Condoleezza Rice: Director of the Hoover Institution | Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson

[Music] welcome to another special plague time i'm at home edition of uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson the daughter of a presbyterian minister and a school teacher condoleezza rice grew up in birmingham alabama she received her undergraduate degree from the university of denver her master's degree from notre dame and her doctorate again from the university of denver she has served in many positions in academia and government including as i mentioned just a moment ago as provost of stanford and as secretary of state and as of september 1st secretary rice has become the new director of the hoover institution the public policy center at stanford condi rice welcome thank you peter great to be with you condi the first question is more or less mandatory you and i have known each other for a number of years and if i may say so until september 1st you had a wonderful life you taught at stanford you were participated in a consulting company and you gave speeches and you still had time to practice piano and play golf and now you have taken on a job that will involve endless fundraising countless administrative tasks attempting to lead some 200 fellows of the hoover institute i i love our colleagues i really do love them but they're not all easy people so the first question again is mandatory why have you done this well peter maybe i should have had my headaches and you you left out but i also of course i had a chance to be on the college football playoff committee and uh to chair a commission on basketball yes life was very good but in the final analysis um i had to ask myself do i like where we are right now as a country and as a world and i had to say no i think we have challenges and problems that are piling up that are challenging our values uh challenging our freedoms uh challenging our prosperity and most importantly challenging the sense of americans in particular that equal opportunity and equal access are there for them and those challenges to the governance of of free peoples suggest to me that we need really good answers to a lot of the problems that we're facing we need them to be based on solid and sound research new ideas that are fully explored explored where the data takes us and uh i thought there's no better place to do that than the hoover institution a place that has a very solid foundation in the notion that uh free people's free markets uh prosperity and peace are to be sought going all the way back to the wishes of uh herbert hoover himself and so if i can help lead and in fact really uh bring our our colleagues together around that joint uh goal that set of of responsibilities then it seemed a good time to do it connie let's we'll come to hoover in a moment let's take just a moment to explain explain your thinking actually on public policy centers on think tanks there are over 5 000 colleges and universities in the country far lower number of think tanks far lower but not not insignificant hoover brookings heritage the american enterprise institute cato and so forth what are think tanks for what distinguishes them from the usual or the from the rest of the academic world well think tanks i believe have to have one thing that is is there in the academic world and that is grounding in research that is driven by research questions which are then answered by data and where the data takes you wherever it will in other words you're really seeking in a sense the truth uh from the questions that you ask but they also have to be places that want to have an impact on policy and impact on outcomes and impact on the thinking of leaders and those who are actually responsible for calling out and carrying out policy and what distinguishes hoover is that it has two other really uh unique features one is it sits at a great university one of the really leading universities and a leading university in uh the new technologies and the innovation and technological frontiers of the world and it is at the opposite a library in an archive and so it's committed to its history it's committed to uh those historical documents and historical experiences that inform the way that we think about policies so to my mind hoover is kind of the complete package it is a think tank where we care about policy where we do fundamental research but it is also a place that can draw on those documents and lessons of history and it can do it in an environment of a great and broad university you've spoken of several areas of emphasis or organizing questions and however you're still very new in the job so you haven't spoken about them much so i'd like to ask questions that have the virtue of being real questions i really don't quite know how you're going to answer these questions so slap me around if i'm asking bad questions or you know i had milton friedman on this show and he treated me like a very slow graduate student he said no that's not the interest he he rewrote the questions before answering them feel free you've one of those areas of uh kind of organizing question if that's the right way to put the way you're thinking about these you have talked about the challenges or the failures and this is the term you're using of late stage capitalism so of course i look up that up and it wasn't used by marx but it is associated with the left and here's a definition that i found online late stage capitalism is a popular phrase that describes the hypocrisy and absurdities of capitalism as it digs its own grave now something tells me you don't really expect or want free markets to dig their own graves so how are you using this phrase i'm using this phrase as a challenge to us all to be provocative in our thinking to be wide-ranging in our thinking