The Ricochet Podcast - The State of Education

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

The hour may be late to protect America’s future, but all is not lost. We can sense this thanks to the actions of men like today’s guests. Mark Bauerlein joins Rob, Peter and James to discuss how universities have robbed the young of the grand narrative, along with his work at Sarasota’s New College. Andrew Gutman, who made headlines two years ago as a frustrated father willing to speak up... Source

I did see somebody in the elevator earlier, which was rare, but no, it's basically me. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Read my lips. No new taxes. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson and James Lallick. That's me. We're all back together. We're going to go to school with Mark Bauerlein and Andrew Gutman. Let's have ourselves a podcast. America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. I was going to put him in...

Excuse me. We never get bored. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet podcast number 630. You can join us. I know. I know. You can join us on Ricochet. Well, no, no, we don't stop that, Rob. We keep going. We want to get to 666 and see exactly what happens. Well, that's that's the end. If you join us at Ricochet.com, by the way, you will be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. And you'll see exactly why we've gotten to 630, because there's a thriving group of people who love to listen to every word we say with rapt attention and adoration afterwards. Actually,

probably no, but that's the fun of it. We get to disagree from time to time. Hey, everybody's back. It's Peter. It's Rob. It's me, James Lileks in Minneapolis. Peter in California. Rob, I assume, in Gotham. Yes.

So here we all are. And yay. How's everybody doing? All well on this end. Rob was gone for a while and traveled all over the world. And I'd like him to compress into two sentences what he learned, what we should know about what he learned. Just compress it all into two sentences. I don't know about two sentences, but I'll compress it into two little phrases. in the world got measurably miserably poorer thanks to

covid restrictions thanks to covid hysteria among the rich countries um jerusalem is uh uh a staggering place and i mean almost in a physical way like you sort of stagger you like you can't believe that it's that it's that first of all it's still there and you just can't believe the rich nasty irony of the fact that the headquarters of the three revealed religions which share so much i mean so much text they've put on. I've spent 2,000 years trying to kick each other out. And it ain't over. No, and I feel like it's going to be a very bad March and April.

And that's it. And also that Cairo is a fantastic city. Cairo is a great city. Oh, really? I would go back to Cairo in a heartbeat. If I may follow up to the extent of one question, James, and then I toss it all right back to you. Rob's form of Christianity is, to my mind, a little amorphous, and yet it's always there. Oh, yeah. There you go. Christmas and Easter, he tells us about these vast treks he makes

across the island of Manhattan to participate in the church. What, in your mind, in your heart, awe, nothing, what was it like to go to the church, to the holy places? And in particular, I'm asking this because you wrote about it, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Here's what's the most amazing thing, is that I feel like people, you know, I don't know if people are religious or even non-religious, but certainly Catholics, I suppose. As you know, I do not count myself among that group. You know, you go to the important places in your religion, or the important places in Christianity, and you look at beautiful art.

And you look at the Sistine Chapel, the famous porch in St. Peter's. You look at these beautiful statues and these incredible paintings. And, you know, you walk through the Met, and that's, what is it, 80% of it is pictures of Jesus at some stage in his life, right? And then you go to Jerusalem, you there is no real art there the church of the resurrection the church of the holy sepulcher what do you want to call it it's just kind of a dump um nobody really it doesn't you're not you don't you know people are not standing in line to see a painting or a sculpture or to look at um a fresco um they're standing in line to touch a rock they're standing in line to feel something the place itself if you're used to sort of western style uh you know order it's got like you know like all these these orthodox various orthodox

churches kind of have control over it and and they all sort of split. The Christians have such a hard, have had, historically, I mean for millennia, such a hard time administering their own holiest site, that the Ottoman Sultan finally had to give the control of the site over to two Muslim families

that have had it for about a thousand years. And they control, one controls the key, and the other controls the door. Because you couldn't trust the christians to sort of get along there's a ladder as you walk into it there's a ladder that continues to this day to this day yeah you know i saw them like i saw them like a ceremony right yeah um it's not even a ceremony it's just a kind of a guy and the family kind of just assigned somebody it's's just, they're responsible for it, but they, they pay some to do it. And they have for a thousand years, you go into the church and it's got like, you know, there's like a lousy,

crappy looking lights and like did those dairy queen curlicue kind of fluorescent things in front of the holy tomb, you know? And like, it's kind of like like it needs a big cleaning up and just and there's a there were power strips plugged into the wall and like and yet um it just goes to show you you know that it isn't really about the art or the painting of the sculpture or the architecture it's really just about the place and so you go uh and you stand in line a little bit and then um and every religion has this experience. I mean, you know, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity share this.

You go to the place that is the most holy, whether it's the Western Wall or the Al-Aqsa Mosque or the Dome of the Rock or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. You go and you stand in line and you touch a rock, and you see what isn't there. It's an empty tomb that's the story of christianity is that you open the tombs rolled away and it's not no one's there the dome of the rock is the rock on which muhammad was taken to heaven he's not there the western wall is the wall upon which next to which or on top of which depending on which side of this you believe was the site of the second temple it is not there so you go and you're you go all the way to jerusalem to look at things and to experience things that are not there anymore there's only one thing that's there and that's you

and that to me was i thought the most moving thing is that i'm not there to look at anything or to see anything i'm just there to be there and to be me yeah and um what's amazing is that that um you know more and more and more people are going to die because of that i mean it just isn't it just more and more people and it's not going to be peaceful it's not on its way to being peaceful um it's on its way to being a little bit more um i mean i think i'm i'm pessimistic about the spring so um you're talking about the new israeli government yeah the new israeli government and the and the reaction to it i mean everybody's to react everybody likes to say things and then they wonder why the other people are overreacting to what they're saying so um you said it's going to

be a bad spring why yeah well i think what's going to happen is you have a new israeli government that's kind of wobbly politically it's having trouble getting its judicial reforms passed. The one thing it can do is act tough on West Bank and then rely on the Palestinians in Gaza, the Hamas, to launch missiles. Then you have Hamas, which is going to take any provocation it can i mean people palestinians were complaining about some radical uh jewish clerics demanding the rebuilding of the third temple which would it's sort of like saying uh you know i want to build a house right where you live it means've got to tear down where you live, which is the third holiest site in Islam.

