquote, I guess that you would describe going on American campuses. In May 2017, students from Evergreen State College in Washington State stormed into a class taught by biology professor Brett Weinstein and began cursing and hurling racial epithets. Fuck you, you, piece of shit, screamed one student. Get the fuck out of here, screamed another.

Weinstein, a lifelong progressive, had refused to obey an edict from Evergreen's director of First People's Multicultural Advising Services that all white faculty canceled their courses for a day and stay off campus. And it resulted in that. So I think those kind of examples, certainly from an objective sense, suggests some problems. But you were actually, you experienced this directly. And if you could talk what happened to you at Claremont McKenna College, it would be useful. Well, my previous book was called The War on Cops, and it was looking at the empirical basis for the Black Lives Matter narrative that we're living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black men. And if you look at the data, it's just not borne out. what determines police use of force is civilian use of force and violence.

And recently a National Academy of Science study came out with this yet again, that it is the civilians' use of violent force that predicts whether an officer will. And so when you look at the data, it turns out that black men are not being shot disproportionately, to their involvement in violent street crime. If you use that as a benchmark, this sounds uncomfortable to say, but they're actually shot less than would be predicted by their violent engagement in drive-by shootings. I mean, the fact of the matter is Lawrence,

and this is also very painful to say, that the face of violent street crime, and I'm talking here overwhelmingly, of robberies, armed robberies, and drive-by shootings in this country is basically black and brown. In New York City, blacks are about 23% of the population. They commit almost three quarters of all shootings. When you add Hispanic shootings to black shootings,

you get over 98% of all shootings in the city. Whites are 34% of the population. They commit less than 2% of all shootings. Those disparities exist in every single city today. And just so we don't, so we get a little less hate mail maybe then. So my point was I was just going to push back and my, but I want to suggest, I assume you. I'm not justifying police shootings. No, exactly.

Nor are you suggesting that this is not, there aren't perhaps social conditions that contribute to this, I think. Sure. I would definitely, I would definitely say that there are social conditions that can, for me, it's the breakdown of the family and the lack of kids are not being socialized. Sure. But in any case, what I found in going out to inner city neighborhoods is that there is an enormous untapped support for the police that does not get reported. I've spent a lot of times going to police community meetings in East Harlem in the South Bronx, in central Brooklyn, in south side of Chicago. Every single time, I swear, every single time what I've heard from those good law-abiding residents who show up, they take time off of them, their week to show up at these meetings is we want more cops. You arrest the dealers. They're back

on the corner the next day. Why can't you get them off the street? There's kids hanging out by the hundreds fighting, whatever happened to truancy laws, whatever happened to loitering laws. So that was a voice that was not being heard. So I wrote this book saying it's more complicated. You know, it is not, it's not, you cannot explain this by police racism. So I was invited to Claremont McKenna College, which is a small liberal arts college in Southern California. And a call went out on Facebook several days before I arrived to shut the fascist McDonald down. And so this got more and more organized. And the students surrounded the auditorium where I was supposed to speak and would not let anybody in it.

There was some video online of a biology professor and older man trying to get in and just getting pushed back by the people. And there were scuffles and skirmishes. It's nothing like Milo riots in Berkeley. So nobody could get in. They had to escort me into the auditorium early through all sorts of secret passages. And so I gave my talk to an empty hall. But outside, the protesters were chanting and pounding on the glass window. and they had said they'd moved where the podium was

because they didn't want the podium to be visible as the night came on and the lights came on in the room just for safety reasons. And then the pounding on the windows got so bad that they figured they couldn't protect my safety. So I was escorted out the kitchen by the police. Well, it's, yeah, it's one example. Let me just say I'm not playing a victim here.

Whenever I'm asked to describe what happens, inevitably the left says, oh, well, you're playing the victim, card like an offense. I'm not. I'm not claiming I'm a victim. You're just saying no, but that the fact that that could happen on university campus is itself ridiculous. How is it possible to describe something without if you're going to say that's a victim? So tell me, you tell me. You sleep at night. You can still sleep at night. Yes, yes, but you tell me how I'm supposed to describe how anybody's supposed to describe that if that's an odd event. So anyway. Facts are facts and you described the

facts. The people who were the, if there were any victims, and I'm not even, I hate the word, if there are any victims, it would be the students who actually had wanted to come. Sure. engage with me and ask me questions. That was not possible. No, I think that's the case. I know of it. I attended a similar event that my wife actually knew about it. Actually, my wife attended the worst part of it at a university up in Oregon. And it was just amazing because it was a law class, in fact, but the kids weren't allowed to hear the kids who'd come weren't allowed to hear because people were playing music and trumping and, you know, and it's your, you're doing a disservice to the people who actually want to listen. Well, maybe we'll get to that, but I mean, I've interviewed Ricky Jervais, who points out that people who go to one of these things and get mad at what someone's saying, it's like people who walk down into a street and see a sign saying guitar lessons. They're saying, damn it, I don't want guitar lessons.

But anyway, but you point out, I think, interestingly enough, ironically, you say, of all chance, how do you spell racist CMC was the most absurd. and it didn't even rhyme. Race to CMC, quote, unquote, is so eager for quote unquote diverse students that it has historically admitted black and Hispanic students with an average of 200-point lower SAT score than white and Asian students. So I think, I mean, part of the point of the initial aspect of your book

is that not only is the attempt to silence, not just people you disagree with, but distinguished, but Chaucer is ridiculous, but also universities are the opposite of places where people are experiencing racism in an institutionalized way. It's not as if racism doesn't happen, it happens all sort of, but in fact there are places where the opposite is happening.

So maybe you want to talk about that a little bit. Yes, I mean, this is what is so remarkable is the effort that goes into maintaining this narrative that on campuses, one is the subject of rampant bigotry. I was just protested at Holy Cross, and that chant was hilarious. My oppression is not a delusion. This got chanted again and again to drown me out. And afterwards, this is organized by the Black Student Union at Holy Cross, which is a Catholic Jesuit school up in Worcester, Massachusetts, the co-president of the union said, I'm just so proud of what we did. We're on to bigger, I can tell this, it started something new. For you to be claiming that there was something

courageous and effective and transcendent about chanting my oppression is not a delusion at Holy Cross or any other college is ridiculous. The fact of the matter is, again, because of the Academic skills gap, which is very large, it's a standard deviation, that if schools are determined to engineer their critical mass of minority students, it's very complicated, is you get a cascading effect. They are all admitting so-called underrepresented minorities, URMs in the admissions jargon, with a huge, huge, huge. deficiency of skills. I am not saying, and nobody, this is something called mismatch, which you're bringing students in to an academic environment for which they are not competitively qualified. Nobody is saying that minority students should not go to college. What they're saying is they should go to college under the same conditions as everybody else, which is in a class

where your peers share your academic qualifications. Only blacks and Hispanics are put under the burden of being catapulted into academic environments where they are not prepared to compete. We're not all of them. I mean, it's obviously some of them are. Some, but it's pretty big. I mean, Harvard in this recent law school, the admissions case, with the agents, yeah, if Harvard did not exercise large racial preferences, it's currently at 14% black student body, it would be less than 1%. So there's a lot of preference going on. Anyway, so for students to think that they're the victims of racism, it's just the opposite. They want, and the same goes for faculty. Again, the faculty, there's not a single academic department that is not twisting itself into

knots to hire and promote, not just URMs, black and Hispanic faculty, but women as well. Well, yeah, we'll get there. Right, we'll get to that. You know, the important thing is I want you to provide what I find, one of the many things I find refreshing about your writing is that you actually provide statistics and data and not just opinion about this. And the statistics are quite remarkable in a variety of cases, and I'll try and quote some of them from you.

But one of the things that you talk about, when you're talking about the fact that universities, that what you constantly focus, They should be focusing on, in your case, great books and education, but instead are focusing on what is an, quote, unquote, an invented environment of oppression. And people feel so threatened that they want to close down anything that appears to threaten them,

any speech that appears to threaten them, which is really, if anything, university should be the bastions of free speech. should be the place where you hear things. And I've said, in fact, I was planning to say later, but I'll say now that I've always said that one of the purposes of education is to make you uncomfortable in the sense that if you're comfortable, you're really not pushing your boundaries. And what's the point of going to school if you're not pushing your boundaries?

Yeah, I actually disagree with that. I mean, that's said a lot. and I guess I have, it's becoming an increasingly conservative view of education that I, to me, the best definition of it comes from the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who said that school is about passing on an inheritance. Yeah, okay, hold that thought because I know the last part of your book is the purpose of universities, and I think that's one place where we disagree somewhat. I think partly because of your background in, let me just say it now, your background in literature,

where great books are important. And the remarkable thing about physics is, for example, is that if you're really good, you don't ever have to read a book at all. You know, Feynman could derive everything himself rather than reading books. And I love books, so let's make that clear. So I want to get to that academic discussion,

but I want to get there going through the materials you talk about first. And one of the things that I found striking when you talked about shutting you down and other people and potentially racist speech or the assumption that everything that's happening is racist. You quoted Frederick Douglass, whom self said slavery cannot tolerate free speech.