about how we get at the core of anything that's ailing what i consider to be the greatest economic system that humankind has ever created and that is the belief that if people are incented for their labor if they uh mobilize resources smartly and capital smartly uh everybody will be better off i believe in free markets i believe in free enterprise i believe in the private sector uh i believe in small government uh to make sure that the private sector is freed to the degree that it can be to to do all of those things but i recognize too that those who don't believe in that are making some very serious charges about where capitalism is failing and if we just say oh no no no you don't understand we're actually growing the economy then people will say well what about all of those who've been left out and i'll tell you what happens uh peter when you're not provocative enough in your own thinking about your assumptions about what is right is you get lazy and if you get lazy you open the ground to those who would dig your grave and so my view is that unless we have answers to these questions and i'll i'll give you a couple of them um we in fact are not doing our jobs as responsible stewards of uh the best economic system that humankind has ever uh created um you know i of course study the soviet union so i am not unaware of where late stage capitalism comes from in fact uh if you really look hard it is a phrase that lennon liked to use oh lennon used lennon and so i looked at marks i was looking in the wrong yeah looking in the wrong place so i am a slow student and so um you know i'm a specialist on the soviet union i understand the critiques but i always say to people who say well how about socialism i say well look the only time that from each according to his talents to each according to his needs the only time that's worked is at gunpoint uh it's actually not an incentive for people to to create to innovate to produce what it is is a recipe for authoritarianism and totalitarianism so that's what it's led to so what is our answer however to the following capitalism is inherently unequal because markets will reward some things and not others we accept that you and i don't get angry because yo-yo ma makes more money playing the cello than i would have made playing the piano it's inequality of talent with my sports friends i use the example that i don't get mad the lebron james makes more money than i would uh playing basketball because it's inequality of talent but if it's any quality of access and any quality of opportunity now we have the politics of jealousy and capitalism cannot survive when you have the politics of jealousy because now what it says is i'm not getting a fair shake and therefore i'm going to take what is yours and redistribute in a way that is quote equal because i can't trust your system to do it does that sound familiar in the environment in which we live uh today does it sound familiar for people to say uh i'm going to make sure that those people pay their fair share uh as if the hard work that people have put in ought to simply be put into a kind of generalized pool where some government official gets to decide how it's going to be redistributed so the reason that i think it's important that we take this on frontally is that we have now descended into the politics of jealousy i'll tell you one little story about this so when gorbachev met with george h.w bush for the first time uh president bush was trying to explain capitalism and he said something like well you see somebody who's seeking benefit for himself to get wealthy himself can actually make it better for all of society by creating jobs and gorbachev wasn't buying it right he was just his eyes were glazed over i could see it and finally he said george george let me tell you why capitalism will never work in russia in the soviet union he said we have this parable a peasant finds a land's lamp genie comes out and says what can i do for you the peasant says look at my neighbor he has a wonderful harvest his wife is lovely and his children are good to him look at me my harvest is lousy my children hate me my wife has left me and the genie says so you would like me to make you like him he says no no i want you to make him like me that's the politics of jealousy and so you don't reward hard work and you don't reward risk-taking what you do is say there has to be a quality of outcome and that's the struggle that we're in today so if you i'm on the spectrum of new well we have free markets enormous work and free in some ways decisive work by hoover fellows and nobel prize winners milton friedman george stigler gary becker and well i found this quotation by another hoover fellow who was a nobel prize winner friedrich hayek if old truths are to retain their hold on men's minds they need to be restated in language and concepts of successive generations no statement of an ideal can be complete it must be adapted to a given climate of opinion so on the one hand there's this notion which i get completely of restating for contemporary for our time for our generation in the language that students can understand the issues that we care restating what we what has already been demonstrated but then there's also the question of actually doing new work on specific areas and you're not going to be satisfied with just restatement i don't guess so for example education what do you have specific um i i mean i don't want to get you try to get you ahead of yourself you're still settling into the job but are there specific questions within this provocative leninist framework framing of late stage capitalism that you'd like to see addressed yes by the way a lot of people have not liked lit stage capitalism so i'm going to call it mature i like it now now that i know what they call it mature