The Ricochet Podcast - The Ivies Must Die

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

Just James, Peter and Rob this week to wade through the disaster that has become of American higher education. Naturally, the essential question arises: what do we do about these once-prestigious institutions? The Ricochet trio think it through. 

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lilacs and today we tackle the question, is it time for the Ivies to die. Last night what you saw at Columbia University is open support for Hamas, holding signs saying Al-Qassam Brigade, your next target, pointing at Jewish students. So here you have it. America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. I was going to put him in a foot.

Excuse me. Welcome. It's the Ricochet podcast. Number six hundred and eighty nine. I'm James Lollix in drizzly Minneapolis. Rob Long is in Gotham and Peter's in California. And I guess in all three of these locations, they're characterized by something akin to discord on the campuses. Quite extraordinary what we've been seeing this week. Quite extraordinary.

And I think the people who are saying, well, it's going to be great because Trump's going to dominate the tray. Everybody's going to look at the Trump stuff. People are seeing on display a segment of the left that, well, we've been seeing for for years but really hasn't been this emboldened on this nasty uh in some time and it's not going to end uh soon it's going to spill over into the convention and uh another zesty summer of love is coming up guys looking at this what do you say i know of course that these people are not anti-jewish at all no it's just a matter of being anti-zionist a very very specific designation and distinction that we must respect or not. Rob, Peter?

Peter Robinson I'm a little... I know, it's a little late to keep saying that I'm shocked. I am still shocked. I was in my office the other day, actually, I was meeting somebody for a cup of coffee on the Stanford campus. And in the background, I heard a great racket and some music being played, brass instruments being played very badly. And that usually means it's the Stanford marching band on the way to a football game. I thought, wait a minute, it's wrong, it's spring. And I turned and it was a parade and there were Palestinian flags waving and placards being held aloft and it's all right there. And then as I returned home, I happened to pass a couple of fraternities and a couple of the fraternities or excuse me, this is complicated here on the

Stanford campus. There are only a few real old-fashioned fraternities left. Now, there are theme houses. I guess these were a couple of theme houses that had Palestinian flags draped from the windows. And there, as I pass the Hillel House, there's a Stanford cop at the Hillel House. So, it's disconcerting to see it flaring up all over again. I thought that at least with regard to this one campus here in California, things had died down. There was a flare-up on October 7th, but things had been quiet. And now it's not quiet. And I just don't understand how Stanford students... Now, some of the people in the parade, many of the people in the parade may not have been Stanford students, but those theme houses were on the Stanford campus and they're lived in by

Stanford students. How can they understand so little about the history of the 20th century? How can they understand so little about the 21st century of the history of the Middle East, of Israel and the surrounding area? And you cannot understand the history and chant from the river to the sea. You just can't. So, I don't, I don't don't it's none of this is even computing but it just it is more than disconcerting well you certainly can if you wish that history had turned out differently um rob yeah i mean i i actually feel like this is divorced from history and divorced from what's happening it's it's um it's like this emotional craziness that you you know they this is a unfair cherry picking but they did

I saw a video of these young women in NYU not that far from where I'm standing right now a couple blocks and they were protesting or something and someone said what are you protesting you know they said Gaza or something well what's

happening there? We don't, why are you protesting NYU? I don't really know. And then she looked to her friend, like, can you help me? Yeah, you know, I'm not as educated on that as I should be. But, you know, we're here in solidarity. We came from Columbia to our friends in NYU. So we're here in solidarity for we came from columbia to our friends in nyu until we're here to solidarity i mean these things kind of have their they develop their own life

it's like i'm protesting this thing i don't really care about or know much about and then the university is like complaining about it and then that is why i'm protesting i'm protesting because you're against it um and it it it's this kind of this very strange coddled generation uh that is um that it's not their fault here's my position it's not their fault their teachers uh were uh almost to the to the person 60s radicals the 60s hippies grew up to work go back right back into the academy and be the professors and now they're tenured professors in schools and they have been teaching and high schools and they have been teaching them uh these students uh this incredibly mythic view of the 1960s this heroic myth that students protested and they ended a war it was a bad war and student protests ended it which is just not true it was a bad war that's fair and students

protested that is also true they did not end the war that is a historically completely inaccurate point. The last American left, I think, Saigon in 1975, almost? 74, 75? In 1972, after at least eight years of student protests, the country voted in a landslide

for the candidate who was not going to leave Vietnam without peace for the honor. It wasn't against Nixon versus McGovern. McGovern not going to leave Vietnam without, you know, peace with honor, it wasn't, he was against, you know, it was Nixon versus McGovern, McGovern was going to leave, McGovern was the choice of those students. They did not have an impact on the foreign policy at all. What they did was they dispersed over the years, and they went into teaching high school and college, and they produced a teaching high school and college and they produced a generation that now comes from columbia down to nyu to protest the thing they don't know

what they're protesting for to show solidarity for people who they don't understand to argue about a part of the world that they do not they could not locate on the map maybe or the key events on a timeline but they know that they can participate in this drama because their teachers were to participate in the drama and because all the cultural uh stories about the 60s were all about how great the drama was um this is self dramatics of the most uh like sophomoric sophomoric but empty empty kind. Say this for the SDS, or say this for, what's his name, and all those guys, say this for the hippies. They had been raised in the 50s. They went to actually schools that taught American history.