And he warned that liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That of all rights is the dread of tyrants. It's the right which they first of all strike down. And so the irony in some sense of striking down speech in an effort to preserve liberty is a remarkable thing to be happening. Right. Well, they wouldn't, I don't know,

and I think conservatives way overused liberty and freedom. I'm so sick of it because there's many more things. Yeah, I grew up in Canada where we didn't talk about liberty and freedom as much as Americans do. I see, so maybe, and was it that much less free? I don't know. No, it didn't strike me as that. I'm sure not. That's colored me.

Yeah, no, I think tradition and order is also very important. But in any case, they're not striking it down in the name of liberty. They're striking it down in the name of their power and their effort to crush perceived oppression. But what I find really amazing is the failure of universities to teach these students to be able to think abstractly and to extrapolate from a current situation

to derive a principle for that, because every time they are claiming that they have the force majeure to shut these people down, they're setting a precedent saying that is something legitimate to do. It's not that difficult. You don't have to engage in very abstract logic to say, okay, so what happens if we give Trump this power? Do you really want Trump to be able to find what hate speech is? Because I'm sure he's willing to do so.

And I'm sure there's plenty of media outlets that he would call hate speech. So that's one thing at the very least, whether or not you believe in the free marketplace of ideas, if you're at all conscious of the tables can turn. Now, it may be that in academia, it is an empirically sound judgment that the tables will never turn. And forever here on out, we will always be in control and we will be the ones defining hate speech. But should there be some kind of apocalypse and power changes, again, the history, the history. historical ignorance of this because this is what governments have done throughout history. Exactly. You'd think that, you know, the lessons of history would be learned.

Right, but they don't learn history. I mean, come on, they're not reading histories. I've quoted this before, but I learned it last year. I love this quote from Mark Twain, who said, history may not repeat itself, but it sure rhymes a lot. But one of the problems is not just the ignorance or literally the ignorance of, of students who are feeling this, but the fact that university administrations are going along with it. And an example, I guess, that hits both of us

because we're both at Yale, is this remarkable experience. I want to read from your book here. People have probably heard of this, but a notorious video of a black female student at Yale screaming and cursing at her college master in November 2015. And before I left Yale, I was gonna become a college master.

So that even more. Anyway, it's a chilling portrait of self-engrossed Bethos-filled entitlement that's never been corrected by truth, much less restrained by manners. Be quiet, she shrieks at the frozen administrator. Why the fuck did you accept the master position? Who the fuck hired you? She continues at full, self-righteous cry. You should not sleep at night.

You're disgusting. What caused this? The master's wife, child psychologist Erica Christakis, had recently suggested in an email that the Yale multiculturalism bureaucracy did not need to oversee Halloween costumes. Her email prompted an open letter signed by nearly a thousand faculty, deans, and students accusing her of racism and white supremacy and calling for her and her husband's immediate removal from their jobs and campus home. A hundred or so, mostly minority students then mobbed her husband, Nicholas Christakis, a renowned physician and sociologist,

for an hour-long abuse session in the college quad that included, Be quiet, shriek among equally horrified displays of rudeness. You were disgusting, screamed another student. I want your job to be taken from you. Look at my face, first of all, and understand that you are such a disappointment to this university, to see your students, to yourself. You were disgusting male.

You were discussing 20 seconds ago, a day ago, and a month ago. And then Christakis later hugs one of the students, Abdul Razak Mohammed Zakaria, in a conciliatory gesture. But Zachariah orders Christakis to understand that, quote, the situation right now doesn't require you to smile. Another female student, Alexandra Zina Barrow, Carlow cries that Christakis' invocation of free speech creates, quote, a space to allow for violence to happen on this campus. Christakis responds, that I disagree with.

Barlow shouts at him. It doesn't matter whether you agree or not. It's not a debate. Now, the reason I wanted to do all that and mention those two names, as you mentioned later, in case anyone must understood where the administration's sympathies at Yale lay, Yale conferred on Alexandria, Azina Barlow and Abdul Razak Mohammed Zakharaya its graduation prize for accomplishment in, quote, the service of race and ethnic relations. Yale lauded Barlow for her, quote, womanist, feminist, anti-racist work and for teaching her peers, faculty, administration

about inclusive leadership. I just, you know, what could one say? What can one say? I mean, again, it's hard to believe that there's any faculty member, no matter how nuttily committed to the victimology narrative that would not be appalled by this. But you know, but you point out over and over again, well, in this case, faculty signed this letter.

But they often, in the case of your case too, I think the faculty did not stand up. No. And one can understand that. As a faculty member, former faculty member, it's, there's lots of fear that if you do stand up, and somehow, I mean, faculty live in fear, you may not realize that, but they live in fear of people taking away the resources and their department shrinking and and and and they live subject to the whims of the administration in some sense.

And although they, you know, may perhaps shouldn't be so timid, it's really, one can at least understand how speaking out against a political wave. Yes. Which is adopted by administrators would be viewed as something dangerous for faculty member to do for their own career. I mean, it's, you know, you may not be. elodible, but it's understandable. No, it's very understandable. It's easy for me to take my pot shots and get out, you know, so it would take a heck of a lot of courage to be a pariah in an environment where you have to live every single day. But yeah, no, it's, it was amazing. Again, the experience my wife had, she was, there were all these faculty in the back of, standing in the back

of the room when these students were stopping the speaker from speaking in a law class and the students from hearing, and not a single person said anything. But it's, you know, peer pressure is very, and, and, and, and it's very hard to overcome virtue signal. which will really, I think, want to talk about it sometime or not. Well, but, you know, the faculty are not just scared of the administrators, they're also scared of the students. You know, I recently was reading this wonderful 1917 lecture that Max Weber, the great German sociologist, gave,

called Sciences of Vocation, because I gave a speech about social justice. And he says another reason why an academic should not indulge in his own political views on the academic platform is because his audience is forced to be silent, meaning the students are not allowed to talk back. They have to accept his authority. And I thought, if only, I mean, this is just such a grotesque inversion of what I think should be the proper hierarchy. Well, you do. You see, actually, I think it's interesting. I think students should be encouraged to be skeptical of their professors, and that's part of education. I mean, I view, I've always viewed authority as an anatham in some sense, or at least to be questioned.

In fact, one of the things, total aside, but, you know, I like to bring in science, is that it went, as a chair of department for many years and involved in admission committees, and of course, one saw a lot of Chinese students coming in physics because they certainly do much better in exams than American students. And so their GRE scores overwhelm American students on the whole. But the interesting thing was that when they came into graduate school, they do well on the classes, but when it came to dissertation time, that what was happening was that they unduly respected the professors.

They would never want to contradict. And what's wonderful, I think, at least for China that's beginning to happen is you're beginning to see that change. there's still too much hierarchy in China because if you don't, at least in science and I hope it's the case in the humanities, well, if you're not willing to contradict the wisdom of those before you, then you're not likely, at least,

to explore new options. And in physics, if you're not willing to say, well, maybe this is wrong and let me explore it and see and let the data tell you whether it is or not, then you know, so you have to not accept if you quote unquote the wisdom of your professors. You should be one of the list. listen to it. But I tend to think that, and again, this is where maybe we slightly disagree. I think

I should listen to everything with a skeptical mind, including if I'm a student, what the professor in front of me is saying. Well, I was a talky student. I, you know, I love talking in class. These days, I do sort of feel like students are better seen and not heard. But I would say it's different. I mean, science is clearly teleological, and you are definitely, Like Weber said, as a scientist, you know that whatever you do is going to be canceled. You know, that's your hope. Well, you hope you're wrong. It won't be canceled, and that's important.

But it may be transcended. It would be transcended. That's the biggest misunderstanding of science. And incorporated. Yeah. Newton is still right. He's not canceled. Right.

Right. But I say that only because that's a huge misunderstanding on the part that somehow scientific revolutions do away with what they were before them. They don't at all. They just incorporate it in a new whole. Neither the political revolutions ever do away, in my opinion, everything that went before them ultimately. Well, you can't. Well, I don't know whether China did or not.

Yeah, maybe. But I would say in the humanities, I think that's not quite right. I think that there is, no student knows enough to challenge his professor's theory of how early civilizations spread around the Mediterranean. I'm sorry, a freshman coming in, does not know that. Well, no, okay. And you don't challenge the periodic table. You don't challenge German cases. You can ask questions about it. And look, and I think you should be willing to challenge it and then find out you're wrong. I mean, if a student says, you know, that doesn't sound logical to me. That's, then, then it's worthwhile saying it and then finding out that

their thinking is wrong. Because actually, oh, this is fun because I hadn't planned to go in any of this, but pedagogically, there's a lot of data, in my opinion, that suggests the only way you learn something is confronting your own misconceptions. When you learn something by writing down the blackboard, well, you can memorize it, but you forget it. But when you see something and you say, gee, that can, when, and then you think about it and you work on it and you realize, hold on, what I thought I was thinking, it was just completely wrong, then you remember it, then you

internalize it, and that happens in physics all the time. And again, I think we are up against the two cultures problem. You know, I don't think a student approaching Esculis is Orostaea for the first time. One of the great works of Western civilization, this

trilogy about the House of Atreus that traces the creation of justice and the rule of law from a cycle of the furies, arrestes being pursued by the furies to take vengeance on his mother for killing his father and being persuaded by Athena to accept the rule of the tribunal. A student approaching that as a freshman, we did it. Simply, it's not for him. I don't even know what it would mean to disagree with this. You're there to absorb something that

is a novel experience. I guess the point is I don't think anyone should ever be persuaded from disagreeing. They just can be wrong. And so I'd like to encourage students to at least, well, in a reasoned, rational way with substance, that's the whole point, is to have rational discussion, is to be able to back up your arguments

with rational points, but to be not to be afraid to say, you know, I just don't, either, maybe I don't understand it or I disagree. I think we have to encourage that. And you reference, in fact, someone I know, a friend of mine, Jonathan Hates and co-wrote a book called The Coddling in the American Mind, and I heard him here actually at the 92nd Street, Y, in New York a while ago, happened to be in town.