capitalism and so capitalism has changes as changes it needs to make i think that the way that you deal with the politics of jealousy is you look hard at what is the social contract underlying the uh the economic system we know that uh you get great macro effects you get growth uh we've had just before this pandemic uh record low unemployment uh you know job creation innovation there are a lot of great things that we can point to but the social contract which says all right everybody's going to get an equal chance at the benefits of that there we have a problem and what is that problem i would say that one of the biggest interventions that we've always used is a high quality education for every child so that people can uh fully benefit now today i can look at your zip code and i can tell in the public education system from your zip code whether you're likely to get a high quality education and we have wonderful fellows at uh hoover uh people like mackie raimi raymond and uh eric heineck and of course um carolyn huxby who are looking at this system and saying what about the policies that we've adopted are making that high quality education harder and harder for the poorest of kids to attain now i personally have done a lot of work on education reform because as a high as a higher ed person i'm really interested in the product that i get i'm interested in the question of can a quote elite university like stanford actually be accessible for a kid who grew up poor with parents who couldn't speak english it's an important societal question we know that what we want it to be is that you're not trapped in your class that generations do move forward now if i look at the k-12 education system today i have to say that it's an opt-out system what do i mean if you are of means you will move to a district where the schools are good and the houses are expensive palo alto fairfax county virginia hoover alabama outside of birmingham where my family lives now if you're really really wealthy maybe you'll send your kid to private school so hosts talking trapped in in failing public schools neighborhood schools poor kids a lot of them minority kids and yet we have people who need the education most people who need the education most kids who need the education most and by the way i know sometimes there are dysfunctional parents who are poor but sometimes these parents are just poor and they need better choices so i say to myself why would anyone be against charter schools not that all charters are good but a lot of them are why would anyone be against choice for parents why would anyone be against vouchers and then i hear well those will destroy the public schools and they say okay if you want to say that and you want to write that editorial in the washington post be my guest but then send your kid to school in anacostia don't send your kid to sit well friends and write that editorial and so the hypocrisy of that position needs to be exposed in order to get at this question of why is the education system failing the poorest of our kids and contributing to this sense that the social contract isn't supporting the upward mobility that we were once accustomed to gandhi another of those organizing questions you've discussed is america's place in the world today you're a russian expert of course you're interested in russia and europe i've heard you discuss the importance of doing work on a rising india but of course the dominant foreign policy issue is china let me give you a quotation from a late colleague of ours henry rowan hoover fellow this is this is harry rowan writing in 1996 when will china become a democracy the answer is around the year 2015. this prediction is based on china's uh steady and impressive growth which in turn fits the pattern of the way in which freedom has grown in asia and elsewhere in the world close quote now harry rowan was not only a good man but a brilliant man and economic growth it was plausible to argue that economic growth was supposed to lead to democracy in china just as it had in taiwan and korea and i i was in i was a kid speechwriter in the reagan white house we believed it then for a quarter of a century and longer the fundamental hope has been expectation has been that as china got richer china would become freer and instead in president xi china has a new emperor what went wrong let me just say peter china has not faced a reckoning about the essential contradiction between economic well-being and political repression yet uh we don't know maybe it never will but i will not yet concede that they will not eventually have to deal with that contradiction and you if you don't think they think they are trying to deal with that contradiction look at the way that she is behaving you're getting even more frantic attempts to control the message you're getting even more frantic attempts to use the internet and social media as a means of uh political control actual social credits to people uh for doing the right things on the internet and if you do the wrong things then you don't get points toward a ticket to get on a train to go to work uh this is not a confident leadership this is perhaps the leadership that knows that there are essential contradictions in that system if you look at what's happening with hong kong for instance so the chinese brutal and brutal because uh the problem with authoritarians is that they know there's no peaceful way to change power and whatever we want to say about whatever messy democracy looks like we can change power peacefully and we have a prescribed way to do that now if you're an authoritarian you really don't have a prescribed way to do that and so you're always fearful of your people it becomes a spiral of ever greater repression because you're more and more fearful and eventually something has to