2019 Institute for Honor Symposium Keynote with George Will

[Applause] thank you for that kind introduction which is that not all forms of inflation are painful and for to the Washington Lee community for the invitation I've had I'm bound say the honor of being disinvited from a university for some provocation of that I'd put in four hundred and forty newspapers that they objected to and and I'm somewhat experienced with this at Princeton where I got my PhD and where I served as a trustee they've recently had turmoil over the fact that one of their institutions is the Woodrow Wilson School and Woodrow Wilson a son of Virginia had some fairly retrograde views that are now resented and judged harshly and there's lots of turmoil of Princeton there was about them they sort of split the difference I thought of that one coming to a university named after two gun-toting slave-owning white males and I said well that's bad enough but one of my hosts is named Calhoun but then my dog or actually my wife's dog she's a South Carolinian his called Calhoun so I've been walking on the wild side for quite a while yes sir sure is that better can you all hear there can you hear in the back excellent it is a delight for me to be back however briefly in academia particularly at this beautiful and exemplary institution I am a faculty brat the son of a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois and I am an almost completely lapsed professor myself when leaving Oxford 45 years ago I was uncertain as to whether I wanted to be a lawyer or a professor of political philosophy so i temporized by applying to a distinguished law school and to Princeton's doctoral program I chose to go to Princeton partly perhaps largely because it is located midway between two national league baseball cities this gives you some idea of my standing as a serious scholar I taught for two and a half years before turning to or as my father thought before synching to journalism actually I am currently once again addressed as professor once a week at Princeton where I am teaching a political philosophy seminar but I do not want this embarrassing fact widely known because professors are not in good order every where and the bad odor is not new in 1976 two of my friends New York Senator Jim Buckley and Daniel Patrick Moynihan were running against each other for the US Senate seat that Jim then held on the evening of the June day in which both of them won their party's primaries Jim over at his headquarters said I congratulate professor Moynihan and I look forward to running against professor Moore Nahan who I am sure will conduct the sort of high-minded campaign that is to be expected from a Harvard professor back at Pat's headquarters or reporters at Penn Jim McKeon was referring to you as Professor Moynihan Pat to himself up to his considerable height and said the mudslinging has begun we're meeting here because mudslinging and much worse has become so ubiquitous but it is tempting to conclude that public discourse has never been this course this heated this vituperative that is however an a historical judgment although the u.s. election of 1800 is arguably the most important election in world history it was the first that resulted in political power being peacefully transferred from one political party to another the campaign of 1805 rhetoric worse than what we hear today for example a Connecticut newspaper said that if Jefferson were elected quote murder robbery rape adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced and Jefferson a Jeffersonian journalist wrote that John Adams quote behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous hermaphroditical character the 1837 lynching of lives you Lovejoy an illinois newspaper editor and abolitionist was hardly the only such anti bought Antebellum political violence in 1856 South Carolinian congressman Preston Brooks became incensed about abolitionist rhetoric from Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner Brooks went on to the US Senate floor and so severely beaten Sumner with a heavy cane the Sumner was absent for that from the Senate for an extended period Brooks constituents were so delighted by his assault that they inundated his office with a fresh supply of canes so although our civic life is not what it should be we should remember the axiom that ignorant of the past causes us to libel the present that said however this too must be said ignorant of the past can also make us vain about the present and uncivil in our arrogance ignorance of the past can make us prone to judgments that flatter us ignorantly while there have always been unlovely aspects of American argumentation today's distempers are unquestionably different in quantity and in kind it is important to wonder why this is so and what can be done about it I am most puzzled by the fact that I cannot for the life of me fathom why people are as angry as they are I could understand that when we were arguing about slavery and disunion and all the rest in fact what alarms me more today is less the discord than a consensus that is as broad as the Republic and as deep as the Grand Canyon it is the consensus that we should have a large omnipresent on the Provident welfare state and not paid for it everyone's agreed on that night from the left fringe of the political spectrum to the right fringe everyone has agreed both parties have a constant and perennial interest in running enormous budget deficits in giving Americans a dollars worth of government benefits and charging Americans only eighty or so cents for them once upon a time we borrowed money for the future to win Wars and build infrastructure for the future for unborn