And they make an interesting point, but you also, but I took your take on it, which again caused me to rethink this. So there's an example. They make it a point that students feel entitled because they grew up in a society where, and not only feel entitled, but they feel easily offended, and feel they should never be offended because they grow up in a society

where parents teach them that everything's a threat, that going across the street alone is a threat, and the world is threatening, and you should never, ever feel uncomfortable. That modern American parents want their children to never feel uncomfortable. And when they do feel uncomfortable, they feel that's an offense, even a physical offense,

even if the words are making them uncomfortable. And I think the point is very well made. But you pointed out an interesting point that when it comes to trigger words that are gender-related, you point out that if that coddling was the case, you say if risk-averse child-rearing is a source of the problem, why aren't heterosexual white male students demanding safe spaces, as we talk about safe spaces? Because there are safe spaces. I heard recently, and I don't know of the university, where a speaker was, coming in to speak about free speech.

And at the time, there were women's groups on campus that organized safe spaces so people would not have to hear about free speech. And you do make the point that safe spaces now are, if it's just coddling, that alone can't explain things because there appears to be a gender gap in the need for a space. Do you want to talk about it? True. But, you know, I, I was, we were just sharing before this show started a really nauseating document from the Secretary of Yale University about these spa treatments that undergraduates can get because they just need to unwind from their stressful days being a Yale student. Come on.

You've got like a sampling of extra virgin olive oil in the dining rooms. It's outrageous that they, that this amount, it's decadent, that they're being taught to think of themselves. as in need of therapy as an 18-year-old. They should be out like striding the moors and wanting to write romantic poetry for God's sakes. They are the most unfortunate individuals in human history. So there is, and I also see, you know, in New York, you see these little three-foot-tall, four-year-old boys

on tricycle scooters. So this is probably the most stable contraption ever invented. So two big wheels, and the boys three feet. And he's wearing this huge bubble helmet. And his father's got his hand on the shoulder just to steady him even further. So there's definitely that. And, you know, I contrast this with H.L. Mencken's fabulous autobiography, happy days of growing up in Baltimore in the 19th century and just raising hell. I mean, that's what boyhood should be.

So there is that. But I think that I do disagree with Hayton Lukianov in that I think this whole. guise of being vulnerable, as I, we started speaking with briefly in the start of our talk, is ideological. It is very specifically targeted at a certain set of ideas. It's based on hatred and resentment. And it's not, everybody who comes out of this environment is not given an equal hand to play in the victim's sweepstakes. Well, and once again, Playing the victim card and having that victimhood validated, our two sides of the coin, there are both, you would argue, equally,

or at least both of concern. And we've already pointed out this ridiculous response of Yale, which doesn't surprise me, actually, having taught there for a long time, but I left for many reasons. But you also point out, and it's worth reminding, that it's not just academia. You know, there's experiences at Google in that regard, too. where people are willing to point out that there may be reverse discrimination

or someone who actually called out for greater openness to ideas that challenge what you might call progressive dogma is then potentially fired. And so that's happening in the workplace as well as well as the... You know, people have this, the optimists among us, which I do not count myself as one, do believe that, oh, well, there's this firewall between academia, and there's a conservative political columnist in Washington, Michael Barone, who wrote a book several years ago, distinguishing between hard American and soft American. He said, soft America is quintessentially the academy, you know, the academy, and that they, you know,

students that don't have to live up to standards and they're coddled. As soon as they get into hard America, which is the workplace, the marketplace, they'll have to, their spines will stiffen. It was a plausible thesis. It turned out to be wrong, you know? Soft America is taking over heart America. And when you mentioned Google, so James DeMoor was fired for writing a very reasonable 10-page fact-based memo, drawing upon decades of psychological research, you know, the big five personality

traits, poor James DeMore was such a geek. He was so naive that he actually thought he could get away with using a term of art in psychology, which is of their, you know, there's sort of big five personality distinctions, one of which is neuroses or being neurotic. It's not his term. It's psychology's term. But he was so naive that he thought he could say, well, females score higher on the neurotic level.

So this is like everybody went absolutely bonkers. But he was suggesting that average career predilections may explain why there's not 50-50 male-female in high-tech. And it may not, the point is, it may not be true what he was speculating. But the mere speculation should not, Should not get you fired. Should not get you fired.

It's unbelievable he got fired. Unless you, I mean, you know, there's a difference between demeaning individuals and saying you're not, you're not capable and making an intellectual speculation. Well, this was not what understood. DeMore was not talking about any female at Google. Exactly. He was merely explaining why there's not more of them. He was trying to explain it.

And he was trying. It may be, it may not be right. It may, you know, it's a plausible hypothesis. Sure. I told you, I'm skeptical of everything, but you should be allowed to make the hypothesis. Right. He was talking about distribution. So two things that were relevant.

to this besides him getting fired. The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, who's now been elevated recently to the head of Alphabet itself, which is worrisome, he used the language of academic victimology and firing demure. He said, well, the females feel unsafe by his presence. But there was a whole, when this happened, there was discussion that broke out on the Google chat rooms, and there's a few conservatives. And, you know, I was invited to speak at Google. It was very interesting. Somebody reached out to me several years ago. They have a speaker program and thought it would be interesting or useful for me to talk about this penultimate book, The War on Cops. And it turns out that I was going up to Mountain View to give another talk. So I hadn't heard from this guy, this

engineer who'd reached out to me. And I contacted him again. So, by the way, I am coming up. and he said, you know, after much consultation with his professional, friends and family, he realized it would be too professionally and personally dangerous for him to even advance my name with the Speaker Committee. So it's a very dominant political monoculture there. But there was some conservative chats, and one person said, we got to stop this diversity thing, our HR department, which, of course, in Google, they've got all their Googly language that's very precious, so they call it people analytics.

Again, the corporate world, the people that have been marinated in this stuff are going out, they're going to HR, and they're also bitching and moanin as regular employees. Yeah, yeah. No, it's certainly going beyond academia, and I think that's what's, well, it's worth raising. And the Google example is a really interesting one because Google, you know, I've been to Google many times and it sort of prides itself on this. you'd think this open environment to explore. I mean, that's what it's supposed to be out.

I mean, that's what innovation is for if you're creating new products, is to break outside the box and ask questions that may not seem sensible and see where they go and have open discussion in these, in literally safe spaces. They have these little tents you can talk in, all this stuff. And, you know, so I was shocked to see that. But let's push some other buttons. Affirmative action.

There's a whole fair amount of the book on the fact that in 1996, California voted to ban race and gender preferences in government education. You claim two things. One, it wasn't carried out in universities. Universities managed to try and go around that. And two, that affirmative action, while on the surface sounds like a very useful way to help underprivileged minorities, instead is insidious. and not only is inappropriate,

but actually doesn't help the people you're trying to help. And so, you know, I wanted to talk about it. You focus on UC Berkeley and the law school. I don't know what, maybe because of your law background, I'm not sure why, but, or maybe it's where there was data. It was the data, exactly. They refused to let the data out. Yeah, exactly.

They let the data out, and I found the data quite remarkable. Well, they didn't, John Morris, who was the head of the Board of Regents, got it, and Richard Sander got it. it, but no, they didn't let the dad out. They have to be dragged into court to let the dad out. Richard Sanders, this UCA law professor who is the theorist of what I've mentioned before, mismatch, which is your second thesis there. And he's a progressive.

I mean, he has a book out now on desegregation. He would like to see somewhat more government involvement in housing desegregation. This is, you know, not that being a conservative should at all, you know, serve as the grounds for questioning one's right to talk about the facts of, of, you know, not that being a conservative should at all the facts of racial preferences, but he's not one. So, but he's trying to get, you see, to give them more data, he's trying to get the California bar to give him more data, and they're all just stonewalling.

The data you, but the data you provided, you know, does show, well, first of all, rather compellingly shows two things, that there is, that the university is violating that. The university was violating the rules in the sense of having very different SAT scores. And, you know, just one piece of data. I mean, there's so much in here, but Berkeley Law School reduced the role of the law school admission test, L-SAT, and college great point average in ranking students, and it lowered the L-SAT cutoff score that would disqualify a student for consideration. Previously, these lowered expectations had applied only to minorities, but now they had technically applied all students.