give and so i would not yet rule out the possibility that the liberalization of chinese politics i didn't say the democratization but the liberalization of chinese politics is going to have to take place uh i remember who jintao telling us when he was president that and he he told us this that in one year they had 186 000 riots 186 000 and uh it was that some party hack out in a province uh took somebody's land expropriated somebody's land a peasant's land they didn't have a system of courts to which they could appeal so he and his friends riot the chinese are looking at things like whether or not they need a court system that could be more neutral where people might actually believe they could win against the government now you start to see the nose under the tent if you will the camel's nose under the tent of expectations about property rights so i just think maybe it will never happen but i would not be surprised if the she experiment his experiment with greater repression with a greater ideological purity with going back to something that looks like the little red book with going back to something that looks like red ballet even the arts are being affected yes uh this is to me a sign that they're actually worried about what you just just said so let me um let me go with this question slightly different way february 1946 treasury department asks a couple of questions of the embassy in moscow and a diplomat named george you know exactly where this is going yet diplomat named george cannon produces a 5 000 word document which has since been known as the long telegram and it is an astonishing document he describes it goes into the history of russia the internal contradictions of communism and he lays out in this telegram the fundamentals of containment which would remain the essential framework for american foreign policy for the next 45 years until the soviet union collapsed right there has been no long telegram about china and what strikes me you know all of this far better than i do but what strikes me is that kennen was able to draw upon a body of scholarly work in which he and other diplomats were steeped people people had of course been studying russia for a long time but they've been studying the bolshevik they've been studying russian communism since the bolshevik revolution so how what can hoover do to establish the groundwork so that you or one of our colleagues somebody can write the long telegram somebody can help this country establish an intellectual framework for this staggering challenge of facing a rising country of 1.3 billion people what can hoover do yes well we could we could do worse than uh some of what we did in response to kennen because if you think about uh great scholars like robert conquest yes what did robert conquest do he told the truth about what was going on in the soviet union and he was excoriated peter by uh the more liberal soviet ecological community that said no he has to be way off with his numbers about how many people were purged it turns out his estimates were low about how many people were purged and so one of the things that i would like to see hoover do is to be true to our heritage of really supporting the best history on these places that can really inform and by the way we have i mentioned it at the beginning we're an archive yes we have great historical materials we have people who want to put their papers with us because they know they will be preserved and the truth can be told from them so let's start by really bringing the best young historians of china of places that are unlike china like india and and frankly history is being practiced in the academy in a way that's not really very inspiring any longer it's become ever smaller narrower questions about history read dissertations these days read a lot of the books you know when i was a young faculty member i remember sitting at at a first faculty meeting with gabriel allman and who'd written the civic culture and seymour martin lips that political man and i mean these big questions we have historians who can ask big questions we have some of them now neil ferguson and and russ berman and uh and victor david hansen but we want to attract more who will ask big questions and on china let's help the get the history straight let's be we already a place where i think people will put their papers to protect them let's do more of that secondly let's from the long telegram let's get right the couple of things that ken and said that are applicable today he said first of all until they have to turn to deal with their internal contradictions deny them the course of easy expansion we can do that with our military power we can do that with our allies one of the things that we have going for is that china does not have is we have friends and allies china has clients we have friends and allies uh countries like india the world's largest democracy in a democracy that is remarkable where people who don't speak the same language don't worship the same god have consequential elections every few years and turn over the government peacefully so let's learn the lessons of that and study those things and finally something that one of our fellows is leading um larry diamond leading projects on on chinese sharp power one of the things we know that the chinese are doing that the soviets tried to do and maybe did it more clumsily is they're trying to create a different narrative they're interfering in elections they're they're uh creating uh falsehoods about us and about uh what we do people always hearken back to radio for europe and voice of america right you know voice of america and radio for europe were not propaganda arms of the united states government they just told the truth they just told the truth and so as we construct a way of thinking about china let's