Now, they may have been distorted by the time they got there to college, but they were a lot more informed about America's role in the world and about the dangers of the world than the generation today, although they were not effective. So, you know, maybe, anyway, that's my rant is now over. I knew thought for me, which is now maybe 48 hours old, but as somebody said something on my Twitter feed, and I thought, oh, actually, that's right as well. Every word Rob said about the teachers, but you know what is also involved here? The admissions offices.

They chose these students. That's right. You know these students wrote pat little essays about how socially concerned they are and how they had protested this or done that social activism in high school. They chose these social activist nitwits. Columbia has the students it chose. Well, I mean, there are many things here. You have to feel sorry for the students at NYU, because unlike the people who have the nice green veldt, the big swath of lawn in which they can pop up their tents,

which all look alike and all come from somewhere. When I in college and we were if we're going to protest i hadn't the faintest idea what we would do tent wise we would probably go over to midwest mountaineering and pool our money and get maybe one you know uh pop-up that we could all fit into but uh this the profusion of tents that just appear place by place by it's almost as if there's some sort of network of NGOs that's funding it. Anyway, the poor students at NYU don't have a mall, a green space, because NYU is just slotted into a whole bunch of buildings to go to the square. So you've got to feel kind of bad for them.

But secondly, you're right. Yes, this is, as Rob said, the process of the Long March, of the people who very comfortably, very wonderfully, attached themselves like lampreys to these great institutions and found for themselves money, sucker intellectually-wise from the rest of their peers, respect and the rest of it, hollowing out an institution so that they can preach against it,

but by themselves living every single measure of a comfortable life that's a product of Western academia. Hypocrites, the lot of them, and intellectually bankrupt people, morally bankrupt, socially, emotionally bankrupt people who are still wafting on some cloud of self-regard that they first conjured up in the 60s and the 70s. I say it's communism and hell with it. But as for the students, right, we have valorized the protest to the point where just about any, the very act of protesting itself sanctifies whatever it is you're doing and whatever it is you're protesting, unless you're marching around with a tiki torch wearing khaki

pants, in which case, you know, you're the worst person ever in the world. We have Charlottesville times 10 all over the country when it comes to not just anti-Zionist activity, anti-Jewish activity, specifically stating things that are beyond the pale and American discourse. Freedom of speech, yes, of course, but go back to Poland, go back to Belarus, saying that of American citizens who are of Jewish descent and faith, is anathema to the culture and is as anti-American as you can possibly get. It's wrong. It's absolutely wrong. An expulsion ought to follow from what I think kind of sounds like hate speech. I don't like hate speech things, but that's the term they're going to use.

And those are the, you know, banishment from they're going to use and those are the you know banishment from society is going to be the price that you pay for it according to the left well then i'm one of those american guys who say let's apply all these laws equally but it's what what what galls me with so many things galling me obviously and not that keep going james you're beautiful when you're called but for some for people, the sound of masked rhyming chanting makes their blood rise and their spirits soar. I find it absolutely contemptuous, and I find it a substitute for thought. And a tribal chant that indicates that you, not that you've thought through the issues, not that you have a grasp on the issues, but that you're part of an organism that spontaneously arose in order to perform this dance for everybody else to show that you're on the right side of things. And I think

it's almost back to silent majority. I think most people, when they look at this, a lot of people who are on the left, center left, do not feel the same sort of exaltation when they hear IDF, KKK all the same. They don't. And they may be the silent majority in the next election. We don't know. But I just have an instinctive revulsion to it. It's the sound of everything crumbling. And we went through it in 2020 2020 and we're going to hear it

again yeah i mean i i guess what i what's sort of interesting about it to me is the idea that it's kind of reflexive the um the i guess the theory is and this is actually a ultimately a sort of a problem disconnect in society which is that the theory is if you're a student is that you're told if you're successful or um you're the winner something must be bad you did something you stole something um you know i have an argument some of my my very pro-israel jewish friends about um whether october 7, whether they're facing an existential issue here, existential problem, existential crisis for Israel. And my point is, of course, no, no. The answer is no.