The school also removed the quality adjuster for high school GPAs so that a 3.8 from a school where half the students drop out before graduation counted as much as the 3.8 from a school where the student's bodies frantically competing to rack up academic honors. And the purpose of that is not to lower quality, but inevitably it lowers quality, right? Right, right. They all pretend, it's so funny, the schools pretend, oh, well, SATs, they don't matter, LSATs, they don't matter. When they're calculating for whites and Asians, they'll, they'll calculate somebody's SAT to the point, oh, 5%. You know, it matters a lot except for underrepresented minorities. But, but, okay, let's, let's, let me be the devil's advocate here and ask you to present the counter evidence that the argument is made that if you if you will that you give people a chance that a lot of people don't and it's true

I mean I lived in Cleveland and taught it at a university in Cleveland for a while and the just seeing the Cleveland Public Schools and going in there which I did and seeing the circumstances under which teachers had to teach, much less students had teach. There were no books. They literally didn't have a tax base, and it was just an abysmal environment. So there's no doubt that those students, regardless of their family environment,

which also problematic, and they were primarily black students, they were suffering from a disadvantage from a system that wasn't giving them what they should get, what they deserve to get. So accepting that fact, and one makes the argument that, okay, giving some of them a leg up, to have the opportunity to be in a situation where they do have those resources and can flourish

is a good thing. And I think that's the argument behind a permanent action. But you do point out, so having said that argument for it, one points out, and you say here, contrary to the claims of infertive action proponents, the evidence is strong that students with a combined SAT score of a thousand, say, are less likely to do well in competitive colleges that students with test score several standard deviations above that. And you make the argument that there's more evidence from law school, from bar exams, that you do a disservice by putting people in an environment where they feel they can't compete. And where they can't. But also, once they can't compete, they feel they can't compete, and it's demoralizing. Rather than putting them in an environment

where they are competitive, then they can actually do better. So maybe do you want to give any of the data or discuss that? Yeah. Again, there's three points that really need to be made first. Let's notice at some point the elitism of this discourse. Number two, what we're talking about is empirically, does it work? We talk about the beneficiaries of affirmative action, the beneficiaries of racial preferences. Are they, in fact, beneficiaries? And what's the third point? Well, I'll get to it. Okay. But the fact of the matter is, let's take it out of race. Oh, and we're talking about averages, not individual cases.

Sure, distribution. So if, let's take it out of race and make it gender. And so MIT decides it needs more females in its freshman class. And it admits me with 650 on my math SATs, and all my peers have 800, more or less. So that freshman class calculus is going to be pitched. to students that are at 800. And as somebody with 650, I'm not gonna catch up. Now, there may be, you know, of course there's gonna be individuals

that do rise to the challenge. But on average, on average, you're putting them at a competitive disadvantage. Now, had I gone, and this is where the elitism gets in, instead of, my third point is, nobody is saying minority shouldn't go to college, that's the thing. It's go to a college where everybody else has FIT. Your same SATs.

Instead of going to MIT with 650s, I went to, what, let's say, Boston College or BU. Let's say there the average is. You're laughing. Are these risible schools? No, no, I'm just thinking of all the people of Boston College and BU who are going to be so upset. No, I'm saying they're great schools. They become much bad. When I was in, yeah, anyway, they are.

They are great. That's my point. Yeah, yeah. It is the MIT's and the Berkeley chanceers of the world that are looking to, down their noses at so-called second and third-year schools. The presumption is unless you take exactly. Unless you go to the IVs, your life is over. Yeah, unless, yeah, so the presumption is unless you're, we need to let people in here because we are the sole source of knowledge. But if you let them go to BU or BC, they won't in fact. They'll flounder. Their lives are over. And I advise

students, by the way, when I, when kids ask me about one of your PhDs and physics or whatever, and where they should go. And again, I grew up in Canada where things are so different, all the universities are more or less the same, and you go where you want to go because of geography as much as anything else. But I always say, if you can get a good education at any institution, and in the states, there's so many liberal arts college, you can get a good one or a bad one. It's up to you. It's up to you. Do the work. And if you do well at a less well-known university, at least in science, you'll have no problem getting into the best universities in graduate school. And so it's up to you to to learn wherever you are, and you can get a fantastic education anywhere, or a rotten one.

Right. So there I am at BU with my 650 SATs on math, and my peers do as well. So the teaching, I'm going to be able to, it's pitched to my level. And, you know, when California voters did pass in 1996, Prop 209, which purported to end preferences, gender preferences, as well as race preferences in government activities, whether it's contracting or university admissions, the Chancellor of Berkeley got up and said, well, where will we get our leaders of the future? Well, you're going to get them from University of California at Riverside. I mean, why the presidents or chancellors of the second and third tier don't object to this snobbery is beyond me.

Again, there's nothing shameful about going to, and obviously I went to Yale, but I don't think that's the only place you can get an education. I went to a small school in Canada. Right. You see. I did my PhD at MIT. Exactly. Exactly. And so the issue is not. It's always seen like you're saying black shouldn't go to college. No, I'm not. I'm saying they should go under the same conditions as everybody else. It is a unique burden to be put into an environment where you are going to struggle. It's painful. It's painful. But we've all been there and it is painful. I mean, It's useful, on the other hand, to struggle, I think. We all have to learn because we're all going to go into environments that we're going to struggle.

And that's another thing is that everyone thinks, everyone, well, I think somewhere one of these, again, we'll see if we get to the quote, but it's like everyone is excellent. That's not true. Right. And we all kids nowadays, everyone is brilliant. There's one quote when one of these schools which is everyone, everyone is brilliant. And it's not true. And we need to realize that we need to struggle because some of some, Sometimes we're not doing as well as we should.

Or maybe it's not what we should be doing. And it's just part of life and a job and a relationship and everything. So struggle is not to be avoided, I think. But you're absolutely right. To be systematically find yourself in a class. And I've found that even in my career when I just decided to pick something. I don't think it's right for me. And I should go somewhere else and do it.

It's okay. But one of the problems of this that I find besides the fact that you present a lot of data suggesting that systematically students that are admitted by affirmative action don't pass the bar as effectively as students who go to other institutions and of law schools where they don't feel out of place, right? I don't know if you were going to remember any of those statistics, but I was impressed reading that. Yeah, that's why he wants to get the California Bar Association that has extraordinarily detailed data to be able to make just this point to compare mismatched students with non-mismatched students.

But what we see, I mean, what we do see is with the Duke University as well, with the attrition rate of black males from STEM because they're admitted to Duke with over a standard deviation difference in SATs. And the guy that was the expert witness in this recent Harvard lawsuit, he's an economist at Duke. He found that black males actually come into Duke with a higher rate of wanting to major STEM than white males, but by the time senior year comes around, the STEM major graduates are overwhelmingly white and Asian, because again, the blacks have not been able to catch up.

The perverse thing, but the brilliant thing about this whole diversity racket is the codependency between these students that are being taught to think of themselves as victims and the bureaucracy. So what happens is when schools are exercising to a school, there's not a single selective school that is not implementing very large racial preferences, the so-called beneficiaries of those preferences do struggle academically. They are then encouraged to blame their struggles on circumambient racism. And so they then present a whole new set of demands, you know, more diversity, more mental health, more faculty of color, more ethnic studies, more diversity bureaucrats and more critical mass of minority students, which then in order to get that

critical mass, you have to dig deeper in the pool, creating more academic mismatch and even greater degree of it, and the cycle just starts up again. But you have both the alleged beneficiaries of this scheme and the diversity bureaucracy reinforcing each other. Interpreting the data differently, interpreting that Duke data and saying there's clear evidence of racism because more black students come in, wanting to do STEM, and fewer, you graduate. Therefore, the system must be racist. Right.

And I mean, that's a possibility. But name some names. I mean, I go to these causes. Name some names. You tell me who are the bigots. When Peter Salvi, the president of Yale, Peter Salvee, who's just done one genuflection before the race hysteria over the years. So I, you know, you say Yale's always been that.

Well, maybe I didn't, wasn't exposed to it. but it seems to me that Salvi is like one of the worst, I have to say. I've known some pretty bad Yale presidents. Okay, well, that may be. You can inform me about that. I have no stakes. I'm not a big fan of university presidents. Anyway, it doesn't matter.

Well, yeah, they compromise a lot. They used to be intellectual leaders. But he keeps, he has this theme about, well, we need to struggle so hard. It still is just this desiderotum that lays decades in advance of being able to have equal opportunity at Yale and fight injustice. name some names. Peter Salvi, please tell me who among your faculty are grading with bias, who are not allowing their black students to talk in class, who is giving them, you know, unfair assignments, nobody. I can guarantee you, there is nobody at Yale or any other college. Well, there may be one or two, but in general, when you say nobody.

Again, you're absolutely right. You don't see that. And in fact, you point out that a lot of these grading is blind grading anyway. Right, in law schools. And so it, but I think the point I want to make before less people, well, I know what people think, but is that this is a question that I have about affirmative action beyond race, because we're going to get to gender next. And as I said, we're going to push another set of buttons. But is universities are probably not the place to solve a problem that needs to be solved at a much different level. We just said the issues, as I pointed about in Cleveland, are social issues. I don't think, I suspect, neither you or I think there's some intrinsic intelligence gap between the pigment, the pigment in your skin.