tell the truth about them and let's tell the truth about us what has made us great is not to be top down in innovation but to have multiple sources of innovation what's made us great is not to be afraid of free uh discourse and uh and and ideas and so i think the long telegrams out there waiting to be written hoover's doing a lot to put its pieces together kantian history that was also an emphasis on history is something you've mentioned as a particular concern of yours i i had a note here i wanted to ask you a question i'm going to ask it but i had a note to myself that you might challenge the premise but i think you've indicated just now that you agree with the premise well we'll see and so here's the premise it's my premise you may disassociate yourself from it right away if you want to but my premise is is that history as practiced in major universities has become grievance studies it's been become captured by ideological concerns the history departments used to be above all the place where you went to seek to understand go someplace else to devise action or reform but first history history departments used to insist ex not necessarily explicitly but the way to approach history was with humility the first thing you did was try to understand what happened all right so there's an ideological capture i'm continuing with my premise and there's also for some for reasons i have to admit i don't understand narrative history the kind of history that bob conquest wrote [Music] the kind of history that norman neymar wrote in his his magisterial works on eastern europe for one reason or another that isn't being done in history departments but that is what neil ferguson does and that is what victor davis hansen does so that's my premise and my question is this is there some way in which you look at the hoover institution almost as a monastery during the dark ages where we take it on ourselves if others won't do it the hoover institution will still take seriously the task of passing on our inheritance uh absolutely i do agree with your premise uh both that uh there's a heavy ideological blanket over history these days uh but some of it came for the right reasons that certain histories of certain peoples had been written out of the imperative of the the dominant narrative and certainly that needed to be addressed but uh when it becomes uh a an ever smaller set of issues uh that are just devoted to trying to create a specific narrative about a very specific very small uh grouping of people or very uh very fleeting moment in history now we've we've got a problem and um so yes i think we will be a place that people who want to do big history will feel comfortable um neil and his colleagues and he has colleagues from all over the country my co-author philip zeliko at the university of virginia is one of the participants in an applied history project that is going on at hoover how do we think about the lessons of history and sensibly apply them rather than just as people often do when they're policymakers just kind of grabbing it whether whatever historical analogy seems to suit your cause at the moment so how do we think about that in a systematic way and there's another reason again we are an archive i really hope that we can make it more accessible to students and i'll tell you why i taught an american foreign policy class 25 kids i had 160 applications the the best and the brightest in majors like economics and history and international relations and and uh one day i said and you know when we had khalid sheikh mohammed under lock and key after 9 11 it would have been like having rommel under lock and key from during world war ii and i got 25 blank stares who was wrong and so it's not just for policymakers and to be true to the history and to understand how we got to where we are it's not just to apply the history better human beings have been in some of these situations before how do we learn from that but it's also someone has to preserve the history for our students because they're no longer learning it connie the the last of these organizing questions that i i think we'll have time to discuss technology and governance and uh here i don't have a big premise to pronounce this is the the one of the organizing questions i've heard you discussed that i myself grasped the least so here's what i think i understand and and the point of departure here is bill gates who commented not long ago bill gates of all people that social media was a poisoned chalice that was the phrase he used so we expected social media to bring us together and increa instead it's created all kinds of new divisions spend spend five minutes on twitter if you can um we hoped for a burst of creativity we got video games we wanted innovation and and well as peter thiel famously put it we were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters so i think i understand that frustration what are your hopes here what what can the hoover institution do to restore the promise of tech is that the is that the right question for me to be asking you it's the right question i mean first of all look at where we sit we were talking about what's unique about the hoover institution we sit in the silicon valley surrounded by uh by technology and innovation and what i find uh here is that people here tend to take for granted that technology is good well in fact technology is neutral and how it's applied how it affects institutions how it affects people's lives that's that's what makes it good or bad and and frankly human beings have been historically a lot better at the knowledge part than the wisdom part we've uh just give you one example of course uh the same splitting of the atom that allowed us to turn on uh the lights from civil nuclear power or to do medical isotopes gave us the atom bomb so