Israel has had now 80 years of very, very focused, very effective leadership. The security of the state of Israel is not in question. It is militarily, maybe it was unprepared on October 7th, but it is far superior to its enemies. And it has shown time and time again that Israel is a very, it's a secure state. Not that it's not under attack occasionally, but that they're going to win. And they're going to win because they've been focused on that for 80 years and they've done a really wonderful job doing it. And that's not a bad thing it's a good thing but people are just they are made just they're discomforted by that and the the prevailing sentiment among sort of the progressive left is if you're strong and you protected yourself you're probably a criminal that if you have built something you know you

didn't build that as obama said that you probably took it from somebody right and so there is among the left and i think especially among the jewish left this kind of what's happening is a kind of an academic kind of a break a psychological problem which is like we israel is a successful state because because it took its security seriously and focused on it and had a culture and a population that was focused on this great idea of a Jewish homeland. That is literally the theme of the Hebrew Bible, right? That's the theme of the oldest, longest-lasting religious text in human history. So this is a big deal, right?

And they took it seriously, and they are at no point did anybody think, oh, you know what, Hamas might win. They're not going to win. So that, if you're an academic leftist, you're like, well, then Israel must be evil. It's got to be bad because the winners are always bad.

Everybody who wins a war is a criminal and did a bad thing. And everybody who succeeded somehow took it. We just don't have, we no longer understand how people got where they got and that they worked hard to get there. And I feel like there's part of that I see, I see in my Jewish friends who are liberal, who are now kind of trying to recalibrate their idea, and I see it in the culture in general, the idea that if you were successful or if you accomplished your mission, who would you take it from? I haven't fully thought this through, but that's my theory. You're right. Behind every fortune is a great crime. That's the idea.

I agree. That's a great crime. That is the idea. That is a, I agree, that's a profound point. I might modify your view on whether or not Israel is involved in an existential crisis to this extent. It's not a threat to their existence as long as they have us. They need our carrier groups in the Eastern Med. They need our technology to help them with the Iron Dome and successors to the Iron Dome. They need munitions. They need support. They need us. Here we have the Biden administration scrambling to try to figure out what to do because among many people, in particular Jewish donors, the population of Jews in this country is

so small, it's 2%, there's really no place where the Jewish vote is going to be decisive. But Jewish contributions, Jewish participation in the democratic, all of that matters enormously. And if you look at our friend Andrew Gutmann who's running for Congress now in Palm Beach, is himself Jewish, he's running as a Republican, he's tweeting that he's hearing over and over and over again from Jews in his congressional district. He's campaigning, shaking hands, giving speeches. So, he's on the ground at this saying, I've been a Democrat all my life, this time I'm voting for you. So, you've got one party, the Democratic Party, which among one of its traditional constituencies

isn't doing enough. And then Biden requires the youth vote to defeat Donald Trump. And we know two things about the polling among the young. One is that they are uninterested and bored by this campaign. Why wouldn't they be? You've got one octogenarian and another septogenarian. But we also have this youth vote that thinks the Biden administration is supporting Israel too much. Well, that is the political bind that the Biden administration is in. It's not great.

Couldn't happen to a nicer group. But if you're thinking in terms of, is this an existential crisis for Israel? It's a problem for Israel if they don't have the American, if they don't have firm support across both our parties. It's just a dangerous position to be in, to have only Republican support, to be able only to count on republican support i i accept that i just mean to say that that the history of the state of israel is uh an amazingly triumphant history yes yes of a people who you know for thousands of years have had you know you know how many you know attempted murder attempt you know how many how many attempts to to to eliminate them have been barely thwarted right and they have a homeland and um and they protected it with incredible courage and strategy and focus and sacrifice um that is you know what i'm one of the great stories of

modern civilization um it didn't come without a price and it didn't doesn't come without a price today but it's a an extraordinary extraordinary victory for good over evil that you know we should at least celebrate that that that seems to me to be yes we certainly saw a story quite a big story the other piece of it of course is that everything changes the day iran gets a nuclear weapon right everything changes that day they they cannot be permitted to get one and you know what they're saying in amman and riyadh and cairo and probably you take it out go ahead you know what they're saying they're saying in amman and riyadh and cairo and probably you take it out go ahead you know what they're saying they're saying take them out you know these uh thank god for the israelis because they're gonna do something about this i mean the the great is the great secret israeli strategy

the past 23 years has been isolate hamas drive them to the arms of iran make them iranian clients make them clients of the um ayatollah in Tehran. And then let's see what the king of Saudi Arabia and the king of Jordan and the dictator in Damascus and the military dictator in Cairo have to say. You know what they're saying? They're saying they're looking at their shoes and saying, yeah, well, it's, you know, like that great moment in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when one of the kids is running off to do something dangerous. And Charlie and Willy Wonka saying, don't stop. No, please stop. Oh, no, don't.

Don't touch that button in the least energetic way possible. That is what the Arab countries are saying to Israel right now. Stop. Stop that. Don't do that. Meaning they want them to go ahead and do it um that you know look uh it's one way you can look at all this this disaster this chaos it's horrible and warfare is terrible and you can look at all and think it's just a giant disaster but in some ways this is a logical outcome one of the logical outcomes of a strategy that has um

that was necessary for israel to pursue which is to make um small incremental peace with its arab powerful arab neighbors not big peace little peace here and there you know here and there starting from really this is a 23 year process starting from september 12 2001 um and isolate and drive their enemies on the in on the ground to the arms of the only agreed enemy in the region that everybody hates and that's iran and um iran foolishly and hamas foolishly fell right into it unfortunately it led to this terrible war where people are it's a horrible thing that's happening there um but it did clarify the sides it does it did clarify the uh many of the posts that i read talk about the uh the idf incursion into gaza is something that just happened for some weird reason which escapes us at the moment. Everything was fine, pretty much.