But there are social issues. And the place to resolve them is where the social issues are being manifest, which is K to 12, families. In the social structure, I would argue differently because I think, because I come from what you would call a welfare state. I come from Canada where, which is, you know, where there's actually social welfare and people are provided for. but however you want to solve it, the place is probably not in universities. And it's even worse when you try, if you're trying to solve it for university students,

if you want to solve it at the faculty level. Right. You know, when you say, look, we don't have a, if you look at the faculty here, it doesn't represent demographically the region, you can't solve it when you don't have the infrastructure of students coming up through the system in the first place. And so every time you try and solve it at a higher level,

you're making more artificial, and as we'll talk about, I think I do agree with you, impacting on what should be a meritocracy. Well, the degree of irrationality is, I mean, one shouldn't be stunned anymore because there are so many blatantly counterfactual propositions adopted by universities. But whenever there's some student protest about we need more faculty of color and engineering, what do the adults do? they go into a fetal position and they say, oh, Maya Colpa, we're not trying hard enough. We're going to do another five-year diversity report and gather diversity metrics. And now, you know, the pressures are enormous on faculty hiring committees. But nobody says in like 2016, in the entire United States, there were like seven graduates who were black of Ph.D. programs in electrical engineering.

So you tell me, how can every engineering department in the country have its critical mass of 13% black professors, which is the representation of the population? Because that's always the benchmark. Yeah. You're not allowed to say, okay, who's actually qualified? You use a population benchmark. It's not possible. Mathematically, it's impossible. But the administrators, rather than telling the truth about the pipeline problem will cop to phony charges of racism.

And this is another thing that is happening in the real world. Paul Weiss, this very elite law firm in New York City, and of course it's global now. But it is very left wing. It gets diversity awards all the time for its pro bono work, blah, blah, blah, blah. It had recently, it was so, again, another naive thing. It put on the web a picture of its latest partner class, and they were all white. And so this, the New York Times blasted them, front page article about Paul Weiss's racism, BS. Well, you know, but Paul Weiss, the managing partner,

was not willing to speak the truth about the pipeline problem. And I've talked to a partner there who said, the problem is, you know, and Sandra has shown this as well, that law firms hire black associates, first-year black associates out of law schools at a vastly disproportionate rate than whites.

They're wanting diversity again, but they've, the black, thanks to racial preferences in law schools, they graduate overwhelmingly in the bottom quintile of their class, and so they don't have the skills. They don't have the writing skills in particular. So anyway, what's bizarre about our current moment with this anti-racism religion is that the elites would rather cop to phony charges of racism than speak the truth about the academic skills gap. And I agree with you, it cannot be solved at college. It needs to be solved before. You gave, I have to say, a statistic surprise because of about Arizona State where I taught,

which the president raves about the demographics and trying to serve the people because it is a state university. But he said, and this is in the implicit bias area, I think, you said, at Arizona State University, a white with the same academic credentials as the average black admit, had a 2% chance of admission in 2006. That average black had a 96% chance of admission. So that surprised me. Yeah, and I'm a surprise, you know, given the effort to say that, you know, it's sort of open to, I mean, what's often said,

and I've always admired the statement that the ASU is open to any student who can pass the minimum requirements. And what I'm hearing here, if this is true, is that maybe two thousand things have changed since 2006, I don't know. Anyway, let's move from race to gender. There's lots of aspects that you talk about in your book, not just affirmative action related to gender, but of course beyond that, the victimhood,

which you start out by talking about in terms of what you call the campus rape myth, which certainly you try and justify as a campus rape myth. You say the campus rape industry central tenant is that one-fifth to one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college year. Completed rapes, outnumbering rapes by a ratio of about three to two. The girls' assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys, but the guys sitting next to them in class at the cafeteria. And when you hear that number, it's obviously wrong. If 25% of the people are being raped, so maybe you want to talk about that. Yeah.

If that were the case, there would have been a stampede to create single-sex colleges all over again, where females could study in safety. Now what we have is these fanatically status-obsessed mothers, I guess they're no longer baby boomer mothers. what would they be, like Gen, I don't know, Gen Y, Gen X, that are trying to get their daughters into Harvard 18 years in advance. You know, the stampede of females to get into colleges grows more and more intense by the year.

And so none of the behavior, either females are too stupid to take self-protective behavior or the campus epidemic is not going on because every weekend, you know, Rugby Row, we had the famous Rolling Stone hoax, every weekend the coeds are still trooping to the frat houses for the parties. So are they going knowingly into rape dens

or is in fact something far more ambiguous, far more doubly, you know, mutually complicitous going on here? And I argue the second. Well, I think one point, do you make the point is that when it that when it actually comes to reporting rapes,

to justice officials, the numbers are very different than 45%. Yeah, it's like 20 at most. And the really thing that's so funny is the schools, they're angry if they have low rate numbers. That's what I was going to say. One of the things that I'll interrupt, because you claim that I was going to get to this, and it's amazing to me, you claim that universities try to promote the number of rape cases. And there's a competition between universities to get a higher incidence of rape. That seems highly non-intuitive.

You want to explain that? Well, because there's different audiences. At that point, it's the Title IX administrators on campus, and it's the self-righteous feminist harpies that are crusading on this thing. They want the show that their numbers are up. Now, if parents were to ever believe the campus rape ideology and say, well, I'm not sending my child to Harvard,

it's a bastion of rape, you know what would happen? the president of Harvard would turn on a dime and say, there's no safer place in this country and probably the world for your daughter than at Harvard. Believe me, she is going to get through it fine, you know? But the parents aren't really listening to the Clary Act reports. It's the Title IX administrators who are. And speaking of Title IX administrators and that, by the way, let me point out one area of disagreement here. which I found interesting.

It's some, I don't know what the word blame is right, but you certainly attribute the 1960s sexual freedom, liberation as result, ultimately, producing the kind of sexual promiscuity that lends itself to the, to misunderstandings that get reported as rape. And so I think you give equal weight

to the current victim dilemma or delusion and the promiscuity that came out of the 1960s. Well, I think that, yes, the 60s sexual liberation misread the male and female libido. I think it assumed that the male and female libido are equal in their voracious appetite for as much non-consequential sex as possible, and that by removing and, you know, disparaging traditional norms that serve to try to equalize the power and balance between males and females, that everything would be fine. So, you know, male chivalry was deemed as oppressive, and female prudence and modesty were also deemed as oppressive. And so the drunken hookup

where, you know, there's no consequence sex and you don't necessarily know your partner all that well, was assumed to benefit both parties equally. And well, it turns out, out. And I think we have, you know, the biological evidence that hormonally males and females respond to coitus differently. That for females, it does produce a surge of the hormone that, you know, wants to have emotional bonding. And so there's a lot of females who are walking around the night after, you know, and there's the guy, you know, with his lacrosse bodies or whatever, and not feeling any particular tug of empathy and longing and regret. And, and regret. and embarrassment. I mean, these are, sex is very, very complicated.

Yeah, I guess. So now we're regulating it like a contract, which is ridiculous. Well, yeah, that's the problem. And we're also giving, you know, we're not taking case-by-case well, we're not listening to everyone involved, which is a part of the problem. I think that we're going to get to when we talk about the problem of us capping on campuses. I just want to say that, you know, having grown up in the 60s, the part of the sexual revolution that I, that I do think was really important was women being allowed to be viewed as sexual beings, as there's nothing wrong with women, you know, having sex. And before marriage or, you know, there was a clear double standard before the 60s, which I think was inappropriate, that women who had sex outside of marriage

were somehow evil and men who did weren't. And I think the, so I think the, the healthy thing it came out of that is that we are all sexual beings and that sex has to be understood. as implicit as a part of life and be dealt with by everyone and not labor. And it's true, and we'll talk about biological differences. And to argue there aren't biological differences is ridiculous. But the fact that women shouldn't be held to a different standard in terms of engaging in sex, I think is a healthy thing. Yeah. Well, I would say that, you know, the defaults for premarital sex have now been reversed and that those defaults before the default was again and you're right there's a double sound for females in particular you the default for premarital sex is no you can you can

waive the default by agreeing to it but the default means you don't have to argue every single time when the guy's petitioning you he has to argue you to yes now the default is yes it's just assumed that this is how we behave. And it's the females who have the burden of getting to know. And I would say that that arranged, the previous structure, I think, was more realistic about unequal bargaining power, unequal desire and unequal consequences.

But you're right. I mean, literature is filled with stories of the females in the 19th century who become, castaways and are, you know, go into exile because they are pregnant. So there was a double standard. I would say, on the other hand, the consequences of unprotected sex for females is much higher. Much higher, sure. So something that is more sort of female protective, you can always point to the individual cases of injustice, and that's the problem. Norms are going to have consequences. and now we're very reluctant as a society to have stigma with consequences attached to anything other than

phantom white supremacy. I mean, we're still stigmatizing like this. Under the stereotypes, which are just, yeah, which are the problem. Part of the problem here is, and you point out, and having been at a university, I've seen the impacts of it, was this dear colleague letter from the Obama administration, which was just, which responded to a potentially real problem that certain universities were protecting, say, football players who were... Yeah, athletes. And that was a real problem.