Americans who would benefit from the borrowings that they would in fairness help to repay we don't do that anymore what we do now is we borrow from the future to finance our current consumption of government goods and services this is let us not mince words this is decadent democracy and to repeat there's no discernable dissent from it what strikes me then is that the political class in Washington particularly is more united by a class interest than it is divided by ideology which makes the simmering Furies in the country and sometimes between the members of the class all the more difficult to fathom so what are Americans so angry about most Americans are I suggest not angry they are sad and they are embarrassed and they are sad because they are embarrassed about the country's condition many I grant many perhaps most of the viewers of Fox News and MSNBC here I bite one of the hands that feeds me and CNN these people are angry however all of them combined make up a tiny fraction of the country there are about 327 million people in this country and right now late on this Friday afternoon in March about 327 million 323 million of them are not watching cable television and not listening to talk radio and not participating in some Twitter mob fueled by the outrage du jour one should generally resist the temptation to lapse into medical terminology when discussing politics but here I intend to lapse I am convinced that some Americans have become addicted to anger they are happiest when they are unhappy I suspect that when they are indignant a brain scan which show pleasure synapses firing as they do when cocaine is being used this kind of pleasure can become habit-forming social media offer instant and endless gratification for this kind of craving anger can be fun particularly when the anger is a form of self flattery it is self flattery when it is not just disagreement with others but with disparagement of others when it says that the others are not just wrong they are unlike they and me in moral amaura because they are wrong this phenomenon anger is self flattery anger as vanity explains America's recent and ongoing plague of present ISM present ISM is the activity of judging the past by the standards of the present without regard to how those in the past found themselves situated through no fault of their own present ISM usually means judging and judging harshly those who are considered by us to be our moral inferiors because they did not act as we assume we would have acted had we been in their place present ISM and Falls judging them without regard to how they were immersed in social context that they in turn had inherited from generations before them consider in contrast to this present ISM Lincoln in his great Peoria speech of October 16 1854 in the aftermath of the enactment of the kansas-nebraska Act Lincoln said and I quote I have no prejudice against the southern people they are just what we would be in their situation if slavery did not now exist amongst them they would not introduce it if it did exist amongst us we should not instantly give it up Lincoln continued when southern people tell us that they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we I acknowledge the fact when it is said that the institution exists and that it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way I can understand and appreciate the same I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself further on in Lincoln's Peoria speech his first major speech ever on the subject of slavery he said of America's founding fathers the argument of necessity was the only argument they ever admitted in favor of slavery and so far and so far only as it carried them did they ever go they found the institution existing among us which they could not help and in the Declaration of Independence they cast blame upon the British King for having its introduction now Lincoln was a political man speaking politically in the best sense of that word he was speaking to persuade by maneuvering amid swirling passions in circumstances he did not choose and did not control he was not dwelling on the entire truth but he was not being untruthful he was going out of his way to be respectful he was being civil he was being civil by an act of what I will call historical empathy which suggests to me an axiom the path to civility in the present begins in empathy in the past I sometimes wish there were only one permissible college major history the deep mature study of history has four benefits that are directly germane to the challenge of ameliorating the harshness of our current discontent first the study of history teaches the viscosity of society the great turbid givenness of historical settings that historical actors do not get to choose second the study of history teaches how limited is our range of possible change and how conditioned our thinking is by inherited political categories and vocabularies third and consequently the study of history teaches empathy for those who grappled with large problems fourth the study of history inoculates us with a certain wariness about how our own grappling with our own problems might be judged when looked at by the moral squint of subsequent generations I recently required the students in my Princeton seminar to read some of Lincoln's writings from the 1850s his 90 1854 speech in Peoria and response to the kansas-nebraska act his response to the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision which held that black people have no rights that white people are bound to respect the 1858 Lincoln Douglas debates in which the two men debated whether the principles of democracy required popular sovereignty