So none of this, I mean, all of this is saber-riding. None of this is going to happen, I don't think, but it's going to cause a lot of, there'll be a lot of rioting and a lot of rocks throwing and a lot of people killed before they exhaust themselves for the next few years, I think. I wish. I have my solution to the problem. Ah, good. Here we wish i might have my solution to the problem ah good here we are

i have a solution my solution is more christians there are fewer and fewer christians few of your palestinian christians than ever before and whereas right there is there is really no other place in in christendom that is more holy than Jerusalem, or more holy than the West Bank in general, capital W, capital B. And all the Christians are leaving. I would say Christians should move. The more Christians there, the better. Maybe kind of ease the tensions a little bit. And the secularists would say that actually what the area needs to be, what it really needs is to be stripped and drained completely of these religions, of these antiquated sky, God, Father things. Yeah, I know, exactly.

What would they have to fight about if it wasn't religion? Well, I think that they would probably come up with something, human beings being what they are. But the no art thing is interesting to me. I mean, that's kind of how I see it, too, as though all of the splendors were offshore to the other cities, to Rome. You know, we just had an exhibition here in Minneapolis from the Uffizi. And I know Peter, of course, has been at the Uffizi himself on a private tour, right? Oh, two or three times.

Right, right. Two or three private tours, that is, yes. Right, where you go with such rich guys, they actually allow you to touch the paintings and the rest of it, all the things the rest of us can't do. And the astonishing amount of religious iconography that was brought over. What's interesting to the modern eye is that you look at all of these things that they brought from the Uffizi, all these manifestations of religion in which I grew up, and every one of them has a story which has become, over time, inscrutable. A reference, a gesture, an object, a piece of symbolism, this whole vast visual language, which I get some of it, because I've studied it a lot, but there's so much that's obscure and waits to be said. To go to a place that is denuded completely, and as Rob said, just allows you to communicate with the absence,

or the presence implied by the absence is a fascinating experience. I'd still rather go to the museum, but that's just me. So that's more than two sentences, Rob, but I've learned an awful lot. And how long were you there? You were there for, you know, 36 hours, right? Yeah, I talked to two cab drivers. That's how you do it. That's what I was going to do. No, it was there for about two weeks. Two weeks and a long time in Jerusalem, but I would go back because I would actually have to spend a month there and just kind of be there because there's tons to see.

And there's just lots going on, and it's great. Stupid question, which may be irrelevant to a lot of people, but I think isn't. How are newspapers there? Do they have a vibrant culture where there's lots of broadsheets and people hawking them in the corners and people snapping them open in the cafes as they go? Or is Israel a high-tech society beyond that and just simply stares at their pads like everybody else? Israel definitely is sort of super high tech and very advanced technologically um uh there's sort of two big um uh two big papers in israel and one is um um uh sort of the more of the new york times he called haretz and it actually comes with the new

york times you buy it your time um and that so they do read it not to get it yeah yeah i don't know i found it i'm not very interesting actually um but they have enormous amount of sort of online media i was in it was in uh i went down to jordan so to cross into jordan i went to uh a lot which is a tiny little it was a horrible you know kind of a dumpy little beach town. It was a resort town in Israel on the Red Sea. And I went into the hotel little gift shop and asked for a...

See if they had a newspaper there, because, you know, hotel gift shops often sell newspapers, right? And, you know, I don't speak any Hebrew, but the person said, what? A newspaper? You have a newspaper? And then the guy looked at me like uh then he said in english no we don't we don't have that no we don't have that like it was an outrageous thing for me to ask no we don't have that we don't have that like shaking his head and then another guy i guess the boss who was another part of the shop

was like called out to him in hebrew i think um hey what did he ask for and then the guy says in hebrew back you know shrugging like what an idiot this guy a newspaper can you believe it and then the other guy looked at me and then said in english no we don't have that go online he said mad that i hadn't gone online which i thought was great um introduction to the to the region, I should say, to the temperament of the region. I'm going to sum up. I agree with everything you said about what it's like to be in a degree, not as if you're putting it to my judgment, but yes, I agree. You experienced some of that. The only thing you didn't mention, but only because I asked you to keep it to two sentences,

was the sound in the Holy Sepulchre. You go to St. Peter's, rather hushed, the tour guide is trying to hold his voice down, and then St. Peter, hey, over here! Sounds of different masses, bells being clanged, it's just, it's loud. A priest I met in Jerusalem said you go to Rome to experience Christ in his divinity, and you come to Jerusalem to experience him in his humanity. That struck me as pretty good. Although, I mean, I don't know. The empty tomb is in Jerusalem. That's about as divine as you get.

Well, the thing about Rome is, aside from the fact that there's an incredible church every four yards, inside of which contains a profusion of art and Baroque, marvelous, you know, it's extraordinary, and you never tire of it. But then you go to St. Peter's, which is built on such a gigantic scale that as a human being, you feel very, very small. You feel among giants. You feel as this is a race of giants that you can aspire to, that you can eventually ascend to. But I never come away, I always come away from Rome, or any one of these experiences, frankly, even though you've just connected with the oldest parts of your civilization, you still feel, you feel invigorated by it. You feel absolutely up to date, up to the, I walk

with a spring in my step out of every museum, because I feel that I've been filled up by what my culture can give me. But does that mean I'm going to live longer because I've been in museums? No, it doesn't. But let me ask you this. Is it possible to extend your lifespan and feel younger at the same time, that sort of youth that you feel when you learn something or done something or gain? Well, according to a Harvard scientist, a Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough, absolutely it is possible.