And so, you know, it was well-intentioned. But the net effect of it was to basically get rid of due process and any burden of proof. And the net effect, as you point out, is to say in the case of a drunken hookup of two students that the male is always responsible and the female is not responsible. to remove responsibility. But I, I mean, there are just so many examples one can give. But you describe one at Washington Lee that I, take a, this is just an example of what goes on, and I want to read it, because people may not be familiar with how unfortunate the situation

is as a result of the implicit assumption that one person is, that people are guilty, and that evidence doesn't matter. which of course is the basis of due process, which is what keeps our country going. Take the case at Washington and Lee University. After a late night party with the usual heavy drinking, the female accuser Jane Doe told her male companion, I usually don't have sex with someone I meet on the first night,

but you were a really interesting guy. Jane Doe began kissing John Doe, took off her clothes, and led John Doe to his bed, where she took off his clothes. They had intercourse. That was on February 8, 2014. Jane later denied using that pickup line in the ground that she often had sex with someone, that she often had sex, which is someone she had just met.

Jane, and then I'm skipping a little bit, Jane started psychological therapy after seeing John's name on a list of applicants for a study abroad program that she'd also applied to. She told one of her therapists that she had, quote, enjoyed the sexual intercourse with John Doe, but was advised that her actions and positive feelings during their first sexual encounter didn't negate that it was sexual assault. During one of those talks, Washington Lee's Title IX officer informed the audience that the emerging consensus that regret equals rate.

After Jane Doe learned that John had been accepted to her study abroad program, she decides to initiate her campus' sexual assault machinery against him. A travesty of proceeding followed in which the Title IX officer rejected John Doe's request to consult a lawyer with Dante asked warning that a lawyer can't help you here and the school expelled him. and so the danger of taking a highly charged situation of young people, unfortunately, it's a buck and all. Yeah, and courage to have to drink and not realizing that there are different responses to it. And always having an institutional structure that always assumes one thing without the necessity, is in this case the preponderance of evidence, 51% evidence, whatever that means, is problematic. Maybe you want to talk more.

Yeah, well, I mean, my reaction ultimately is just like throw everything to the hell with all of this. It's just, and conservatives have been taking the easy way out, I think, which is to really harp exclusively on the due process problems, which are legion. And again, you have a betrayal of the major truth-finding mechanism that has been worked out over centuries in Western jurisprudence, which is cross-examination, the right to confront your accuser. And that is essential, absolutely essential. But we need to step back that there's something just weird. Can't we see how weird this is that we have these bureaucrats and these tribunals to adjudicate the subtleties as like how much pressure somebody's applying, you know,

because we're doing this a whole affirmative consent thing now. And so you have students that at the start, you mentioned the sexual liberation era, which was, you know, the students demanded get the adults out of the bedroom. We want to have as much sex as possible while in college and get rid of the parietal rules and, you know, we should all be able to visit at all hours of the night. now turning around and saying they want the adults to create these tribunals where they can replay every grope in front of this sort of voyeuristic administrator. It's just bizarre. This is sex guys.

It's a single individual usually who makes that decision right at universities now. Yeah. Kettle 9 is generally single investigator in many universities. Well, that's different. That means you've got both a investigator who's also the adjudicator. Adjudicator, exactly. But sometimes there can be a. a group of people, but this ain't happening once you graduate.

You know, you're going to have to deal with this on your own. But again, we're talking about something that is the very realm of the cathonic and the irrational that has defied the ability of poets for millennia to describe. And then we're subjecting it to these bizarre. You read some of the school's contracts definitions of affirmative consent. They go on for 25 pages. mortgage contract. Well, and as someone pointed out, and you quote, a university investor points out that

universities are not equipped to handle plagiarism, not rape. That rape is, we have laws against rape, and we have laws against sexual assault, and we, and that probably the place to adjudicate these is not in a university, if there's a case of rape or a case of sexual assault. It should be handled a legal system. Yeah, well, they're not. But then people will say that, of course, they're underreported because people feel the legal system is biased against them.

Yeah, well, no, the reason is they don't think that they know that these cases will be thrown out initially because the evidence of there being mutual codeterminacy is so great. And, you know, my point is, again, as you mentioned, that it's just a bizarre double standard, that it's always the male who's at fault. They both can be drinking equally, both, you know, losing their rational self-control. but the male is now being turned into the guardian of the female well-being again. Which one... Which is a Victorian value, which I'm not against, but let's go a whole hog.

Well, that's right. I think it's becoming a Victorian value, and I think your point about that and more generally, as you talk about Me Too, and we'll get to it in the community, is that in the context of feminism, it's hurting. Because what it does is it makes women appear to be, incapable of handling themselves and need to be either chaperoned or males have to be excluded. Right. And here's the real active agency that will prevent you. I ask campus rape administrators this. Okay. If you believe there's an epidemic of campus rape, that's serious. That is scary,

dangerous. You could end it overnight if you persuaded every female on this campus to not drink herself blotto, often to the point of unconsciousness, not get into bed with a guy you barely know and take your clothes off. That would end it, because these are not instances of some stranger crawling through your window at 2 a.m. with a knife. These are people that you know you're fraternizing with them, and you are deliberately drinking. Nobody's got you like a fish, you know, with the wooden pike steak in the mouth pouring down liquor into you, you are doing this yourself. And what the campus rape administrators always tell me,

oh, I would never send a message of that sort of personal responsibility because rape is never a woman's fault, which means that they would rather preserve the principle of male fault than to protect females. And I would say if they really think females are undergoing this epidemic of the most traumatic crime a female can experience short of being murdered, the first consideration is how do we end this? And the first consideration is personal responsibility. So either they don't believe it, which I think is what's going on, or they are so political that they want to keep going these phony examples of rape culture just so they can continue prosecuting their case. against the patriarchy.

Part of the problem, and I agree with you on this, part of the problem, if you need to do, if you need to circumvent rules of evidence and due process, then you must feel that the examples are ambiguous, too ambiguous to be dealt with in a way, which, as you said, is clear violation of a person, and that's problematic, I think. And it is, and it's, unfortunately, it's, fortunate for me as a person on the left politically that right now, one is seeing that this effort, at least at universities, to try and in other places to try and get due process and in some sense encouraged.

She tends to be the province of the right right now. And it shouldn't be. And it shouldn't. And universities should be places of not only free speech, but open debate. and places where, if anything, individual rights should be, on all sides should be guaranteed. They should be places because there are places of open discourse and places who have critical inquiry where that should apply in all aspects of universities and they're not. Well, as I get older, I feel the yearning, and I think this has been one of the great yearnings of Western civilization,

which is to craft a system where human beings can be confident that they are being governed by neutral principles and law, not partisan passion. Yeah. And it's terrifying to think. And, you know, as somebody, again, who came out of deconstruction, I still imbibed deconstruction that I don't believe in truth, actually. Even though, you know, I live it as if I do, I write because I do believe I'm counteracting falsehoods. And yet there's a part of me that still is too wedded to the idea that there's infinite number of interpretations. Well, you know, but, but again, the hope is that you can have some kind of neutrality, a tribunal where you don't have to worry is the judge, a Democrat or a Republican,

that there's a possibility of the rule of law. And again, my, my deconstructive pass said, oh, come on, give me a break, you know, interpretation and bias will always come in. But these procedures that we have developed in Western jurisprudence are so precious to try and check the human instinct for revenge, for partisanship, and, yes, for a university of all places to be discarding them and scoffing at them is truly an irony. You talk about Columbia, you know, having – they required all students to basically – take certain classes to show, you know, basically to show that there was gender bias. And if they didn't, they would lose academic standing. And I think your statement, basically, if Columbia felt compelled to take on the issue of sexual respect, quote unquote,

it could have done so in a way that actually had intellectual value, had it remembered its primary mission, is to fill the empty noggins of young with the least passing knowledge of mankind's greatest works. What you're saying is instead of forcing kids to take these classes with ridiculous names and some... Fluff, it's content-free. Content-free fluff that they should be getting them to look at these issues in terms of... Redone Giovanni. Yeah, yeah, or read works with great literature. Yeah, okay.

But let's go beyond the classroom because, you know, the next thing you do is policing sexual desire, the Me Too movement's impossible premise. And you point out... you know, well, again, these things are well-intentioned as the Obama letter was well-intentioned. It was designed in principle to address what appeared to be a problem, but in some sense it's gone way overboard. And you say, I think the resulting Me Too movement formed out of other workplace predators inevitably adopted the epistemology of campus rape movement.

Overly broad definitions of what constitutes sexual misconduct are now being legitimized in the workplace, a partner of Worstein-Birstall-LLP said. And again, you give many, many examples of not just how that's happening, but how institutions are supporting that. And the most recent one, because I thought you wrote a brilliant article after this book, but on the Placidonimo case, why don't you talk about that? Because that's a clear example. I sort of want a poster child for much of what we're seeing reported in the newspapers

over and over and over again about powerful white males who are being brought down for sexual misconduct. And why don't you talk about Placet and Mingo and your views about that? Well, this really exemplifies the, what is driving this. I think is hatred for a civilization deemed as two white and two male, and the modeling theatrics of the rape victim rhetoric. Placito Domingo is now 78 years old. He's an extraordinary Spanish tenor raised in Mexico. His parents had a Zadwela company. This is the Spanish folk opera tradition. and he early on in his career was spotted an extraordinarily beautiful voice, subtle, taught, erotic, capable of expressing rage and sorrow and desire.