in the territory required that is allowing white settlers to vote slavery up or to vote it down as they chose these were the biggest possible issues freedom or slavery majority rule versus minority rights national unity versus national dismemberment now ask yourself what issued dividing Americans today is of even remotely comparable importance inequality of wealth inequality has been increasing but the number of Americans without adequate economic resources has been decreasing is today's burning issue civil rights we have gone in less than a generation from no consensus about basic rights for gays and lesbians to broad acceptance of those rights an amazingly swift transformation of public opinion in the mid 1980s when my children were young directly after the 1984 election in which President Ronald Reagan defeated former Vice President Walter Mondale I occasionally would refer to this election with my children when they would ask me if they had my permission to do this or that if my answer was yes I would say yes you can do it you want because Mondale lost it's a free country I was jesting and no doubt I was being unintelligible to my children my jest however was to try and make a serious point I was obliquely telling my children that even if mando had won we would still be a free country because in our country the basic structure of constitutional freedom is not put at risk in our elections it is precisely because the stakes of our elections are generally agreeably low they are not of existential dimension that it is puzzling that our political arguments right now generate such heat now clearly there are economic factors and facets of modern government that are having for many people various kinds of embittering effects the velocity of economic change under globalization produces creative destruction that is creative but also unquestionably as destructive of entire industries and hence of communities some people find this exhilarating and prosper from it others find it frightening and feel as though they have fallen through the fissures in society and been forgotten or worse than forgotten they feel that they have become despised for their inability to cope the sting of felt contempt is bad enough - it has added the loss of the solace provided by attachments churches clubs civic organizations in communities through which blows the gales of globalization the result is the modern epidemic of loneliness which makes globalization's casualties susceptible to what have been called the diseases of despair alcoholism opioid abuse and the rest these people these casualties of social change are apt to express their disappointments anxieties and resentments in extravagant rhetoric and they are apt to respond to politicians who court them with angry rhetoric of victimization furthermore while I do not want to embrace technological determinism clearly certain new media social media with their instantaneous dissemination of unfiltered unedited thoughts does not encourage civility I will not mince words these media give platforms to people who mistakenly think of themselves as intellectuals people who lacking a ballast of education or a fund of information substitute invective for both people who in earlier days were restricted to venting their unformed opinions in barrooms also there is something about today's sprawling regulatory administrative state that makes many people feel understandably aggrieved big government becomes big by taking on ever bigger roles in the allocation of wealth and opportunity the bigger that government becomes the more opaque it becomes its complex gears and levers and pulleys can be discerned understood and manipulated only by the educated the confident the articulate and those who are affluent enough to be well lawyer which is to say the bigger government becomes the more it becomes the plaything of rent seekers rent-seeking is the act of bending public power for private advantage to confer a benefit on oneself or a disadvantage on competitors all of which means that the regulatory administrative state becomes an is seen to become regressive transferring wealth upward to the socially nimble and the politically strong when people say the system is rigged they are not wrong although many of them would make matters worse by making the government bigger and more intrusive and more prone to generating resentments consider this datum about the simultaneous growth of incivility end of government in 1964 on the eve of the pell-mell expansion of government under President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society 77% of Americans agreed with the proposition that they could trust the government almost or most of the tall most all or most of the time fifty years later only 19 percent agreed with that as causes of contemporary incivility the factors just mentioned from economic forces to new technologies of communication to government's new scope and pretensions are not the only or even the most interesting and important reasons for the new disturbing tone of public life and political discourse a moment ago I asked what issue today is remotely comparable to the issues that convulsed and nearly shattered the nation in the middle of the nineteenth century the answer is there is no such issue today none which points us to an interesting conclusion perhaps the most telling aspect of today's incivility and political arguments is that we are not arguing uncivil ly about issues as issues were understood until relatively recently so let me propose a theory the bitterness of today's political arguments is related to the fact that politics can do little to a swage many of today's grievances this is because