Oh, Gaza was an open-air prison, don't you know? Oh, they were being starved by the Israelis, don't you know? Oh, the Israelis were being so cruel that they actually reduced to five the daily shuttles between Gaza and the hospitals to treat people who couldn't get treated in Gaza. Oh, the genocide. But then something happened, and I can't quite remember exactly what it is. Something to do with some guys in parasails. Well, that was it. Yeah,

some guys from Gaza were parasailing off the coast, and the IDF shot them down. Anyway, wave that away. Just wave that away. What matters is, of course, that the IDF went in and killed 33,000 people so far uh specifically the number that comes from hamas and hamas itself is downplay has said well you know what it may be 23 000 we don't know we're kind of checking our records why anybody believes in my famous idea and that they're believed that everybody that israel has that the idf has killed is is a civilian and preferably a 14 year old boy with a dewy face or an infant that's that's it they i mean they're not going after soldiers.

No, they're targeting mothers. They're going after the least useful military targets available. Somehow. That seems to be, again, the assertion. And all of this is an overreaction. The idea that a neighboring country, it's called Gaza country, elects this group to run them. This group has in their charter, river to the sea, kill the Jews, death to the Jews. And then the people that they elect promptly go and do something like they did on October 7th, the details of which will come to my mind.

And that the proper response to this is to let that government remain in power. It's what they're saying. I mean, you can't go into Gaza. You can't go after Hamas. But perhaps you could have done something to tit for tat it. So let's just imagine then that the IDF goes into Gaza. Let's say they choose a music festival for some reason. And they parachute in and they kill a lot of young people. they drag the women back and they rape the women they put it in as a matter of

fact they film themselves doing all these these various atrocities and then they drag hostages back to Israel and periodically will release videos of them with an arm missing to you know spouting some platitudes about this about how they're being treated and refused to to tell anybody where they are, and don't release them, or maybe one or two of the sort. What would the reaction on the campuses be? I think the reaction on the campuses would have been equal in its ferocity to Israel going in and attempting to eradicate Hamas once and for all. And perhaps that's the calculation that they made when

it comes to the international. You know what? We're the Jews. I don't like anything we do. So let's just go do it. And what's more, the idea that going in and having a targeted assassination in a music festival and dragging people back, that somehow that's that that that is the proper response. Beggar's imagination. There's no way it is. There's absolutely no way it would be. It would even be conceived of by the government. So that's the way it is there's absolutely no way it would be it would even be conceived of by the government so that's the strange thing it's like sending in the military to do a military job of killing the guys who are behind this is the war crime but but if they just gone in and done a tit for tat somehow that would have been a tempered response

and i just hear a horn there from that was was me. That's the city agreeing with you. Right. Yeah. Well, you know, the city agreeing with me, I don't know. What I see in Columbia is madness. I mean, when I hear students, you know, we had that video that was released yesterday by one of the leaders of the organization talking about how Zionists do not deserve to live this is a student on record student leader that they don't deserve to live and it's all he can do to keep from killing them and he hasn't killed them yet and we're supposed to actually applaud perhaps when this guy says that i haven't killed a zionist yet um it's a nasty nasty group of people uh but where do they go from here is the question. Let's say they graduate. Where do they go exactly? Do they go into the world of business that they supposedly hate so

much because it's this late capitalist hellscape that oppresses everything? Do they just sort of suck it up and say, well, I'll be a good voter, I'll be a good revolutionary in my own way, in my own time? I guess I have to live in the system or do they just spread into any more uh you know social institutions and governments and urban yeah governments and charity groups and social groups and the rest of it and continue i mean i miss the old day i miss the days when the scolds and the reformers were standing on a corner with a salvation army band you know and being you know prim and some sort of, some little bit Puritan, as opposed to these endless,

endless tiresome, odorous Marxists that had bedeviled us since that hairy bastard wrote his book. Ah. I don't know how to respond to that. I don't know if you can, and I don't know what to. Well, I mean, look, what's going to happen, you said what's going to happen, I gonna happen you said what's gonna happen i mean i think what's gonna happen is they're gonna um well those kids are gonna go into the they're

gonna go into teaching yeah great unless i mean i i had um i had uh lunch yesterday with a old friend of ours a friend of our um of ricochets uhchet's, Andy Kessler, a great columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Wonderful guy. I just looked at Peter's face. Peter's like, really? What's going on there? No, you're not allowed to have lunch with Andy Kessler without my permission. He's one of the smartest people.