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to the podcast, Mark Bauerlein. He taught for nearly three decades as an English professor emeritus at Emory University. He's a senior editor of First Things and the author of The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, a follow-up to his 2008 book. Earlier this year, he was among the six of Governor DeSantis' appointees to the new College Board of Trustees, which means that you are one of the minions of the Genghis Khan, as Vanity Fair is calling him now. Apparently, there was this group of brave little freethinkers who were doing their best to tend to the guttering flame of Western civilization. And along came DeSantis and the rest of it and just imposed this mad, massive set of rules on these brave little souls.

This is the new college in Florida. That's what we're being told. Anyway, can you tell us what's going on at New College? What was it? And what do we hope to see it become in the future? Well, I think that the key word in your description just now is little. And really, the first question I have to ask is this gem, this liberal arts gem that is the object of a set of conservative vandals descending upon it to destroy it. It really has to answer one basic question that I would say, and that is, why is it that in a state with 22 million people, the state's exploding,

and you've got a public college price tag, which is wonderful at 10 grand or so, you've got an amazing faculty-student ratio. Why is it that this school can't break more than 700 students? It's not even as big as a high school in Florida. If it's so great, why can't we build up the application pool? Why don't more students want to go there? I mean, 700 students, this seems to be quite a public expenditure on a fairly low rate of return. And what we want to do is see if we can build the college. If we can see, are there some ideological barriers to a lot of students who might want to go there? We have 70% of the student body is female, 30% male. And admissions officers will tell you that when you break the 60% barrier on female students, boys don't want to go

there and then girls don't want to go there. So we've got a problem there. Do we need to look at that? Do we need to see if somehow there is the identity politics getting out of control on campus? I mean, a lot of the students claim this is a queer campus and it's going to stay that way. Well, no identity should be applied to any campus as its campus identity. That's going to push away a lot of students as well. So we're really in the phase now. We fired the president at our first board meeting. We fired the general counsel. We actually put under question the DEI programs. We want to

get a report on what DEI programs do. I would like to see all DEI programs, terminate with extreme prejudice in one, remove the DEI statements that are required from every faculty member who applies for a job. Oh, they've done that, have they? Wow. The loyalty oaths, yes. Exactly. So there are, you know, it's going to be a slow process. Even small institutions take a while. Mark, can I just say, so the new college describes itself on the website as Florida's Public Honors College. So the first two words there are Florida's and public. And as far as I can tell from reading the news reports, the faculty were shocked that the governor, who is, after all, the leading public official me like yet another instance of academics taking it as granted that it's the job of taxpayers to fund their salaries and to permit them to do whatever they want to do with the institution. And there is no accountability to those taxpayers within living memory on many of these campuses.

So what we have is a fine institution on all kinds of academic, by all kinds of academic measures, but the self-absorption is more or less total. Is that fair? Is that what's gone on at New College over the years? As you know, Peter, from your experience at Stanford, the Hoover Institution, the faculty have been able to assert this prerogative all across the country for a long, long time. We're in charge. We're in control. We are only accountable to ourselves. This is about academic freedom. We are the ones who determine peer review, what gets taught, what gets tested, what are the

criteria of inclusion and exclusion. And they've really had it pretty well to the point where they've become quite spoiled. The idea that I work in a public institution, I get a check from the state, ultimately from the taxpayers, well, so what? Right. And the other, one other dynamic that I've noticed again and again is the faculty have progressively, again, I'm asking if this is the case that you're at the institution you're now helping to run, faculty have progressively intimidated trustees. Trustees tend to be, not exclusively, but they tend to be at one institution after another business figures. And I myself have been astonished again and again at how academics are able to cow or how figures from business permit themselves to be cowed by academics. Your job is to raise money,

you just don't know enough about the work we do to establish curricula or academic. Leave that to us. All of it to us. You just pitch the money over the transom to us. Now, so one of the more striking things about that nefarious man, Ron DeSantis, is that among the trustees he's appointed to New College in Florida are two genuine academics. We're talking to one, Charles Kessler is another. What do they make of that at New College? You're not about to be intimidated by people with doctorates. You know, when I go down for the next board meeting, I'm going to sit down with faculty who want to meet and we'll talk, we'll debate, we'll talk

about DEI. I'll tell them exactly why I think it's wrong. And I can borrow, as you said, upon my 30 years of experience in teaching at a top-level research university, I've read manuscripts for all, you know, 20 different presses and journals, evaluating them for publication. I've been on hiring committees and tenure and promotion committees. I've been active in the scholarly associations. I've written or edited a dozen books. So I can't be thought of as an outsider coming in. I know the way things work within the campus. So I'm not a businessman who, let's say,

I have a local business in Sarasota, Florida, and I've got to be a little careful in running against the grain of things. I don't want some students showing up protesting outside. Right. Right. I just sort of go along rubber stamp and write a check. But this is I've had to explain to a lot of journalists, trustees. Think about the trustee of a trust.