many of the grievances are about status about social standing and about perceived and felt condescension and contempt in 1943 he a behavioral scientist Abraham Maslow introduced the idea that human beings have a hierarchy of needs at the base of that hierarchy of what has come to be called Maslow's pyramid our physiological imperatives the needs for food shelter nourishment safety and sex in advanced societies however people advanced needs these include what Maslow called belonging needs such as acceptance and affiliations higher still on the pyramid are esteem needs such as self-respect and social status and if the pyramids apex is the need for self-actualization meaning a sense of fulfillment in developed societies where the satisfaction of physiological needs is taken for granted the higher needs become high-stakes political subjects the satisfaction of such needs becomes a political agenda it is however surpassingly difficult to translate those needs for self-respect social status esteem and self-actualization into government action so they become subjects for compensatory acknowledgement through divisive political rhetoric as broad considerations of economic well-being have lost their political salience e considerations of ethnicity sex culture and religion have become more salient this is why welfare state answers to the basic questions about material distributive justice have not calmed our politics if anything the satisfaction of material needs is open the way for more divisive politics about subjects that politics can hardly address quite different concerns even more passionately fought over have broadened the range of political argument Americans have always been torn between two desires that are in tension one desire is for the absence of restraint the other desire is for the presence of community as the nation's social pyramid becomes steeper those closer to the base than to the apex feel increasingly at the mercy of governing and media elites who do not seem to be elites of character as well as of achievement as the acquisition and manipulation of info Meishan becomes more important in individuals prosperity life becomes more regressive this is because the benefits of information accrued disproportionately to those who are already favored by natural aptitudes and aptitudes acquired through education and other socialization it is however not necessarily unfortunate when a society experiences considerable cognitive stratification after all we actually do want the gifted and accomplished to ascend to positions that give scope to their talents as robert frost's has said i'm against a homogenized society because i want the cream to rise what is however unfortunate is when the transmission of cognitive aptitudes and skills become so much a matter of family advantages that a child's prospects can be largely predicted by information about his or her parents Americans have long fancied that ours is a society of middle class dominance a middle class society without other significant calcified class distinctions a society open to upward mobility Americans have been reluctant and hence slow to recognize what the sociologist Richard Sennett called the hidden injuries of class this reluctance is however receding for at least two reasons one is apparent to the middle class as it looks down with alarm and the other is apparent to the middle class as it looks up with envy and resentment after more than half a century of attempts at Emilia's of social policies it is undeniable that there exists an underclass trapped in the intergenerational transmission of poverty furthermore the middle class believes and it is not mistaken but as society becomes more technocratic and complex and more given to rewarding cognitive elites those elites become more adept at entrenching themselves by passing their advantages on to their children as modern society has moved somewhat away from assigning status and opportunity on the basis of kinship or patronage or class it is sought quantitative measurements to enable American society to be a society of in Napoleon's phrase careers open to talents a meritocratic society seeks to assign rewards on the basis of impersonal and objective standards as aptitude tests however kinship patronage and especially class creep back in on little cat feet as the sociologist daniel bill warned nearly fifty years ago quote there can never be a pure meritocracy because high status parents will invariably seek to pass on their positions either through the use of influence or simply by the cultural advantages their children inevitably possess thus after one generation Bell went on a meritocracy simply becomes an enslaved class unquote the cultural advantages are so potent that the resort de crass influence becomes of diminishing importance to the extent that a meritocratic society measures and rewards intelligence and to the extent that differences in Evin in intelligence result often from family inheritances of cultural baggage to that extent a society of truly equal opportunity is a receding chimera meritocracy in theory seems at first to be the translation of the conditions of modernity into the spirit of democracy in practice however meritocratic aspirations are actors in a hierarchical society that seems especially ruthless because it is produced by impersonal supposedly scientific processes and measurements it is a society in which social standing is supposedly the result of objective credentialing so those who do not flourish are apt to feel a special bitterness they are denied the consolations of concluding that the competition was inherently unfair all these developments are made more painful by what