He writes these hilarious, brilliant, but also very entertaining, lovely columns in the Wall Street Journal. If you have not read uh andy kessler's columns you really should treat yourself and we're talking about this stuff and you know we're saying like well uh the only solution i mean it used to be that you'd say oh you know what we need to reform these places we need to reform these schools the schools need to do x y and z now and we're talking about this yesterday i don't know if he agreed with me but what i said was um no no they need to be replaced they need to they need to no longer exist they need the market needs to squash them out and we need to stop

treating uh columbia or yale or dartmouth or harvard degrees if it means meaningful and that that we need to stop referring to that as an education because it's an education is a as a specific noun that means something. Instead, it's a diploma, which is a certificate you got. The culture needs to reject it and replace these institutions with new and different and better institutions, not fantasize about reforming them. Rich people in charge, even rich conservatives in charge charge have a hard time doing that because they went to harvard to or yale or princeton or you know whatever and they're like well i i you know can't you just fix this bad part about this great credential that i have instead of throwing the

credential out and the answer is no and i suspect that across the culture and in politics too i mean look i don't know the people listening to this that are staunch republicans and they're staunch trump voters and there are people listening to other podcasts that are staunch democrats and staunch biden voters but there's a whole bunch of people we all know who are in the middle and they're bigger that number is getting bigger and bigger and bigger that are saying that even people who are going to you know hold their nose and vote for one of the two clowns running are saying how did this happen right how did we get to this and we got to this because the parties are old and ossified and uh sclerotic and they need to be replaced and harvard yale princeton dartmouth uh nyu columbia are sclerotic. The universities are ossified,

and they need to be replaced. We need new brands, new names, new institutions. It is a very unpleasant thing for a conservative to say because we're supposed to be conserving these things, but every now and then, you got to throw it all out. You've got to throw the baby and the bathwater out and get yourself a new baby. And the tub. Peter, you are there in academia. Do you see the likelihood of this actually happening? Because it seems to me that the institutions that we have seen cover themselves with, be spattered with the feces of their own actions in the last four or five years, as we've watched every single one of them sunder their responsibilities and waste their credibility, that the only thing that

actually replaces these institutions, which are still here, still around us, is some societal catastrophe that takes the whiteboard and just takes everything off it. And then, of course, you turn to the assembled people and say, well, what do we write next? That's never good because what they end up writing is some utopian nonsense that falls apart and bloodshed and guillotine in about four or five years. So, absent some sort of catastrophe that makes the very concept of Harvard and Yale part of the old and before times, is it likely that these institutions will be changed? I don't know. By the way, I agree with Rob that Yale must be replaced, but I have some reservations about Dartmouth. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Andy Kessler, who's a Cornell man. No, no, baby and the bathwater out. No. So, here's what I, Dartmouth has a new president. She's been on the job for about a year now. And after October 7th, Dartmouth responded as, of course, I'm paying close attention because I have my youngest child is about to graduate in a few weeks. So, I'm paying attention to what's happening at Dartmouth. All right. They responded pretty well. Instead of big, huge protests, the college immediately organized, I believe it was a history professor who understands a great deal about the Arab world and another professor who understands a great deal about the history of Israel and Judaism. And they had events for the kids to come actually learn things that they couldn't learn on Fox News or CNN. My point is this, this is the moment when those institutions either get it together

and reform themselves or at this point, I do believe we're at a decisive moment. Rob will be proven right if within six months or so we don't see. How Yale reforms itself, I don't know. But Harvard has a vacancy in the presidency. Whom Harvard chooses as the new president will tell us a great deal about whether these institutions, when I say these institutions, what do I mean? I mean, no new institution is ever going to have three centuries of history, which is what Harvard has, or two and a half, 280, which is what Dartmouth has. Yale is the second oldest, as I recall, so Yale's close to 300 this year as well. No new institution will have that.

No new institution will have 100,000 alumni, nor will it have what's the Harvard endowment. Harvard and Yale are both in the many tens of a billion. Dartmouth is eight billion or something like that, much smaller. So, they have tradition. They have records of service to the country, at least up until the 1960s. They're worth saving if they can be saved. And we will very soon know. A question for Rob. Look what happened in Texas. They tried it in Texas. They got dispersed. They tried it in Georgia. Oh boy, did they get dispersed. To try it in Florida, not going to fly. Is the question maybe not to blow up those institutions, but to somehow manage to transfer the credibility that they have to places that are less likely to let a thousand Jew haters bloom.