we are pretty good at discovering things we're not always very good at knowing their their effects and being able to mitigate the bad and uh to uh amplify the good so uh whether it is the gene uh splicing and crispr out through social media out through drones which are changing the nature and the calculations of warfare uh to uh ai which uh we have now a technology that people say actually threaten what it means to be human i i'm still waiting for the ai uh symphony that's going to sound as good as beethoven but there's some people who say that's going to happen and so uh how our institutions our 250 year old institutions are simply being overrun by these developments and that's why i've called it technology and governance not technology and policy because first we need to understand how are our institutions going to be responsive and by the way it has huge national security implications as well uh you talked about china i i've told some of my chinese friends i think one of the the dumbest speeches that xi xinping made was to say that china was going to overtake the united states and ai and quantum computing and frontier technologies because it got our backs up but let's make sure that it got our backs up in the right way that it doesn't become okay so we need a national strategy well fine but innovation for us has always been from the multiple sources so let's not lose that uh we uh need to be careful that we don't assume that every chinese student working in a lab is working for the pla because we want to be open to ideas into the training of the next generation of a billion four people so we have a lot of challenges that technology has brought but we have a lot of opportunities too now the possibilities for better learning for kids in in undeveloped uh or underserved communities uh the possibilities i i think even about the impact that technology may have on higher education i frankly think peter universities are whistling past the graveyard on this oh you do i do i do because i think the the hybrid learning that we're now seeing uh some remote some in the classroom i think we're going to see more of that and he was coming for a long time if you're in a class with 700 other people or 500 other people maybe you're better off online maybe you're better off pacing your uh your work so that if you didn't understand differential equations the first three times you can do it a fourth and so um i think technology is it has marvelous possibilities but it has potential very devastating downsides and we need to understand how our institutions are going to respond gandhi if you'll indulge me a few questions about you you wrote in the email that you sent to all of us all of us who work at the hoover institution on september 1st your first day as director my life and career path have led me to this moment so a question or two about that path you grew up figure skating and playing the piano those are two pursuits that require hours of practice and i mean not just hours of practice to to master hours of practice to achieve competence and then you got a little older and you studied russian russian is a hard language and here at stanford you served as provost the president of the university gets all the love all the love from alumni the provost gets stuck with budgets and 10-year decisions that have gone sideways and telling people nice work but no and so and now you've taken on this crazy job so there is something about you that all your life has been drawn to things that are difficult how come well i do believe that uh it kind of starts with how i grew up and with watching my parents and watching the people around them um if if you grew up in segregated birmingham alabama when i did there was hope on the horizon uh rosa parks had already refused to sit in the back of the bus and uh brown versus the board of education had already taken place and uh dwight d eisenhower had insisted on the integration of little rock if you grew up in birmingham when my parents did or when my grandparents did i don't know how you got up in the morning and decided that despite the difficulties you are going to raise a family and educate them and put food on the table and go to church and make the world better and that's what they do and i feel so fortunate to have landed where i am from where i came i feel so grateful that um i grew up in an america that was changing in ways that would allow me to reach potential that my parents and mentors and role models saw in me that i just don't think i have an option to shrink from hard things i also think that you're better if you're doing hard things um i i one of the pieces of advice i give to students when they're starting a major with me or whatever i'd say look uh all of us love to do the things that we do well and just keep doing them over and over because it's wonderfully affirming that i do that well but if you never try to do things that are hard for you then you will never understand and believe that you can overcome things that are hard for you and so i say if you love math do more reading and writing if you love reading and writing do more math challenge yourself every day and you're going to be better for it and it's a broader message i think for the country as a whole just because something is hard doesn't mean that it can't be done if that had been the case the united states of america would never have come into being i mean we were going to go up against the greatest military power of the time with a third of george washington's troops down to smallpox any given day i think that wasn't hard people were going to cross the the continental divide and covered wagons they didn't even know where they were going and they kept going you think that wasn't hard you think it wasn't hard to survive a civil war brother against