has come to be called assortative mating wherein the members of society's upper echelons marry one another consolidating family advantages I grew up in Champaign Illinois central Illinois Lincoln Country the country of a man who had no family advantages according to local lore Lincoln a lawyer in private practice was in the Champaign County Courthouse in 1854 when he learned that Congress had passed the kansas-nebraska Act raising the specter of the expansion of slavery into the territory sir it was Lincoln's relentless canny opposition to this the unite that ignited his career the noblest career in the history not just of American politics but of world politics in the tumult and passions that preceded the coming of the Civil War and on the very eve of that war in his first inaugural address as you have already heard today at that moment when seven states had already voted for secession Lincoln spoke to those he called my dissatisfied fellow countrymen he said we are not enemies we must not be enemies if Lincoln could say this in a context as fraught as the spring of 1861 surely we in are much less trouble time can similarly speak with malice toward none after Lincoln said that we must not the enemies he spoke the loom words already spoken though passions may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection the mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and Patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature here Lincoln recurred to a theme that ran like a golden thread through the rhetoric of his public career a concern with national memory and with shared memories as supports for civility in his first great speech in 1838 and then 29 year old Lincoln delivered to the young men's lycian of print of Springfield Illinois a meditation on the perpetuation of our political institutions in one of his luminous phrases that has permanently enriched our national vocabulary he worried that the silent artillery of time would erase the national memory that twenty-three years later in March 1861 he hoped would summon the better angels of America's nature in the library of America's two volume box set of Lincoln's writings the first item included is from six years before that speech about the silent artillery of time it was his 1832 message he was just 23 years old to the voters of Sangamo County Illinois announcing his candidacy to represent them in the state legislature he began with what was then his favorite topic internal improvements as infrastructure was then known but he came quickly to the subject of education concerning which he said and I quote that every man may receive at least a moderate education and thereby be enabled to read the histories of his own and other countries by which he may dually appreciate the value of our free institutions appears to be an object of vital importance even on this account alone to say nothing of the advantages and satisfactions to be derived from being able to read the scriptures and other works both of a religious and a moral nature for themselves notice the very first benefit of Education that Lincoln mentions before religious and moral benefits is the ability to read histories and by doing so to appreciate the value of American institutions so as he began his career I shall end my remarks here by insisting on this the basis of civility in public discourse must be a mature and humble talent for thinking historically a talent for thinking about political and social questions in all their complexity a talent that can only be acquired by studying history there is no shortcut back to civility and there is no use denying something about which I will speak frankly it is this intellectual insecurity is an underestimated cause of today's incivility ignorant and stupidity these are not the same things are the fertilizers of this incivility because they cause some people to adopt a rhetorical aggression as a defense against being exposed as lacking some things that are essential for engaging in public argument the things that are lacked are information and a capacity for reasoning ignorance and stupidity are probably not present today in greater quantities than as usual in the human story ignorance and stupidity are however more conspicuous more prominent more rampant or unavoidable more widely disseminated and more lucrative than they used to be there's an old saying among lawyers if you have the facts on your side argue the facts if you have the law on your side argue the law if you have neither pound the table many participants in today's arguments go straight to table pounding because they do not have the mental furniture to do anything else which brings me back to a subject from which I never stray far the subject of a grounding in history everyone has a moral obligation to be as intelligent as it is possible for her or him to be and you cannot be intelligent in the present without being marinated in the past Kipling said that he who knows only England does not England know similarly he who knows only his own time does not his own time now so to combat incivility we must make it fashionable to never be seen without a history book tucked under one's arm this is not a dramatic idea or one that promises the instant gratification of banishing incivility from the public square it is however important that we relentlessly insist upon an ethic of public argument that says anyone can participate but pay attention to no one who has not done his or her homework my closest friend was the late Senator Moynihan who famously said everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion but not his or her own facts the long trek back to civility begins by insisting that