Yeah, I mean, sure. Okay. I mean, I like my solution, which is like total destruction of that institution and rebuilding it from the rubble. But I see that yours is a more judicious and probably more effective and more realistic of a suggestion i would just say about the harvard thing which i think will be interesting i hear my prediction for the next president of harvard will be somebody who you you have no idea they'll be the blandest most anodyne most carefully calibrated paper trail of that person whoever that person is i mean if they could if they could generate an ai president of harvard they would do it because

what they need is somebody who has no opinions and doesn't represent anything and isn't going to make anybody mad and has no paper trail and that person my guess is that person is going to come from stem right i mean that's who you want that's the goal that's like somebody who's like basically been doing important research and something useful um uh and and and it's going to be a dog whistle for people on the right because we're going to be kind of thinking you know listen if you've been sitting in a lab and you if you believe that there's a right answer to the problem and you believe that there is such a thing as truth then you're probably on our side correct um so that's that will be how that shakes out i think but i still feel like you know i don't know why we uh you know what we need is more we're clinging

to these brands i don't know we should just no i listen to brands i mean like what barry weiss is doing is amazing what i think what ben Sasse is doing in Florida is incredible. I think there are people that are trying to come up with a new way of treating higher education that is, in fact, the old way, which is how do I teach you to be a great citizen, a useful citizen, prepare you for a life of some kind of productive service, and give you the tools you need to make your way in the world, instead of, how do I give you a four-year subsidized vacation so you can explore your trauma and figure out how the world and your life have been unbearable for you. I'm not quite willing to join you in destroying the Ivies, but here's where I am willing to join you. This is America. It's a great, big country. And the idea that the Ivies have retained,

the Ivies, eight institutions, one's in New York and all the rest are in, two are in New York, Columbia and Cornell, and all the rest are in New England. And they're very, very, they do hold a special place in our history, but the idea that they should have dominant levels of prestige, that they should have been the dominant educational institutions as long as they, that's over. It's just done. Here's one thing we have in this country. We have regions. We have federalism. We have the University of Florida, which is a great public institution, and the people who run the University of Florida, in part the governor, but also other, I think they're called trustees,

I can't recall the governing structure, but they bring in Ben Sasse. And what is Ben Sasse? What is one of Ben Sasse's first moves? To end DEI at the University of Florida. Folks, some of you will lose your jobs. Some of you will be transferred into new positions within the university. Those of you who lose your jobs will be able to apply for new, but it's over. And two weeks later, the University of Texas says DEI is done. And they're a little less nuanced about it. They just fire a bunch of people. Well, God bless Texas and God bless Florida. We've got different, and we have this entrepreneurial spirit. So, the University of Austin is a brand new institution. This is what Barry Weiss is participating in. It's what my colleague here at Hoover,

Neil Ferguson, is participating in. Full disclosure, it's what my oldest son, where my oldest son is working down in Austin right now, helping to put together the University of Austin, which will admit students this fall. It will be up and running and functioning. It is an accredited university. It has raised many tens of millions, I think at this stage, it's fair to say many hundreds of millions of dollars. It's going to work. Let them have it. The idea that the University of Texas should in any way bow and scrape to yale it's over that's just done you you managed to i like how you you've taken my bold statement and you've said well not not obviously not dark but yale for sure the yale for sure all right you know that's the unambiguous case it's that

is the one unambiguous case you start bringing the village down and you bring the whole village down you could start again it's no big deal right we'll be fine i mean look i mean i remember years and years ago talking to a reading an article read a great book by the great writer james grant who's a wonderful financial writer and then i had lunch with him and he's like you know we have this we have this idea that these things aren't supposed to change that all monetary monetary system lasts forever and they don't like the dollar changes its value and what it stands for and the world currency changes all happens a lot like these changes do happen right um and there's a lot of chaos when they do and a lot of fear when they do but yeah you know i don't know like we we should be prepared for that and we

shouldn't cling to what i seem to me to be institutions that are totally out of gas look if something doesn't suit something doesn't suit you and suit your culture and your needs anymore, come up with something better. Replace it. It would be great to wake up 100 years later and find that Yale and Harvard are the nation's preeminent technical schools, vocational schools. They used to be. I know.

Look at that guy. His son got a plumbing degree from Yale. Oh, man. I didn't respect that. There used to be. There were seminaries, right? A seminary was essentially a trade school. And then there was a Sheffield Science School or Sheffield Science Academy or something was basically half of yale right um now it's now financially

these these institutions at least yale and harvard i don't know about the other ones but those institutions financially are if you look at their budget if you look at their sort of financial profile they are health care companies they're hospitals and research hospitals with a little bit of a university attached to it on the side in terms of the amount of money they're they're the health care insurers so it's it's they're already there we just have we just don't want to give it up because the people who write new york times people are on tv and people like me were like we like we want you to think that yale was really something special which it was but we want you to think it converts it confers upon me some kind of like extra credibility which

it does not do which i don't have to tell the ricochet listeners that they already know i've done more to diminish the prestige of yale university on this podcast than anybody well i mean the the notion of a university always in the public mind had a certain segment of airy-headed uh professor absent-minded types who would wander around and think about keats and the rest of it and have no practical application to the rest of the world. Now, though, I think there is the general idea that the people who fill these universities are motivated by two things. One, a profound ignorance of the past, and two, a profound guide to Lord Byron's 17th canto of Don Juan, instead what they're doing is they're churning out interchangeable, unreadable, dense concatenations of buzzwords about social issues, the only purpose of which is to identify and

to clarify the evil nature of this system and the requirements that it be completely dismantled. I mean, that's it. And by the way, that is not in any way an overstatement. When Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, when her papers began to circulate on the internet because she'd been accused of plagiarism, accurately accused, we know, it immediately became clear. They were exactly what you just described. Right.