But he was also very charismatic. He was also a brilliant entrepreneur for music and classical music. and opera in particular. He created opera companies in Los Angeles, a world-renowned opera competition for young singers. He mentored thousands of people. And there are testimonials to his kindness, his generosity, the fact that in an opera house he was gracious towards everybody, thanked all of the staff. Yeah, in Europe, they said that. the head of the opera company said that, you know, that he went out of his way to treat everyone and thank his staff.

I read that from your article. Right. So, and then he brought opera to millions more, as he was one of the three tenors with Placito Domingo and Jose Carreras, that, you know, did soccer, World Cup stadiums and stuff. So, you know, a real ambassador for the form. So last summer, the AP, the Associated Press, had a story that nine females came forward, all but one of them anonymously,

to accuse him of sexual advances. Most of these incidents happened in the 80s and the 90s. This was, again, last year, where Domingo was very, according to their stories, and these were people who were either mostly in opera choruses or very minor singers that may have hoped for some very brief walk-on roll, that Domingo made unwanted sexual advances to them

and it was very persistent, you know, he would whisper in their ear, gee, I wish you could go home with me tonight or, you know, do you have to, you know, stay home and rides in cabs where he would make an advance on them. In one case, a female, presumably, completely voluntarily, they did have sex, He's been married to one woman all his life, all his life.

And she broke off the agreement. And by all accounts, whenever they actually explicitly told him to stop this or when this affair is over, he accepted it. But nevertheless, because they felt like he was unduly persistent, that he was a sexual harasser and his career should end. Again, all but one of these was anonymous. the one woman who was on the record, she was a soprano. He'd never touched her once, but again, after curtain calls,

he would keep it whispering or are you sure you have to go home at night? So this created the first AP report in August, created this massive uproar. And immediately, the Philadelphia orchestra that had him scheduled for a gala opening concert in the fall, canceled, the San Francisco opera, canceled as engaged, after these nine reports, the Philadelphia Orchestra, again, another example of the spread of the, of the nauseating victim rhetoric from universities outward, said, well, you know, our communities

are unsafe by Placido. In other words, our audience members are unsafe by Placido on stage. In other words, if you're living in West Philadelphia and Placito Domingo is performing the Kimmel Hall, you are at risk if you're a female. This is absurd. So a second AP report came out with another 11, I guess, anonymous accusers. One, again, was on the record. And her story was that Domingo, in a dressing room, he'd been pestering her, sort of grabbed her breast. And she said she'd said this to the makeup man. Did you see what happened? They contacted the makeup man. He doesn't recall any about it. To me, that's not determinative. It could have happened.

Now, my point, and so then all these other media outlets wanted to jump on the bandwagon, only AP got the anonymous accusers. NPR then wrote a story, two stories actually in a row, about this revolt at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which had said, we're going to wait for the L.A. Opera, which is the company that Domingo founded and was still the general director. and again, Domingo put opera on the map in Los Angeles. He got Hollywood money to, ordinarily Philistine Hollywood money to contribute. The L.A. Opera started an investigation. Metropolitan Opera said, okay, he slated to open in Verdi's Macbeth in September

with this Russian superstar soprano on a Trebko. We're going to wait to see what L.A. Opera concludes before we make any decisions. Well, the weekend before Domingo was going to open in the Metropolitan Opera's Macbeth, I went to the dress rehearsal for that. The orchestra members and the chorus in the Met then had this meeting with the Met General Manager, Peter Gelb, raising bloody hell, saying, we are unsafe. The fact that a 78-year-old man is in our house makes us as females in the orchestra pit, unsafe. This is ridiculous. The idea that a 70-year-old man places a threat and under current

microscope, you really think that he is going to make an advance to you. And even if he does, how about you say no? You know, is this like so impossible? So the Met, after this came out and there was this revolt among the staff, Peter Gelb decided on a moment's notice to cancel Domingo, and basically Domingo will never sing again at the Met, and his career in the United States is over. Now, there's two ways one can approach this as a skeptic. The easy way is the due process argument, which is to say Domingo had no due process. He is facing anonymous accusers.

These are incidents that happened 20, 30 years ago. How can he possibly defend himself? We don't know the facts yet. is way premature to make these judgments. It's like the campus kangaroo courts, but there hasn't even been that. This is purely he's being hanged in the media. My position is more radical, which is that I am willing to grant, for the sake of argument, that all of these things happened, and that if we went through due process, that there we

would be able to find females who, in fact, Domingo was pursuing. Let's notice Domingo throughout his career has been pursued mercilessly by females, by female singers. We are living in a bifurcated existence more and more as females enter more and more workplaces where we have the realm of ideas, and then we have the inevitable incursion of erotic desire. Let's take a point that you actually told me about today, about another up, which is, you know, people could argue with you. and I'm sure will. But let's take this other opera tenor, I think. Vittorio Grigolo.

Something equally significant happened to him for something that seems absolutely ridiculous. Do you want to? Yeah, he was touring with Royal Opera, the British Opera Company in Japan, and it was a performance of Faust by Gouno. And the staging had Grigolo, the tenor, He's a very, very charismatic, very exuberant stage presence.

The staging had him during, as Faust, you know, he's an old man, starts out as an old man, he's given eternal youth in a pact with the devil. He apparently, a pregnant woman during the course of the opera presents him her belly, her pregnant belly to pat. And this is part of the stage business. So during the curtain call, the baller. who played this voiceless part with the belly, she was on stage with her prosthetic pregnant belly.

And so Grigolo apparently went up and sort of gave it just a good-natured pat, mimicking what the stage business was. She got all upset about this and felt like she was being sexually assaulted that he was patting her prosthetic belly. And apparently there was some exchange where he then got sort of hot under the color. But this was all in sight of the audience. The entire company was on stage. He wasn't dragging her to his bedroom and raping her.

It was a pat that was visible to everybody else. So this created bloody hell again. The man is a sexist. And as of yesterday, both the Metropolitan Opera and Royal Opera have fired Grigolo from all upcoming performances. Okay. So I think that's a clear example of. of something that I think is almost easier to see

is perhaps an overreaction. But your point you make, and I wanna move, you know, I wanna move off this in a second because it's highly emotionally charged to, the other aspect of this, which is continuing the diversity delusion, the other aspect of this complaint is not just sexual harassment,

which you're talking about, but also sexual inequity, namely gender inequity in universities and other places. And I want to talk about that delusion, which I think you deal with very well, and I want to end with that. But before we do, you make a key point,

if the argument is made that men and women need to know, that they respond differently to sexual suggestions, sexual innuendo, et cetera, et cetera, and men need to be sense about this, you make the point that women recall from this same behavior reveals, and I'm quoting you, reveals a fundamental divide between male and female experiences of the body and sex. And there are, and I mean, they're unambiguous for people to disagree that there have been studies. No doubt that women and men treat sex and even smiles differently.

Feminist tick of blaming males for every female behavior that contradicts their ideal of gender equality undercuts the very claim of equality. Your point is that the point you're making, which is interesting, is that by saying that males are different, but they need to be the same, but they're different, violates the claim, the feminist claim that everyone's equal anyway. And I think, so maybe you can say it more eloquently than I just did. Yeah, I mean, why do we, if there's no difference between males and females, why should we have gender quotas in politics? You know, why should we have gender quotas and corporate boardrooms? Because everybody's fungible, so there is no difference. So you can't play it both ways. Well, I'm glad you said it that way, because that leads to the final thing I want to discuss with you,

which is, should there be gender equity, should we demand gender equity in every environment possible? And you actually started in classical music, saying it's happening in classical music. This demand of gender equity means that people are not able to find, allow, have male conductors, or in fact in one, I think in one music course, they were, you couldn't, someone was saying, well, who is this Mozart? Yeah. Who is this Beethoven?

Where, you know, as a Columbia's core curriculum. Yeah, and there was not so gender, but as a person of color saying how. And so we need to see everywhere, in order for us to learn or experience or enjoy a concert, we need to see people that look just like us. Well, it's logically impossible.

I cannot stand the role model argument. How could Marie Curie discover radiation? She didn't have a female role model. It becomes logically impossible if you can only do something that somebody's already done before you of a particular, you choose the categoristic characteristic. It's arbitrary. Why gender?

Why not blue eyes? Why not? I don't know. Somebody's five foot four. But if you can only do something that somebody's already, then you can never do something the first time. And if you start thinking about diversity in that extent, it's not just gender.

It's why short people, it's red hair people. But it's more than... Do something because you love it, not because you have to have a female role model. But there's also getting back to something we talked earlier, the artificial nature of imposing something at an inappropriate time. I was at the Nobel Prizes in 2004, and I was really impressed when they... At the 90 of the awards, there was one woman who won the Nobel Prize.