You are there to monitor for malfeasance. You are there to make sure the mission is being observed. And that's what we're supposed to do in a university. I mean, the trustees are the ones who ultimately do things like approve a professor for tenure. I mean, we actually are part of the intellectual running of the institution. And that exactly, Peter, that's what's been forgotten in a lot of places. Hey, thanks for joining us. It's Rob Long in New York. I've got three questions. One is just to set the stage for a minute, because I may have this wrong. 700 students in the college,

and it was going broke. I mean, there really isn mean there really isn't i mean to be you know not no offense but if i'm put on my green eye shade and i'm the cfo of the state of florida i'm closing that college 700 students not enough i'd take that money and build a high school right so it wasn't as if the choice is to this great liberal arts, you know, Hampshire College, we create our own curriculum, kind of free thinking curriculum university and keep that going. Or the barbarians from the right wing come and turn it into, I don't know what, you know, University of Hamburg in 1932 or whatever. It was really turn the thing into a Cinnabon or keep it as a going university. I mean, I know it's an extreme way to put it, but is that kind of right? You know, Rob, if this school were getting 20,000 applications and 2,000 students and it was really bursting at the seams, 2,000 enrolled,

you know, we would have to say, wait a minute, this does sound like a success story. It does sound like Florida voters like this college. But you're right. The facilities need to be updated. You need better food on campus, not so many vending machines. You need a more vibrant place. I mean, look, Sarasota. I was there last month.

I took a video and I thought, if the admissions office sent recruiters to upstate New York high schools in in January and just did a film. Just a weather. Yeah, right. Right. No, I get you. All right. So my other question is this. I mean, you know, the old joke is that academic disputes are so nasty because the stakes are so small. We're talking about a small school that no one had ever heard of no one in sarasota had ever i mean the santa smita joke the other day he said i know people who live in that neighborhood who've never heard of this college right so this feels like a very big experiment that we're about to have, where you have the forces of, you know, the whatever we call the DEI forces on one side, claiming that theirs is the way, and we have people who've been trying

to reform that on the other side, who now have this influence and control over a very small, very, I mean, you know, small university college. And won't we know in a year or two, at a very low cost, which one works? I mean, if there's, if you, if we have you on in a year, you say, guess what, we have 20,000 applicants, and we took 1,000 of them, or 1,500 of them, our enrollment has doubled. Won't that be the answer? I think that we do need to say we're going to be accountable a year from now. How are we doing? Let's assess our job performance. Let's assess the job performance of the president. But Rob, you know, you said it's a tiny, tiny place. It's microscopic. But what it shows is if a governor had appointed six hard leftist liberals to a board of trustees, give it a collective yawn.

OK, this is correct happening because six conservatives have been appointed as trustees. And believe me, the media have gone ape over this. The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post. I mean, I don't mean just left wing. It i spoke with the new yorker this morning uh usa today and what it shows is really this is such a big story at the media and it won't seem to settle down is that the left regards the campus as its territory right correct that's exactly right and it has exactly right it has been they have that's actually a rational conclusion of them to draw because of course it has been trustees traditionally been really really rich dudes who kind of write a check and look the other way while marxist professors are given tenure and what it shows is, well, I'm not sure if it's just that the left wants total control and simply finds any conservative presence offensive, repulsive, or do they sense the insecurity of their grip?

Well, that's one little success. Right. That was my next. That was my next question was, aren't they really afraid that this damn thing might work? What if it works? So I guess, so you've been down there, and I know this has been these early days yet, but I have to ask you about some, maybe even lie to me, because I need to hear some goodness. I have this experience all the time, and I'm wondering if you do, which is that, you know, you're talking to people who are on the left and they say you know after a glass of wine or when you're in the you know you're by yourself you know i agree with you on a lot of stuff have you ever have you felt that way as you guys have stormed the gates that a couple of i don't know i'm assuming a couple of english professors who still teach chaucer and maybe a history professor who still teaches you know

military history have come up to you and said, thank God. I think that I can't tell you how many times I've had people come to me who have been canceled, conservatives somehow who've been canceled. The mob ganged up on them, you know, 50 to one. Right there. You mean you mean there or just in general uh in general in general uh and and tell me oh you know i've gotten these emails from this colleague from that liberal colleague and they said they sympathize they think it's awful but they just won't open their mouths i mean the timidity sure and conformity among the professorate is astonishing especially these are some of the

most protected labor classes on earth true and they fear the grim looks of their colleagues uh as if as if if it was you know the the the nkvd coming to their i guess what i mean to say is that in any one of these schools my this is my premise there's a noisy group of left-wing agitators and there's a noisy group of left-wing agitator adjacents and then there's a group in the middle that just you know keep your head down teach calculus and then there's a group that's a smaller group maybe that's like i hate all this i wish i could go back to teaching the cities. Have you been welcomed by anybody? No.

No. Not on this. I mean, I've had a few people write to me, but they're not in that sort of moderate, centrist, liberal, regular folks kind of group. They're people already who've had their tensions. But see, I think, Rob, I have seen three hard leftists steer 27 moderate liberals in any direction they wanted them go, because they usually borrow upon the guilt factors, the factors. And, you know, the last thing a liberal wants to be called is racist. Right. They are scared to death. That term and the leftists in academia, many of whom are cluster B personalities, they're extremely sophisticated in the arts of manipulation and intimidation. And it works. Again, people do these things because, you know, at the meeting, the last meeting, you had 27 public commentaries scream at us as racist and everything else.

And we didn't care. It didn't affect our judgment. Your indignation just doesn't fly with us. Sorry. Mark, from the, if I may widen the lens just a little bit here, from the immediate politics of what you find yourself in the middle of to your field, I'm going to ask a question that's Rob's question too, although he doesn't know it yet. If you're of our generation, Mark's and Peter's and Rob's and James's, when you went to college, you could major in English because you were being instructed. The senior figures in your English department had received their

intellectual formation in the 50s and very early 60s before the poison began. And now, after all these decades, no smart kid would consider, I'm overstating the case, but English departments are the sources of some of the worst wokeness. My theory is part of this is the kind of move to STEM and away from the humanities because the English professors are not in the business of discovering new knowledge, which is the mantra you hear at campus after campus. They are in the business of conveying appreciation of a patrimony, which is a different business to be in and one that in general is less appreciated in the move to STEM. All right. Correct my analysis if you want to, but the question is this.