Unreadable. Nothing but rivers of jargon. When people said they were plagiarized, it was like, how could you tell? How could you tell? Exactly. I don't know what any of it means. Where do you find such bad writing to steal? Yeah. Unbelievable.

If you barred the use of this slew of sociological nonsense in these people's works, they'd be unable to produce a thesis paper because, I mean, it's like newspeak. are just tiresome, tiresome repetitions of the whole idea that we are all merely helpless, powerless cogs in a system of systemic systemism, and that only through true evaluation and interrogation of our intersectionality can liberation be—I mean, it has gone so far up its hindquarters that the entire, I mean, it's impossible. They've just made intellectual pretzels of themselves. And so, but we kind of get that now, don't we? We've all seen this on display over and that. Is that the popular conception now, the people who go to these places? Or, I mean, I can't conceive of the people who send their kids to school to learn this stuff actually think there's merit in it they're just doing as rob said for the certificates that brands them as employable at this level in this place yeah look the the um

the one of the side effects the which was positive, I think, in general, of education was that you got confused. That you went and you learned enough about the world that it made you confused. Like, well, I don't know. Like, it's confusing, right? And you just don't see that on the Columbia or NYU campus. Those kids are not confused. They don't, I mean, they should be, but they're not embarrassed that they don't know why they're down at NYU.

They go, oh, I should learn more about it specifically, but they just know that in general that they're doing the right thing, which is something they've been told by their teachers, which is their teacher, because their teachers, I mean, all my teachers were, not all my teachers, not all my professors, because I was the wrong generation. But most of them, certainly every single graduate teaching assistant I had, and every sort of English teacher and history teacher, most of them anyway, had had some kind of important adolescent experience in the 60s. And decided that their curriculum was going to be based upon how great the 60s were and you can like any university you go you look at there will be a class or two or 10 or 50 about the 60s and how great they were and how important they were there will not be any

classes about the 50s or the 40s or the 20s even maybe the 20s in english literature but like or the 70s right right the the generation that rioted in the streets in the 60s and did nothing um went on to teach classes about how great they did they wrote their own myths and um this is the generation that grew up on that myth and You're making an absolutely fascinating point that takes me back in my own memory. I'm just enough older than you, Rob. Thank you for admitting that. Yeah, well, when I was at Dartmouth, there were two layers of professors. And when I was there, the senior professors had all trained in the 50s. And they were all men. They were, yes, I think without exception, they were all men. And they had standards. They spoke well. Vincent

Starzinger, constitutional law, you never saw Vincent Starzinger without a jacket and tie. And in class, he would say, Mr. Robinson, what do you have to say about Reynolds v. Sims? Mr. Long. That was still alive. It was still real. But at the same time, the associate professors, the young guys had trained during the 60s, and it was exactly as you described. But I was there at the last glimmering where you could avoid the jokers. I mean, I can remember walking into class and there was a professor, I won't name his name. I don't think he ever got tenure at Dartmouth because he seems to have disappeared. But this guy had long hair and he wore jeans and his class

began. He sat on the desk and looked at us and said, well, okay, let's talk about it. What did you guys make of Taming of the Shrew? And I thought to myself, my parents, this is hard for them for me to pay to come here. I don't want to hear what my classmates make of taming. In other words, you could just feel it. The 60s were right there. So, of course, needless to say, I dropped that course and ran back to Jeff Hart, who had trained at Columbia under Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling in the great old days. But you could see it. You're absolutely right. The 60s were decisive. But I have to disagree with Rob.

Go right ahead. We don't have to. Do they talk about the 50s? Do they talk about the 70s? Yes, they do. Because they have to constantly mine the past for proof of all of the various horrible things that the culture has done to marginalize people forever. So, in other words, are they going to teach the full breadth and scope of the 70s, how it was, how the first part was a curdled efflorescence of the nonsense of the 60s, and how the later part was a complete descent, you know, into Weimar-era style degeneracy before we stood up and put our tie back on and our suit coat back on and started behaving?

I mean, do they tell that state no what they will do is they'll have a class about how the origins of queer theory can be found in the first transgender person to start the riots at stonewall and they'll get somebody who's made poems that were published in a chapbook who didn't capitalize their name and didn't have any particular rhyme scheme as being the most important poet of the era. So they'll go back and the past can be excavated over and over again to exalt and bring up all the people who are now the heroes, the people who stood and thwart the various cults. So don't teach them the cult.