it is shameful to be uninformed let us begin that trek it took a long time to dig the hole that Americans are in so remember the rule of holes when you are in a hole quit digging thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Applause] mr. will has kindly agreed to answer a few questions from the audience and so I'm going to turn it over to him and let him recognize people if you would put your hand up we have people in each aisle that that have a microphone so wait till you get the microphone to ask your question Thank You mr. will within the last couple of years it was reported and probably was reported by you that you had resigned from the Republican Party Mark Twain once said that he belonged to no organized party he was a Democrat how does one resign from the Republican Party that's easy you you send an email to the register of voters in Maryland say I'm now an unaffiliated Maryland voters it was not a breathtaking transformation of my identity because my identity is hardly tied up with politics in general least of all with a political party but on the 2nd of June 2016 my good friend Paul Ryan endorsed the current President of the United States so the next morning I left I said it was clear to me that the normalization of something I considered abnormal was going to proceed and it was going to proceed without me [Music] mr. will you write of a nice little place on the north side of Chicago it's even called the friendly confines and over years of getting drugs ability still flowed like water like rivers what severe alert yes so was the questionnaire the friendly convo well it was it was it was old Stein lager beer for a long time it made those people civil who it didn't make pugnacious yeah I do not help you didn't go to Wrigley Field expecting to win so you weren't disappointed I think yeah I can tickle a moral lesson for society out of this baseball is if I may now talk about something I understand and like baseball is the ideal sport for a democracy because it's the sport of the half loaf no one gets everything they want all the teams are now in spring training every team in spring training knows they're going to win 60 games every team knows they're going to lose 60 games playing the whole season to sort out the middle 42 games if you win 20 and 10 out of 20 games you're definitionally mediocre if you win 11 out of 20 games you're going to win 87 games and you might play in October so it's a game of again no one gets everything they want and there's a whole lot of losing involved in failure Ty Cobb in a career batting average of 367 which means more than four out of ten times he failed well as I say that's really good training not just for democracy but in its way and it's training for civility I do not have a question sir but I pray that you or the University with your permission will publish your remarks thank you I'll work on that that there's portions of it and a book coming in June called the conservative sensibility by me at better bookstores everywhere so knowing that Lakeland was a second if I recall to run as the Republican after John Fremont what is the chances of there being a new part in this country arising that would be an inner moderate position pulling from the moderate positions of both parties into a new political party and being successful that's a good question I had I think my column this Sunday is on a lunch conversation I had lunch with Howard Schultz the inventor of Starbucks really and he was contemplating to run for president I think as he looks into the possibility he's running as an independent he may flinch from this because it's a very narrow and implausible path to the presidency political parties are not immortal you're quite right the Whigs were immortal until they weren't and the Republican Party rose out of their rebel the problem is that with the winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes which exists in 48 of the states Maine and Nebraska do it by congressional district it makes it very very difficult for a third party to break through Ross Perot got 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992 running against George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton and no electoral votes the last American received electoral votes and Runyon's third party was George Wallace in 1960 and an eighth he had a regional base where he got his electoral votes in the south but because of the regional base and because of the views he had that appealed only to that region he was he was really it was impossible for him to become a plausible national candidate so I I wouldn't count on a new party emerging to give you just one more example of how the deck is stacked against them you can't be a plausible presidential candidate if you're excluded from the debates and under current practices they may fiddle with this percentage but the current practice is you have to be have 15% support in a basket of polls on the eve of the first debate and that's hard to do go ahead George thank you again for being here we really appreciate it I really believe that you were the greatest writer on baseball and the 20th and 21st century and I appreciate it particularly in men at work your chapter about Earl Weaver remember the chapter about telling a young person who has always lived for baseball that he's not good enough you know and how it hurt him and you also talked in that chapter and elsewhere in the book about respect for the game and I want to tie this to your topic today because somehow or other when coach Rennie Bollinger pulled a kid back from the field because his shirt was untucked and his hat was askew because he didn't respect the game or when Earl