How does the renewal take place? After decades of this, how does the renewal take place? You know, let me say about your characterization, you're absolutely right. English used to give, the humanities generally, used to give undergraduates a big picture, right? A grand narrative. At UCLA, where I was an undergraduate, there was a three course survey class from Beowulf to W.H. Auden that gave you the full lineage, right? Patrimony. Our civilization. I took that class at Yale. Western civilization was a grand narrative. It was a monumental formation for the young.

T.S. Eliot called it the ideal order of monuments. And it was impressive. It made young people realize I'm stepping into the shadow of greatness and that there is a coherent world of sublimity and beauty that I can join. The great American novel, this was, you know, the Hawthorne, Melville, through Faulkner, Hemingway, Ralph Ellison. This was, again, a formation, a tradition that could be handed to them as their inheritance. Well, they destroyed it. They got rid of it. The requirements are gone. No big pictures, no grand narratives. And what did they put in the place? Diversity requirements, right? Critical thinking, these empty, it's just a random hodgepodge. Education for them is just kind of, oh, isn't this little bit interesting? Oh, look at this author. Oh, what wonderful contemporary

relevance. What a waste of time. Most of them think, I'll just say one quick statistic about English. In 1970, one in 12 or 13 bachelor's degrees in America went to an English major. It was the center of the campus. Now it's below one in 50. English is just part of the window dressing of the curriculum. And of course, yeah, the STEM and business have been the... Can I just ask one quick question? I know James got it.

What's the tuition at new college yeah i think it's about 10 10 000 okay i know it's an amazing it's kind of a lot i mean andrew's gonna run you 60 grand right exactly i'm sorry james i cut you off go ahead i know i was just building on what you're saying before no english majors because to study English literature would be privilege and supremacism and all the rest of it. And it's better to have a great expanse of knowledge of other cultures that have little or no influence on this one. It's like inheriting a house and not teaching them exactly where the silverware is and where the light switch is and where the furnace is. It's madness. I understand it. I get it. I agree. So we got the dumbest generation, as you call them, in 2008 in your book. 2008, a few years later, social media starts to take over the minds of the youth, and we see all of these plummeting rates of happiness, all this increase in despair. And the whole mental health of a generation is turned away from communing with

other people in the college quadrangle to staring at the little glass rectangle, even when they're in the same room with themselves. But now they've grown up, and they've grown up without this cultural patrimony being handed to them or instructed to them. What was the result of this when the dumbest generation grew up? How are they doing? We haven't given them a coherent tradition, a meaningful past. We haven't given them any religion. a meaningful past we haven't given them any religion they have no transcendent orientation to them and we haven't given them a country that they can feel pride in i mean people like to feel good about their home

tell them you should feel bad about your homeland so the result is 32 year olds who were just rootless they've got no foundations. They have no structure in the universe with which they can structure their lives. We gave to them a cosmos of just chaos, randomness. I mean, take the term diversity. Well, diversity for what? What is the purpose? Well, diversity for diversity.

The only thing that they have to belong to is the self. And it's not even a self that's in a boat in a great fleet. It's just an empty little bark bobbing on a big ocean. And with those happy words, we have to let you go. But we thank you so much, Professor Barland, for coming along. And we will watch keenly what is done at the new college because it's a great story. It's a great little experiment. It is a great story. It is a great story and we wish you a great story all the best and uh heck i wish you'd been a professor

when i was an english major because uh i'd like to i'd like to listen to you and it's fine so thanks thank you mark i bet you i can still recite the uh canterbury tales the opening. Very perfect, gentle connect. The dracht of March hath passed to the road. The dracht of March hath passed to the road. I would like everybody just to pause and think how the hell I'm going to insert a commercial into this whole thing. Yeah, okay, alright. So we all remember our

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I'm just telling you right now, once you take them out and sleep on them for a night, they're not going back. But if for some reason you have to, that's free. Anyway, no, they're not going back. What am I kidding? Make the best of bedtime. Make the most of bedtime with Bold and Branch sheets. Get 15% off your first set of sheets

when you use the promo code RICOSHET at boldandbranch.com. That's boldandbranch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D, Branch.com. Promo code Ricochet. And we thank Bullen Branch for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Andrew Gutman. If you're a Ricochet listener on a regular basis, then you know that Andrew is a familiar name, needs no introduction. But if you haven't been hanging around Ricochet, tsk, tsk.

In short, he's the Brearley Dad. Remember that story uh and the host of take back our schools and he started the speak up for education substack newsletter welcome back andrew how are things i'm things well i'm good i don't know if the situation in education is that good but thanks very much for well we were just talking about we're just talking about florida and i heard i'm in florida now ah which some listeners may or may not know we got we got two guys who are going to reform education here and you're both concentrated in florida couldn't you move to california and work some magic out there we could use some help wait

so so explain so why florida aside from just the weather and all the other stuff why florida biggest side yeah sorry well that's where everybody from new york is going um we we debated have you left manhattan permanently uh sort of we may go back oh wow we're not sure okay so so we were manhattan 25 years uh we left you know obviously when we left brearley um then we got kicked out of our apartment over mask issues. That's another issue. And we left to New Jersey for about a year and put our daughter in a school in New Jersey and then debated almost every night. Do we go back to Manhattan or down to Florida? And we wound up going down to Florida, put her in a school here,

which probably the only non-woke, secular, strong academic school in the country. And I did an exhaustive search. But we're not very happy with it academically. So now we're actually going to send our daughter to boarding school in the UK, which is another story, because they're all also going down kind of the woke path. So we are in Florida. There's great things about it. And now we're debating what to do, though, once our daughter is overseas. So we just had so that's the long winded answer as a guest. No, no, no. Yeah. We just had as a guest, Mark Bauerlein, Bauerlein. And he is now he was a professor at Emory Emeritus.