It's a given that the culture of the time was wrong because it was heteronormative, it was white supremacist, it was Western civilization. That's a given. So the only bones you can make is to go back and find all the reasons that it were wrong, now that we've all agreed that it's wrong. But it kills me that these people do these things in these settings that are designed to sum up the great aspirational notion of Western architecture and how it must gall them, really, to walk around with these ideas festering and curdling in their head and igniting their heart and to look around and to know that they are utterly incapable

of constructing a civilization that can construct something like the beauty that they see around them. Yep. James has done it again. He's talked us into total submission, Rob. Yeah, he's james has done it again he's talked us into total submission rob yeah he's yeah if i if i just if i just spam if i spam everything with 50 points then nobody knows what to respond to i love the way this conversation is there anything else you'd like to say about yale rob robbie merges holding a torch of light to start i demonstration. And then the first thing he does is turn around and throw it at his own house.

Yeah, well, I mean, you know, it's always a question, right? Are you throwing out the right stuff or not, right? That's kind of what we, as you move through life, as you move through the culture, like, okay, we're getting rid of some bad stuff, and we're going to keep the good stuff, and we've just got to make sure we're throwing away the good stuff. We're keeping the good stuff and throwing away the bad stuff, and we're going to keep the good stuff, and we've got to make sure we're throwing away the good stuff. We're keeping the good stuff and throwing away the bad stuff, and we're doing a good job. If you accept that the label of a thing doesn't matter, that there's no particular value to Yale anymore, there is a value to education and to knowledge and to truth,

then you have to ask yourself, what's the goal of a society? What's the goal of an education is that's to educate the next generation to be useful productive citizens and contribute meaningfully to the you know for the furtherance of the human race and human flourishing in general um so it's not to um keep yale afloat now if that happens automatic anyway, fine. That's, that certainly has been the case for the past 200 years, but everything kind of runs out of gas eventually and you have to change. So what's the goal isn't to, I mean, I'm not a nihilist. I'm not saying the goal is to throw is to torch the idea here. I'm just saying, find another way to do it. Um, the, the, the point,

the strategy, the goal is the same. The pathway is different. Yale to Linda Est. Well, there's hope. One of the most popular series on streaming last month, I think, was The Three-Body Problem, which starts out with a very vivid and effective demonstration of a communist Red Guard struggle session. And I'm watching this, I think it's Netflix, Apple, I don't know,

a thing about Ewan McGregor who's stuck in a hotel in Moscow during the Bolshevik revolution and by God the commies are pretty gentlemen in Moscow the commies are pretty the Bolshevs are pretty awful horrible people there too that's two representations of commies

in the media lately as being bad that's a heartening sign and also um while we of course abhor collectivism we do like people getting together and i believe rob you before we go you need to tell us about some meetups uh that are going to be happening yeah i would just say the greatest thing about ricochet is that we have uh irl in real life uh gatherings which are kind of the fun of it um you know sometimes we i think we spend too much time in front of a screen um later this year ricochet members are getting together for the national view cruise that's mid

june so i think there's still places available so if you're if you're mid-june free um you can join your fellow ricochet members and go there and i know they always have a couple meetups there and they have a couple tables and it's actually a lot of fun, but I've had, I've had more fun meeting Ricochet members on those cruises. I'm not going on this one, but, um,

there are a lot of fun. Uh, last week, Katie Koppelman, um, uh, member Katie Koppelman put out an itinerary for 4th of July weekend meetup in Fargo.

And I'd be there. I would be there. That's around the corner from you, but, um, okay. So that's 4th of July, uh, Fargo, North Dakota.

Matt Balzer is hosting the annual German Fest meetup in Milwaukee during the last weekend of July. So we have mid-June and July kind of taken care of. And Randy Waivoda is hosting a meeting up in St. Louis in early October. And Randy is like this incredible meetup, you know, master MC impresario. He, he put together the one we did in New Orleans a little while ago. And, and they're always real.

They're more than just a meetup. He usually puts together something else too. And St. Louis is really interesting place. A really interesting city. So those are just the three that are on my dashboard, but there are more always coming up. And if you're like,

well, listen, the 4th of July, I can't make it. I can't get July and June are done and October maybe, dashboard, but there are more always coming up. And if you're like, well, listen, the 4th of July, I can't make it. I can't get July and June are done and October maybe, but I want to do one in September. Join Ricochet, put up a member post, tell us when and where you want to meet. And I guarantee you the Ricochet membership will show up because that's what we do. It's like the Elks. It's like the IOOF. It's like the Kiwanis, the Rotarians,

and the rest of it with all the rules and the rest of it. So yes, Ricochet, go there, join if you haven't already. And if you've been listening to 689 of these podcasts, I think maybe 690 ought to be the one that finally gets you to join, or maybe 691. It's been a lot of fun. Nothing starts my Friday, my weekend off better than sitting here in this room staring out at the skyline of my great city and talking to rob and peter and i hope everybody's enjoyed the conversation as well we'll see you all in the comments

at ricochet 4.0 next week guys next week fellas ricochet join the conversation