brother and come out a better more perfect union so yes it's really hard but if you only do that which is laid out for you easily you're not going to achieve very much at all and so um yeah i think i like to try to do things that are hard by the way i'm not always so good at them i was not really that good a figure skater but i kept trying kept working at it sports you've said you'll watch anything with a score and you've been known to get up early to work out with stanford athletes and you've helped this and that different athletic program at stanford recruit kids so how is it that someone who has devoted so much of her energies to the life of the mind loves sports what do you get out of it oh well first of all it's pretty clear when you win and lose i kind of like that aspect of it look i think taking care of your physical being is very important peter you know i'm very religious and i believe that you were given a body and a mind and a soul a spirit and that you need to take care of all of them um i also find sports challenging in a way that i find almost nothing else uh in the quite the same way although i will say there are some aspects of the physicality of piano being able to connect what your brain is seeing with what you need to do and what you have to do in sports that i actually find that there's some carryover but i just love sports and and i really do think that some of it was i'm an only child my dad thought i was going to be his all-american linebacker he had planned for a boy i was going to be named john he had bought the football he got a girl he decided oh well i guess i'll just have to teach her about sports and so it was if you're an only child you know it's music with your mother and sports with your father and so maybe john rice is as much the reason as anything that i love sports as much as i do you just mentioned religion and anybody who reads especially your book about your early life extraordinary ordinary people what comes through is that your parents the whole the other thing that comes through is that you were raised by parents but you really were raised in a community absolutely people knew each other and there were a lot of people looking out for little condoleezza they believed in education boy did they but they were also people of faith now the whole world knows what you've done with regard to education but if i'm how do you what is the role of faith in your life and for a director of the hoover institution i i almost want to say how much are we allowed to talk about faith in this current environment do you see the question i do i absolutely do uh first of all faith is integral to who i am i i almost it's so integral that it's even hard for me to step outside and say how it affects me i think it's it's there all the time and you know it's been there for me in really hard times like the losses of loss of my parents i remember after 9 11 we went up to camp david i was so grateful that friday night that i was in a community of faith john ashcroft attorney general at the time actually plays gospel piano um i i play brahms he plays gospel piano so he played and we we sang music and it was it was good to know that there were people who believed that uh there was a higher being on whom you could call i my my favorite phrase is always the peace that passive understanding that somehow uh there are times when your your intellect isn't enough and you have to look someplace else and so faith is just integral to who i am i grew up that way and i i tell people i'm unapologetic about it um i'm not telling other people that they have to be religious or have faith but i'm going to tell you that i am because you won't know me unless you know that about me now in terms of the academy i really hope that we get to the point one day when we can understand and be willing to look at religion both as a factor in human development and as a factor in human history i had one experience with this one point i was when i was provost i oversaw a two-year committee to reform the humanities requirement to your committee okay only an academic institution has two year committees but um this was after we've been through the whole western culture debate western civilization debate and and we've gotten this new but no our students didn't really like the way the humanities requirement was set up so in this committee two things happened that said to me we're a little off base in the academy one was that you had to assign a book by a woman of color fine i said does my book on german unification qualify i'm a woman of color that's a dirty question it turned out that i don't think it would occur to people that a woman of color might not actually write about women of color and so that was that was a bit of a light going on for me a second one was uh we we had to address race gender and class in each of the sessions and i said well what about religion uh religion has for good and for bad had as much if not more effect on how human history has unfolded so what about religion uh suddenly people were willing to drop the others then rather than include religion so this um allergy to talking about uh this factor in human development uh we've got to find a way to get over it because spirituality which is the kind of academic way of saying religion does matter to human beings and how they develop and so i would hope that at some point perhaps we can even have that conversation and maybe hoover can help lead it connie if i may you're busy you've got a big job i've been saying that last question then this is going to take a moment or two to set up but if you'll be bear with me two quotations quotation 1 condoleezza rice in her book extraordinary ordinary people the racial hatred in alabama found full expression on september 15 1963 when a bomb at 16th street baptist