And now he is a trustee at the this new experiment, kind new college it's kind of a new thing new new college so it does seem like there's experimentation i mean you know look i wish him well plus ben says at the university of florida it does seem like there's experimentation taking place in florida that if you were looking to innovate education in a uh in a in a incredibly diverse, multicultural, cacophonous state, maybe one of the top cacophonous states in the union. Florida is a perfect place to go, right? Yeah, I think there's a number of things. Obviously, you have a lot of the initiatives that DeSantis and company are doing, which I am a very big supporter of. And then there's so much activity, there's so much money down here. There's so many people moving down from the Northeast, from California.

There's a lot of activity in sort of the K through 12 education world, micro schools, new schools being formed. So, and it's much, much easier to do that. I mean, I think we talked about this whenever it was a year or two ago. I tried, I tried to build a school in New York City. I wanted to do that. I desperately wanted to do that. I made some progress talking to philanthropists, talking to prospective teachers and parents. You know, when we decided to leave New York City, that plan went out the window. But to do it in a place like New York City is astronomically expensive.

To do something in a state like Florida is not easy and not inexpensive, but much, much more doable. So there is a lot of activity here, but a lot of it is what DeSantis is doing. This is a measure I don't... It seems to me this is worth dwelling on to the extent of about 15 seconds, so I'll take 15 seconds to dwell on it. You were a master of the universe. Now, I know that if you're in Manhattan, you're very aware of the pecking order and there's always somebody who's 10 times richer. Okay, still, you were working in the financial world in Manhattan. You talked to philanthropists. We know what that means. You talked to really rich people, some of the richest people on the face of the planet. And after all these conversations, you looked at each other.

You all looked at each other and said, it's too hard. It's too expensive. New York has become impossible for the people who inhabit the very tip-top strata of the entire American economy. It's just staggering. It's just staggering how things we we hear again and again about how new york has become unlivable for the poor the astonishing thing is that it's impossible even for the very richest people to take new ventures i wrote a piece on this and when we left new york and when we came down to florida uh and i was very critical of everything that's happened to new y York in the last couple of years.

It is not a place to raise a family from poor to middle class to super billionaire. It just is not the place to raise your family. We said this, and this is why we may go back or at least spend part time there without a kid.

It's not unlivable with a kid, with what's happened to the school, with the crime and quality of life issues. It's no longer a place to raise a family. And that's really sad school with the crime and quality of life issues it's no longer a place to raise a family and that's really sad because for the last 25 or 30 years after it got cleaned up it was a terrific place now yes it was not an easy place if you didn't have a fair amount of money but even you know it even you know for public school families with all the culture there

um if you could make it work it was a great place to raise a family that's no longer the case and i don't i think it's done and it's very very sad well thanks i still live here um so on but you're not you know you don't have kids in school i don't have kids in schools that's true it's yeah yeah it's a great place you want to go out to dinner um uh okay so yeah uh well you know i don't know miami's pretty good. No good Chinese takeout. Your podcast, Take Back Our Schools, Ricochet listeners can hear and subscribe to, so if you're not listening to it, subscribe instantly.

Could you tell us about the upcoming interview you have with James Lindsay? Sort of a big deal, right? Yeah, so that should go live, I think, tomorrow. So for some listeners maybe familiar with James Lindsay, he's very well known in sort of the anti-woke space and in the Twitter sphere. He's got a big Twitter following and somewhat controversial. But he is sort of considered the leading authority on the ideological foundations of everything we call woke. And what

we talk about in tomorrow's episode is his thesis, which is one I wholeheartedly agree with, that the fundamental mission of schools has changed. It is no longer, and this is, you know, I think part of what your conversation was with Mark a little while ago, it is no longer about passing down knowledge to the next generation. It is no longer about teaching English and math and history and science. It is now a political education. And this is not just in fancy $60,000 a year, really private schools. This is in almost every school, public and private in the country, including in most religious schools. The fundamental mission of education has changed to political education, to training progressive activists. So this is what James,

who is very knowledgeable about the ideological foundations of this coming out of Marxism and critical theory and critical race theory and queer theory, and he makes that case, and he makes a very convincing case, and it's one that I agree with. Could it be that the reason that they've shifted to this is just out of desperation because there are no metrics for these things? If you teach somebody DEI, if you steep them in all the various identities and the rest of it, there's no real hard and fast test that you can give at the end that tells whether or not they passed. This last week, we heard that Baltimore has, I think it's something like zero students who are proficient at grade in math. And even those

who can put a couple of numbers together are doing so. Grades and grades below what they do. And this is being met with usual horror. It's being blamed on Fox News and Republicans and the rest of it. And simultaneously with this, there was on the web a little viral video about somebody showing off their high school. I think it was in Canton, Ohio, which was this absolute palace. And somebody was pointing out, well, here's the reason that the students in Canton are doing well and the students in Baltimore aren't. Look at all the money that they have. But even when you factor out what it costs to build, even if you factor out the taxes and the rest of it, it turns out that they're spending two, three times more money in Baltimore

in these cities per student, supposedly, except that it all goes for the administration and the buildings which are falling down and the educators and the DEI staff and all the rest of it. That it's not money. When you mentioned before that New York is expensive, yes. I mean, the infrastructure of putting a school together is going to kill you. But there still is, isn't there, this idea that if we just bump up the number of dollars that we throw at per student, we will achieve something. As opposed to the fact that we have absolutely broken people coming into the school system because of dysfunctions at home and the culture, matched with people who are no longer interested in teaching them,

matched with people who are incapable of keeping a class even safe and quiet. The answer is to let the money follow the students and let the parents who have the care for their students go to the places that they need to be. Isn't it? We know that. Are we any closer to making that argument on a national scale and seeing something actually change? Okay, you said a lot. Let me answer this in three ways. This is the ricochet way, as you know. I've learned this from Peter and Rob. There's absolutely no correlation. He's not wrong.