Weaver kept mediocre talent out of the game because of respect for the game we also need that in the civility discourse and bringing that back into and so the question is how do we get that how do we get respect for the game back into American society you touched on it today and I want to try to connect those dots well beginning with Earl Weaver who famously said this ain't football we do this every day and that's part of the secret I mean baseball is there 162 games in 183 days because it's every day Earl Weaver said it's not a game you can play with your teeth clenched it requires a kind of moral equipoise a concentration of course and a competitiveness but you can't be wired all the time just can't survive the sport of the long season that way and it's same as true with politics and you have to be able to turn it off and keep it in its place which in a civilized free society is at the margins of life most Americans rarely think about politics and when they do it's with a sigh and that's the sign of a healthy society a healthy society is not always talking about fundamentals when we were really talking about fundamentals in the 1850s we were on the lip of a civil war and we don't want to live that way it comes to Mike you talked about the continued growth of the federal government and the administrative state do you think that constitutional amendments could be useful to restrain or limit the scope of the federal government I do not first I'm very reluctant to amend the Constitution because as Madison said it would be constant changes of the Constitution will make it less revered but beyond that it would be very hard to frame an amendment that would do this the courts are going to do it with increasingly I don't want to get into the weeds here about Chevron deference and presence of the Dean over here but Chevron deference and and the non delegation doctrine and other matters the courts are I think gathering their nerves to begin to push back on the independence of executive agencies but at the end of the day as Lincoln said everything rests on an opinion which is shiftable sand with opinion you can do anything without it you can't do anything said I said Lincoln so we just have to have aroused people with the patience of politics and it required should require patience you shouldn't be able to make great changes on slender majorities Jefferson's phrase but over time I think we can convince the American people I mean I write a hundred columns a year trying to do this having no discernible effect but one can get the country alert to the attenuated nature of our control of our own government and I think we're gaining on the rascals frankly mr. will thank you for being here you quote a President Lincoln solemn artillery of time do you see any hope in colleges and universities across the country excluding our beloved University of returning to a more academic historical correct including the study of history I'm pissed I'm very pessimistic I have degrees from two of the world's top 10 universities by any ranking Oxford and Princeton I think the great research universities are the finest tournaments of our civilization they evolved through eight centuries of political and ecclesiastical dangers and thickets and we do we have seen how in five or ten years the legacy of 800 years can be frittered away by bad academic leadership the fact is that a number of people went to earth after the 1960s went to earth in the Universities got tenure imps have been reproducing themselves through the tenure system and the university has taken on a new role as a therapeutic institution therapeutic first of all for the young people within it and therapeutic for the society that surrounds it and that is I think on the whole incompatible with the fundamental duty of a university which is first of all transmission transmitting the best that has been said and thought as as Matthew Arnold said and beyond that basic research and scholarship not tied to passing agendas of social reform I'm you you ask can it be done yes but once the barbarians are within the gate and get tenure it's very difficult at the beginning of your lecture you spoke about the fact that politicians of all stripes are united by a politics of the well-to-do and at the end you you talked about education as an answer to many of my problem how do we avoid the danger that the education given by an institution like this one and received by most of the children and grandchildren of people in this room is an education of the well-to-do well that's a--that's the problem and I know I can I can speak about Princeton Princeton his very energetic in trying to get people to come to Princeton and peer institutions who normally would not have applied in earlier days from schools that high schools that do not normally feed people to schools like Princeton and thereby Princeton loses by losing this great ocean of talent that exists in our society it's a it's a very vexing problem because it because as one wise man Andrew Ferguson a refund writer in Washington has said the least diverse classes in America are SAT prep classes these are part of how the inflamed class of which I have a paid-up member reproduces and transmits its advantages and the better schools the more conscientious schools and I'm sure this is one of them wrestle with this constantly as to how they do not simply become [Music] a mechanism for transmitting the advantages there was already advantaged the great change occurred in American higher education when the scholastic aptitude test was adopted by Harvard and elsewhere until that time Harvard was a remarkably undistinguished university educating the children of the Brahmins