church killed four little girls who were on their way to sunday school services hadn't yet begun at westminster that's westminster presbyterian where your father was the minister but i was there with my mother as she warmed up on the organ all of a sudden there was a thud and a shudder the distance between the two churches is about two miles but it felt like the trouble was next door quotation two herbert hoover in his 1959 statement to the stanford board of trustees which is as close as as former president hoover ever got to writing a mission statement for the institution of which you are now the director quote this institution supports the constitution of the united states its bill of rights and its method of representative government close quote you grew up under jim crow i am talking to someone who can remember the bomb blast from a church bombing that killed four little girls and yet here you are director of the hoover institution which who and herbert hoover in founding the institution stated as axiomatic the fundamental goodness of the united states and its founding institutions what do you say to people who who who who reject who reject that premise who say no this country was tainted from the outset what do you say to kids students you've been a teacher you're all off and on but mostly on you've been a teacher throughout your career what do you say to students they're starting the college year and then they're clicking over to facebook and youtube and they're seeing riots across the country what does condoleezza rice say to explain why she believes the united states of america is still worth the trouble i say first and foremost that human beings are imperfect and the founders were imperfect men but they sought to give us institutions that would allow us to move closer and closer to being better never to be perfected to find you but to being better and they sought to give us those institutions and i think they succeeded in that now it is absolutely true and i've said it myself we have a birth defect it was slavery and do i wish that john adams and others who refused to be slave owners had won on this score and we had rejected slavery of course my ancestors suffered as a result my ancestors are both slave owners and slaves themselves and so i understand the depth of that wound that was slavery but what's remarkable to me about this constitution of the united states is that it once counted those slaves as three-fifths of a man in order to make the compromise to create the united states of america and yet it would be that very constitution and its courts and its legislative legislatures that people would appeal to to eventually deliver rights to the descendants of slaves and so whether it's the great civil rights legislation of the 60s or whether it's the court cases that uh thurgood marshall and others won like brown versus the board of education and others the institutions were good enough to make progress on that most awful of wounds slavery to make progress toward delivering rights to the descendants of slaves that is a remarkable story in human history and that's why i believe these institutions are not just worth preserving they're worth fighting for and they're worth using they're worth accessing they're worth insisting that they continue to bring that progress i told people when i would travel abroad i would say look i don't look at the united states through royal scholar classes somebody who grew up in birmingham can't look at the united states the rose colored classes but i will tell you one thing when i look around the world and i look at how people govern over difference the united states knows that we've had a problem with difference and we keep pushing the frontiers to try and get better and on the day when i stood in front of a portrait of benjamin franklin to take the oath of office as secretary of state taking an oath by the way to that very constitution that it once counted our ancestors as one as three fits of a man i stood there sworn in by a jewish woman supreme court justice ruth bader ginsburg who was my neighbor and i remember thinking peter and i've said this several times what would old ben have thought of this well he couldn't have imagined it couldn't have imagined it but it was because people kept believing in the institutions and kept pushing the institutions as someone said not asking the united states to be something else just ask the united states to say to be what it says it is and that's a much stronger ground to go from than if you never had those institutions uh to use them and finally i'll just say that those of us who are fortunate enough to have made the progress that we have not complete not enough but to make the progress that we have or to those who fought to keep fighting and so i would say to all of those young people don't give up the united states of america is a pretty remarkable experiment that's still unfolding condi i said that was the last question i'm going to slip in one more the pac-12 canceled this fall season that means you won't be able to watch stanford football condi who do you like in the sec in the sec i have to like alabama right of course of course condoleezza rice educator author diplomat and now director of the hoover institution thank you thank you so much peter great to be with you for uncommon knowledge the hoover institution and fox nation i'm peter robinson [Music]

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 159,328

Rating: 4.6764984 out of 5

Keywords: Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson, Hoover Institution, Condoleezza Rice, Hoover Institute, Democracy, think tank, capitalism, inequality, prosperity, public policy, china, geopolitical

Id: p4spXsjO6VE

Length: 55min 19sec (3319 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020