There's no correlation between money spent and educational achievement. We've known that for 50 or 60 years. So start with that. I mean, New York City spends more than two times, maybe close to three times the national average per student in the public school system. Charter schools spend less and do better. So, you know, that this is about, this is not about the money. Okay, so let's say that. Is what is happening in schools, I think this is how you started your question, is it really just to kind of, you know, sidestep and distract from the fact that these schools suck and educational achievement is so

bad. No, I don't think that's the case. I think this is a deliberate mission change of schools. This is political activism. This is a cultural revolution. This is training our children in a cultural revolution to take down and destroy Western civilization. I feel very strongly. Not everybody is trying to do that most of the people in this system most of the teachers even even I'd say the head of school the really these are the useful idiots they don't really understand what they're doing but that is that is what they're doing and this is again this is what James talks about on on take back our schools that'll come out tomorrow um so then I think the last point you sort of hinted at sort of the school choice issue,

will school choice be the thing that saves us? Uh, no, I don't think it is. I mean, that's taken a lot of attention, especially in sort of Republican politics. And a lot of the red States are pushing this, you know, in theory, I'm a big proponent of school choice. I do. I mean, we've had the issue, where do we send our kid, you know, to school and we can afford things that a lot of families can't. But, and I think I heard Chris Rufo say this at one point that 10% of families. We do need to give them more choice. We do need to give families a way to get out of these woke schools or these badly performing schools or dangerous schools.

But this is not going to fix the fundamental problem. And the fundamental problem is our children are being indoctrinated in very, very leftist, neo-Marxist, cultural Marxist political activism and cultural revolution. That's really what is going on. And that's, I'll end with this from, you know, from, you know,

being in this movement now for two years, we have failed at convincing parents of this. We have not successfully articulated to parents how bad it is, what their kids are learning in these schools and what is really happening. The gender issues and trans issues now are starting to obviously get more attention because it is so obvious how bad this is. But the bigger picture of the change of mission of schools has not been successfully articulated to parents or to Americans in general. But I think that's what's going on. It used to be you had to wait for them to come home from college to be little leftists who rejected all your values.

Now it happens in high school. Can I address that if we have time? That's exactly right. If you look at it from a political standpoint, I wrote a piece and I put it up on Ricochet after the midterm elections. The failure of the red wave, right, did it really happen?

If you look at the aggregate House races, Republicans won the popular vote by a few million votes. Look at young people, 18 to 29, something like Democrat plus 30. In some of the key battleground states for Senate, Democrat plus 40 or 50. That's why the Senate went Democrat. Now, these are kids that got indoctrinated in political activism and in very leftist ideology, mostly in universities. We are now doing this in kindergarten, sometimes even in pre-K. We are doing this. To be fair, there were some lousy candidates, just to be fair. This is terrifying.

You put in a good candidate. There's a lousy candidates. You had the abortion issue. But if you look at the demographics about how progressive these young people are, and again, we haven't seen these young people who are now being indoctrinated in schools in K through 12 start voting yet. This is terrifying. It's terrifying for Republicans, obviously, but it is terrifying for the country because we will have, if we don't reverse this very, very quickly, we will have a president in AOC or someone like that not too far in the future, not at 24, but at some point if this doesn't change. Andrew Gutman, the podcast is Take Back Our Schools,

the Substack newsletter. You can read it in Substack. Sign up for it, please. It's Speak Up for Education, and we look forward to hearing your interview with Mr. Lindsay coming up soon on the Ricochet Audio Network. Thanks for joining us again today, Andrew, and we'll talk to you later down the road. Thanks for having me. Andrew, keep your eye out. All I need in Florida is an eighth of an acre and hook up to the sewage. Yeah, sell Peter some swampland. Literally, you've got a real estate scam happening right now.

Thanks, Andrew. That used to be big business back then. They used to be big business back. Used to be big business selling people those plots down there. The history of it is absolutely fascinating. I mean, one guy out of an office could move an awful lot of territory. And a lot of it was legit. And a lot of those places, if you look at them today, they're fascinating because they're 50s and 60s planted out communities.

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We're Americans. It's the Super Bowl. Not the game itself, which I thought was a good game. I enjoyed it. But the commercials. Rob, you were back i know peter that you were hanging with notepads to take down all of the uh the new messages from the culture that you were getting from the ads what stood out to you nothing i was with old friends and we skipped the ads catching

up on each other's kids i'm sorry to say over to rob on that one heretical um you know i'm surprised by it i mean this just shows maybe i i'm thinking about it wrong i don't have really a football brain but like i'm surprised how high the scoring is right oh you're talking about the game i mean um i was just i don't i don't the second half was an amazing thing i just was surprised like you know these are the two best teams best offense best defense almost by definition And you'd think that you'd win the Super Bowl by being 3-0 or 2-0 or 6-0 or there'd be a field goal block. You know what I mean? You'd think that it'd be much more of a

trench warfare. And it was like, I don't know how many, 70 points on the scoreboard combined. That's a lot. I don't know how many, 70 points on the scoreboard combined. That's a lot. I don't know. That was what struck me and not the commercial. So here you go. What does it matter to me, says the man in television.

Well, I mean, I don't watch it. I'm fascinated by the commercials because they tell me what they think I want to be. They think this will appeal to me. They think that I will regard this as normal or interesting or desirable or something like that i'm fascinated by the lessons that are pumped out of these things but there's something that was a mainstay in all the commercials this year which i've noted which was starting to unnerve me a lot and once you recognize it kind of bugs you there is a consistent color palette that is working through most of these commercials when you whether you realize it or not it's a teal it's a metallic teal a turquoise dark turquoise

color that is not natural okay it's not natural and not only do you just see it pop up from time to time but it is inserted intentionally all over the place um and i've been collecting screenshots where does this fit into the davos plot to reset the world well that's the thing the reason i mean if you wanted to say the commercials that stood out in my mind that set themselves apart were ones that used primary colors that were separate from this that really made a difference to stand out by themselves the rest of them saturated themselves in this hue so that it all became part of this overall general smear of this color. Oh, it's in the Benz commercial.