of New England and the SAT came along and introduced the Ivy League to a number of things first people going to universities of the for the first time from their family it introduced the Ivy League to more Jewish people and the Ivy League was comfortable meeting at that point and everyone got better because again it was careers that opened to it and open to talents and talents objectively measured here's the problem any day now we're going to get a ruling that will go right to the Supreme Court on the question about Harvard's admissions practices the oral arguments are over the judges discerning member I wrote a column about this and showed it before I published it to my friend drew Faust who had been president of Harvard and I said if Harvard relied solely on so-called objective metrics and admitting people that is high school transcripts and objective aptitude tests it would be 40 percent asian-american and 1 percent african-american and we we don't want that Harvard doesn't want that and they're right not to because it turns out the so-called objective measurements are a lot more complicated and flawed than we thought go back to what I just said about SAT prep classes not being very diverse the objective measurements measure inherited family social capital and any University worth its salt and I can only speak for Princeton is worrying about this non-stop but it's a it's a anyone has a solution send me an email mister will you have any thoughts as to the contribution that American secondary education and the degree of funding which it is getting in the various states may be having on various political commentary you've been making as well as our generalized ignorance of history yeah well they the social stratification of America is deepened by the vast disparities and the competence of education K through 12 after the Second World War when the baby boom generation began going to the public schools like a pig through a Python everyone was agreed liberals conservatives Republicans Democrats everyone's agreed that the best predictor of the school's performance was the amount of money is spent on it increased financial inputs cognitive outputs would increase and so we did under both parties teacher salaries got better class sizes got smaller everything improved except test scores and so in the 1960s we had decided to study this and James Coleman of a sociologist at Johns Hopkins undertook the largest social science project in American history at that point the result was the Coleman report there was the conclusion of the Coleman report was so seismic that was Pat Moynihan's word for it but the Johnson administration released it on a Friday of a fourth of July weekend hoping no one would notice because what it said was the sovereign predictor of the school's performance is the quality of the families from which the children come to school that is controlling for relevant variables 90% of the differences in a school's performance is determined by quantity and quality reading matter in the home the amount of homework done on the home number of days truant from school amount of television watched in the home but most of all don't tell me the pupil-teacher ratio tell me the pupil parent ratio because this Coleman report came out in 66 in 1965 Pat Moynihan then a 38 year old social scientists in Lyndon Johnson's Labor Department produced what has come to be called the Moynihan report the actual title was the Negro family the case for national action in it he said we have a national crisis because twenty-three point seven percent of african-american children are born to unmarried women twenty three point seven seventy two percent forty percent of all American first births today regardless of race color creed national forty percent are to unmarried women a majority of American mothers under age thirty are not living with the fathers of their children a majority now what Pat said when he produced this report was that the lesson of history is clear from the wild Irish lumps of the East Coast in the 19th century to South Los Angeles today when you have a large cohort of inadequately parent and adolescent males I've raised three boys I know the whole point of civilization is to civilize adolescent males you have turbulent neighborhoods and schools so busy trying to maintain discipline they cannot teach we don't know what caused this therefore we don't know what to do about it it's another one of those social problems we have no idea how the government gets a purchase on this but that's the fundament the family disintegration is the basic fault basic problem for primary and secondary education I was not but two decades ago I was on the west side of Chicago in what we call with our new delicacy a challenging urban environment used to be called a slum a terrible place was a public school with devoted teachers wonderful principal and they say we'll do anything for our children but we will not send homework home listen why not they said because 90% of our children go home to be the parents of their siblings 90 percent came from homes about fathers you can't begin to fix primary and secondary education to you something happens about the disintegration of the family which is always has been and always will be the primary transmitter of social capital the habits mores customs dispositions that enable people to thrive in a free society mr. will

Channel: Washington and Lee University

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Keywords: George Will, politics, Washington and Lee University

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Length: 62min 15sec (3735 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2019