And they came up before the King gave the prizes, and made a statement, he said, you know, you'll notice there's one woman on stage and, you know, seven men or whatever. And some people are concerned about that. However, the Nobel Prizes are given often for work that's 40 years old. And in many of these fields,

there weren't women in these fields. And we're hoping that, you know, as things go on, 40 years from now, you'll see different. But no one, I think, would argue, I hope not. No one would actually, I'm sure some people would argue. No one would want you to say, we need when we're giving the Nobel Prize, to not think of the best work that's done,

but make sure we have 50% women up there, even if there aren't 50% women in the field, even if, because 40 years ago they weren't working on it. And we're seeing that more and more. You give examples in university departments where at the assistant professor level, there's more gender equity than there is at the full professor level in a field where women are only starting to enter into the field.

So it's not too surprising. since usually you have to be, you know, have been in academia for a number of years before you come a full professor, if they're just entering the field, you wouldn't expect as many female full professors. So requiring that, or when Justin Trudeau in Canada, who's loved by everyone, made a remarkable statement, 50% of his cabinet were going to be women. Now, the question is, it turned out 25% of the elected representatives were women. So was that an appropriate thing to do? Let me throw it over to you. Well, the other thing we didn't talk about with preferences is the stigma attached.

And from now on, I'm not going to be confident that any female who gets the Nobel Prize from here on out that that's a fair playing field. I'm not going to be confident. Maybe it is. But you will never know. Exactly. The a asterisk. The asterisk. There was a law professor at the Yale Law School, Stephen Carter, who wrote a book in the 1990s called Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby.

and he wrote about the sort of mental challenges, emotional challenges of living in a world pervaded by racial preferences. He never knew whether he was chosen for something because he was the best or because he was the best black. And that goes for females too. You know, I'm sure I have been the so-called beneficiary of gender preferences in my career, and it annoys the hell out of me. I don't want to be chosen because I'm the best female, but I was actually contacted by a producer. so recently for TV who was explicit. They wanted me on some panel on income inequality, something that is not my

expertise, and they said, we want a female. That's ridiculous. It's demeaning to you. And you're right, but it also, I think the real point is that it puts the asterisk on, if there were a female who was an expert on it, you'll never know. On that panel, you ask that question. I vote against, you know what, your

readers or listeners are really going to hate this. Every proxy ballot that I get from like a mutual fund that I have shares in, if there's females on that board, I vote against them, every single one without knowing more, because I am confident that they are there. There's companies that are moving out of California now. They are desperate to find females to get on their boards. They can find no one with the expertise, and so they're leaving California. Well, and I think to come back to the university

again and end with the universities, what we're seeing is universities bending over backwards, the same way we're race, to admit, mea culpa, in a situation where which they initially aren't even guilty, but creating an infrastructure which makes it implicit that they're guilty. And the thing that I, when you talked about the creating the bureaucracy to handle diversity, gender diversity and racial diversity, I was, but gender diversity was just amazing to meet. The University of California, there was a new diversicrap position that, and he said it would augment

UC San Diego's already massive diversity apparatus, which included the Chancellor's offers, the Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Equity, the Assistant Vice Chancellor for Diversity, the Faculty Equity Advisor, the Graduate Diversity Coordinators, the Staff Diversity Liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the Chief Diversity Officer, the Director of Development for Diversity Initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gendered Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council

and Climate Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, all the directors that cross-coct cultural center, the Lesbian Gay Transgender Resource Center, and the Women's Center. It's all about identity. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And it creates this environment where narcissism. It's navel gazing and narcissism. Well, and it replaces the focus on knowledge, on knowledge and quality and excellence. And excellence and accomplishment. Right. But also, but by being there, it encourages, it teaches them, yes. But implicitly, makes the assumption. Anyone who goes in would say, ratifies your victim. Yeah, you go in

you say there must be, it must be inequity. We're in fact, in the STEM fields, at least it, there's every evidence that there's the opposite. Alessandra Strumia, you've probably talked about it on your show before. He showed that females are now getting hired with much less

research background, earlier in their careers than males. Well, you, I mean, you give some evidence in the book, but there's every bit of evidence that there's no, as you point out, there's no one has given evidence in spite of the fact that there's the claims inequities, and the claimed inequities are simply due to the fact that, once again, fewer people go in a certain field at a certain time than otherwise.

But I think you made the claim that no one's actually shown explicitly that someone, that there's been examples of people not being hired because they're women, where in fact it's quite the opposite. And I mean, as a chair of a department, I'd have to say, and this is not new for 20 years. And I was proud when I was chair of the department that we happened to hire the first two female faculty members. And we, for whatever reason, we had the first all-female matriculence in a physics graduate. Not all them accepted the offers. But we were looking at these things. And, and, but as a chair, if I hired anyone, any faculty member 20 years ago who wasn't female, I had to write an explicit letter explaining why. So it's not as a

if it's not as if the system is biased. But by having all these positions, you make it seem like it is. And then, you know, Caltech had a program for the future of physics. And I actually had a, there's a young woman I recommended and she got in. But the program basically said, you can come to this if you're not male. Well, you know about, you know about manals. Manils are now verboten. And these are scientific panels composed, you know, predominantly of males. And you have the head of the NIH now, Francis Collins, saying he's never going to go to a conference if it's predominantly male. Whereas fanels are okay. You know, you see San Diego recently announced very proudly that it's putting on some biology conference on microbes, and it's all females.

Fannels are glorious. Now, are these the most qualified researchers? Who knows? Yeah, and again, puts that asterist. And the NSF, actually, the woman who's ahead of the NSF said something about the fact that people, grants would not be given if there weren't, if there weren't basically gender equity. An example that I can give, which is closer to home, because my background is Jewish. If we go back to the Nobel Prizes again, if you look at in physics, the 212 Nobel Prizes that have been given to physicists, 57 of them have been Jewish, which means 27%. When the Jewish population in the United States is 2%, in Europe, it's less than 1%. there's clearly an inequity for Christian people, and we need to do something about it. But in fact, it's a reflection of many cultural factors. And the last thing you'd want to do is the Nobel Prize is, once again, to say, well, we just have too many Jews.

I'm very worried. I'm very worried, you know. Well, I think where we agree is that universities in particular are not the places to solve inherent problems that are, social problems that exist beyond, whether it's race or gender, but also that in order, that talent should be colorblind, it should be gender blind, it should be height blind, color of hair blind, it should be based on accomplishment. And I think that education should be about taking you out of yourself and the claim,

the demand of students to study things that match their, the pathetic, being female is not an accomplishment. It's not particularly interesting. And there are some great female writers. I love Edith Wharton. I love George Elliott, Virginia Woolf. But I don't read for females. I read for great language.

And that's where we come back to where I want to close. And to some extent, our agreement to disagree. If it makes you uncomfortable to read from people who aren't like you, that's the best thing university can do is to force you to read people that aren't like you, that have thoughts that are different from you, because that'll take you out of your comfort zone. And I think, you know, you would stress more of the fact that universities are there and, in effect,

the last words of your book are basically say to get, you know, dump the great knowledge on students. I think that's a part of it. I think what universities are really, in my mind, should be create lifelong learners, to be places where people, because probably both you and I, I can certainly say I knew more,

I learned more physics after I got my PhD than before, but what I learned was how to learn, and how to tell the wheat from the chaff, and to learn how to determine when I'm wrong, when my bias, my physical bias leads me to a conclusion that is wrong and to be able to question myself at all times. So I think university is to instill knowledge, but beyond that,

to perhaps make you uncomfortable by being able to force you outside your comfort zone to ask when you're wrong. Well, first of all, I know we're rumminging up again. Many, many time barriers, but I would say the lifelong learner meme is one that universities have been using for decades now to compensate for their failure to cram knowledge into the empty noggins of students. Well, you can just look it up and, you know, learn how to learn. No, you learn how to learn by first you have to have a knowledge base. You can't look something up if you have no idea what happened in World War II.

So, yes, of course, you learn to learn by learning. You know how you learn to learn. You learn to learn by cracking the books and actually absorbing content knowledge. And that's what we're letting universities off the hooks. Okay. I agree with you there. Although I think to learn, you learn by questioning, in my opinion. And I think we teach people to question.

And to end, I guess, we're in this environment. After people hear this, and they either agree with what you said or hate it, they're going to go to the Internet. And the Internet is this incredible, well, we used to think was this incredible source of knowledge, but it's a source of misinformation as well. And we have to, I think, in this next generation, teach students the tools to be able to tell the garbage from the sense. And that means to know how to ask questions about the material they're reading, to know when things may be, maybe, that credentials maybe have a, maybe there's a reason for credentials, and to be able to

distinguish with wheat from the chaff. And I think the educational system has to respond to a 21st century where people do get much of their information from this little thing I'm looking at as I talk to you. Okay. Well, I'm not going to set us off on another. We'll have, we'll have another chance to come on for so long. And I appreciate the courage you've had to bring up these ideas and potentially inferior people, at least get people talking about these issues, which is really the important point of this. And as I said, science and culture come together. The necessity to question these things and necessarily to look at our culture. and I really appreciate this discussion with you.

Well, I appreciate the care with which you read my book and your willingness to speak about it in a gracious and understanding manner and try and put my best arguments forward for me. So I greatly appreciate it, Lawrence. Thank you so much. Thanks again. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. You can continue the discussion with us on social media

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