Oh, it's in the Snickers commercial. Oh, it's in the Tums commercial. And I don't know why. It's not Pantone's color of the year. It's not a particularly new color because this teal and orange was being used over and over in movie posters about three years or so ago. It's not an attractive color. It doesn't really make people feel better about anything. As a matter of fact, it's kind of depressing. There was an Amazon commercial about a guy, about a dog that was misbehaving. Okay. And people, oh, the dog, the sweet, oh,

it's dog. It's, it's, it's dog. Um, but it starts out with this color in the room because that's what the furniture is. Then moves to the kitchen. Dad's wearing the color. It with this color in the room because that's what the furniture is. Then it moves to the kitchen. Dad's wearing the color. It's the color of the trivet. It's the color of the cabinet. Moves to a room where that color is pouring through the window, which does not. It's not a color of nature. Nighttime doesn't look like that.

It ends with the dad driving the crate, which is that color, home at night. And the light outside in the rain is that color. And I don't know why the only thing i can think of is this is the color of the eyes of our lizardoid subhuman um over the more rational and when they finally come out of their lairs from underground where they have been manipulating society they will open wide those awful eyes and we will see the color and we'll been trained to worship it that's the only thing I can possibly think. Rob, Rob, everybody has a podcast now, but only we have James. That's right. But isn't it possible?

I've noticed when you watch the Super Bowl, everything is hyper-saturated. It doesn't even seem real. The game doesn't seem real. Everything's super hyper-saturated. The colors are just like everything's amped up, mostly because people tend to watch. I think they're, I don't know, I'm guessing. the colors are just like everything's amped up mostly because people tend to watch i think they're a stare i don't know i'm guessing they're they're compensating for the group nature of the viewing experience that people are in bars and restaurants and together

and the screen isn't quite so up in your face but when you're watching your home tv it really it's like to me it's like it's like it's like weird it's like yeah it doesn't seem like these those are real uniforms that's real grass that's a real football it all has this kind of cgi quality but i think that's just something they type into the box but maybe not well our own uh nfl tv guy here at ricochet may be able to tell us whether or not they're boosting the saturation on that and that's possible i mean but the show itself the television the football game itself pops with a whole variety of colors there's a It's just visually

all over the place, and it's interesting, and it's eclectic. Even though it's very much stage managed, it's not uniform of a hue. What I'm convinced that they're doing, however, is that they add this color to things where it isn't in the original product. There was an ad for the new Oppenheimer movie, which had this saturated teal, metallic teal, all over the place. And I'll bet when I go to the movie, it's not there. When I'm looking at the Batman movie, all of a sudden, that's Batman's color.

All of a sudden, that's the color of his lair, which it ain't. That's black. It's supposed to be black, but it's not. I'm going to go to Ricochet today, and I'm going to post a whole series. Please do. I was about to ask you.

Let's let everybody see this. Yes, because James, you are now in territory where you have to prove you're not crazy. I know. You have to prove it to us now. I started about three or four weeks ago with my buddies when we were watching football, pointing it out to them. And now they see it and they start to move around in their seat and say, my God, you're right. It is everywhere. So, yes, I will post that.

Tell us, just describe the hue one more time, the color we're looking for. It's a dark teal, turquoisey, metallic sort of, there's something unnatural about it. It's a blue that's lost its humanity. We it's in tom wolf territory now it's a cyber blue it's a blue that it's it's artificial intelligence's idea of the sky let's put it that way that's what it is uh anyway anything else gentlemen um or are we done i think we're done hey no no we're not done he says i know i think we have to be done because uh the we're about to get back go ahead yeah i know you're not Catholic. I think we have to be done because we're about to get back. Go ahead. I know you're not Catholic, James, but I'm afraid you do have to go to confession.

I'm slow on the uptake, but it just tweaked with me that you used a visit to the Vatican and the invigoration one feels from visiting these great treasures of Western civilization as a segue. You used it as a segue. I'm just staggered by this. All right, now I'm... By the inappropriateness of it, the audacity... That too, that too. Audacity, inappropriateness, keep going. I'll let you know when you use an adjective to which I

object. I atone completely. I was just, I was struck by Rob's conversation about the barrenness of these places, and not barren in the empty sense, but just unadorned. And my mind was casting back to the churches and the things like that, and then I saw what ad came next, and I thought, well, we'll go there. And I didn't realize that Peter Robinson was taking notes about this and would later, you know, have to bring me to take me straight. Well, I stand accused and I'm sorry for that. I don't know if there's anything else I should apologize for other than begging you to go to Apple Podcasts again and give us five stars.

I'm not going to apologize for that. I say it every week. You don't do it. You're the one at fault. So there, go do it. And I'll stop complaining. Should also note that you switch the ad to which Peter was referring is one of our sponsors, Bolin Branch as well, and Refund stop complaining. I should also note that Youth Switch, the ad to which Peter was referring, is one of our sponsors.

Bolan Branch as well, and Refunds Pro. Great companies that have helped us through this week, and why not make your life better by going and seeing what they have to offer for you too. There are Ricochet meetups to come, and we're going to tell you about those on the site so you can see whether or not they're actual human beings from Ricochet convening in an area near you. Meet don't be afraid they don't bite they're lots of fun and that pretty much does it great podcast good to be back with both of you at the same time

and we'll see everybody in the comments at ricochet for now 4.0 5.0.com next week fellas next week boys ricochet week, fellas. Next week, boys. Ricochet! Join the conversation.